Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 (2 page)

The woman snorted, “Everyone knows they’re going to die. Even snot-nosed brats barely out of their mother’s swaddling.”

Sara bit her tongue, but she very much doubted an eight-year-old with a belly laugh a mile long, a Cams’ she remembered fondly, was thinking about how and when he would die, and she doubted even more that any of those lads and lassies had a mother who swaddled them in anything. It was well known that the orphans who joined the guilds didn’t come from well-off houses in search for apprenticeships. They came from the streets, from mothers who had abandoned them at birth. These women feared the stigma of giving birth to a child with no man in sight or they came from families who had fallen on hard times. Sara had learned that people were willing to do a lot worse than sell their children to the guilds for a profit. It made sense to them after all—one less mouth to feed and even a bit of coin for handing their children over.

The old and wizened mage nodded toward the front.

“Not like that one.”

“Not like what one?” Sara echoed.

“That one was no orphan,” the woman replied.

She was looking ahead and Sara could tell, just from the way her face was set, that she would say no more. If Sara were a betting woman, she would have sworn on a day’s wages that the woman’s beady eyes were fixated on the scalp of a certain red-haired gentleman. Sara had questions on her mind, but the woman hobbled forward and out of sight before the words had a chance to escape her lips. That was the last Sara saw of her as she disappeared into the crowded ranks of mercenaries further up ahead.

As Sara let out a slow breath and her eyes remained trained on the red hair that she could see thanks to her own battle mage gifts she couldn’t help but feel the fury rise once more within her. Sara didn’t have the emotional strength or the desire to stomp through a sixth of a mile of mud to race up to the front and confront the captain on a suspicion. A suspicion of ineptitude, of moral ambiguity, or of general cowardice. She couldn’t. Besides, the second suspicion wasn’t exactly a capital crime and the first and last were something she couldn’t prove. The man certainly hadn’t risen through the ranks of the cut-throat mercenary’s guild based on his good looks. For now she would wait and watch and let the pain, the anger and the fear simmer like a black cauldron over a banked fire. As long as she didn’t allow her emotions to control her actions, Sara felt that the pain they awoke kept her mind sharp, acting more as a boon than a burden. It kept her awake. It kept her alert.

S
ara’s fist slowly clenched by her side as she felt the pain in her heart manifest itself into an almost physical knot that grew tighter and tighter in her stomach. Sara was no fool.  The captain had abandoned the lot in favor of saving his own skin, keeping his prized division of fighters away from the fray. Above all—continuing on with his mission to deliver the captured Kade mage known as Nissa Sardonien, the revered Sun mage, to the council at the battlefield.

He’d done it for a
reason
. But in her opinion, his reasoning was flawed. His logic was corrupt. He was without honor.

“Can’t do anything about it now though,” she muttered softly to herself, “The only option that remained would be to bring him up on court martial charges back in Sandrin.”

As things stood that would just have to do. She didn’t have to like the conclusion. It rankled her skin like a cat that had gotten wet and was trying to rid itself of the odd sensation on its fur. Sara felt pain, anger, and a smoldering desire for retribution, retribution that
would
come. Her resentment wasn’t because of some all-consuming love of her fellow mercenaries. She hadn’t really liked any of her campmates. In fact, she had flat-out disliked a few. Still, she felt some responsibility to fight for the memory of her fallen comrades, just as she fought for her father’s ghost. Besides, none of them deserved to die like that. They had signed up for glory on the battlefield in the name of their empress, not to be sheep slaughtered as one captain’s diversionary tactic.

Sara spit into the swamp in the disgust while she felt her lip curl up in anger. She couldn’t help it. Disgust roiled through her from the bad taste in her mouth to the dark pit in her stomach that threatened to make her hurl.  She shivered, though it had nothing to do her sweat-stained armor or the swamp water that seeped into her boots and everything to do with the man who led them. Sara would call him a coward before she called him a leader. But fortunately for him, the captain would never again have to hear her opinions of his actions. In fact, the man cared less for her opinion than he did for Ezekiel Crane’s at the moment. Except for one brief exchange, the captain had made a point of studiously avoiding her while looking important at the front of the lines. At least, Sara liked to think he was avoiding her. The fact that he might not consider her significant enough of a threat to even entertain a conversation briefly crossed her mind. Briefly.

