by Terah Edun
She dipped into her battle magic, enhancing her vision with eagle-eyed precision, and she realized the black shadows she saw at the base of its hind legs weren’t shadows, but sinewy flesh encased in midnight fur. A swamp leopard was latched onto its right calf. The leopard’s claws and teeth were sunk into the gray flesh and when it shifted to get a better grip, red blood gushed out in a torrent from the torn flesh. Then the elephant trumpeted again in anger and fear.
Sara swallowed harshly and watched as the mercenaries nearby the elephant rushed to aid their last remaining supply bearer. But even with swords and shields they couldn’t do much. The well-hidden swamp leopard was partially protected by the overhang over a small, moss-covered hole in the ground. A cave, really, built not of stone but rather soil and rotten wood.
The swamp leopard clearly had the advantage. The mercenaries couldn’t get close enough to hack at it with their weapons, and the entire swamp was too wet for them to burn it out. Sara watched as the thick brambles to either side of the struggling war elephant scratched long, red scars in the thin skin of its heaving sides. She couldn’t see any of the same vegetation near her so she was less worried. Cautious but not fearful. Somehow the elephant had been able to turn around and face its attacker and now its ivory tusks were facing away from its foe, and the thick brambles to either side blocked it from turning around to confront the leopard. Had it been able to move its massive bulk, the war elephant could have risen up on its hind legs in its signature move to crush its foe with its massive weight in a stunning blow designed to break bones and mince muscle to squashed sacks of meat. Instead, the war elephant bellowed in agony as the swamp leopard crunched down with its massive jaws, in a move that Sara could see from where she stood high above. The leopard’s black fur rippled like a pelt made from the night sky as it absorbed the red blood that flew down from its prey in a splash, and but it was the flash of white when its teeth clamped down again that caught her eye.
“Wherever that leopard came from, it’s smart enough to know what it has now,” Sara said to herself, “The perfect vantage point.”
It was true. The small hole in the ground was the perfect spot from which to survey and attack its prey. The leopard didn’t even have to drag the elephant into the hole. The overhead ledge was preventing the archers from getting a good aim at the ravenous beast and it was as if the leopard knew that, because it made no efforts to protect its flank. Instead, it focused on what was right in front of it.
They watched helplessly as the elephant bled to death and slowly fell to its knees and then its side, as the swamp leopard tore flesh from its thigh and dragged the torn piece of carcass into its den for consumption.
A mercenary Sara didn’t know came up to the root she was standing on and looked down on the scene with muddy dreck all over his face and tired eyes. “Fucking sorry way to go.”
Sara looked down at him with a raised eyebrow. “You’d rather die of the swamp fever?”
The man looked up at her. “I’d rather die with a blade in my gut and my dead foe at my feet.”
Sara smirked. “Then you’d die alone, on the battlefield, with your intestines festering and slow gangrene easing you into the afterlife. Could take hours. Could take days.”
The man’s eyes didn’t flinch in surprise. “I’d rather that and die with honor than to be dragged to my death while having my leg torn to shreds by a mauling best.”
Sara stared at him. Not in disbelief, not really. But she felt a keen sense of pain in her heart as she looked back at the war elephant’s prone form. It was still crying for help.
“I’d rather not die at all,” she murmured.
“What was that?” her new friend asked.
Then a female mercenary pushed between them. “Everyone who’s able to, go form a chain gang. We need to get to that water and be on our way.”
The man who Sara had discussed death with moved on.
The female mercenary turned to look up at Sara with a gesture of her chin. “That is no way to die. But neither is a sword to the gut. The best death isn’t an honorable one. It’s lying in your bed with your family surrounding as you die of old age. Remember that.”
As she prepared to scramble down from her perch, Sara was careful to get visual clues of the quickest path to the ground.
Just as she turned to descend the woman called back to her, “Stay with your charge.”
