Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 915

Capítulo 915: No plan(1)

Asag was right.

Gods damn him, he was right.

They needed a plan. Everyone knew it; everyone felt it like a stone grinding in their gut. Before them rose the Finge a fortress carved by madmen who must have chiseled the walls chosen by the gods. Strongest castles ever built, people said.

And Alpheo?The person they believed would have a plan even to bring the house of the Gods down?

He had nothing.

Not a spark. Not a half-formed thought. Not even the ghost of an idea.

He stared ahead at nothing, hollowed out. He felt like a man walking with his ribs pried open, all his organs exposed to the cold. The only reason he was here at all, the only reason he had an army, a chance, a future, that he was not scurrying home more than comfort would allow, was because of the highest sacrifice a friend could make.

And what good was he doing with it?

Without looking at the table beside him, he groped blindly for his cup. He tilted it to his lips, eager for the warmth, the dullness….Nothing bathed his tongue and lips. Only air.

A faint tremor passed through his fingers. He snatched the carafe next, but even that mocked him with its lightness. When had he emptied it?

He groaned, pushed himself halfway out of the chair and fell right back into it like his bones had melted.

The carafe slipped from his hand and clattered against the floor, rolling until it hit the leg of the table with a dull, accusing knock.

He closed his eyes.

What was happening to him? He had always been the one with answers, always the one with some plan tucked behind his tongue, some trick, some angle, some gamble. There was a time when ideas poured out of him so fast he could barely catch them all.

Now?

His mind was a barren field.

No, worse. A graveyard.Silent. Cold. Full of a name he didn’t dare say aloud.

He was tired. Not physically, his body could have marched another fifty miles if ordered. But something inside him… something deeper… was collapsing. He felt as though the marrow in his bones had run out. As though every thought had to claw its way through ash to reach the surface.

He couldn’t even bring himself to stand. He couldn’t even lift his own head.

A good-for-nothing. That’s what he was.

A fraud .

A man built on the brilliance and blood of others, men braver than him, men better than him. He had claimed their victories as if they were his own, paraded their sacrifices like banners in the wind.

He might’ve planned the battles, yes. But what use were plans he could no longer act on? What use was a mind that went dark the moment he needed it to blaze?

He felt sick.

A weasel.A craven.A greedy, ungrateful rat gnawing on the bones of his betters.

What did the others see in him? Why had they risked everything just to lift him higher? What had possessed Egil, of all people, to cross every line, to spit in every god’s eye, for an ambition that served no one but Alpheo?

Was it guilt, some twisted need to pay back the months they had spent tossing daggers at one another’s throats?

Was it pride,Egil’s refusal to ever lose, even when the winning move meant his own destruction to which he did not even know if it would succeed?

Or perhapse it was simpler…maybe he just wanted to get one over on him?To save him another time just as he had done at the Bleeding Plains.

Alpheo would never know.

Egil had taken the answers with him, carried them into the fire like everything else he was.

Wake up.

Wake up, damn you.

You are your mind’s keeper.

Think of something.

The words hit him like stones hurled from his own skull. He repeated them until they rang like iron on iron.

Wake up.Wake up.Wake the fuck up.

He had no luxury to drown in himself or wine for that matter. He could mourn after the war. He could break after the Fingers fell. He could collapse into the dirt after he had a crown crushed beneath his heel. Until then….he had to at least act as he was before.

Misery was a victory he would hand the enemy. And he would hand him nothing.

If he was curled in a chair like a sick old man, then the Usurper was laughing in the mud, licking his wounds and sharpening his next trick. That Masked dog, what was he using, what had he done to turn those soldiers into something half-feral, half-steel? For a flicker he wondered if he should dissect that puzzle, but no. Now was not the time to chase the teeth of the hound. The castle came first. The Fingers came first. He could gnaw on the dog’s secrets later.

He raised his head, only for his eyes to strike the smooth white ceiling of his chamber, bland and suffocating in its quiet perfection. No sky, no wind, no breath of the world.

A bird trapped in a mural.

His thumb drifted, foolishly, automatically, back toward the cup. That wretched impulse, the mind seeking oblivion before duty, filled him with fresh disgust. He snapped his hand away as if from a hot iron and set the cup firmly on the table. Empty. Like his head. Like the whole damned chamber around him.

He drew a long breath.

He had spies in the Fingers. Marcus had seen to that, one of the few assurances that still held weight.There were not many and they would not be of great use, but it was still a grace.

The Usurper was there, holed up, preparing the city, no doubt reinforcing every plank and hinge and gate for Alpheo and Mesha’s arrival.

So close.Close enough that Alpheo could almost smell his fear.

And yet… so impossibly far

He should have been bursting with ideas, dozens, hundreds. Knowing precisely where the Usurper was should have opened a floodgate of options. Where were they? Why was his mind as silent as a frozen grave?

He sifted through possibilities that fizzled the moment he touched them. Sabotage? Absurd. Too few spies. Too many guards.

Assasination?Even worse.

For even if by some miracle one reached the Usurper’s private quarters where he fucked and slept, those were the safest rooms in the castle

“Come on,” he muttered. “Wake up.”

He slapped his own cheek,hard. The crack echoed. Pain flared though it came delayed and muzzled, heat blooming across his face, embarrassment prickling in his throat. But nothing else came of it. His mind remained a locked chest.

The Masked dog had lost twice now since leaving the Fingers. There had to be nobles among his ranks nursing bitterness, men who had marched south drunk on dreams of triumph and easy glory, only to watch their victories snatched from them and pissed on by fate.

Surely some of them might be swayed.Surely some door might open from the inside.

Maybe, someone could be convinced to open a gate? To misdirect a patrol? To simply be absent at the right time?

Hope flickered.

And It crushed it immediately.

NO. No no no.

Rubbish. Utter horse shit.

How was he supposed to reach them? How was he supposed to even identify them? His spies were precious few, far too few to waste on fishing in an ocean of unknown faces. He barely knew a third of the noble houses that followed the boy, much less the Usurper, how was he to know who among them might be willing to betray him.

Dogs, the lot of them,but even dogs had names, and Alpheo didn’t know which hounds to call or how to call them. He couldn’t even bark at the right tree,hell, he couldn’t even find the damn tree.

His fingers dug into his temples.

How maddening it was.How humiliating.

He had clawed his way to a hollow victory,won by the blood of those that cared for him and now he couldn’t even use it. Couldn’t pursue it. Couldn’t bring the final blow.

He was no hound.No Egil.

He didn’t have his resilience, his unyielding drive, his brutal simplicity of purpose. Alpheo only had his mind,his sharpness, his cunning. And now even that abandoned him.

He was the keeper of his own mind.

But who, then, was left to keep the keeper?

He rose from his seat in a fit of anger at his own helpness, but just as he rose from the chair he stumbled like the drunk he was and fell to the ground.

He was so numbed by wine that he felt no pain, except that of shame.

He was disgusting.

You have died for nothing, he hurted so much to admit just how lost he was. He felt so….numb and tired, his lids so heavy that he just wanted to sleep.

He knew it was wrong, this shouldn’t have been his behaviour.

With what face was he to meet him? What had he to show for what he was given?

He was not even sound enough to stand on his own feet without stumbling.

Had there been a mirror there, laughter would have spewed from his teeth.

He didn’t need one to know how he looked.

The words he had spat at Egil a time ago were haunting him now as he watched over himself.

Just a fucking drunkyard.

He did not even hear the knock at the door when it came.