The Shadow of the High King by Frank Dorrian

Author:Frank Dorrian [Dorrian, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TBR
ISBN: 9780995518407
Publisher: Impaled Monarch
Published: 2016-08-29T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Traitor Lord

The north was burning, and now the flames had spread to the Middenrealms – just as Garrmunt had said they would.

The first town to fall silent had been Ostermoor. The scouts had reported it was now just a blackened ruin filled to bursting with its dead. The next had been Bellom’s Crest. They said that when Bellom’s Crest burned, the fires could be seen across its lands for more than a week, the screams from behind its walls heard even longer.

King Aenwald did not know about that. But what he did know was that when he got his hands on Haakon Garrmunt, the legacy of pain the man would endure would have chronicles written in its honour. Songs would be written of his unending torment, poems of his divine excruciation. The saga of House Garrmunt would be ended slowly, piece by bloody piece, upon the torturer’s rack.

He sat there, in his field tent, fingers drumming idly on the arm of a carven chair as he waited for word from his lieutenants, mind wandering down dark paths. At the end of each was Haakon Garrmunt, skin flayed, flesh salted, tongue ripped out, eyes gouged, entrails spilled, fingers splintered, shins cracked. A thousand other things as well, as his mind wandered ever more deeply into black currents of hatred.

There were ways to keep the man alive long enough to see all his limbs removed and eaten by pigs before him. Substances his alchemists could concoct that would heighten the man’s pain, keep him alert as the flayer’s knife did its delicate work.

Dark vaults opened and closed one after another in his mind. In them he constructed a torture chamber without form or shape, ever-changing, ever-growing, thinking and adapting itself to the sweetest, most unique pain for the one placed in it. Darker and lower paths he trod, paths men should keep from he embraced and found in them a solace, warm and rewarding.

You bring their men across the Parting Sea, he thought, and not for the first time that day. To land upon my shores, to bring your new god’s filth to my people.

Men know nothing. Men who blindly follow gods know even less.

A man cannot call himself King over a land like Caermark if he is made of anything less than iron. Those who are unworthy find themselves burnt by the fires that rage unseen in such places. Aenwald had not ruled here twenty years to be unseated by a turncoat bootlick and his new master – some pretender to the throne of the Old Empire, fallen to worshipping some blood-drinking demon.

Aenwald would rule here until the very end. And if that end was to see the land burnt to cinders as he and Garrmunt wrestled in the Middenrealms, then so be it – he would rule a land of ash and bone.

But he would rule.

He could hear them now, the screams of the prisoners they had taken in the last skirmish, as his interrogators extracted every last detail from them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.