by Jim Butcher
He blinked several times at the bowl and looked up and around him. He was back in his tent, and it was morning again-a different morning, he thought. The sun was out. He felt weak as a puppy and twice as hungry.
He moved his blankets and looked at the scar on his abdomen. It hadn't closed neatly-though it would hardly be the first time that had happened to him. The scar marking the injury was as thick as his little finger, raised from his skin-the hallmark of a vicious injury attended to by an overworked and exhausted Legion watercrafter, worn to the point of collapse from saving men's lives as swiftly and as certainly as possible.
The past two days were little but mist in his memory, a few solid points, with many hours of nothingness in between. That happened, sometimes, when a particularly extensive injury required particularly extensive watercrafting to rectify. He'd been close to gone, then.
He turned his attention back to the simple mash and ate until the bowl was empty.
"Good morning," said a voice outside. Crassus. "Are you up?"
"Not dressed yet," Marcus said. "Just a moment, sir."
"Don't," Crassus said, alarmed. The young man came into the tent. "Healer's orders. You're to stay in bed all of today."
That sounded good to Marcus, but he wasn't about to let the young officer know it. "I'm fine, sir. I'll go talk to Foss about it."
"Captain's orders," Crassus said. "Stay in bed."
Marcus grunted. "Sir." He rubbed a hand over his head. "How'd yesterday go?"
"The short version? Nasaug hit us with better than three thousand of his elites spearheading twenty thousand raiders. They tore through both Guard Legions and threw them into confusion. If you and your men hadn't held, they might have routed us completely."
Marcus grunted and gestured at himself. "I didn't do much of that."
Crassus lifted his eyebrows. "I've had a number of men report that you hacked the shaft off that javelin in your belly and kept giving orders for more than an hour. It wasn't until we started pushing them back that you let them take you to the healers."
Marcus blinked. He remembered nothing of that. "Well. That wasn't real bright of me."
"Under the circumstances, I'll forgive it," Crassus said. "You held. We got everyone rallied up on First Aleran's flanks, and started pushing them back- but it was bloody close." He shook his head. "They left quickly once the tide began to turn. We actually took more casualties than the Guard-the Canim let them run once they'd been broken up and came after us. We got hit hard, but we hurt the Canim as badly as they hurt us."
"Then we're losing," Marcus said quietly. "There's more of them."
"Yes there are," Crassus said. "But we're close to Mastings now. Twenty miles from here to the ruins, and we can see Mastings from there."
Marcus grunted. "They aren't going to give us the ruins cheap. It used to be a fortress. They'll have rebuilt portions, fortified it. We should move on it now."
Crassus nodded. "Arnos is holding us here for two days. Raiding parties have been hitting our supply trains behind us. We're going to run short on food if we don't hold here for the wagons that managed to get through."
Marcus growled. "They can get an awful lot of work done in two days."
"I know," Crassus said. "But I have my orders, and you have yours." He nodded at the bowl. "I'll have some more brought in. You're to eat it and get some more sleep." His voice sobered. "I'm going to need you."
Marcus put his fist to his heart and bowed his head.
Crassus returned the salute and left the tent. "Excuse me," he said to someone outside. "Could you bring him some more, please? And don't let him go wandering around."
"Of course, my lord," answered a woman's voice.
"Captain, is just fine, ma'am," Crassus said. "And thank you."
Lady Aquitaine came into the tent in her washerwoman disguise, bearing a covered tray. She gave Marcus an elaborate curtsey, and he shook his head at her.
"Captain will do, indeed," she said, casting a narrow glance over her shoulder in the direction of the retreating Crassus. She settled the tray on Marcus's lap and removed the lid. The aroma of fresh, hot food threatened to rob him of his sanity.
"Where on earth did you get fresh eggs out here?" he demanded. "And ham?"
"I'm a woman of means," Lady Aquitaine said. "Eat. I'll talk."
Marcus's stomach howled more than growled, and he fell to with a will.
