The quarry had once supplied stone. The armed crew had turned its cut faces, sheds, and timber stacks into a fortified camp.
Vhar studied the quarry from the tree line at first light. The pit ran forty meters across. Stacked crate-timber and quarried slab blocked its open side. Three raised platforms held armed men, while cut faces and equipment sheds could hide twenty people or eighty. Smoke rose from two cookfires. The camp had not seen him yet.
"That's a fortified quarry camp," Tavik said, low, from beside the same tree line. He nodded once toward the barricade. "Whoever's down there built it to hold."
"Which is why you're not going in with me," Vhar said.
Nyra had already turned toward the goat track Tavik's people had scouted along the quarry's western lip. It passed a scattered stockpile of the band's recovered cargo. "Civilians first, if any are held below. Cargo second. We stop anyone who comes around the western lip." She checked Thronebreak's grip once. "You do not need us in the pit."
"I don't," Vhar agreed. "I need the pit itself, and everyone in it who decides to make that a problem."
Tavik's jaw worked once, and he said nothing else, because there was nothing left to negotiate.
Vhar stepped out from the tree line into open ground.
The nearest platform sentry saw him within three heartbeats and shouted an alarm across the pit. Thirty heads turned toward one man standing forty meters from their wall.
AARRGHH!
Vhar's hands stayed loose at his sides. He had come to break the barricade and kill every armed man who chose to hold it.
Vhar crossed the forty meters in one burst.
WHOOSH!
Dust rose behind him for forty meters, marking where he had launched from the trees.
The barricade was still splintering when Vhar hit it. His shoulder smashed through the timber wall. The spearman behind it raised his weapon too late.
BOOM!
The barricade exploded outward in three directions at once. Vhar's palm found the spearman's chest before the man's balance recovered from the collapse under his own feet, and drove through it with the same unbroken motion that had carried him the whole forty meters.
THUD!
The body flew backward and struck the broken barricade. Vhar stopped on the quarry floor without bending a knee. Stone cracked under both boots.
CRACK!
| SLAUGHTER'S END |
Four bare invocations before this one, and none of them had ever needed a name. This one arrived with its own.
The two remaining platform sentries broke position instead of holding it. One arrow found his shoulder anyway, the density under his skin turning what should have been a deep punch into a shallow one, cheaper than the half-step it would have cost him to avoid it while the platform still had his attention. The other abandoned his post entirely for the equipment sheds behind the pit.
Vhar drew Radrazh before the arrow finished its flight. He drove the dark-red sword through the second platform's support beam instead of the archer above it. The platform buckled and crashed sideways, taking the archer into the ruined barricade.
CRACK!
Vhar drew Ulqor with his other hand. The archer tried to run beneath the falling platform. Vhar caught him before he reached the equipment shed.
CHUNK!
Ulqor pierced between his shoulder blades before he reached the equipment shed doorway.
The quarry was already screaming by the time the third body hit the ground.
Men poured from the cut faces and sheds: eight, then twelve, with spears, hatchets, and a crossbow on a raised ledge. Vhar ran through the middle of them without slowing. He used neither sword unless the next body required steel.
Vhar broke ribs, elbows, and knees as he passed. Two men ran for the same gap in the wreckage. One backhand opened both throats before either cleared it.
A spearman planted his weapon against the rock and braced. Vhar passed the spearhead before the man's back foot set. His elbow shattered the spearman's jaw and lifted him off the ground.
CRACK!
Another swung a hatchet in a wide, honest arc that would have opened a lesser man's skull if it had ever landed. Vhar caught the wrist mid-swing, reversed the grip, and buried the hatchet's own blade in the collarbone it had been meant to protect.
THUD!
A third and fourth tried the spearman's mistake in reverse, closing together rather than apart, certain that two committed bodies would succeed where one alone hadn't. Vhar's forearm crushed both their throats in the same motion, and the two of them collapsed still tangled with each other, neither one having landed a single blow worth counting.
The crossbowman on the ledge fired once. The bolt buried itself three meters from Vhar.
