Nightblade (The Tales of Ascadell Book 1)

by Jason Howard

  He stepped on a sticky fern that released a pungent odor. It smelled like rotted meat and clung to his moccasin. The smell rose up around him every time he stopped to listen to the battle he was nearing.

  A flurry of bats screeched past him as he sprinted through a web of reaching vines. Bugs swarmed him. He ran through small clouds of the angry, whining, biting multitudes. He hadn’t thought to smear papu jelly on himself before leaving, so he was a natural target. It didn’t matter.

  Finally he came to a suitable vantage. A tall tree on the edge of The Heart. He held the halberd with one arm as he climbed with the other, throwing himself up with incredible heaves, grabbing at the lower branches, pincering the trunk with his feet, then climbing fast, using the branches as easily as a ladder.

  What he saw when he stared down at The Heart horrified him.

  The battle was already over. There was no good place for him to join the fray. Taken unaware, the warriors of his tribe had been slaughtered. Most of the women were also dead. He scanned them to see if Almera was among the corpses. Then his attention was jerked to a man that was dragged in front of the huge, muscular leader of the black-armored soldiers.

  “You’re in charge?” Roen asked.

  “I am the chieftain,” Artem’s father said, keeping his chin aloft even though his hands were bound. Artem applauded his father’s pride even in this hopeless moment.

  “Chieftan, I am going to ask some questions. Answer or everyone left in your tribe will die.”

  The black-armored soldiers were lining the women and children up now, all in front of the largest cookfire. They were prodding them with swords, sneering at them. Artem shuddered with rage. The dishonor of these soldiers was staggering to him. In no tribal war for generations had women and children been included in the fighting. Battles between the tribes were fought for hunting rights and territory, nothing more. They were a necessary way of settling disputes. This was different. These soldiers took pleasure in causing terror.

  Artem’s heart sang as he recognized Almera among the survivors. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth.

  “How many other tribes are there in this jungle?” Roen asked Artem’s father.

  “Just kill me. I would rather die than dishonor myself.”

  The words rang in Artem’s mind. He was dishonoring himself. How could he hide in this tree while his father faced this beast? Even though it was hopeless, Artem should attack. Perhaps he could slay a few of the black-armored soldiers before dying.

  Roen lifted a hand, removed a glove and held a palm toward an old man. The tribe’s shaman. His name was Koballas.

  A gout of flame erupted from Roen’s hand. Koballas screamed as he burned alive. He fell, writhing and bucking until he was still. And quiet. His ignited clothing turned to ash.

  There were whimpers and words of supplication from the line of survivors.

  “Silence!” Roen yelled. He turned to Artem’s father. “How many tribes are there in this jungle?”

  Artem’s father stared down at Koballas’s charred corpse. He said nothing.

  “Nile, bring the map,” Roen said.

  A man strutted toward Roen. Artem noticed a tattoo on his neck. It was hard to tell from Artem’s vantage, but it looked like a moonflower.

  Artem started climbing down the tree. He had seen enough. He must act now. He must fight and die with honor.

  He heard Roen say, “Mark the locations of the other tribes on this map. If you lie to me, I will come back and kill every last person in your tribe. If you mark them true, you’ll never see me again. That’s what you want right?”

  “I want you to die painfully. That is my dying wish.”

  Artem hesitated before breaking from the treeline. He could see his father marking the map. He could also see the backs of a few black-armored soldiers. He could sneak up on them and slit a few throats before he was noticed. He crouched low and started his approach.

  “Last chance.”

  “You will kill us no matter what I say, so I will say nothing.”

  Roen shoved Artem’s father toward the line of survivors. Artem hesitated. He saw, among the errant corpses, his mother. She was still beautiful, but her chest was a pool of blood. She looked peaceful as she lay there. His mother saved his life in that moment. If he hadn’t seen her corpse he would have rushed forward and attacked. But his hesitation spared him the pointless effort.

  Roen fanned his arms, and fire leapt from his palms. Screams raked the air.

  Artem stood in horror. He tried to absorb what he was seeing.

  He watched as the last of his village burned to death. Roen’s flames melted skin, incinerated bones, and silenced agonized begging. His troops finished any that still moved, stabbing down at moaning victims with charred skin. It was finished in moments.

  Artem stood, exposed. He wanted to fight. He wanted to die. But he was paralyzed. He couldn’t fight. He could barely move. He saw Almera’s corpse. He saw his father’s corpse. He saw his mother’s corpse. He smelled the singed hair, the cooked flesh.

  He took a hesitant step back. Then another. Then he disappeared behind the treeline.

  “Clean this up,” Roen commanded. “We camp here tonight. Tomorrow we find the next tribe.”

  “Hooaah!” his men responded, a practiced chant.

  Artem turned away from the carnage. He walked. Slowly at first, his legs like jelly, his mind blank. He couldn’t feel anything. Not the bugs feasting on his flesh or the humid breezes winding through the trees. He moved aimlessly, like an animated corpse.

  Time meant nothing, it passed like the steady flow of the river.