"Our young Crassus is too modest," Lady Aquitaine said. "He's all but totally responsible for rallying the entire First Senatorial. And Captain Nalus is swearing up and down that the Second would never have survived the battle without Crassus's steadiness and that fool Antillar's cavalry."
"The Senator's less than thrilled with that," Marcus said.
Lady Aquitaine waved one hand. "As am I. Crassus has something young Scipio didn't."
"A title," Marcus said. "Legitimacy."
"Precisely. The son of Antillus Raucus." She shook her head. "I've worked hard to set up Arnos to receive the political profit from this campaign-and in a broader sense, my husband hardly needs more rivals."
'You can't really think Crassus could threaten him," Marcus said.
"No. Not now. But ten years from now, with the credit for a successful campaign behind him…" She shrugged. "The wise gardener plucks weeds when they are small rather than waiting for them to take root."
Marcus stopped chewing.
"We'll use him to take the ruins," Lady Aquitaine said. "We'll let him help us secure the city. When we march on the city…" She shrugged. "Take care of it, my Fidelias."
"Crassus," he said.
"Yes," she replied.
"That could prove difficult. And if his death is traced to me-to any Aleran, for that matter-it will cast a shadow on the Senator. To say nothing of Rau-cus's response."
"Which is why I have taken the liberty of procuring one of those Canim balests for you, my spy." She poured him a mug of spiced tea from a pitcher. "It's beneath your bunk. He'll die at the hands of the foes he so bravely confronted, a hero of the Realm."
Marcus nodded and forced himself to continue eating.
"I know you've been injured, and you need rest." She calmly picked up the tray, tugged aside the blankets, and studied his wound. "Goodness, someone made a botch of this." She laid her hand over it, and her eyes went a bit distant. "But it's closed solidly enough, I suppose." She restored his blankets and returned the tray. "Do this for me, Fidelias, and you can finally get out of this place. It hardly suits you, you know." Her eyes glittered. "The next year or so will be very exciting. I'll want you at my side."
He nodded back. "I'll take care of it."
"Excellent," she said, her eyes glittering. "Eat. Rest."
She departed the tent.
Marcus sat quietly for a moment.
Kill Crassus.
Or refuse her orders. Kill himself.
Marcus set the question aside and ate everything left on the tray. He drank the tea and settled down to sleep. He would think things through more clearly after food and rest.
He would need his strength.
Regardless of what he did with it.
Chapter 39
Dreary days and miserable nights blended into one long, slow, ugly ordeal, and Amara grew heartily sick of swamps and everything to do with them.
The days were all the same. They started at first light, with a cold breakfast. Then they would slog forward through endless mud and shallow water. They would stop for rests, but increasingly, as the days went on, the stops seemed to do less and less to allow them to recuperate. Bernard sometimes managed to find dry wood that would burn without giving off too much smoke, but there was never much of it, and he was willing to chance only tiny fires.
They would cook whatever meat Bernard managed to shoot-the garim provided most of their foraged fare, though the meat was tasteless and oily. They could never chance a fire at night, as Bernard said they could be seen from miles away, and without a fire, the nights became s
omething utterly miserable.
They would stop on dry ground to rest-but "dry" was a relative term in the swamps. Moisture seeped in through blankets and clothes regardless of what they tried to prevent it, until Bernard collected enough of the smaller garim hides to provide a single sleeping mat. One of them had to remain awake at all times, so they couldn't huddle together for warmth, and as a result what little sleep Amara did get was attenuated by her constant shivering.
And, of course, absolutely every part of the day was accompanied by thousands and thousands of insects that crawled, insects that flew, insects that swam, and Amara found herself constantly brushing them from her eyes and nose and ears and mouth, like walking through some endless living curtain.
When first light came, they would rise and set forth again.
And so endless days passed.
Though Bernard claimed to feel better, he did not offer to lead them again, and Amara saw him rubbing at his eyes or temples when he thought she wasn't looking. The First Lord, for his part, continued to drift in and out of sleep, and if he did not recover from the steady fever, at least he did not further deteriorate, either.