Sara nodded as she watched the woman descend to the shallow ground to help redistribute the water. The dying animal’s cries echoed throughout the swamp. She felt some sympathy for it and wished someone would put it out of its misery with a knife to the throat or arrow to the jugular, but no one seemed inclined to. Then she thought about their situation strategically. There was something hunting them in the swamps. Several things, actually, and all of them were bigger and badder than the swamp leopard. Perhaps fresh meat would slow their pursuers down when a fighting force of trained men and women couldn’t.
Besides, they needed the water. She watched as some enterprising mercenaries finally decided to kill the crying pachyderm and then proceed to slice flesh from the elephant’s shoulder. She knew that not everyone would be eating dried grain tonight.
As another mercenary passed her—and handed over what she assumed was the last flask of fresh water she was going to get—he whispered, “Elephant steak tonight.”
Sara grimaced, but her mouth watered a bit at the thought of meat. It had been a week and a half, and yes, she could live on barley and grain bars, but this...this was what she needed to survive, to thrive, and to be able to fight like the warrior she was.
Sara chuckled. “Besides if I spend one more day eating those dried sticks of grain held together by what tastes like resin, I’ll shaft somebody.”
She knew those dried sticks were keeping them alive. The one time a mercenary had tried to catch fresh meat, the creature’s insides had been too poisonous to eat. A gift from the Kade mages, no doubt. She had heard rumors that they had those among them that could influence the very environment around them. It wasn’t until the builder had actually inferred those rumors could be true that she even considered the possibility though. The possibility that this hell was of someone’s creation. After a week and a half in this dreadful swamp, she was beginning to believe it, too. She had seen things not of this earth. Creatures that looked normal but were poisonous to the touch. Fanged predators that stalked them at night and left naught but illness in their wake.
No, if the other mercenaries believed the Kades capable of the task of creating a swamp and filling it with unholy creatures, then who was she to say that they were wrong? The rumors of Kade magic were virulent, and she was beginning to think the stories of their war exploits weren’t entirely unfounded. The Kades weren’t like other mages. Not like a weather mage could make the winds blow stronger or an earth warden could cause an earthquake. No, these Kades could do unnatural things. Have plants burn with an all-consuming fire that killed every living being, but strangely left the living trees untouched. Draw upon gems to melt the flesh from others and make the environment around cloaked with an illusion so seamless that it felt real.
All rumors that no one could substantiate. Hell, they were told in whispers in the taverns back home. If there was one thing the imperial court agreed upon, it was that speaking of the Kade mages with any sort of reverence amounted to treason. And talks about the extents of their powers could sound like reverence to unassuming ears. So Sara and her former friends had only heard rumors and innuendos. Myths that she was starting to believe were true. Even if Nissa Sardonien had yet to show even a spark of the powers to influence the rays of the sun, as she was supposedly capable of.
Then the call for everyone to mount up and move out flowed back over the standing group. With a sigh, Sara shouldered the weight she helped carry and turned back north to march onwards.
Despite being fed up with grain bars, feverish from the heat, and damned tired of marching forward, Sara knew that regardle
ss of the length of the swamp and the distance ahead, she had to go on. Each step forward drew her closer to a healer. Closer to dry land, and closer to safety. They couldn’t turn around. They had come too far already. There was nothing but more swamp to the west and east. So they kept going north. North to safety.
She almost laughed at that. Safety. It was almost a ridiculous concept to think of a battlefield as safe. But this mysterious swampland was riddled with traps, and Sara knew that if she didn’t leave soon, she might never. She had faith that they would make it through. Whether or not they’d be half-dead when they emerged was another question entirely.
“What a fickle thing hope is”, she murmured to herself in a tired manner while shifting the heavy weight of her backpack from one shoulder to another.
One foot in front of the other.
Because you see, Sara Fairchild and over two hundred hail men and women had journeyed through the portal way on faith. Faith that they would be transported to the edge of the battlefield on Kade-claimed lands. Faith that they could surge out of the portal way, ready to take on any Kade enemies that confronted them while staying in point formation. Regardless of her disgust at the captain’s leadership, she knew that if they could just plough through any resistance like a sharp arrow through flesh, then they could join forces with the thousands of imperial troops already stationed on the front.
