Death Flag

  “Well, that’s the plan,” Madison said flatly. “If you have a better idea, I suggest you tell it to me now. Otherwise, things are going to get a bit complicated from here on out.”

  “I could still try and get closer to the group,” Warren suggested. “I might be able to figure out something that way.”

  “There’s only one way up that cliff, and they’re sitting at the top. That group we ran into last night was your common, run-of-the-mill slaver. They habitually don’t set guards or watches because there’s no one out here who would be stupid enough to bother them, and we got lucky enough that we were able to walk up on them. These guys . . . Well, if they’re anything like this bunch, they’re not very much to talk about. But I think there’s something to those who are up on the plateau. They’re up there for a reason, and they’re likely to have a lookout watching the only reasonable way up or down. Unless you’re going to climb a cliff face that’s straight up and down in broad daylight”—Madison pointed upward at the sun that was starting to rise—“then this is our only lead.”

  “Do what you have to,” Shayna said firmly and without hesitation. Madison turned to look at her, and there was a fierce light in her eyes that he hadn’t noticed there before. “Whatever you have to do. Do it.”

  “Warren, I think it might be best if you set up a perimeter,” Madison said. “See if you can figure out what happened to the missing man—but don’t engage. If anyone starts to come this way, let me know immediately.”

  Warren cast one last glance over at the unconscious man and then nodded once and set out to start running a perimeter. Madison didn’t relish what he was about to do, but it was likely the only way that he was going to get the answers he needed. He had been held prisoner by these people before, and he knew that it was only a matter of time until something awful happened to either Erin or Alyanna. That was likely the same conclusion that Shayna had suddenly come to and why she was encouraging him to get on with it: she wanted to save her sister from whatever horrors might be in store for her. That was also why Madison had sent Warren away. He knew that the younger man was going to have issues with Madison’s methods.

  Madison turned and made his way over to the unconscious bandit as soon Warren was out of sight and lost in the trees, finding him exactly where he had left him collapsed against a tree. It had happened rather quickly at the onset of the fight, but Madison slightly recalled slamming the man’s head back against the trunk and then punching him in the nose, and the man’s bloodied face was a testament to at least half of that recollection. Madison reached down and ripped the cloth covering the man’s face out of the way, revealing a somewhat average-looking man. He had olive-toned skin and a scraggly beard that badly needed to be trimmed, but there wasn’t anything otherwise distinguishable about him. Madison rocked the man’s head back and off his chest once he was confident that he was still breathing and slapped him across the face. When he didn’t stir, Madison slapped him again. The man’s eyes fluttered open as if he were coming out of a deep sleep, and his eyes rolled around in his skull as he struggled to focus.

  Once he realized that Madison was standing over him, the man visibly shuddered and tried to jump to his feet, reaching about for what was presumably some type of weapon.

  “Don’t try it,” Madison warned in a low tone. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and forcibly pushed him back down against the tree. “Just don’t. If you want to have any chance of making it out of here alive, I suggest you remain calm and get cooperative.”

  The man looked up at him with eyes that were filled with fear. He quickly looked from side to side as if desperately seeking some type of saving grace or an escape, but that only made things worse for him. The only things left for him to see were Shayna, standing to the side with daggers drawn, and the bodies of his dead comrades. His eyes flitted across the carnage as if in disbelief and then returned to Madison’s face.

  “Get the picture yet?” Madison asked casually. “You’re going to either cooperate or join your friends in whatever afterlife you think is out there. Got it? Nod if you understand.”

  The man stared up at Madison’s face as if trying to figure out how serious he was, but he didn’t give any sign of answering. Madison materialized his knife in his right hand as he simultaneously grabbed the man’s hair and jerked his head back with his left. He pressed the tip of the still-bloodied blade up against the man’s eye threateningly. “We can play whatever games you want,” Madison growled. “But you’re only going to lose—one small piece at a time.” He pulled the blade away and roughly released his grip on the man’s hair at the same time. “Get it?”

  The man looked up at him once again, and Madison was convinced that there was a tinge of hatred mixed in with the fear in his eyes now as well. Reluctantly, however, he made one small, almost-imperceptible nod. “Do not think that the goddess will forgive you for this,” he said defiantly, almost spitting the words out. “She will know what you have done here, and she will seek our vengeance.”

  Madison couldn’t stop himself from grinning a cocky, lopsided smile. “Yeah. Okay. Sure. Now, why don’t you start off by telling me why you attacked us. That should be a nice and easy question for someone like you to answer.”

  “Because the goddess willed it,” the man replied without an ounce of deceit or mockery in his voice.

  Madison wanted to sigh. He could already tell that this wasn’t going to go well, and it was going to be even worse if this guy hammed it up with some otherworldly religious justification. “Really? You’re actually going to go with that? Couldn’t you just tell me that someone paid you to do it? That you were trying to take us prisoner so we could be sold at auction or something?”

  “I do not claim to know the will of the goddess,” he said devoutly, tilting his head back as he spoke. “It is not for one such as myself to question her will, only to obey her wishes.”

  “Fine. Tell me about this goddess then.”

