Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 881

Capítulo 881: Battle for the sands(1)

The city still screamed. Even after the thirtieth sunrise since its fall, the wails clawed their way through the alleyways like smoke from a fire that refused to die, given instead more wood to raise more flames.

The result was the stench of empire dying beneath their fleet.

Meanwhile down by the harbor, the fleet of the Confederation gleamed beneath a rising sun to a setting Empire.

Slaves, gold, silks, and whatever else could be pried loose from the corpse of Azania was put on ships. For the men aboard them, that was enough. They had come for plunder and blood, and they’d found both in blasphemous abundance. Now they wanted out, back to the free seas, before the only remaining army noticed what they’d done.

It was sensible. The Free-Men had always been raiders, never rulers. They struck, they feasted, They raped, burnt and then they just vanished. That was the way of their kind, wolves, not shepherds.

But wolves could not build crowns.

And if Cain understood his brother right then that was precisely the madness Blake hungered for.

Cain hated that he belonged here. The Confederation was a scourge; whatever kingdom they forged would be a sickness that burned itself out within two generations, if not one. His people were too wild to kneel, too stubborn to obey, too drunk on the sea’s freedom to ever chain themselves to thrones. The only thing keeping them united now was the will of one man, the legend that led them.

Blake. The Bastard of the Free Seas.The Rising Star of the Confederation.The Red Angel. The brother to the mad and the cripple.

Cain stood silent on the terrace of the shattered Sun Palace, where the headless statues of an Azanian sultan looked down , he projected it with a crying face at the knowledge that it was his successors that spoiled an empire set to inherit the world.

His brother had dressed for the part. The armor he wore was taken from the corpse of the Imperial Guard’s commander, whom Blake had personally gutted and then turned his skull into a drinking cup. The armor was pure gold, no paint, no pretense, just molten sunlight hammered into plates.

Below, the sailors and killers looked up at him, and the light off that armor hurt their eyes. To them, he was half-idol, or whatever they needed him to be.

Of course all the trinkets were Cain’s ideas, the bracelets, the necklaces, the heavy rings that clinked when he moved. He’d even fastened an Azanian crown over his brother’s mask, so ornate and ridiculous it bordered on mockery. Blake had grumbled, but he’d done it. Because if he wanted to rule pirates, he’d have to dazzle them first and surprise them second.

And it worked.

When Blake stepped forward onto the balcony, the mob below roared.

His iron mask, looted from that same dead Azanian captain, gleamed in the light. It was forged in the likeness of a demon, the mouth split with claws, the eyes sunken and cruel. It had been meant to frighten enemies. All it did was however attract the attention of the last man he would have wanted to meet, a mistake that cost him his life.

Blake raised both hands to the sky, the gold caught the sunlight and threw it back at the crowd like a flare. When he spoke, his voice carried across the docks, booming like a horn.

“You all know me!” he began, his voice the statue of pride. “You know my name, my deeds, my bloody road. Twenty-five years I’ve sailed the waters of this cursed world, and twenty-five years I’ve done what no bastard of the Free-Men ever dared dream! I have burnt the lands commanded by many gods, I have burnt their temples, killed their men and spilled my semen in their women.”

The crowd cheered, the sound the living storm a sailor would fear.

“Once, we rotted in swamps, trading fish for scraps, bowing to princes and emperors who pissed on our backs and called it rain. I found you there, in the mud, in the filth, and I gave you war! I gave you glory and salt and freedom! Now look at you!”

He turned, arms outstretched toward the smoking city. “You are masters of the sea between two worlds! Romelia, that bloated whore of a nation, humbled and broken at Harmway! Their armada’s bones bleach beneath the tide! And Azania, once the jewel of the east, now lies at our feet! Their capital burned, their ruler killed, their temples sacked! Their people” he paused, grinning beneath the mask, “our spoils. Their women our prizes. Their feasts of flesh, our daily right!”

The five thousand men below roared as one. Spears, axes and cutlasses raised, boots stomping the blood-slick stones of the harbor. They screamed his name, over and over, until the echo carried over the dead city. When the silence was here once more he continued

“To you I promised glory, gold enough to choke a king, and a tale the like of which no tavern bard has dared speak, so that you might tell it at your leisure to sons and grandsons,” the speaker called, voice rolling across the quay like a wave. Smiles bloomed like reflected sun on the faces below; Cain watched them, watching his brother, drinking in the sea of men who had followed that rising star across wind and water.

“But of all the glitter and noise,I cared not” he went on, stripping rhetoric as easily as he started stripping the ornament many slaves had toiled to put on him, “what is it I truly want?” Heads cocked in confusion. Brows furrowed. The crowd leaned forward as if to close the distance with attention alone.

“I do not want your gold.” The bracelet of gold on his left hand, flew from his wrist and tinkled into the eager hands below. Men scrambled, then straightened, cheeks flushed with sudden, petty triumph.

“I do not crave hollow renown.” The breastplate, too fine and bright to be left as mere theatre, slid from his shoulders and thudded at his feet.

That noticeably he did not throw down to the troops.

It was such a fine armor after all.And it was his.

