Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 842

Chapter 842: Sinking ship(2)

He watched the crone hit the floor and, for a single breath, he doubted his strength, he however shrugged the doubt away when he saw the blood.

The sight of her mouth split and red steadied him; it reminded him that whatever knot of fate she wrapped around his life, she was still flesh.

She was still a fucking old hag.

“I hate being mocked,” he spat, hauling her up by the throat until her spine snapped against the plaster. Her eyes were the same empty wells,no pleading, no pleading, no flinch. The more leeway he granted her, the louder the voice in his head that warned: you will end up the joke.

He would not be the joke.

“You gave me a quest,” he said, every word a stone. “You spun me a need and I burned a city for it. I have walked through their children’s kitchens with my boot in the hearth. I cut through the best champions this earth could sprout like pastry.

I cracked the skull of a special soldier who wore gold like a god, and…” He squeezed until she tasted iron. “he could have taken my carotid and ended this march forever. He missed. He bled for that mistaken. It was glorious. Had we met in a tavern instead of a war, perhaps we would have shared bread, laughed at the same thing.”

He dragged a hand across her face, wiping the blood into a smear that matched the red at his nails. The blade he’d pressed to her throat went back to its sheath with a crisp.

“You told me the god wanted them punished,” Blake said, voice raw as gravel. “You told me their heads had swelled with arrogance and that the Sun demanded the blood of the city that worshiped him .

So I did what you asked.

I burned altars, I broke idols, I took their children and hawked them like loaves. I ripped open the palace and poured the sea through its rooms. I did his work.” He pressed his forearm harder against her throat until the old woman’s chin quivered. “And when the prize was in my hand, when I held the thing I wanted, it slid away.

He stopped me.

The child , that abomination, died in its cradle, and still I was denied. How does a god do that? How does he call for ruin and then turn aside from his chooser? Is the Sun fickle? Is he a trickster who smiles as you kill for him and then laughs when you reach for the reward?He ordered the extermination of a race and yet cast his hands when protecting one of them?”

He jabbed his bruised hand at the spread of dried gore on his palms like accusation. “They will call me the Butcher of Khairo. They will sing Sun’s Dawn and brand our swords into legend, like devils who came from the sea.How Blissful of them not to know that their very god called those demons to them”

He stared at her until the air between them felt thin and raw, watching the witch’s placid face creak like old wood into something harder, anger, sudden and slow. “Will he do the same to me?” he snarled. “When I hand him his tithe in blood and ruin, will he spit me out like this rotten city he tended to so lovingly? When I have given my due, will he cast me aside?”

The witch opened her mouth. Blake tightened his grip until the old woman’s throat knotted white beneath his fingers. “Make your answer satisfy me,” he hissed, voice a rasping blade. “If it does not, I cut you down now and drown the debt in your blood. I have won what you asked, the abomination is dead. I do not need you. Say your riddles, and I will cut every cord I hold to your god. I will go my way with the crown on my head and the sea behind me.”

She gasped air when he eased his hand, greedily swallowing the sound as a man left droughting at a spring. She did not cower. Instead her eyes, those black wells he could never fathom, fixed on his.

“From where did you think that abomination sprang?” she said, each word slow, sifting into the room like dust. “From the earth? From chance?”

“You ask what bred him? The last sultan, god-crowned in his arrogance, mixed seed and sin with that whore of my line. He courted two scourges for it : one born of desert and sun, one born of sea and salt. ”

She let the syllables settle, watching every twitch of Blake’s jaw. “He cast his favor upon you. Strength unfathomed by men sits in your grip. You think yourself the smith of your fate, but you are the hammer’s arm.

You are the blade he chose. You are the thing he raised to cut the old world down and raise a new one, your kingdom shall be his new altar.”

Blake’s laugh was a dry thing. “Then why deny me the prize? Why spare a scrap of that house he burnt down?Why didn’t he let me have it.?”

The witch’s smile was slow, terrible. “You call denial what is counsel.

You call the god fickle because you cannot see the fine lines of his design.

You wanted a woman, a symbol, would you have torn down the world over her?The sultan received two scourges for that whore , how many will you receive?Are you above it?He sent to you only gifts, but he is also holding on his other hand scourges.

He would not let you repeat the sultan’s arrogance, you should thank him for that.

“Had you done that, it would have been on par with a worm wriggling its way into his apple.Be lucky he had stopped before you could have made the sacrilege”

Her voice turned sharper. “Do you imagine the crown to be unconditional? The gift was for a purpose, it is not an end but a means.

He gave you a weapon to carve a path for a king. He did not give you a lover to parade. Pride will be the last blade you ever lift if you mistake appetite for right.”

She tapped a knuckle once against his chest, where the blood had dried to the steel. “How much ingratitude can you carry before the hand that feeds you becomes the hand that thrusts you down? You call this arrogance in your blood. I call it mortal blindness.

Gaze upon the sultan and make sure to see where he could not.”

For a heartbeat, Blake’s grip slackened.

He had torn down a city, butchered its children, drunk deep of its ruin, yet all that fire had been sparked by the arrogance of another man. What sense was there in copying the very mistake that had bred abomination?

He did not know that wasn’t his thought.

The witch’s voice slithered through the silence, steady as an old hymn.

“You have been given strength beyond men, Red Angel. Not stolen, not stumbled into,given. Fire does not consume you; it crowns you. It is the breath of the master you serve. You are close now, closer than your kind has ever come. A reign without end waits at your grasp, if you build it into the house of the lord who raised you.”

Her words dripped, bitter honey, each promise binding his anger tighter to her will as she held his burnt hand.”You struck down the first abomination of this age. You think it ended there? Fool. There is another. Breathing still. Mocking still. An insult made flesh.

He is the one set against you, set against the Sun himself. Every heartbeat he steals is a curse. Only when you sever it will your path lie open.But you are favorite, his gods are weak and fickle, he is alone, while you are not.”

She leaned closer, the stench of her herbs wrapping the words like smoke.”From that moment, nothing shall be denied you. Gold enough to drown your fleets. Glory sung from shore to shore. Women beyond count.

A dynasty that will outlast time itself. The sea , whom you once served, will break its back to serve you. Statues raised on every coast, every port, every isle, kneeling in terror and in prayer, begging to be spared from your sword.”

Blake’s lips twitched. Then curled. Until his mouth was pulled into a broad, stupid smile. The kind of grin he hadn’t worn since boyhood, and he had dreamed of glory. His mind flickered with pictures he could taste like blood on his tongue: a throne carved from sunstone, seas turned to highways at his command, the heads of kings laid at his feet.

Not the chill of anger was in him, not the sting of denial, but an heat that whispered this was the right path.

The witch studied that smile. That raw, stupid, smile. And for the first time since she had laid her hands on him, something shifted in her eyes.

She saw, at last, why her god had stayed Blake’s hand upon that…thing , why he had spared it.

Blake was never meant to be the end. He was only the means to it.

And that spark was to be the result.

Blake was wrong, she was wrong, her god had not forsaken his ancestral home, he was simply cutting away the rot there…

How foolish of her to think she had understood his great plan.

For her god with one swing felled a thousand.