Now, the morazeth women drew their weapons. Lila held a short sword in one hand, a whip in the other, while others held wooden fighting staves, long hooks, tall pikes. Genda, a squarish, stocky fighter, wore metal-studded gloves on each hand and prepared to fight with her fists alone.
Lila called, “There is no excuse for failure. When we attack General Utros and his army, don’t embarrass me by getting killed.” She meant no humor in her statement, though some of the city guard chuckled nervously. The arena warriors did not. “You will fight and you will learn. And if you do well enough in real battle, you may not need to fight Utros again.”
“We’ll make them sting, ha ha!” called a bright young voice.
Bannon turned to see Timothy, whose rough-spun slave clothes had been replaced with a fighter’s girded waistcloth. The scamp wore no shirt and gripped a short sword that looked too big for him. His skin was gray-white from the lingering stone effect, and when he swung his sword, his movements were slow and his joints stiff, but the grin on his face was real.
Lila seemed impressed. “I expect every one of you to be at least as brave and strong as a lowly yaxen herder.”
Some of the fighters affirmed that they were, while others, particularly the haughty city guard members, grumbled at the boy’s arrogance.
“We’ll fight beside you, Timothy,” Bannon said.
The seven morazeth trainers divided the fighters into squads, so that the smaller teams could spar against one another.
“Out in the combat field,” Lila said, “you won’t have a well-mannered arena fight. If you don’t watch your back while battling one enemy, another might thrust a spear through your heart. Don’t expect rules, don’t expect honor.” She strode among them, glaring at those who didn’t show sufficient confidence. “And I don’t expect you to fight with neat rules either. A real battle is not a game, and the winners don’t receive ribbons or trophies, though some of you might receive a pleasurable reward from one of our beautiful morazeth.” She waited, sure she had their attention. “You are responsible for protecting our city and preserving our freedom.”
“And do we have freedom now?” asked one of the household slaves, a muscular man who had volunteered for training.
“You have more freedom than you had before,” Lila answered. “And if General Utros is defeated, you will be in a position to demand more.”
The former slave rested the point of his sword in the sand and stood with his legs spread, facing Lila, who came forward to meet his challenge. He said, “I could have had complete freedom if I’d slipped away one night. Many others ran from Ildakar, and now they have full lives far from here. Some mountain villages like Stravera accept runaway slaves. When my friend Garth ran off, he begged me to go with him, but I listened to Mirrormask instead. I stayed behind to overthrow Ildakar for the freedom of all.” He grimaced. “Now look at us! The entire city is imprisoned. I should have left when I had the chance.”
Lila stepped so close to him that her flesh nearly touched his. “Do you think you could escape now? Why not slip out at night, tiptoe through the thousands of enemy soldiers? Be my guest.”
“I’ll stay,” the man grumbled. “And I’ll fight. I already made up my mind. The sorceress convinced me.”
Lila stepped back. “Good, then you’ll be my first opponent tonight.” She glanced to the side. “Bannon, you train Timothy. Break the yaxen herder if you can.”
Genda let out a loud shrill whistle, and all the fighters stood at attention. Kedra, Lyesse, Marla, Thorn, and Ricia took up their positions, facing groups of opponents. When Genda whistled a second time, the battle was unleashed.
The arena rang with wooden staves striking armor, hardened gloves smacking against flesh, steel crashing against steel. Big Genda struck her opponent in the chest with a steel-mesh fist and knocked him back onto the soft sand.
Without hesitation, Timothy swung his short sword at Bannon, laughing as he attacked. Bannon lifted Sturdy to deflect the blow, and he smiled as well, seeing the scamp’s eager fury. Timothy flailed his sword from side to side with no finesse, and Bannon easily countered each thrust, each parry. He couldn’t help but think of his own clumsy abilities when he had first bought Sturdy from a Tanimura swordsmith. Vowing never to be defenseless again, he’d used his last coins to buy the weapon, but he hadn’t really known how to fight.