The one time he had approached the two of them, days past, it had been to deduce Ezekiel’s opinion on their location. Sara hadn’t thought then that Ezekiel knew where they were. She had been surer by the minute however after that exchange, Sara Fairchild was sure that the captain didn’t know his ass from his hands, in addition to being a coward. Ezekiel, however, hadn’t been able to shed any light on where they had ended up. He had quietly and respectfully explained that he had not one clue where they were in the swamp nor the distance to the end. As a ‘rare items acquirer for the wealthy’, Ezekiel’s explorations had taken him to various parts of the empire, but never had he wandered into these lands.

Neither Sara nor Captain Simon had bothered asking why he’d overlooked this part of the empire. They had only to look around at the miasma of heat and wet to see why. This place was like living in someone’s armpit. In addition, Sara hadn’t seen any sign of intelligent life living in the swamp, neither human nor even
kith
, and the stench of the place was worse than her underclothes after a fortnight on the march.  She had to wonder what in the seven hells a swamp was doing smack-dab in the middle of what was supposed to be the most bountiful farmland in the empire.

However it came to be here,
Sara thought with a weary wipe of her brow, The temperatures are going to make me weep for a mug of cold water from home.

Sara remembered asking a builder about how the swamp had come to be here. He was a mercenary assigned the sole tasks of maintaining the long-abandoned war machines and the roads their mercenary core traveled on and so if anyone would have known the answer, he would have. His face had been a curtain of sweat as he quietly said, “Magic. Magic is all it is. This civil war is less than a decade old and the mages are changing the very fabric of the landscape. Mark my words, Algardis will never be the same. Never look the same after this is done.”

Sara had wondered what he had meant then. But when she had questioned further, he had just wandered off muttering about mold on the spokes of his carriage wheels and rust lining his cannon casings. Sara would be the first to admit she didn’t know much about taking care of machinery, but she knew weapons and a dank swamp didn’t belong anywhere near the empire’s most fertile fields.

“These lands are supposed to be filled with fields of golden wheat and brown barley for as far as the eye can see,” she muttered distastefully as she eyed a frog-like creature that gazed right back at her with two of its three eyes; the last one tracked on an insect she couldn’t see.

As Ezekiel had nodded in understanding and given the captain his somewhat-sincere apologies that he couldn’t help, after all, he was stuck here— too—and if the captain was lost, so were they all, he kept a tight grip on Sara’s left wrist. Because she wasn’t thinking of pleasantries or even giving the man who had brought them here a sympathetic look. No, Sara knew and Ezekiel knew, that she was very likely to bring up her clenched fist in a swift left hook, being ambidextrous had its benefits after all, and clock the captain straight into his nose. She hoped her fist broke the captain’s fine, patrician nose too. It would serve him right.

Sara couldn’t abide incompetents any more than she could evil-doers. This captain, in her mind’s eye, was a lot of one and a slight bit of the other. A person had to have a little bit of evil in them to blithely make the decision to leave his mercenaries in the path of an assault like sitting ducks while he took cover. Sara’s left wrist had ached, not from Ezekiel’s grip, but from the tremor that ran through her muscles as she fought the urge to jerk free and assault her captain. It would do them no good here. She had known that. She hadn’t liked it, but she had known.

Under the captain’s assessing gaze, she had watched as he had figured out that she would deck him if he had stayed a minute more. To his credit, Captain Barthis Simon had turned away quietly, not questioning the defiant rage in her orange eyes that undoubtedly made them glow like the coals of a banked fire. He didn’t turn away because he was afraid; he, too, was one of the fabled battle mages. He had turned away because he was smart, and Sara Fairchild was a fight he didn’t need at the moment.

As she had watched him walk away with rage and disgust in her heart,
Sara remembered huffing and irritably yanking her left wrist out of Ezekiel’s bruising hold
.
She had stared at the retreating captain’s back and said to Ezekiel beside her, “Don’t ever get in my way again.”

“Fine, I’ll just let you hang in the gallows for assaulting an officer,” he had said dryly.

Sara had then turned to him with a solemn look on her face and a bit of the anger still in her eyes.

Ezekiel had stilled at the look. “I was only trying to help.”

“When I need your help, I’ll ask for it.”

A tic had appeared in Ezekiel’s eye. “You see, Sara, that’s something friends do.”

She folded her arms crossly as she watched him. “What?”

