by Terah Edun
The overweight pack she carried for both of them on her shoulders slammed down on her armored back with a momentum that made her grunt in pain just as she felt the knife at her waist jostle and slice into the skin of her stomach. It stung, but it probably wasn’t too serious. Sara let out a sharp whistle of breath as she fought to make sure at least one of her weapons was still in her control. That would be the one that she could still feel gripped in her sweaty palm. With a grunt she jerked on the handle and realized with a quick look over that it was stuck in the mud. The quickness of the fall and the angle she had been forced to hold it at the last minute just to avoid stabbing Ezekiel in the gut had forced it to lodge into the wet mix of water and earth beneath them. She looked down at her waist with a groan and expected to see a bit of blood seeping from the thin slice. One look at the blood that was currently running down her shirt and through the tears in her clothing told her that initial assessment had been wrong.
Shock must be keeping me from feeling it, she thought with detachment. To her practiced eye, it didn’t look like the cut was that deep, though, just long and shallow which was what allowed the blood to run down like a freed waterfall across her chest over and under the white tunic that was now sticking to her skin.
Sara growled. Not angry about the shirt or worried about her superficial laceration. If anything, it was serving to sharpen her senses enough that she had more clarity of thought than before. Just as she was sure it was doing the same to the rest of her fellow mercenaries. Worry focused her thoughts as her eyes turned to Ezekiel with assessment and she tried to jerk his unresponsive body up and sit herself up while pulling on his body. He had fallen face down, and that wasn’t good. She knew that every second was critical as they approached the one-hour deadline for his envenomed bite.
“Ezekiel!” she cried she succeeded in pulling him slightly from the mud and his head flopped forward like a living doll. With a surge of battle strength, she pulled him towards her and upright so sharply that his head flopped backwards.
Breathing hard, not sure if she had in fact just used more battle magic or if the surge of strength had come from adrenaline-laced fear, she stared into the curator’s face. His eyes were closed, and all she could see was brown mud over his pale features. Hastily, Sara wiped the mud off, careful to clear the muck from his nostrils and make sure none had entered his mouth. Fortunately for Ezekiel, his mouth had been closed when he fell.
“Unlike most other times,” she said, jesting as her heart beat erratically, and a tic developed in her eyes as she searched his face for any signs of life. Even his mouth didn’t move, and the air was nowhere near cold enough for her to see breaths forming between his lips.
She could see that he had fallen for one reason. He was unconscious. She felt for a pulse. With a sigh of relief, she confirmed that it was there. Weak, but steady. He was alive. Emotions she didn’t even know she was holding back welled up within her. Tears started to blur her eyes, but she swallowed back a sob and looked around for aid. Anyone. Most of the clearing was empty except for two unknown men and a slew of abandoned bodies. Even the six-foot-tall soldier with his dead brother on his back was gone. Vanished.
“Where in the gods’ names did the swords on the perimeter and the archers go?” she muttered to herself. “Cowards!”
Taking a deep breath, Sara peered around, her lip curled in a sneer at their cowardice but she had to acknowledge that they were still there. Far enough back to be useless for a one-to-one battle but still there. For now, that left her, an unconscious Ezekiel, and two strangers to face a descending horde.
She felt some measure of relief that they weren’t facing this alone. But the two strangers were complete unknowns to her. She didn’t know their skills in fighting, and she was saddled with an unconscious man to boot.
“Still,” Sara muttered. “Someone’s better than no one. Usually.”
Staring at the two distant forms, who brandished no weapons and seemed in no rush to change that, had made her amend that statement. If they were going to stick around, she’d at least like them to be useful.
Sara also knew that she was talking to herself, but it gave her time to collect her thoughts and prepare a response in the eerie silence. With quick glances around, she noted that the mercenary archers—what was left of them, anyway—had managed to pull themselves into a patchy perimeter of ringed guards. The few who had still had arrows divided them out among the group, though that only amounted to, at most, two arrows apiece.
They’ll need to be damned good shots to make just two arrows work, she thought with wry cynicism. It was turning out to be her modus operandi under pressure. That, and cold, hard anger. At the moment, she preferred detached cynicism. When she got angry, people tended to die, and she lost herself in the momentum. Right now, she didn’t just need to defend herself; she needed to care for an unconscious man in the process.
Sometimes being a battle mage had its upsides. This wasn’t one of them.
She noted with a careful eye that just behind the patchy line of archers, perhaps three feet back or so, were armed foot soldiers, mercenaries who held swords and glaives in hand, ready to charge forward...at what, she wasn’t quite sure. They didn’t know what was coming out of the sky. It was still covered in dense fog which layered the swamp like an ethereal cloak and made it damned hard to see past the canopy. Kade soldiers could be descending quietly to the ground by ropes and she would have no idea. Even that was an optimistic outcome. The most they could hope for was hand-to-hand combat in a scenario devised exactly against that. The terrain worked against every instinct she had to stand her ground, and the superior vantage point of the descending crafts above gave her no doubts that they could launch a volley of mage fire without even descending from the decks. In fact, that was what the Kade mages were known for: stealth and sneak attacks. Campaigns that desolated Algardis forces and left whole companies eradicated, without a single Kade head on a spike to show for it.
