Author's Note: Here we go again kiddos. Thanks for all the support!
I hope you enjoy and review this update.
Bedwyck's blade drove into Garlan's back thrice before Giantsbane, hearing the Tyrell knight's shout of pain, realized what was happening. With a roar of his own he stepped forward, bringing his blade down in a sweeping strike that cleaved into the side of the former black brother's head and made the body drop once again. Garlan stumbled forward, trying to turn but buckling at the knees and dropping to the snow, blood hemorrhaging out of his back.
Damon sprinted towards his goodbrother as the circle of his companions collapsed, more and more of the dead swamping around the men in the chaos Bedwyck's arrival had wrought. Over the din he heard a shout of pain that seemed to come from Robb, though Damon could not be sure as corpses continued to appear. Several intercepted Damon with inhuman snarls and creaking bones, slowing his advance towards his men. The ice demon—the Other—that had done whatever it was that had brought Bedwyck back still strolled towards the mass of fighting bodies unencumbered, icy blade down and at the ready.
The Golden Stag watched from behind a line of enemies as Handsome Harle faced it.
The Wildling chieftain had launched himself at the Other with a cry, leaving a fully down Howd behind to be covered at once with dead. The Other brought its blade up to meet his axe, quick as the night. It was steel and in decent condition, much nicer than the usual Wildling weapon, taken from a Black Brother near Shadow Tower who likely had noble ties—or so Harle claimed. His brother insisted Handsome had traded a dozen furs and a child to Lyseni slavers who had put in just north of Eastwatch for it. It's make and origin made no difference however, as it shattered with an ear-splitting crack into steel shards the second it met the Others weapon.
Damon broke through the line of corpses at the same moment the axe shattered and sprinted as fast as his ankle could towards the pairing. Harle did not seem shocked to have lost his weapon; nay, he seemed to have anticipated that happening. He had let go of the axe grip at the same time it made contact, bulling forward through the rain of splintered steel to drive his shoulder into the demon's middle.
Harle was not small; most men, apart from a Clegane, would have gone down after such a blow. The Other, though it staggered a step back, did not. Damon could almost swear he heard Harle's shoulder shatter as the axe had, and did hear the wildlings scream of pain as he crumpled to the ground.
Damon was only a dozen feet away when the Other raised a booted foot and, much as Garlan had done to the corpse earlier, crushed Harle's skull with a mighty stomp.
The king raised Widow's Wail, Valyrian steel smokey and rippled with red, and brought the weapon down.
The Other turned and blocked his blow in a motion, but unlike Harle's, Damon's blade remained whole, a sound unlike any Damon had heard before breaking through the din like a thunderclap as the weapons met.
Icy blue eyes pierced Damon's soul for a moment, and then a dozen dead men leapt on Damon from all sides.
The reeking corpses overpowered him with sheer weight of numbers, Damon shouting in both anger and fear. Damon was not small, and his years at the front had made him almost all muscle, so he kept his feet for a moment, trying to stagger free of the grip of a dozen dead men. But then a pair of skeleton arms wrapped around his leg, pulling it out from under him and sending him toppling to the ground below a swarm of enemy.
Where the Other went he could not say, though it didn't try to penetrate the mass of its minions that held the king down, other jumping on top of the pile as if they meant to crush him. With a start Damon realized that perhaps they did. Widow's Wail, though still firmly in Damo's grip, was pinned to the side, his arm held down by sheer weight. The King had managed to bring his other arm, clad in steel forearm plate and gauntlets, across his face; it kept the clawing fingers and gnashing teeth away from his eyes and nose, but otherwise was just as useless as more arms wrapped around his extremities and torso. The golden man choked on the scent and the rotting blood that poured from the bodies to cover him, for one terrifying moment wondering if he was going to drown in it or in the bile it brought out of his stomach.
Sweet Tommen. Myrcella. Uncle Jaime. Margaery. I have failed you all.
