The effort it took to appear unmoved by Golius’s remark had him clenching his back teeth until his ears throbbed. Bron wasn’t Cimejen. Loyalty to command only went so far. No one, be they gods or generals, mages or madmen, would ever torture his woman. He’d build a mountain out of their corpses if they tried.
The heavy sense of being watched made him glance at Cimejen. The eunuch regarded him intently, as if he clearly heard every word of Bron’s internal declaration. He stayed silent, though he held Bron’s stare until the general spoke again.
“Take a patrol with you. We already have guards watching the temple, but I’d rather be too cautious and waste a few resources for a couple of hours than risk losing another of my battle mages and the itzuli in an ambush. Even this soon, the Daggermen outside of Baelok may already know we have her in our possession.”
Still seething, Bron struggled to hide his anger and simply nodded. He waited a moment before speaking, regretting that he’d finished his ale. “With your permission, I want to do a final scouting of Baelok tonight.” Disaris had proclaimed Ceybolddead, killed in a catapult strike that had felled a wall on top of him. No doubt she was right. Still, something niggled at him, a push that demanded he see for himself the mangled body of his erstwhile friend and Disaris’s husband.
“Why?” The general’s puzzled tone held a tiny hint of suspicion. “It’s blacker than the Queen’s heart up there right now. What are you looking for that can’t wait until morning and better light?”
Under Golius’s and Cimejen’s regard, Bron didn’t dare prevaricate. They were as savvy as he when it came to parsing out the questionable truthfulness of lim-speech, and they’d just heard a bucketful of it from Disaris. “The itzuli told me her husband died in Baelok. If anyone will hunt her first to silence her, it will be him.” He offered another tidbit of knowledge that would either strengthen his request or raise alarms for the general. “I knew him and once called him friend. He lived in the same village as the itzuli and I did.”
Golius’s eyes narrowed. “How close of a friend?”
That depended on which of them was asked at any given time. In the end, they’d become bitter adversaries, each one believing the other possessed the thing they wanted most. “Not close enough to spare him from punishment or me killing him if necessary, should I find him alive,” Bron said.
Once Golius agreed to the nighttime foray, Bron left with a dozen men and returned to the shattered citadel. In the moonlight, its silhouette reminded him of a giant’s skeleton, ravaged by scavengers until all that was left was a mangled ribcage and broken arm bones raised in hopeless supplication to pitiless heavens.
The general hadn’t exaggerated when he described the night’s darkness. The path up the plateau’s side to its peak was narrow and treacherous, even in daylight. It remained a challenge now, even with the help of torches made brighter byBron’s spellwork, and the distant flickers of lantern light that burned for the Daesin soldiers pulling night guard duty in the citadel’s heart.
Once they reached the first broken gates, they navigated a path through a sprawling courtyard strewn with stone rubble and splintered timbers. There had been bodies splayed among the piles of rock earlier, but those had been carted away to a spot far from the Daesin encampments to be burned in a funeral pyre.
“I’ll not curse good earth by burying a Daggerman’s body in it,” Golius had spat at one of the carts piled high with the enemy dead. “Burn them, and let the wind scatter their ashes and be forgotten.”
Bron led his men into the shell of one of the palaces that made up the fortress complex. What remained of the roof when he’d found Disaris was gone as were most of the exterior walls and all the interior ones. The spine of a staircase curved into open air, creaking mournfully in the cold breeze that spun up from the dry plain below. He and his vanguard had discovered Disaris nearby. She’d mentioned witnessing the wall falling on Ceybold, and she couldn’t have stumbled far before they found her among the bodies of dead Daggermen and the women who served them as either wives, slaves, or both.
Bron split his team into four groups, sending each one in a different direction to investigate the various piles of masonry rubble. Body recovery had already begun here, but there were places where the army hadn’t yet cleared away the debris that may yet conceal someone still hanging onto life. While he didn’t think it would do him any good in this instance, he invoked the spell that allowed him to “see” magic, whether it be that of a person, an artifact, or a trap.
Nothing glowed in his vision, no shimmering puddles of opalescence or shifting outlines of a body in movement or even one at rest. There might be numerous people still trapped underthe detritus, but they didn’t possess any magic, and if they did at one time, death had snuffed out that particular light.
While his spell didn’t reveal anything of use, his torch did. One of the hills of stone cast an odd shadow from its edge, a darker shade of gray on the earthen floor. He walked closer, bringing the torch down for a closer look.
