In three months, even a dog could learn routine, much less men.

As the horn’s brassy wail cut through the humid night, the garrison moved like men who had lived this nightmare a hundred times over. There was no need for shouting; archers unslung their bows in a single fluid motion, and the watchmen atop the battlements began hurl torches into the abyss below to illuminate the killing fields beneath their feet.

It was like throwing a speck of light inside a bottomless well only to see the monsters rummaging where the eyes could not see.

Asag tried to match their speed. He attempted a sharp turn, putting weight on his mangled leg to reach the gatehouse, but a white-hot spike of agony shot up his spine. He bit back a curse, his gait breaking into a jagged, uneven wobble.

Should have visited the privy while I had the chance, he thought grimly, finally reaching his post. He braced himself against the cold stone of the gatehouse, praying to the Five that his bowels wouldn’t betray him in the heat of the fray.

He wasn’t eager to make himself known as the only legate who shat himself in battle.Edric would never let him live it down.

The sun had dipped hours ago, leaving the western horizon the color of a fresh bruise,, it was a nice dawn, but now the sky was a canopy of coal-black. The stars were out, sharp and uncaring, but the moon was nowhere to be seen. The only light came from the sputtering orange glow of torches planted in the dirt just beyond the walls, stakes claimed by the unlucky few who drew wrong and were made to plant them.

In that hollow, moonless dark, the League moved. They came like thieves and murderers, which was fitting, for that was all they were.

Along the crenellations, the air was filled with the smell of sweaty bodies. Archers stood with arrows nocked, eyes straining into the gloom. Since the oil had run dry in the second week and water was too precious to waste on the dying, they had turned to the earth itself.

Great vats of sand were being stoked over roaring fires until they shimmered with a lethal, white heat. It was a nasty business; the sand would poured into the joints of armor, trickling down to the skin where it couldn’t be wiped away.

For a few heartbeats, there was only the sound of wood creaking and the distant, rhythmic clatter of the enemy’s plate.

Then, the first ladders hit. They rose from the deserted outer strongholds where the League had been stalled for months, their efforts now focused entirely on the gatehouse that stood like a defiant tooth in a broken maw.

Asag had made the call to seal the lower towers, a gamble that was now paying dividends. From the westernmost turret, he heard the sharp, rhythmic thrum of bowstrings. The men perched there were a constant plague to the attackers, raining shafts onto their flanks with no easy way for the League to strike back.

"Don’t fret about the arrows, men!" Asag roared, his voice acting as a whetstone against the silence. "We’ve enough to fill a granary! If you think you have a shot, by the gods, take it!"

Silence reclaimed the wall, heavy and suffocating.

It was Old Dick who finally shattered it. One of Lord Damaris’s levies, the man was down to his last five teeth and prone to grumbling that in a year he’d be reduced to eating nothing but peas-porridge. He let out a sudden, defiant cackle.

"I may be an old dog, but I’ve got a proper hard-on over here!Come and feel it dog of Ozenia!!"

A wave of rough laughter rolled down the line.

"Old Dick’s got the right of it!" Ugly Ross shouted, his voice as grating and loud as his face was scarred. "Let’s put some shafts where the sun don’t shine!"

"Eh," Big Oaf Owen chuckled, his massive hands effortlessly hoisting a stone the size of a man’s torso as if it were a beach pebble. He looked at Ross with a slow, confused grin. "It’s night, Ross. The sun isn’t shining anywhere today. Eh."

Shadows swarmed across the killing fields.

The air suddenly filled with the shriek of projectile, arrows and stones arcing through the dark like a horizontal rainstorm. The alarmed shouts of the bastards below soon punctuated the night making true of the garrison’s response.

Asag had never been half the hunter Jarza was, but he was well-acquainted with the weight of a bow. Yet, with his wrist a ruined mess, the weapon was useless to him.

With a frustrated sigh, he snatched up a sling, swinging it with the brutal, practiced momentum of a flail. He didn’t aim; in this press of bodies and blackness, he simply let the stones fly into the void. He had no way of knowing if they found meat or dirt, but the sheer density of the target made the odds high.

Basil would have a field day up here, the thought surfaced unbidden. He found himself thinking of the boy, and of Alpheo, and of the brothers he hadn’t seen in a lifetime of months. A sharp pang of loneliness bit deeper than his wounds, but he didn’t have the luxury of indulgence.

To his right, the thrum of a bowstring was followed by a triumphant roar.

"AH! I took one!" Ugly Ross barked "Caught the cunt right in the chest!"

"Take another," Asag grunted, giving his sling another vicious rotation before letting fly.

The enemy was close enough now that the torches caught the contours of their bodies, vague, frantic shapes in the flickering orange light. He watched a stone, probably his, connect with a man’s shoulder, the impact spinning him off his feet with a yelp of pure agony.

