Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 943: Fog in the night(2)

"Did you get anything out of him?" A hoarse voice, muffled and sharpened by two thin slits of dark metal echoed in the tent.

Mavius never once took his gaze off his sight from the dangling, bloody sack of torn meat hoisted up on a chain like a heavy, useless punching bag.

"The torturer believes he did, Your Imperial Majesty," Landoff answered, his tone flat and utterly professional. He signaled the guards to release the chain. The metal shrieked against the pulley, an abrasive sound that grated on Mavius’s already frayed nerves.

"Any answers about the questions I had for him?" Mavius pressed, cutting straight through the theatrics to the core of his anxiety.

"Nothing definitive, really," Landoff noted, shaking a folded piece of blood-smudged parchment. "And truly, nothing new to add to what we already gleaned from this."

Mavius sighed, the sound like tearing coarse linen. "You know I needed names."

"A bit difficult to obtain when the carrier didn’t even know them himself, Your Imperial Majesty. That was not unexpected. Had I been orchestrating a defection of this magnitude, I’d ensure my runners knew nothing counterproductive to their mission."

The corpse of the spy dropped heavily to the packed earth floor. It was dragged away without ceremony, leaving a dark, rapidly drying smear and a small, widening pool of blood.

"Perhaps he was lying," Mavius argued, a thin, desperate thread of hope. "Perhaps we were too hasty; we killed him before he truly broke. We only had him for less than a day."

Landoff raised a thin, aristocratic brow, fixing his liege with a brutal, clinical gaze. "If, after a night under those implements, he still had the conviction to lie, then I should indeed reevaluate every man I hire for my dirty laundry. No, Your Grace. He was clean of names. We extracted all the parchment held, and nothing more. It means the conspirator is well-guarded enough to take precautions not to be found. Really though...it looks like the peasant’s bar for his choice of men is quite high."

Mavius did not laugh. He was in no mood for such humor. If the fact that they were standing on the last, sinking deck of their rebellion wasn’t bad enough; he had just discovered there were predators, sharks cloaked in his own court colors, already circling the water, waiting to take their bite out of him.

The political situation was a catastrophe metastasizing into something worse by the hour. How many more lords were ready to defect? A lord who had supported the Mavius rebellion for ten long years would undoubtedly be punished by Mesha.

But a lord who defected now, bringing the Fingers back as a blood-soaked, winter gift? Well, that lord wouldn’t be absurd to expect a full pardon, a reward, and a far more powerful title.

He would have done the exact same thing were he in Mesha’s position, hell he had done so already...and failed only because of that cunt from the South.

The moment Mavius had appeared to be the ascendant star, they had flocked to him like vultures. Now that he was visibly falling, the very opposite would happen at a moment’s notice. It did not help that those lords were watching the enemy creep closer to their gates.

They had even managed to break through the first line of defense after the breach.

"The fact we know a betrayal is coming is a massive advantage," Landoff insisted, trying to impose a silver lining on the disaster. "We may not know the who, but if we put our men into the key positions, as we are doing right now, we can evade the worst of the fallout."

Mavius rubbed the cold, sharp metal of his breastplate. "It would have been better to strike a deal with him, use him as bait. We could have captured the man who was meant to receive the letter. That man would have known the recipient."

"A capture makes quite the necessary ruckus" Landoff countered with pragmatism. "A lord expecting a letter from the enem would be keen to hear about anything that could endanger him. There is no way we wouldn’t have tipped his hand. I suggest we work with what we know rather than get sour about what we could have had. It would have been a catastrophe if we hadn’t found the letter out at all."

That was a meager consolation, they both knew that.

The balance was tipping violently against them. They may have dodged a single death blow for the moment, but they were still bleeding out from a thousand cuts.

Their initial, naive hope had been that winter would come and force the besiegers to leave had been dashed, early November was upon them, the first snows imminent, but they were already down two walls, and there was no chance Mesha’s force, scenting victory, would retreat in such conditions.

They had no hope that the opportunistic lords serving his brother , now so tantalizingly close to victory, would suddenly call it a day, as they would have done if they had nothing to show for it. The path ahead was brutally simple, that a child could see it: Either they delivered so many catastrophic casualties that Alpheo’s army promptly broke, or they would be the ones broken and purged.

