Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 (16 page)

Not all mercenaries were mages, but all mercenaries were trained to
work
with mages. The empress’s soldiers, however, didn’t have that distinct trait, and they bore that fact with pride. A long time ago, Sara Fairchild had thought she would be the one to break that barrier, just as her father and forefathers had once believed. Battle mages, after all, couldn’t be ignored. They were needed in a way that even the soldiers had to acknowledge. But it had been no coincidence that, for the most part, her father had ended up in leadership and administrative positions, even though his training in the arena made him far more suited to the front line. The army’s excuse? Generals and commanders did not lead from the front, battle mage or not. Sara had wanted to change that.

She laughed bitterly.
Looks like I’ll be changing it alright. There hasn’t been a Fairchild in the trenches for decades.

“Partly a matter of getting the upper hand on the Kades,” the sailor said while lowering his voice. “We found out where Nissa Sardonien was a few weeks ago. Believe you me, getting the drop on her was no easy task.”

Sara blinked. She couldn’t believe it. The woman could harness the power of the sun and light. Going up against her in daylight would have been suicidal.

“But we did,” the sailor said, finishing nervously. “Now we’ll get the way into the fortress out of her and end this before any further embarrassment comes to the empress’s name.”

“Embarrassment?” murmured Sara.

“Yeah,” said the man defensively.

“That’s how they refer to it on the streets of Sandrin,” Sara said. “I didn’t think you’d call it that here as well.”

“Why not?” the sailor asked.

Sara turned around and got a good look at the horizon. The airship was starting to descend towards land and she had a good vantage point from so high up above.

Pointing straight forward with one hand, she said, “We’re coming in from the southwest, correct?”

The sailor came up beside her and nodded.

Sara had studied a map of the territories in the northeast region of the empire. This was supposed to be the breadbasket of the land. Empty of everything but fields upon fields of barley, wheat, and crops that provided food for the rest of the empire. She knew from her geography studies that it was flat land, with rich soil, and nary a population center larger than four thousand families in any direction. So seeing anything contrary to that knowledge made her back stiffen and skin crawl automatically.

And well, this? This made her shudder physically at the wrongness of it all.

“Then pray-tell, what is that?” she asked while tilting her head and narrowing her eyes.

The man licked his lips and took in the structure she was pointing at. Three miles due north of their ship was a towering dark mass with four spires reaching towards the heavens, surrounded by a mage shield so large and powerful that it was visible even now.

“That is the tower of the Kades,” the man said quietly.

Sara nodded and moved her finger due south, crossing a distance of just a few miles, to point at an enormous, orderly formation of tents. Thousands of tents—lined up in rows with people milling between them like ants.

“And that?” Sara asked just as quietly.

“The Algardis encampment.”

Sara nodded and turned to look at the sailor beside her. “When the Kades erected that monstrosity, this fight turned from a skirmish to a civil war.”

“Yes,” said the sailor.

Sara continued. “And when they ambushed the elite Corcoran Guard and massacred over half of those mercenaries, it went from an embarrassment to a blemish on Algardis history.”

“Well—” started the man.

Sara held up a hand. “I’m not finished. When we wipe the Kades off the map,” she continued with a pleasant smile, “it will fade from a blemish to a blip in history. Not a moment more.”

The man gave a deep swallow. “So it’s a good thing we captured Mage Sardonien, then, isn’t it?”

Sara turned back to look at the dark tower rising above the Algardis camp like a crowned city before its peasants. “We should hope so. Otherwise...”

“Otherwise?” the sailor asked with a catch in his voice.

“Otherwise, we’re in for one hell of a civil war,” Sara finished while looking down on the enemy encampment with disbelief on her face as her airship sunk in its shadow and the towers rose above their heads in the distance.

S
ara Fairchild didn’t have very much else to say to the man, and he soon wandered off with a troubled look on his face. She stood with her face to the wind and closed her eyes to everything. Closed to the world. Closed to the vision in front of her. Closed to the lies. Closed to the memories. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep all of her memories from floating to the surface like dead fish at high tide.

A slight smile spread across her face as she remembered standing on the steps of the stone platforms that dotted the city streets of Sandrin. There were six such platforms, each centrally located in the six major districts—north, west, east, south, high-tide territory, and the imperial grounds. At the intersections of the major thoroughfares for each of the six was the newsreader’s platform. And every single day without fail, until she had been forced to call upon the head fisherman’s office for a job, she’d washed her face, put on fresh clothes, and headed out the door in the early morning in order to hear the newsreader speak his news. Much like a town crier for smaller locales, the newsreader dispersed the most important announcements from the guilds, councils, and the imperial courts at dawn.

Gathering herself, Sara opened her eyes and joined the line of disembarking men and woman to go down the gangplank to her new home.

“And every day,” Sara said while staring dully at the back of the head of the soldier who stood one place in front of her as they descended the gangplank, “that whey-faced turd of a newsreader crowed that the Kades were dirty brigands. Sure to lose. Couldn’t possibly stand up against the might of the imperial forces.”

Her hand curled into a fist at the very thought. An enemy on the run was very different from what she saw here. The Kade fortress lay like a jet-black mountain which had risen from the earth, complete with spires and platforms. It was an impenetrable refuge that housed an innumerable host of men, all fighting for the Kade cause.

“I wonder if they even
know
how many Kades they’re fighting or what it will truly take to defeat them. Because as of now they all look as clueless as chickens in a barnyard,” Sara wondered aloud as the line moved forward, and she shuffled down the gangplank like an obedient ant. She could only look to the left and right or straight at the back of the dirty unkempt hair in front of her.

