Balanced on the Blade's Edge (Dragon Blood, Book 1) (15 page)

Sardelle waved at the scattering of
snowflakes.
This hardly constitutes a
blizzard.

Give it time. You should
see the clouds coming in your direction.

She grimaced. Yet more news that would be
useful to share with the others, but which she couldn’t.

She extended her senses again, trying to get
a feel for the situation ahead, to help their soldiers if she
could. There were people at the other end of the canyon, but some
had scattered. At this distance, she couldn’t be certain if they
were Zirkander’s people or men from the ship. Oster was the only
one she recognized. He was farther back, closer to her and
Zirkander.

Trees and uneven terrain had forced the trail
to twist and wind before it reached the mouth of the canyon, but
they were finally entering it. A minute or two had passed since the
last shot fired. She sensed…

“They’re leaving.” Sardelle clapped a hand
over her mouth, worried she had given away something she shouldn’t
have been able to tell from her position.

But Zirkander nodded. “I see it.”

The trees made it difficult to see much of
anything, but ah, she needed to look up instead of ahead. That
massive balloon was clearing the canopy. If she had damaged it
once, maybe she could again, although… the number of people she
sensed on it was… high. Over two dozen. Maybe more.

“She’s not nearly as wounded as I had hoped,”
Zirkander said.

No, a sorcerer could make short work of
repairs.

A few people moved about on the deck, beneath
the shadow of the balloon. From Sardelle’s angle, she could only
see those closest to the railing, but she squinted, hoping to catch
sight of the magic user, wanting a look at her opponent. What she
saw was someone with a spyglass, standing next to someone with a
rifle, looking down at them.

“Look out,” she whispered, backing toward a
tree—or trying. The oversized snowshoes tangled beneath her feet,
and she tumbled to the ground in the middle of the trail… in clear
sight for those on the ship.

A shot fired, and she flung an arm out,
forming an invisible barrier in the air around her. A clunk-clang
sounded, another bullet being chambered, and a second shot fired on
the heels of the first. Belatedly, Sardelle realized it was
Zirkander shooting, not those on the ship. In fact… one man had
already disappeared from sight. The second, clutching his chest,
toppled backward, falling from her view.

Zirkander leaned toward her, and she dropped
her shield before he bumped into it. He picked her up and carried
her behind a couple of thick trees before setting her on her
feet.

“Thanks,” Sardelle said. “I forgot I was
wearing these clunky things.”

“They’re definitely awkward.” He was standing
beside her protectively, his arm around her back, but his gaze was
toward the sky. Carried on the currents, the ship had already
drifted out of view.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get your salvage,” she
said. Or maybe not… What if she ripped the balloon again? Sure,
there were no rockets to hide her sabotage, but with the trees
blocking the view, who would know what had happened?

She closed her eyes, envisioning that
balloon, and tried to cut a hole as she had before. This time, it
didn’t work. She sensed the why right away. There was a protective
film about it, not unlike the barrier she had just thrown up. The
sorcerer. He knew she was out there and wasn’t going to be caught
unaware again.

A screech came out of the depths of the
canyon, eerie and hair-raising. Sardelle gulped. “Was that… a
cat?”

There had been mountain lions and wolves in
the Ice Blades in her day, and she had heard both, but this sounded
like something different. Something less… mortal.

“Almost sounds like a hawk,” Zirkander said.
“A really loud, creepier-than-a-haunted-battlefield hawk. Let’s
find the other men and get back to the fort. There’s nothing left
for us here.”

The screech sounded again, closer this time.
It reverberated from the canyon walls and seemed to hang on the
breeze for an eternity. Something about it made Sardelle want to
spring in the opposite direction and let those soldiers find their
own way home. Zirkander didn’t shy away though, and she strode
after him.

She searched the valley with her senses,
hoping to find the creature and identify it. Or maybe just find it
so they could better avoid it. She sensed the men. They had been
spread out, trying to sneak up on the ship as its crew finished
repairs. They were angling back toward each other now, though two
seemed to have lost their way in the snow and trees—or maybe they
were intentionally looking for the source of those cries. Sardelle
shuddered. She wouldn’t.