On the battlements, the defenders no longer had to search for targets; they only had to choose them.

Then came the heavy, wooden thud of ladders biting into the stone of the gatehouse.

"Show them the way down!" Bald Mock bellowed, his axe flashing as he hacked at the top rungs. Beside him, men with spears stood like statues of iron, ready to thrust diagonally the moment a helmet appeared over the lip of the wall.

A ladder sprouted barely a step to Asag’s right. A face appeared almost instantly, that of a young man, eyes wide with adrenaline.He probably didn’t even want to be there.

He was quick, but Asag was much faster. He drew his sword and buried the steel deep into the soft meat of the man’s lower neck. The attacker tumbled backward, but as he fell, his weight and the tangle of his cloak wrenched the blade from Asag’s grip.

"Fucking cunt! My sword!" Asag spat, watching his steel vanish into the dark.

Big Oaf Owen immediately tried to thrust his own axe toward the Legate, but Asag shook his head. Instead, he reached down and snatched up a heavy, notched mace, a trophy from a man who had nearly rattled Asag’s teeth loose a month prior. It felt good in his hand; blunt, honest, and unforgiving.

And it indeed unforgave two more skulls that night.

The night became a blur of sound: the frantic shouting of the attackers, the endless whistling of stones, and the wet whimpers of the dying. Then, from the eastern ramparts, a horn blew a single, long note.

Aoooooooooooooo.

Asag froze, his ears straining, begging the gods not to hear a second blast. A second would mean a breach. He waited, heart hammering against his ribs, but the silence held.

One blast meant a repulse. They had held the line.

He laughed in joy.

His own men were frightening enough in the dark, but the bastards of the League were clearly scared shitless by the chaos of a night assault. They had eschewed siege towers, fearing the creak of wood would give them away, betting everything on the element of surprise.

The bet had failed.

It seemed, however, that the gatehouse had been blessed with the only men of true grit the League possessed. Even as the other sectors fell silent, more ladders scraped against the stone here, biting into the masonry with jagged persistence. Yet, for all their climbing, no breach was made; every man who crested the lip of the wall was met with a wall of Yarzat steel and sent tumbling back into the abyss.

Asag looked down at the broken bodies through a gap in the crenelations and felt a surge of cold, bitter anger. They were clearly peasant levies, fodder in its purest form. Some didn’t even possess a mail shirt, sent to scale a fortress in nothing but meat and desperation.

Did those gilded princes truly think they could win a war with such shallowness? Asag wondered. Astonished by their low opinion of them . There was a limit to how much a commander could be provoked by such a half-assed attempt. It was a waste of life that didn’t even have the decency to be a real threat.

How could he find himself so disappointed to the limit of anger for an enemy blunder, was a mystery...and yet here he was.

With his ruined wrist, Asag was robbed of the satisfaction of joining the defense. He couldn’t draw a bow or haul a vat of sand. Luckily, Big Oaf Owen was doing the work of three men and enjoying every second of it. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The man was a demon.

He hoisted stone after heavy stone, his muscles rippling under his sweat-slicked skin as he hurled them down with tireless, mechanical precision. Every time a rock crushed a helmet or shattered a ladder, Owen let out a booming, chesty laugh, fueled by the roars of praise from the men around him.

The attackers at the gatehouse might have been more courageous than their brothers on the flanks, but as the other sectors were cleared, reinforcements began to pour toward Asag’s position relieving them of their hard-held line. The slaughter doubled in an instant. Fresh archers lined the walls, and the rain of stones became an avalanche.

Finally, even the bravest of the levies realized they were climbing into a meat grinder. Fear, sharp and infectious, took hold. The frantic scurrying up the ladders turned into a desperate scramble down.

"They’re breaking!" shouted Sweaty Pate, his face shimmering with grease and effort as if he’d just been hauled out of a river.

"Eh! Like hay!" Owen bellowed, wiping his brow with a hand the size of a shovel.

"Yes! Just like hay!" Old Dick cackled, his few remaining teeth gleaming in the torchlight.

The cry was taken up by the entire garrison, a rhythmic, mocking chant that rose into the coal-black sky, drowning out the whimpers of the wounded below.

"LIKE HAY! LIKE HAY!PRESS THEM DOWN!BREAK THEM DOWN LIKE HAY!"

The shouts followed the fleeing men into the dark, punctuated by the deadly thrum of bowstrings as the defenders rained shafts into the backs of the routed levies.

Asag thought little of that attack, murmuring in a smaller voice like hay, like hay, copying his soldiers. He didn’t yet know what that attack meant for him, for the enemy, hell for the entire fucking war.

For if he knew he would have kissed Old Dick in that ugly mouth of his.