*Note: This was written by a friend of mine to help him get exposure.
Staring out over the courtyard, he felt strangely calm and peaceful, regardless of the fact that the sun was directly overhead and pelting him with its fierce rays. He sat above the archway that led directly into the main hall where the King held court every second Sunday of the month. It was a precarious place to sit and mostly only birds ever sat there but, he had found as a boy, that he was not afraid of heights. This had prompted him to explore every aspect of the castle he could climb to. This was by far his favorite perch.
The view from atop the archway allowed him to see for half a mile across the horizon from left to right through the open gateway while offering him a great view of the castles main gate and courtyard. He would sit here for hours a day, just watching the various traders, slaves and workers come and go. Sometimes there were days when hardly any traffic came through the gates but he would sit there nonetheless, keeping a sharp eye cast around the land beyond the castle for a merchant caravan.
A crow alighted beside him, cawing loudly and waKing him from his memories. As he stirred, it took flight again in fright. Frowning slightly as the sound of the murder of crows came crashing down on him, he wiped the sweat from his brows with a blood stained fist. Through-out the castle the sound of feasting and fighting rang out as the crows squabbled with each other even though there was plenty of food to go around; typical of them.
Beneath him, spread all over the ground like a grotesque all you can eat, self-serve buffet, were dozens of corpses with at least two or more crows pecking and pulling at strips of their flesh. Every body that had been face up was without its eyes; the crows always went for the eyes first as they were so soft and easy to remove.
Sighing contently, he tried not to gag on the stench of decomposition, aided greatly by the heat of the sun. The buzz of hundreds of flies was almost as loud and annoying as the din of the bickering crows. He swatted at them as they buzzed lazily around him, drunk with food and heat. He must have smelt just as enticing as all the dead with all the dried blood and bits of torn flesh stuck to him, the sweat pouring from his pores must have made him smell like quite the delicious feast. He really ought to have cleaned himself hours ago but after last night he’d been exhausted and had found himself, quite suddenly, atop his favorite perch and had not bothered to move since.
Disjointed images of the slaughter flashed before his eyes as if they were parts of a haphazard story he was being told by an inept storyteller. However, he clearly remembered the plans he had put in place to ensure his revenge.
Days ago he had set his plans into motion, maKing half-hearted attempts upon the Kings life that he knew all too well would fail. He had slipped poison into the Kings face basin that he used to wash each morning but he had ensured that the Kings had taken his mistress to bed the night before. She had awoken first, as she always did, intending to slip away unnoticed but she had first stopped to wash as he knew she would. The King awoke to find his mistress dead hours later. The first attempt had put the castle on alert. Men who had quarrels with the King wound up dead in their beds.
Next he had a special armor made for the King, a gift from a small, distant, nonexistent monarch. Knowing the great greed of the King’s head of guards, he had ensured that the guard saw the armor first. The guard tried it on as was expected but as soon as he fastened the clasps, small knives built into the armor had sprung forth and severed the man’s arteries and vein. He bled to death in minutes. At this point the, the castle was thrust in a state of panic; two attempts on the King’s life in as much as a week? It was unheard of. The King was now accompanied by no less than fifty guards from the moment he awoke to the point of sleep, during which five men patrolled his bedchambers at regular intervals. This new security arrangement was still not rigid enough.
Two nights before the slaughter, he had breached the King’s bedchamber and killed two of the patrolmen before allowing himself to be seen by a third, then fleeing as the alarm was raised. The King, severely shaken by this close encounter, shut himself in the very heart of the castle. There was a room beneath the castle that had been designed to keep the King and his family safe from a siege on the castle. At last, that was where he wanted the King to be, scared and trapped in a cell of his own design with only one entrance.
While the royal guard, twenty strong, watched over the King, night and day in his siege room, the rest of the castles small but skilled army exhausted every resource they had to find the man who was trying to kill their King.
Two days passed while he made the King cower, scared to walk freely in his own castle then, on the dusk of the third day, he presented himself at the castle gates. By then a poster with his face had been placed on every wall, on every building in the castle. He called out to the guards who instantly shut the gates behind him, thinKing they were cutting off his escape. They came at him then, their tempers high and
hatred palpable; he watched them come to him, and then one by one he made them embrace death. After he had killed fifty of the guards, they became wary of him, some even scared. Then he advanced on them, striking without mercy, dispatching of them with cold, calculated efficiency. He killed any who stood in his way, using whatever weapon he could grab, having lost his sword in the fray.
Moving across the courtyard in the deepening gloom, he killed indiscriminately, slaughtering civilians and soldiers alike. Men, women, children and babies fell before him maKing the sandy courtyard slick and slippery with blood. They ran then, tearing into the castle and locKing the doors screaming about demons and devils and god coming to take them home. He killed the ones who had gotten locked out, pressed against the door, pleading for their lives and then he vaulted through a high window into the castle.