  He came to a small waterfall many hours later. There was a break in the trees ahead. He saw that the sun was rising. The dawn. That meant he had been walking all night.

  He sat there, the terrible images replaying in his head. Despite that, the sunrise was beautiful. One of the most beautiful he had ever seen.

  He wondered if he was going mad.

  His father’s voice filled his thoughts. His father was a hard man, and had always been especially hard on Artem. But he loved his father’s stories. He remembered one about a long finished war. He remembered how his father had told him that he’d met the a general names Lanthos. A general who was now the King of Ascadell.

  King Lanthos should know about this. King Lanthos had known his father, and would help Artem seek vengeance. He had to go to Sal Zerone, the capital city of Ascadell.

  Artem thought of Almera.

  “Vengeance,” he said aloud, tasting the word.

  The beautiful sunrise warmed his skin, which was dotted with swelling bites. The sun felt good.

  “Vengeance,” he said again.

  ***

  Back at what had once been Artem’s village, Roen stared at the steaming corpses that were his handiwork. They had been piled into a mass grave, which his soldiers were now filling in with dirt.

  He stretched and yawned. The morning sun felt good. In the jungle, the annoying racket of birds and animals was getting louder now. He hated this place, with its bugs and beasts. Hopefully he’d be out of it soon.

  There was a gentle moan, and Roen snapped to alertness.

  He scanned the bodies below carefully, and saw one glinting pair of eyes. It was a battered but still beautiful woman, blinking like she’d just woken from a deep sleep. She sat up, a lone moving figure amongst the corpses. Most of her clothing had been burned away by his attack, but she was alive. And she had no burns. Impossible.

  “How did you survive?”

  She said nothing, just looked up at him with confused eyes. Then she looked around and screamed.

  Roen’s Raiders were suddenly on alert, but he calmed them with a quick command.

  She was whimpering now, trying to crawl out of the grave, but it was too high, and the burned bodies didn’t make for good footing. She kept slipping, crushing limbs to ash.

  Roen looked down at her and a slow smile formed. There was only one way
she could have survived. She had a hidden talent, an extremely high level of Willpower, and it had shielded her from the flames he had channeled.

  Bareloth was going to be very pleased. This would make up for his mistake.

  “What’s your name?” Roen asked.

  She looked up at him, her lower lip trembling. She said nothing.

  “Tell me your name!”

  “Almera.”

  Chapter Seven

  Frix (slang)

  –noun

  A common insult for a lascivious, lustful woman. The word was derived from a species of nomadic desert cat with the same name. There are fewer females than males in this species, but approximately once a week the females copulate for forty-eight or more hours, having sex with most of the males in an entire clan.

  She wasn’t tall, but her presence could crowd a large room. She was sitting cross-legged in front of a crackling fire. She had long, brown hair that fell across her shoulders. Her thoughts and motives were invisible under her mask of nonchalance. She went by Cera.

  She groaned and sweat leapt from her pores.

  Get on with it, she thought to herself. Just let it go.

  But it was hard, because her body was tensing up, getting ready for the pain of transformation. A spell she’d cast on herself many hours earlier was ending. It was a face morphing spell she’d used to complete a disguise.

  Her trade was usually bounty hunter. But sometimes, for the right price, it was assassin. Sometimes, when there were no good jobs, it was thief.

  Her face started to melt. She let out a low growl of pain, which shrilled into a scream as her nose elongated slightly, and her eyes shifted, and her cheeks got thinner. The burning pain was like acid dribbling across her skin. It made the nerves in her spine flare and goosebumps stand among the beads of sweat populating her flesh.

  For a few moments she was nauseous—channeling the spell had drained some of her energy. Still, she wasn’t close to getting mageplague from overuse of magic. When she had been a raw mage, untrained in channeling, that spell might have killed her. But her dangerous, violent life had forced her to hone her abilities.

  Since leaving the Arcane Academy she’d started using her Talent for second story jobs. Things had been going well—until they went too well. She’d been recruited by The Beholden, a centuries old clan of criminals led by the Eye, a deity that most believed was only a myth. She had risen up in the ranks of the Beholden. She was the best mage they’d ever seen.

  Eventually, the Eye had chosen her to be their leader. As their leader she’d committed atrocities that still brought bile up the back of her throat when she thought about them. There had only been one way out of the gang.

  She’d faked her own death. If they found out she was alive they would kill her, or worse, take her back. The King had also placed a bounty on her head for some of her crimes against the crown. She couldn’t risk showing her face to a single soul.

  That’s why she changed it every time she left the wilderness and returned to civilization. There was only one person in the world who knew she was alive. Zed, the Beholden alchemist who had helped her fake her death. But he swore he would keep the secret, in exchange for one favor, at the time of his choosing.

  She moaned gently and let herself fall back into the grass. She relaxed there, her cold sweat drying. Sparks leapt up from her little campfire, and a puff of smoke obscured her view of the treetops and stars above. She breathed deep, letting the pain of the spell wash away with each exhale. When she was ready, she finished packing up her small camp. She folded her tent and put it into an enchanted pouch that fit in her palm. She always kept it on her belt, even when she was sleeping.

