Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1011: A bastard

The golden sun had just dyed the sky a bleeding red, as it dipped toward the peaks of the Mountains of the Gods’ Hands. With its departure came the first creeping fingers of the highland cold, a chill that even the height of summer could not fully suppress.

He sat atop a weathered stone, the shadow of a stately oak offering a silent, cool homage to his presence. He found it queer that such a fragment of nature could remain so utterly unburdened by the hand of man, even as the earth surrounding it was littered with the broken husks of his fellows.

The low, rhythmic whimpering of the dying rose into the stagnant air.

For his own sake Tiberius tried to ignore it. It was much about the deaths as much about how vain all that was.

He focused his entire being on that tree, standing tall, indifferent, and magnificently unbothered by the slaughter. He raised his hands, cupping them tightly around the sides of his head to shutter his peripheral vision, creating a narrow, porcelain corridor of sight where only the oak existed.

In that small, framed world, there was peace.The same one he had searched for so long, which he would never be able to attain till he drew breath.

He marveled at the fragile boundary of his own flesh; only the width of his fingers separated the hellish landscape he had helped create from the primordial beauty of nature.

It was a reassuring in a certain way, the knowledge that he had not yet fallen so far into the abyss that he could no longer find pleasure in the sight of something living and green.

He glanced down at the emblem of the Eagle embossed upon his breastplate. Once silver and proud, it was now dyed a heavy read matching the sky above and the saturated dirt beneath his boots.

They were likely scouring the camp for him at this very moment. The mental image of his absence causing that wrinkled, prune-faced of Julius to fret and pace brought a brittle, jagged smile to his lips.

He needed these stolen moments of solitude. He needed to be away from Julius’s unrelenting ambition, away from the stench of woodsmoke and victory songs. Perhaps it was an arrogance born of vanity to crave silence after such a meticulously planned operation had delivered triumph into the open palm of his hand, but as he sat there, he felt no cheer for his victory.

The whimper of the dying man rose to a shrill, piercing the bubble of Tiberius’s sanctuary. He turned his head, his initial flash of irritation dissolving into a hollow, aching surprise and then to guilt

"You are crawling the wrong way, friend," Tiberius said softly.

He looked down.

His forehead was slick with a grey, deathly sweat; his fingernails were broken stumps caked in the red-brown clay of the valley. One shoulder was a shattered mess , pinned uselessly against his torso.

With a hand that had signed death warrants for thousands that very morning, Tiberius reached out and gestured toward the horizon.

"It is there you should go," he said, his fingers tracing a line through the smoke. "To the south lies the Fingers, and another enemy. You are crawling into the mouth of the wolf."

The soldier who was now nothing more than a broken cup that was leaking, looked up. His eyes were wide, bloodshot orbs of confusion, fixed on the handsome, porcelain face of the young man peering down at him from a throne of stone. His lips were cracked into dry, white fissures.

"Go west," Tiberius explained with a terrifying, gentle calm. "West is where you come from. West is home."

The man looked toward the setting sun, then let out a tired, rattling sigh that collapsed into a brittle laugh. He slumped, his forehead resting against the dirt where the worms were already sensing their feast.

"You know you aren’t going to live past the hour, right?" Tiberius asked. The man’s laugh turned into pitiful weeping.

Tiberius surveyed the landscape of his making. He was the Imperator of the East, the master of the board, yet he found this a wretched, small place to die. There was no poetry in this mud.

He felt pity for the man.

He unclipped the canteen from his belt and nudged it against the soldier’s temple, waking him from his sobbing. The man grabbed it with a desperate, animal strength, drinking greedily, the water spilling over his chin.

As the man drank, Tiberius watched a raven drop from the sky, landing with a heavy flutter upon a nearby corpse to delicately pluck out an eye.

"It is all a lie, you know," Tiberius began, his voice a melodic drone over the sound of the man’s frantic swallowing as he watched the black bird swallow his meal. "The outcome of this battle was decided in a tent weeks ago. A meaningless act . You, and the thousands rotting around us, could have been home. You had no chance. Many of the lords in your camp had already traded their loyalty for gold; they were simply waiting for my signal to betray you."

The dying man began to cough, water and bloody phlegm spraying over his hands. He took two ragged breaths and resumed his desperate drinking.

His throat must have been hurting...

"Those same lords who forced you into this ditch will not even be punished," Tiberius continued, his gaze drifting to his own crimson-stained hands. "We want them compliant, not dead. This battle? It was a vanity. This carnage? A theatrical necessity to satisfy the pride of some men. Your death is entirely inconsequential. A meaningless punctuation mark."

