Chapter 91: Blood at the Wall
The attack had been going on long enough for the night to feel cursed.
Valen's men had taken the front and kept hammering it, shields locked, spears braced, bodies pressing forward through smoke, screams, and the wet crack of breaking bone. The Sythans fought from behind stone and timber, from windows and parapets, from murder holes and narrow gaps that turned every step into a gamble. Arrows hissed down in black rain. Stones were dropped from above. Men went down in the crush and were trampled before they could scream twice.
Braavos was no city now.
It is a war right now . There is no right or wrong just a Wolf versus Human.
And The Wolf himself - Artos stood near the front with his sword in hand, face and armor spattered with old blood and fresh. Around him the Valens fought hard, but even they looked shaken by the force of it. This was not a duel, not a clean field clash where courage and skill might be measured with some honor. This was siege work. Ugly work. The kind where a man died because he was the one nearest the ladder, or because the stone under his foot shifted, or because someone above him had a better angle to kill.
Lord Valen rode the line with a hard face and a furious voice, pushing his men onward.
"Keep pressure on them!" he shouted. "Do not let them breathe! Hold the line! I repeat Hold the line!"
A man near the front took an arrow through the throat and fell without a sound. Another crouched over him for half a heartbeat too long and got his skull split by a falling stone.
Artos watched it all with a cold eye, though there was anger in him too.
He had seen wars before, participating in it when he was 14. He had seen cities burn. He had seen men die in numbers so large that the mind stopped counting them and simply accepted the red work as part of the day. Yet there was something different here. Siege made every mistake matter. A bad step. A loose handhold. A broken board. Any of it could end a man before steel ever touched him. It's not a matter of skills and birth but pure luck and persistence.
Lord Valen saw Artos looking toward the wall and guessed the rest.
"No," he said at once, his voice lower now but no less firm. "Not you. I am not making my daughter a widow before marriage"
Artos glanced at him. Grimaced at people are predicting him always in matters like these.
Valen jabbed a finger toward the ladders being hauled up through the press.
"You are not climbing that wall. Not while I still have breath to stop you."
Artos gave him a hard, humorless look. "We need the wall. We need that win, we don't have time. I would serve a good motivation to the soldiers. They need the hope and bait. This is how wars run,Lord Valen."
"We need you alive more," Valen snapped. "This is not some open field where you can throw yourself forward and trust your men to follow. A siege does not care who you are. It kills kings the same as beggars. One broken rung, one spear under the boards, one stone to the head, and that is the end of it."
Artos did not answer at once.
"Aye, you are right this is not a open field. But still a war and We are from North we learn to survive before we even breath in that cold hard winter. So I would do what my ancestors would. What my brother would all of them would do . Lead from the front. We never run from Wars."
Lord Valen frustrated and tries to put some sense into Artos a few more times.
On the other side of war, Waymar stood apart from the main rush, not moving with the others. He had gone to the edge of the action and then stopped there, waiting for Rick as instructed. If he would have there he would have faught with Artos to not do that in the seige but he is assigned to a specific duty here and is unaware of what is going to happen.
Rick was already deeper in the dark with the smaller teams, guiding the other demons through the weak places in the Sythan hold.
They moved like shadows through side entries, narrow service passages, forgotten drains, and blind corners where no man had thought to watch. The first Sythan guard died with a hand over his mouth and a blade between his ribs. The second was taken at a rear stair and dropped before he could shout. Others went down in silence or with half a cry swallowed by the noise of the main assault.
The inside of the settlement had become a butcher's maze by the demons.
Artos knew the danger. That was the point. The front not only had to hold long enough for the hidden knives to do their work but also make a big opening so the trap could work.
Valen's men battered the outer line. The demons slipping through the weak spots. The plan is working.
The Sythans are not a fools. They are fighting hard. They are in advantage and they knew it. Taking very bit of advantage and tactics that is helpful.
Still, the wall stood above them, and Artos could see the gates from where he was. He could see where the real break had to come from.
"We need someone up there," he said.
Valen's face darkened. "We do not need you up there."
Artos looked at him plainly. "I am going."
"You will be killed, boy."
"Maybe."
"Then let another man do it."
Artos turned back toward the wall."I am a Stark no matter what I say, and we have a thing. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If I can't go up in that ladder i have no right to ask anyone to go up there. "
Valen stepped in front of him. "You are not a bloody god , Hal. You are a man. A man can die on a ladder as easily as anywhere else. Easier, even. Ask any fool who has ever taken a castle. The climb is where brave men become corpses."
Artos's jaw tightened.
Valen stared at him as though he had not heard correctly.
Artos went on, his voice steady but low. "If I send men to climb and I stay below, they will know I do not trust them with my own life. If I go first, they follow. If I bleed first, they fight harder. That is how this works. Please i have been in fights long before I became a man. I know how it's working."
Lord Valen let out a rough, frustrated breath.
Valen seized his arm, hard enough to make the blood on Artos's sleeve smear. "Listen to me. This is not a duel. Not a charge across open ground. A ladder on a siege wall is a death trap. You slip, you fall, you get a spear through the belly before you even know what happened. A man can die on the way up and never touch the wall at all."
Artos gave him the faintest of smiles. "I've survived worse."
For a moment Valen looked as if he might strike him just to keep him from going. Instead he swore under his breath and looked back toward the wall.
The assault had already begun to shift.
Demon's groups were killing their way through the inside now, and the defenders were starting to feel it. Men on the battlements turned to shout orders that no one answered. A rear gatehouse had gone quiet, which was worse than noise. Somewhere in the settlement, a horn was sounded too late.
