“No matter how much you need me?” Thora sneered in a voice like frozen vinegar.
“No matter how much you think we need you,” Lani said. “If the stone spell no longer works, then I propose the guards place you in a dungeon cell with warding runes around the door so you can’t use your magic to break loose.”
Quentin nodded, anxious to move on to other business. “That should work for now. We can decide what to do with the sovrena after this crisis.”
Damon said, “I propose we add Oron to the duma. His name has come up before, and he has demonstrated his worth and ability many times.” He stroked his mustaches. “We don’t have time for a drawn-out process.”
“I agree,” Quentin said. “We need wizards and we need a full council. Oron can be a provisional member.”
“Agreed,” Lani said.
Beaming, Oron tossed the thick blond braid over his shoulder. “I will be proud to serve.”
“That’s not enough,” Elsa called out. “We need a new sovrena, and no one is more powerful than Nicci. Let us acclaim her as the new sovrena of Ildakar.”
Even as the voices built, Nicci shouted over them. “No! My companions and I will help you, because we’re trapped here as well, but you have to help yourselves. This isn’t my city. It’s yours.”
“It’s my city,” Thora said. “No matter what you do to me, I built Ildakar. No one cares more about the city than I do, and I will not see it fall.”
“You won’t see anything at all.” Lani gestured for High Captain Stuart and his guards to remove her from the ruling chamber and take her to the dungeons beneath the tower. Disgraced and defeated, the former sovrena walked stiffly away.
Nicci was glad that Wizard Commander Maxim had fled the city. He was gone now, perhaps even captured by the awakened stone army. Regardless, he was no longer her concern.
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.
CHAPTER 6
General Utros had lost all but the most rudimentary tools, but he did have inexhaustible manpower, and his soldiers had complete devotion to serve the needs of their commander. He did not waste any time.
Within a day of their awakening, though the displaced army still reeled in confusion, First Commander Enoch sent teams into the hills to cut trees with sharpened battle-axes, to strip and haul the logs down onto the plain, where they chopped them into structural beams. With furious effort, the men erected a dozen command structures, with the largest headquarters for General Utros and the twin sorceresses. The workers created wooden buildings with sturdy walls, logs cemented with mud, thatched roofs of thin branches lashed with long grasses.
Though the awakened soldiers were oddly numb and impervious to the chill that had set in the night before, Utros insisted on building up the camp, pulling together as many normal trappings as possible. Though it was mainly symbolic, his fighters had nothing else to cling to.
Situated in the center of the plain, his headquarters structure was a rectangular building with a high roof, lit by daylight through open windows, as well as two braziers inside that held low fires. The rudimentary building was not as comfortable as his old lavishly appointed command tent, but after campaigning for Iron Fang across the wilderness, Utros was no stranger to austerity. This would do.
He sat inside the structure now, inhaling the wafting smoke from the braziers, basking in the orange-red glow of embers mixed with pungent herbs. With hewn logs, the soldiers had constructed benches and a long, rough table where Utros could conduct his war councils, but as of yet he had no maps, no paper or ink for messages, not even any fresh clothes. He hoped his scouting teams would soon find outlying towns where they could procure basic supplies.
For now, Utros sat on a sturdy bench at the head of the long table. With regimented thoughts, he contemplated Ildakar, his army, and his war. Ava and Ruva were with him, close and alluring, their skin as smooth as marble. Many times, he had watched the two stand naked inside the dim shelter, using razor-sharp knives to scrape every inch of their skin. The only mark that marred their perfect bodies was the ugly mirror-image scar on the outside of their legs, where their bodies had once been fused together from birth.
The paint that now swirled and colored their skin was faded and flaking, but neither of the two women looked weak. They were patient. They were strong. They counted on Utros to get them what they needed as soon as he could.
And he intended to do so.
The foremost ranks of his soldiers continued to pound on the impregnable walls of Ildakar, showing their might. Given enough time and men, and their hardened fists, they might actually batter their way through the thick stone. A tiny acorn growing in a crack could split apart a boulder.
