Chapter 1394: Long awaited due(1)

A warhorn sounded in the distance, lone and mournful it cut through the frozen air with a chill far colder than any wind the winter had yet managed.

From the left, Edric noted silently. The Primogenia, led by the betrayer’s son, had reached its staging line at last. Every piece was on the board, it appeared, and the board was set on ground of his own choosing.

He cast a cold evaluating glance toward the enemy’s final refuge. It was precisely the pathetic ditch he had envisioned, no better and no worse: a crude perimeter of sharpened timber logs barely three meters tall, raised in haste by men who knew nothing of raising anything, built without towers, without hoardings, without so much as a proper walk behind the parapet for a man to stand on with both feet. A smattering of desperate brigands lined it regardless, armed with hunting bows meant for hares, woodsmen’s axes meant for kindling, and heavy river stones meant for nothing at all, staring down at the wall of iron gathering in the brush below them.

Men more at ease raping unarmed folk than facing a proper fight.

The moment a single breach was opened in those wooden stakes the enterprise was finished. Everyone in the forest knew it. Edric knew it, his captains knew it, and the doomed rats behind the palisade knew it best of all. They were likely cowering over it even now, whispering to one another about mercy and terms and the long odds of the night, as though any of the three had ever been offered to the folk they had left in ditches from here to the coast.

For a fleeting heartbeat Edric wondered whether the Vulture Lord stood among those trembling ranks, staring his own death in the face and finding it uglier than he had imagined. If the bastard possessed so much as a shred of true nobility he would take his place at the breach alongside his men when it came. But he had spent far more years as a banished outlaw than ever he had as a lord, and Edric suspected highborn etiquette had long since given way to the cowardly instincts of a thief. Nobility was a habit, and habits starved to death like anything else when they went unfed.

The rising sun burned off the last of the silver fog drifting up from the rivers and from the dark still waters of the lake, and the world came clear and sharp and merciless. Even the Five Gods had cleared the stage, it seemed, eager for the spectacle and content to watch it from their seats.

Edric drew his longsword, the steel singing high and bright as it cleared the scabbard. With a sharp decisive twirl of the blade he set the dance in motion.

Three armoured horn blowers stepped forward in absolute unison and raised their brass to their lips. Three times the horns wailed out across the treeline, long and low and rolling, and as the final note died away the Yarzat host unfurled itself like a gleaming rose of iron petals opening to the light.

The Voghondai led the right. The First swept in from the left, heavy banners cracking and snapping in the wind like whips over a team.

A deafening, blood curdling roar erupted from the auxiliaries on the right flank. Armed with broad headed axes and heavy round shields, the tribal warriors went ahead hauling crude timber ladders between them, wholly indifferent to the rain of arrows and stones that rattled and skipped and whined harmlessly off their iron.

Not all of them carried breastplates. The greater part wore only chainmail, and so the honour of the frontline charge had been given to those clad in full plate, trophies stripped from the dead during the War of the Bloody Penny or else gifted to the first warriors who had come to these shores some ten years past. They wore another people’s armour and had made it their own, the way they had made everything else their own.

Now and again a lucky arrow found a seam between gorget and shoulder and dropped a warrior face down into the churned mud. If any of them whimpered as they fell, Edric could not hear it above the savage bloodthirsty howling of the pack, which did not slow, and did not look back, and did not so much as break stride around the bodies.

As the shafts rained down from the wooden wall, the King’s archers replied in kind.

Arrayed along both flanks, the lines of local bowmen drew in calm rhythmic unison, nock and draw and loose and nock again, the motion worn smooth by drill. They wore no royal surcoats upon their chests, being merely conscripted levies pulled off their own fields a season past, but under the flat glare of legion steel at their backs they loosed with a precision that would have shamed better men.

The moment the first Voghondai vanguard crested the ridge, a cloud of black feathered shafts leapt into the pale sky and hung there a heartbeat before it fell. The volume of it smothered the defenders utterly. For every arrow the bandits sent down, three came screaming up in answer. The outlaws held the advantage of height, and height was worth a great deal on any other morning. But quantity has a quality all its own, and when that quantity grows overwhelming enough it sweeps everything before it, height and courage and hope together.

The exchange turned brutal in seconds. The parapet became a slaughterhouse as the archers below found their mark. Men screamed as heavy war-arrows, proper arrows that the bandits could never even smell in their own bows, punched through throats and torsos, pitching several defenders backward over the wall to break their necks on the earth below. Many more collapsed behind the parapet, clutching at feathered shafts that bled, apart from blood even the last courage they held.

Desperate shouts echoed from behind the timber. Outlaw captains, perhaps, screaming themselves hoarse at men who had already stopped listening, ordering them to stand and shoot and hold the line as though any of the three still lay within their power. Edric wondered whether one of those frantic voices belonged to the Vulture Lord himself. Did the bastard understand at last what his rogue scum were truly worth when set against a proper army instead of a sleeping village? Could he feel the cold hand of death reaching up through the trees for his throat, patient as a creditor come to collect on a debt years overdue?

Edric closed his eyes for a single beat and sharpened his ears against the din, waiting on the sweetest sound the morning had left to offer him.

It came.

THUCK. THUCK. THUCK.

He had no need to open his eyes to know the Voghondai ladders had slammed home against the timber wall.

As the from the front of that maddening band of demons a single terrifying war cry ripped upward through the forest canopy and sent the ravens off the branches in a black torn sheet.

