Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 999: Loss from grace(3)

The Valakii had come to a realitazion,when first their eyes laid on their deaths, if the argument was to be settled by the sword, the mountain would only serve as their collective headstone. Their only hope lay in the weight of their words, though even those felt flimsy against the iron-clad silence of the host before them.

The counsel given to the Prince across the sea had been unerring; these were men born of stone and they respected only that which could break them.Had it been the opposite the Valakii would have only held sport in their killing of the outsider.

With a small band of household guards, Korgas and Volar traversed the vast, trembling expanse. Behind them lay the pass of their ancestors where they took their position for a stand; before them, a foreign tide that seemed to have risen from the very depths of the earth. Every step was a battle against the instinct to flee, a heavy, cold anchor of dread dragging at their heels.

It was a beautiful day for a slaughter.Unfortunate that if it came to be , it would be theirs.

The April sun was a radiant jewel in a sky of unblemished blue, the surrounding woods, thick with the lush foliage of spring, stood eerily indifferent. The trees did not shiver at the clink of armor; the birds did not cease their songs for the death of men. To the mountains, the men below were merely parasites, their petty blood-feuds beneath the notice of the eternal peaks.

As they drew within bowshot, the true scale of the Outsiders became pressure. Countless eyes peered through the narrow slits of black-lacquered helmets. The First Legion stood in terrifying, mathematical perfection, cohort after cohort, five men deep, a geometric forest of spears. They did not shift; they did not murmur. They simply were in their poised aggression, which was capable enough of telling Korgas more than a thousand war cries ever could.

The Chieftain knew then that if he signaled the charge, his people would be swept away like withered leaves in an autumn gale, their very names erased like footsteps in a blizzard.

His eyes finally found the commander, and the last shred of Korgas’s pride evaporated. If Korgas was a boulder, the man before him was a Great Oak of some forgotten age. He sat atop a warhorse of immense proportions, a beast that looked as though it had been forged from muscle and thunder, one of the same hellish creatures the Trazhanie had brought in their failed conquest years ago. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Korgas remembered that failure. He had been a boy when the mountain tribes had laughed at the "proud men on proud steeds," slaughtering the stranded invaders and burning their supply carts without a care. He had seen the Trazhanie die in the dirt.

But he could muster no laughter now.

Atop the Legate’s helmet, a brilliant crimson plume, a crest like a bloodied cock’s comb, rippled in the wind. It was a defiant, arrogant flourish, announcing his presence as if to mock the very notion of danger.

His skin was not the pale, ghostly hue of the "white devils" he commanded, nor was it the sun-bronzed hide of the tribesmen. It was black as a starless midnight, the deep, obsidian hue of the tribes’ mortal enemies from the sandy wastes.

Korgas tore his gaze away from the obsidian giant to look at the man who had truly wounded him, the Chieftain of the Chorsi. This was the man who had brokered the path from the old world of servitude into the new world of the Alliance, and now he stood on the opposite side of the field.

A betrayer.

To Korgas, the foreign legion inspired fear, but Varaku inspired only unadulterated contempt.

"We swear this day, and for all the winters that shall follow, to be brothers of the blood and the bone," Korgas began, his voice a low, bitter rasp, reciting the words of the Great Pact. "Your enemy shall find my spear at their throat; your hunger shall find the milk of my herds. We shall walk the high paths together, and the spirits of our ancestors shall witness that no shadow shall come between the Valakii, the Chorsi, the Aranuai, and the Mashka, and furthermore any other tribe that shall enter our alliance."

Korgas spat onto the dry earth between them. "Those were the words you announced before the mountain peaks. I see now how little it takes for a Chorsi to trade a sacred promise for foreign stone. The milk we drank in brotherhood has not yet turned to piss in our bellies, and already you take the field against us. The words you swore are left in the dust to be scattered by the wind. We would have taken up iron to fight the Duskwindai with you gladly, yet we bear steel against one another. What say you, betrayer?"

Varaku, the feller of the Duskwindai, did not flinch. Unlike the Legate, he did not sit upon a foreign beast; he stood on his own two feet, rooted into the soil of his fathers. His face remained as expressive as a field of winter snow.

"It is unfortunate," Varaku said laconically.

"Is that the sum of it? ’Unfortunate’?" Korgas roared, his son Volar clutching his arm to restrain him. "No excuse? No explanation? You named us brothers only to stab us the moment we turned to tend our herds! Give us a reason, or let the crows have the truth of it!"

"Just as I swore that oath to you, I swore another to the Crown that saved us," Varaku replied, his voice calm but heavy as a falling stone. "I did not come here to take up steel against you. I am here to ensure that no blood is spilled and that the words of Yarzat are given the weight they deserve."

"You would choose the Outsider over your own kind?" Korgas asked, bewildered by the perceived madness of it.

"It was the ’Outsider’ who gave me the steel to retake these hills when you were still hiding in the crags of your masters," Varaku countered, his eyes sharpening. "It was the ’Outsider’ who filled our bellies when we were faced with starvation. And I recall it was the lot of you, the Valakii, the Aranuai, and the Mashka, who begged for the intervention that now stands before you. I counseled you against the insults you threw at the foreign man, but you were deaf then. I hope you have ears now, for I am frantically working to ensure your tribe is not given to the worms."

Korgas looked as if he had swallowed a mouthful of ash, while in Volar, a flicker of hope rekindled. If the Chorsi were interceding, perhaps there was a bridge back from the abyss. He begget his father to ask for their wish.

"What do they want?" Korgas demanded heeding his son.

"That is a question better asked of the one who commands the storm," Varaku replied, nodding toward the Legate.

The question was relayed through Torghan, who stood near the Legate, his scarred face a mirror of his father’s. After a brief exchange in the sharp, clipped tongue of the South, the obsidian giant finally spoke. His voice did not carry the frantic energy of a tribesman; it was a slow, tectonic rumble that seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of Korgas’s bones.

He learnt of the meaning only when Torghan relayed it

"There is much to be discussed between the Prince of Yarzat and the Chief of the Valakii," the translation rang out. "Great insult was offered to us, and in the Golden Lands, the man who bears the word of the Prince is the Prince. To spit upon the Envoy is to spit upon the Crown itself. We did not seek this field; your insolence summoned us and its consequences."

The Legate leaned forward over the pommel of his saddle, his eyes locking onto Korgas with a terrifying focus.

"You laid threats against our men of royal word. You claimed you would see us driven from these hills. We are here to see you make those threats true. But in the meantime, hear our own: I promise you, by the blood in my veins and the iron in my hand, that if further harm befalls a single servant of Yarzat, we shall not merely defeat you. We shall erase you. We will slaughter every male of your line until the Valakii are a memory. We will take your herds, burn your grass until the earth is a blackened husk where nothing may ever grow again, and drive your women and children into the East to toil as nameless shadows in our fields."

The Legate’s hand drifted to the hilt of his massive blade.

"And for you, Chieftain of a tribe that will be no more, I reserve a singular end. I shall nail you to a Great Oak facing the rising sun, and I shall keep you alive long enough to watch your world perish so as to be the last thing to plague your sight. That I swear by my name and the glory of the Prince.

So, let us see which of us is a man of his word. Shall we both fulfill our work this day, or shall none?"