I doubt I look much better
, Sara thought wryly, all the while resisting the urge to put a finger in her own hair, which she was sure was a nest of dirt, leaves, and more dirt. It made her shudder to think about it. She may not have been a girl who loved the pretty dresses or jewelry that most well-born girls seemed to adore, but she was absolutely fastidious in keeping her body clean and her appearance well-tended.

It was the least she could do for a long-suffering mother who had loved to dress her up and who had realized, when her daughter turned the age of six, that if she invited Sara to one more dressmaker’s shop for hours of fabrics and fittings, that it would be destroyed by the time they left.

So when the winds shifted and brought the smell of the dozen men and women lining up ahead of her to get off the ship, Sara curled her nose in disgust and turned her face away, desperately trying to avoid the stench. It only succeeded in bringing her line of sight directly in conflict with the glare of the sun, but that was better than retching over the side of the gangplank. None of them had had a proper bath in days, herself included. Gritting her teeth and resisting the urge to pinch her nose, she raised an arm to shield her eyes and glared down at the Algardis encampment that lay directly adjacent to the airship. The field they had set down upon looked to be just off to the side of the barracks for the soldiers and mercenaries, which was just as well. Where there was a barracks, there was a bath—and for now, that was all she needed to know.

Humming to herself, Sara took careful stock of what she could see and compared it in her mind to the imposing fortress that loomed so perilously close. She refused to look at it. Acknowledging the Kade presence at that moment, even for one more second, would just send her into a rage. She had her priorities. Her first and only mission was to find Matteas Hillan and whatever journal entries her father had left behind. Below that mission was the desire to protect Ezekiel, and last of all was the urge to get involved in the skirmish-that-was-actually-a-civil war with the Kade mages. Sara was beginning to come to terms with the fact that the future battles that faced her were more than just the quick fights between Algardis regiments and brigands at night. If nothing else, the ambush by Kade mages with not a single loss of life on the opposing side confirmed that they were dealing with trained military tacticians. The kind that could tear an empire asunder if they so choose.

She would do her utmost to avoid that, regardless of whether or not she was
supposed
to be serving on the front lines of whatever battles happened. Sara intended to put her skills to use elsewhere and solve a mystery wrapped in an enigma—the puzzle of who her father really was and what he died for. His cause of death may have been execution for treason, but that wasn’t the reason he died. Before she left this encampment, she would uncover the truth.

As she looked over the camp that sprawled like a flat and orderly ant colony before her, Sara wondered what exactly she would find so many hundreds of miles away from her home in Sandrin—or rather, what was
left
of her home in Sandrin. Briefly, she wondered while standing in the endless line if there was anything to go back to or would just a shell of blackened timbers and charred stone meet her if she went back.

When I go back
, she told herself firmly.
Because I’m going home. Sandrin
is
home.

Exhaling a pent up breath, Sara tried to keep herself convinced of that. Thinking about how the house could have survived the flames was a pretty idea, but she knew in her heart of hearts that it would have been almost impossible. The fire would have destroyed all but the shell, protected by magical fire suppressants so the entire block didn’t go up in smoke alongside one house. But everything inside would be gone. All of her trinkets, the ones that reminded her of what she had already lost from her childhood—her homes, her family, her friends, her material wealth.

There’s one good thing about that fire
, Sara thought to herself.
Fire burns blood. There will be nothing left of my mother’s ugly demise for me to see.

But she would always remember. She knew that she would never forget that night. The night that a necromancer had walked into her home and callously took the life of the woman who had given birth to her. To Sara her mother meant life. Or
had
meant life. She’d patched every scrape on her, admonished her when she got in scuffles, praised her when she’d won her fighting matches and fed her like a horse. In other words, she had
believed
in Sara’s potential even if she didn’t agree with her choice of a career. Now that light in her life was gone. The necromancer had snuffed it out like a candle casually starved of air. That’s what Sara had felt like when she had seen her mother die once and been robbed of life twice—the first time when her throat was cut and the second time when the necromancer had revived her corpse only to sacrifice it in a desperate bid for his own wishes.

She flashed back to the night when she had seen her mother’s dead eyes. The necromancer had stood near her mother, touching the back of her mother’s head to animate her just after death. His death magic seeped into her like the poison that flowed through Ezekiel’s veins—allowing the necromancer to control her mother’s body.

Sara would never forget the chill that went through her when she had realized the voice that had welcomed her home that evening wasn’t her mother’s. Not really. It had her body empty of a soul forced to enact the commands of a heartless mage who would have done anything, and did anything including forcing a mother’s dead body to assault her living daughter in a struggle for control, to get what he wanted.

Absentmindedly, Sara shuffled forward as two more mercenaries were admitted into the camp. Each was given a slip of paper and a pack of supplies.

I don’t resent the necromancer, though,
Sara thought with detachment.
Not really. Resentment is too futile an action. I hate him. I hate him for taking away the last living person in the world who knew me and loved me before I became what I am today. A penniless drifter with no place and no purpose. Certainly not what my mother planned, especially when my father was alive.

That fierce hate would have kept her going, she knew, if her purpose were to avenge her mother’s death. But it was not. Her mother had been a pawn in a larger game. A game that Sara was just beginning to see involved a far broader spectrum of players than she had ever believed possible. Her father—a commander in the empress’s armies. Ezekiel Crane—a seemingly innocent historian of magical arts who hid more than he revealed. The necromancer—a high-ranking member of the Red Guard mercenaries who had certainly not been acting alone.

She had to wonder who or what else would present themselves as an obstacle in her way. But she knew one thing—even if she wasn’t quite sure who else was playing this maniacal game, she did know
how
it was played. Strength-for-strength, in a deadly winner-take-all fete. And Sara knew she wouldn’t be acting true to herself if she wasn’t prepared to put everything on the line—including her life—to learn the truth about her father’s treason and who was behind the cover-up.