“Oh, Lani!” Elsa wrapped her arms around the dead woman’s shoulders. “Oh, Lani.”
Quentin stood behind them, appalled.
Nathan felt stricken and helpless. “I didn’t know how to stop it. I could not save her. Dear spirits…”
“Dear spirits, indeed,” Quentin said. He turned to Elsa and Nathan. “And now we should be even more afraid. We know that General Utros is calling a dragon.”
CHAPTER 57
Lila never let herself relax, and Bannon suspected that she didn’t know how. The young morazeth remained vigilant, muscles taut, reflexes alert. Even when she shared his bed and showed some small amount of tenderness, she remained a coiled spring ready to react.
Now, when she led him down steep streets to an arched gateway into the rough sandstone bluff, he knew she didn’t just want to go for a walk with him.
“We should always be on our guard,” she said. Since his escape from the enemy camp, she had occasionally stopped calling him “boy.” Perhaps it was an indication of respect, or maybe Lila just forgot herself. “Ildakar’s walls have protected our city for thousands of years, but our river defenses keep us safe as well.”
In the merchants’ district she stopped at an entrance to the supply tunnels within the sandstone bluff, and he followed her into the cool, torch-lit passages. Muscular workers rolled barrels or loaded carts with piled sacks of grain. Some carts were drawn by plodding yaxen, others pulled by broad-shouldered men. Lila walked along at a brisk pace, following the wide tunnel.
“Where did all these supplies come from?” Bannon asked. He had known of previous trade with villages in the hills, but the giant siege army had cut off those routes.
“When we were under the shroud, Ildakar had to be self-sufficient,” Lila said. “Our stockpiles can supply us for many years, and that is why the general’s siege will never succeed, no matter how long he waits.”
Bannon paused at wooden tubs full of fish with drooping whiskers. Their sucker mouths gaped, and their eyes were glassy. “Those are fresh fish, not preserved,” he said. “From the river?”
“Once the shroud came down, many villages upriver came to trade with us,” Lila said. “We still receive plenty of supplies even with the army encamped on the plain.”
As she led him along the tunnel, he spotted daylight ahead, which outshone the torches. Lila brought him to a wide opening that looked out upon the sheer cliff and the river below. She paused at the edge of the opening and peered down the bluffside.
Bannon joined her and saw that while the sheer cliff seemed as unassailable as the high city walls, a network of steps, ladders, platforms, and ramps let people enter and exit through numerous openings on the cliffside to receive deliveries from dock platforms on the riverbank. In the air in front of them, several crows chased each other high above the water.
Lila explained, “We take goods from the trading boats and bring them up here for delivery throughout the markets in the city.”
Bannon remembered the three Norukai slaving ships that had come to the city. Kor and his companions must have led their numerous beaten captives up to the slave market by this route.
“We are secure,” Lila said. “If anyone tried to attack us from the river, we could drop the platforms, disengage the docks, and isolate ourselves.” She stepped right up to the edge and looked down, her feet less than an inch from the drop-off. Bannon felt dizzy just looking at her. “We have never needed to take such extreme measures.”
She stepped out onto the cliff face, finding cleverly hidden stairs in the sandstone. Without a rail or a rope, she began to descend toward a wooden platform twenty feet below them. When he hesitated, she called, “Come with me.” She darted down the path carved into the rugged bluff.
Bannon refused to show fear and stepped after her, seeing wider walkways, wooden steps anchored into the rock so that haulers could carry crates, sacks, and barrels into other openings and holding areas. Lila waited for him on the platform below, and he realized she had been testing him. He joined her without comment or complaint. She hurried along steps to another platform, and they worked their way down the cliff.
When he reached a wide spot to spread his feet, he turned to look up. The bluff face was smooth and sheer, showing little natural weathering of the soft rock. Other pockmarks and cave openings led into a warren of tunnels within the uplift. More than a hundred feet below, the river looked blue-green and placid, and the top of the cliff was just as far overhead.
