Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2

by Terah Edun

  Sara cleared her throat. “Take him up to the ship, please. I’ll be following right behind.”

  They collectively muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” and took off without another glance.

  Sara watched the stricken man with more secrets that she would have ever given him credit for be borne across the swampy terrain and up onto the ship deck with the help of some skilled earth mages. They had devised a simple yet effective system of pulleys using materials from the swamp around them.

  Sara stood alone, with her fists on her hips as tried to decide what to do.

  Chapter 15

  Between Ezekiel being loaded on the ship and her own boarding, Sara hadn’t made a decision. Not a significant one, anyway. She knew her highest priority at the moment was getting answers from a hopefully soon-to-be-cured Ezekiel Crane. What came after that, well...that would come afterwards.

  With a sigh, Sara leaned on the side rails of the airship and held on tight as it ascended into the sky. Once they gained enough altitude, she noticed that the ship stopped hovering in midair as if weightless, and instead began to push forward through the winds like a ship on water would ride the waves at it headed out to sea.

  Staring out at the blue sky and fluffy clouds, she realized something that had been pushed out of her mind while they were in the swamp. Their tribulations at the hands of the natural predators of that noxious swamp had been only one part of her journey. As the ship creaked and turned in the winds for a northeast heading, she knew that the real journey was now beginning.

  Slipping back from the railing, Sara turned and grabbed onto the shoulder of an airship sailor mid-stride. She didn’t know who he was and she didn’t very much care to learn. He had been nearby and as good as any person aside from the airship captain to answer her questions.

  In fact, he was better, she noted thoughtfully as he turned in her grip to face the person who had halted his journey. Better because he’s low enough on the totem pole that he might have heard things from behind closed doors and be willing enough to disclose those secrets without realizing the importance of what he was reporting.

  At least, that was her hope. In either case, it was always better to question the invisible lackey. Officers tended to know precisely when to shut their traps before they spilled too many beans. This man on the other hand was clearly not an officer. Perhaps a deckhand. Perhaps a boatswain. It didn’t really matter who he was, as long as he was forthcoming with what he knew. As he whirled about and opened his mouth to spew something angrily, he changed his mind when he saw who had grabbed hold of him...or rather, what. Sara had no doubt that he had not the foggiest clue who she was or what her reputation was on the streets of Sandrin.

  She wasn’t prideful enough to think she had a reputation that spread across the empire. What she did have, however, was a profusion of knives and weapons about her person. His face paled as he took in the inventory, and he swallowed whatever angry words he had had on his lips.

  Contritely, he asked, “May I help you, miss?”

  Sara smiled. “Where are we going?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “To the Algardis encampment, of course.”

  “Where would that be?” She stayed calm as she let him go.

  The man glanced away towards the helm as a stiff wind brushed by their ship, and several nearby men hurried to grab onto something. Not Sara. Not this sailor.

  He simply widened the space between his feet and leaned into the wind; Sara mimicked him in order to keep her balance. The sailor waited until the captain had turned the ship into the wind before returning Sara’s gaze. From the look on his face, he had decided to humor her.

  Finally he said, “Two miles west of the Kade fortress.”

  “Fortress?” repeated Sara.

  “Aye,” replied the sailor firmly. “And in-between their fortress and our encampment is the battleground of the first civil war the empire has ever seen.”

  “And this...civil war. What are we walking into? Are battles happening as we speak?”

  The man grimaced. “Nah. The Kades have ground troops, but that’s not their specialty. They prefer sneak attacks and bombardments from far away, cowards that they are.”

  “Sounds like what we encountered on the road,” Sara said.

  The sailor nodded. “Heard about that.”

  “What about at the Algardis camp itself? Is it ready to withstand any attack from the Kades? How much longer will the Kades mages be able to resist our onslaught?”

