Short chapter but trying to wrap up this arc. Time to get back to the Landing
Jack got a hand under Harold's arm and hauled him upright. He winced in pain as he was hauled up.
"Ribs?" Jack said.
Harold breathed in, testing. "Bruised. Not broken…I think." He muttered.
"It was a good strike," Jack said and stepped back to clean his axe on the leg of a dead lizardman.
Around them, the sounds of battle were finishing up. Lizardmen that had broken were being run down along the shelf's edge, his legionaries cutting them off in small groups, driving some right off the shelf while others were slew were they stood. A few of the lizards tried the wall — got an arrow, got a spear — and the rest died. The fighting was tight and close, and Harold's men were not in a merciful mood. He watched two knights drive a berserker-variant to the edge and shove it off without slowing down. Watched a centurion step over a wounded lizardman and drive his sword into its head without looking at it.
He didn't stop them.
He was still tracking it all when a sound behind him startled him — a grunt of effort and he turned.
Dalen was on his knees at the edge of the ritual circle.
He had the female ritualist's dagger, and he was stabbing her body over and over and over, his shoulders working in a piston rhythm, tears dripped down his face, and his mouth was open in a soundless scream. “Ah shit, I was wondering if this would break someone.”
Harold started toward him, but Henri got there first.
He came from Harold's left at a walk, and he didn't grab Dalen's arm or shout at him or try to take the dagger. He just crouched beside him, got close, and waited two beats, and then he put both hands on Dalen's shoulders and held on. Dalen's rhythm stuttered. Henri said something Harold couldn't hear — low, close to Dalen's ear — and Dalen's arms stopped.
He sat there for a moment with the dagger still in his hand and his shoulders heaving, and then something in him gave out, and he folded forward, and Henri caught him, pulling him in with both arms, and Dalen's face went into Henri's shoulder and his whole frame shook as they sat there on the ground.
Henri held on, making no attempt to be anywhere other than where he was.
Fitch appeared from somewhere and crouched on Dalen's other side and put a hand on his back without speaking, and Dalen's breathing started calming again. Henri said something else to him, too quiet to carry, and helped him up by degrees.
Harold watched them go — Henri and Fitch walking Dalen toward the wall, one on each side, Dalen's head down.
"Don't blame him for it."
Carter had appeared at his shoulder, still bleeding from the cut on his face, a strip of cloth pressed to it with two fingers. Parker was two steps behind him.
"Breaking like that," Carter said. "Most people from home — from Earth — they're not ready for what one person can do to another."
Parker was looking in the direction they'd gone. "Seeing something like that for the first time." He gestured with one hand at the bodies stacked at the circle's edge.
Harold looked at the stacks. He'd seen them during the fight and had to shove his horror away. He looked at them now. His mind cast back to other more familiar scenes. His shoulders drooped. More than anything…he was just so tired.
"How do you get ready for it?" Carter said. He wasn't asking for an answer; it was just a way to try and cope with the slaughter.
Harold exhaled through his nose. "You don't." He looked at the bodies. The people stacked there, most of them in clothes that suggested they'd been taken from beds and roads and wherever ordinary people were. "Nobody gets ready for this. You either come through it, or you don't, and it always costs something." He shook his head slowly. "And this is early. This is the start."
Carter looked at him.
Harold waved him away and turned away from the sight. "At least the nest is destroyed now," Harold said. "The rewards we will get from destroying this should be substantial, but will it have been worth the price we just paid." He looked out over the shelf, at his men moving through the aftermath. "The next wave we fight will be worse than the one we blew up. We have to end this.”
Neither Carter nor Parker said anything to that.
Boots on stone behind him, and Hale walked up. He clasped forearms with Harold, the grip firm.
"My lord. Shelf is ours, we're searching every structure now." He held Harold's gaze. "There's something in the back."
He led Harold across the shelf at a walk — past the gatehouse, past a cluster of legionaries stacking lizardmen dead in a row with practiced efficiency. Towards the point where the stone plateau ran up against the mountain face. There was a cave mouth there, with torch sconces carved into the walls that were still burning, and Harold ducked his head and followed Hale in.
As soon as he walked in and smelled it he knew what he would find. The smell of packed, neglected, and abused humans is a smell that is hard to forget. Multiple chambers branched off a central corridor cut into the rock, the tool marks still visible in the walls, and the torches ran the whole length of it.
Each chamber had cages.
Iron, floor-to-ceiling, packed with people. The first group Harold saw were gaunt, their skin pulled tight across their faces, their eyes adjusting slowly to the additional torchlight he and Hale brought with them. The second chamber had people who looked like they'd been taken recently — a few with bruises still purple, clothes still intact, still holding themselves like people who expected to be able to leave. The third had children.
Harold stopped in the mouth of the third chamber.
He opened his mouth to order them released. But he didn't need to say anything.
Two squads of legionaries came past him at a jog from behind, one of them already pulling iron keys off a ring he'd found somewhere, and they fanned into the chambers, and the sounds of locks turning and cages opening and people crying started almost immediately. Someone in the first chamber was trying to ask a legionary what was happening, and the legionary was trying to explain, and neither of them had the right words for it.
Harold stood there for a moment and breathed.
"Get Renna," he said to no one specific, but Parker was behind him, and that was close enough. "And the potions we have. Treat the worst cases, but we can’t give up our healing potions on the mostly healthy ones. We are going to need for the next fight."
"Already moving," Parker said as he ran off.
Hale stood beside Harold in the corridor while the squads worked. He wasn't looking at the cages. He was looking at Harold.
Harold turned and walked back out into the light.
On the shelf, in the grey morning that had become full dawn without him noticing, his men were moving through cleanup and the first stages of occupation — hauling lizardman dead, posting watch, beginning the grim mathematics of figuring out who they'd lost and how badly they'd been broken. A pair of legionaries were helping Corwin wrap his head properly, the blood mostly dried now. Ren had his arm in a rough sling and he was missing fingers. Fitch was sitting against the wall with Dalen beside him, and tears were still falling from his face. Harold could see that this had broken him. He just hoped he would recover.
Harold stopped and looked at all of it.
"One day," he said to Hale. "We rest here one full day, we treat the wounded, we see to the people in those chambers. Whatever they need." He turned to face Hale directly. "Then I'm dispatching the knights to Lords Brennig and Caswell. The Gemheart stone needs to be found and extracted before we destroy the remaining relic circles — if we collapse the circles and the stone's still in that hold, we lose it, and after our losses, I want every reward we can get." He paused. "The mana saturation on this shelf — you've felt it."
Hale nodded once.
"The next wave is on a two-day clock at the outside," Harold said. "Probably less. We've disrupted enough of their circles that we bought some time, but not much." He looked at the men around him, the cost of what they'd done written on all of them. "We need to be done before it shows up. We have taken enough losses on this shelf for one campaign."
Hale absorbed this without comment, but he nodded slowly in agreement.
"I'll get them moving," he said.
"Do that." Harold looked down at the dent in his chest plate. "I liked this armor too."
Hale looked him in the eye. Saluted one more time and left. Harold stood in the dawn on the shelf they'd taken. He was so tired. He turned and walked to the mutilated body of the head ritualist.
He needed to retrieve that dagger. It was almost certainly a system item. It would make a good gift for Sarah.
And she almost certainly has good ingredients in her. No rest for the wicked.