  She unsheathed her beautiful twin shortswords and let the firelight kiss them. She stood up and her white mare, Hessia, nickered comfortingly.

  “I’m okay, girl,” she said.

  She muttered the words to a spell that let her sense the heartbeats of nearby animals. Her footsteps were silent. Her movements were whispered threats.

  She was hungry, and she wanted to dine on venison tonight.

  Before she could get far, a voice whispered from a pouch in her tunic, where she kept a speaking stone. It was Roen’s voice, but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that he was a good paying customer that she had never seen, but had contacted her through a mutual associate. She reached into the saddlebag and fished around until she produced a speaking stone.

  “Cera, I trust you’ve been well?” Roen asked.

  “What’s the job?”

  “I’ll tell you the job, you don’t have to be such a frix—”

  “You’re wasting my time.”

  “Fine, straight to business then. I need you to find someone that pissed me off. The dirty little chulgar humiliated me and—”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I prefer alive. I’ll double your pay if you bring him to me alive, but don’t hesitate to kill him if you have to. He’s a slippery one.”

  “Okay. Description?”

  Roen used a spell to send his memory of Zac’s face into her mind. Then he told her the last place Zac had been seen. She mentally mapped out the fastest route to Detren, then turned her steed, Hessia, in that direction.

  Roen said, “Also, we tracked him leaving the town and heading for the river through the woods. He must have gotten away by water somehow, although the canoes we saw were chained and locked. Perhaps he knew how to pick the locks. We couldn’t find him in the woods after a thorough search done by my best—”

  “Okay,” she said, cutting him off. “Have my money ready, I’ll bring him to you in a few days.”

  “Excellent, I knew—”

  She tossed the speaking stone back into her saddlebag. She had never liked Roen or his blustery way of talking. She could hardly stand listening to him, and she knew that he loved listening to himself. But he paid well and was an outlaw, like herself. He would never rat her out to the Ascadellian Army, the Lionhearts, or any city guard.

  Although he was a chulgar, he was also an excellent client. She would find this escaped Raezellian slave—she hated the word zell and the way he had tossed it into the conversation so enthusiastically. What the client did from there was his business of course. She spurred Hessia to go faster—she wanted all this business to be over with. That, and she didn’t mind a little more wind in her hair. The air was fresh and soothing.

  She heard the distant heartbeat of an elk. She unsheathed her shortswords and leapt from Hessia, her silent sprint accompanied by a hungry smile. Surely there was time to stop for dinner on the way.

  ***

  When she arrived at Detren, she was immediately hit by the stink of corpses. She channeled a spell that purified the air in front of her. The gentle glow of a night-eye spell burned from her eyes, and dyed her vision a ghostly shade of blue. Soon she found the source of the smell. Corpses reposed in various positions of resistance. Most of the dead had either been killed while running away or fighting. Some had been trapped in buildings that were burned to the ground.

  She wondered what her client had to do with this. She found one slave, ripped from the base of the neck to the top of the groin, dried gore spackled on the mud in front of him. Flies buzzed, landing to taste the rotting mess.

  Roen did this.

  She pushed the thought away. But it didn’t go far. It nipped at the corners of her mind as she walked through the ruins.

  I didn’t sign on in order to help finish a massacre.

  If you don’t have the stomach for it, then don’t be a sword for hire.

  But this one time you should just walk away, just walk away from the job.

  You can’t walk away, he will never work with you again. And possibly . . . he’ll find you and punish you. Kill you. You can’t afford any more enemies right now.

  When she got to the shore she forced herself to focus on her work. She looked for footprints but didn’t find them. She walked along the shore, meticulous
ly searching. She glanced up at the stars, which, because of her night-eye spell, looked like glowing orbs the size of dinner saucers.

  She searched in silence, feet gracefully picking their way between the shrubs and stones. She found the two canoes chained to a wooden pole.

  She took off her boots at the water’s edge and stood with one foot in the water and one foot in the mud. She closed her eyes and felt the coolness of the mud and water. She calmed until all she could hear was her breath and her pulse. Then she recalled an exciting memory. Recently she had rode Hessia through the gale winds of a thunderstorm, through the icy splinters of raindrops and the howl of the wind in her ears broken by thunderclaps.

  She thought of his name again and again—Zac, Zac, Zac—and she asked the water, in the ancient language of the elves, long extinct, but whose language she had learned from ancient tomes: where is the man who came here three nights ago? How long did he ride your currents, his soul afire with excitement? Show me.

  And then the images came to her—of the night passing, of the dawn coming, of him paddling farther, sweating in the sunlight, muscles straining to pull him faster, night falling, another dawn coming—he had paddled through both nights and finally he had gotten off at a fork in the river and let his canoe float away. The last image she saw was him, taking off his sweat-soaked shirt as he approached the shade of a tree, a broad smile on his face—he was free.

  When the vision was over her heart was beating fast.

  For a moment she wondered why he had ditched his canoe so soon, but when she thought about it she realized that he was smart to get off the river after two days. Staying on the river much longer after being tracked to it by Roen’s men would be too obvious.