Siege of Stone

CHAPTER 5

When Adessa thought about Wizard Commander Maxim, she longed to hold his head in her hands.

The morazeth leader possessed the singular focus that only the very patient, or the very obsessed, could have. Maxim’s face was at the center of her thoughts: the narrow nose, the dark goatee, the thick brown hair. She longed to slide her fingers through that hair, grasp it tightly while ignoring the clumps of blood.

She wanted to stare into Maxim’s brown eyes as they turned glassy with death, then lift the head from his bloody shoulders as his body collapsed to the ground. She would hold her trophy high with blood still dripping from his neck, and she would smile as his face went slack, forever erasing his pompous sneer.

Adessa was determined to hunt down and kill the wizard commander for what he had done to Ildakar. That was her mission, and as leader of the morazeth, she refused to fail.

She had sprinted from her beloved city during the night of the revolt, clad only in high-laced fighting sandals, a black leather wrap around her waist and across her breasts. Her bare skin was toughened from a life of combat and branded with protective spell runes. She knew each symbol intimately, remembered the trainer pressing a red-hot iron onto her arm, her inner thigh, her back. Each rune was a gift bought with pain, unparalleled protection against magic. She recalled the heat that sizzled and smoked as the trainer held the branding iron in place longer than was necessary, because he relished the wince on her face, the hiss of burning flesh. After earning the first few symbols, Adessa had learned not to give him that reaction, to ignore the pain. So long ago …

Each such branding mark made her stronger, if she was strong enough to receive it. Unworthy morazeth candidates who whimpered or flinched were rejected, some of them executed outright, others allowed to die in the combat arena or, worst of all, sent down to the ranks of slaves to live out their days in public humiliation. Most of those failed women took their own lives within weeks.

When Sovrena Thora had personally dispatched her to kill Maxim, Adessa had wasted no time gathering supplies or preparing a pack. Instead, she had just left the chaos in the streets—the wild slaves giddy with their undeserved liberation, the burning buildings, the prowling arena animals—and had run beyond the city walls to find Mirrormask before he escaped.

If Sovrena Thora had asked her, Adessa would have stayed behind to fight the rebels all night and not count the cost in blood, because a traitor’s blood was small coin indeed. But her mission was to bring back Maxim’s head and throw it like a melon on the floor before the sovrena. If necessary, Adessa would spend the rest of her life achieving that aim.

Fleet of foot, Adessa had run beyond the walls into the dark night. After a lifetime of hard training and brutal combat, she was strong. She had a sharpened short sword, a dagger in a sheath at her right hip, a spiked gauntlet on her left hand, and her bonded agile knife, whose pinprick could unleash a world of pain in a victim.

Those were only the obvious weapons. Adessa herself was the real weapon, and she also had the added power of life magic within her, the strength of the growing baby she had absorbed from her own womb, reclaiming the life she had created. Adessa would be more than a match for the wizard commander, as soon as she caught him.

In the darkness outside the city, Adessa had discovered his tracks, and once she knew the general direction Maxim had taken, she loped across the open grasses, heading to the hills in the south, following him.

Maxim had always been an aloof, lazy man, pampered because of his powerful position in Ildakar. With her senses heightened because of the life magic, she could easily spot the broken grass blades, the stir of weeds, the stink of his passage. Maxim didn’t realize how many oils and perfumes he wore. When surrounded by the city’s smells, he never gave a thought to it, but now his trail left a lingering aroma, which Adessa could easily track.

Just before dawn in the hills to the south of the city, she came upon an obvious mark on the slope, a place where Maxim had cleared away grass to expose raw dirt. Using a dagger, the wizard commander had gouged a complex spell-form in the soil. She stared at the design, but couldn’t recognize the magic he had worked. From the residual tingle, though, she sensed it was powerful.

Kneeling, she touched the moistened clumps of dirt that ran along the main lines and studied the red-black smear on her fingertips. This was not just mud, but dirt mixed with blood. Seeing no human or animal carcass nearby, she realized that Maxim must have shed his own blood to work the spell. A wizard’s blood, which was potent indeed. She wondered what magic he had unleashed.