SPLURT!
Ulqor sliced his throat open before he got a second one nocked.
The older man in the leather cuirass had stopped shouting orders by the time the twelve became four, then four became none. He stood on his ledge above the eastern cut face with a sword he hadn't drawn and a face that had finally stopped believing its own count. Whatever he'd built this quarry to survive, it hadn't been this: one man who didn't slow down, didn't retreat, didn't need the numbers to matter at all.
Steel rang beyond the western lip. Nyra met each strike, then drove the attacker backward. She had not called for help.
Two of Tavik's people hauled a loaded handcart away from the fighting. Its wheels caught on loose stone, but they kept pulling it toward the trees.
Six more men crouched behind overturned carts at the eastern cut face. They stood close enough that a spear could not pass between two bodies without touching a third. One leveled a reloaded crossbow while two braced spears against the cart rims and aimed upward.
The men had built a tight barricade around the carts. It gave them cover from arrows and nothing else.
Radrazh went through the nearest cart's frame the way a fist goes through rotted wood, and the men crouched behind it lost their cover and half a second of balance at the same moment. Ulqor took the opening that half-second bought, crossing to the second cart before its defenders finished reacting to the loss of the first.
The nearest defender thrust his spear over the broken rim. Vhar knocked the shaft down with Radrazh, stepped over it, and cut through the man's wrist at the joint. The severed hand hit the quarry floor still clamped around the spear.
SPLAT!
The man screamed once. Vhar drove Ulqor through his open mouth and out the base of his skull. Blood sheeted down the cart planks as the body folded over them.
The second defender tried to crawl beneath the overturned wheel assembly. Vhar seized the axle, tore it free, and dropped the full weight of cart and stone onto the man's spine.
BOOM! CRACK!
The quarry floor shook. The trapped man stopped moving beneath the splintered wheel.
The crossbowman fired from behind the eastern cut. Vhar turned his shoulder. The bolt punched through his coat and scraped across the dense muscle beneath before falling clear. He threw Radrazh.
WHOOM!
The sword crossed the pit end over end, split the crossbowman's chest through the leather cuirass, and buried itself in the cut face behind him. The man's weapon dropped first. His knees followed.
Vhar reached the rock wall, pulled Radrazh free, and came back through the remaining three before they could decide whether to run. One lost both knees to a low sweep. One lost his throat to Ulqor. The last raised both hands with his sword still in them. Vhar kicked through the man's sternum. The body struck the cart wreckage hard enough to break it again.
THOOM! SPLINTER!
Loose quarry stone rolled downhill through the blood and broken cartwood. One wheel spun on its edge, struck a corpse, and fell flat with a dull clatter. The first barricade had become a field of snapped timber, split bodies, dropped spears, and boot-deep cracks in the quarry floor. No defender stayed behind it. No one on the platforms raised a weapon.
From the western lip, Thronebreak rang against steel once, then twice.
CLANG! CLANG!
Nyra had her own attackers contained. Vhar could hear their boots skidding over loose stone and the sharp, flat reports of her spear butt striking ribs or knees. Tavik's people kept the cart moving uphill, their hands shaking around its handles but never letting the load roll back toward the pit.
The men beyond the eastern cut saw all of it. One dropped his hatchet. Another dragged a heavy document case behind the second wall, then turned back for a strongbox when someone shouted at him to leave it. They were not trying to hold the quarry anymore. They were trying to buy enough seconds to carry proof away from it.
The man in the cuirass shouted again.
RAAGH!
This time the shout was not an order to hold the carts. The man in the cuirass was warning someone behind the cut face. Vhar did not answer. He would reach that person after he cleared the men in front of him.
The next cart broke like the first two. The men behind it ran. Neither cleared the wreckage. Everyone still standing saw that their headcount could not stop Vhar.
Vhar reached the man in the cuirass before he finished shouting. Beyond the last cart stood a second barricade of stacked crates and a shed beam, built in the last few minutes. Someone waited behind it instead of running.