The flat-topped greathelm still stood there, intact—the stone fist on its crest pointing at the sky.
But its owner lay on the ground, a headless corpse.
Because of his immense size, the blood gushing from Gregor Clegane's neck poured out far more than any other man's, spreading in a red haze that soaked the hard earth around him.
The hilt of the gilded sword that had once belonged to the Kingslayer was in Kal's hand.
On its tip, he had skewered a giant's head.
Gregor Clegane's neck, once joined to his body, had sunk onto the sword-tip; body and head were parted.
Holding the sword aloft, Kal tilted his head back a little to look at the trophy on his point.
A warm runnel of crimson leaked from Gregor's severed neck and slid down the long blade, reddening the bright edge and filling the fullers, until the longsword's golden crossguard had drunk its fill of this sadist's—this murderer's and rapist's—blood, and gleamed a deep, wet red.
Through the narrow slit of the flat-topped greathelm, Kal could see the eyes inside had not closed.
In those hollowed pupils, thick unwillingness lingered.
"I thought it would take a little more work."
Gazing through the seams of the greathelm at those eyes that would not shut, Kal felt a flicker of surprise.
As he spoke, he drew back the longsword he had thrust out to catch the lopped-off head; with a lift of his hand he plucked the Mountain's head from the tip.
Then, carrying the still-dripping head, Kal glanced at that half of a corpse—the man who, at the last instant, had flung himself around one of the Mountain's legs and tripped him, throwing him off balance.
It was that sudden accident that made the Mountain die so simply—almost comically.
Though the Mountain's heavy carcass fell and crushed him in the end, even squeezing what little viscera remained in his chest out through his body, the dead man's fierce face showed only the pleasure of a vengeance repaid, not a trace of pain.
Kal looked at this warrior of the mountain clans who had walked out of the Mountains of the Moon with him—nameless to him—who, in King's Landing, a city that should never have crossed his life, had died here without a sound.
Holding the Mountain's head, he stood silent for a moment.
A faint sigh came from within the antlered greathelm.
Then Kal suddenly raised his hand; with a flick of his longsword he hooked up the yellow surcoat bearing House Clegane's sigil that still clung to the Mountain's corpse.
With a simple wrap of that surcoat, Kal tied Gregor's head to his belt.
After stowing away the gift that had delivered itself to his door, Kal finally had the leisure to turn and face the Lannister soldiers before him—men whose will to fight had drained away with Gregor Clegane's death.
All around, because of that duel with the Mountain, the struggling and killing had unconsciously fallen still.
They stared at Kal Stone with baffled, awed eyes, as if seeing a god-demon alive in the world.
Then, as Kal's gaze fell upon them, every Lannister soldier who had witnessed the fight with his own eyes trembled, and the shock and doubt on their faces turned at once into panicked unease.
They looked at Kal, yet their eyes could not help but fix on his belt.
There, wrapped in a surcoat emblazoned with House Clegane's sigil, hung a head larger than a watermelon.
Its owner had been the owner of that surcoat and that sigil.
Before the naked eye, the blood still seeping from it grew tacky beneath the cloth. The scarlet soaked the yellow surcoat until it darkened almost to black. That bulging, heavy head jangled their nerves.
"Surrender, and you will not be killed!"
The dull voice carried through the antlered greathelm and into everyone's ears.
Looking at the men before him—and at the bodies lying on the ground, never to rise again, blood and broken limbs strewn everywhere—Kal decided to give them a choice.
On the silent field, only Kal Stone's voice drifted through the air, thick with the stench of blood. Outside the walls, the cries of battle still rolled on without end, shot through with shrill screams. Only this little pocket just inside the gate felt like some secluded haven, jarringly out of place.
Silence held for two seconds. Then the clatter of a longsword hitting the ground jolted everyone.
"I surrender, I—ah!"
Spurred by Kal's offer, the quickest to react—a Lannister soldier frightened out of his wits by the promise of mercy—instantly dropped his weapon and threw both hands high, shouting at the top of his lungs, as if afraid to be a heartbeat too late. But before he could finish the word surrender, a second spear from behind punched hard through the side of his exposed neck at the very instant he let his weapon fall and raised his hands.
Everything he had meant to say, every hope in his heart, was choked back by the cold in his throat and the blood welling out.
"Kill any man who tries to surrender—no mercy!"
Whether from fear or fury, a Lannister who, by his kit, was clearly some sort of captain, kicked the fallen man over after skewering his neck, then thrust his bloodied spear high and bellowed, voice ragged and hoarse.
He did not stop at shouting. In the same breath, he leveled his spear again and charged the clan warriors before him—men who had already halted their hands.
His sudden burst of killing woke the warriors of the mountain clans at once. They raised weapons in haste and knocked aside the blow.
They had meant to obey Kal's command and take these men's surrender—but there was only so much they could swallow. Rage broke over them. Weapons came up, and they crashed together with the men before them.
Watching the peace that had just begun to settle break apart under this sudden turn, Kal's brows creased within the helm. Helpless, he gave up on accepting surrenders.
He watched the very Lannister who had just enforced the no-surrender order go down at last—hemmed in by several clan warriors, his throat opened from behind in a single stroke by Bronn.
Kal understood then: these men whom Tywin Lannister had deliberately sent—using the whole of King's Landing as hostages to threaten King Robert—were, in all likelihood, more than half of them diehards of House Lannister.
Or, to put it plainly—
Their interests, their honor, their families—their very survival—were all bound up with House Lannister and with Tywin.
So getting these men to surrender was impossible.
They understood perfectly what it would mean if the Lannisters lost this war.
They had no choice. They could only follow the road they were on all the way into the dark.
Either success.
Or failure.
