Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 (8 page)

Solemnly, he had said, “It’s agreed then. You’ll save my life.”

“And you’ll take mine.” They’d ended that conversation with a brief handshake. Ezekiel had then gone back to one of the five books he’d managed to snatch out of compartment chest before mercenaries had pushed it into quicksand—over his loud and furious protests—in order to form a bridge for them to pass. Sara had wondered why he’d bothered carrying them into a swamp with all the wet mildew that would make short work of his pages but Ezekiel had looked over at her with a disdainful sniff and simply said, “Magic can preserve all things and these need to be preserved.”

Now as Sara looked over at Ezekiel, she gave his waist a slight squeeze. She doubted he even felt it. It made no matter. She would keep her promise. Even now when the yellow ichor leaked from Ezekiel’s left upper thigh. When he had begun to falter in his steps, Sara had done the only thing she could think of. She had grabbed some supple branches from the swamp interior as well as thick hanging vines, which the damned bog had plenty of, and bound his left leg to her right with sailor’s knots. That way when his mobility started to fade, Ezekiel could keep going.

She was actually grateful the venom had affected him differently than the others. If he had lost all mobility in the legs too quickly and she couldn’t get someone else to help, she had been prepared to tap into her battle magic and lift his weight with her own strength, but with his ability to hobble with her help, she only had to use all of her physical strength and endurance to get them by.

As they walked forward, Sara knew that eventually her natural strength would come to a limit. Before it did, she would rid herself of her armor before she left Ezekiel to die. What came next would be up to her compatriots.

“Forty minutes,” grunted Ezekiel as they hopped and walked along the way.

Sweat beaded on her brow, her right side felt like it was going numb from the strain, and she was damned hungry for some of that elephant meat. It was long gone by now, but it was sign of the desperate time that she actually desired its return. But she couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. Because stopping meant death.

“What?” she muttered.

“Forty minutes until I die,” he wheezed.

“Do you
have
a death wish?” she snarled. “Because if you do, I’ll cut your throat right now and make your dreams come true. Don’t tempt me, Ezekiel. Now stop your babbling and keep walking.”

Privately, she knew she was just lashing out. A promise was a promise. If he had made her swear to cut his throat, she would have done so long ago as well. But he had made her swear to save his life, so she was doing that. The light-hearted attempts at banter—or dark melancholia, she couldn’t decide what his constant muttering about time said about his mental state—came from the hallucinatory properties of the venom that were setting in. So she didn’t blame him for babbling.

Too much.

Other stricken victims had asked for their children, for their wives, for their damned dogs and for a good pint of ale before they died. Only this idiot curator babbled about death.

“T
his march has to end,” Sara muttered five minutes later as she saw another soldier drop—dead on his feet.

As she watched rain patter down on his leather jerkin to slide in rivulets to the muddy swamp, she almost sighed. She didn’t have to kick him for a response to know he no longer inhabited the plane of the living. His still flesh, and the fact that no one would voluntarily lay face-deep in mud only to choke to death on it, told her that.

“We can’t keep going on like this,” admitted Ezekiel slowly through the right side of his mouth.

“Not enough food, not enough water, and over half the division dead,” agreed Sara with a weary sigh. For once in her life, she wasn’t sure what was next. Would they make it out alive, or die here in this swamp like some forgotten troop out of legend?

Sara said, “I honestly thought I’d at least
make
it to the battlefield before I died.”

Ezekiel chuckled. “We don’t always get what we want, do we?”

Sara raised a tired hand to bat away some of the mosquitoes swarming near her face, to no effect. “Cheeky buggers. I’ll be dead soon, anyway,” she told them. “Can’t you wait until then?”

A new man appeared beside her slogging through the mud. As he passed her by, he turned and laughed as he said, “Nah. They want the blood while it’s fresh and still running in your veins. Can’t get hot blood if you’re dead.”