  “She is the great Golden Goddess,” he replied with a look of devout admiration.

  “A-huh. Go on.”

  “The Golden Goddess who watches over our lands unseen appeared to us one day, telling us that her messengers would soon arrive with her word. She told us that our lives would be forever changed after that, and she was correct. She saved us from a miserable existence and delivered us from the oppression of the wicked beasts. We have been selected by her to mingle with her chosen people, but we must first prove ourselves as worthy of her blessings.”

  “So, by proving yourself worthy, you mean by killing us. You brought almost a dozen people here to kill three people, and that somehow makes you worthy? Seems cowardly and craven to me,” Madison stated derisively. “What bravery or honor is there in attacking someone with four to one odds?”

  “The honor is in the act of obedience,” he chanted almost reverently. “It is not for one such as myself to question her will, only to obey her wishes.”

  “But why us? Why here?” Madison pressed. “Where are the rest of your people? How many are with you? Where did that man run off to?”

  The man suddenly turned mute, holding his gaze defiantly but refusing to say anything more. He was apparently happy enough to sing the praises of the goddess, but when it came to giving up information of any real value, he turned as silent as the grave.

  “Perhaps I didn’t make myself quite clear,” Madison said in a low tone. He pressed the blade against the man’s cheekbone and drew it down across his face slowly, carving a thin, red arc behind him. The man grimaced and gritted his teeth against the pain, but he didn’t make a move to try and stop him. Madison hadn’t even gone to the trouble of finding the man’s hands, so it was almost as if he was tacitly accepting the punishment.

  Realizing that things weren’t going to work, Madison suddenly shifted tactics. He flipped the blade around in the palm of his hand and slammed it down into the side of the man’s thigh. The blade penetrated deeply but without hitting anything vital. The man sat up
and howled in pain, and Madison struck him across the face with the back of his hand. If subtle and slow pain wasn’t going to do it, maybe this would. “You have about twenty minutes before you bleed to death,” Madison warned. “Either you cooperate, and I give you treatment, or you bleed out and die. The choice is yours. Your mission is a failure. Your goddess will never accept you, and you will die a wretched, miserable, lost soul. Talk and live and perhaps there is a chance for redemption.”

  The man spat up a mouthful of blood, and Madison noticed that his nose had started bleeding again from being struck. He whimpered slightly and stared down at his leg in disbelief.

  “Decide quickly,” Madison said encouragingly. “You don’t have much time.”

  “Alright! Fine!” the man hissed, his fervent piety suddenly broken. He reached down and gripped the sides of his legs as if it was somehow going to do him any good but didn’t reach for the handle of the knife buried there. When he spoke, it was hasty and jumbled up without too much of a coherent order. The pain propelled him forward, and once he started speaking, it was as if he believed that he could somehow forget the fact that he was betraying his people and his goddess if he passed over everything quickly enough to forget ever having said it. “We were told that he was here. The man we’ve been looking for all this time. The goddess told us to come to this area and cooperate with those damned pirate scum over a month ago. We didn’t like it, and we don’t like their kind, but we didn’t have much choice but to obey her commands. There were reports of someone seeing him down below after he killed a band of slavers. He set fire to the forest to cover his escape, so someone reasoned that he had to come up higher to escape the flames. That’s all I know, I swear!”

  “What pirates? What man?” Madison asked suspiciously.

  “The pirates! The only pirates left! They sail under Garin Fane. He’s unified the whole bloody lot of them on this side of the ocean under his banner from what I’ve heard told, but he’s working for the goddess now! They’re out here searching for something she wants.”

  “What does she want? What is she after that would be out here in the middle of the wilderness?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, gritting his teeth and rocking his head back and forth for a minute. “I don’t know. Something about Janos’ treasure. That’s all I’ve heard. That’s between him and her. I told you: I don’t question the goddess. I just obey whether I like it or not.”

  “And yet a man hears a lot of things if he listens to the gossip. You’ve been out here a month, right? So, you must want whatever it is pretty badly. People talk. Men gossip. What man are you looking for?”

  “I told you!” he said, his voice rising in desperation. “We’re after him! It’s our job to find and recover him, nothing else!”

  “What about the lord?” Madison asked. “Why were you and your men following him? Why were the slavers after him?”

  “Please,” he pleaded, staring down at his leg. “Please don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.”

  “Where is Lord Fox?” Madison demanded, raising his voice as well. “Where is he being held?”

  “Ah . . . He’s . . . They have him. The slavers have him. They weren’t supposed to capture him, but they did it anyway. He’s being held in the big camp. The big camp . . . Down below to the east. It was not the goddess’s wishes for something to happen to him. We were supposed to leave him alone for now, but something changed. They got greedy, thinking that they could hold him for ransom and get rich and then let him go later. They’re angry about being out here for so long, but they’re after him as well, just like we are.”

  “Who? Who is this ‘him?’”

  “Him!” the man insisted as if the answer should already be obvious. “The one the goddess is after! You’ll know him by the mark of the . . .” The man’s voice trailed off as he finally focused in on Madison’s hand. The tattoo there was covered by his armor, so there was no way the bandit could see the mark. There was no way for him to know that Madison was likely the person they had been looking for all this time, but he seemed to sense it anyway. “You’re him . . . You’re the one who . . . O-Oh, goddess! What have I done?!”