Breathing in and out slowly, Sara saw no alternative. She would have to wait out the attack and see what came. She couldn’t do much against a ship. Her skills as both a battle mage and an individual were in direct hand-to-hand combat. But it felt damned lonely in the center of the cleared out ring as she waited to see what more would fall from the sky.
She took in the two other individuals who had stayed with her. They did so for their own reasons, and Sara doubted any of those reasons was the man cradled in her arm.
“But they’re here and that’s what counts, right?” she muttered to herself. Especially since she was currently occupied with an unconscious curator and couldn’t move, let alone overcome the fear that Ezekiel would die the moment she left his side.
Her gaze traveled over the first of the two who had remained. It was the fire mage—Pullo. He stood in the middle of the clearing and stared up defiantly at the slowly descending forms in the sky. Sara turned to see what had caught his gaze. She could make out that each blob wasn’t an individual fighter like she’d expected. Instead, at least six narrow objects descended out of the sky. They were extraordinarily large, but beautifully slender at the same time. The base of the object seemed rounded, with curved sides almost like a whale, and she thought she could see little bits of movement on board. It was certainly like nothing she had ever seen.
“That fire mage is either extraordinarily stupid or incredibly brave,” she said as she glanced over at him. She fought the urge to try to wipe the slowly dripping mud from her face as she focused.
Then her eyes took in the one man walking toward her and Ezekiel as the archers crouched all around them in a smaller perimeter around the clearing with their bows primed to target the objects floating down towards them.
When he stopped, Sara said nothing. She wanted to know what he wanted. He certainly had made no efforts to stop at the fallen forms of their comrades all around them to check and see if they lived, so Sara had no illusions that the man she now recognized as the captain of her mercenary g
uard came towards them out of any sense of wanting to help.
Finally, Captain Barthis Simon stood directly above her, his arms clasped behind his back and his lips pursed together tightly as he kept his wary gaze pinned on the floating objects above her.
A few seconds passed. Sara was beginning to wonder if he just came over for the company.
“He’s alive?” Simon asked tightly.
“Barely.”
“Let’s keep him that way.”
“Why do you care?” Sara shot back.
He turned a contemplative gaze on her as if the enemy combatants weren’t bearing down on them this very second. “Because I have plans for you both.”
Sara was tempted to stand and slit the captain’s throat for his callousness, but she couldn’t. She needed the red-haired demon’s help. Instead of asking what he meant by ‘plans’, she said hoarsely, “If you need him so much, then save him.”
It was as close to pleading as she could muster towards a man she reviled.
His cool and calculating blue eyes locked on hers, “I left dozens of comrades under my command like garbage by the wayside in the push to get here, to this clearing. If I had the antidote, don’t you think I would have used it already?”
Sara chuckled darkly. “I don’t know. Would you?”
Captain Simon frowned. “Oh, ye of little faith.”
Sara bared her teeth in a fierce smile that was more grimace as she put her fingers over Ezekiel’s pulse.
“His pulse is weak. He’s dying. If you’ve got something up your sleeves, now’s the time,” she said tightly.
The captain knelt down, but he didn’t touch Ezekiel. Instead, he just stared into Sara’s eyes over her friend’s unconscious form. Bright blue meeting vibrant orange. She couldn’t read the glacial eyes that gazed at her, but their intensity reminded her of a legendary lizard that could freeze victims with a gaze. The basilisk.
“I may have faltered when we first arrived,” he acknowledged, “But I have pushed us to the true path and brought us to salvation.”
She choked back a horrified laugh. “Salvation? Our enemy rains fire down upon our heads, a swamp has devoured our men—both the living and the dead—and we stand with less than a hundred souls when we left the forest that bordered a field of death with two hundred-and-seventy-five. What kind of salvation is that?”
“The kind that only the strongest survive,” he said softly as he stood and looked up into the sky with a smile in his face.
Sara looked at Captain Barthis Simon with dread. Horror pulsed through her as she realized that he had lost what little of his sanity remained and led his guard into a death trap. Then Ezekiel jerked in her arms. Sara’s eyes snapped back down to the man whose torso she held clutched in her arms. He was looking up at her.
She smiled and whispered. “You’re awake. Stay that way. We’ll get out of here.”
She didn’t believe that, but the longer she could convince Ezekiel to stay in the land of the living, the longer she could convince herself to keep from making sure Simon’s didn’t do the same. Ezekiel tried to move his lips, and she leaned down to catch what he was saying. But as she waited for a whisper of a word, nothing passed his trembling lips. Leaning back, she looked into his eyes with dismay. She wondered if this would be his final breath. But Ezekiel’s gaze only grew sharper and his attempts to speak more forceful as he moved his mouth again and again, trying to speak. When he finally gave up and his eyes stayed firmly glued on hers, Sara realized with a start that Ezekiel wasn’t really looking at her.
