Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 841

Chapter 841: Sinking ship(1)

Khairo had fallen.

Few truly grasped what that meant. A legend undone, a citadel of half a millennium brought to ruin. A feat the Confederation had chased for generations, dreamed of in fireside tales and songs of vengeance, now accomplished in their lifetime, by their hands.

They had not only torn down a city,they had shattered an empire, maimed another, toppled the order of the world.

The Sun Palace, once the holiest jewel of the desert, stood desecrated. The marble that had borne sultans and priests was now wet with spilled wine and seed. Every ten steps, orgies bloomed like weeds, sailors rutting with slaves, some with each other, with anything warm enough to take them.

Those not fucking drank till their wits failed, stuffed their bellies with stolen feasts, or fought over gems plucked from shattered vaults. The air reeked of sweat, blood, incense, and piss. The sacred halls of the Sun God had become a brothel, a tavern, a gutter.

And everyone was glad.

Casks burst freely, treasure lay in heaps, meat roasted on spits torn from holy banners. Songs of victory rolled through corridors drowned in gold and gore. There was enough plunder to feed every greed, enough glory to brand every man present with immortality.

But not for him.

No cup was offered. No hand clapped his shoulder. No woman he beckoned

Blake walked unheeded through the revelry, red from crown to heel. Blood lacquered his arms, clotted in his hair, matted against his skin till he seemed carved from gore itself. His axe dripped in rhythm with his steps. His eyes burned like coals left too long in the fire.

He should have been triumphant. He had done what none before him had dared, what even the old kings of the sea could not achieve. His name was shouted from lips drunk on plunder. His power had never been closer, his moment never riper.

But he was not triumphant.

Inside him gnawed a sickness he had never known. Not when his house lay in ruins. Not when he learned how his kin had been butchered. Not even when he first sold his soul for steel and sails.

Anxiety. Rage. A bitterness deeper than defeat.

Because he had been denied.

The Sultaness had been his by right,his prize, his proof, his conquest to chain and parade before the fleet. The mother of Azania broken to his leash, a living trophy to crown his victory. She would have been his banner, his vengeance, his pleasure.

Instead, she had been ripped from him. Stolen by the very hand he thought his ally.

The Red God. The Sun.Or whatever the fuck the god he fought for was.

He had bled for it. Killed for it . Brought the greatest city of the sands to its knees. And for what? To be mocked? To be hobbled at the moment of his triumph?

His blood roared in his ears, hotter than the fires still eating through the palace halls.

He had earned her. And it had been taken.

Not by man. Not by empire. But by the god he had thought to aid.

“HardGut!” One of the guards he’d posted at the gates of his mansion barked out as Blake passed.

Blake didn’t spare him a glance. He shoved the head of the Unkillable into the man’s hands. “Have a cup made from that skull. He was worthy.”

A fitting prize. That one had been a fight worth remembering. He would have savored it more, etched it into his marrow, if not for the sour taste of ashes where his victory should have been sweet.

The slaves laboring in the mansion corridors shrank as he strode past, their eyes drilling holes into the marble at their feet. Not one dared look up at him, the Red Angel of the Sea he started to be called.

He ignored them.

They were gnats, not his prey.

His gaze dragged across the portraits lining the gilded walls. Every one of them was a Sultan. Bronze faces, oil eyes, the line of a dynasty that had stood five centuries. He could have ordered them ripped down. But no. Better to leave them. Better to let them watch.

How else was he to taunt them?

At the end of the corridor, he reached the door. One kick and the hinges screamed. The wood splintered open, crashing back against the wall.

Inside, the crone sat. Clear as the sun at dawn, her face rose from the gloom, wrinkled, leathery, and as ugly as a turd.

She didn’t turn at the intrusion. Didn’t even flinch as if she expected him. Her hands moved slow, steady, grinding herbs into paste in a shallow bowl.

The smell hit him like rot given breath. A choking stench of smoke and bile, of things left too long in the sun. But Blake didn’t gag. He didn’t recoil. He was too furious to feel it. Compared to his hands, that reek was nothing.

He closed the distance in a stride. His hand clamped around the crone’s throat, dragging her off her stool, and in a breath she dangled against the wall like a broken doll.

He barely registered the second figure in the room. Malida, his bed slave, had been crouched in the corner. A sharp shriek slipped from her lips before Blake’s gaze cut her down to silence. One nod of his head, and she scurried out, the door slamming shut behind her.

His eyes locked back on the witch’s. They were as blank as ever. Black pools. No fear. No hatred. No life.Unsettling as always…. He could carve a thousand corpses in a statue and still never feel unsettled, but when he stared into her, it was as if he stared into a void where no man’s will mattered.

That alone made him hate her more.

He pressed harder. Her feet scrabbled for the floor. Still no sound. Not even a whimper.

“What plagues you, Red Angel?Were your wings clipped?” she rasped, tilting her head, her cracked lips curling with that name the men had begun to sing.

Mocking him. Always mocking. His teeth ground to the other. He pressed harder.

“Your god,” Blake spat, “he is no ship. Yet he sails both shores and all rivers. I do not understand him. What I do not understand, I despise. And I will not serve something that might turn on me like a cur in the night.”

With his free hand he drew the dagger from his belt and pressed it to her throat. ”And if I do not serve him, it means you are more useful to me dead.”

A thin bead of blood rose. She did not blink. She knew, as he did, it was bluff. He could not kill her. He was too tangled in her threads.

Too dependent, like a baby waiting for his mother’s milk, he had tasted the power, so how could he deny it any longer?

He no longer had any choice, and yet he still believed he was his own.

“Your god and I had a bargain. And yet his aims shift like morning mist. I summoned the fury of the sea at his command. I laid waste to those who praised his name. I butchered their city. I chained their people. I burned their palace. The sultan and his family is gone. The abomination you cursed is dead in its cradle.

The whore who birthed him bled after. What was asked of me , I delivered. And yet…” His voice cracked with fury. “And yet I was denied what was mine. Is this how your God rewards his faithful? Do I have to take it as a sign that I can no longer trust him?”

He thrust his ruined hands in her face. Skin split. Nails black with dried blood. Fingers that had been burned with a fire not his own.

It was easier when all he had to worry was where to raid next, now instead he had to look up to see if the sky was to fall on him.

He had denied his old god, there was no way back for him, he could only strived forward.

The witch meanwhile, for the first time smiled. And then she laughed. A sound like dry wood snapping in a fire, rasping but full, almost joyous.

She understood where his anger stemmed.

He had just been denied a good fuck; the thought made her laugh even harder.

Her mirth meanwhile dug under his skin.

Then she said something. Not in his tongue. Not even at him as she just stared up.

Blake roared. He shook her by the throat so hard her skull cracked against the wall. “You know my tongue, hag! Speak it! Speak!Explain your god’s wills and his wrongdoing to me!”

Her eyes found his. For the first time, he looked away. Something in them pressed against him, heavy, unbearable, like the gaze of the deep itself.

He did not release her but his gaze did.

“Fool,” she said. Only that.

She may have been too useful to be killed, but that did not mean she wasn’t up to a beating.

His fist came to her cheek.