Two small flatboats had tied up against the receiving docks, where Ildakaran workers helped unload sealed barrels from one boat and quarried stone blocks and slabs of rock from the other. Workers used ropes and pulleys to lift the heavy crates along tracks in the cliff to a receiving cave. Other platforms levitated on their own, and Bannon realized that some gifted merchants were using magic to assist in the efforts.
Two levels below, as they climbed down a ladder, Bannon saw a smaller platform no more than four feet wide, which held two basins of fresh-caught river fish, still flopping. Workers high above pulled ropes to raise the tubs of fish to a different receiving cave. Even though their city was under siege, with thousands of enemy soldiers just outside the thick walls, the workers at the river called out in casual conversation, joking and laughing as if this were any normal workday.
Zigzagging along the sheer rock, he and Lila made their way down the sheer bluff. He held on to the sandstone, keeping his balance, and fixed his gaze on her bare back, not looking down. She went to the southern edge of the main bluff, where the stairs switched direction again, and showed him a stream of river water tumbling and gurgling along a wooden chute. Bannon was startled to realize the water was flowing backward, running uphill from the river into the aqueduct passages. It splashed and sprayed with the speed of its passage, until it plunged like a reverse waterfall inside the cliff. He saw spell runes carved into the rock.
Lila said, “General Utros blocked off the streams that normally provide water from the valley, but we have all we need from the river. We just bring it up into Ildakar. If necessary, we can also release the water. If invaders try to scale the cliffs, we can open the locks and let our cisterns and storage tanks flood the cliffside.”
Bannon followed her to the river’s edge, and they had to step aside as workers trudged up the stairs carrying sacks of grain on their shoulders. Finally, at the waterline, they walked out onto the wooden docks, where the two flatboats were being unloaded. Each had a captain and a handful of crew members.
Ildakaran merchants stood beside the flatboats, tallying up supplies and receipts, paying the captains with bags of gold coins and jewels. One city merchant puffed out his cheeks. “The grain doesn’t cost any more to produce, and the fish are still fish. Why so expensive?”
The riverboat captain frowned. “Sorry for the increased prices, sir, but with your city under siege, our danger has increased. I have to pay my crew more to convince them to come here.”
“War demands higher prices,” said the second captain. “Your need is more desperate now, and if you’re desperate, then prices go up. Simple commerce.”
“We will pay the asking price,” the merchant grumbled. “Ildakar has no use for all this gold anyway. I’d rather have food to eat.” He looked down at the last barrels, where the slippery forms still twitched. “And those are eels, my favorite! I’ll eat half the cargo myself.”
Bannon remained puzzled as he and Lila came forward. “But the siege is on the plains, and the soldiers can’t make their way down to the river. Your work is no more dangerous now.”
“Oh, there are dangers, young man,” said the captain, and the man on the adjacent flatboat nodded as well. “Hanson there comes from downriver, which means he has to skirt the swamps, and if you want the stone he brings from the quarries, he has to take his boat past all those swamp dragons and killer snakes.”
Hanson gritted his teeth and nodded again.
The captain continued, “One of the villages do
wn there was destroyed, thanks to some wizard from Ildakar and a morazeth. There’s almost nothing left of Tarada now.”
Lila frowned at the information. “A morazeth and a wizard?”
The captain nodded. “Tarada was a fine town in a peaceful oxbow. They caused no one any trouble, but then a wizard made himself their new leader, and a morazeth attacked him—a woman just like you. All the villagers suffered, many were murdered, and most of their huts were ruined.”
Hanson crossed his arms over his chest and grunted. “So if you want our goods and you ask us to face dangers like that, you can pay a little extra.”
“We will pay, as I said,” the merchant repeated, eager to be done with the transaction. He had his workers unload the containers of eels onto one of the lifting platforms.
