Siege of Stone

CHAPTER 30

Slogging through the muck, her skin covered with insect bites and slime, Adessa used her dagger to hack at a thorn vine that hung in her path. The plant’s tendrils recoiled when her blade severed them, leaking greenish sap, like blood. These mindless hazards kept her from her real prey, Wizard Commander Maxim.

One of the thorn vines actively slashed at her like a whip. The sharp spines glistened with diamondlike drops of venom. One of the thorns caught Adessa on the arm, slicing across her skin, and she whirled and slashed once, twice, severing the tentacle from its base and letting the twitching tendril fall into the muddy swamp beside her.

She looked at the scratch and saw that her skin was already inflamed. Without hesitation, she used the dagger to slice her own arm, turning the scratch into a profusely bleeding cut. She squeezed and milked it to make the flowing blood flush out the poison. She sheathed the dagger and now used her sword to chop away the rest of the attacking vines, then pressed forward, following Maxim’s faint trail.

She had confronted him only once, that night at his camp when he’d distracted her with magic and left her to fight a pair of swamp dragons. While Maxim vanished into the wilderness, she battled the large lizards for half an hour before finally dispatching them. She hadn’t found him again since.

Now Adessa’s work would be more difficult, because he knew that Thora had sent her on this mission to kill him, and he knew how deadly the morazeth were, especially her.

As she searched for his trail, she pondered what her sisters were doing back in Ildakar. She assumed they had quelled the unrest and saved the sovrena. Adessa had faith in them, and she would worry about her own task. When she brought back the wizard commander’s head, she would once again concern herself with Ildakar.

Alert for more attacking vines, she picked her way through the swamp, studying broken twigs, crushed grasses, old footprints in the soft muck. She knew Maxim was a day or more ahead of her. Fortunately for Adessa, even though he was a powerful wizard, the man was not particularly good at covering his tracks.

She continued, cautious in the hazy light that penetrated the leaves overhead. She didn’t want her scorn for Maxim to let her make mistakes. Yesterday, she had gotten off on a wrong trail and followed what turned out to be a young black bear, which had bolted into the underbrush. She realized that Maxim had gone a different direction entirely. Several wasted hours later, she finally found where she’d gone astray. Now she was after him again. She moved along, eyes to the ground, scanning around her for spiderwebs, attacking vines, or swamp dragons lying in wait.

Back in the city, Maxim had been an aloof man. Despite his rank, he treated Ildakar with disrespect, and now Adessa knew that Maxim was Mirrormask, a traitor who had fomented the rebellion among the slaves, causing untold harm to the city. Even without the sovrena’s orders, Adessa was convinced that the wizard commander had to die for his crimes.

She was devoted to Ildakar and always had been. Adessa had been born centuries after the shroud of eternity was put in place, and she had grown up hearing legends of outside enemies, but never seeing any threat beyond the unrest within Ildakar itself.

As a girl, Adessa had shown great physical prowess in rough-and-tumble games that nobles watched for amusement. She had been recruited by three morazeth who came to her parents’ home one day and paid them gold from the Ildakaran treasury. More importantly, they convinced Adessa’s mother and father, and the girl herself, that joining them was the greatest honor their beloved city could bestow. Agreeing wholeheartedly, Adessa promised to become the best morazeth Ildakar had known, but her father had chastised her for bragging. “You don’t have to be the best. Being a morazeth is enough.”

She had joined other girls her age, begun combat sparring. From the very first day, it was more exhausting and painful than anything she’d ever experienced. At first, the recruits treated one another as friends, but when the girls didn’t fight hard enough, or strive with all their might to hurt their opponents—their comrades—other morazeth would come in with clubs, gang up on the entire team, and beat them senseless until the girls understood. Or at least most of them did.

Two of the new trainees died in the first week. By the second month, Adessa killed one of them herself, a young girl who had tried to make friends, but showed a core of weakness. After Adessa did that, she’d been rewarded with the first protective rune branded on her upper arm.

She remembered the expressionless morazeth standing close, nodding encouragement, whispering, watching as the training leader removed a white-hot branding iron from an intense brazier fire. Adessa braced herself, knowing that if she cried out, she would be punished for her weakness. She thought she was prepared, but nothing had readied her for the searing bolt of heat that screamed through her skin, into her nerves, until it exploded in her mind. Adessa gritted her teeth and made no sound, listened to the sickening sizzle, smelled the burning meat of her own arm. The pain lasted forever, but it was done as swiftly as the morazeth could manage. Someone splashed a bucket of cold water on her arm and another doused her eyes to wash away any hint of tears that might have leaked out of her squeezed lids.

“It’s all right,” said the training leader, replacing the still-smoking brand in the brazier. “You can faint now.”

With her trainer’s permission, Adessa collapsed.

Over the years, each branded mark had been just as painful, but Adessa never screamed, never flinched, never cried. And now, her skin was a complete leatherwork of art. No part of her was vulnerable to a magical attack.

Adessa was proud of the ancient tradition, a carefully bonded society of women warriors, guardians. According to very old legends, some morazeth had gone north as mercenaries, but they were long departed, and if any of their teachings survived, the women must have changed dramatically in the intervening millennia. Adessa and the morazeth of Ildakar remained unwavering.

Now when darkness fell in the swamps and Adessa could no longer be sure of her path, she found a place to camp, resting on the ground against a wide tree trunk beneath dangling beards of moss. She let herself doze, her senses alert for any creature that might consider her an easy meal. As she sat motionless, she heard a rustle in the grasses. She peered out from behind the mossy veil to see a serpent as thick around as her thigh gliding through the underbrush.

When the snake broke through the reeds, sensing Adessa, it rose up to reveal not one serpent head, but three of them branched like a trident from its neck, tasting the air with black tongues. Each had only a single eye, and when they struck forward, the three mouths yawned open to reveal curved fangs.

Adessa prepared to fight. Even with three heads, a snake was just a snake. She felt no fear.

The central head plunged down to strike her, but she ducked to the side, letting the fangs sink into the moss-covered tree trunk. In the instant it was trapped, Adessa struck off its head with her sword, and dark blood spurted out of the stump.

The other two serpent heads attacked. The thick main body rolled forward, rising up as the remaining pair of heads lashed out. She lifted her sword overhead and brought it down with a single stroke, splitting the snake at the juncture of the last two heads. The sharp blade cut down along its spine, and the snake flopped in two halves like a split ribbon. The separated heads, not knowing they were dead, kept trying to bite her. She continued sawing downward and finally cut through the snake’s heart, or one of its hearts, and its entire body collapsed.

Adessa grimaced in disgust as she found herself covered with serpent blood as well as insect bites, mud, and sweat. Standing over the dead hulk of the snake, she used her dagger to skin off the scaly hide. Snake meat, even raw, was nourishment.

As she chewed on the moist reptilian flesh, Adessa withdrew into her makeshift shelter again, resting, pondering. She still felt the blood magic from the unborn infant within her, enhancing her senses and powers, and she knew that boost would last until she tracked down and killed Maxim.

But she had to sustain herself. She made sure she drank enough water, ate enough food, to keep her body strong. Over the years, she had given the same admonishment to all trainees in the combat arena. Adessa had never thought of the fighters as slaves, but as her pets, and pets needed to be disciplined.

Now, in the dark buzzing swamp, she recalled the champions she had made and the lovers she had rewarded over the years. When she was finished with them, those men were completely loyal to her, wrapped around her finger even when she sent them into the combat arena to die. Many had been kidnapped from outside villages, taken when they were young and broken, sold by Norukai raiders, or born of other slaves inside the city.

Ian, her last champion, her last lover, had been a devoted young man who never disappointed her, always defended her, until the end, when that outsider Bannon had made him remember his past. Though Bannon seemed a weak and naive young man, he created hair-fine cracks in Ian’s armor of duty and eventually turned her champion against her.

Adessa still didn’t understand what she had done wrong. She had taken Ian into her bed and had shown him true passion, primal lovemaking like the rutting of wild animals. His pleasure had been so great he nearly fell unconscious after satisfying himself. Adessa had even let herself grow fond of him, sometimes holding his sweaty body against hers after he was sated and after she, too, had let herself release that inner thunder of pleasure. She’d let him plant his child in her, and Adessa had felt it growing, the energy of the unborn part of her.

If not for the uprising, she would have given birth to Ian’s baby, but Ian had betrayed her, and so she killed him. Instead, that child growing within her had proven to be a powerful resource, an innocent life. In addition to the protective runes that covered her skin, Adessa now had that blood magic, the life magic of the unborn child, a sacrifice as potent as any slave on the great pyramid. As a woman she had given life, and as a morazeth she took it back.

Now, as the hours of the night crawled along, she sat against the mossy bark of the tree, sensed the emptiness in her womb and compared it to the fresh strength throughout her muscles.

She waited several hours for the moon to rise, and under the silvery light, she emerged and sprinted off again in pursuit of her quarry.