  She was thinking of the tactical advantage the Algardis troops must have with greater numbers and superior fighting mechanisms. Surely, this would be over quickly. She was also wondering if she would have time to find Matteas Hillan and uncover the conspiracy against her father before she was re-deployed home. This was the full might of the Algardis empire, after all. She had no idea how the Kades had lasted this long.

  “Could be...” said the sailor uneasily, his voice trailing off.

  “Could be what?” Sara said sharply.

  “Could be a week. Could be months.”

  Months, Sara thought with surprise. But still...he had been helpful. Perhaps she could get more out of him.

  Sara lowered her hands and folded them politely in front of her waist, trying to look as innocuous as possible. She wasn’t certain she succeeded, but the man didn’t run away screaming, either.

  Sara waited patiently for an answer that didn’t come.

  Then she said, “Look you could tell me the rest of it or I can ensure that me and my fellow mercenaries make sure you don’t leave this ship walking straight.”

  The man blanched. “That ain’t right.”

  “This entire situation isn’t right,” Sara said wearily, “I just need some answers.”

  He gulped, looked away and back at her. “You didn’t hear this from me, you know, but Kansid wasn’t exactly happy with the changeover in command in favor of your captain, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I might,” Sara said.

  And she did. Several days before leaving Sandrin, Captain Barthis Simon had received his orders to relieve Captain Kansid of his command. To hear that Kansid was upset was unsurprising. It was bad news for Sara, though, because Kansid would still control his original regiment of mercenaries, which Matteas Hillan served in. If Kansid left before she spoke with Matteas, there was little hope of her ever uncovering the conspiracy surrounding her father’s death. She had until they arrived at the Algardis encampment to learn the layout of the command structure and ingratiate herself with Kansid. If he planned to fight with Captain Simon over his reassignment, all the better.

  At least, better for me, Sara thought. With those two arguing instead of transitioning duties from one to the other, the Red Lion regiment that Hillan is assigned to will be around that much longer.

  Carefully, Sara asked, “Unhappy enough to challenge him when we set down?”

  “Unhappy enough to consolidate his position amongst the mages, the mercenaries and the soldiers,” said the sailor. “More than that, I don’t know. Kansid commands the Red Lions. You know and I know that you mercenaries don’t like dealing with each other, much less working in coordination with each other’s captains as they are now.”

  Sara nodded companionably, as if she had been a member of the mercenary guild for years instead of the few weeks since she’d blustered her way in—most of which had consisted of wandering around a swamp and watching her comrades drop like flies.

  “Whose side are you on?” she asked.

  “The empress’s,” the man said with a shrug. “And rumor has it that her spies had written you lot off for dead until the mages insisted that you had a plan. Caused some tension, you see? My captain was staking a lot of her command on this air ride. Securing all that fuel, commandeering four of the imperial mages, and searching a damned swamp ain’t easy.”

  “You didn’t know where we’d emerge from in the swamp?” Sara asked curiously.

  “Do you know how many clearings there are in
that damned bug-infested moss pit?” the sailor demanded while grabbing onto a flailing rope in irritation. Whether to stop his hands from doing something else or to get the end of the rope out of the air from where it could do injury to someone’s eye, she didn’t know.

  Sara decided it was caution for his fellow travelers from the way he quickly tied off the loose end of the rope in a sailor’s knot around a thin pole.

  “We didn’t see you until that fire show you lit up over half of this side of the swamp,” he continued ruefully. “We were about to turn back, actually. Give up. Let the emperor’s spymasters and their non-mage network know we were wrong.”

  “Wrong about finding a lost group of mercenaries?” Sara said. “Forgive me if I seem a bit callous, but I wouldn’t pay one thousand shillings to save this lot. We’re the empress’s people through and through, but not worth launching the kind of search-and-rescue mission you did.” Sara gestured around. “The magic alone needed to keep these ships afloat could arm enough battle fire to set the whole country ablaze.”

  The man grinned as the winds began to pick up. “You’re not wrong, lass. You’re not wrong.”

  “Then?” Sara said in a leading tone.