And then, for the second time since he had come North, Damon felt and heard a direwolf dive over his prone form, this one a great mass of white using its weight to knock a number of the bodies of those weighing him down off of the king, leaving few enough that Damon had a chance. The king seized the opportunity with both hands just as he had at Last Lake, vaulting to his feet with a rush of adrenaline and swinging wide to cleave through a few of those trying to again tackle him, spitting out vomit and blood even as he gasped in for untainted air. One, the skeletal body of a mere child, managed to dart beneath his blade and wrap its bony arms around his left leg, trying to bring him down again, but Damon wrenched it's head off it's body with a jerk of his left hand, bolstered by his fear and billowing hate for the dead monstrosities.
Even as he took Mance and the other Harle were riding through the chaos, leading with them the remnant of horses. No one else accompanied them, and Damon did not have to guess to know what that meant.
Giantsbane was already climbing atop one of the garrons as it went by, blood from a wound to his scalp turning half his fiery locks even redder. Jon Snow had a mountain of bodies surrounding him, Ghost tossing aside one of the dead it had snatched off Damon as he catapulted into those fighting his master.
Where's…?
He saw it then, alerted by the frantic snarls of grey Wind as the creature fought towards the former King of the North. The Other was raining blows down on Robb Stark, blood pouring from the Northman's left arm as he crouched over the still form of Garlan Tyrell, Oathkeeper slashing above his head to ward off the blows. Damon knew at once that it was seconds from the end and wasted no time diving towards them.
Jon Snow had seen it too, desperately fighting that direction, Ghost keeping them off Jon's back, as Grey Wind finally bodied his way through the mass of enemy.
All three converged at the Other.
Widow's Wail stopped the blow meant for Robb's head a mere second after Oathkeeper was finally batted aside, Damon bodily stepping between man and monster and shoving Robb down across Garlan with one arm. No sooner had he parried than Grey Wind appeared behind it and sank his massive teeth into the Other's shoulder, wrenching it away from Stark—and onto the swinging blade of Jon Snow, stepping in from the other direction. Longclaw, the former sword of House Mormont, shattered the demon into a thousand slivers of ice.
Like puppets whose strings had just been cut, corpses around them fell in the dozens, mid strike or jump or step. Like a candle snuffed out they simply ceased to move, dropping to the ground.
But not all of them.
Several, a few close at hand but mostly those audible through the trees as they closed in, were still moving. Mance Rayder was shouting above that din, screaming at the top of his lungs towards the stunned southerners on the ground. "Get on the fucking horses! Now, you fools!"
As if another controlled his body, Damon caught the reins tossed to him by Giantsbane, holding the garron steady as Jon and Tyrek, his nose broken and bleeding, helped the wounded Robb onto it. Mance and the red-haired wilding made short work of the remaining corpses as they did so, giving the southerners a moment to recover. As soon as the Stark lord took the reins Damon dropped to his knee at Garlan's side, reaching to his goodbrother's neck for a pulse.
"He's dead," came Mance's voice, harsh and unforgiving.
"No, he isn't," Damon replied, voice hoarse and half dead in its own right. He was not a healer, but Damon knew how to stop bleeding, and was in the saddlebags of one of the garrons to retrieve the bandages to do so at once. "Let me stop the bleeding and get him on a horse."
"He'll slow us down," Mance all but cursed. "Even if he's not dead yet he will be soon. We don't have time."
Damon's head shot up even as he worked, Tyrek having wordlessly stepped in to assist. Fear of the approaching dead was countered by sheer rage at the man insisting they leave Garlan—one of the few men Damon might be able to call a friend one day—to die alone. "Then ride on, get back to the Wall without me and be slaughtered to a fucking man by my uncle Jaime."
Mance glared, eyes full of hatred, but after only a moment was off his horse and next to them, helping finish the rough bandaging and then, alongside the King of the Iron Throne, hauling Garlan up and over a saddle. Jon Snow was ready with a length of rope from their supplies, tying the downed Reachman to the saddle as tightly as he could.
