Sublimate, Illuminate, Eradicate
Tenth Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC
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"Tell me, Ser Doyle, do you still trust me?" Denys coldly regarded the groaning beams above them, the disused hall echoing each panicked shout of surprise from what few of Lady Whent's men brave enough to stand fast against a foe shaken loose from the blood-lined walls of Harrenhal. A line of men formed up and shouldered their new masterwork crossbows, apprehension writ clear across their faces.
"I trust good steel," the knight said, one eye socket a bleeding ruin, skin peeling back from that half of his face as he stood steady enough to rack a crossbow even as his squire handed him a bolt smeared with faintly luminescent, silty substances, the metal glowing hot as it was just pull from a brazier. "Less so witchery. I do like your own take on it," he said grudgingly. "I fucking hate ghosts and ghouls having their way with the people behind these walls. I don't give a shit if it's the ghost of Harren fucking Hoare himself or his own Nan who I'm sure he would have stabbed in the back sure as any Riverman who died putting the stones up." He raised the crossbow just as the door three men had their shoulders thrown up against began to shake.
"Steady," Ser Doyle said, even as Denys gripped his bronze barrow-blade, eyes closed as he centered himself.
Be the blade, he thought,
feel the air. Harmless platitudes, but they served the purpose of distracting himself from thinking of what cornered his friends and if they would manage without him there. When the door was thrown open and the men tossed aside like loose sacks of grain, he even managed to smile as the purple vial suspended with a mechanism was released and smashed open in one great flash of light. Doyle barked, "Their magic's buggered, make a hedgehog!"
The dead brute who had bull-rushed their way inside grinned ferally, flayed face pulled taut as the dozen men around Denys lifted their bows, only to stumble in shock as a pair of bombs hit them in the chest with precision. After, the expected wraiths shrieked in impotent fury as the salt stained bolts somehow managed to find purchase in them, thanks to Denys' forewarning of the garrison. Most of the armsmen now carried at least one weapon treated with the
concoction he had come up with after many evenings trying to figure out a solution to their inability to contribute to most fights that had been happening and claiming their lives out of hand. Now they weren't merely contributing, they were getting even. The answer laid in the ectoplasmic concentrations of incorporeal undead residue left behind when they were dispatched.
"Form up," Doyle barked out in a routine manner, not even vaguely surprised that they had almost been slaughtered to the last by enemies that they only had last minute warning of, pushing his squire, the boy already rushing to collect the spent bolts in hopes of salvaging another use from them. Behind the older knight, even as he drew his own sword and hobbled to stand beside Denys by the shattered door, the footmen did not share his sanguine disposition, rushing to and fro to move the barricades aside. The alchemist was busy applying salves to the concussed men-at-arms lying strewn about the floor, or else offering more potent healing philters when that did not suffice. "We need to relocate," Doyle murmured. "Pattern forming, we'll be getting hit again, twice as hard, unless we go further into the Keep."
"They're herding us," Denys said, not that either man was unaware of the implicit threat in that prospect.
"It'll place us closer to that red witch of yours," the knight countered, and though he wouldn't call that sorceress in service to the Red God 'his' anymore than the King would he imagined, Denys did not argue. He would just as readily take her aid as a Lannister at this point, if only to make an end to this place.
***
"Criston," Denys said as the group filed into the disused storeroom quickly, "What happened to..?" The Stormlander was the only man standing in what was tellingly a room filled with nothing but stacks of dead carcasses, some obviously weathered by the long years biding their time before the feast, and some more recent, and the others completely unrecognizable. A man nearby emptied their stomach in an instant at the sight.
The Stormlander shook his head, and Ser Doyle cursed.
"Too many pieces to put back together again all proper," Criston replied. "Didn't know Ser Cedrick well," he said in rough apology to the Riverlander knight, "But he was a brave man who made the bastards struggle for it, all the way to the end." No one even made a comment about how, where so many had fallen, Criston had managed to survive--cowardice was the last thought on anyone's mind--no one this deep into the trap was likely to be craven, and he had the help of a mage with him anyway, though Denys did not spot Thoros, nor this corpse, present. Likely enough the red priest was somewhere nearby, though Denys hoped it was not getting drunk.
"I don't give a shit how many bastards died twice for it, they are killing good men, friends beside," Ser Doyle spoke more of a mind to stiffen his comrades' spines than to convince himself. Whatever the Riverlander veteran had seen in this haunted place had hardened his heart, though Denys could see a glimmer of true sadness past it. "We are
lions, not mice for them to hunt! This ends tonight!" He held up his sword, and so the remaining warriors still with them let loose a ragged cheer. Denys wasn't even mortified at the simile not favoring a draconic bent--Golden Shields would be a welcome sight if only to put one more body against what they had seen further in.
"Thoros is around here somewhere," Criston told Denys as the two pushed ahead of the group, confirming his prior theory, excusing the movement as 'scouting'. "He says the red woman is onto something big, likely what's behind all this rot. Probably doesn't want to call His Grace down upon it, though I'm not sure what she's trying to prove."
"She may have her fill of piety, but she's likely she is just trying to earn the King's favor." The cynical thought seemed somewhat unlike him, and even Denys marked down the change in his own demeanor. "This place... it's barely standing, and malice the only foundations. Take away the cruelty and the hate, and I'm starting to think it'll all come tumbling down. Not even his Grace will be able to put that back together again as it was."
"Do we even want to see this monument to Ironborn madness whole again?" Criston all but spat. "Perhaps that's how it was always meant to be, but for one stubborn horror who really should have stayed burnt the first time."
They came upon another scene of slaughter, and neither man spoke on. Only the clash of blades and exploding alchemical munitions marked the occasion as any different from the last.
This time we're prepared.
