Blood and Mud

Chapter 47: Chapter 47

Getting out of the Shaman’s tomb was nothing like getting in. No groping along walls this time, no sparking the blade every few paces to check that the floor was still there.

The Rune of Antiquity thrummed under the torn leather of my sleeve, cold and pale. It showed me the cavern as it was, and faintly over that, the cavern as it was about to be.

The climb out of the burned arena was steep, close to vertical in places. Pale, overlapping trajectories flickered across the rock ahead of me. A ledge would crumble, and I’d watch it crumble before my boot came down, and put my weight on the next one instead. I quit testing holds altogether.

I climbed hard and fast and didn’t tire. My body, healed and running hot on Astra’s resonance, kept pushing me upward without complaint.

Astra flew ahead of me, grey and silent, riding the updrafts. The rune under his wing pulsed in time with my heartbeat.

Slowly the stink of old bone and alchemy thinned, and the air turned warmer and wetter, heavy with stagnant water, rotting leaves, damp soil. I hauled myself over one last jagged outcrop of limestone, shoved through a thicket of petrified roots, and stepped out into daylight.

It was too much all at once. I squeezed my eyes shut and threw up a gauntleted hand against the glare. The swamp heat settled over me, thick and wet and loud with insects, and after the cold below I was almost glad of it.

Astra shrieked like he’d won something and shot straight up into the open sky, where he circled high over the canopy of weeping swamp trees.

I was on a high, moss-covered ridge. My eyes needed a while to adjust, and when they did, the Mud and Blood Coalition’s country lay spread out below me, green and brown and grey all the way to the horizon.

I walked to the edge and looked down.

A barbarian settlement sat in the shallow basin right beneath me. Not a war camp, not like the ones the 7th had wiped out days ago. A village. Lizard Tribe, all civilians.

Dozens of round, domed huts stood along the shore of a slow, muddy river, built from hardened mud and woven reeds and the big shed scales of swamp reptiles. There was no palisade and no watchtower, and nobody was beating a war drum.

I sat down in the tall grass with the sword across my knees and watched for an hour.

Everything down there was ordinary. I’d forgotten places like that existed. Broad-shouldered men with green tattoos dragged nets through the shallows and came up with silver fish. Women in plain woven clothes tended smoking fire pits, scraped fat off hides, hung strips of meat in the sun to dry. A gang of small children, naked and caked in mud, chased each other through the water, and their laughter drifted faintly up the slope.

Peace. People getting through a day.

I watched the children playing in the mud, and my chest went hollow. Centipedes, skeleton phalanxes, that tree. I’d come out the other side of all of it built for one thing. I didn’t belong down there with them anymore. I was a monster, no different from what I’d been killing in the dark.

The rune flared. A sharp sting behind my right eye, and a flash of silver steel and red blood swept over the village below, there and gone.

I got to my feet, hand tight on the sword.

A whistle blew somewhere across the river, shrill and metallic.

They came out of the rotting treeline on the far bank: hundreds of Imperial legionnaires in heavy grey plate and crimson cloaks, the West Border Army. They moved in step and without hurry, like men who’d done this before.

The first volley of heavy crossbow bolts hit before anyone in the village knew they were under attack.

The fishermen went first. One man was hauling a net when an iron bolt took him through the throat, and he fell backward into the river, and the water went red around him. The village broke into screaming. Women dropped what they were holding and ran for their children. The few men who got hold of rusted spears or bone-handled machetes charged the Imperial line to buy their families a little time.

Battle would have been the wrong word for it. The legion had a shield wall, and the Lizard men had machetes.

The heavy infantry locked shields and went through the huts at a walk. They turned aside every desperate blow and answered with spear thrusts, all together, all on the same beat. The bodies piled up in the mud.

When the resistance was finished, the legion turned to the rest of it. They weren’t killing the women and children. They walked through the survivors and beat the mothers down with spear hafts, chained their wrists, and threw the crying children into wooden carts like livestock. Slaves. Spoils for the frontline grunts.

I watched a legionnaire backhand a pregnant woman into the mud and drag her off by her braids.

I didn’t stop to weigh what it would mean, interfering with the regular army. Jurisdiction didn’t come into it. The rune throbbed cold against my arm.

I stepped off the ridge.

I made no attempt to hide. I walked down the muddy slope and straight into the burning, screaming village, my uniform in rags, caked with white bone dust, dried blood and black ash. I looked like something dug up out of a mass grave.

Five infantrymen were shackling a knot of terrified barbarian teenagers beside a burning hut. They stopped and turned as I came up: broad, unshaven men, their grey armor spattered with civilian blood.

”Hold on. What’ve we got here?” The lead soldier let a length of iron chain drop into the mud, took a grip on his bloody broadsword, and sauntered toward me.