Artos saw the change and pointed with his blade.
"Now."
Valen's men roared and surged forward again, smashing into the gate line with renewed violence. The Sythans answered with a hail of arrows and a rush of spears through the narrow gaps in their defenses.
The front became a knot of struggling bodies, blood and wood and steel all jammed together in one heaving mass.
The ladder was brought up.
It shook in the hands of the men carrying it.
Artos stepped to it before anyone else could stop him.
Valen grabbed his shoulder again. "Hal."
Artos paused.
Then he climbed.
The first rung held.
The second creaked.
An arrow struck the side rail and splintered the wood inches from his hand.
Below, men shouted. Someone cursed his name. Someone else called for shields.
Artos went up faster. He didn't stop. He knew fear means death in a siege.
A stone came down from above and caught him across the shoulder, hard enough to knock the breath from him. He grunted, nearly lost his grip, and caught himself before he fell. Another step. Then another. A spear point jabbed down from the parapet, close enough to tear the cloth at his sleeve. He twisted, slammed the pommel of his sword into the ladder hook, and kept moving.
Valen shouted something from below, but the noise swallowed it.
One of Artos's demons climbed behind him, then another, both of them yelling curses and climbing with the desperate fury of men who knew the ladder was a death sentence but were unwilling to let their commander die alone.
That sight did more than any order could have done.
The men below bellowed and pressed harder into the assault. Fear was still there, sharp and cold, but it had changed shape now. If Artos could climb under that rain, then no man had cause to complain of his own risk.
The line surged beneath him like a living thing.
At the top, an enemy soldier leaned over with a spear and thrust down hard.
Artos caught the shaft with his left hand, pulled the man off balance, and drove his sword up through the gap beneath the breastplate. The defender gasped, toppling sideways and disappearing from the wall with a wet scream.
Another man swung a mace at Artos as he hauled himself up over the lip.
The blow struck his side instead of his head, but it still hit hard enough to open him up.
Not deep. Not fatal. Yet enough to sting and start bleeding beneath his armor. He snarled through his teeth, shoved forward, and rammed the hilt of his sword into the man's face until the nose broke and the bones gave way.
Then he was over the wall.
He landed in a crouch and rose into a killing field.
The gate defenders had not expected him there so quickly, and the sudden sight of him cut through their confidence. He moved like a man already hurt and still refusing to stop, sword flashing in the torchlight. One Sythan soldier came at him with a short axe and took a cut across the wrist. Another came from the side and was shoved hard into the stone, his head cracking against the battlement. A third tried to back away and found one of Artos's climbing demons already behind him, dragging him down into a knife fight that ended with both men falling off the inner stair.
The gate was near.
Artos fought toward it with the men around him, all of them pushing through the narrow space between the battlements and the gateworks. Below, Valen's line was still hard at work, battering the front and forcing the Sythans to hold too many places at once.
Inside the settlement, Rick's guided teams were cutting down the rear guards one by one, and the Sythan defense was beginning to look less like a wall and more like a man being torn apart at the seams.
Lord Sythan saw it too
At first he tried to hold. Then he tried to counterattack. Then he realized that neither was enough. The situation had shifted under his feet. His men were no longer in a position to fully defend and fully strike. Every order he gave had to be carried through blood and confusion and reached only half the time. He began pushing his men more aggressively, trying to drive the attackers back from the wall and the gate, but that only exposed them to more killing.
It was the sort of mistake men made when they could not accept that they were losing.
Artos recognized it immediately.
"Keep pressure!" he roared from the wall.
"They are cracking!"
A soldier near him hesitated, staring at the blood on Artos's side.
Artos drove his blade through the next man's throat and barked at the first one, "Move!"
The man moved.
That was the kind of thing Artos did. Not because he was untouched by pain, but because he refused to let it own him. He bled, and still he climbed. He hurt, and still he struck. The sight of him working through the wound, grim and relentless, sent the rest of the men forward with a savage kind of courage.
Valen saw it from below and shook his head once, almost in disbelief.
"That fool," he muttered, though there was no real anger in it now.
Waymar, somewhere deeper inside the hold, had still not moved from where Rick was meant to meet him. He stood waiting in the dark while others did the killing, his part in the next turn of the plan held back, that stillness made the battle around him feel larger, as if another knife had been set aside for later.
Artos is at the wall now. He was in the blood and the shouting and the collapse of men who had thought stone could protect them.
He drove forward until the defenders began to give ground.
Lord Sythan saw he is falling, the gates and walls have been breached.
"Ahhhhh, Fuckkkkk. That bastard. That worthless Sellswords . A Sellsword against the mighty Sythans. Those Valens . No I need to survive first. The i will kill those vermins."
"Yes My Lord we need to survive first and then we can take our revenge." His men said and advised.
With others agreeing as everyone wanted to survive first.
And then Lord Sythan ran.
Not all at once. Not in some grand obvious panic. But he turned away from the center of the fight and moved toward the deeper hold with a handful of men around him, trying to save what he could while the rest died buying him time.
A lord fleeing is worse than enemy breaching the castle.
The Sythan defense broke with it.
Some men still fought. Some still held. But the shape of the battle had changed. The front was no longer a front. The inside was no longer safe. The wall was no longer theirs.
Artos stood above the gate with blood on his side and on his arm and in his breath, and looked down at the ruin below.
"No mercy! Kill them all." he shouted.
And the men below answered with a roar that shook the siege.
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