Tiberius took a breath that felt like inhaling glass.

He saw the truth of his condition, he was a puppet in purple, a brilliant tool whose value would plummet the moment his wife produced a male heir.

The man stopped drinking. He looked up, his weeping stilled by the sheer, rambling madness of the youth before him.

"I wanted to be a poet, you know," Tiberius said, a ghostly, pathetic smile touching his lips. "When I was a child, I thought words could mend the world. That dream is dead. The road I walk was paved before I was born, and I cannot step off it without the axe finding my neck...and in fear of my own life I have signed the death of many others....Do you think the gods exist?"

The man answered with a wet, hacking cough.

"If they do, why is their silence so absolute? Are they so disgusted by what we have become that they have turned their faces away? Or are they like us, leaning forward in their seats, enthralled by the gore?"

The wounded man shivered, a final surge of spite flaring in his eyes. "Y-Yo... cough... you... fuc... head..."

Tiberius turned. On the ridge, the clibanarii were appearing, monstrous silhouettes of iron and horse, the sun glinting off their scales. They had found their master.

"You are going to die, friend. You won’t see the stars tonight," Tiberius said, drawing his sword from its scabbard. The steel sang a mournful note as it shone with the dying light of that day. "As thanks for the company, I shall send you swiftly. Is that agreeable?"

"You get off on this... godsdamn nobles gods curse you all ..." the man wheezed, his voice failing amidst a final, violent spasm.

"Aye," Tiberius whispered, his eyes filling with a sudden, stinging heat. "On that, you are right. May the gods damn us all."

He thrust the blade down. The steel met the resistance of cloth and flesh, then slid home with a sickening, effortless heat. The man’s back arched, his limbs going rigid against the earth, before the tension snapped and he went limp. Gone forever.

Tiberius sat in the silence, the blood of the man he had offered his mercy cooling on his blade, as the iron-clad riders thundered down to hail their master.

"Hail, Your Imperial Majesty!"

The thunder of hooves died into a rhythmic clatter as Ronis, Commander of the Imperial Clibanarii, threw himself from his saddle. He struck the earth with the heavy, metallic finality of a falling anvil, his iron scales shimmering with the dying light of the sun. He snapped a salute, his fist striking his breastplate with a hollow ring.

"We were consumed by worry, Sire. We feared some treachery had found you in the tall grass, that some ill had befallen the heart of the Empire."

"It would have been a hollow triumph had the victor been claimed by the dirt, would it not?" Tiberius replied, his voice a ghost of its former self. He lifted his crimson-bathed sword into the air. The hick coat of dark blood began to sluggishly crawl down the fuller toward the hilt, staining his fingers a permanent, royal red.

A younger rider moved forward, extending a clean silken cloth to tend to the Imperial steel. Tiberius ignored him and wiped the gore from the blade against the thigh of his legs before slamming the steel back into its scabbard.

"Are you prepared to return to the camp, Your Imperial Majesty?" Ronis asked, his eyes gleaming with the reflected fire of the burning horizon. " The soldiers are screaming your name, the Imperator who shattered the sky with his charge, the hero who severed the head of the rebellion with a single stroke. This was a day for the epics. The traitors broke like glass; they flee with terror at their heels, and our vanguard pursues them with heavy steel and swifter steeds."

Tiberius looked at Ronis, then beyond him to the distant encampment where the torches were beginning to blossom like orange ulcers in the dark. Had Julius not been born to a Great House, he could have been the finest playwright the world had ever known. The choreography of the day had been flawless. Julius had staged the slaughter so perfectly that every drop of blood spilled seemed to serve only to illuminate Tiberius’s glory.

A long, suffocating time of festivity would follow. He would be forced to endure the sycophancy of the nobles, to feel their oily congratulations slide off his skin as they toasted to a victory bought with the lives of men they didn’t know. He had found the honest, dying rattle of the soldier at his feet far more palatable than the music of the court.

"I find the air here more... honest, Ronis," Tiberius said, his voice flat. "Leave me. I would count the stars, you think them truly to be countless?I would like to find the answer tonight."

Ronis hesitated, his iron-masked face unreadable. "I would grant you the peace you seek, Majesty, But you see, Lord Julius has sent word, he... insists upon your presence for matters I was not informed of."

Even after eleven years a chill still passed through his spine.