They had stopped for a meal an hour before, and Amara still hadn't gotten the taste of the oily garim meat out of her mouth, when she saw movement in the swamps ahead. She stopped, holding up a hand, and glanced over her shoulder at Bernard.
They were standing in waist-deep water, and Bernard immediately laid his bow and quiver across Gaius's floating stretcher and crouched until only his head was showing. Amara followed his example. He moved soundlessly through the water to stand next to her, squinting ahead.
Amara lifted her hands and called to Cirrus, willing the fury to bend light in the space between her palms. The air there blurred for a moment, and then came into sharper focus, magnifying her view of the area ahead of them.
There were three men moving through the swamps. They were dressed in garim-hide cloaks, trousers, and boots, and the mottled hides of the swamp lizards blended in perfectly with all the green and grey and brown around them. In fact, Amara never would have seen them at all except for-
She willed Cirrus to draw her view even closer to the three men, and she focused on the one in the lead. Around his throat was the gleam of a polished, metallic collar. With her fury's help, she was even able to make out the word engraved on the steel: Immortalis.
"Immortals," she whispered. "They're Immortals, Bernard."
He said nothing, but she saw his eyes flicker with concern. The enslaved warriors had been driven beyond madness by the furycrafted collars that controlled them. Kalarus's Immortals had been responsible for the deaths of dozens of Citizens on the Night of the Red Stars. They were virtual juggernauts, entirely insensible to pain, completely focused upon serving their master, Kalarus. Amara had seen Immortals simply ignore swords thrust through their throats, limbs severed from their bodies, accepting hideous wounds more than willingly in order to strike down the targets their master had sent them to eliminate.
"Crows," Bernard murmured.
A moment later, Amara saw something else, through the haze of humidity, beyond the patrolling Immortals.
"Bernard," she whispered. "I can see the mountains."
He took a deep breath. She felt his hand move to her and rest for a moment on the small of her back. "How far?"
"Ten miles?" she guessed. "Twelve?"
He nodded. "Close."
"The patrol is passing us," she said. "We can push through today if we hurry."
She had already begun to move forward when Bernard's hand slid around to press against her stomach and hold her back. "Wait," he said quietly.
"For what?" she asked.
"If Kalarus has his Immortals here," he said, "then they're looking for us, specifically. He wouldn't send them out unless he thought it was that important."
"Agreed," Amara said.
"Those three are the sentinels we do see," Bernard said. "But I'm more worried about the ones we don't."
Amara frowned. "What do we do, then?"
"We watch them," he said. "We wait. We'll see how regular their patrols are and look for a way to slip through between them."
"Wait?" Amara said. She looked at the vague, vast forms of the mountains in the distance. "We're so close."
"We can't get sloppy now," Bernard said, his voice solid, certain. "We wait."
"I thought you were worried about someone catching up to us from behind."
"I am," he said, nodding. "But the men coming behind us have to search miles and miles of swamp, sweeping along in one big, slow line. The Immortals have a much smaller area to watch."
"What happens if they catch up to us while we're waiting?"
"Pretty much the same thing that happens if we rush out there and bump into a gang of Immortals standing sentry in a hidden blind," Bernard said.
"That's not terribly encouraging," Amara said.
"I can't take you anywhere." He gestured around them, pausing to brush a swimming serpent, nudging it gently aside. "No matter how nice it is, you always seem to think it could be just a little bit better."
Amara's stomach twitched in tiny jerks, and her quiet breaths of laughter stirred the water beneath her nose and mouth.
"Plenty of trees," Bernard said. "A beautiful view." He slapped at himself as one of the stinging flies that filled the swamp struck at his ear. "Friendly neighbors."
"You know me, Bernard. I'm just one of those women who needs someone to do everything for her."
His eyes wrinkled at the corners, and he started snorting quiet laughter, too. "Crows, yes. That's you."
