Heaven's Betrayed King

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4: The Summit Keep

Kyran's POV

The stone stairs leading to the summit were broad, carved straight from the mountain’s gray granite and at the top stood the keep’s outer courtyard ringed by a six-foot parapet of rough masonry.

Twenty mercenaries in leather and iron scale formed a tight overlapping shield wall across the entrance and behind them stood two handlers holding leashes, straining against the lunges of four war hounds... massive gray-furred beasts bred for hunting runaway slaves witb their jaws dripping foam against iron-spiked muzzles.

Standing on the raised stone balcony overlooking the courtyard was Overseer Malakor.

He was a thick,square-jawed brute with a scar running from his ear down into a greasy beard and draped in a wolf-pelt mantle that failed to hide the broad paunch of a man grown fat on stolen rations and bribes. In his hands rested a heavy iron-bound arbalest with the thick steel prod already cranked back and notched with a broadhead quarrel.

“Halt right there, Drax!” Malakor shouted down with his voice gravelly and harsh. “You butchered six of my men and smashed my crushing mill. Drop the steel and get on your belly or I turn the beasts loose and let them tear the meat from your ribs while you watch.”

I stopped at the top step, twenty paces from the shield line.

Ris lingered four steps below me, clutching a broken spear shaft with knuckles white as bone witb his breath hitching in his chest.

“Drax,” he whispered with his voice trembling. “They have the high ground. If the hounds charge, we cannot hold them both.”

“Stay behind the stone pillar,” I told him, not taking my eyes off the line.

Inside my chest, the black seed of the Resentment Core hummed with a sharp and violent frequency as the fury that had driven my climb down the switchbacks now settled into a cold focus.

The dark mana did not explode outward in grand celestial displays.. instead it wound tightly around my tendons reinforcing the brittle bones of this starved body and deadening the pain in my raw palms.

“I will give you one chance, Malakor,” I said with my voice carrying cleanly across the stones without strain. “Open the crystal vaults and throw down your weapons. Walk out of this valley on your own feet and I might leave you with your tongue.”

A roar of coarse laughter went up from the mercenary line.

Malakor leaned over the parapet, spitting into the courtyard dirt. “The sun really did fry your skull. Loose the hounds! Strip his bones!”

The handlers unhooked the iron clasps and the four war hounds bounded forward with terrifying speed with their claws clicking against the flagstones as they crossed the courtyard in three massive leaps with throats open in a chorus of snarls.

I did not retreat an inch.

As the lead hound launched itself at my chest with jaws snapping for my throat, I sidestepped to the inside, letting the beast’s momentum carry it past my shoulder and in the same rotation, I drove the iron skinning knife down into the base of its skull.

The animal collapsed mid-leap with a dull thud.. dead before it hit the flags.

The second hound lunged low, aiming for my left knee and I planted my heel and kicked upward with the steel-toed sole of the guard’s boot, catching the beast square under its lower jaw. Bone cracked witb the snap loud as a breaking branch and the hound flipped backward into the third animal, tangling them both in a thrashing mass of limbs.

The fourth hound hesitated for a fraction of a second but that was all the time I needed.

I closed the distance in two long strides, gripped the iron short sword with both hands and brought the blunt spine down across the beast’s spine. The dog dropped instantly, paralyzed in the dust.

The mercenaries’ laughter died in their throats as the shield wall stiffened with several men shifting their boots nervously on the gravel.

“Shoot him, you idiots!” Malakor roared from the balcony, leveling his arbalest.

A steel bolt whistled through the air, aimed straight at my chest.

At twenty paces, an arbalest bolt could punch clean through iron plate but a mortal’s finger on a trigger telegraphs every motion before the sear releases. The moment Malakor’s knuckle tightened, I twisted my torso to the right.

The bolt grazed the leather bracer on my forearm, tearing through the hide and gouging a shallow trench across the stone steps behind me.

Before Malakor could drop the weapon to reach for the crank, I kicked the dead hound’s heavy body forward into the center of the shield wall, disrupting their footing and I followed directly behind the carcass.

The two center shieldmen braced to absorb the impact but I did not hit them high. I dropped low, swept the iron short sword horizontally across the lead mercenary’s exposed ankles and drove my shoulder hard into the rim of the second man’s shield.

The dark mana in my core flared hot, lending the frail body the explosive force of an iron ram.

The wooden shield splintered and the second guard flew backward into his comrades, shattering the formation.