“And I do not seek my name carved high so that strangers may admire it in years to come.” The iron mask came off last, and the crowd saw the man beneath: a weathered face, hair thrust back from a burnished brow, a chest mapped with the hard lines of scars.

“All I have ever asked for since I first took this thankless road, the risk, the blood, the enemies made on both sea and within our own councils that once even searched for my head, has been for one and one thing alone.” He paused, and Cain, standing ahead of the gilded ruin of the palace and behind his doom, felt the words settle around him as if the air itself had weight.

“For the good of our way of life.”

The Red Angel then spoke of the swamp-huts and the long years of scraping for a crust, of how he’d reached into that mud and hauled men to ship and sail.

He told them plainly: he had stood against the Call and its comfortable stagnation; he had raised blades when others would have stayed to dream. His chest, creased by scar and sun, made a clearer argument than any speech ever could.

They ate from his tongue as if they were birds.

“I have marched you into fights that brought no laurel except of those you have given me. Who, among you, can claim to have given more to your cause?” He cupped a hand to his ear and the silence answered,no brave voice rose to contradict.

“You will be famous, you will be wealthy, you will have what you ask for,” he said, and his tone softened as if he pitied them. “But I, will not share that sweeter bite. I did not cross the sea to feed my vanity. I did not risk my neck for the coin you clutch or for statues to be patted. I came to build something that will last when the clinking of coin and the fever of conquest have gone to dust.”

He stepped closer to the edge and looked over the ruined city spread beneath them. “You talk of packing your chests and leaving,” he said, slow and fierce. “What will remain if you go? The glory we took will be retaken. A new sultan will rise in the smoke-drowned throne. Azania will stitch itself back together and come for us again. All our work, our suffering, will evaporate like salt on a hot stone.”

His voice rose then, raw with refusal. “I will not let that be our story.”

The shout cracked the air. It carried, on the wind, into the holds, to the slaves on the ships “I will not see us crawl back to the hole we clawed out of. I want the sea to be ours, a domain that answers to us.

“If we run now,” he shouted, voice cracking like a sail in a squall, “everything we bled for will be for nothing. You want to go home? Pack your chests, smoke your pipes with oppium, sleep in the same beds you crawled from? I understand that. I know the hunger for hearth and the fear of storms. But our Confederation needs more than men who can hold a cup. It needs heroes.”

He fell to his knees on the salt-streaked stone and struck his breast with both fists until the sound rang out sharp and ugly. ” BUT I AM NOT ENOUGH, BROTHERS. I AM TOO WEAK!” The words tore from him, half prayer, half confession. “If we leave now, what we have done here will be forgotten. They will raise a fleet; a new sultan will take the throne; the lords we spared will sell our gains back to the highest bidder. The sea will close on us and call us thieves, nothing more.”

He looked up, eyes burning, voice steadier but harder for the pleading. “I cannot bear that. I will not let our labor turn to ash in the mouths of other men. I will not watch our names swallowed by tides because we chose cowardice over everlasting glory.”

He rose, pacing the lip of the quay as the ruined city smoked behind him. “Do you want to return home? Then go! There is no shame in choosing that after what you have done. But understand what you will miss.We are so close to make a Romelia out of Azania. We can break the legs of the other giant and gnaws at the guts once he is down.

We can make this sea ours! Just like we did with that of the South and Romelia. We can make an empire out of this sea. Imagine a world where every sea is ours, brothers!”

He turned, letting his words sweep across them like a net. “We can choose otherwise. We can step off the path that everyone expects of us, that of thieves escaping in the night and build a thing of our own. We can refuse to be only the hand that takes and the shadow that flees. We can make a harbour, a fortress, a line in the sand that says: here we stood and yet stand!”

His hands slammed into his chest. “Make no mistake, this is not a plea for glory. I have no hunger for my name carved in stone. I ask for a life of glory for our sons and grandsons. I ask that when a boy looks out over this water one day, he can say: ‘My grandfather fought here. He bled so I could stand.’  Won’t that be the most beautiful eulogy of all?”

The words hit like cannonshot. For a breath the crowd held, then a low sound rose: a ripple of voices, a footing of boots.

Blake was gaining rithm.

He stood at the center of it, chest heaving, the mask once again in his hand glittering like a broken sun.

Someone threw down trinkets and bracelets at his feet, though he was just as quick to take them back when he realised he was alone in that; others raised knives and fists high into the smoke-dark sky. They shouted his name until it braided with the sound of the sea.

For a moment he was lost in it,the heat of their affirmation. The roar swallowed him and held him aloft.

”So let us raise our sword for a future that none expect of us.

Let us do so much that when we return home, all we will see will be the shamed faces of people who were not here with us.

So let us do what none other could!

SO WITH ME BROTHERS UNTIL THIS SEA IS OURS!AND WE SHALL BE EMPERORS OF ALL SEAS”

When the shouting finally receded into a thousand ragged echoes, one clear answer remained, hammered out by a thousand voices and the stomp of boots on stone:

“With Blake! Till the last sail!”

He let that cry wash over him, breathless, fierce, and for the first time that day, he gave a smile.

He had won.