The moment General Vasco Salgado merged back into the mass of steel and silk of his ranks, the royal army moved with the inevitable cadence of an iron tide. Dozens of siege ladders, heavy and clad in damp hides to resist fire, were flung against the fortress's grey stone with dull thuds that echoed like the heartbeats of a giant.
The air, clear moments before, became a forest of death. The hiss of arrows from the Aurelian lines was so constant it sounded like the tearing of an immense sheet of black silk over the defenders' heads. Atop the battlements, the acrid, sulphurous stench of the Brigade's gunpowder – that end-of-the-world odour that clings to the throat like vinegar – began to mix with the fine dust of limestone, shaken loose by the impact of projectiles.
Alistair moved in a trance of terror and fury. He was stationed at one of the bulwarks, eyes watering from the thick smoke, firing frantically – not with a longbow, but with one of the heavy crossbows the Brigade had piled by the embrasures.
Beside him, half-hidden by the parapet, Lucius acted as his 'loader', his small, nimble hands moving with feverish precision. Since the boy lacked the raw strength to bend the crossbow's steel prod with his bare hands, he used an iron cranequin – a geared crank that clicked with every turn of the handle.
– Even to kill people, a man's forced to do bloody exercise – Lucius grumbled, his face flushed red from the exertion as he turned the crank with all his might. – I'd rather be hauling wine barrels back in Verdejante. Wine, at least, doesn't try to return the favour with a bolt in the eye.
Alistair, about to pull the trigger on a figure scaling a ladder, let out a brief, wild smile – a nervous reflex in the midst of the carnage. But his smile didn't last long; the time for long-range fighting ended when the top of a siege ladder locked against the stone right in front of him. The first Aurelian soldier to leap onto the parapet was a massive man, whose bucket helm bore the golden lion, wielding a battle-axe that still gleamed in the sunlight.
Alistair dropped the crossbow and his hand scrambled desperately for the leather hilt of his sword, sliding the steel from its scabbard with a metallic wail. In a mix of pure panic – the kind that makes the knees wobble like jelly – and an adrenaline rush that scorched his veins, Alistair swung the greatsword. The blow was wide, clumsy, and lacked the elegance of a master-at-arms, but the weight of the iron was real.
The blade caught the first attacker in the flank, ripping through the mail with a sound like grinding glass, and the momentum of the swing continued in a blind arc that struck the shield of a second soldier, pitching him back into the abyss below.
Alistair gasped, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs. He saw Roderick a few paces away, the captain wiping an opponent's blood from his face with the elegance of a veteran butcher.
– Did you see that, Roderick? – Alistair shouted, his voice pitched high by the hysterical excitement of someone who has just cheated death by a whisker. – Write what I say in the history books! Soon I'll be known as the finest swordsman in the seven kingdoms!
– Or the luckiest bastard ever to swing a piece of iron! – Roderick added, as another soldier appeared at the top of the wall.
The trumpets of Aurelia let out a long, metallic lament that cut through the clamour of steel – a sound that rose from the royal ranks like a sigh of exhaustion. After two hours of a carnage that had turned the battlements into a slaughterhouse of crimson mud and guts, the men of the Lion began to descend the ladders, retreating like a tide pulling back after battering the rocks.
On the walls, the survivors of the Brigade let out shouts that were half-triumph, half-madness. Hector Duvall, his face smeared with soot and the dressing over his eye soaked a dark red, punched the parapet, hurling obscene insults at the backs of the fleeing soldiers.
– Run back to your mothers' skirts! – Hector roared, the gold in his teeth flashing under the cruel midday sun. – Tell Salgado that the Brigade's steel bites deeper than his lies!
Alistair let himself slide down against the cold stone, his chest heaving, his sword weighing on his arms as if it were made of lead and not iron. But the triumph was a brief flame, extinguished by a sound that made his stomach knot: the groan of heavy chains and the crawl of massive timber over hard-packed earth.
In the middle of the royal ranks, like an ancient beast emerging from a cave, appeared a colossal bombard. It was a monster of forged iron, a cannon of obscene proportions, its barrel wide enough for a man to crawl inside. It was pulled by dozens of horses and men stooping under the effort, the carriage wheels carving deep ruts into the Aurelian soil.
Alistair stood up, leaning against the wall, his face pale beneath the soot. He watched the monster being positioned, its black mouth pointed directly at them like the eye of a blind, famished god.
– I reckon – Alistair whispered, his voice failing in his dry throat – that Hector's balls won't be enough to stop that thing. Not his, nor those of every man in the kingdom.
There was no warning. The first shot from the bombard wasn't a sound; it was a force of nature. The world exploded in a thunderclap that made Alistair's teeth vibrate in his mouth and the very earth tremble beneath the fortress foundations. The projectile, a carved stone ball the size of a wine barrel, struck the west wall with impossible fury, announcing the end of an era with its impact.