"I have a suggestion," murmured Gaius. "If you're both quite finished amusing one another."
Bernard gave Amara a sidelong look and his hand moved under the surface of the muddy water.
She clutched at his wrist and tried to glare at him as her cheeks turned scarlet. "Pardon, sire, of course."
Bernard grinned and turned his attention forward once more.
Gaius coughed a few times. "I would suggest that you wait until near sunset, Countess, and then fly an aerial reconnaissance. It's generally easier to spot hidden sentry posts from above."
"What if they have Knights Aeris about?" Bernard asked.
"We've not heard any windstreams of late," Gaius replied. "Besides. Even if there are enemy Knights Aeris, the Countess is more than capable of handling herself. And in the meanwhile, we can observe enemy movements before drawing any closer."
Amara glanced at Bernard, who frowned pensively for a moment, then nodded. "They already know we're about. It might be worth the risk to know more about what's immediately ahead." He grimaced down at the water. "Going to be a little damp while we wait, though."
"We'll take turns on the stretcher," Gaius said. "I won't need both legs to support my weight in the water."
"No," Amara said. "That isn't going to happen, sire."
Gaius blinked. "Excuse me? Countess, I believe that I am perfect-" He broke off, coughing again, struggling to smother the sound with his hands. The sound became ugly for just a moment, and then he got himself under control again. "You may," he breathed, "have a point."
They settled in to wait.
During the course of the day, patrols swept by every two to three hours, on varying paths. The last patrol passed to within twenty yards of them, but Bernard had raised a woodcrafting around them, and once more, they remained unseen.
Finally, the shadows began to stretch, and Amara murmured, "I'd best draw back a little way. I don't want to chance them hearing my takeoff."
Bernard nodded once and kissed her cheek. "Be careful. Good luck."
Amara paced silently back through the swamps and found a point of higher ground which she could use to become airborne. She grimaced at all the mud on her and did her best to get the heaviest bits off before she called out to Cirrus. It was a bit of an effort, given the way the mud hampered her ability to will her fury to action, but she took off on the quietest windstre
am she could manage and ascended several thousand feet, to the edge of her ability to see what was below her in detail.
For a single glorious moment she paused to take a deep breath, her face turned up to the sun, and gently urged Cirrus to dry her clothing. She'd been wearing wet things for so long, she'd almost forgotten what anything else felt like. The air smelled fresh and clean, this high up, and more importantly, it was entirely free of the constant stench of rotting vegetable matter. For that matter, she couldn't remember the last time she had gone so long without flying, and it felt glorious to be in the air again.
She let out a guilty little sigh and turned her mind back to business. Bernard and the First Lord were still down in the muck. It hardly seemed fair for her to waste time reveling in being away from it when they were waiting for her to help them get out themselves. She willed Cirrus to magnify her vision and approached the swamp's edge out of the concealment offered by the setting sun.
At first, she worried that the haze might lower visibility too much to make the overflight practical, but she soon proved able to see the swamp below clearly enough. It did not take her long to spot the three outposts in the general vicinity of their approach.
Two were built up into trees at the very edge of the swamp, and a third was dug out of a mound at the base of a dead tree, overlooking the swamp's edges, shrouded by brush and grown over with vines. That last looked large enough to shelter perhaps a dozen men-and all three posts had dogs tethered nearby.
Amara sailed to several other vantage points to double-check what she had learned, though she didn't dare fly directly over the enemy strong points- without the glare of the sun to keep casual glances away from her position, it would be entirely too easy for a sentry to spot her by accident.
With the sun setting in earnest, Amara descended back into the swamps and hurriedly returned to Bernard and Gaius. She couldn't find them, even knowing the general area in which they'd been, until Bernard lowered his wood-crafted veil and beckoned. She waded back to them and quietly reported what she'd seen. "We can't get through without going by at least one of their watch positions," she concluded. "Which, I suppose, is why they put them there."