There was no third path.
With that clear in his mind, Kal lifted a hand and took off his antlered greathelm, raising his head to look up at the city wall above.
Just now, squad after squad of Lannisters had poked their heads from the gaps in the crenels.
Their commander, Kevan Lannister, seemed to have realized the Dragon Gate had fallen; at some point he had already come around to the inner side of the wall.
Kal stared up at Kevan Lannister on the ramparts, his face set and cold, though his hands made no extra move. Only his eyes narrowed to slits, and a killing intent began to spread.
He raised his hand and drew his thumb across his throat at Kevan Lannister, who was peering down at him from the wall.
In answer, Ser Kevan only gave a small wave.
Then the Lannister soldiers who had stuck their heads out from the crenel gaps showed the bows in their hands.
Keen arrowheads leveled from afar at everyone below the wall.
"My lord, our men are still down there!"
At that moment, seeing that Ser Kevan meant to attack even at the cost of his own, a guardsman at his side hurried to warn him.
At the voice that tried to stay him, Kevan Lannister merely turned, expressionless. His gaze was as stark as the Long Winter.
"Do you mean those men below who were so craven in battle they wanted to surrender to the enemy?"
Ser Kevan pointed toward the soldiers beneath the wall.
"They threw away their honor. All I am doing is picking it back up."
"Or would you rather see those enemies push into the city under Kal Stone's lead?"
"Vini, do you know what you're saying?"
Faced with his commander's question, the knight—himself from a cadet branch of House Lannister—gulped without thinking.
But after Kevan's reminder, he instantly realized how foolish his earlier thought had been.
He had watched with his own eyes how the man below had brought down that monster, Gregor Clegane.
If they did not block him here and crush him back, then once he truly gathered a band of fighters and forced his way into the city, Lord Tywin's plan would be ruined.
And that would mean House Lannister as a whole—the whole of the Westerlands—would lose everything in this failure and never rise again.
Realizing the gravity of it, the knight at Kevan Lannister's side steeled his heart in an instant. Meeting Ser Kevan's stare, the last threads of pity still flickering in him were cast away like mist.
He turned, raised the command banner, and slashed it down.
"Loose!" Vini's eyes went wide as he rasped out a roar. "Shoot every last one of those damned filthy mongrels!"
Kal looked up at the wall. First he'd been blocked when Gregor Clegane led men to hold him up; then he'd gotten tangled with these fighters and lost the advantage of forcing his way into the city.
He had not foreseen this—least of all that Kevan Lannister would be so ruthless, and so decisive.
And now, of all the men present, the Lannister soldiers were the most numerous.
On Kal's side, the only reinforcements were the clan warriors squeezing one by one through the opening he had smashed in the gate.
With men trickling in while the Lannisters waited at their ease, his numbers would never match theirs.
At such close range, with fire coming down from above, everything below looked the same—there was no telling friend from foe.
As the order went out, the iron rain returned, falling like a downpour.
From only tens of meters overhead, arrows loosed from the bowstrings reached their marks in an instant under gravitational acceleration.
With a few quick cuts, Kal knocked aside the shafts flying at him. On the strength of his extraordinary reflexes and dynamic vision, he took no hurt.
But the men still locked together in their paired struggles had no time to react before the disaster from above struck, and they scattered, clutching their heads.
In the chaos, few even realized what was happening overhead.
Kal had time only to bellow, "Take cover—keep pushing into the city! Don't clog the gate!"
In that turmoil he could give no detailed commands.
All he could do was issue one order and let his people trust to luck to slip past the gates of death.
Even so, Kal would not sit and await his fate. After shouting, he no longer cared whether anyone heard him.
He tore off his antlered greathelm and hurled it to Jon Snow, who had just cut down the foe he'd been dueling—no time for another word.
Freed of the helm, Kal's view cleared.
He lifted his head and swept the surroundings, spotting only one stairway in the distance that led up to the ramparts.
The ground between was crammed with enemies.
With two swift strokes, he lopped off the heads of two Lannister soldiers who, caught between attacks from within and without—unable to surrender, unable to live—had gone mad.
Kal rolled forward and, in the same motion, snatched up the two-handed greatsword that had belonged to the Mountain, Gregor Clegane.
In midair he shifted his gilded longsword to his left hand, then scooped the greatsword from the ground with his right.
Even without the strength draught he had drunk, Kal could handle such a weapon more easily than the Mountain; as it was, all the more so. So the instant he rose from the roll with the greatsword in hand, his right arm swept a level cut through the air.
Three Lannister soldiers happened to be before him, fighting back-to-back. They saw a blur—and their heads came off.
Before the pressure could pump blood from the severed necks, Kal dipped a shoulder and slammed them aside, the headless bodies that still blocked his way tumbling away.
Then he ran.
The stray arrows from above were little threat to him, but they were plainly a stumbling block to leading his men in to storm King's Landing. Yet the next moment made him halt after only a few strides.
He stood taller than most men, and with that height came a wider view. Overhead on the wall, it was no longer only the hiss of arrows dropping shaft by shaft—horns were sounding from who knew where.
As the horncalls spread, every alley and road leading inward from the gate answered with the heavy, even tramp of boots.
The Dragon Gate sat at the wall's northernmost corner, very near Rhaenys's Hill. There, the hill split the road that led into the city to left and right.
From the footfalls alone it was clear a great mass was pressing in—sweeping from both sides to close around the very spot where he had just forced his way through.
Kal stopped, frowning, and glanced left and right.
At once he understood: this was no mere gate he had broken; he had fallen into another of Kevan Lannister's pockets.
Or rather, this was one more contingency Kevan had prepared for the war—
—and Kal had run headlong into it.
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