A sudden headache sprang up behind Mavius’s eyes. He lifted a hand to knead the pain away, only to be stopped by the cold, unyielding press of metal. He wrenched the heavy piece off.

Landoff, watching the sudden, violent exhaustion, and doing his best not to look at the prince’s face offered no comment on the outburst, merely letting the sound die in the damp air.

"Your Imperial Majesty... it is well past the midnight watch," Landoff attempted, stifling a dry, controlled yawn of his own. "Perhaps you would benefit from some rest?"

Mavius was poised to snap, to lash out at the suggestion of weakness, before the reality of his own bone-deep exhaustion slammed into him.

"Perhaps I would indeed."

"Will you send for your wife, then?" Landoff asked.

Mavius rubbed his temples, the skin clammy and painful to the touch . "No. It is late, as you said. I just want the dead weight of sleep. Perhaps a fresh mind in the morning is what I need to make sense of what must be done. This is all too much for now."

’’Perhaps indeed, when you wake, you’ll have your answer’’ Landoff said as he bowed to his son in law as he left the tent.

And indeed he would find his answer the next morning.

-------------------

"Your Imperial Majesty, I beg you, please reconsider."

Lord Willios knelt, his knee scraping painfully on the cold stone floor of what had once been his great hall, but which he knew might soon be the enemy’s. He did not bow his head, however. His gaze was fixed straight at the iron mask of his liege.

"My nephew." Lord Landoff interjected, smoothly sliding his imposing frame between the two men before either could unleash a word or action they could not afford to take back. "You have observed the current circumstances. I fear that your castle may no longer be secure enough to host the Imperator and his immediate family. I trust you understand it is of utmost importance that the Imperator is sound and safe, even in the most inconspicuous of events. The safety of the State depends upon his living person."

For a flash of raw fury, Willios wanted to scream at his uncle , What State will remain if The Fingers fall? But he found gentler a vocabulary to express his outrage.

"My dear uncle," Willios began, his voice dangerously measured, "if the Imperator retreats from this fortress, what message will that broadcast to the lords? Must I remind you how tense the situation already is? To see their liege....’’ he tried to find the right word ’’....retreat from The Fingers might as well be an official announcement that he himself does not believe the castle will stand."

"If it is to fall," Landoff shot back, his voice a low, lethal murmur, "it would be a catastrophe if the Imperator were to be captured or, gods forbid, harmed."

"It would be equally so if The Fingers were to fall entirely!" Willios insisted, his knuckles white against his sword pommel.

"Lord Willios," the Imperator finally spoke, his voice hoarse behind the iron. "As bad as that would be, must I remind you, of all people, that we have already conquered The Fingers ourselves?We will do so another time if that is to happen"

The simple, arrogant claim cut deep.

"Of course, Your Imperial Majesty," Willios replied, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood, clamping down the dozen rebuttals that threatened to erupt from his throat, one more cruel than the other.

"We obviously pray for your success; you shall be made Marshal of our forces immediately, and placed in command of the various lords and Imperial units within the fortress. In the meantime, we shall only leave with a small, necessary retinue, ensuring the strength of the defense force remains untouched." Mavius stood straighter, the vain gesture attempting to project authority. "I am certain you will defend your holdings to your last breath, my leal lord."

The conferral of the grand title did little to sweeten the sourness in Willios’s mouth. It was a golden chain: authority, yes, but also of terminal responsibility.

That would probably be the post where he would find the darkness of death.

"I am sure you understand that with the title of Marshal, you now have, apart from command and authority over the army, also the right to see the authority of the Imperator respected. As far as the lords know and care, your word is now his word. I am sure you understand the meaning of that right."

Willios lifted his defeated gaze toward his uncle. He understood completely. Until other words were said, he was the Imperator’s will and power.

"I understand, Uncle." He rose, brushing the stone dust from his knee, with the face of a man accepting a death sentence. "I then wish Your Grace good travel."

He knew his liege had been made to choose between a difficult defense and personal safety. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

He had chosen safety condemnding Willios to die for the sake of that choice.