“They help without being asked.”

Before she could get another word in, Ezekiel Crane had proceeded to do what he did best in a huff—ignore her. He had strode forward silently. She had followed moments later, and they had been silent marchers for the better part of an hour before Ezekiel broke as he spotted a crested-something-or-other bird that he had to get Sara’s attention for.

“Look at that, Sara! That’s a black-crested Willow Pike C—,” Ezekiel had exclaimed.

Sara hadn’t paid his words the least bit of mind. But she had obediently trained her eyes on the bird Ezekiel’s trembling finger pointed at while putting a hand on his raised arm and forcing him to lower it. Caution had forced her to put a wary hand on a knife even as her eyes sought out his prey. She wouldn’t know if the bird was one of those caged balls of feathers so popular with nobles on Market Street or a terrifying, razor-beaked predator until she had set her eyes on it. Relief that it was the former and not the latter put a small half-smile on her face. You could never actually tell if whatever Ezekiel was pointing at like an attraction in the central square was dangerous or simply interesting. He seemed to find both qualities mesmerizing. Both because the bird was the former and he was talking to her again. Sara tensely wondered for a minute if she could have trusted Ezekiel to shoot it out of the sky; she hadn’t exactly had a chance to test his mettle with the old bow-and-arrow.

She had reluctantly decided to just be grateful the issue hadn’t come up.

“You’re sure it’s not a threat?” she had teased.

“Of course it’s not a threat,” had said Ezekiel, “But I don’t know what it’s doing
here.
They’re woodland birds, not swamp creatures.”

She had watched the black and white winged creature flit from branch-to-branch before it took flight,
away
from the direction they were heading. Its movement left her both with a sense of unease and cautious satisfaction. Satisfaction because she had been right. Unease because being right meant they were stuck up the creek without a paddle, so to speak. In other words, they were screwed.

“It’s going away from us,” Sara said.

“I know,” grumbled Ezekiel as he hastily put away the sketchbook he had brought out from a pocket of his non-regulation gear.

“That’s bad,” Sara said.

“I know,” Ezekiel repeated with slumped shoulders while staring ahead. Then he side-eyed Sara in surprise. “Wait. Why do
you
think it was bad?”

It was obvious he thought it was the end of the world because he had just missed his opportunity to illustrate the rare bird.

“Because,” Sara said as she looked forward into the endless swamp that lay before them, “You never want to go somewhere a damned bird won’t, and...“

“And?” Ezekiel prodded after she was silent for a moment.

“And,” said Sara grimly, “We’re three miles into this swamp trek, by my estimations, and we’ve yet to see anything as close to normal as that bird, rare though it is, as we walked by. That tells me two things: one, the builder was right—this swamp is mage-made.”

“And the other?” Ezekiel asked quietly.

Sara looked over at him, “That we’ve barely reached the beginning. The bird turned around because it could. It would rather turn back to fly to normal land, presumably, than go further into this swamp.”

“Oh,” said Ezekiel with a thoughtful look. “How much longer do you think the swamp lasts?”

“I don’t know,” Sara remembered answering, “And that’s what worries me.”

Ezekiel nodded to the rapidly receding form of their red-haired captain visible in the distance and said, “You’re not the only one.”

S
ara eyed the captain’s back, her gaze still filled with anger, but pure pity resided in it as well. He may have abandoned his men, but she doubted he wanted to be anywhere near this group of mercenaries if he tried the same with them. Two hundred-and-seventy-five mercenaries meant two hundred-and-seventy-five well-trained killers who would hunt him down at the first sign of treachery.

They may have been loyal to him, but they weren’t fools. Sara had seen what he had done to his other mercenaries. So had the surviving division—now
her
division, as she been promptly promoted after surviving the fray and returning to the fold with a very valuable prisoner in tow. But it wasn’t just Sara the captain had to worry about, because it was those two hundred-and-seventy-five mercenaries who had seen him abandon his other troops without batting an eyelash. They wouldn’t care that he had done it for the greater good, not when it came down to their asses being on the line. Mercenaries were mercenaries for a reason. They were ruthless killers and shrewd practitioners of war. Everyone knew that you didn’t join the mercenaries’ guild because of your loyalty to the crown. You joined for the sense of the adventure, the excellent pay of the guild, and the damned-fearsome fight training you received.