  Madison made his cowl disappear into his equipment stash, giving the man a good look into his face for the first time. If what Shayna and Warren had said was to be believed, there was no real way for the man to have seen his face before now. “How are you to identify this man?” Madison asked, smiling arrogantly despite his best efforts not to. “Dark hair? Dark beard? Tall? Pretty nondescript, I’m sure.”

  “B-by a marking,” the man stammered. “He wears the mark of the Legion. It’s . . . It’s said that he’s . . . That he’s returned.”

  “Oh?” Madison made the plate covering his wrist and forearm disappear and pressed it in front of the man’s face, clenching his fist for effect. “What would this man do if he found out that you were after him?”

  “I-I don’t . . . Please . . .” He fell into a fit then, tears forming in his eyes and sobs wracking his body. He rocked back and forth in place, still clutching onto his injured leg.

  “Who is in the camp up above? Why would someone go to all the trouble of coming all the way up here in a hurry just to make camp?”

  “I . . . I don’t . . . Please!”

  “Tell me!” Madison pressed, almost shouting. “Why are they here?”

  “They have the girl!” he cried. “They have the girl! We were supposed to meet up with them and wait for orders before moving her to another location! It’s the safest place in the region! No one can get up there! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  Madison felt his heart start to race and the pressure start to grow at those words. “Which girl? Who do they have? Is it Fox’s daughter?”

  “No . . . No! I . . . It’s the other one! The princess is being taken straight to the goddess! She’ll be moved to the big camp first and then on to the goddess herself! We have orders not to harm that one! She’s going to . . . She’ll be . . . for you . . .”

  “Yeah. She’s bait to lure me in. She’s the perfect key they need to make their entire plan work. They get control of Stargrave, and they use her as leverage to control me and lure me in like fish to fresh bait.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . Please! Please don’t kill me! Don’t let me die!” the man wailed, once more being overcome with sobs. “I shouldn’t have! I shouldn’t have. I’m—”

  Madison struck out with his fist again, rocking the man’s head back against the tree and rendering him unconscious for a second time. The man’s head slumped down to his chest, and his hands dropped idly to the ground, no longer able to clutch his leg. Madison glanced over at Shayna then for the first time since waking the man up and beginning the questioning. She looked as pensive as he felt, even if he could only tell by the way she was standing with her arms across her chest. It made him slightly uneasy to think that he couldn’t read her facial expressions, so he stepped over to her and pushed the hood back for her.

  “What do you think?” he asked, looking down at her. Now that he could see her face, he realized that she really was as apprehensive as her posture suggested. Her brow was furrowed with worry and her mouth was set in a thin line. The questioning had been far tamer than Madison had expected, and he seriously doubted that she had been upset by it. He had needed to use a bit of force, but he hadn’t need to shed nearly as much blood as he had thought, so it was likely the knowledge that her sister was being held up above in a camp that was supposedly impossible to attack.

  “I think he’s a nut job,” she answered coldly. “But I don’t think he’s lying. He seems to know who you are, and I think he’s more afraid of you than he is in love with his goddess.”

  Madison nodded. “He really did seem to give up the knowledge and flip on his beliefs rather quickly. I guess he wasn’t really that devout in the end after all. Still, you think what he said was true? That Erin is up there? Being held captive?”

  Shayna shrugged. “
It’s the best we have to go on. He also told us where Lord Fox and Alyanna were, and that’s the best we have to go on.”

  Madison reached up and scratched his beard while he considered things. “Warren!” Madison shouted, calling to the scout. He was reluctant to call too much attention to their position, but it was impossible not to if he was going gain the Warren’s attention.

  “I’m here,” Warren answered almost immediately in a low tone.

  Madison swiveled to find the young man standing behind him. “You didn’t go far, did you?”

  Warren shrugged. “I figured that I had better make sure you didn’t do something that you were going to regret later.”

  Madison snorted. “There’s little chance of me ever regretting anything I do to these people. They’ve tortured, they’ve killed, and they’ve taken my friends hostage. They’re getting off easier than they deserve as far as I’m concerned.”

  “The fact that you believe that is what worries me,” he said quietly. “I know what you’re capable of, and that’s the problem. Still, as long as you know where the line is, there’s still hope of coming back, right?”

  Madison knew that he was parroting his own words back to him, but he didn’t understand why. There was a bit of derision there, which was incredibly unlike Warren, so there must have been a reason for it. Regardless, Madison didn’t have time to figure that out at the moment. He had enough problems on his plate already without adding on one more, and they were all time sensitive.

  “So, you heard everything?” Madison asked. “No need for me to bring you up to speed on anything?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure I caught everything,” he responded. “You want to know what I think?”

  “That’s right,” Madison confirmed.

  Warren shrugged and leaned against the tree he was standing beside. “It seems pretty obvious already: I think you’re going up there no matter what. And then you’re going after Fox and Alyanna as fast as you can.”