He found himself in a room full of women, cowering and crying against each other as their husbands raced to the main hall to help barricade the door or kill the demon. They alone did not stand a chance against him and after a minute filled with the screams of terror of dying women, he moved on leaving nothing to stir in his wake.
The screams brought the husbands rushing back up to the aid of their dead women. Cursing him, mad with rage and grief and stink of fear, they came and fell.
He passed a mirror in the hall that reflected back at him a bloody mass of flesh and cartilage and even a tooth in his hair; he saw no sign of himself.
Screams rang so loud through-out the castle that night as if the devil had decided to open up the bowels of hell and show the mortal world the torture that awaited their souls in his Kingdom. He lost track of the time and the amount of lives he took as he moved steadily across the castle, people fled before him like animals before a thundering storm. Then all was quiet as he stood before the door that the King cowered behind, no doubt losing control of his bowels as the screams of his dying court echoed like ghosts in the silence. He shoved the guard off the shaft of a broken lance he had impaled him with. Turning back, he made his way his way to the room directly above the siege room.
Retrieving barrels of explosives that he had hidden two weeks ago behind the broken remains of a wardrobe; he broke some of them in the middle of the room then places the remaining ones on top of the mess. TaKing a torch from the wall outside the room, he threw it on the explosives and ducked behind the wall as the explosion roared out across the castle maKing the walls shake.
A roll of rope sat on the table in the sitting room next door and he retrieved it along with the mallet and pegs that lay beside it. He went back to the room that he had just blasted apart and drove the pegs into the floor then tied the rope to them and threw it down the gaping hole. Acting fast, he swung down on the rope before the guards could react; he was on the ground before the first man moved. Sidestepping the clumsy man running at him with a war hammer, he loosed a chop to the base of the man’s skull with his hand and heard the man’s neck break with a satisfactory snap. As the guard fell, he grabbed the hammer from the now limp hands and spun, smashing the man’s head into the ground.
Twenty pairs of eyes stared at him through the settling dust, stunned. Then it was all chaos as the King and his remaining guards made a rush for the door. Darting sideways, he cut them off, smashing the breastplate of the nearest guard, before sweeping low and breaKing the legs of the two guards skidding to a halt behind him. There was a mad dash as the remaining men scattered, survival instinct taKing over as fear seeped into every molecule of their being.
Smashing the skulls of the two broken men at his feet, he dropped the bloody hammer and took two knives from off of the dead men. He lost himself in the mass of bodies, slashing and stabbing everything he could find, they dropped before him like puppets that had their strings cut suddenly.
The last guard tried to hide himself beneath the bodies of his fallen comrades but it was a vain attempt. He flipped the guard around and drove each knife into the man’s eye sockets, between the slits in his helmet.
At last they were all dead, each and every subject in this accursed Kingdom. He stood and threw back his head and closed his eyes, relishing in the silence. It didn’t last long though, behind him the King shifted, crying into his robes.
“Please…” his voice, hoarse with screaming, pleaded, “please don’t… I- I have gold. S- so much gold,” he stuttered.
He rounded on the King, eyes ablaze with a hellish light. “Gold?” his voice was soft but cold, “you think I did all of this for gold?”
The King whimpered and seemed to shrink before his eyes as he advanced on him.
“You unfathomable, insufferable, blubbering imbecile. You think I did all of this for gold?” his voice was steady even as his hands shook. “My Lord,” he whispered, “I did all of this for vengeance. For the bitter-sweet, double-edged sword of revenge.”
The King dared to look up at him and he struck him and struck the man across the face once, twice, thrice, again and again until the man’s face was bloody mess.
“My Lord,” he said quietly, “I’m sure you remember the band of assassins you had slaughtered twenty years ago. The same band of assassins you yourself had commissioned to be your personal killing squad decades before.”
He struck again, holding the King upright as he slumped to the floor, barely conscious.
“I was five years old when your guards came. My father had already begun to teach me his art and I was so excited, I loved him for it. They bore us gifts, your guards, said they were there on your orders, that you had a task for them. ‘Why send so many men to deliver a message?’ my father asked. They brushed him off and camped with us that night. They slaughtered everyone in their sleep. I watched as they slit my father’s throat.”
He could remember it clearly even though he had been so young. His father; dead, his mother; dead. The soldiers had killed everything that moved… everything except him. His nana had come for him the following day, horrified to find him grasping the hands of his dead parents.
“They made a mistake, your men,” he said to the senseless, bloody mess of the King’s face. “They should have killed me too… but they didn’t and now, I am your end.”
