Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 916

Capítulo 916: No plan(2)

With a great heap of effort, Alpheo dragged himself upward, his muscles trembling under the weight of exhaustion. He staggered once, then again, catching the edge of the desk just in time to prevent a second fall. His knees felt made of wet sand, his skull hollow as a rotted gourd. Breathing alone felt like a labor fit for three men.

The knocking continued almost mocking in its regularity. Then came a voice, muffled by the ringing in his ears and the pulse pounding behind his eyes.

Alpheo blinked stupidly, head throbbing, head swimming, not recognising the voice.

“It’s open,” he muttered, rubbing his face with both palms as if trying to peel away the fog.

It may have been an assasin for all he knew…

The hinges creaked. Footsteps slid across the floor. Even without lifting his eyelids, Alpheo felt a shift in the room, an uncomfortable familiarity settling around him.

And then the voice:

“Evening, grandson.”

Alpheo let out a tired breath that was almost a laugh.

“First time you call me that in what?Ten years?” he murmured, tilting his head back against the chair and letting his eyelids fall shut again. He didn’t need to look. He felt it, the stare, heavy as a hand pressing on the back of his skull. A stare that judged, dissected, pitied.

Shahab.Of course.

He could practically picture the old man’s face.

You’re happy, aren’t you, old bastard?Bet it was on your bucket list,to see me like this.Cracked. Smeared. Drowning in my own head.

How many times had Shahab called him arrogant? How many times had he tried to puncture his confidence with sly, polished little barbs? Too many. Far too many, and now Alpheo was too pitiful even to be worth insulting.

The chair beside him creaked as Shahab sat, the sound somehow accusatory. Alpheo finally opened his eyes just enough to catch a glimpse,pity swimming across Shahab’s expression like a sheen of oil.

Had he drunk even a drop more, he might have vomited at the sight.

“You look…” Shahab began, voice groping for gentleness he almost never used, “weary.”

Weary.That was a hell of a polite word for the pathetic ruin he currently embodied.

“I’ve been working on plans to capture the Fingers,” Alpheo murmured, his voice dry as dirt. “Time’s closing in before the siege. Better to avoid showing up with nothing in hand.”

He swallowed, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, resisting the reflex to reach for the empty cup by his elbow.

“So all this time you have been working?” Shahab asked quietly.

“That,” Alpheo admitted, “and drinking.”

And wallowing in circles like a dying fish…

“Quite a lot of the latter,” Shahab said, tapping the side of his own nose as if Alpheo needed it spelled out.

Alpheo raised the back of his hand to his face. Red. Too red.

He wiped again, slower this time, then grabbed the towel from the table and scrubbed his hands clean, feeling Shahab’s gaze burning holes into him the entire time.

He didn’t even try to assemble a mask. Not tonight. Not in this state.

“Why are you here?” Alpheo asked, his voice raw with exhaustion, no hostility, no pretense, just bone-deep weariness. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t straighten his back. He simply stood there with the towel in hand, drained and waiting.

“You haven’t been yourself for a bit,” Shahab declared, releasing the words as though delivering judgment from a throne.

No shit. And he would never be as he once was.

“Since his death,” Shahab clarified, softer and Alpheo heard the tremor tucked behind the old man’s composure. “Many are worried about you. Word of your… latest indulgences does not stay contained.”

Alpheo snorted, rubbing his thumb against the bridge of his nose. “Can’t a prince have some vices to fall into?”

“Not when those vices are destructive to said prince,” Shahab retorted, leaning forward, palms braced on his knees. “I am worried about you, boy.”

“That…” Alpheo swallowed hard, fighting down the sour tide creeping up his throat, “…would be a first.”

He would not vomit in front of this man. He’d sooner bite through his own tongue.

Shahab exhaled slowly. “My granddaughter cares about you. And you are now of my blood. I care about you too enough, at least, to recognize when you’re in a bad place.”

