Chapter 4: Garviel
Life was never easy for a mercenary. Especially one that'd already died.
Garviel knew this first-hand, and very much wished he didn't.
It was never fully clear to him how he managed to avoid joining the rest of the corpses in the dirt at the top of Shattershin Pass. Three of them had survived. Fleabait did so by running. Garmon by hiding. And somehow, apparently, he'd did so by just getting the fuck back up.
He'd met the two of them when he stumbled into the southern encampment several days after the attack, pale and exhausted, only to find that it too had been overrun and destroyed. The blackened craters around the outside of the shattered gates and walls showed where the magister had made an effort to be useful. Around and within each one, stacks of scorched bones and melted armor slag ran together in a solidified slurry over the mangled corpses of the camp defenders. He recognized the handle of Harken's sword sticking out of one of the mangled heaps. A couple paces away, the captain's lifeless body stared at the sky, his mouth hanging open in a wordless shout. Over a dozen of the skeletal warriors lay unmoving around him, their armor rent in large gashes or their helmeted heads severed from lifeless bodies.
So the old man had gone out like a hero. Always a better man than the others, Harken. A shining example of virtue in the face of adversity. Garviel admired him for that, if for nothing else.
He'd walked over, and with a forceful jerk, pulled the weapon from the heap with his good arm. The blade slide effortlessly from the jumble of metal and bones, nearly sending Garviel sprawling on his ass. Looking down at the weapon, he was impressed to see not a single mark on the blade. It could have been fresh forged, and he'd have been none the wiser for it. Must be enchanted, or at least of a far better make than anything he'd ever wielded. He looked around for the scabbard, finally spotting it on Harken's side, underneath him and half-buried in the snow. He gingerly rolled the captain's body over with the heel of his boot. It rolled stiffly onto its side, its pose frozen from either the cold or rigor mortis. Perhaps both.
"Sorry, Captain. It seems a waste to leave a blade like yours in a place like this. I mean no disrespect." Garviel found himself saying out loud as he bent down and untied the scabbard from the dead man's side. As he did so, the searing burn in his shoulder returned in force, and the sudden rush of warmth told him the wound had opened back up. Looking down, he saw fresh dark streaks running from beneath the paldron down his side. He grimaced, pressing the palm of his left glove against the place where he felt the worst, and set off deeper into the encampment. He could already feel the loss of sensitivity in his arm, which meant that if he didnt find a more permanent way to close the wound soon, he'd be giving death a second opportunity to collect. And if the bugger couldn't finish the job the first time, then he couldn't really be trusted with another chance, could he?
Garmon and Fleabait had taken shelter in the magister's old tent, which survived the attack by virtue of chance or magic. When Garviel stumbled in to the large canvas room, pale and delirious, the two of them leapt up from the fire they were sitting around and drew weapons like they had any idea how to use them. As soon as they saw who it was, they immediately dropped them and rushed over to help.
He didn't remember much of what happened next, but he suspected it was probably very unpleasant. Looking at the scarred-over wound now, it looked like it have been closed by a blind orc with a bent fish hook and some binding twine.
The next thing he remembered clearly was bobbing in and out of consciousness on the road south, away from the encampment. Somewhere, they'd managed to obtain horses. Every place they encountered on the way towards Duchy lands had been torched, and blackened roof beams jutted towards the sky from where they'd collapsed inward from the fires. Mangled corpses of men and women and dogs and children lay across broken fences and mud-soaked roads, and even in spite of the cold, clouds of blue-bottles and horseflies drifted to and fro from bloated body to bloated body. The entire roadline, from the northern encampment all the way to the borderlands of the Free Cities, was one continuous string of desolation.
The one thing most jarring about it all was that there was no reason to it. In normal raids, men were killed, women and children subjugated, and resources plundered. What was useful was kept, and what was disposable was not.
Here, everything had been destroyed with equal disregard. In one farm plot they'd passed on the way, an entire silo of grain was put to blaze, and fire-blackened kernels poured out into the frozen dirt between scorched support beams. It was enough food to feed the whole of the Iron Sons for a month, rendered ruined and left to rot.
They reached the Free City of Montkreig before nightfall on the seventh day to find it in the aftermath of a siege. Thousands of corpses rotted in the sun beneath the tall stone walls surrounding the city, surrounded by a near equal number of armor-wrapped skeletal remains, their skulls crushed or bodies torn to pieces. The city guards stopped them a few hundred feet from the hastily repaired gates, and after a short appraisal and a few pointed words from Garmon, motioned them into the city.