The survivors moved as one after that, the sound of death growing louder as Damon vaulted atop a garron, grabbed Garlan's reins, and spurred it south.
Aleqou Garantis had made his fair share of mistakes in his forty years, but never having sampled the charms of King's Landing until now was rapidly rising up that list.
The Captain of the Iron Shields, five hundred killers and thieves who preferred to be paid to conduct those vices, peered once more at the girl lounging on the bed in the brothel's heart. Alia was a Reachwoman, whatever the hell that meant, and while she was not the match of those women found in the pleasure houses of Lys, she was still highly skilled and at half the price. Indeed, he was beginning to think you paid more for the idea of the pleasure houses than for any pleasure actually received there.
Okay, so that was an exaggeration, but still—this brothel in the barbarian lands of Westeros held more vice than he could ever have expected.
Alia said something in a sultry tone as Aleqou stepped out of the door, though he didn't pay enough attention to grasp what it was; he knew enough Westerosii to get by, but he was far from fluent and until this point in his life hadn't cared enough to learn more. The longer he stayed, though, the more intrigued by these western people he became. He'd expected a fight to capture this reeking mass of a city, had been warned there would be a fierce one by the Baratheon paying him, but he'd still underestimated the sheer savagery they'd encountered. There had been few enough defenders that there had been no realistic hope of fending them off, yet still those who had stayed had fought bitterly to repulse them.
But that had only been the beginning.
His respect for them had grown in the weeks since they had conquered King's Landing, as a rebel cell in the city had gone about making life difficult for Stannis from the moment the fighting had stopped. Mercenaries had been popping up dead all over the capitol from the first night in ones and twos, their throats slit in alleys or alehouse latrines or, in the case of a half dozen Jolly Fellows who had forcefully commandeered a merchant's home as their own, in their beds. It took a gutsy people to do as they had been doing, risking what would certainly be a gruesome death if they were caught in order to strike back at those occupying them. It was unsettling of course, and Aleqou would gladly kill any of the murderers he came across, but his respect for their tenacity grew even as fear of them did the same.
And fear was growing, there was no doubt of that. Stannis, the king that Aleqou and his men had thrown in with, had tried to crack down on them, assigning several smaller companies and bands and his own Iron Shields with maintaining peace and finding the murderer. So far, though, not a one had been caught and the killings had increased in frequency. Mercenaries were showing signs of then stress by taking it out on those who's city they occupied; this, combined with the growing food shortage—something that the city had dealt with already in the recent past—had set the hearts of those in the city against their invaders. Riots were few and harshly dealt with, but they were growing in both number and frequency despite that.
A big instigator of those was a man named the High Sparrow, a Westerosii high priest of some sort who had come to power recently. From what Aleqou gathered at war councils, the wiry man had not been a supporter of Damon Baratheon and Tywin Lannister originally but had taken to Stannis' association with Melisandre and R'hllor about as well as a wild horse took a rider. From their fortress at a church on a hill—and it was a fortress, as more and more hungry mouths took up cudgels to defend their faith—they carried out their own brand of justice. Stannis had yet to move to eliminate them to avoid lighting the tinder box that was the city while he was already focused on expanding his influence into the Crownlands, but if they waited much longer…well, Aleqou did not know who would prove victorious.
The other was Oberyn Martell, a Dornish Prince who had been neither captured nor killed during the battle. The Red Viper of Dorne had taken the fight to the shadows and streets with no hesitation and deadly skill, his poisons having taken the life of two captains of smaller bands before the mercenaries had started to become paranoid. Much to the frustration of Stannis, the Prince was a known face, openly sampling wares at brothels throughout the city and cursing Stannis while doing so, then melting away by the time the Baratheon King's men arrived to capture him. That man, above the others, had earned much respect from Aleqou for the sheer boldness he possessed.