Bannon was confused, looking at Lila. “How can there be a morazeth out in the swamps? Do you think the wizard was Maxim?”
“I have no doubt of that.” Lila stared down the wide river toward the swamps, which looked like a festering scar of vegetation. “And I would wager the morazeth was Adessa.”
CHAPTER 58
Far downriver from Ildakar, the swamps finally gave way to normal terrain. Adessa had to worry about normal, natural hazards. And Maxim himself.
She continued her hunt for days after leaving devastated Tarada. She was still scratched and bruised, but she healed quickly, and the extra life energy from her absorbed baby continued to give her unparalleled strength, though she hated to squander the rare blood magic. When she finally cornered the wizard commander, she would need that strength to defeat him.
First, though, she had to find him.
Adessa kept tracking Maxim through the swamps, fighting low-hanging branches, splashing across shallow channels, trying to sense which direction he would have gone. After the explosion of steam and the wash of water that had obliterated Tarada, he had stolen a boat and gone miles downstream before working his way into the wilderness again. He couldn’t hide forever, but he had a significant head start on her.
She narrowed her eyes in the waning light. The sun had already set, and orange light filtered through the forest. Frogs and night insects began their music even before darkness fell. Adessa pushed through the tall grass, but when she heard rustling in the underbrush and the splash of a large animal, she decided to find a protected place to wait out the darkness. She wasn’t tired. Her body had enough energy to go all day and night, but it would be a foolish risk to blunder ahead without being able to see. There were too many potential predators, and she could easily lose Maxim’s trail in the dark.
Resigned, she found an ancient tree, a swamp oak that might have been growing since the early days of Ildakar. Its trunk was covered with moss and shelf mushrooms. Overhead, among dangling vines and the patchy beards of swamp moss, she saw a wide horizontal branch and decided that would be a good place to spend the night, high enough above the ground. Finding handholds in the cracked bark, she scampered up the trunk. When she reached the wide branch, she swung her legs over either side of it, feeling the rough bark on her bare thighs.
Darkness fell like a blanket tossed over the trees. Adessa didn’t need a fire, since the air was warm and humid, and she had no food to cook anyway. Instead, she settled herself in a comfortable position, her back against the trunk, her legs drawn up on the thick branch. She tugged some of the nearby loose vines, snapped the twigs and air roots that held them in place, and lashed herself to the branch to keep her from falling while she slept.
For many nights she had lain awake, alert, resting her muscles but not her mind. Now, she felt secure enough that she could give her body what it needed. She channeled her breathing, felt her heartbeat, concentrated on her singular goal.
She repeated the words of Sovrena Thora in her mind. “Kill him. Leave the city, now, and hunt him down.” The command was burned into her memory, and Adessa had accepted it. “Bring his head back to Ildakar. The people of this city must see that the wizard commander has met justice.”
She imagined the moment when she would defeat the wizard commander and use her long combat knife to cut off his head.
Adessa’s thoughts stopped there. She didn’t let herself think of what she would do after she completed her mission. For now, there was no “after.” Killing Maxim was the only thing in her life.
As she pressed against the trunk, she felt only a slight easing of tension in her muscles. Not quite relaxation, but it was enough. A morazeth didn’t need much.
She thought about the women she had trained to fight at her side to serve the needs of Ildakar. No arena warriors were as great as the morazeth, and Adessa was the greatest of them all, but she had left her sisters, and she was here now, out in the swamps alone, tied to a tree above the ground in a dangerous night.
Adessa closed her eyes, touched her flat abdomen, and traced the fine rune brandings on the taut skin, but she thought of the unborn child that was no longer inside her womb. If she had let Ian’s baby come to term, it wouldn’t have been her first child. She’d let herself be impregnated by four other champions. Three daughters were now being raised by gifted nobles, and if they proved worthy, Adessa would take them as morazeth trainees. None of them knew their mother’s identity, and she would not treat them differently. Her last child, a boy, was of no use to her. Apparently, he was a rambunctious young man who had difficulty learning his sums, and therefore posed problems for the merchant family that had adopted him.
