Beyond the Hell Cliffs (10 page)

“Raegith, run damn you!”

Raegith pulled his eyes away from Onyx and turned back to see Zakk grappling with the unarmed soldier.  The boy bashed the soldier in the face with his head and flipped the man over his shoulder with disciplined precision.  Raegith noticed the prone figures of the other four men.  Between Hemmil’s instruction and his constant, steadfast training, Zakk was a terrifying machine.

Zakk dismantled the Saban and leveled his sword at the man’s neck.  Then he hesitated.

“Kill him!” Raegith roared.

But Zakk would not land the final blow
.  Despite his training and preparation, there was one thing Hemmil could not train: a killing resolve.  Raegith knew very little about the red-haired boy Hemmil personally trained, but he had gathered enough to know that Zakk had never been in a true battle before and most likely never expected to have to turn his blade on a fellow soldier.  Raegith could see the fear on Zakk’s face.  Even to defend his life, the boy was unwilling to kill another soldier.

The Saban soldier saw it too and retaliated.  The kick drove Zak back and he was on his feet.  Then one of the other soldiers was up and behind him.  Zakk put up a good defense against the first soldier but the other came from behind and cracked a sword hilt over his head, dropping him to the ground.

The soldier who killed Onyx snatched Zakk’s sword up, reared back and drove it forward.  The blade bounced off of a shield.

“Enough, Garret!” the soldier behind Zakk yelled, shielding the boy from the man’s killing blow.  “He’s a boy!”

“A boy who tried to kill us all!” the man named Garret replied.

“Really, Private?
  If so, then why are we all still alive?” the man asked.  “It seems you spent more than a blink under his blade and are still breathing.  We take them all alive!”

Garret turned and looked at Raegith and a smile crept over his face.  “Well, not all of them.”

The commanding soldier looked over at Raegith and Onyx.  “Garret, you psychopath… what have you done?”

“She tried to kill me with her witch magic, Corporal!” Garret yelled.  “Falfa told us that these Ellies with the crazy eyes are volatile, remember?  He said their magic is queer and dangerous and it was!”

“Just grab the half-breed and let’s get back to the others.  They may need our help.”

Garret laughed.  “
There’s three platoons of us.  You think they need our help with four guys?”

Chapter 8

The Saban soldiers subdued Zakk and Raegith and marched them back to the battle.  Despite Raegith’s protests, Onyx’s body was left there in the forest.  The Sabans cared little for a dead Stone Seer and the man named Garret faced no reprisal for murdering her.

As they approached the carts, Raegith was stunned to see most of the men lying dead or wounded.  Boram was on a knee and braced against his sword in the ground, breathing heavily and looking at the handful of men left.  Tavin was out of arrows and had his knife out and Hemmil was leaning up against the cart.  No one moved.

Raegith was confused by the sight until he spotted Ebriz.  The bard was standing behind the kneeling lieutenant, a small stiletto digging into the man’s throat. 

“Lieutenant!” the corporal holding Zakk yelled.

“Let the two boys go, Corporal, or your commander dies,” Ebriz said.

“Corporal, keep a hold of those prisoners!” the officer yelled before receiving a cuff on the side of the head from Ebriz.

“Fuck you, treewalker!” Garret yelled.  “You drop the knife or we kill both of them!”

“I’m not spinning a lie here, Saban!  I’ll bleed him out and then come for you,” Ebriz warned.

The corporal looked over at Hemmil and then back at Ebriz.  He kicked the back of Zakk’s knees and pushed the boy to his knees.  Then he held his sword up over his neck in an executioner’s fashion.  Raegith felt his legs go out and he was pushed into the same position.

“You traitors know nothing of a soldier’s resolve!” the corporal yelled.  “I have my orders and so does the lieutenant.  To arms, men!  Kill the lot of them as soon as the Twileen draws blood!”

“Wait!”

Hemmil was on his feet and taking a step forward.  He held up his hammer in front of him and then let it fall to the ground, along with his shield.

“Let the two of them go.  We surrender.”

“Bullshit!” Boram growled.  “We can take them.”

“They’ll kill him, Boram,” Hemmil said.  “Are you truly okay with that… and what would come after?”

Boram roared so loudly that his face turned deep red.  Raegith could almost feel the man’s rage and frustration explode in that moment and he wondered if the warrior had ever surrendered in his life.  Had Raegith not been there, or even if he would have stayed and fought beside his comrades, things would not have turned out that way.

Boram and Tavin dropped their weapons and were quickly overwhelmed by the remaining soldiers.  Both of the men were beaten down, but spared.  Ebriz dropped his blade and was quickly turned on by the lieutenant.  It took only a few hits from his armored gauntlet and the bard was unconscious.  Hemmil stood there, stone-faced as the lieutenant approached him and kicked the weapons away from his feet.

