The sound of a thousand armored boots marching on cobblestone is the sound of an approaching earthquake. It was a sound Aethelburg had not heard in living memory, and as Commander Eva led her contingent through the city's arteries, she saw its effect. Citizens who had been arguing or milling about in frightened groups now scattered, pressing themselves into doorways and alleys. Windows were shuttered. The defiant, chaotic noise of the city was replaced by a new, more terrifying silence: the silence of anticipation.
Eva rode at the head of her column, her face an unreadable mask of granite. Joric rode beside her, his own expression a mixture of grim determination and youthful anxiety. This was not a patrol to keep the peace. This was an army marching on its own city. Eva felt no pride, no righteous fury. Only the cold, heavy weight of necessity. She was a surgeon, and she had been ordered to cut a festering cancer from the heart of her patient, even if the procedure might kill it.
They reached the Merchant's Forum and did not slow. Eva's orders, shouted through her lieutenants, were precise and clear. In a matter of minutes, a double line of the Royal Guard, shields locked and spears leveled, had formed a perfect, glittering ring of steel around the entire square. All exits were sealed. Inside the ring, the several hundred Covenanters who had gathered for their midday sermon were trapped, their jeers and chants turning to cries of alarm and confusion.
At their center, on the blood-stained auction block, the hulking enforcer Vorlag stood, his expression of fanatical certainty momentarily faltering as he saw the sheer, disciplined force arrayed against him.
Eva dismounted and strode to the center of her shield wall, a Royal Crier at her side. She did not draw her sword. Her authority was a sharper weapon.
"Hear the word of the King!" the Crier's voice boomed across the trapped square.
Eva spoke, her own voice cutting through the sudden silence, amplified by the unnatural quiet. "In the name of King Valerius, I, Commander Eva of the Aethelburg Wardens, declare this assembly to be treasonous. The cult known as the Covenanters is an enemy of the state. Your leader, High Scrutator Ouen, and his lieutenant, Vorlag, are wanted criminals."
She pointed a gauntleted finger directly at the bald-headed enforcer. "Surrender your leaders. Disperse and return to your homes. The King's mercy will be extended to those who obey the law." She let the offer hang in the air for a moment before delivering the final, unyielding line. "Resist, and you will be met with the full force of that law."
Vorlag stared at her, a slow, ugly smile spreading across his face. He spat on the stone of the shrine. "There is only one law here, soldier-bitch," he roared, lifting a heavy, iron-shod club. "The will of the God of Bargains!" He let out a guttural war cry. "For the glory of the ultimate sacrifice!"
He charged. The mob behind him, a wave of shrieking, fanatical humanity, surged forward.
"Hold the line!" Eva commanded, her voice a whip-crack.
The wave of bodies crashed against the shield wall with a sickening crunch of flesh and bone against steel. The discipline of the Guard held. They were a rock against a raging, chaotic sea. The Covenanters fought with a terrifying zeal, their eyes glazed over with a martyr's ecstasy. They threw themselves onto the spear points, trying to create openings with their own bodies.
"Second rank! Pikes, forward, through the gaps!" Eva directed, her mind a cold engine of tactical calculation. "Archers on the rooftops! Target their backline! Break their cohesion!"
Arrows rained down, and the Covenanter's rear flank crumbled into chaos. The shield wall, a single, monstrous organism, began to push forward, its spear points a hedge of death. It was a brutal, ugly business. This was not a battle of elegant swordplay, but a grim, grinding purge.
Joric, fighting on her right, grunted as a heavy club splintered his shield. A massive Covenanter surged through the momentary gap, his face a mask of rage. Before the man could bring his weapon down, Eva's own sword was in motion. It was not a flashy move, but a brutally efficient thrust into the man's exposed side. He gargled, his eyes wide with surprise, and collapsed.
"Close the gap, Joric!" she snapped, already turning to assess the next threat.
The fight lasted less than ten minutes. The Covenanters' fanaticism was no match for the Royal Guard's superior training, armor, and discipline. The wave of their charge broke, and then shattered. The mob dissolved into terrified individuals, who were systematically rounded up, disarmed, and forced to their knees by the advancing guards.
The aftermath was a scene from a butcher's shop. The cobblestones of the forum were slick with blood. Dozens of bodies, both guards and Covenanters, lay still, while the air was filled with the groans of the wounded. Eva walked through the carnage, her face grim. She found Vorlag pinned to the ground by two of her guards, a deep gash in his leg. He glared up at her, spitting a wad of bloody phlegm at her feet.
"The Scrutator will see you all burn for this," he snarled.
"He will have to get in line," Eva replied coldly. "Chain him. Take him to the dungeons."
Her final order was for the shrine. "Tear it down," she commanded. Her soldiers, using crowbars and brute force, splintered the blood-stained auction block. They gathered the morbid trinkets and offerings into a pile and, using one of the Covenanters' own torches, set it all ablaze.
The fire rose high into the sky, casting a flickering, hellish light on the faces of the captured fanatics, who watched with expressions of pure, unadulterated hatred.
Eva stood in the center of the now-secured square, the smoke stinging her eyes. She felt no triumph, only the deep, bone-weary exhaustion of a surgeon who has just performed a brutal but necessary amputation. She had won the battle for the Merchant's Forum. But she had also created two hundred new martyrs, and two hundred families who would now see the King's law as a murderous evil.
A messenger ran up to her, his face pale. "Commander! A report from the palace. An informant from within the Covenanters…"
"Where is Ouen?" Eva cut him off, her voice sharp.
The messenger swallowed hard. "He was not at the forum, Commander. He was never going to be. He was seen leaving the city through a smuggler's gate an hour before the attack. He took his inner circle with him."
Eva closed her eyes. Of course. Vorlag and the others were a sacrifice. A distraction. While the Guard was busy purging the forum, the true leader of the insurrection had slipped away.
She looked around at the burning shrine, the lines of shackled prisoners, the bodies of her own dead soldiers. They hadn't cut off the serpent's head. They had merely swatted at its tail, and in doing so, they had shown it exactly how far they were willing to go. Ouen was now free to spread his poisonous faith to the rest of the kingdom, to a world full of desperate people.
The Purge of Aethelburg was over. The true war had just begun.
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The Chronicle of the Fallen
Time Period Covered: Day 72 of the Age of Fear
Victims of The Reaping: 1
Victims of the Covenant: 4
Deaths from Civil Unrest: 87 (Includes 12 Royal Guards and 75 Covenanters and civilians from the First Purge)
Total Lives Lost: 92
Of Note Among the Fallen:
— The last master sailmaker of Seacliff, a man whose family had rigged the royal fleet for generations.
— A Royal Guard Sergeant, a twenty-year veteran, slain at the Merchant's Forum.
— Sigrid, the designated "Ice-Reader" for the Frostfang Outpost in Karak.