Swinging the man across his shoulders, he tied him to the end of the rope before climbing up. Then he pulled the King out of his precious siege room and brought him to the castle gates, slipping and sloshing through the blood soaked sand. He hung the King there at the gates, leaving his body to welcome death into his castle
Staring out over the courtyard, he felt strangely calm and peaceful, regardless of the fact that the sun was directly overhead and pelting him with its fierce rays. He sat above the archway that led directly into the main hall where the King held court every second Sunday of the month. It was a precarious place to sit and mostly only birds ever sat there but, he had found as a boy, that he was not afraid of heights. This had prompted him to explore every aspect of the castle he could climb to. This was by far his favorite perch.
The view from atop the archway allowed him to see for half a mile across the horizon from left to right through the open gateway while offering him a great view of the castles main gate and courtyard. He would sit here for hours a day, just watching the various traders, slaves and workers come and go. Sometimes there were days when hardly any traffic came through the gates but he would sit there nonetheless, keeping a sharp eye cast around the land beyond the castle for a merchant caravan.
A crow alighted beside him, cawing loudly and waKing him from his memories. As he stirred, it took flight again in fright. Frowning slightly as the sound of the murder of crows came crashing down on him, he wiped the sweat from his brows with a blood stained fist. Through-out the castle the sound of feasting and fighting rang out as the crows squabbled with each other even though there was plenty of food to go around; typical of them.
Beneath him, spread all over the ground like a grotesque all you can eat, self-serve buffet, were dozens of corpses with at least two or more crows pecking and pulling at strips of their flesh. Every body that had been face up was without its eyes; the crows always went for the eyes first as they were so soft and easy to remove.
Sighing contently, he tried not to gag on the stench of decomposition, aided greatly by the heat of the sun. The buzz of hundreds of flies was almost as loud and annoying as the din of the bickering crows. He swatted at them as they buzzed lazily around him, drunk with food and heat. He must have smelt just as enticing as all the dead with all the dried blood and bits of torn flesh stuck to him, the sweat pouring from his pores must have made him smell like quite the delicious feast. He really ought to have cleaned himself hours ago but after last night he’d been exhausted and had found himself, quite suddenly, atop his favorite perch and had not bothered to move since.
Disjointed images of the slaughter flashed before his eyes as if they were parts of a haphazard story he was being told by an inept storyteller. However, he clearly remembered the plans he had put in place to ensure his revenge.
Days ago he had set his plans into motion, maKing half-hearted attempts upon the Kings life that he knew all too well would fail. He had slipped poison into the Kings face basin that he used to wash each morning but he had ensured that the Kings had taken his mistress to bed the night before. She had awoken first, as she always did, intending to slip away unnoticed but she had first stopped to wash as he knew she would. The King awoke to find his mistress dead hours later. The first attempt had put the castle on alert. Men who had quarrels with the King wound up dead in their beds.
Next he had a special armor made for the King, a gift from a small, distant, nonexistent monarch. Knowing the great greed of the King’s head of guards, he had ensured that the guard saw the armor first. The guard tried it on as was expected but as soon as he fastened the clasps, small knives built into the armor had sprung forth and severed the man’s arteries and vein. He bled to death in minutes. At this point the, the castle was thrust in a state of panic; two attempts on the King’s life in as much as a week? It was unheard of. The King was now accompanied by no less than fifty guards from the moment he awoke to the point of sleep, during which five men patrolled his bedchambers at regular intervals. This new security arrangement was still not rigid enough.
Two nights before the slaughter, he had breached the King’s bedchamber and killed two of the patrolmen before allowing himself to be seen by a third, then fleeing as the alarm was raised. The King, severely shaken by this close encounter, shut himself in the very heart of the castle. There was a room beneath the castle that had been designed to keep the King and his family safe from a siege on the castle. At last, that was where he wanted the King to be, scared and trapped in a cell of his own design with only one entrance.
While the royal guard, twenty strong, watched over the King, night and day in his siege room, the rest of the castles small but skilled army exhausted every resource they had to find the man who was trying to kill their King.
Two days passed while he made the King cower, scared to walk freely in his own castle then, on the dusk of the third day, he presented himself at the castle gates. By then a poster with his face had been placed on every wall, on every building in the castle. He called out to the guards who instantly shut the gates behind him, thinKing they were cutting off his escape. They came at him then, their tempers high and
hatred palpable; he watched them come to him, and then one by one he made them embrace death. After he had killed fifty of the guards, they became wary of him, some even scared. Then he advanced on them, striking without mercy, dispatching of them with cold, calculated efficiency. He killed any who stood in his way, using whatever weapon he could grab, having lost his sword in the fray.
Moving across the courtyard in the deepening gloom, he killed indiscriminately, slaughtering civilians and soldiers alike. Men, women, children and babies fell before him maKing the sandy courtyard slick and slippery with blood. They ran then, tearing into the castle and locKing the doors screaming about demons and devils and god coming to take them home. He killed the ones who had gotten locked out, pressed against the door, pleading for their lives and then he vaulted through a high window into the castle.
