Taking Water From Pilamine

At the gates of Pilamine, the Lacrenese army is gathered.

With no formal pronouncement of war given to the Pilamines, nor any scouts who could know of the assault permitted from leaving Sebilles, the Pilamine forces are highly unprepared for this attack and disorganised in their response. Still, they understood the meaning of an army on the horizon, and promptly sealed the city’s gates shut and posted more archers on the parapets.

It’s a predictable, and indeed predicted, response.

Renard loads the Iron King into a catapult and launches him onto the parapets. He reams through the archers, slaughters the gatekeepers, and opens the grand portcullis gates using the mechanism inside the walls. Perfectly uncontested, the army enters the streets of Pilamine.

The objective of this war is to plunder Pilamine’s water stores, depose Pilamine’s rulers, and assume command of its castle. So, the complete capture and subjugation of the city into a Lacrenese territory.

After bringing in their supplies, the Iron King first orders the gates closed and posts a battalion to guard them so no Pilamines may leave. The rest of the contingent, he orders to assemble around the castle. Again, with so little warning given for the Pilamines to organise, and its primary defence being its walls anyway, no serious skirmishes arise with any soldiers as the Lacrenese army mobilises to this point.

The army arrives at the castle. They are too late to storm it — the drawbridge is already raised — but do unpack their supplies and quickly establish a base from which they can siege it. Renard reasons that Lacren will now lock down any other exits to the city, plunder what valuables they can find, scout for back entrances to the castle, and hold high-ranking figures ransom until the Pilamine lords capitulate.

And indeed, the Iron King orders squads from their army to sack the city. This is normal. Renard looks to the Iron King for instruction as that contingent departs.

Abnormal, the Iron King orders Renard’s contingent to begin rounding up Pilamine civilians. Renard pulls the locals from their houses and assembles them into a line, figuring these must be the ransom. But the Iron King surprises him again by unpacking a water distiller from their supplies and presenting it at the front of the line.

The Iron King then orders that the civilians be executed and their blood drained one-by-one, so it may be distilled into water.

Water is, fundamentally, the reason why they came here, the Iron King explains. If they shall take this city, they shall take it for every last drop.

Renard freezes, as does every other soldier present. There are brutal tactics of war, and there are cruel but necessary ways to pressure lords — and then there’s this, a proposition beyond inhumane. Silence stretches, on and on.

A thin hope lingers that a voice will speak up against the Iron King, but none does. Nor does his dispassionate air open room for jokes or debate. He is serious, and expects no resistance. Recognising that someone must fold to start the momentum going, despite the pit sinking in his throat, Renard steps up and slits the throat of the man at the front of the line. With that boundary crossed, and this course established, the other soldiers equally suppress their objections and smoothly drag more Pilamines forward.

Every strike of the blade, and gurgle as the Pilamines sob and bleed like livestock, makes Renard feel sicker and sicker. Equally grows his anger. He wishes to beat each gurgling, crying, squealing Pilamine over the head and shout: Shut up! Don’t make this hard! We must do this. What, you think I’m to blame, that I’m taking fun from this? You cow’s droppings! Why couldn’t you have gotten away?

But he cannot yell these things, snorting grimly at himself for thinking them, as he knows there is no way they could have escaped. The Iron King watches idly over the procession, scanning for stragglers, knocking on doors and dipping into buildings himself. It is clear to Renard that he will slaughter anyone who refuses this work.

For God’s sake, somebody stop this! Renard internally screams as he throws another corpse onto the pile.

“Daddy!" shrieks a little girl a short ways down the line. Renard’s heart sinks. “Daddy! Daaahhhhdeeeee!!", keening in the horrible way that only a little girl can.

Before she can reach him at the head of the line, Renard surrenders his post. When the Iron King is not looking, he pawns the job to another soldier and advises he’s going to find a Pilamine higher-up to use as ransom to get the castle open. Though initially only an excuse to get him away from the girl, this pretext soon becomes real as Renard goes door to door to door, yelling at folks to get in line and praying one will be important.

He is rewarded as he finds a magistrate of the city. The magistrate is terrified of Renard’s arrival, only for Renard himself to break down and beg that the magistrate do something, anything, that he come with Renard and appeal the lords to open up the castle so this madness can end. But the magistrate does not want to go.

Renard hoists the magistrate by his lapels and yells at him, impressing how dire the situation is and how he absolutely has to do something — when the rear gates of Pilamine open, blocks away but visible to Renard. Armoured, armed, and mounted reinforcements have arrived from the coalition, who had departed the city only hours before, and are evacuating everyone they can through the rear gates. Relieved, Renard releases the magistrate and urges him to run.