She chuckled as she glanced over....and up. He was at least a foot and half taller than her with long legs to match, but his pace was as slow as her own. She could see why, with the weight he carried more than doubling his own. He had a man slung over his shoulders like a sack of grain. He was carrying a full-grown mercenary, and the man was barely moving. The only time his legs flopped was when the man carrying him stumbled around a particularly thick mud pool.

“Is he dead?” she asked quietly.

“No,” grunted the man carrying his fallen comrade.

She frowned. He looked dead. You didn’t pass out in this swamp like dead weight. You died.

“Are you sure?” she asked gently. Gently for her, that was. Pretty insistently for total stranger.

“No,” he replied.

“Do you want me to check?”

“No.”

“Why not?” coughed Ezekiel.

The man hesitated before his next step. “Because he’s my brother, and as long as I don’t check, I know he’s alive. I’d rather he be alive and on my shoulders than dead and rotting.”

Sara was quiet for a moment. There was nothing she could say. It made perfect and imperfect sense. As long as the man believed his brother was alive, then to him, he was alive. The moment he checked and confirmed, he could be dead.

She sighed. Logic kicked in. The man had a greater chance of staying alive and defending himself if he wasn’t using both hands to hold his brother’s immobile form atop his shoulders.

As she turned to do something she was really bad at—coax him to check his brother’s pulse anyway and deal with the emotional consequences—she heard something approaching from above. Like the whirl of wings more numerous than anything she had before encountered. Besides, the sound was coming too fast. Much too fast.

“Hear...that?” Ezekiel asked, his breath coming out in a wheeze. It was getting harder for him to talk and breathe simultaneously. Sara knew the paralysis was spreading to the right side of his body and his throat. She also knew that before he fully succumbed to the paralysis and eventually died from asphyxiation, it would be a slow and harsh descent while his brain tried to cope with the lack of oxygen by slowly shutting down until he fell unconscious. It wouldn’t be painful so much as excruciating to know what was happening and be unable to do anything about it. Before his last few minutes of life, Ezekiel could also expect the muscles in his throat to restrict so tightly that the pathway of air to his lungs would be cut off. Sara knew from experience what it would feel like. That is, she knew what it felt like to slowly suffocate. The spotty vision. The gasping breaths. The darkness just at the edge of your mind, coming forward like a cloak of shadows as you fell back into its grasp.

It had been unintentional for her. It was a part of her training. Sara thought it would be similar to her time in the training grounds when a particularly overzealous sparring partner had pulled her into a grappling hold. He had outweighed her by sixty pounds and it had been hand-to-hand combat. When he had grabbed her from behind while wrapping his arms around her throat in a bruising hold, nothing she had been able to do could force him to loosen his grip. Not kicking him in the shins and knees with all of her might. Not slamming her fists down on his muscled arms or clawing at his wrists. Nothing forced him to release her. As it had dawned on her that she was losing this fight and dark spots began to grow in her vision, she had looked to her left. Her father stood there with a thunderous expression on his face and his own muscled arms folded in front of him.

Her last thought before she lost consciousness was ‘Father, save me.’

When she woke several hours later, she had looked straight up into her father’s disapproving face. He had said one thing, “Rest. You’re going to need it.”

Her throat feeling like a living bruise, Sara had slipped back into slumber with the touch of a healer’s hand. The next morning, her father had taken her out to the training fields and drilled her again and again with a practice dummy about what she had done wrong. The most important lesson, though, hadn’t been what fighting tactics she should have used to break her training partner’s hold. Instead, the lesson that he wanted drilled into her mind was that she shouldn’t have tried to rely on anyone else to save her life.

“Faith like that,
kitling
, will get you killed,” her father had said tautly.

“But father...” Sara remembered protesting.

He had cut her off before she could finish the sentence.

“But nothing. Rely on your strengths, know your weaknesses, and do what you have to do. But do
not
think that I, or anyone else, will be coming to save you.”

