They emerged like a curse given form—one hundred and twenty silent wraiths in steel, blooming from the alleys and the gutters, from the places where honest men did not look. No war cries, no drumbeat of challenge. Only the whisper of boots on stone, the muted rasp of blades slipping free from leather, the creak of gambeson tightening over racing hearts.
They moved as a single shadow, pouring through the unguarded gate like black water rushing a breach. The narrow approach to the keep swallowed them whole, their forms ducking beneath the torchlight's feeble grasp.
What they lacked in the polished precision of royal troops, they made up for in the kind of ferocity only found in men who had learned war not on a drill field, but in the alleyways, the border skirmishes, the backroom murders. These were not soldiers.
They were butchers.
