Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 759

Chapter 759: In a pickle(1)

“Hands off me! What is this about?” the man roared, his voice bouncing off the stone walls of the barracks.

Eight men were on him, two for each limb, their grips like iron shackles. He thrashed, trying to twist free, his boots scraping against the dirt floor, but they were stronger and, more importantly, more in number.

A fist slammed into his gut.

The air punched out of him in a choking gasp. Another blow landed in his ribs, sharp and merciless, and his body curled involuntarily under the pain. The fight bled out of his limbs, not gone entirely, but reduced to twitching, stubborn resistance.

While the others pinned him to the ground, a ninth man crouched down beside him, pulling the satchel from his shoulder. He took his time, to open as his fingers rummaged through the worn leather pouch.

The pinned man’s breath came ragged. Every movement of the searcher’s hand made his chest tighten.

It didn’t take long.

The ninth man’s hand emerged holding a folded scrap of parchment. His eyes lit up as he unfolded it. A slow, crooked smile spread across his face.

“Didn’t know you could read and write, you rat.” he said, almost conversationally, waving the paper just inches from the prisoner’s face.

The man on the ground clenched his jaw, saying nothing. But inside, his stomach turned to lead.

He didn’t need to look to know what it was.

There would be no talking his way out of this except as a corpse.

————–

“Sir! Alator has been captured by the guards! They’ve thrown him into the dungeon!”

Marcus froze mid-step, the words uttered above the clamor of the mine.

His head turned immediately to his back, eyes scanning the line of overseers further down the tunnel. Relief flickered through him when he saw that none of them had reacted, either they hadn’t heard, or the racket of the miners’ work had swallowed the outburst whole.

This fucking fool.

He pivoted on his heel and closed the distance to the messenger in two strides. In a swift movement Marcus seized the man by the scruff of his roughspun tunic, yanking him close enough for their noses to nearly touch. His voice came out in a low, sharp rasp, just loud enough to be heard over the metallic ringing of pickaxes.

“Don’t shout, you idiot! Do you want every soul in this pit to know?What’s gotten into you?” His breath was hot with anger, his eyes hard as the rock walls around them.

The man shrank back, wide-eyed. “N-no, sir… but—”

“Yes, Alator’s been captured,I got it…” Marcus cut in, his tone dropping further trying to make it appear calm , despite his heart being anything but calm.

Still he couldn’t let anxiety take over him.

“And if they think he wasn’t alone, they’ll start looking for the rest of us. And you… you thought the best thing to do was drag me away from the others in the middle of our shift? You’re lucky the overseers didn’t hear us over the miners’ noise, or else we would have made company for Alator.

You bloody fool.”

The rhythmic clang of metal on stone echoed all around them, reverberating through the low-ceilinged tunnel. Down here, every sound carried, bouncing off damp, blackened walls, making whispers as dangerous as shouts, or at least they would be if it were not for the continuous ruckus around them.

Still, the news was bad, worse than Marcus wanted to admit.

“How,” he said slowly, his grip loosening but his eyes still fixed like iron, “did that idiot get caught?”

“I… I don’t know, sir,” the man stammered, glancing nervously toward the far end of the shaft. “I just heard from the others… they say the guards suddenly marched into the barracks this afternoon and took him. No warning. No reason given.

He must be getting tortured as we speak”

Marcus would have screamed if not for two things, his instinct for survival and the sheer importance of the mission.

One clearly being more important than the other.

Instead, he ground his teeth until his jaw ached, forcing the fury down into something cold and sharp.

Untenable. That was the only word to describe their situation.

With one of his men in the guards’ hands, it was now a race against the clock. Sooner or later, Alator would talk. Not because he was weak, Marcus had drilled that lesson into every operative he commanded, but because no man alive could hold his tongue forever. Pain broke everyone.

They hadn’t been trained to resist pain. That was a fool’s fantasy.

No, his men were taught how to procrastinate pain. How to endure long enough to feed their captors scraps of plausible nonsense, to muddle the truth and buy precious hours for the others to act, always if they could.

Alator had to know his best chance lay with them, hoping they would get him out, he knew after all of the plan.

Marcus told himself that twice as he turned toward the rhythmic clang of pickaxes on stone. Fifty overseers patrolled the mine. Three hundred slaves hacked away at the rock under their whips. The numbers were unbalanced , one overseer to six slaves, but the odds for the slave wouldn’t ever be that good.

Each of them was starved, half-sick, and chained together in gangs of six. The keys to those iron links never left the captain’s belt, and the captain always stood at the very mouth of the mine, stationed there for exactly that reason.

Even if the slaves tried to rise up, they’d have to kill armored men while chained and half-dead, then somehow get past the captain before he bolted. And once word reached the garrison outside, the whole mine would drown in steel.

An uprising would fail and die before it even begun ,unless of course…. they had help. That was why they were there.

“How many of us are here?” Marcus asked without turning his head.

“Twelve, sir.”

He swore under his breath. “Fuck, so few?”

The man shifted uncomfortably. “We weren’t prepared to act today. I wasn’t even supposed to be here, I got myself into the shift to inform you.”

The news landed like a stone in Marcus’s gut. The situation looked worse the more time it passed…

Twelve men. Twelve against thirty eight, and they had to do it in silence. It was worse than he’d hoped.

Still… they could do it, twelve blades could do a lot of damage if used well, and it always better than one.

Maybe.

Even so, it would be a throw in the dark. And the only other option, abandoning the mission altogether, tasted like ash in his mouth.

He could already picture the prince’s face when Marcus returned empty-handed. No, it didn’t take a genius to know how much the prince valued this place, and really he didn’t want to be the one reporting failure.

That was not an option.

They had to try.

Marcus let out a slow, steady breath, as though exhaling the last traces of hesitation. His mind was already moving, breaking down the risk into parts, and finding one worse than the other.

He cringed as he turned to his companion. “Go. Inform the others. We act now. Tell them to ready themselves and wait for my signal. They’ll know what to do when the time comes. Once you’ve passed the word, get back to me. We have work to do.”

The man blinked at him, taken aback. “Sir… you really mean to do this with only twelve?”

Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “Do we have another choice? This is a race against time.

Who knows how long it’ll take before they make Alator talk? Do you want to be here when he does?”

The question seemed to hit the man in the gut. He swallowed and shook his head.

“Then go,” Marcus said, voice low but carrying the iron edge of command. “Tell them what I’ve told you. We’ll make do with what we have here.”

The man hesitated one more heartbeat. “But … we don’t even have the weapons for the miners.”

Marcus turned his head, gaze sliding toward a nearby group of miners. Men in rags, their backs bent, their skin pale from years without sunlight as they came in the mine during the morning and only left after dawn.

Their arms swung pickaxes in dull, emotionless arcs, iron heads clanging against stone.

“They already have weapons,” Marcus said. “They just don’t know it yet. A pickaxe will split a skull just as well as it breaks rock.Just enough force in the right place, at the right time.”

He didn’t add the last thought aloud, but it weighed heavy in his mind.

And really, we don’t have any other choice.

The man nodded stiffly, casting one last uneasy glance at Marcus before slipping away down the tunnel, vanishing into the dim glow of the torches.

And alone Marcus stood still, listening to the fading footsteps and the constant, echoing rhythm of iron on stone.

Soon, this place would sound and look very different, hopefully littered with corpses that weren’t theirs….