From the looks of things, the attacking force got as far as the inner keep before succumbing to the defenders. From the looks of things, it appeared that whatever these things were that they'd faced on Shattershin, they fought until not a single one of them was left moving. The thought of it sent a chill up his spine then.
That was fifteen years ago, back when it was believed the Legion were a one-off event, caused by some ancient curse or a necromancer with a grudge.
Nowadays, with Legion attacks happening all over the continent, Garviel understood them for what they were- a force of nature, as consistent, predictable, and unrelenting as the cold itself. The cause of their arrival was as unknown to him as it was unimportant. He didn't need to know how the cold came to be to know how to don a jacket or light a fire to keep it at bay, and he didn't need to know where the Legion came from to stop them from going where they didn't belong. And that was enough. Let the magisters and their high towers and their swishy rentboy slaves figure out the why on their own time. So long as he led the Iron Sons, there would be at least a handful of the living left to put a stop to the dead, or join the dead in trying.
Garviel massaged his left shoulder with a grimace. Getting old would have been bad enough without his shield-arm constantly aching and throbbing. Something hadn't mended right in the shoulder joint when it healed, and every morning, battle, or cold day reminded him that he should have been a dead man.
He reached for the bottle on his side, and drank a mouthful. The locals were known for the quality of their butter and cheese. They were not known for the quality of their ale. This particular vintage tasted like yak piss, but it was cleaner than the water, and made the pain a bit more tolerable.
As he watched, the rest of the Iron Sons prepared for their next trip. Fat Morton and Adelbert arranged the goods in the back of the travel cart, while Hamon tended to the horses. Mikken, Bernard, and Tolstein carried sacks of food and collections of tools and medical supplies from the back of the inn to the back of the cart, while Garmon argued with the sutler over the prices of each of the goods. Fleabait was somewhere else, probably sleeping off a hangover in some farm daughter's arms like the useless gutter shite he was.
Garviel was glad Harken was not alive to see the state the company had fallen into after the battle. It would have been hard for the old man to bear.
One thing was as true now as it always had been, and that was that the public perceived those who survived a battle based solely on the number of survivors. If thousands survived, it was called a rout, and no one thought much of it outside of the tacticians. If only dozens or hundreds survived, it was labelled a massacre, and every survivor was extended comfort and sympathy as those who have suffered through a great tragedy.
However, if only a couple managed to survive, the perception was quite different.
You see, there was only one possibility if one or a handful made it out, and that was that the ones who made it weren't there when the rest of the fighting men died. No honest soldier would survive an attack that managed to kill everyone else, especially not unscathed. Therefore, in the minds of the simple folk, as well as the military masterminds, any man who had the unfortunate luck of not being butchered with the rest would by default be labled a dastard. It was not often an inaccurate label, but for those who genuinely had managed to survive through other means, it might as well have been a death knell. A mercenary or soldier known for cowardice was a soldier or mercenary who found the world around him suddenly inhospitable and unwelcoming. Shelter and succor were scarce and came at a high cost, work was terrible if it could be found at all, and one township after another would see fit to drum you out with riding whips and clubs if you attempted to enter.
The only option was to find one place that would tolerate you, and rebuild a reputation from scratch, one man at a time. And so that is what they had done, day by day. Torkenfeste was the last place any of the three of them had wanted to operate out of, but after months on the road, it was the only village they'd come to that'd not immediately tried to see them out.
It had taken over a decade, but the company's reputation was respected enough again that they were now, if not held in high regard, treated as worthy of general acceptance. Their numbers now exceeded three dozen, and for the first time since crawling out of the mud, they now had a formal commission from one of the political powers to the south. Some upstart republic that'd risen to power out of the ashes of one of the noble kingdoms. Adelrest, or some such.
The commission did not name much in the way of detail, which had initially given him pause. Jobs that were light on detail had the unfortunate tendency to be so because no sane man would accept the contract given all of the information upfront. But the pay was excellent. One month's work would earn them enough to take light work the rest of the year and still live above means. And odds were, as far south as Adelrest was, the Legion would not be involved.
That was good. The one time at Shattershin had been enough. He had no desire to face them again if given the option.
Garviel drained the last of the terrible ale, and tossed the bottle into the alley with a shatter, before turning and walking back into the inn.
It was time for breakfast.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone