Blades of Sorcery Read online

  So when she’d finally made her way through the crowds and to Captain Barthis’s side, she could be forgiven for still not looking down.

  Until now.

  And what Sara saw made her catch her breath.

  It was endless.

  A canyon so large and so long that she couldn’t see the end when she looked west. And could barely discern an edge when she looked east.

  “What is this?” Sara asked, astonished.

  She was fairly certain it hadn’t been here a few days before. In fact, she’d swear on it.

  Captain Barthis answered, “A mass grave.”

  She blinked in shock. “The Kades?”

  She meant to ask whether the Kades had created it, but the answer he gave made her want to hurl.

  “Our own,” the captain said curtly. It was also the first sign of an emotion in his voice that didn’t resemble pain.

  She looked over at him as the wind off the cavern gently ruffled her hair.

  “What happened?” Sara asked.

  His fingers curled in a fist. As if, just by speaking, he was reliving the memories that he wanted to bury. She didn’t blame him. Even flashing back onto the events of last night made her stomach churn, but she had to know. They had to know.

  “Sir, please,” Sara said—she knew it was a tough ask of him to speak, but no one else she had passed had even bothered to mention what lay directly in front of them.

  She knew they’d seen it. Which made her wonder why they’d been silent. But she had a feeling she did know why. Now that she thought back on it, it had been in their feverish gazes, their laughter too forced, their hugs too tight. Sara realized that the joy they’d greeted the “lost” regiment with was perhaps so high to mask the sorrow of just how many they had lost. And looking down at the cavern out of the corner of her eyes, Sara realized the sheer number buried in that slash in the earth had to be untold hundreds, if not thousands.

  So when she looked to her captain for answers, it was with that loss in mind. And that pain.

  “The Kades cut the entire encampment off,” he said. “Shield walls dropped from the sky with no warning. Like locusts, they gobbled us up until we were trapped and fighting within for our very survival.”

  Sara nodded, encouraging him to go on. She knew this. She’d been trapped in the very same hell herself…for hours. They had survived. But this cavern was something else. Something new.

  Barthis lifted his eyes to the sky before he straightened his shoulders and looked back at her. “When we fought our way through, I found that the initial attack had affected us all in different ways.”

  Sara waited for him to continue after he paused. She didn’t interrupt or move. She was like a gazelle frozen before its predator, not wanting to startle them in action and yet not bounding away either. She knew that whatever he had to say next would change her perspective forever. She just couldn’t say how much.

  The captain continued with only the slightest clench of his hand into a fist to show that he was reliving those memories. “After we came through, I noted that some of us even won with overwhelming numbers, depending on where they had dropped those domes. But we were all shocked to see the shield walls crumble. Still, none of us let the opportunity to push the Kades back further pass us by. We rallied together, and I immediately began receiving running reports from messengers within disparate groups.”

  The lack of emotion in his voice was concerning to her, but better that than grief. Numbness she could deal with; grief led you down paths that sometimes you didn’t or couldn’t come back from. Like dark despair. Like killing yourself. And as far as she could tell, Barthis was the most senior officer available. He was the only officer available…until she found the others. So she bolstered him with a light squeeze of his forearm. The man she had up till now despised. But she had to admit that his grief was genuine. No matter what he told her next, his concern for his mercenaries and all the people who served under him was real.

  Either that or he’d lost so many souls in one run that even his nonchalant persona had cracked.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, Sara listened as he kept reporting, thinking all the while that this was one of the most surreal moments of her life. A captain reporting to a mercenary three officers below his command was…unprecedented. But these were unprecedented times.

  Still Captain Barthis spoke, and she listened because she had the feeling he hadn’t previously spoken aloud the thoughts he was telling her now. And if she was the first person he’d told, it was as cathartic for him to get it out as it was informative for her to hear. It remained disturbing for them both, however.

  “After a few hit-and-run skirmishes where we bolstered the fighting of those whose shield walls had just come down, we began to gather in greater numbers,” he said. “Thousands of us. My troops. Then…then it came.”

  He sounded haunted.

  “What came?” Sara asked gently.

  “The bombardment,” he said. “But it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It struck the center of the encampment with pinpoint accuracy over and over again. It never eased up, and the target was the area where our main troop quarters lay. Their shield walls were just coming down. They had no haven even if they’d won the battle within their dome.”

  Sara was silent. That was horrifying.

  “And you know what they said?”

  “Who?” Sara said, startled. “The soldiers? They yelled something back before they died?”

  A smile, the first one she’d seen, ghosted over Captain Barthis’s face.

  “No,” he said with a grim look at the sun floating over the canyon’s edge. “The enemy.”

  Sara stilled. “What did the Kades say?”

  He turned around to look at her with a wild look in his eyes. “‘This is for our shield mages.’”

  Sara didn’t know what to say.

  But Barthis wasn’t through.

  “What could they possibly have meant by that? We’ve never targeted their shield arrays—hell, we’ve never even been able to get inside their camps to hit their lower-ranking mages!”

  Sara stuttered out the words before she thought to keep her mouth closed: “‘This is for our shield mages’—they said that?”

  “Word for word,” her captain confirmed. “And when the bombardment started, it didn’t let up until the canyon you see before you lay fully formed.”

  Pale and sweating, Sara stared out at the massive slash in the ground, the “mass grave,” as the captain had called it. In her mind, she called it another name, and it was retribution. Knowing that and knowing her own responsibility in making that happen, Sara let out a harsh cry, half wounded animal and half human sob.

  When Captain Barthis heard her sound, he didn’t flinch or turn away. Instead, he wrapped a stiff arm around her back and pulled her in. Sara couldn’t do much more than stare into the canyon she had made, stunned at the lives lost and the havoc wreaked. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the one who had physically taken those lives. She was responsible because she had led the charge against the Kade shields…and she had slaughtered their mages.

  As he rested his chin on top of her hair and gripped her tightly, the captain said, “Don’t weep for our lost, mercenary. Cry for our vengeance. Because I don’t know how or why the Kades got what they did in their head, but I’ll return their heartless attack with fire and brimstone like they’ve never imagined.”

  Sara shook her head against his chest and then forced herself to raise her head. She wiped the tears on her cheeks away and proudly held her head up high.

  Looking Barthis in the eye was one of the hardest things she’d ever done in that moment, knowing that the ghosts of the slain were watching her too.

  “Sir, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  18

  Sara watched as the captain looked at her face. Once he saw how serious she looked, he turned away from the canyon fully and said, “I’m listening.”

  Sara almost com
mented on how much more put together he sounded now, as if all it took was someone listening to him to make him feel better, but she didn’t. Although she did wonder if any of her guilt would be assuaged by telling what she’d done now.

  She guessed she’d find out soon enough. Although she couldn’t mention how much better he looked while doing it. That wouldn’t be appropriate, and besides, he probably wouldn’t want anything to do with her once she told him what she had done.

  Nevertheless, Sara had to give him an explanation, and so she did. She tried to never shirk away from her duties, and telling the truth, in this case, was one of them.

  So she took a deep breath and spelled out exactly how she’d brought down her shield dome and several dozen others alongside it. When she was done, he was silent. Contemplative. She let him think while she reassured herself that she’d done the right thing by speaking up. After all, what if he had done something so heinous in retaliation that she could never forgive herself? Besides, she wasn’t the only one who knew what had happened. She was just the first to report.

  When she was getting so antsy that she couldn’t take waiting anymore, Sara said, “Sir?”

  One word. But a loaded question.

  He let out a deep sigh and put his hands behind his back.

  “Sir, I’d understand if you want me gone,” she said quietly, shoulders hunched.

  Forget her mission to find her father’s journals—she had managed to kill an entire army of her own people. There was nothing for her here now.

  “Gone?” asked Barthis.

  “I killed so many of our people with…with impetuousness,” Sara blurted out. “I didn’t think of what the Kades would do in retaliation. I just acted. I swung my swords, and in doing so, I condemned so many lives that I can’t even fathom the numbers lost.”

  “Did you do it in maliciousness?” he asked.

  Sara frowned. “You mean when I killed the Kades?”

  “No,” he said, staring at her. “When you decided to kill those shield mages.”

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t even doing it for vengeance. Not really. I knew they were the key—” She paused.

  “The key?” her captain asked. “To what, Mercenary Fairchild?”

  Her voice caught in her throat as she looked out and back down into the canyon. So many lives lost.

  But she answered him in a steady voice. “To the shields. We needed them to come down. So that we could help each other. So that we could turn back the tide against the Kades, now, instead of when they decided to vanish into the night again.”

  Captain Barthis nodded. “And why do you think that was wrong?”

  “Because actions have consequences,” she said, looking at him in disbelief, amazed that he didn’t realize this himself.

  “Yes, they do,” her captain replied with a twitch of his lips. “But so does inaction. You do realize, had you left them alone, the Kades would have killed us all, slowly but surely. Like a massive snake constricts the air out of the windpipes of its victims, the Kades would have gone dome by dome and eviscerated us all with glee.”

  Sara bit her lip. “That doesn’t change the fact that I initiated the actions that made the Kades retaliate so harshly.”

  “I suppose you did,” said Barthis. “You and those other mages you spoke of.”

  “No,” said Sara as she took a step back and put a hand on her weapon at her waist. “This isn’t their fault. They were only following orders and trying to save us all.”

  Barthis stepped forward and said fiercely into her face, “And what I’m telling you is so did you, Sara Fairchild, so did you. Not only did you accomplish that, but you also freed us all.”

  “Yes, but at what cost?”

  He swallowed heavily as he nodded. “That’s a cross we’ll all have to bear.”

  “Me more than anyone else.”

  A small smile flickered on his face at the defiance in her voice.

  “I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that matter,” the captain said.

  “I guess so,” Sara said, her head held high.

  “Always the firebrand, Mercenary Fairchild,” he said with a chuckle.

  Sara was practically wavering on her feet with exhaustion, but she managed to stand tall as she said, “Always and forever, sir. And I’ll take whatever punishment you deem fit. I’ve earned it this time.”

  “As opposed to the others?” he said dryly.

  She flashed him an irate look and opened her mouth to defend her former actions.

  He quickly said, “Never mind. Now isn’t the time. Just know that I don’t want you gone, mercenary, but I must do something with you, I admit.”

  Sara nodded, glum but resolute. “And I await your decision.”

  She was imagining imprisonment, even whipping. The thought of enduring what Nissa Sardonien had made her flinch. But at the same time, Sara was starting to understand the darkness of the steps he’d taken to get information out of the captured mage. After the battle she’d endured from darkness till sunrise, she would have done just about anything to prevent it. The bloodshed, the heartache, the slain friends.

  It was those friends and the comrades she didn’t even know that she thought of as she accepted Captain Barthis’s judgment. She was lucky to have emerged relatively unscathed from the front. Others lay dead in ditches, and Sara couldn’t help but feel despondent about that. Without the battle mage gifts she’d been born with, she too would be lying in those fallow fields. So she didn’t say a word to convince the captain of the lack of need to punish her. She just waited for his next orders. To her surprise, they weren’t a punishment, but rather ones she readily was eager to obey.

  “Get some rest, mercenary,” Captain Barthis said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Sara didn’t see any censure or mockery in his eyes, just sincerity, so she proudly saluted and marched off to do just that. She was too tired to argue anything else, and besides—her case was clearly set. She was guilty, and that was all there was to be said.

  It was no more than ten minutes later that she was directed to a very bare-bones wash station, little more than a pump with water and a screen of reeds to cover the person washing themselves, but she didn’t complain. Once she’d scrubbed herself raw, she sought a clean cot and a warm bed. Which she fell into like a person who hadn’t slept in a week.

  * * *

  When she woke two days later, it was like waking from a never-ending dream. She noted it because it had been a pleasant dream, and also because she was one who rarely dreamt. She also rarely slept long hours. So waking from this cocoon of warmth and blankets was even more jolting when she thought about the headache of a nightmare that had been interspersed throughout her slumber. She had dreamt of clashing swords, blood spurting from necks, flaming dragons, and a full night-and-day’s battle that had only ended a few days before.

  When she sat up and stood with a yawn and a stretch of her arms above her head, she chuckled. “That was some dream.”

  Someone behind her said loudly, “What were you dreaming about?”

  Sara froze. She spoke without turning around, hoping that this too was a dream. “That I slept for more than a day,” she said. “And I was safe.”

  “Well, you did and you are.”

  Sara groaned. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the person that the voice belonged to. Instead it was the fact that by having the voice here, in her non-dream, it meant that the rest of her dream—specifically the endless killing part—hadn’t been just the fuel of her nightmares. No, it had been real, and this too was real.

  “Well, that’s no way to greet a friend.”

  Sara rolled her eyes, because that voice belonged to none other than Karn, and Karn wasn’t assigned to her lodgings. Why was he here, and where was Ezekiel? Because they always lodged together. Always. She turned around tensely.

  She thought about questioning if he was an apparition, but even she knew as she stared at him, looking from one cot over, th
at he was all too real. She punched her pillow in frustration as she growled and shook her head.

  “You’re in some mood. Do you always wake up this foul-tempered?” asked Karn, eyeing her. He kept tossing his half-eaten apple up in the air.

  Sara swallowed harshly and shook her head to dispel the irritation. It didn’t work. In fact, other body parts jumped in to complain, namely her stomach. She’d taken cleanliness over a meal when she’d fallen into her deep slumber. Now her body was ready to make her pay.

  “Everything that happened,” Sara said. “It was real?”

  “Yes,” he said, sitting up on the left side of the cot.

  “And the people who died?” she asked. “Our friends?”

  “Still dead,” he replied.

  Sara froze. “The Kade invasion by night? The shield walls?”

  “All down, thanks to us,” he said with a satisfied smirk.

  She let her shoulders relax. At least some good had come out of that hellish night-and-day.

  Sara took a deep breath and reached under her pillow for the one thing she never forgot, no matter where she slept. Her knife grip readily met her hand, and she exhaled a sigh of relief.

  Noting that Karn was still staring, Sara snapped, “What are you looking at?”

  He gave a grin. “Nothing. You’ve got nice underwear, is all.”

  Sara looked down and saw that all she was wearing was a pale white undershirt that was skintight and some knickers that could have extended past her upper thighs but didn’t.

  Growling, Sara grabbed her pillow and threw it at him—hard. He was lucky that was all she threw at him.

  “Stop looking, you creep,” she said as she placed her knife blade facing outward on the bed in front of her and searched for some pants. She didn’t have to look long; she found a full outfit kit neatly folded underneath the cot.

  As she ducked down to put on her shirt after pulling up the pants, Sara asked grumpily, “How long have I been out? It feels like more than two days. I’m starving.”