Behind him, the Alarians he’d left standing were swarmed by the revitalised Delaluzians.
In front of him was another fight, several Delaluzians against a far larger number of Alarians. The Delaluzians were trying to disengage but their enemy was too overwhelming. Beyond the fight was a bright light in the far distance, the opening of the tunnel, undoubtedly within Alarian controlled land. A few more minutes and an Alarie soldier would make it out of the tunnel, alert their forces and then it would be over for any Delaluzian left in the dark.
The light of several discarded fire-magic flares cast the battling soldiers in flickering, red light. Moving closer to the second fight, David studied the strained, bloody faces of those in Delaluzian brigandines. There. Toward the back of the group, able to run if he wanted but seemingly unwilling to, fighting alongside a taller soldier. The boy.
His duty surging like a fanned flame in his chest, David crossed the calm distance between the two fights, moved by instinct and compulsion to finish his task. He reached the boy, grabbed him by the back of his brigandine and spun him out of the fight. The blade of the advancing Alarian was caught on David’s long dagger, the tight confines not allowing for anything larger. Voluntarily taking the Alarian’s second knife in his side left David open to slam the edge of his free hand into the enemy’s neck. Windpipe crushed, the Alarian fell back, weapons dropped as he clutched at his throat. Kicking the Alarian backward into his fellows, David drew his revolvers and fired into the opening in the Delaluzian line as he backed away.
Clear, he turned just in time to catch the boy from rushing back into the conflict.
“Let me go,” he cried, pushing against David’s chest. “I have to help Dem. He’s still in there.”
“He’s not important,” David said, tone uncompromising. “I was sent to bring only you back.”
The boy stopped struggling, staring at David in shock that slowly turned to understanding. “You.” He pushed again, this time in horror.
David let him go, certain that if the boy tried to get past him, he could stop him.
Gaping, the boy shook his head. “No. I won’t go. Not without Dem. And you can’t take me back. I command you not to.”
“Only the Duke of Ibarra can command me.”
As if suddenly remembering it, the boy raised his long dagger and dropped into a crouch. “Then I’ll fight you.”
“You know you won’t win.”
“Yes, but I know you can’t kill me. He wouldn’t—”
David rushed him. Taken by surprise, not really believing David would hurt him, the boy was too slow. He jumped back but with a spinning kick, David knocked the blade from his hand, following through with a boot to the boy’s ribs. Flung into the wall of the tunnel, the boy rolled away, falling to the ground. Struggling up, he gasped, bending over and clutching at his middle.
Grabbing his arm, David whirled the boy around and into a punch that snapped his head back.
“Kill, no,” David said, hauling the boy upright. “He didn’t say anything about unharmed, though.”
And he punched him again, a blow that knocked the dazed boy out.
His unconscious quarry hanging limp from one arm, David looked around. The second fight continued on, more desperate now the Delaluzians were down a man. Contrary, the first was over, the last Alarian being put down by a grim faced corporal with a streak of grey through her hair.
He had the boy. His task was done. Getting out of the tunnels, commandeering a dirigible and returning to Ibarra would be easier than getting here. It was time to go. The duty was still pulling at him, as it always did, to ensure he returned to his master, to his captivity. He didn’t want to be a soldier, never had. He didn’t want to fight because they told him too. He could, and should, just walk away now. Take the boy and go.
Yet something stopped him. It wasn’t the duke’s compulsion, but something else, something deeper and older. A memory of feeling companionship with the other children taken in by the church, of having friends he would fight for.
Somewhere in the confusion of the last fight was someone the boy felt that for.
It hurt, but he ignored the stabbing pain in his chest and hauled the boy back toward the triumphant Delaluzians behind him.
“You two.” David pointed out two of them. They snapped to attention, responding to the command in David’s voice. “Take this boy out of here. Make sure he doesn’t escape. You will be rewarded by Duke Ibarra if you keep him safe.”
