Siege of Stone

CHAPTER 58

Far downriver from Ildakar, the swamps finally gave way to normal terrain. Adessa had to worry about normal, natural hazards. And Maxim himself.

She continued her hunt for days after leaving devastated Tarada. She was still scratched and bruised, but she healed quickly, and the extra life energy from her absorbed baby continued to give her unparalleled strength, though she hated to squander the rare blood magic. When she finally cornered the wizard commander, she would need that strength to defeat him.

First, though, she had to find him.

Adessa kept tracking Maxim through the swamps, fighting low-hanging branches, splashing across shallow channels, trying to sense which direction he would have gone. After the explosion of steam and the wash of water that had obliterated Tarada, he had stolen a boat and gone miles downstream before working his way into the wilderness again. He couldn’t hide forever, but he had a significant head start on her.

She narrowed her eyes in the waning light. The sun had already set, and orange light filtered through the forest. Frogs and night insects began their music even before darkness fell. Adessa pushed through the tall grass, but when she heard rustling in the underbrush and the splash of a large animal, she decided to find a protected place to wait out the darkness. She wasn’t tired. Her body had enough energy to go all day and night, but it would be a foolish risk to blunder ahead without being able to see. There were too many potential predators, and she could easily lose Maxim’s trail in the dark.

Resigned, she found an ancient tree, a swamp oak that might have been growing since the early days of Ildakar. Its trunk was covered with moss and shelf mushrooms. Overhead, among dangling vines and the patchy beards of swamp moss, she saw a wide horizontal branch and decided that would be a good place to spend the night, high enough above the ground. Finding handholds in the cracked bark, she scampered up the trunk. When she reached the wide branch, she swung her legs over either side of it, feeling the rough bark on her bare thighs.

Darkness fell like a blanket tossed over the trees. Adessa didn’t need a fire, since the air was warm and humid, and she had no food to cook anyway. Instead, she settled herself in a comfortable position, her back against the trunk, her legs drawn up on the thick branch. She tugged some of the nearby loose vines, snapped the twigs and air roots that held them in place, and lashed herself to the branch to keep her from falling while she slept.

For many nights she had lain awake, alert, resting her muscles but not her mind. Now, she felt secure enough that she could give her body what it needed. She channeled her breathing, felt her heartbeat, concentrated on her singular goal.

She repeated the words of Sovrena Thora in her mind. “Kill him. Leave the city, now, and hunt him down.” The command was burned into her memory, and Adessa had accepted it. “Bring his head back to Ildakar. The people of this city must see that the wizard commander has met justice.”

She imagined the moment when she would defeat the wizard commander and use her long combat knife to cut off his head.

Adessa’s thoughts stopped there. She didn’t let herself think of what she would do after she completed her mission. For now, there was no “after.” Killing Maxim was the only thing in her life.

As she pressed against the trunk, she felt only a slight easing of tension in her muscles. Not quite relaxation, but it was enough. A morazeth didn’t need much.

She thought about the women she had trained to fight at her side to serve the needs of Ildakar. No arena warriors were as great as the morazeth, and Adessa was the greatest of them all, but she had left her sisters, and she was here now, out in the swamps alone, tied to a tree above the ground in a dangerous night.

Adessa closed her eyes, touched her flat abdomen, and traced the fine rune brandings on the taut skin, but she thought of the unborn child that was no longer inside her womb. If she had let Ian’s baby come to term, it wouldn’t have been her first child. She’d let herself be impregnated by four other champions. Three daughters were now being raised by gifted nobles, and if they proved worthy, Adessa would take them as morazeth trainees. None of them knew their mother’s identity, and she would not treat them differently. Her last child, a boy, was of no use to her. Apparently, he was a rambunctious young man who had difficulty learning his sums, and therefore posed problems for the merchant family that had adopted him.

Adessa inhaled the air redolent of rot and swamp flowers, closed her eyes.

Ian’s unborn child was different. Ian had been a brave and strong young man, devoted to Adessa, until Bannon and the sorceress Nicci helped turn the entire city against the long-established order.

Ian …

She remembered how she had taught him to please her. When she took his body into hers, it was like a form of physical combat, and Ian had excelled at it. He was, after all, the champion.

She shut off those thoughts. Ian was dead because she had killed him. The child growing within her womb had served a different purpose, providing the magical strength she would need to defeat Wizard Commander Maxim. Nothing else mattered.

Adessa heard a rustling below and looked down from her high branch to see large creatures prowling along the ground on stumpy legs, gliding through the muddy water in search of prey, a pair of swamp dragons with jaws that could snap through the thickest thighbone. Adessa was high above, though, and the swamp dragons didn’t even look up. She made no sound.

As an exercise, she considered dropping from the branch, thrusting her dagger into the backs of their skulls, and killing both of them. It would have been enjoyable and would have provided fresh meat, but Adessa remained where she was. She needed to rest. She needed to find Maxim.

She could slay all the swamp dragons she liked, once she had the wizard commander’s head in a sack. That was the joy she anticipated most. Other forms of entertainment would wait.

She rested her head against the trunk, checked the vines holding her in place, and closed her eyes. Tomorrow she would continue the hunt.

The wizard commander would not elude her forever.