Wary, she looked around, listening to the predawn noises, the restless stir of wind and grasses, creatures prowling in the last hour of night. Did Maxim know she was hunting him? Had he cast some sort of camouflage spell that would deflect her pursuit? No, this spell-form was something else.

Maxim’s magic didn’t concern her. Anything other than finding and killing him had no bearing on her life. She saw the tracks where he had left his bloody spell-form and headed south into the hills along the uplift above the Killraven River. She realized he was heading toward the swamps that stretched for miles downstream.

Adessa set her face with grim determination. Maybe he thought he could hide there. She wouldn’t let him.

In ancient times, the Killraven River was one of the main waterways in the Old World. Ildakar had originally been a river port, a bustling trade center that received barge traffic from the many communities in the mountains upriver and from the estuary that spilled into the sea to the south.

In the wizard wars three thousand years ago and the Midwar fifteen centuries later, the wizards of Ildakar had defended their city by reshaping the landscape. They had lifted the land into impregnable cliffs that rose high above the river, while unleashing the Killraven from its banks to flood the lowlands, creating treacherous defensive swamps. Long ago, those duma members had not given a thought to the consequences of their actions. Many thriving villages had been ruined and displaced in the floods, but Ildakar was safe from attack.

She continued to hunt for two days, following the line of hills as the uplift gradually sank back to river level. She left Ildakar far behind, pursuing her quarry. The pampered wizard commander kept up a surprisingly swift pace.

Adessa made her way into the flooded lowlands full of gnarled, knobby trees balanced in the muck, where she found it more difficult to follow his trail. She picked her way across hummocks of grass, spotty islands of solid ground amid soggy puddles. At first, the stable path was obvious, and she could tell where Maxim had gone, but soon she faced thousands of options, a step left or right, over this puddle or that. She experienced a thrill upon finding a deep footprint in the mud where the wizard commander had stumbled.

The swamp simmered, grew more sinister. Silvery webs strung between the branches were large enough to catch the buzzing dragonflies, leather-winged moths, or even small birds. Hanging in wait, round spiders with bodies the size of an apple hung like black fruit. One of the spiders dropped onto Adessa’s bare shoulder, and she crushed it with her palm, splattering ichor and smearing away its sharp, twitching legs. She wondered how the wizard commander would survive out here. If one of the swamp monsters killed Maxim before she got her chance, Adessa would be very angry.

She worked her way along, always pursuing, searching for any mark of his passage before the swamp erased it. She lost the trail for more than a day, which forced her to backtrack and retrace her own faded footprints, looking for any sign. Adessa scoured the hummocks, looked through the knobby tree roots, fought her way among vines, splashed through the muck, thrashed the high razor-edged grasses, searching for any hint of where he had gone. The wizard commander had vanished.

At first she was confident, but after circling the obvious routes for hours without any sign, she began to feel desperation. She could not fail! She dared not return to Sovrena Thora without the man’s severed head. She ranged wider, stopping to meditate, extending all her senses, looking for any hint of his passage. Maxim was a weak and inexperienced man, and she could not let him best her. She couldn’t.

Adessa’s face was splattered with mud, her short dark hair clumped with perspiration. She pushed her way across a thicket, slashing spiderwebs with her dagger. When she crashed out into an open grassy area, she came upon the swamp dragon.

The fierce armored reptile was low to the ground. It had spiny ridges along its back, an elongated snout filled with fangs that could snap down on prey and crush bones, rip flesh. The swamp dragon’s head was raised, its jaws open, its slitted eyes dull and turned to stone.

The monster had been petrified. The creature must have tried to attack Wizard Commander Maxim, and he had unleashed his stone spell. The swamp dragon stood as a fierce-looking statue in the grass and muck.

Adessa smiled. She was on the right track again. This was a reminder of the creatures she might face in the swamps, but she was not afraid. As a morazeth, she was the most dangerous thing out here.

Adessa extended her senses and picked up the path again. Now she knew where she was going. She continued to hunt.