The two soldiers glanced at their corporal. She studied David, then nodded to her men. They took the boy and retreated through the remains of their unit.
“What now?” the corporal asked David.
Never intending to take charge, it somehow always happened. Turning back to face the fight, David considered their options. With the two Delaluzian groups joined, they still didn’t stand much of a chance. Especially not with reinforcements beginning to charge into the Alarian tunnel. It wasn’t a good fight to be a Delaluzian in.
“It’s hopeless, isn’t it,” the corporal murmured so only he would hear.
Even as she spoke, the Alarians surged forward, overwhelming the last of the Delaluzians.
“At least we can stop them,” David replied and reached into his coat. Pulling out his hand, he showed what he held to the corporal.
She swallowed hard, then nodded. Without a word, she spun and shouted a retreat.
Ahead, the Alarians heard and rushed forward, determined to catch them. David waited as long as he could, judging how far the Delaluzians had gone, how quickly the Alarians were advancing. When he could wait no longer, he hauled back and threw the small, egg-shaped fire-bomb, not at the fleeing Alarians, but at the timbers shoring up the ceiling.
Spinning, David sprinted away, not waiting to see the fire-bomb hit the wood, or hear the ceramic crack. The muted explosion of tightly bound fire magic suddenly released bowled him off his feet. He tucked into the roll, got his feet beneath him, surged up and kept running. Super-heated air pushed at his back, the flare of red light burning the edges of his vision. Then the deep, vibrato ringing of collapsing earth drowned out everything else.
Around the corner, he caught up to the last of the Delaluzians. The corporal had dropped back, urging her people along, shoving them if they faltered, insulting them if they hesitated, bolstering them if they staggered.
“Don’t know who you are,” she panted to David as they followed the soldiers, “but thank you. I didn’t think we’d get out of there ali—”
BOOM!
The soldiers ahead of them disintegrated in a red mist. Chunks blew backwards, knocking David and the corporal off their feet. Ears ringing so loud he couldn’t hear anything beyond the clamorous crashing of his own heart, David rolled over. The corporal was rocking on the ground, a shard of steel jutting out of her calf. She was drenched in blood, most of it not her own. Something nudged David’s boot. He looked. A soldier stared up at him, eyes wide, mouth gaping, a head only, his body coating the walls of the tunnel.
David stood. Not one soldier remained alive. They’d taken the brunt of the mortar blast, protecting David and the corporal from the worst of it.
A twinge made David look at his stomach. A gash had been ripped through his coat and shirt, tearing open his flesh so a loop of blue intestine bulged out, dripping blood. Ahead of him, four Alarians were crouched around a specialised mortar. It had the upright barrel the bomb was dropped down, but it also had a second one, pointed more parallel to the ground. Drop the bomb down the vertical chute and it would be propelled out of the horizontal one.
They prepared another bomb.
Nothing stood between him and it this time. Perhaps this was how he would die, torn to shreds, splattered about a pre-dug grave. No final sermon to guide him into the Shadows, no chance at revenge for what the countless Dukes of Ibarra had done to him. At least it would be an end.
Yet the compulsion to obey his orders was ever present. One hand pressed to his stomach t
o keep his guts in, David raced for the mortar. Eyes wide at his stupid charge, the Alarians dropped the bomb down the chute and turned away, arms over their heads. David launched himself into a flying kick. His boot hit the side of the horizontal shaft of the mortar just as the bomb exploded out of it.
#
It was late. Gabe was exhausted, his body one big knot of pain and confusion. So many different wounds, so contradictory, all of them fighting for prominence in a mass of tissues too small to suffer so much. His eyesight was blurry and he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. Every bone felt fragile, as if the pounding in his skull would crack it open from the inside, spilling his spongy, used-up brains on to the dirty floor.
“Mage?”