Oddly, she couldn’t find it even with her
mage senses. The screech sounded one more time, so she knew the cat
or hawk or whatever it was hadn’t left the canyon, but she couldn’t
feel anything in the direction the noise had come from. Or where it
had
seemed
to come from. The way it
reverberated from the rocky walls made it hard to tell.

Two shots fired.

“They’re not shooting at some animal, are
they?” Zirkander didn’t sound out of breath from their charge into
the canyon.

Sardelle was too busy gulping air to
respond.

“Unless the airship left some men behind,”
Zirkander added.

“I don’t think so.” Sardelle didn’t sense any
people in the canyon, other than those on the colonel’s team. “It
seemed pretty full,” she added, when he glanced back at her. Minus
the two men he had shot… They wouldn’t be happy about that. She
hoped the craft wasn’t heading back to attack the fort. It had
flown off in the opposite direction, but that might not mean
anything.

“Colonel Zirkander?” came a call from their
left. Boulders and the cliffs of the canyon wall were visible
beyond the snowy trees, but Sardelle didn’t see the speaker.

“Coming,” Zirkander called. He veered off the
trail. “They must think we’re alone if they’re shouting,” he added
more quietly. “But what are they shooting at then?”

The screech sounded again, as if to answer
his question. It sounded like it was coming from the sky rather
than the canyon floor, or maybe some precipice up the cliffs. Once
again, Sardelle tried to find it, but the only life she sensed was
that of the soldiers and of a few rodents and chipmunks, most
burrowed beneath the snow. She counted four soldiers. Hadn’t there
been five before? Maybe she had been mistaken.

“How many men are out here with you?”
Sardelle asked.

“Five.”

Uh oh. Either someone had gotten separated
from the group, or…

The parkas of two of the men came into view
through the trees. If not for the contrast of the white ground,
Sardelle might have missed them. It was growing dark, with the snow
picking up again.

One of the soldiers lifted a solemn hand at
their approach. “It’s Nakkithor, sir.”

“What happened, Sergeant?” Zirkander
asked.

“We’re… not sure.”

“We didn’t see it,” the second soldier said.
“Nak was behind us, maybe ten meters back, at least that’s what I
thought. Then we heard his screams. We ran back and… ”

Sardelle tried to see past Zirkander without
leaving the trail he was breaking. The drifts hugging the trees to
either side were above her waist. It took a moment before she
located the man they were talking about. The soldier lay unmoving
on the ground in a tiny clearing, his body half hidden by a tangle
of thorny brambles on one edge. Dark crimson stains spattered the
snow. She didn’t have to take a closer look to know he was
dead.

“I swear I saw something, some shadow running
or flying away,” the sergeant said. Sardelle squinted through the
gloom to pick out the names on their parkas. Makt. “It was big and
moving fast, whatever it was. I shot twice, then realized it might
be you.”

“I haven’t managed to move that fast out
here,” Zirkander said, stopping beside the body. “It wasn’t
me.”

“I thought I hit… whatever it was, but it
didn’t cry out. It just disappeared behind the trees.”

“Rav and Oster went to look,” the second man,
Eringroad, said. “See if they could find tracks or a sign that we’d
hit it. As you can see, there’s nothing around here except our
snowshoe marks.”

“Are you sure they’re all our prints?”
Zirkander asked. “The Cofah could have had snowshoes too.”

“Fairly certain, sir. We saw the ship take
off and searched around it. No one seemed to have been left
behind.”

“No
one
.”

While the men debated, Sardelle mentally
braced herself and walked up to the side of the body. She couldn’t
believe she hadn’t sensed something that was big enough to kill a
man, and to kill him swiftly it sounded like. His face had been
ravaged by claws or—she thought of Zirkander’s hawk guess—talons.
The eyes were missing, gouged out, the holes so deep they revealed
brain matter beneath them. The front of his parka was shredded, his
flesh cut open, entrails torn free and slumped into the snow.

Sardelle took a long breath, glad the air was
so fresh and cold. As a healer, she had seen death before, and all
manner of wounds, but this was a particularly grisly display. Had
she arrived earlier, maybe she could have saved him, but maybe not.
He must have died quickly from those extensive wounds.