I moved through their broken ranks with the precision of an imperial general culling a mutinous levy and every strike had a single purpose. A short brutal thrust under an iron collar.. a backhand chop to a windpipe.. an iron pommel driven into a temple. The blunt blade did not need a razor edge when driven by the focused weight of my hatred.

In less than two minutes, the courtyard fell dead silent save for the dragging scrape of boots and the ragged gasps of wounded men bleeding out into the shale.

The two houndsmen dropped their leashes and fled toward the valley ramp, abandoning the keep entirely.

I stepped over the pile of fallen steel with my chest heaving as the strain on this mortal shell demanded oxygen and looked up at the balcony.

Malakor was scrambling backward toward the doors of the keep’s ledger room, dragging the empty arbalest behind him like a broken club. His face was gray with the wolf-pelt mantle slipping from his broad shoulders.

I took the stone steps to the balcony three at a time.

Malakor reached the threshold, turned and swung the iron arbalest wildly at my head but I caught the steel bow with my left hand, absorbing the shock through my shoulder, ripped the weapon from his grasp and drove the butt of the stock straight into his gut.

The breath exploded from his lungs in a wet choke as he crashed down onto his back across the floorboards of his study, clutching his stomach and squirming like an overturned beetle.

I stepped inside, pushed the door shut behind me with my boot and looked around the room.

Shelves lined the walls crowded with ledgers, trade manifests and iron strongboxes. In the center of the room sat a massive wooden chest, bound in bands of black iron and reinforced with warding runes that glowed with a faint and pulsing azure light.

Through the seams of the chest, a deep resonant hum vibrated against the floorboards... the unmistakable heavy aura of high-grade stabilizing crystal ore.

I walked over to Malakor, placed the flat of my boot firmly against his throat and rested the point of the bloodstained short sword against his nose.

“The letter,” I said softly. “The one from the capital demanding these crystals for Drustan. Where is the communication matrix you use to report to the court?”

Malakor’s eyes bulged with his fingers clawing uselessly at my boot.

“Who... who are you?” he wheezed with blood flecking his lips. “You are no quarry slave. Drax couldn’t read a ledger.. let alone know the name of the Supreme Sovereign!”

“You don’t need to know my name,” I said, pressing down slightly until his windpipe narrowed. “You only need to know that your master in the Nine Heavens is choking on stolen marrow and the medicine he needs is sitting in this chest.”

Malakor’s face went from gray to white as the realization struck him. “You... you intercepted the imperial dispatch...”

“Where is the communication crystal?”

“In the desk!” Malakor gasped, pointing a shaking hand toward a writing table near the window. “Bottom drawer! The bronze box with the imperial seal!”

I kept my foot on his throat while I reached down with my left hand, pulled open the drawer and lifted the bronze coffer. Inside rested an azure crystal sphere the size of a fist, pulsing in sync with the large ore chest across the room.

This was the direct line to the capital’s supply bureau. If this crystal shattered, the report of the mine’s destruction would take weeks to reach the Nine Heavens by mortal courier... leaving Drustan starved of stabilizing crystals while remaining completely blind to the threat rising from the lower dirt.

“Please,” Malakor whispered with tears mixing with the grime on his cheeks. “Take the gold in the lockbox. Take the horses from the upper stable. Just let me leave the valley. I will tell the court the mountain collapsed... I will tell them the mine was buried...”

“You will tell them nothing,” I said.

I drove the short sword down with a single and clean thrust through his throat, pinning him to the floorboards.

Malakor gave one shuddering breath with his hands falling limp against the carpet and died.

I wiped the blade on his wolf-skin pelt, walked over to the desk and picked up the communication crystal. With a sharp squeeze of my palm channeling a sliver of the Resentment Core’s dark mana into the matrix, the azure sphere cracked down the center with its inner light dying with a faint glassy hiss.

Outside, the door creaked open and Ris peered in with his eyes wide as he looked at the dead overseer and the massive chest of stabilizing crystals.

“Drax...” Ris whispered with his voice trembling. “What do we do with all this? The whole garrison is dead or scattered and the slaves are gathering in the lower yard.”

I looked down at the iron-bound chest containing the very lifeblood Drustan needed to survive his stolen throne.

“Find twenty strong men who can handle a wagon,” I said, turning toward the window that looked out over the vast mortal continent stretching toward the horizon. “We take what we can carry, burn the rest of the mine to ash and head for the border...”