Timothy drove at him with such energy that Bannon took a step back. He met every blow, countering the boy’s energy, but all too often the yaxen herder left himself wide open. As soon as Bannon saw a chance, he struck hard, crashing the flat of the blade on the boy’s shoulder. He checked his blow at the last instant, not wanting to injure Timothy, but to his amazement his steel merely glanced off the bare shoulder, as if it had struck a hard surface. Bannon hesitated in surprise, and his young opponent charged forward, smashing Sturdy so hard that Bannon nearly dropped the weapon.
Timothy let out a cry of joy. “I could have killed you, Bannon Farmer! Beware of a worthy opponent like myself.”
Bannon slipped under the boy’s short sword and again struck his scrawny arm with the flat of his blade. “And I could have cut off your arm.”
“Could you? My skin is better protection than any armor you’ve ever worn. Besides, I have two arms, and by the Keeper’s beard, I could keep fighting even if I lost one.”
Around them, the loud combat continued, punctuated with yelps of pain as fighters suffered blunted blows from the morazeth. One arena veteran, a man with scars on his skin and face, seemed uninspired in his fighting. His morazeth opponent, Ricia, knocked him to the ground and placed her sword against his chest. “Aren’t you interested? When you fail, you will die. Remember that when you fight the enemy soldiers.”
The veteran’s face turned ruddy. He picked himself up from the combat sands, brushing himself off where dust clung to his sweat and blood. “I make no excuses, Ricia.” Letting out a growl, he fought with renewed energy.
Bannon kept sparring with Timothy, although perspiration dripped down his face and his muscles ached. The scamp was reckless and full of energy, and after Bannon suffered several bruises, he decided to stop going easy on the young man. “You’re careless,” he warned, and slapped the flat of his sword against the boy’s hardened thigh.
“We need to take risks!” Timothy said. “How else are a thousand of us going to fight tens of thousands of enemies? Or more?”
Bannon didn’t have an answer for that, so instead, he just fought harder.
A man’s voice spoke out from the arched entry at the edge of the arena. “I brought two more for you to train.”
Genda whistled again, and the fighting stuttered to a halt. The grunts, clangs, and clatters faded into heaving breaths, coughs, and groans of pain.
Lord Oron nudged two young men ahead of him. “My son Brock and his friend Jed will do their duty to fight for Ildakar. Lady Olgya and I have encouraged them to volunteer for the upcoming offensive.”
Bannon wiped sweat from his face as he stared at the once-haughty young men. He wondered if his harsh words in the skinning house had had any effect on them. They wore colorful silk jerkins sashed at the waist, Brock dressed in crimson, Jed in forest green. Both wore black pantaloons and polished boots, and each carried a gleaming sword, fresh from the city armory. Clearly, the weapons had never been used in battle or even practice.
As the trainees looked at them, a few snickered or muttered. Jed and Brock stumbled forward, uncertain. Brock turned back to his father. “But we’re gifted. We should be testing our skills in magic. Train us!”
“You could have been doing that all these years,” Oron said, “but it’s also good to learn how to fight for yourselves.” With a brusque gesture, he forced them to join the other sweaty trainees.
Lila came forward. “Those two should strip down if they intend to fight. This isn’t a pleasure party or a banquet, and we wouldn’t want to stain those fine silks.”
Oron made no move to join the two newcomer
s on the training field. “These new silks might protect them. Jed’s mother says the fabric may be impervious to blows.” He frowned at the boys, showing his impatience. “Jed and Brock are pleased to test the garments against your weapons.”
The two young men fidgeted nervously.
Bannon nudged Timothy, and he and the young yaxen herder went to meet the pair. “We’ll train with Jed and Brock, and we’ll go easy on them for now.”
The two young nobles responded with arrogance, as if Bannon and the young scamp were far beneath them.
“Oh, show them no mercy,” Oron said with an iron smile. “General Utros certainly won’t.” The lord tossed his yellow braid behind him as he stalked out of the arena.
Bannon and Timothy faced the newcomers, who drew their pristine swords. Genda let out her shrill whistle again, and the fighting commenced.