He found himself in a room full of women, cowering and crying against each other as their husbands raced to the main hall to help barricade the door or kill the demon. They alone did not stand a chance against him and after a minute filled with the screams of terror of dying women, he moved on leaving nothing to stir in his wake.
The screams brought the husbands rushing back up to the aid of their dead women. Cursing him, mad with rage and grief and stink of fear, they came and fell.
He passed a mirror in the hall that reflected back at him a bloody mass of flesh and cartilage and even a tooth in his hair; he saw no sign of himself.
Screams rang so loud through-out the castle that night as if the devil had decided to open up the bowels of hell and show the mortal world the torture that awaited their souls in his Kingdom. He lost track of the time and the amount of lives he took as he moved steadily across the castle, people fled before him like animals before a thundering storm. Then all was quiet as he stood before the door that the King cowered behind, no doubt losing control of his bowels as the screams of his dying court echoed like ghosts in the silence. He shoved the guard off the shaft of a broken lance he had impaled him with. Turning back, he made his way his way to the room directly above the siege room.
Retrieving barrels of explosives that he had hidden two weeks ago behind the broken remains of a wardrobe; he broke some of them in the middle of the room then places the remaining ones on top of the mess. TaKing a torch from the wall outside the room, he threw it on the explosives and ducked behind the wall as the explosion roared out across the castle maKing the walls shake.
A roll of rope sat on the table in the sitting room next door and he retrieved it along with the mallet and pegs that lay beside it. He went back to the room that he had just blasted apart and drove the pegs into the floor then tied the rope to them and threw it down the gaping hole. Acting fast, he swung down on the rope before the guards could react; he was on the ground before the first man moved. Sidestepping the clumsy man running at him with a war hammer, he loosed a chop to the base of the man’s skull with his hand and heard the man’s neck break with a satisfactory snap. As the guard fell, he grabbed the hammer from the now limp hands and spun, smashing the man’s head into the ground.
Twenty pairs of eyes stared at him through the settling dust, stunned. Then it was all chaos as the King and his remaining guards made a rush for the door. Darting sideways, he cut them off, smashing the breastplate of the nearest guard, before sweeping low and breaKing the legs of the two guards skidding to a halt behind him. There was a mad dash as the remaining men scattered, survival instinct taKing over as fear seeped into every molecule of their being.
Smashing the skulls of the two broken men at his feet, he dropped the bloody hammer and took two knives from off of the dead men. He lost himself in the mass of bodies, slashing and stabbing everything he could find, they dropped before him like puppets that had their strings cut suddenly.
The last guard tried to hide himself beneath the bodies of his fallen comrades but it was a vain attempt. He flipped the guard around and drove each knife into the man’s eye sockets, between the slits in his helmet.
At last they were all dead, each and every subject in this accursed Kingdom. He stood and threw back his head and closed his eyes, relishing in the silence. It didn’t last long though, behind him the King shifted, crying into his robes.
“Please…” his voice, hoarse with screaming, pleaded, “please don’t… I- I have gold. S- so much gold,” he stuttered.
He rounded on the King, eyes ablaze with a hellish light. “Gold?” his voice was soft but cold, “you think I did all of this for gold?”
The King whimpered and seemed to shrink before his eyes as he advanced on him.
“You unfathomable, insufferable, blubbering imbecile. You think I did all of this for gold?” his voice was steady even as his hands shook. “My Lord,” he whispered, “I did all of this for vengeance. For the bitter-sweet, double-edged sword of revenge.”
The King dared to look up at him and he struck him and struck the man across the face once, twice, thrice, again and again until the man’s face was bloody mess.
“My Lord,” he said quietly, “I’m sure you remember the band of assassins you had slaughtered twenty years ago. The same band of assassins you yourself had commissioned to be your personal killing squad decades before.”
He struck again, holding the King upright as he slumped to the floor, barely conscious.
“I was five years old when your guards came. My father had already begun to teach me his art and I was so excited, I loved him for it. They bore us gifts, your guards, said they were there on your orders, that you had a task for them. ‘Why send so many men to deliver a message?’ my father asked. They brushed him off and camped with us that night. They slaughtered everyone in their sleep. I watched as they slit my father’s throat.”
He could remember it clearly even though he had been so young. His father; dead, his mother; dead. The soldiers had killed everything that moved… everything except him. His nana had come for him the following day, horrified to find him grasping the hands of his dead parents.
“They made a mistake, your men,” he said to the senseless, bloody mess of the King’s face. “They should have killed me too… but they didn’t and now, I am your end.”
Swinging the man across his shoulders, he tied him to the end of the rope before climbing up. Then he pulled the King out of his precious siege room and brought him to the castle gates, slipping and sloshing through the blood soaked sand. He hung the King there at the gates, leaving his body to welcome death into his castle