“Looks like the attack came from the air,”
Zirkander said. He wasn’t unmoved by the death, she sensed, but his
words came out calm and detached. This would be an analytical
discussion, not an emotional one.

Makt glanced at him. “That’s what I thought,
sir. But I wasn’t sure… I didn’t want to sound stupid. I reckon
there’s eagles and other big raptors up here, but an eagle couldn’t
do this, could it? And even if it could, why would it?”

“Why, indeed?” Zirkander looked to Sardelle.
Did he think she would have the answer? He couldn’t possibly think
she was somehow responsible, could he? Maybe he had figured out
that her powers were more than academic. Or maybe he thought it
suspicious that she had run after the group. “Are you all right?”
he asked, flexing his mittened fingers toward the body.

Oh. Concern. Not suspicion. Not yet.

She looked at his hand but not at the body.
She had seen enough. “I’m… ” Fine? That seemed a ludicrous thing to
proclaim with a mauled soldier at her feet. She simply nodded to
finish her answer.

Snow crunched, heralding the return of the
other two men, their rifles in their hands. They were shaking their
heads before they reached the colonel.

“We didn’t see anything.”

“Not so much as a tuft of fur.” Oster glanced
at Makt. “Or a feather.”

“It’s getting dark though.” The first man
eyed the metal gray sky above the pines and firs. Thick flakes
wafted down peacefully, unperturbed by the death below. “If there
had been drops of blood out there, they would have been hard to
pick out.”

“Should we head back, sir?” Oster asked.
“Even darker clouds are heading this way, and there’s a lot of wind
coming across the canyon up above. The airship had to fight to head
off to the north.”

Zirkander was staring down at the body, a
fist pressed to his mouth. “Yes, there’s nothing for us out here
now.”

Except a mystery. Sardelle couldn’t believe
something had slipped past her awareness. Something deadly. Was it
possible the airship sorcerer had masked it somehow?

“Let’s make a travois so we can haul him
back,” Zirkander said. “I’m not leaving his body out here to the
animals.”

“Yes, sir,” Oster said. “Rav, you got an axe?
Use those saplings to—”

A screech ripped through the forest.

It wasn’t in the distance this time, but
nearby, overhead. Sardelle searched the clouds, her hand balled
into a fist, ready to unleash an attack. Even in the small
clearing, the trees fenced them in, and little of the dark sky was
visible.

“Cover,” Zirkander barked.

The soldiers split into twos and lunged
behind trees, then knelt, their rifles pointing to the sky.
Zirkander started for a tree of his own, but saw Sardelle wasn’t
moving and grabbed her. Just as he was pulling her away, she
glimpsed massive outstretched wings high overhead, the dark shape
seeming more shadow than substance against the snow and clouds.

“There,” she cried at the same time as two
rifles fired.

Zirkander pushed her toward a pair of trees.
“Stay between them,” he ordered, even as he took two steps in the
other direction and raised his own firearm to the sky.

The bird—no, it was far too large to call it
a bird—had swooped out of sight almost as soon as they had spotted
it, but it came back around, higher. Even with the poor visibility,
Sardelle would have expected the men’s bullets to hit it, but the
creature never flinched, never altered its flight path. It was
climbing higher and higher. Readying for a dive.

She still couldn’t sense it, and that
perplexed her but didn’t keep her from preparing an attack of her
own. Shots rang out from all of the rifles. The massive bird pulled
in its wings to dive, like an osprey arrowing into a lake for a
fish, except its target was Zirkander. Sardelle pulled wind from
the coming storm, channeled it, and slammed it into the plummeting
creature. It was flung to the side, hurled into a stout pine.

Sardelle blew out a quick relieved breath.
She had feared that since she couldn’t sense it, she wouldn’t be
able to strike it, as if it were some kind of illusion. The great
bird—it had the markings of a barred owl, not a hawk, but it was
nearly as tall as a man—recovered before it hit the ground,
thrusting its wings out to beat at the air, to pull itself back
into the night sky.

All through this, the soldiers were firing,
their spent casings leaping from their rifles and burning holes
into the snow all around them. The creature climbed back into the
sky, not fleeing from the barrage but preparing to dive again.