Sara had nodded obediently, though it hadn’t soaked in right away. Later, when she was on the training field, again and again and her father had stood back with a troubled face but unwavering stance as he watched her take a beating from bigger and faster soldiers, mages and non-magic people alike. Around the third or fourth fight, she had transitioned. Transitioned from a girl trainee to a young woman warrior who knew one thing—that she couldn’t rely on her father to
save
her. That in battle she must save herself. He was her protector, her mentor and her father, but he would not always be there.
That
is what he wanted her to learn. Independence. She first needed to be able to depend on
herself
before she leaned on others. So she had.

Now, glancing over at Ezekiel, Sara knew that all of those techniques she had learned—how to break a grapple hold, how to disable an attacker, how to break a windpipe, and how to keep from being put in such a compromising position in the first place—would be useless here. Because Ezekiel’s opponent was a poison he couldn’t fight, one that spread inside him like an insidious fog. The encroaching paralysis would leave him unconscious and perfectly helpless, as it had done to so many others. Then the razor-billed dragon would strike. Or that was its plan. Sara had a plan of her own, and it involved shoving her sword up the predator’s throat as far as she could reach before she let it or, as she suspected, its pack of hunters, claim her friend. 

She pushed those thoughts from her mind. Ezekiel was currently breathing, even if it was labored. Right now, they had something else coming for them from the sky, and they would deal with it, come what may. Sara tilted her head up with a frown and listened hard, trying to figure out what it was. Another threat? It was too loud and too high up to be another one of the venomous land dragons or a leopard. She watched with still and wary eyes as the tree branches above them began to snap back and forth with alarming velocity. The rain’s steady downpour, however, was unaffected which told her that whatever this was, it was elemental in nature and certainly not coming from the sky’s atmosphere. No, it was below the heavens and above the land, and strong enough to make winds of its own that disturbed the branches as they swayed back and forth.

It made her uneasy to think of something that powerful. The sound of buzzing was growing closer.

“No, not buzzing,” she muttered to herself. “Flapping. But what in the world could flap that large?”

Horror went through her mind as she answered her own question.
Dragons
.

“But it can’t be,” Sara said as her eyes desperately tried to pierce the dark foliage that blocked her view above. “Why here? Why now?”

She knew that dragons haven’t been seen on Algardis lands since the great founding.

Having never seen a dragon, her thoughts were conjecture. But she also knew of nothing else that made such strange sounds and descended from the skies. Although, truth be told, she
did
expect to hear roars. Nevertheless, she needed to be prepared. Or, well, as prepared as she could be to fight a
dragon
. The mercenaries were highly disadvantaged standing in mud with their vision obscured by the rain. But Sara knew—and she had a feeling her compatriots knew—that even if the able-bodied turned their backs and ran, they wouldn’t get far.

Either the swamp would kill them, easily picking off desperate stragglers without the strength of a group—not that that strength had done much for them so far—or, they could face this unseen threat together.

“Rather like staring down the maw of a dragon with no fear,” Sara muttered to herself wryly.

You know you’ll be eaten. You know you’ll die. But at least you’ll die with honor
, she finished with a thought.

She at least wanted to get eyes on the oncoming foe before she decided if she wanted to shuck honor and turn tail and run. Or hobbled, as it were, with Ezekiel on her arm. Sara wasn’t stupid, nor was she foolhardy. Facing down a dragon was not on her morning agenda.

Sara said quickly, “I’m going to set you down, Ezekiel. Get your bow ready!”

She did as she said without hesitation. As she knelt on the floor by his side and quickly unsheathed her knife for her right hand while standing to retrieve her cross-back sword with her left, Sara watched the scenery above with wary readiness.

Between wheezing breaths, Ezekiel managed to ask, “How?”

She gave him a surprised glance and then flinched at her callousness. He couldn’t string, much less aim, a bow with one hand.

“Never mind,” she muttered, somewhat ashamed at her momentary lapse as he leaned back on his one arm that remained moveable. He was trying to maintain some mobility by taking his weight on his right arm while his left side flopped uselessly about.

Then the winds above them became so harsh the branches blocking Sara view of the sky abruptly snapped off and plummeted toward them.