  “It became partly a matter of sticking it to the empress’s mundane brigades and spies. A pride thing, you know? We need to show the empress that we mages are useful out here. We haven’t defeated the Kades yet, but we’re going to,” he said.

  “And also partly a matter of...” Sara said, leading him further, hardly even paying attention to his blustering about magic.

  She had grown up knowing that there were tensions between mages and mundanes in all elements of the warrior caste. The mercenaries. The soldiers. The intelligence network. They all provided different functional levels in the empress’s system of protection, advancement, and war. The intelligence network was closely allied with the soldiers. The mages tended to work alone. The mercenaries were a rare breed. Ranks filled with both mages and mundanes—magical and non-magical folk, that is—in an effort to justify their existence. The mercenaries would perform tasks that soldiers refused and mages were incapable of doing. They had the combat training, and often the magical skills, to do what needed to be done.

  Not all mercenaries were mages, but all mercenaries were trained to work with mages. The empress’s soldiers, however, didn’t have that distinct trait, and they bore that fact with pride. A long time ago, Sara Fairchild had thought she would be the one to break that barrier, just as her father and forefathers had once believed. Battle mages, after all, couldn’t be ignored. They were needed in a way that even the soldiers had to acknowledge. But it had been no coincidence that, for the most part, her father had ended up in leadership and administrative positions, even though his training in the arena made him far more suited to the front line. The army’s excuse? Generals and commanders did not lead from the front, battle mage or not. Sara had wanted to change that.

  She laughed bitterly. Looks like I’ll be changing it alright. There hasn’t been a Fairchild in the trenches for decades.

  “Partly a matter of getting the upper hand on the Kades,” the sailor said while lowering his voice. “We found out where Nissa Sardonien was a few weeks ago. Believe you me, getting the drop on her was no easy task.”

  Sara blinked. She couldn’t believe it. The woman could harness the power of the sun and light. Going up against her in daylight would have been suicidal.

  “But we did,” the sailor said, finishing nervously. “Now we’ll get the way into the fortress out of her and end this before any further embarrassment comes to the empress’s name.”

  “Embarrassment?” murmured Sara.

  “Yeah,” said the man defensively.

  “That’s how they refer to it on the streets of Sandrin,” Sara said. “I didn’t think you’d call it that here as well.”

  “Why not?” the sailor asked.

  Sara turned around and got a good look at the horizon. The airship was starting to descend towards land and she had a good vantage point from so high up above.

  Pointing straight forward with one hand, she said, “We’re coming in from the southwest, correct?”

  The sailor came up beside her and nodded.

  Sara had studied a map of the territories in the northeast region of the empire. This was supposed to be the breadbasket of the land. Empty of everything but fields upon fields of barley, wheat, and crops that provided food for the rest of the empire. She knew from her geography studies that it was flat land, with rich soil, and nary a population center larger than four thousand families in any direction. So seeing anything contrary to that knowledge made her back stiffen and skin crawl automatically.

  And well, this? This made her shudder physically at the wrongness of it all.

  “Then pray-tell, what is that?” she asked while tilting her head and narrowing her eyes.

  The man licked his lips and took in the structure she was pointing at. Three miles due north of their ship was a towering dark mass with four spires reaching towards the heavens, surrounded by a mage shield so large and powerful that it was visible even now.

  “That is the tower of the Kades,” the man said quietly.

  Sara nodded and moved her finger due south, crossing a distance of just a few miles, to point at an enormous, orderly formation of tents. Thousands of tents—lined up in rows with people milling between them like ants.

  “And that?” Sara asked just as quietly.

  “The Algardis encampment.”

  Sara nodded and turned to look at the sailor beside her. “When the Kades erected that monstrosity, this fight turned from a skirmish to a civil war.”

  “Yes,” said the sailor.

  Sara continued. “And when they ambushed the elite Corcoran Guard and massacred over half of those mercenaries, it went from an embarrassment to a blemish on Algardis history.”