Blood, not shadow, stained the floor, creating a trail that thinned and lightened as is stretched from the stone toward the near horizon of another collapsed wall. Heartbeat quick and heavy against his ribs, Bron rose to follow the blood trail, noting where it disappeared to be replaced by a weaving pattern of footprints, dotted with tiny droplets of dull red. The prints looked as if they’d been made by a drunkard stumbling his way home. But the path they took didn’t lead to a pit, large enough to swallow an adult careless in their steps.
The pit’s inky blackness swallowed all the light cast by the bright torch, preventing Bron from seeing anything beyond its edge. He bent and grabbed a piece of masonry lying next to his feet and tossed it into the hole. It fell a short distance, bounced off something hard and fell again, only to bounce twice more before rolling away into silence. Bron tossed another stone in, listening as it followed a similar path as the one before it. Whatever lay beneath the earth here might be deep, but its descent sounded gradual, possibly navigable by someone trying to escape a conquering force and evade capture. The gods only knew where it led, but he had his suspicions. One of Baelok’s greatest assets were its large underground cisterns. They were the reason the citadel had held out as long as it had against the Daesin siege.
Based on the bloodstain, whoever had survived a crushing death by the fallen wall was badly injured. Even though they’d avoided capture by his team or other Daesin soldiers, their fate was likely no better. Dying alone in the sepulcher-dark of thecistern caverns wasn’t the most comforting ending. And if they miraculously survived that and escaped Baelok altogether, the surrounding terrain with its deadly wildlife offered little if any mercy to a wounded traveler.
Bron backed away from the pit, satisfied that there were no Daggermen hiding in this section where he searched, and if one had managed to escape via the pit, then so be it. The Daesin army wouldn’t go home defeated because of one fanatic.
A small voice, insistent in its warning, refused to back down. “What if the escapee is Ceybold?”
As if the torch itself heard the voice, its flame flared even brighter for a moment, casting its light on something small that glimmered next to the spot where one of the stones Bron had taken sat. He crouched once more and held up the item for closer inspection.
It had the look of a Daesin coin at first squint, of similar circumference and thickness, yet it lacked the triangle punched into the middle that marked all the currency of the realm. Instead, its center was solid and carved with an iris flower on both sides. Bron gasped, recognizing the symbol. It wasn’t a coin, but a prayer token and protection charm. This one had a hole drilled out of the bottom third, just large enough to thread a thin cord through and wear the token as a piece of jewelry. Ceybold had once possessed such a token. So did Bron, who still kept his tucked away in a small pouch with other keepsakes. Ceybold had given it to him fourteen years earlier as thanks for saving him from the vicious madness of his own father.
For a moment, dread froze him in place, conquering logic that demanded he consider the possibility that the prayer token was of no consequence, that it could belong to anyone, that Disaris was surely correct in her declaration that Ceybold was dead. Every instinct screamed she was wrong, and it was panic, not reason that finally unlocked his muscles, sending himbolting across the fortress toward a different gate, ignoring the confused calls of the men who’d accompanied him to Baelok.
He clutched the prayer token in his clenched hand, fancying it burned a mark in his palm with the malice of the man who was surely not dead and had purposefully left it behind during his escape, a message of mockery for Bron and a promise of retribution for Disaris.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Bron chanted as he careened down the ramp built by Daesin troops to invade the fortress. “Fucking bastard, I’ll rip your liver out and eat it in front of you if you break one of her fingernails.”
The moment he hit the saddle, his mount launched into a gallop, hooves spraying sand as it raced across the plain back to the encampments. Bron reined the horse to a slower canter once they reached his camp, dodging and swerving tents and soldiers until the makeshift lanes became too crowded to navigate safely. He abandoned the animal at a crossroads of tents and sprinted towards his own quarters, heart racing as faster and harder the closer he got to them.
Those guards he’d left to watch over Disaris while he was gone leapt out of the way as he shot past them and burst into the tent. The single lantern he used to illuminate the tent’s interior was almost guttered, its candle dying a slow, flickering death. The last of its flame gave off a muddy glow that revealed Disaris asleep on his bed, huddled beneath the covers.
A loud sigh of relief gusted past Bron’s lips, and he held a second breath as she echoed the sound before turning on her side away from him. The sharp edge of her profile had softened in slumber, and those betraying eyelashes fluttered gently, with dreams instead of lies this time.
Bron dropped abruptly to his haunches, draped his arms over his knees and hung his head. “Thank the gods,” he whispered to the ground beneath him. Just as quickly, he lookedup, scanning the back wall of the tent for any oddity that might alert him to an attempted incursion. Nothing looked out of place except for an empty bowl and spoon placed on the stool near his bedside. Someone had brought Disaris supper, and she’d cleaned the bowl to the last dregs.
