Blood and Mud

Chapter 48: Chapter 48

The ten-mile march through the southern marshes took under three hours, and I wasn’t tired at the end of it. Astra’s rune pulsed steadily into my Ember, a closed circuit that never ran down.

I walked in through the outer perimeter of the West Border Army’s main camp, and the regular infantry got out of my way. I was caked in dried blood, bone dust and black ash. My sleeves were torn off at the shoulder, so the lattice of stars branded into my right arm glowed in plain sight, and my right eye shimmered with a pale light. Astra rode my shoulder like a small grey gargoyle.

The Centurion from the village led me to the command pavilion. He kept well clear of me the whole way, and he was too frightened to pretend otherwise.

General Kaelus, the Butcher of the Plains, stood over a huge map of the swamp with his logistics officers crowded around him. He looked up, and a flicker of real surprise crossed his scarred face. He took in the scars, the arm, the eye, the stillness. The officer who’d stood across that table from him a few days ago was gone.

”Lieutenant Elvit of the Seventh.” His voice sounded like grinding stones. He glanced at the runes on my arm, then at the falcon, and decided not to ask questions he didn’t want answered. ”The Commander reported you lost in the sinkholes during the vanguard clash. The Seventh is three days’ march west of here, burning out the Turtle Tribe.”

”I found my way out,” I said, flat.

Kaelus nodded slowly, eyes on my bloodstained sword. ”I’ll send a fast rider to Commander Erula and Captain Miklas to tell them you’re alive. Until they come to recall you, I’m requisitioning your services. The Coalition’s main force is broken, but the swamps are crawling with stragglers and mutated wildlife, and my clean-up crews are getting slaughtered in the eastern bogs trying to secure our supply lines. Regulars can’t handle augmented threats.”

”You want me to babysit.”

”I want you to hunt.” He slid a wooden marker across the map. ”You’re a Swelled Bud vanguard. Go alone. Cover the eastern grid. When a crew gets ambushed, you destroy whatever hit it. Understood?”

I didn’t salute. I turned and walked back out into the wet heat.

The eastern bogs stank of stagnant water and rot. For two days I worked the mist alone, like a ghost. I needed neither sleep nor rations. The rune fed my precognition, and Astra fed my Ember.

On the afternoon of the second day, I found the third clean-up crew.

Thirty regular infantrymen stood knee-deep in toxic mud, burning heaped-up bodies of the Lizard Tribe to head off plague. The oily smoke from the pyres hid the stink of the swamp. It also blinded the soldiers.

The rune flared before anything happened. It burned cold along my arm, and a pale, ghostly shape took form in the mist fifty yards ahead.

I ran, my boots barely sinking into the mud.

The water erupted. Three mutated swamp lizards tore out of the black depths, each the size of a draft horse, scaled dark green and oozing a foul, bubbling acid. Their jaws were lined with jagged teeth made for crushing armor.

The infantrymen screamed and scrambled backward, trying to form a shield wall in the sludge.

The beasts weren’t going to reach them.

I jumped off the trunk of a fallen cypress and cleared the distance in one bound. The sword stayed on my back. This called for blunt force, not an edge. Coming down, I pushed the astral cold and the Ember’s heat into my right leg and drove my boot into the lead lizard’s skull.

The crack carried across the bog. The skull gave way, the lower jaw drove into the mud, and the neck went with it.

I hit the water already pulling the runed sword off my back. The second lizard lunged, jaws snapping at my ribs. I stepped in under the bite and shoved the dark steel up through the soft underside of its jaw, then let the runes go. The lightning fried what passed for its brain, and the carcass folded into the water.

The third one swung its tail at my legs. The rune had shown me the arc a heartbeat early, so I lifted my left foot, let the tail whip past underneath, and brought the blade down on it. The tail came off clean. The lizard hissed and turned to run, but Astra was already dropping out of the canopy, the rune under his wing flashing. His screech rang out with magic in it, and the shockwave stunned the lizard for half a second, which was all I needed. I closed the gap and put the sword through its spine.

I flicked the acid off the steel and sheathed it. Thirty infantrymen stared at me, too frightened to speak, and I didn’t wait around for their thanks. I walked back into the fog.

The real danger came at dusk.

The swamp went quiet. The crickets stopped, then the frogs, as though someone had shut a door on them. I was walking along a narrow ridge of petrified roots, Astra riding silent on my shoulder.

This time the rune showed me no ghost of an attack. The starlight in my arm throbbed with a sharp, piercing cold, and the air around me felt wrong in a way I could almost see. Someone was bending the light.

I kept walking at the same pace and let my right eye sift the swamp’s light through the starlight.

Ten yards to my left the camouflage came apart, and there he was, clinging to the trunk of a weeping willow.

An assassin of the Lizard Tribe’s elite caste. A shifting, color-changing membrane covered his skin and bent the light around him, so that to a normal eye he simply wasn’t there. He made no sound. He’d slowed his own heart to a crawl by magic. In his hands he held twin curved daggers, thick with purple neurotoxin.

A ghost, built to slip past Imperial heavy infantry and cut sleeping generals’ throats.

But he’d chosen the wrong prey: someone with starlight burned into her arm.

He sprang from the trunk without disturbing a single leaf and crossed the air in complete silence, both poisoned blades aimed at the back of my neck. He expected me to notice nothing until the steel was in my spine.

I waited until he was three feet away.

Then I spun on my heel and threw up my right hand. No sword. The rune blazed white.

I took hold of the light curving around his scales, turned it inside out, and flung it into his wide reptile eyes.

He let out a gurgling shriek. The starlight burned his eyes out in an instant, and his camouflage failed with them, leaving a lean, heavily muscled figure covered in pale green scales. He hit the mud at my feet, blind, slashing wildly with the poisoned daggers.

I stepped over the flailing blades, the rune having mapped every swing before he made it, and brought my iron-shod heel down on his breastbone with everything I had.

His chest caved in. Ribs, heart, lungs, all of it. He lay still.

I stood over him in the last of the light. A killer who could have cut down a hundred regulars without making a sound had lasted less than two seconds.

Astra fluttered down onto the dead man’s shoulder and tilted his head, studying the color-shifting scales.

I looked at my right arm. The starlight hummed along it, cold and calm. Kaelus had been right to send me out alone. Somewhere down in the dark I’d stopped caring for what little tolerance I had for some type behavior.

The silence and the solitude in the caves made me realize even more how power changed something fundamentally in me , the watered down anger or tiredness that you have when people do those little annoying things normally explode so much easier , the realisation that you could just extinguish his flame as easily as breathing made me so much more prone to impulsive actions.

Not something good.

If I do not start to reign my emotion once I become as powerful as legion commander I will become as cold as her , what is the meaning of power if you lose the color of the word .

Are my worries unecessary ? Probably but sometimes I feel like what I know about me is slowly fading away .... Brobably better.

It wouldn’t be long before Miklas and the 7th came to collect their missing lieutenant, I hope they did not already dogged a grave and prepared a funeral for me.

While waiting for my extended family I should understand more about Astra , I never heard about animals with a mover imbedded into them like this to upgrade their natural capabilities , not that I ever searched for something like this.