From atop the walls, the defenders of Ildakar pelted the soldiers, dropping missiles on them: rocks, bricks, chamber pots. They poured down burning oil, which covered the fighters and sent them away screaming. But the projectiles caused little damage to the hardened warriors, and the actual casualties were remarkably few. The flaming oil seared them and their armor, but Utros had seen burn victims before. The fire didn’t have nearly the same effect on the partly solidified flesh. Maybe his vast army was no longer entirely human, but their stiff skin made them more invincible. As a commander, he could make use of that fact.
Hour after hour, lieutenants appeared at his headquarters, delivering reports in an efficient military fashion, as they had been trained to do. The officers described the disposition of the troops, the status of the awakening camp. Utros absorbed the information, memorizing the words because he had no paper on which to write notes. The twin sorceresses also listened intently.
When the vast army had marched across the Old World, crossing over the sheer mountains and covering miles each day at a forced pace, they knew how to set up huge camps along the way.
Now, one of his senior lieutenants stood before him at the far end of the table. Ava and Ruva stared with intense eyes, like two vultures waiting for a dying horse to perish so they could feed. The well-trained lieutenant ignored them and fixed his gaze on the general.
“We spread out the camp, sir. The valley itself shows none of the damage that our army caused on our march to Ildakar and the siege, before we turned to stone. I’ve dispatched a hundred squads for the usual labors, clearing spots for campsites even though we have no blankets or tents, excavating midden trenches. They’re digging enough latrines to serve so many men, thousands of pits.” He looked away, a frown on his pale, hard face.
Utros rested his elbows on the rough surface of his table. “What is the problem, Lieutenant? Report.” Dealing with the bodily functions of hundreds of thousands of soldiers was no laughing matter. Without efficient sanitation, the giant camp would become a cesspit, and diseases such as dysentery and the plague would spread. Utros knew that such debilitating sicknesses killed more soldiers than any enemy’s sword. “You still have spades. You have plent
y of space to dig the pits?”
“The latrines are complete, General, but…”
Ava and Ruva stared at him. Utros grew impatient. “Speak! I’ve faced countless enemies and huge opposing armies. What could possibly be problematic about waste pits?”
“They haven’t been used, sir,” the lieutenant admitted.
Utros drew his broad brows together. “What do you mean, they haven’t been used?”
“No one has so far … needed them, sir. They haven’t…”
“Are they using the bushes?” Utros demanded.
“I’ve asked, sir, but no one claims to have felt the need. I confess, I haven’t myself, not even to … not even, you know, to piss.”
Of all the grand questions Utros had faced, this had never entered his mind. As he was about to growl another question, he realized that he himself had felt no need in the past day and a half.
And that led to another realization. His teams had made makeshift basins, delivered water from the streams across the valley. Utros had plenty of water here in his command structure, but he couldn’t recall whether he had needed to drink. “We’ve been petrified for an unknown time, and we’ve neither eaten nor drunk anything. Our bodies haven’t felt any such call.”
A knock came at the door as someone else arrived. Utros turned to the latrine commander, who backed toward the door. “It was merely an observation, sir. I felt you should know.”
“So noted. Thank you.”
The next visitors sickened Utros. He’d seen bloody violence in his many battles, had witnessed the most appalling injuries and torments, but this was beyond anything he had seen before.
Ava and Ruva lurched to their feet from the side bench. Even the subcommander looked sickened as he led four soldiers into the command structure.
The glow from the braziers and the slanted daylight through the windows lit the horrifically mangled faces of two blind, staggering soldiers. They still wore their armor, but their faces looked like chewed raw meat. Their noses were gone, their eyes gouged out. One man’s ear had been smashed off. Their teeth had been battered, and only jagged stubs protruded from their gums like shards of pottery. Their breath came in wet, sucking sounds through ragged mouth holes.
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