Adessa inhaled the air redolent of rot and swamp flowers, closed her eyes.
Ian’s unborn child was different. Ian had been a brave and strong young man, devoted to Adessa, until Bannon and the sorceress Nicci helped turn the entire city against the long-established order.
Ian …
She remembered how she had taught him to please her. When she took his body into hers, it was like a form of physical combat, and Ian had excelled at it. He was, after all, the champion.
She shut off those thoughts. Ian was dead because she had killed him. The child growing within her womb had served a different purpose, providing the magical strength she would need to defeat Wizard Commander Maxim. Nothing else mattered.
Adessa heard a rustling below and looked down from her high branch to see large creatures prowling along the ground on stumpy legs, gliding through the muddy water in search of prey, a pair of swamp dragons with jaws that could snap through the thickest thighbone. Adessa was high above, though, and the swamp dragons didn’t even look up. She made no sound.
As an exercise, she considered dropping from the branch, thrusting her dagger into the backs of their skulls, and killing both of them. It would have been enjoyable and would have provided fresh meat, but Adessa remained where she was. She needed to rest. She needed to find Maxim.
She could slay all the swamp dragons she liked, once she had the wizard commander’s head in a sack. That was the joy she anticipated most. Other forms of entertainment would wait.
She rested her head against the trunk, checked the vines holding her in place, and closed her eyes. Tomorrow she would continue the hunt.
The wizard commander would not elude her forever.
CHAPTER 59
As she left Tanimura, Nicci felt satisfied with the response from the D’Haran garrison, confident that General Linden would build up the defenses and alert the rest of Lord Rahl’s army. She was already making plans for similar missions to major Old World cities, but after she had dream-witnessed Mrra’s battle with the heart hounds, Nicci worried about Ildakar. She had to get back.
“Breathe!”
Returning via the sliph, Nicci rolled over the low wall inside the chamber in the lower levels of the city. She dropped to her knees on the hard floor, coughed up the silvery presence that filled her lungs, her heart and soul. The sliph was in her, but she forced it out.
In the shadows of the unlit chamber, Nicci summoned a light in her hand as she got to her feet. The glow filled her surroundings, and she smelled the damp rock and mos
s. She turned to find the sliph waiting in her well, gleaming, metallic, and beautiful.
“Tell me what you achieved for the cause,” the sliph said. “Tell me about Sulachan and how our war fares.” She was eager and intense. “I sacrificed everything long ago to achieve victory against the wizards of the New World. I expect the same sacrifice from all our allies.”
“What I accomplished is not your concern,” Nicci said. She thought the sliph might be able to detect a lie, and she didn’t want to answer at all.
The creature was incensed. “I need to know. I can travel from city to city, but I see only my well. It has been so long since I carried anyone else. Tell me news.”
Nicci would need to use the sliph again to travel, but she was uneasy that the strange woman was so curious, so demanding. Placing her hands on her hips, Nicci faced the sliph. “Talking about secret missions is a sure way for the cause to fail. You took me to Tanimura, and I did what I had to do. You don’t need to know what it was. Soon, I will require you to take me elsewhere for another mission. I expect you to cooperate.”
“I will cooperate,” the sliph said, sulking.
“Be satisfied to know that you are helping me.”
“So long as you and I fight for the same cause,” she warned.
Nicci felt a hint of suspicion in the creature’s voice. Without answering, she went to the door of the low chamber and emerged into the daylight of Ildakar. Behind her the sliph remained, watching her for a long moment before she melted back into her placid pool.
* * *
Utros’s half-petrified soldiers continued to pound on the walls. Ildakaran engineers had discovered alarming, hair-thin cracks within the ancient blocks, and gifted nobles used magic to reshape and solidify the stone before the cracks could widen.
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