His eyes were focused upward with a tactical precision—he was looking at the sky, at the enemy. That is, until she had blocked his vision with her head and a riot of curls that had managed to escape her regulation bun, despite her best efforts to corral them. A sad smile plastered on her face, a smile at Ezekiel’s defiance. Useless defiance, but defiance all the same. Sara wasn’t one to ignore a threat. But even she couldn’t fight this. If the Kade assassins in the sky didn’t slaughter them immediately and she escaped into the swamp, she knew two things: she would be forced to leave Ezekiel behind, and the damned swamp would kill her anyway.
The flesh of the animals was poisonous. The plants were carnivorous. The earth was treacherous and the sky was suffocating Everything in the swamp was trying to kill them. In fact, this clearing was the most peaceful time she’d had in the swamp yet.
Sometime between when the captain had come over and Ezekiel had regained consciousness, she had resigned herself to the fact that death from sky assassins was preferable to a slow death from the swamp. So she didn’t look up as she waited for arrows to fall or a blade to pierce her back. Long minutes passed, and Ezekiel’s determined gaze never wavered from the sky to the right side of her face.
But nothing happened. No arrows fell. No shouts emitted. No swords came down. Instead, Sara saw hope bloom in Ezekiel’s eyes while his cheeks began to shine with silent tears that tracked down his face.
“What?” she breathed.
“Look,” commanded the captain from where he stood by her and Ezekiel’s side.
And for the first time, Sara Fairchild followed his command without reproach or hesitation.
She looked up and her heart flipped. She didn’t dare believe it.
And what she saw in the sky brought tears into her eyes, too.
Tears of hope. Tears of change.
On the largest of the floating objects above them, a large flag tossed in the wind. On that flag was a crest—a golden lion rampant on a banner of blood red. The crest of the Algardis Empire.
The crest of the Empress Beatrice Athanos Algardis.
The crest that represented safety. The crest that represented home.
Cheers erupted all around Sara as the mercenaries realized that they were saved. The ragtag band of stragglers tumbled into the clearing, jumping up and down and waving their arms as finally the rains abated, and Sara was able to more clearly see and define the objects above for what they were as they descended from the clouds and through the canopy—airships.
Half a dozen of Algardis airships came down upon them from the sky above.
Chapter 11
Sara let out a shaky breath that she didn’t know she was holding. The airships swept forward until each one rested about twenty-five feet above the earth with a distance at of least six yards between it and the next airship. Without delay, rope ladders descended from the side of each vessel and men quickly scaled their way down to the ground.
Before the first boots hit the ground of the wet swamp, Sara looked up at Captain Simon as she felt an emotion akin to disbelief sparking up within her, surely displaying itself in her eyes while her brow furrowed. “You knew they were coming. You knew the airships were in the area.”
He raised a red eyebrow, presumably at her tone. “One would think you would be happy about that.”
Her stony stare said she was anything but.
He paused a moment and then spoke carefully. So carefully that Sara had to look at his stance and the way his hands gripped each other tightly in front of his waist to try to gauge his temperament. Oh, she knew he was angry. But the captain was as smooth a liar as he was as consummate a coward. His face was a mask that she couldn’t search for clues—a wrinkle in his brow, for instance, that might indicate confusion, or a twitch in his mouth that would indicate doubt. None of that appeared. His tone, like his face, was stripped of emotion. The words that flowed from his mouth were almost dull in their even cadences. Neither tight with anger nor hissing with fury.
So Sara watched him. The whole of his body, or at least what she could see of it. She had been trained in the art of enhanced interrogation. Torture, if you wanted to be less polite about it. Because of that training Sara could see the close to invisible signs in his stance, the occasional jerk of a fingertip before he stilled, and the almost impassive look he gave her. She watched as a thick vein in his neck throbbed with checked anger as he sawed off each word in emphasis.
Saying it forcefully won’t make it any more true than false, she thought wryly.
Sara knew that the bite that laced each of his words was meant to tell her that she should be careful.
He clearly had no idea who he was dealing with or what she had been through. If she could face down her dead mother and not break, she could certainly deal with a cowardly and arrogant captain, although she wasn’t quite sure which trait she despised more at the moment.
Although she was about an inch shorter—and seated on the ground, to boot—Sara stared at her pale and sweating captain without flinching. Her eyes locked on his like a hawk sighting its prey, and there was no doubt in her mind who was predator and who was prey in this relationship. What she lacked in height, she made up in demeanor, and Sara didn’t bother to hide her emotions or restrain her temperament. She wasn’t an angry person by nature. She’d had a happy childhood. Strict, but fair. Still, she’d never been able to abide fools, and when Sara Fairchild couldn’t stomach someone, that person usually went running in the other direction. Fast. She had no compunctions about following her instincts, and distaste could easily morph into outright dislike if the mood suited her. She didn’t randomly kill individuals for the fun of the activity. But she didn’t shy away from what she had to do either.