And so that had been the plan. Nissa had been moved to a secure spot in the middle and surrounded on all sides by observant guards. If the Kade mages wanted to free her, they’d have to go through dozens of Corcoran mercenaries to do so. Unfortunately, that plan to lay waste their enemies in a quick assault hadn’t come about. Not because their enemies had lain in wait for them. No, instead a trap had been set. A devious one.
Instead of being transported to the outskirts of the battlefield or even directly in the middle, the portal way had malfunctioned.
Or been tampered with, Sara thought to herself as she recalled the whispers among the troops. Whispers that had stopped the moment the captain had gotten wind of them. Either way, she was certain that they had been transported over fifty miles south of their destination. At the entrance to a freaking swamp that didn’t belong in the middle of the bread basket of the Algardis lands.
When she had asked a fellow mercenary about the mysteriously dense mixture of fog and swamp that lay directly in their path between the open field they stood in and the battlefield far off in the distance, the woman had answered, “Kade tricks. That all it be. We’ll march through double-time in three days and be where we belong soon enough.”
The woman had been only one-quarter right. It had been a Kade enchantment—that much Nissa had confirmed. But not one she had conjured. Another Kade mage, one with ties to nature and land, had built the bog. The captain had shrugged it off and ordered them to forge through. It was a day later that Sara and the entire division had learned that this ‘Kade trick’ was more like a Kade deathtrap.
Miles out from the battlefield, Sara squinted with weary eyes, hoping to pierce the shroud of mist and rain of the bog that surround her. When she thought of war, she thought of blades slicing clean through flesh, knives piercing stomachs, and blood spraying through the air. She didn’t think of mud up to her knees, nor air so wet and humid that it blanketed them all in a layer of sweat, nor even imagined the putrid smell of sulfur and decay. She doubted this was what any of the mercenaries who surrounded her had thought of when they came to war. The ones who had succumbed to the heat and humidity had stripped themselves down to the bare essentials, throwing their bog-rusted, slime-covered armor onto empty supply carts. After those were filled and abandoned, armor was simply tossed into whatever muddy hole they happened to be standing next to. Few continued to carry the metal plates through the heavy, thick mud, and fewer still wore their armor on their person. Sara was one of those few.
It had been thirteen days and four hours since they had left the confines of the forest that lay next to the battlefield where she and her division and had encountered their first enemy. She had been obsessive about counting the time that passed, especially when she thought they were lost. She didn’t know how it would help in any case, but information was power and this was the only information she could broker.
‘Encountered’ being a relative term, since they had really been ambushed, outmatched and outfought, all without the single presence or death of a living Kade soldier. Sara chuckled under her breath. The books at the academy hadn’t taught them that.
“They told us about being brave on the front lines, showing strength in leadership, and how to kill an enemy forty different ways,” she said bitterly, “But they never taught us how to deal with an enemy that was a ghost. An enemy that stayed hidden and let their magic and bombardments do their work for them. How do you fight an enemy whose blood you cannot shed?”
Chapter 6
As she shook her head, Sara tried to shake the dark thoughts going through her mind as she stared at the comrades who marched beside her. They had left the forest with over two hundred and seventy-five mercenaries in the prime of their lives. Mercenaries with laughter in their throats, hearty muscles underneath their tunics, and the gaze of warriors assured of their victory. They had expected a few days’ march and had been mentally prepared for such. Physically, they had been neither prepared for nor cognizant of what a trek through a poisonous bog like this would do to them. The supplies they had on hand were only enough to keep them alive. But they would not keep them healthy, and certainly not battle ready. Most of those supplies needed to keep them in top-notch shape, like the nutrient mixtures from the healers, supplements from the herbalists, as well as the good ole butchered meat preserved with the heat of fire and spices, had been either in the supplies of the main group or they had been hunted or salvaged from farmland and woodland along the road. But they couldn’t salvage what they couldn’t hunt. How do you find a twelve-point stag in a swamp?