All of this ran through his head in the time it took him to make his way from a back room of Chataya's to the parlor, where the woman herself greeted the steady stream of customers. Six of his best men awaited him there, flirting with the whores as they passed but knowing better than to risk his wrath by going to a private room and not being here when he was ready to leave. Chataya, dark skin flawless, smiled at him as he dropped a pouch of gold into her lithe hand. "Same time tomorrow, Captain?" She asked in Valyrian.
Aleqou responded in kind, taking and lighting a torch from one of his men. "As always. Perhaps the northern girl with red hair."
Her dulcet tones followed him out the door and into the night. "Of course."
Borraq, a hulking brute also from Tyrosh who was Aleqou's top lieutenant more for his cunning than his savagery despite his physical size, chuckled as the six fell into step with their captain, beginning their usual route back to the inn the Iron Shields were using as their headquarters. "I had that one a few nights ago on my own time. She's worth the coin."
"They've all been worth the coin, for the coin is not so great," Aleqou agreed, a jaunt in his step. "At these rates I wish I had come to Westeros years ago."
Borraq was in his customary position behind Aleqou's right shoulder while the others were close behind, eyes alert so Aleqou's didn't have to be; the Captain of the Iron Shield liked to leave no doubt as to who was the true commander of his company. "The food isn't great though, and there seems to not be very much of it." When Aleqou grunted, his lieutenant continued. "I hope I have permission to do what is needed to keep our men fed."
Aleqou pondered that as they walked on through the quiet streets—the presence of soldiers were heavy in this section of the city, so most smallfolk avoided it at this time of night, leaving most of the whoring and drinking to the influx of soldiers. 'What is needed' involved stealing—from smallfolk, from other mercenaries, form the king if need be. It was risky, for Stannis had a reputation of being a stickler for justice and harsh with offenders, but it beat starving, and Borraq was good at doing it inconspicuously. "We will do what we must."
"That's all I needed to hear."
They continued in silence for a while, reaching the short alley a mere stone's throw from the inn. Aleqou entered it without looking back for his fellows, weaving his path around a prone drunk—or maybe the man was dead, it was hard to say. He didn't wear any Free Company colors or those of Stannis, so Aleqou paid him no mind. Halfway through he stopped, patting first one side, then the other. "Damn, I've left my dagger at—"
He trailed off, as he had turned to find himself alone in the alley.
"Borraq?" he called, but there was no one to answer.
He took a sharp inhale to shout the alarm—many of his men were only a few dozen yards away, in the inn—but he never got the chance. The prone man sprang up and slashed out with the flash of a dagger in torchlight before the Captain of the Iron Shields could either shout or react.
A tall man appeared out of the darkness as Aleqou Garantis crashed to his knees, blood soaking his front from the gash in his throat and torch clattering to the ground, though it remained alight. Oberyn Martell, Prince of Dorne, peered down at the dying Tyroshi, speaking in Westerosii. Aleqou, seeing as he was rapidly dying, didn't catch what was said beyond "bodies" and "display".
As the mercenary fell to his side, eyes going dim, he wondered why, instead of fear, he only felt admiration.
It seemed as if he had bathed in blood.
Garlan slumped to the side again, the jolt of his garron off Damon's right nearly sending him to the ground, the rope having loosened miles ago but the Reachman having come back to himself enough to hang on his own. Damon almost lost his own seat when he leaned over to shove Garlan back centered, holding on with only his legs. "Hold tighter, Garlan!" Damon had never shouted at a wounded man before, but they couldn't slow down yet which meant his goodbrother couldn't fall off. The man said nothing, eyes not opening, but his shaking hands visibly gripped the reins more firmly.
We'll have to stop eventually; no horse can sprint day and night for days.
He looked over his shoulder, then kicked his mount into an even faster sprint, dragging the horse of a dying man along behind him.
A/N: *tease* two blondes and a brunette walk into a Wall