The thought of joining the coalition’s evacuation efforts does not even flit through his mind — it is clear to Renard he will not be accepted. Before he can be captured, questioned, or otherwise caught in a melee with the coalition’s forces, Renard runs back to the Lacrenese base to advise the Iron King about the evacuation.

The Iron King surmises that the lords are so staunchly remaining holed in the castle to buy time for the evacuation while likely evacuating out a backdoor themselves. While staying here to oversee the base and the bloodlettings, he orders one squad to escalate the abductions and assault the coalition forces at the rear gates head-on, shifting them into a more exploitable position, while Renard leads another squad to pincer the coalition from behind.

Renard mounts up and does as instructed. After looping around the city, his force comes upon the rear of the coalition, who are frantically shuttling women and children out the gates to safety. Plainly, rescuing the civilians is their priority.

Judgemental stares bore into Renard’s shoulderblades. Sweat burns on his neck. He senses that his own forces may be apt to desert if he orders them to attack. Equally, he knows he cannot defy the Iron King’s will and pacify the squad by waiting for the evacuation to finish before engaging.

Steeling himself, Renard charges forward. His initiative works to draw the rest of the squad into following, and a melee erupts between Renard’s forces and the coalition soldiers. Horses panic, blades sing, crescents of blood arc into the air, and the typical chaos of battle asserts itself boldly. No overpowering force rises from either party, the struggle remaining for now, about even.

Renard, locked in the zone, catches his breath between blows for one vital moment. A blade screams across his armour, narrowly missing a vital chink, thrust with force enough to almost topple him from his horse. Critically, this blade comes from behind him — it must be wielded by one of his own men, whose accuracy suggests they did not mistakenly friendly fire, but willingly attempted to assassinate Renard.

A second strike comes at that same chink, the perpetrator galloping by on his horse. Renard swiftly manoeuvres his own steed out of the way, unable to sight the perpetrator’s identity in the chaos, only to realise he has positioned himself vulnerably before the coalition forces instead. He frantically repositions, breaking out of the melee, and takes some meters of distance — in this short interim and from this clear vantage, he sees his own squad throwing down their weapons, raising their hands, and defecting to the coalition unilaterally.

Realising he is in serious trouble, Renard turns and flees as fast as his mount will carry him. But the thought of returning straight to the Iron King frightens him. Should he hide until things calm down, or take a circuitous route? In any case, pressed by the echoes of defectors and coalition soldiers pursuing him, he cannot stop or slow down. In the end, he does waste considerable time winding through sidestreets before looping back round to the castle.

Which, as Renard arrives, is now open. The drawbridge is down and Pilamine soldiers are assembled on its tongue. Too upon the parapets are archers. Veins in Renard’s neck bulge as he presses his horse faster, before a soldier might intercept him or an arrow might strike him, but through the clamour of distant screams and clopping hooves and banging metal and mental static, a dignified voice pierces him as cleanly as the point of a lance.

“Renard Cox!", it calls.

Renard’s horse rears back, having run into a gaggle of Pilamine spearsmen who raise their weapons at it. Renard, preoccupied with dread at hearing that stranger’s voice call his name, barely reins the animal back onto stable footing before turning to see who addressed him.

Upon the drawbridge is a man dressed in the colours of Pilamine, plainly a knight by the quality of his equipment and the grace with which he walks. Curly, light-brown hair spills down his shoulders like lamb’s wool, framing his beautiful face and complimenting the long, feathery lashes that fan around his dreamy eyes. Perhaps a hundred spearsmen stand behind him on the bridge, with as many archers on the parapets above, their bows all trained on Renard. Behind him, the other spearsmen close the exit, trapping Renard between them and the knight.

The Pilamine knight steps forward, and with a jerk of his chin, orders Renard off his horse.

Reluctantly, but without any choice, Renard dismounts. The Pilamine knight draws his sword and announces that still no recompense has been given to the twelve honourable knights Renard has slain. In their memory, he will hold Renard to account.

It’s a formal challenge to duel, ostensibly to the death, as if to correct the outcome of that tournament several years ago. Renard draws his own blade and steps onto the drawbridge, the spearsmen backing off to allow Renard and the knight some room. The knight waits, poised, for Renard to strike first — striking first against a trained duellist is almost always disadvantageous, but very well, Renard will initiate. The knight’s eyes bulge in shock as Renard not only reads, but smoothly hooks the counterattack, almost disarming the knight on the first swing.

In any case, the knight is now taking Renard seriously as an opponent. He redoubles his assault, thinks smarter about his strikes, lunges and parries with expert precision. However inflamed he is, though, Renard is not. With all the spearsmen waiting in a circle around them, and the archers on the parapets training their bows on Renard, Renard’s eyes dim and a bitter snort lodges in his throat. What a great and honourable and dignified send-off this knight is giving to the memory of his fallen comrades, undermined by the fact these onlookers ensure Renard can’t win, and even if he does win, he will be promptly felled by a hundred spearpoints and arrowheads anyway.