“
Paladin Hemmil!” he announced.  “You and your men are under arrest for the crime of treason.”

“
Just get on with it,” Hemmil said to the man.  “Send the two boys to Augustus and word to the king.  I promise you, on my word as a Paladin, you will regret doing anything else.”

“
The word of a traitorous Paladin is no better than the word of a Rathgar,” the lieutenant replied.  He pointed to the captives.  “Remove their armor, search them and lash them to the carts!”

“No!” Zakk screamed, suddenly attempting to tear loose from his captors.  A soldier stepped in quickly to strike him with a pike shaft, but Zakk was in survival mode and parried the attack, countering with a kick to the crotch and a headbutt to the face.  Other
s quickly reacted and Raegith kicked out into the closest one, tripping him and sending him into another.

The act of rebellion was quickly quelled as both of them were tired, bound and outnumbered.  Zakk took several blows to the head and Raegith was planted on his back by a kick to the face from
Garret.  He looked up to see Zakk slammed against the cart.  He continued to cry out, protesting loudly as the armor was tugged and ripped away.  As the last of the metal armor was stripped away and the soldier began to pull at the under clothes, a tear fell from Zakk’s face.

“Uh,
lieutenant…” one of the soldiers said, standing back away from the exposed Saban before him.  “This one’s a girl!”

Raegith and
the others looked to see the near-naked, pale-skinned girl leaning against the cart, gritting her teeth against the tears in her eyes.  As Raegith would have imagined, she was slender and toned, her skin tight against the rippled muscles underneath.  She was not soft and supple, like Saban women should be, but hard and lean, like a warrior.  Freckles dotted her almost pinkish skin and her slight breasts were taped down with tight linen wrapping.  Zakk was a female Saban and no one, except Hemmil had known it.  No one had ever seen her without her armor.

“Fucking bastards,” Hemmil growled.  “Have you no honor at all?”

“What heresy is this, Paladin?” the lieutenant asked.  “You take on a young female as your squire and disguise her as a boy to cover your deviancy?”

The
lieutenant turned back to the man who had stepped away from Zakk.

“Undo the bindings about her chest,” he commanded.  “I’ll not have her continue the slightest bit of this charade.  Then return her clothes and toss her in with the rest of them.  Is this freak female as well?”

“Why don’t you come check me, asshole?” Raegith said.  “Come on down here, commander… I’ll slap you in the face with it and then you can tell me if you think I’m female.”

“Shut his mouth,” the
lieutenant barked.  A booted heel came down on Raegith’s face and he lost consciousness.

When he awoke, he was lying back on a cart, with Ebriz looking down on him.  This time he felt the pain that he knew would follow the beating he took and the Twil
een bard was not so cheerful as the first time he found himself in this scenario.  Raegith fought against the pain in his face and leaned up to look about the prison he was in.

The
cart was stripped of its contents and Boram’s sleeping form took up most of it.  Everyone was in underclothing, bound and anchored to the rails.  Tavin sat in the corner, a look of calm insanity reflected in his face as he looked upon the prone figure of his friend.  Hemmil sat near Zakk in the other corner, lording over her as she slept in a fetal position under his arm.  Several guards were close by, keeping watch.  It was dark out and Raegith had no idea how long he had been out.

“What happened?  Where are we?” Raegith asked, unsure of how long he was unconscious.

“
Where we are is between the frying pan and the fire, lad,” Ebriz laughed.  It did not extend out the way that it used to.  “They found our papers to the emperor, written in the Greimere tongue.  It was impossible to convince them that we were not traitors after that.  The girl is fine, we think, though she’s a bit upset over being found out and then forced to present her goods before the officer.  The prick took his time giving the order to clothe her.  They took turns taking the fight out of the rest of us.  Boram has been unconscious for hours.  Don’t really know if he’ll wake up, from the beating that he took.”

“He’ll wake, bard,” Tavin said.  “Keep any future thoughts to the contrary to yourself or I’ll rip your throat out.”

“Tavin is not taking this whole thing very well, as you can see,” the bard continued.

“How did this happen?”

“The optimistic side of me says that this was all Falfa’s idea… that Pyrrhus was right not to trust him to let your deal go unpunished.  The pessimistic side of me is telling me that these kind of things are usually committed by the one person who is not among the group when disaster strikes.”

“You
think Pyrrhus turned on us?” Raegith asked.

“
It’s been a long-standing idea among some of the brighter, more political Twileens that if we ever truly beat the Greimere and there was a lasting peace in the lands that the unity among our three races would no longer be necessary.”