“The answer? You don’t,” said Sara disdainfully as she pushed a thick vine out of the way and hoped a snake didn’t fall on her head for the second time. The first experience had been more than enough. They were slimy and large here, as well as vicious. Unlike the small garden or sand serpents at home, she had had to cut this foe up into four pieces before it stopped trying to constrict around her.
Besides the snakes, vermin, and some vicious solitary predators, they found nothing else in this swamp. Stags and boars and elk and anything else that could be expected to fill the bellies of several red-blooded men and women a piece were not native to swampy terrain. And so now Sara Fairchild and, she was sure, Captain Barthis Simon, were faced with the haggard faces of the marching individuals around them.
Men with hollow eyes met her gaze. Women looked around with desperate glances. In the silent faces of the adults, the stark despair was an especially explicit reminder that none of the Cams’ had survived. The quick movements of their feet and the occasional yells and cries as they ran afoul of an irritated mercenary were nowhere to be found. The orphans were long gone. But plenty of the mercenaries were young enough that Sara would have given them a portion of her meat pie...if she had any. Hunger gnawed at the faces of the growing men and women. But it wasn’t just hunger. The men and women of one of the empire’s premier mercenary companies had taken pride in their appearance. Now scraggly hairs grew on the male chins and the once lustrous manes of the women, of all styles, had long since given away to lanky and dank clumps of dirty hair. Desperation had set in and they all had long since given up their vain self-maintenance rituals.
Even their prized Kade mage, Nissa Sardonien, was not immune to the torturous march. Under the orders of their captain, she was being escorted to the Algardis encampment and there she would be under orders to perform whatever needed to be done that would end this battle and win the war for the Empress of Algardis. Nissa stumbled in front of her. Mud covered the back of her robes, from the tip of her braided hair down her back to her calves, which sunk into t
he muck with each labored step.
A small smile of determination crossed Sara’s face as she breathed heavily and took another step, placing one booted foot in front of the other. The heavy squelch of mud as she raised her feet was the only sound she made. The only sound they all made except for the occasional grunt and the numerous curses that rang out in the damp air. That was okay. The damn bog made more than enough sounds for all of them. Creatures she didn’t even want to think about cackled and cawed in the distance. Rain had started to pour from the sky days ago. Rain that seemed the one good thing to happen to the Corcoran Guard since they entered this godforsaken place. But they soon discovered that even the rain here wasn’t normal. The troops had watched in dismay life-giving droplets had been transformed in mid-air to a slick, oil-like substance. The same kind that rested like a layer of filth on every water source in the swamp. Sara was beginning to wonder how anything survived here. Let alone colossal predators.
This day she listened to the splash of unseen creatures as they entered the muddy waters to hunt. Sara knew they were surviving because these creatures knew the ins and outs of this swamp. They hid in dug-out caves, slunk stealthily on tree roots and branches high in the air, and paced through the dense vegetation like ghosts. And little-by-little they had picked off men, women, and elephants to dine on. Now just a skeletal crew of mercenaries remanded.
One of the carnivorous creatures had even loomed up like a monster from the depths of an algae-covered pool and eaten two of her fellow mercenaries whole before she could blink. She had no name for that creature. But she remembered jaws like long and pointed triangles filled with serrated teeth. That jaw, as big as her body, had gaped open in a maw of darkness while two beady eyes stared down the men surrounding its prey.
When it first appeared and ate one of their own, the mercenaries had surged forward to fight the beast. Not to save the man. Even in the instant after its jaws had latched closed, the warriors surrounding the beast had known that saving the man in its mouth would be an impossible feat. The creature’s mouth had slammed shut with such force that she heard the bones of the poor mercenary snap like a dry twigs, and his blood had gushed out from between the serrated teeth like a red waterfall. No, the mercenaries had surged forward to instead avenge their fallen foe. But they had all soon learned that the beast’s plated skin was stronger than steel, with ridged bumps along the spine that ended in a tail that had an armored ball at its end. It had swung the tail like a mace and crushed the chest of one woman with the indifference of a child that flung away a toy it no longer wanted.