When Bannon met the nervous gaze of Jed and Brock, he remembered how he’d berated them for what they had done to him, but he doubted his words had changed their attitude. Brock and Jed certainly hadn’t apologized to him.
“We’re all on the same side now, Bannon Farmer,” Jed said grudgingly, “for Ildakar.”
Brock added, “If we defeat General Utros, then you and your friends can leave. It can’t be too soon for me.”
“I would like nothing more than that,” Bannon said. He was genuinely tired of this legendary city.
“Enough talk!” Timothy ran forward, swinging his sword and startling Brock, who reeled back. He tried to bring up his own blade in defense, but the scamp was too wild. Timothy’s sword struck Brock on the left biceps, and Bannon feared he would cleave the young noble’s arm right off with the first blow, but the silk fabric held like tough, fine chain mail. Even so, the hard blow elicited a scream from Brock, who staggered away clutching his bruised arm. Timothy drove in for the kill, looking as if he meant it.
Jed ran to defend his friend, intercepting the yaxen herder. Bannon and the scamp fought together, testing the two nobles as they regained their footing and helped each other.
“This isn’t how I wanted to fight,” Jed whined.
“I’ve seen you fight,” Bannon said bitterly. “You went out to smash the faces of statue soldiers who couldn’t even move.”
Still wincing, barely able to bend his bruised arm, Brock said, “We damaged hundreds of them, and that’s hundreds more enemy soldiers than you fought, Bannon Farmer.”
“We should have destroyed thousands more,” Jed said.
“I’ll grant you that, but now you have to stand against soldiers who can actually fight back.”
CHAPTER 30
Slogging through the muck, her skin covered with insect bites and slime, Adessa used her dagger to hack at a thorn vine that hung in her path. The plant’s tendrils recoiled when her blade severed them, leaking greenish sap, like blood. These mindless hazards kept her from her real prey, Wizard Commander Maxim.
One of the thorn vines actively slashed at her like a whip. The sharp spines glistened with diamondlike drops of venom. One of the thorns caught Adessa on the arm, slicing across her skin, and she whirled and slashed once, twice, severing the tentacle from its base and letting the twitching tendril fall into the muddy swamp beside her.
She looked at the scratch and saw that her skin was already inflamed. Without hesitation, she used the dagger to slice her own arm, turning the scratch into a profusely bleeding cut. She squeezed and milked it to make the flowing blood flush out the poison. She sheathed the dagger and now used her sword to chop away the rest of the attacking vines, then pressed forward, following Maxim’s faint trail.
She had confronted him only once, that night at his camp when he’d distracted her with magic and left her to fight a pair of swamp dragons. While Maxim vanished into the wilderness, she battled the large lizards for half an hour before finally dispatching them. She hadn’t found him again since.
Now Adessa’s work would be more difficult, because he knew that Thora had sent her on this mission to kill him, and he knew how deadly the morazeth were, especially her.
As she searched for his trail, she pondered what her sisters were doing back in Ildakar. She assumed they had quelled the unrest and saved the sovrena. Adessa had faith in them, and she would worry about her own task. When she brought back the wizard commander’s head, she would once again concern herself with Ildakar.
Alert for more attacking vines, she picked her way through the swamp, studying broken twigs, crushed grasses, old footprints in the soft muck. She knew Maxim was a day or more ahead of her. Fortunately for Adessa, even though he was a powerful wizard, the man was not particularly good at covering his tracks.
She continued, cautious in the hazy light that penetrated the leaves overhead. She didn’t want her scorn for Maxim to let her make mistakes. Yesterday, she had gotten off on a wrong trail and followed what turned out to be a young black bear, which had bolted into the underbrush. She realized that Maxim had gone a different direction entirely. Several wasted hours later, she finally found where she’d gone astray. Now she was after him again. She moved along, eyes to the ground, scanning around her for spiderwebs, attacking vines, or swamp dragons lying in wait.
Back in the city, Maxim had been an aloof man. Despite his rank, he treated Ildakar with disrespect, and now Adessa knew that Maxim was Mirrormask, a traitor who had fomented the rebellion among the slaves, causing untold harm to the city. Even without the sovrena’s orders, Adessa was convinced that the wizard commander had to die for his crimes.