Slowly, he raised his head, squinted at Dina. She came into the surgery and stood before him. Her cool, gentle hands touched his burning, dry skin. It stung but he leaned into it all the same, desperate for something real, for something that didn’t require anything of him in return. Dina sighed and stepped closer, her arms circling his shoulders, drawing his head to her chest. It was all he could do to keep from crying.
Dina’s magic eased into him, soothing some of the aches, stroking the angry blood vessels in his head until he could focus again.
“Better?” she asked.
“More, please.”
She pulled back, worried. “You know that’s all I can do.”
Gabe risked nodding, found his head didn’t fall off and he didn’t puke, and smiled. “Then perhaps some coffee.”
“Of course. We just received word of a final dirigible of wounded. More soldiers they found in the tunnels.”
Stomach clenching, Gabe asked, “Can’t they go to Buey Company?”
Dina pressed her lips together, a sure sign she didn’t have good news. “Buey’s too far away. One of the wounded is very severe. They’re not even sure he’ll make it here.”
Gabe rubbed his face. Dina’s small magic had worked well, targeting the most debilitating of his pains, allowing him to think. “All right. See that the soldier is brought straight here. I won’t go the field. I can’t go to the field.”
“No one expects you to. I’ll send word to the airfield, and get you that coffee.”
Sometime later, Gabe couldn’t judge how long, Dina was back, pressing a hot mug into his hands. He sipped the perfect brew, then gulped and slurped his way through another mug as Nacio informed them the wounded man had arrived.
They carried him in and put the stretcher on the table. Gabe leaned on the table for support. The body—he couldn’t call it a man—was mutilated. Oh, there were arms and legs and a head, all of them liberally cut and burnt, but in between, there wasn’t a whole lot left. The abdomen was torn open, guts sliced and burst, organs ripped out of their beds of tissue, some completely missing. Above that mess, the chest was raw, shattered ribs exposed, bones jabbing into the deflated lungs.
“Why bring him here?” he asked numbly. “He’s dead.”
“That’s what we thought, too,” a stretcher bearer said, pale and hesitant. “But then he moved.”
“Nerve twitches. It sometimes happens.”
But even as he spoke, the body moved. It wasn’t a twitch. The man curled fingers around the edges of his stretcher and tried to lift his head, a gargled groan coming from between split lips.
“Fucking saints!” Gabe fell away from the table.
The soldier relaxed, becoming once more a mutilated corpse.
Into the stunned silence that followed, the stretcher bearer whispered, “It’s him.”
“Who?” Gabe wondered if he’d passed out and was dreaming. If he wasn’t, then this was surely the madness finally catching up to him. He was about to be tied up in his robe and sent home to sit in a room drooling like a mindless idiot for the rest of his life.
“Him,” the man hissed. “The Immortal Soldier.”
Dina, her calm exterior cracked by the impossibility of what just happened, vented a short, disbelieving laugh. “That’s just a myth. He doesn’t exist.”
“Then explain that,” Gabe snapped, waving at the still body.
“We’ve seen it before,” she insisted, her voice cracking. “Palo de Torres. Twice he’s come in barely alive when anyone else would have been dead. That’s all this is. He’s just a strong man with a strong will to live.”
“No will to live could keep that alive. Look at him. There’s hardly enough left to make a decent meat pie!”
The body convulsed, coughing up clots of blood and shuddering so hard the stretcher threatened to fall off the table. Gabe and Dina rushed in, unthinkingly holding him still until the fit passed. A glob of mashed up lung plopped off the table and landed—splat—on Gabe’s boot.
“That’s not dead,” Dina said softly, worried gaze searching Gabe’s for reassurance.
Gabe stared back while the body shivered in his hands. This wasn’t possible. It wasn’t just a matter of a will to live, it was a matter of having the necessary parts to live.
An image of Evellia flashed across his aching mind, of her lying on the straw strewn floor of the stable, bleeding to death; of how he hadn’t reached her quick enough to stem the flow, to keep her heart beating. The gut wrenching realisation she was dead; the way his whole world had simply been broken, set adrift, all because he hadn’t been there on time.