Alpheo said nothing. His chest rose, fell, rose again. Silence pressed thickly between them, heavy as wet wool.

Finally, Shahab spoke.

“I never liked him, you know.”

Alpheo’s right eyelid twitched open, just enough to catch the outline of the old man, back straight, hands knotted together, a man forcing himself to admit something he had kept sealed for years.

“I always found him arrogant,” Shahab continued. “A butcher. And a thoroughly annoying drunkard.” He let out a breath, a small, reluctant huff. “But I admit he brought levity wherever he went.”

“That he did,” Alpheo murmured, voice scraping raw.

“I tended to keep my distance from him naturally. The few times we spoke seriously, I was… perplexed by the way he saw life.And worried too…”

Shahab tilted his head, studying the air as though Egil himself were perched invisibly upon a rafter.

Alpheo knew enough of it.

“Life, to his tribe, is merely a passage to death. Their customs are violence, their joys barbarity. I never lost sight of that.” His lips tightened. “I loved Egil like a brother, but love does not blind me to what they were. He came from barbarian tradition, he was a smart man, but not enough to see above it.”

A muscle twitched in Alpheo’s jaw.Yes. A barbarian he had used like a trained hound. A weapon. A beast of burden.He had given him that damned name.He had sent him to butcher and be butchered.

Shahab’s voice softened unexpectedly. “That may be. Yet perhaps that way of life is what gave him such… jolliness.” The old lord’s mouth curved into a small, wistful smile. “The only thing worth doing in the face of death is to smile and laugh,” he used to say.”

His eyes glazed with memory. “More than once he told me that…usually while I was coughing my lungs raw during last winter.He was a bit of a cunt in that regard, I was seriously contemplating death there…”

Alpheo could not force even the ghost of a smile. His lips stayed a flat, bloodless line.

He could bring himself to laugh at that, not to him, not so soon….it felt wrong.

Shahab studied him for a moment,really studied him, as though trying to read the lines carved freshly into his face.

“I do not know what passed between you and him before you reached us,” the old man said at last, voice low, almost gentle. “I do not know what forged that brotherhood you two shared.” His gaze fixed on Alpheo like a hand gripping his shoulder. “But I know he would not want you to face his sacrifice like this.To live in this state…”

“No… he would not,” Alpheo admitted in a thin voice “Does it matter, though?”

Shahab’s brow creased, but he didn’t interrupt.

“A third of the people I’ve known that are dead,” Alpheo went on, staring through him rather than at him. “would hope for me to wallow in mud and blood.” His eyes were hollow “Do I look like someone who heeds any of it? The world belongs to the living. The dead… they’ve no place in it.”

“And yet,” Shahab said quietly, “sometimes they can influence it from the other side. He led a good lif-”

“And I led him to his end.”

Shahab inhaled slowly through his nose, settling a hand over his own chest as though steadying an old wound. “If there was anything he ever wished for, it was a glorious death. And… I believe he found it. War takes its piece from all of us. Sooner or later it was destined.”

He rose with a grunt, joints cracking, and crossed the small space between them. He rested a weathered hand on Alpheo’s shoulder. A light squeeze, a faint drag of the thumb,a gesture that tried to be comfort, though both of them knew comfort had no place in that room.

“Do not waste his sacrifice by destroying yourself,” Shahab murmured. “I don’t think you could wound him in any harsher way.”

He turned toward the door.

Alpheo’s voice caught him like a hand on the collar.

“Grandfather”

Shahab stopped at once and looked back.

“He was a liar,” Alpheo said, forcing the words out past the iron in his throat. “He didn’t die laughing or smiling.”

A breath passed between the two

“He went off crying about a fucking goat.”

Shahab’s face tightened first in surprise, then recognition. A flicker of grief, a flicker of pity. But no answer. No platitude bold enough to cross that gulf.

He simply bowed his head as he made his way out.

“Good night, Alpheo.”

“…Yes.Good night”

But he didn’t sleep that night.