She was devoted to Ildakar and always had been. Adessa had been born centuries after the shroud of eternity was put in place, and she had grown up hearing legends of outside enemies, but never seeing any threat beyond the unrest within Ildakar itself.
As a girl, Adessa had shown great physical prowess in rough-and-tumble games that nobles watched for amusement. She had been recruited by three morazeth who came to her parents’ home one day and paid them gold from the Ildakaran treasury. More importantly, they convinced Adessa’s mother and father, and the girl herself, that joining them was the greatest honor their beloved city could bestow. Agreeing wholeheartedly, Adessa promised to become the best morazeth Ildakar had known, but her father had chastised her for bragging. “You don’t have to be the best. Being a morazeth is enough.”
She had joined other girls her age, begun combat sparring. From the very first day, it was more exhausting and painful than anything she’d ever experienced. At first, the recruits treated one another as friends, but when the girls didn’t fight hard enough, or strive with all their might to hurt their opponents—their comrades—other morazeth would come in with clubs, gang up on the entire team, and beat them senseless until the girls understood. Or at least most of them did.
Two of the new trainees died in the first week. By the second month, Adessa killed one of them herself, a young girl who had tried to make friends, but showed a core of weakness. After Adessa did that, she’d been rewarded with the first protective rune branded on her upper arm.
She remembered the expressionless morazeth standing close, nodding encouragement, whispering, watching as the training leader removed a white-hot branding iron from an intense brazier fire. Adessa braced herself, knowing that if she cried out, she would be punished for her weakness. She thought she was prepared, but nothing had readied her for the searing bolt of heat that screamed through her skin, into her nerves, until it exploded in her mind. Adessa gritted her teeth and made no sound, listened to the sickening sizzle, smelled the burning meat of her own arm. The pain lasted forever, but it was done as swiftly as the morazeth could manage. Someone splashed a bucket of cold water on her arm and another doused her eyes to wash away any hint of tears that might have leaked out of her squeezed lids.
“It’s all right,” said the training leader, replacing the still-smoking brand in the brazier. “You can faint now.”
With her trainer’s permission, Adessa collapsed.
Over the years, each branded mar
k had been just as painful, but Adessa never screamed, never flinched, never cried. And now, her skin was a complete leatherwork of art. No part of her was vulnerable to a magical attack.
Adessa was proud of the ancient tradition, a carefully bonded society of women warriors, guardians. According to very old legends, some morazeth had gone north as mercenaries, but they were long departed, and if any of their teachings survived, the women must have changed dramatically in the intervening millennia. Adessa and the morazeth of Ildakar remained unwavering.
Now when darkness fell in the swamps and Adessa could no longer be sure of her path, she found a place to camp, resting on the ground against a wide tree trunk beneath dangling beards of moss. She let herself doze, her senses alert for any creature that might consider her an easy meal. As she sat motionless, she heard a rustle in the grasses. She peered out from behind the mossy veil to see a serpent as thick around as her thigh gliding through the underbrush.
When the snake broke through the reeds, sensing Adessa, it rose up to reveal not one serpent head, but three of them branched like a trident from its neck, tasting the air with black tongues. Each had only a single eye, and when they struck forward, the three mouths yawned open to reveal curved fangs.
Adessa prepared to fight. Even with three heads, a snake was just a snake. She felt no fear.
The central head plunged down to strike her, but she ducked to the side, letting the fangs sink into the moss-covered tree trunk. In the instant it was trapped, Adessa struck off its head with her sword, and dark blood spurted out of the stump.
The other two serpent heads attacked. The thick main body rolled forward, rising up as the remaining pair of heads lashed out. She lifted her sword overhead and brought it down with a single stroke, splitting the snake at the juncture of the last two heads. The sharp blade cut down along its spine, and the snake flopped in two halves like a split ribbon. The separated heads, not knowing they were dead, kept trying to bite her. She continued sawing downward and finally cut through the snake’s heart, or one of its hearts, and its entire body collapsed.
Siege of Stone Page 22