An entire section of the wall collapsed, the granite blocks turned to dust and splinters that flew like giant arrows. The screams of the men standing there were drowned out by the roar of the collapse.
Before the cloud of debris and smoke could settle, the royal army roared again, and this time, they had no need for ladders. With swords drawn and shields raised, Vasco Salgado's soldiers surged like a flood through the open breach – a river of steel ready to drown what remained of the Brigade in its own ruins.
Hector, his face transformed into a mask of blood and powder, saw his men being swallowed by the Aurelian tide. The Mad Dog Brigade fought with the fury of the damned, but courage is a poor shield against a thousand spears.
– To the tower! – Hector roared, his voice hoarse from shouting commands that no one could hear anymore. – Fall back to the tower! By every son of a bitch dwelling in the Underworld, move if you want to see the sun set!
The group bolted across the courtyard, lungs burning as if they'd swallowed embers. The air was thick with screams, the smell of burnt flesh, and the metallic clangour of a fortress dying. Behind them, the fortress gates were smashed open and the Aurelian soldiers flooded the yard like a plague of iron locusts.
When they finally reached the top of the tower and barricaded the oak door, the silence that followed was that of a tomb. They were cornered between the sky and the steel.
Orlan, whose once-impeccable clothes were now just a distant memory, leaned against the cold stone, his breath short.
– There is a way out – Orlan hissed, eyes fixed on the door which was already suffering the first axe blows. – An escape tunnel that snakes beneath the kitchens. It's a rat's exit for a rat's situation, but it will take us past Salgado's lines.
Hector straightened his back, his one good eye gleaming with a maniacal flame. The leader of the Brigade wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a crimson smear.
– A sewer pipe? – Hector let out a bark of a laugh that sounded like breaking glass. – I left the Aurelian army with my head held high and a soldier's greatcoat; I'm not leaving my own fortress crawling through the shite beneath a kitchen. If death wants me, it'll have to climb the stairs and ask my bloody permission!
Alistair, however, wasn't listening to the debate over honour and excrement. He was leaning over an embrasure, watching the courtyard below. He saw the coordinated movement of the horses, the groan of the chains, and the slow, deliberate tilt of the iron monster. The bombard – Salgado's nightmare of stone and powder – was being pivoted, its black, obscene barrel rising inch by inch until it pointed directly at the tower windows where they stood, leaving Alistair with the feeling that the blood was draining from his face, leaving him paler than the soot that covered him.
– Is it just me – he began, his voice cracking and jumping an octave in a tone of poorly disguised panic –, or is that metal tunnel down there looking at us with some very unfriendly intentions? – he asked, pointing a trembling finger toward the yard.
Roderick saw the flash before he heard the sound. It was a glint of gold and death that turned the courtyard into a mirror of fire.
– Get back! – the captain roared, his voice tearing through the chaos. – Get away from the face of the tower!
But the words were mere wind against the will of the bombard. The impact wasn't a blow; it was the very foundation of the world being uprooted. The tower, which had withstood centuries of winters, swayed like wicker at the mercy of a gale. The ceiling of oak beams and the stone slabs of the parapet disintegrated, turning into a rain of splinters that reclaimed the space with the fury of a god.
Alistair felt the floor vanish beneath him, as if the earth had suddenly developed a ravenous hunger. The world became a whirlwind of grey dust and pain. When he hit the ground, the impact punched every bit of air from his lungs. A deafening silence set in, broken only by a high-pitched ringing that seemed to pierce his skull. He felt something warm trickling from his ears, and his vision became a blurred smudge of shadows and erratic lights.
Through the fog of fading consciousness, he saw a small figure hunched over him. It was Lucius, his face washed in tears that carved channels through the black soot. His hands gripped Alistair's doublet with feverish desperation, screaming – Alistair saw the movement of his mouth, the panic etched into every line of his childish face – but the lad was too small, and Alistair was now merely a bundle of broken flesh and bone that gravity refused to let go.
– Leave him, little one! – Marcus's voice emerged, not as a sound, but as a vibration in Alistair's chest.
His hands were like iron pincers, hoisting Alistair from the midst of the rubble with the ease of a peasant lifting a bale of straw onto a cart. Alistair felt himself swaying, his head lolling uselessly back as the world spun at impossible angles.
The last image his pupils retained was the thick black smoke pouring through the cracks in the masonry, like serpents of shadow crawling into a tomb, and, beneath the ringing in his ears, a rhythmic, metallic, and pitiless sound: the clank-clank of Aurelian armour ascending the spiral stairs.
Alistair wanted to say something – perhaps one last joke about the poor quality of the stonework – but the cold crept up his legs, and the mercenary plunged into oblivion as he was carried into the unknown in the arms of a man who smelled of sweat, blood, and a lingering trace of hope.