“Gabriel,” Dina said.
It was the first time he could remember her saying his name. It sounded odd, as if coming from far away, and she was swaying in and out of focus.
“What are you going to do?”
He stared at the body, seeing only the missing parts. His magic could reconstruct tissue, but this much? When he was already exhausted?
“I...” Gabe couldn’t say it. Didn’t want to say it. It went against everything he had sworn to do when they cut the tip off his little finger. If he did this, he was as good as admitting Meraz and Ismael were right. Yet this... this would kill him, one way or another.
It was all about balance. And distance. Just as he made up his mind, he recognised the man.
“Nothing,” he whispered and the strange sensation he’d felt that afternoon came back. It had been odd, like a fleeting touch on the back of his neck, letting him know the bastard was watching him. When he’d turned, his nose still stinging with each breath, he’d felt something else. It was darker and deeper, a hole into nothingness that had a weight to it, that drew him toward it.
Gabe let his weary magic loose, a tiny skerrick leaking out and touching Nothing.
He fell into the hole. Darkness consumed him. Cold, empty darkness that sucked all the warmth from him, leaving him shrivelled and floating, aimless, lost in a void. There was nothing to define him, nothing to contain his thoughts or feelings or fears. They spilled out of him, vanishing as soon as they were freed. He felt nothing, cared for nothing, but he remembered feeling and caring, recalled the pain and anger and yet it meant nothing. He screamed but it was swallowed whole, never heard.
Then a person was there. Male or female he couldn’t tell. They just were. The person was missing a hand, the left one, maybe. It was hard to tell.
Something was said and it hurt and Gabe saw Dina staring at him, as close to panic as he’d ever seen her. She gasped when he focused on her, jerking back a little, then she sobbed in relief, touching his face in a way that felt so good.
“What happened?” she asked. “You went to touch him but you seized up, as if you were having a fit, then you collapsed.” Her fingers burrowed into his hair and her magic slid into him once more, seeking and soothing as it went.
“I’m fine,” he managed but she didn’t believe him, keeping her hands on his head until she’d satisfied herself there was no damage.
They were alone in the room with Nothing, who lay quietly like a good corpse should.
“The stretcher bearers ran out,” Dina explained. “I think they’re off to tell everyone about the Immortal Soldier.”
Gabe swallowed hard. “They can
tell whoever they please because this man’s not immortal. I can’t heal him.”
Dina looked from Gabe to Nothing, nodding slowly. “I’ll call Nacio and Manuel in to take him to the death-hut.”
“Let me dose him with opio first.”
“Is it necessary?”
Gabe had never given a killing dose of the drug before, never having admitted defeat and sent someone away to die. It was a euphoric, inciting happiness and excitability when taken in large enough amounts. Given in smaller doses it helped ease pain. Then there was the killing dose, that took away the pain and fear and allowed a person to die in peace.
Recalling the dark emptiness, Gabe began mixing a huge dose of opio. He would give Nothing this at least, a blissful final few moments before calm, gentle death.
When it was ready, he forewent the arm veins and simply pushed the needle directly into Nothing’s heart and injected the drug.
Within moments, the faint twitching stopped, the shiver in the remains of the lungs ceased and then, as if he’d just walked out of the room, Nothing was gone.
Chapter 11
David stood by the table, looking down at his body. What remained of it, at least. The Sacerdio was doing her best to sew what skin there was back together, either an attempt to give him some decency or to stop his innards from falling all over the place. He didn’t know, didn’t care. All that mattered was this new situation.
Whatever the Bone Mage had injected into his heart had been... nice. It had slid through him on the sluggish vestiges of blood, bringing a calm, soothing sensation. His panic had eased. So what if he couldn’t move? Or if every inch of him hurt so bad it felt like needles of ice and fire jabbing into him over and over? It was going to be all right now. It was... nice.
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