  “Well—” started the man.

  Sara held up a hand. “I’m not finished. When we wipe the Kades off the map,” she continued with a pleasant smile, “it will fade from a blemish to a blip in history. Not a moment more.”

  The man gave a deep swallow. “So it’s a good thing we captured Mage Sardonien, then, isn’t it?”

  Sara turned back to look at the dark tower rising above the Algardis camp like a crowned city before its peasants. “We should hope so. Otherwise...”

  “Otherwise?” the sailor asked with a catch in his voice.

  “Otherwise, we’re in for one hell of a civil war,” Sara finished while looking down on the enemy encampment with disbelief on her face as her airship sunk in its shadow and the towers rose above their heads in the distance.

  Chapter 16

  Sara Fairchild didn’t have very much else to say to the man, and he soon wandered off with a troubled look on his face. She stood with her face to the wind and closed her eyes to everything. Closed to the world. Closed to the vision in front of her. Closed to the lies. Closed to the memories. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep all of her memories from floating to the surface like dead fish at high tide.

  A slight smile spread across her face as she remembered standing on the steps of the stone platforms that dotted the city streets of Sandrin. There were six such platforms, each centrally located in the six major districts—north, west, east, south, high-tide territory, and the imperial grounds. At the intersections of the major thoroughfares for each of the six was the newsreader’s platform. And every single day without fail, until she had been forced to call upon the head fisherman’s office for a job, she’d washed her face, put on fresh clothes, and headed out the door in the early morning in order to hear the newsreader speak his news. Much like a town crier for smaller locales, the newsreader dispersed the most important announcements from the guilds, councils, and the imperial courts at dawn.

  Gathering herself, Sara opened her eyes and joined the line of disembarking men and woman to go down the gangplank to her new home.

  “And every da
y,” Sara said while staring dully at the back of the head of the soldier who stood one place in front of her as they descended the gangplank, “that whey-faced turd of a newsreader crowed that the Kades were dirty brigands. Sure to lose. Couldn’t possibly stand up against the might of the imperial forces.”

  Her hand curled into a fist at the very thought. An enemy on the run was very different from what she saw here. The Kade fortress lay like a jet-black mountain which had risen from the earth, complete with spires and platforms. It was an impenetrable refuge that housed an innumerable host of men, all fighting for the Kade cause.

  “I wonder if they even know how many Kades they’re fighting or what it will truly take to defeat them. Because as of now they all look as clueless as chickens in a barnyard,” Sara wondered aloud as the line moved forward, and she shuffled down the gangplank like an obedient ant. She could only look to the left and right or straight at the back of the dirty unkempt hair in front of her.

  I doubt I look much better, Sara thought wryly, all the while resisting the urge to put a finger in her own hair, which she was sure was a nest of dirt, leaves, and more dirt. It made her shudder to think about it. She may not have been a girl who loved the pretty dresses or jewelry that most well-born girls seemed to adore, but she was absolutely fastidious in keeping her body clean and her appearance well-tended.

  It was the least she could do for a long-suffering mother who had loved to dress her up and who had realized, when her daughter turned the age of six, that if she invited Sara to one more dressmaker’s shop for hours of fabrics and fittings, that it would be destroyed by the time they left.

  So when the winds shifted and brought the smell of the dozen men and women lining up ahead of her to get off the ship, Sara curled her nose in disgust and turned her face away, desperately trying to avoid the stench. It only succeeded in bringing her line of sight directly in conflict with the glare of the sun, but that was better than retching over the side of the gangplank. None of them had had a proper bath in days, herself included. Gritting her teeth and resisting the urge to pinch her nose, she raised an arm to shield her eyes and glared down at the Algardis encampment that lay directly adjacent to the airship. The field they had set down upon looked to be just off to the side of the barracks for the soldiers and mercenaries, which was just as well. Where there was a barracks, there was a bath—and for now, that was all she needed to know.