He didn’t see an officer. The spider had ripped my rank insignia off days ago. All he saw was a heavily scarred woman, alone, walking into a war zone.

”Stray camp follower,” another one said, and laughed, an ugly sound. ”Not a swamp rat, and no knight either. Put the big sword down, girl. Play nice and maybe we won’t put you in the carts with the lizards.”

I kept walking. I said nothing.

The rune flared and the world dragged to a crawl.

I could see what they were about to do before they did it. Pale, ghostly copies of each man peeled away from his body and moved a fraction ahead of him, showing me. The lead man was going to grab for my left shoulder. The one on the right was shifting his weight to get at a dagger. The two at the back had let their guards go slack. They weren’t worried at all.

Ordinary men. No Bud in any of them, nothing like Miklas, nothing like Commander Erula. But next to these five I was a landslide.

The lead man reached for me with a gauntleted hand, exactly as the rune had shown.

The sword stayed on my back. I fed a sliver of that cold starlight down my right arm and let the Bud’s speed take over. I was inside his guard before he’d registered that I’d moved. The Veriti knife came out of the sheath on my thigh, reversed in my grip, and I dragged the serrated edge across his throat in one clean pass.

His head jerked back. Blood sprayed across the mud. He went down with both hands clamped over his neck, and no sound came out of him at all.

The other four froze. The smirks slid off their faces.

I gave them no time to work out what they’d just seen. I let the knife fall, reached over my shoulder, and drew the runed bastard sword.

The man on the right was still fumbling at his dagger. I knew where his arm was going before he did. The dark steel came down in a diagonal cut and went through his iron pauldron as if it wasn’t there, through muscle, through bone, and took his arm off at the shoulder. He dropped to his knees, screaming.

The two at the back finally panicked and threw their spears up.

I spun on my heel and put everything into a sweeping horizontal cut. It snapped both shafts, and I let the arc carry on. The blade went through the grey breastplate of the third man and opened his stomach, then bit deep into the fourth man’s thigh, into the artery, and dropped him in the dirt beside the others.

It took less than three seconds.

One man dead. Three bleeding out in the mud, one of them short an arm, all of them screaming for their mothers. The fifth, the one who’d laughed about the carts, had dropped his sword. He sat down hard and scrabbled backward on his hands like a crab, eyes wide with horror.

I walked toward him, slowly. Blood dripped from the dark steel. The runes began to hum, ready to let go.

”Hold your blade!”

The voice cracked across the square, sharp and used to being obeyed. I stopped and turned my head.

An officer was shoving his way through the stunned infantrymen. His plate was spotless, trimmed with a Centurion’s gold insignia, a fine longsword at his hip. Heat shimmered faintly off his shoulders, the mark of a Dormant Bud.

He took in the bodies at my feet, the severed limbs, the clean cuts through Imperial iron, the fact that I wasn’t even breathing hard. Then he saw the runed sword in my hand and the faint starlight in my right eye.

He went pale. He knew the signs, and he knew what he was looking at: a Swelled Bud, a monster out of the Imperial Vanguard.

The soldier in the mud crawled toward him, weeping. ”Sir! She’s a spy, sir, a barbarian witch! She killed the whole squad!”

The Centurion didn’t so much as glance at him, and his hand stayed away from his sword. He snapped to attention and brought his right fist across his breastplate in a perfect Imperial salute.

”Lieutenant.” All the command had drained out of his voice, and what replaced it was old, trained fear. ”I apologize for my men’s ignorance. I wasn’t informed that the 7th Legion’s vanguard was working this sector.”

”They aren’t,” I said. I sounded calm. Detached, almost, for someone standing in the middle of what I’d just done.

The soldier on the ground stared up at him. ”Lieutenant? Sir, she murdered—”

The Centurion didn’t let him finish. Eyes still on me, he drew his longsword in one smooth motion, stepped forward, and drove it down through the weeping man’s chest, pinning him to the mud. The man gasped once and died.

The Centurion pulled the blade free and wiped it, carefully, on his crimson cloak. So that was Imperial discipline. The grunts were expendable. The elite weren’t to be offended.

”We’re deep in the southern marshes, Lieutenant,” he said. His tone was strictly professional, and he was working hard to keep it that way, in case I decided to kill him too. ”This is a main breeding ground of the Lizard Tribe. My cohort belongs to the western army, under General Kaelus. The main Imperial encampment is ten miles north of here.”

I looked at the dead legionnaires, then at the terrified women chained to the carts. I sheathed the sword.

”Ten miles,” I said quietly.

Up in the hazy sky, Astra was circling lazily over the carnage. I had finally found my way back to the war.