This unbalance saps the significance of this fight for Renard. Rather than pursue victory, as such a stupid situation allows no victors, Renard resigns that the best he can do is stall. Yet again the vain essence of knightly piety shows itself, Renard thinks with exasperation, affirmed once again to the idea that none as good as the knights would ever regard him as equal.

The Pilamine knight steps back and pauses the duel, alarmed. Having realised that Renard is not fighting to win, and in fact not regarding the duel seriously at all, and still the knight is not winning, he promptly orders the rubbernecking soldiers to disperse and evacuate. Though confused by this order, the enemy soldiers do break from the bridge until only Renard and the knight remain present.

Renard’s eyes widen with a childlike wonder. Gratitude stirs in his chest as he again regards the Pilamine knight, who Renard suddenly dares to think exactly as honourable and chivalrous as his title suggests. This might be genuinely, a rather good person.

Moved by the show of respect, Renard adjusts his stance and his grip on his blade. The Pilamine knight, though slightly intimidated beneath his decorum, does the same.

The duel resumes. With both Renard and the knight fighting to their utmost ability, Renard feels himself invigorated, and the knight energised in turn. The rhythm in each strike, dodge, and parry carries that of a vital conversation, with every twitch translating from the heart through the muscle into some expression of each fighter’s soul. More than anything his mouth could say, this trance of battle is Renard’s most fluent dialect. It’s a liberating thing to indulge in. Brighter and brighter, in each strike, he feels himself shine.

Equally he feels the rapport coming from the knight. If Renard sweeps a blow that proudly asserts, ‘my devotion to the course I’ve chosen is ironclad!’, then the knight’s desperate parry carries the question, ‘but how could you place that devotion to a cause that is so wicked?’. Such questions or sentiments are ones Renard would typically reject, but having already softened his heart toward the knight, and opened himself to this communication, he is able to accept the sincerity in them — and by that sincerity, accept the knight’s growing confusion.

More and more, the knight cannot understand why Renard aligned himself to the Iron King. He is not proposing that Renard turn against him, as he acknowledges that Renard’s principles ensure he will not. But he cannot see how someone who he indeed recognises as having such principles, passion, and quite a positive core of desire ultimately fell in with the Iron King. The knight seems to be conceiving a course where Renard could have been honed exceptionally into an instrument of good, and though not quite mourning the loss of something that did not and could never pass, is left with the burning and lingering hunger of ‘why?’ did that not happen.

In a sense, even more than the honour of the twelve knights, it feels like this knight is fighting for the honour of that hypothetical good Renard — and by respect for that ghost, is ever more inflamed with passion to defeat the twisted, imperfect thing in front of him.

It is in recognising this sentiment that Renard feels himself waver, and realise, he wants this knight to win.

Not now, necessarily. But he wants this knight to live and encourage whatever he does in the future. With two decisive whacks, Renard disarms the knight’s sword and batters him to his knees, winning the fight.

The knight stares up at Renard, panting and sweating. He cannot accept the loss, but also cannot reject the significance of the duel, so against his manic instinct to live, he does not scramble to flee or reach for his sword.

Convention demands that the loser of such a duel dies. But Cavalier Renard is not so inexorably bound to chivalry. In the stillness and the silence of the bridge and its vacated environs, Renard sheaths his blade. The knight dips his head in a strange mix of shame and gratitude, aware that he has been spared.

Renard exhales and turns to leave the bridge — when a chilling shift hooks the air, and a shadow falls over the two.

Oh, no, Renard’s guts squeeze in on themselves, already knowing what he will see behind him.

It’s the Iron King, covered in blood. He smiles thinly, his sharp teeth peeking between his slit lips, as he strides onto the bridge. Far in the distance, over the Iron King’s shoulder, Renard sees that the rear gates, through which the evacuation had been happening, are now closed.

Frozen by this observation, Renard fails to properly react when the Iron King joins his side. The Iron King, still wearing that horrible grin, glances to the defeated knight — who, furious, surges for his sword.

Before the knight even gets to his feet, the Iron King’s clawed hand pierces like a javelin through his stomach and out his back. He slumps, dead, on the Iron King’s arm. The Iron King withdraws his hand.

“Were you saving this one for me, Renard?" he asks.

Cold and numb, Renard cannot find a fitting reply. A profound darkness feels to sweep and settle over the world, like wind on a candle wick, snuffing out the light with nothing but a dispassionate grin and pride in its own dominion.

“Have we won, milord?" Renard asks.

“Beyond measure," the Iron King replies, bringing his bloodsoaked hand to his lips. He smiles. “Lacren drinks well tonight."