"Svyrne MORNAEEEEEEEEE!"

When Edric opened his eyes, the true dying began.

The Voghondai swarmed up the wooden rungs like demons given flesh and permission both, heedless of the stones smashed down upon their helms and the spears thrust at their eyes, climbing over their own fallen where they had to and not pausing to see who it was they climbed over. They crested the parapet with a feral, unnatural speed no man had any business possessing at that hour of the morning, swinging heavy bearded axes that shattered wooden shields into kindling and bit on through into soft flesh and softer bone.

Dozens of ladders groaned and flexed against the stakes all along the wall. On the far right flank the defence buckled all at once, the way a rotten floorboard buckles, with no warning and then entirely. Under the relentless assault of a dozen iron clad pit dogs the outlaw line wavered, broke, and scattered like sparrows out of a hedge.

"So it goes to the auxiliaries, the honour of first boots upon the wall!" Edric roared, and his voice carried over the din the way it had carried over a dozen battlefields before this one.

Beside him his men rattled blades and axes and maces against their shield bosses, a thunderous rhythmic clatter that shook the frost from the leaves above their heads.

"Now let us see whose steel drops the bars for us!"

Wild cheers erupted from the legionnaires, and back across the field came the answer, the terrified desperate shrieking from behind the timber palisade.

"STOP THEM! IN THE GODS’ NAMES, STOP THEM!"

"ON ME! FORM UP ON ME, YOU FOOLS, ON ME!"

"I AIN’T FIGHTING THOSE MONSTERS! I AIN’T! WE’RE DEAD, WE’RE ALL OF DEAD!"

The panic was as sweet to Edric’s ears as any tavern song he had ever paid coin to hear, woven through with the wet crunching thud of iron tearing its way through flesh and the horrid bubbling gurgle of men learning what their own lungs sounded like from the inside.

He turned back to face his company, his dark eyes ablaze above the rim of his gorget.

"The hour is upon us, Fourth! Too long have we stomached these miserable squirming scum, raping and burning and leeching off our King’s own land while better men bled for it! Today I declare the feast is over! The moment those gates fall, we extinguish them, every last one, root and branch and seed! We avenge our brothers whose corpses these infamous curs dared strip and desecrate in the mud!"

Hardened men nodded grimly to one another, jaws set like iron, eyes fixed unblinking upon the entrance. None of them cheered. Cheering was for the auxiliaries and for the young. Behind the wooden walls the chaotic noise of butchery came surging closer and closer to the main threshold, shout by shout, like a fire working its way along a beam.

If the King were here, he would stay my hand, Edric thought, with a cold inner smirk he was careful to keep off his face. He would bid me fall back and leave the fighting to the men, and he would say it kindly, which would be worse.

But the King was a hundred leagues away in Yarzat. Here, in the damp blood soaked timber between the rivers, Edric held total and absolute command, and no man living was going to rob him of his vengeance. His legion’s honour had been dragged through the dirt the day this rogue uprising began, and honour once dragged does not wash clean with water. The King could rage all he wished upon his throne of gold afterward.

Today belonged to the Fourth.

With a deafening groan of splintering timber and a shriek of iron hinges giving up their purpose, the heavy oak gates swung wide into the dirt.

Out of the threshold came a line of towering warriors in blood spattered iron, the fish of the Primogenia showing on their officer’s breastplate beneath the gore, the rest of them in the black and white of the legions, and every one of them standing in a doorway that had belonged to somebody else when the sun came up.

In the end , it seemed that Thalek’s boys had beaten the tribesmen to the bars; theirs was the glory of the gate.

Edric raised his longsword high into the morning light, the cold steel flashing against the sunbeams filtering down through the dense canopy.

"NO MERCY! NO FEAR! NO DISHONOR!’’ he screamed, his voice raw as iron grinding against stone. "ON ME!"

And with that h plunged forward, leading the charge straight into the mouth of the breach.

Behind him, his merry band of devils surged like a broken dam, a wall of bristling steel and howling rage rushing forward as if the very fires of the five hells were scorching their heels.

The blood-drenched legionnaires of the First lined the open gateway, raising their red swords and splattered shields to cheer the charging Arditi as they thundered past. "GIVE THEM STEEL, FOURTH! FLAY THE RATS ALIVE!"

They replied in cheers and then in blood.

A heartbeat later, the Primogenia fell into rank behind them, joining the ferocious tide sweeping into the lair.

Inside the compound, what followed was no longer a battle but merciless culling. The bandits were trapped in their own grave, terrified, disorganized, and completely broken in spirit, they would have attempted for the rear, but soon enough even that was open with the halberdier of the Third joining in the fun.

Few even raised a sword to parry or strike. Men threw down their weapons and begged on their knees, only to be run through by the charging vanguard plunginst their steel on their throat and guts; others scrambled over their own cooking fires and supply crates in a desperate, blind bid to reach the wall and jump, only to be carved down from behind.

Edric drove his blade through the throat of a crying brigand, tore the steel free with a twist and let the blood splatter on his breast.

Stepping over the warm corpse without slowing his stride to break another man’s jaw with his shield, he turned to the enemy ranks.Of them Edric only wanted one to fall by his blade.

’’VULTURE LORD! YOU CUR, COME OUT AND DIE!THE FOURTH IS AWAITING YOU!’’