“My father, when he was recruiting me for this mission, said that the nation of Rellizbix relied upon this continued war.  He
said that the entire economy would fail if we ever had lasting peace… because we were a nation built upon war.”

“
He was half right, Raegith.  The nation would fall apart with peace, surely, but not because of the economy.  The Faeir and Twileens joined this nation on the basis that a Saban king would be indifferent; a third party favoring neither side.  We needed the Sabans strength and vigor to defeat the Greimere, but the Faeir have no need for a Saban outside of combat.  The Council could much easier take power from your father if they could convince the nation that a warrior king was no longer necessary.”

“If you’
re right, then I put Pyrrhus’s name beside the man that killed Onyx on the list of those I will see dead.  I heard one of them call him… Garret.”

“
We’ll need to be free of this cart first, prince,” Ebriz said, tapping his finger to his lips. 

That night Raegith slept fitfully.  It was not just the uncomfortable place he was tied to on the cart or the pain in his body that kept him awake; he could not take his mind off of Onyx and the Saban named Garret.  Her blank, dying face clung to the back of his
eyeballs and would not leave him.  He did not even get a single word to her before she was gone, it happened so fast.  He fought back the grief.  It would only serve to entertain the Saban captors and so he would only reveal rage and hatred.

The more he bottled all the agony inside of him, the more he felt like he was going to burst.  He had spent so little time with her.  Just when he had convinced her of his feelings and
that they had a future together; in an instant she was gone.  In a land of peace and plenty, where survival was almost assured and true hardship was rare, Raegith was forced to bear witness to atrocity.  It was made even worse that the Saban soldiers felt justified in everything they did.  As much as he hated them, they hated him back for all of the comrades they had lost that day.  Should they take him to Fort Augustus as Hemmil suggested, he could not see surviving among the vengeful men until his father arrived.  Either they would exact revenge on him, or he would find a way to avenge his own loss.

The next day
, around noon, he and his friends were surprised to see Falfa and Pyrrhus approaching the camp.  They both rode side-by-side and were accompanied by a squad of Saban soldiers on horseback.  Falfa was visually appalled by the decimation caused by the small group, as evidenced by the few men left.  Pyrrhus wore a look of disgust, as well, but Raegith noticed that he ignored his former companions and looked only at the surviving men.

The soldiers had moved the cart away from the battle site while he was unconscious.  How far away they were and in what direction not even Ebriz knew.  Even if he could convince Pyrrhus to find Onyx’s body and retr
ieve it, he could not tell the Mage where she was.

“So few of you are left, Lieutenant,” Falfa observed as he returned the man’s salute.

“They were a rowdy group, but we overcame.”  The lieutenant approached with a scroll and handed it to the Vi-Sage.  “We found this on them, along with several goods.”

The Faeir looked over the contents of the scroll and smiled.  “Just as I suspected; they are indeed traitors to the nation.  Is any of this familiar, Pyrrhus?”

The Flame Mage shook his head with a frown.  “The effects of the Stone Seer’s magic clouded everything, Vi-Sage.  You know my reputation and have no reason to doubt my word when I tell you I believed we were travelling to Galveronne all the way up to last night.  I warned you of the possible deception well before you learned of it from the messenger your men sent back… as soon as my mind cleared, that is.”

Pyrrhus looked around.  “Where is the witch who blinded me?  Bring out the Stone Seer, Onyx!  Onyx, answer my call!”

“Beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said.  “The Stone Seer is not here.”

“She escaped?” Falfa screeched.  “Why are you not searching for her?  A rogue Stone Seer is
incredibly dangerous!”

“She’s dead.”

“Come again?” Pyrrhus asked, leaning forward on the warbird he rode atop.

“One of the men, Private Garret… it was self-defense.  She tried to use her magic on him.”

“You killed a Faeir?” Pyrrhus was enraged.  He seemed to be stumbling over several emotions and even Falfa gave him a strange look.  “This is completely unacceptable!”

“Pyrrhus, she was a Stone Seer and a rogue at that,” the Vi-Sage said.

“She…!” Pyrrhus said, taking a moment to steady himself.  “She is the only one who could shed light on what is going on here.  Now we will have to drag all of these traitors back to Fort Augustus for interrogation.”

“Nonsense.
  They are traitors and we have all the proof we need here with this scroll,” Falfa replied.  “We’ll execute them here and you and I will return to file a report with the Council.”

“It was me!” Hemmil yelled, struggling to get to his feet in the cart.  “I coaxed the Stone Seer, I led these men towards the Hell Cliffs and I conspired to profit by sellin
g advantages to our enemy.  The bard, warrior and hunter are all three mercenaries merely serving the coin I pay.  The boy is a slave I intended to sell to the Emperor and the girl… is my sex slave.”