GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 386 - Epilogue — Steel and Blood
"Kill him! Kill him now!"
Kraznys let out a hysterical shriek.
He jabbed his curved blade at the lone Unsullied walking out to meet them and screamed at the mercenaries and overseers he'd paid a fortune to stand around him.
"Whoever kills him — I'll give them a hundred Golden Dragons! No — a thousand! A hundred slaves on top of that!"
Nobody moved.
These were men who ate violence for breakfast. Right now, every one of them had gone pale, their weapon hands trembling.
They stared at the square formation of flame and steel advancing toward them, and felt their legs turn to water.
Charge into that? And die for what?
WHOOSH!
While Kraznys was still screaming into the wind, the flame spear was already in the air.
It tore a scorching line across the sky with a shriek of displaced air, and flew straight past the platform. Past every slaver standing on it.
THUD!
It punched through one of the slaves holding the platform up.
The man didn't make a sound. The force launched him off his feet and drove him into the mud twenty feet back, the spear pinning him there. Flames swallowed him whole.
The platform lurched.
One support gone, it tilted hard to one side.
"Ah!"
The slavers stumbled and grabbed at each other. Several slid straight off the edge and crashed into the snow below, gasping and groaning.
On the dragon's back.
Lynn looked down at the scrambling figures, his hand rising slowly.
He snapped his fingers.
SNAP!
One quiet sound, swallowed by the wind and snow.
And then the battlefield changed.
The snow came down harder. The cold sharpened into something that bit through fur and flesh alike.
Across the ground, the slaves the Unsullied had killed with their flame spears lay in the snow, their fires long since burned out. White flakes drifted down onto blackened bodies and settled into thin, pale sheets.
Then.
The charred fingers of the corpse nearest the Unsullied formation twitched.
Once.
Twice. Three times.
Crack.
It sat up. The movement was stiff, wrong, mechanical.
Where its face had been, there was nothing but ruin. But in the hollow pits of its eye sockets, two points of icy blue light blazed to life.
Cold light. Colder than the blizzard. Not a trace of warmth in it. Nothing living behind it at all.
The slave who had just died was moving again.
It turned its ruined neck with a grinding series of crack crack cracks and looked at the man nearby , a living slave, paralyzed in the snow, trembling too hard to run.
"No... don't... don't come near me..."
The living man scrambled backward on his hands and knees, desperate to put distance between himself and the thing that had been his comrade.
The blue-eyed corpse moved.
Stiff. Wrong. And blindingly fast.
It lunged. Its charred mouth opened wide and snapped shut on the man's throat.
"AAAH—!"
The scream didn't sound human. It tore through the blizzard and was gone.
Blood erupted, painting the white snow a vivid, obscene red. The living slave convulsed, shuddered, and went still.
Then his eyes opened.
Blue light ignited in the sockets.
One.
Two.
Ten.
A hundred.
Every slave killed by the Unsullied. Every man trampled under the war elephants. Every soldier cut down by his own side in the panic.
Every corpse in the snow moved at once.
They clawed their way upright, blue light burning in their eyes, and threw themselves at the nearest person still breathing.
The slaughter ignited from inside the slave army.
"Help! Ghosts! They're all coming back!"
"Don't bite me! Aman! I'm your brother!"
Fear ate through what was left of their discipline like fire through paper. The wall of flame ahead didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered but getting away from this cursed ground, away from the things wearing their dead friends' faces.
Two hundred thousand men broke and ran.
The rout became a stampede.
Countless men who had survived the Unsullied, who had survived the wights, were crushed to pulp under the boots of their own panicking comrades. And those new corpses rose seconds later and joined the hunt.
The wights multiplied like a rolling avalanche, each death feeding the next.
The battlefield had become hell.
On the dragon's back.
Tyrion's mouth hung open. He pointed at the blue tide churning below, his whole body shaking.
"Gods... all the gods... what... what is this..."
Words had stopped working. His mind had simply quit.
He had heard horror stories all his life. None of them came close to this.
Jorah Mormont gripped the dragon's scales with white knuckles, the only thing keeping him from falling. His face had no color left in it.
He had fought in wars. He had told himself he'd seen the worst men could do to each other.
What was happening below was not war.
It was punishment.
On the tilted platform.
Kraznys and his slavers stood and stared.
The flood of routed soldiers and wights poured past both sides of the platform like water around a stone, streaming back the way the army had come. Racing away from this place as fast as broken legs and terror could carry them.
They had been abandoned.
Left behind by their own army, stranded in the dead center of a killing field.
"Run , everyone run, "
One slaver finally moved, sliding and tumbling off the tilted platform, scrambling for the snow.
He made it five steps.
A blue-eyed wight erupted from the wind and snow and drove him face-first into the ground.
"Help me! Please, someone, "
His screaming cut off wet and sudden.
All around the platform: nothing. No soldiers. No help. Just the advancing wall of flame, and the wights beyond counting.
Kraznys watched the man die.
His legs buckled. He sat down in the snow.
It was over.
He knew it was over.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
The Unsullied footsteps drew closer. The fire formation closed in from every side, sealing off the platform completely.
Kraznys looked up.
The Unsullied commander at the front stepped forward. He looked down at the slavers from those flat, expressionless eyes, eyes that held nothing, gave nothing, promised nothing.
Then Grey Worm opened his mouth.
His Common Tongue was hard and clipped, each word placed like a stone.
"Lord Lynn commands."
The words reached every slaver still breathing on that platform.
"Hang yourselves from the Harpy statues. With your own guts."
➤ Next: The Liberator