River of Spears (Kingdom's Forge Book 0) (7 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he walking continued. The second week passed. The days droned on. Step by step, Dain and Nico droned on with them. Their feet ached. Blisters formed. They cracked and bled and formed anew.

Many of the other mercs were worse off. They fashioned crude moccasins from their shirts or jackets, but inevitably those who struggled dropped back and, along with their unfortunate partners, met their deaths on Tyberon spears.

Dain heaved a sigh. He focused on putting one foot ahead of the other.

Balerion was wrong, the grass goes on forever.

It rippled in the wind like waves on the ocean, an endless sea of green. As a scout, he had an unerring sense of direction, but only by the sun and stars could he tell which way they faced. He had tried constructing a map in his head, but gave up after the first few days. The Tyberons’ constant twisting and turning still seemed random. Their crane-feathered guides changed direction half a dozen times each day.

Several more times they found shallow lakes among the grass, and once it rained all through the night—heavy, soaking drops that stung the eyes and made restful sleep impossible. The next day he could feel the thick humidity weighing him down, and it took effort just to breathe.

He glanced over at Nico. He—
she
, he corrected himself— plodded along beside him.

The Tyberons hadn’t cared Nico was a woman.
An enemy was an enemy,
Dain guessed. Women warriors weren’t unheard of. He had seen or heard or read about several lands where females fought alongside the men. Outwardly, Nico hadn’t changed, but Dain noticed her eyes constantly scanning in all directions. She acted more like a skittering sparrow than the ruthless bringer of death she’d been before.

No use blaming her for that. Not after the last few days.

Twice, Dain had fought men off her. He would have thought with all the marching the captured mercenaries would be too tired to try anything, but they proved resilient.

After the second man nursed a broken arm the other would-be paramours got the message. Wilhem, the mercenary chained to Jensen, seemed to be having the same problem. Though the other Pyre Rider remained covered, the other prisoners had assumed that he too was actually a woman.

Their captors continued to keep their watch at night. Dain could sense their nervousness and indeed it seemed to grow worse as the days passed and the green sea deepened. He never saw any sign of what the savages feared.
Perhaps they are just superstitious, fearing the night itself.
But that made little sense—they certainly hadn’t been afraid during their night raids on the posts or the Esterian army.

The rising sun seemed to drive away these unseen dangers. From their postures he could tell they feared little in the daytime.

Dain’s original captor led them again. He walked like the others, with arms outstretched and palms open, but unlike the other cranes, who took slow, steady steps, he set a faster pace.

The column had just set off after a short break at noon when something vast and unseen shifted in the grass ahead.

As one, the Tyberons froze. The mercs followed their lead; whatever frightened their fierce captors they had cause to fear as well. The grasses stirred and, for a brief second, Dain thought he saw a monstrous scaled tail rise and then fall off to his right. From force of habit, he felt for the hilt of his missing sword, then realized his mistake and shook his head.

Poor time to be defenseless.

He glanced at Nico. She stood with her hands held out, ready to cast. He tugged their common chain and she shot him a venomous look. He stared deliberately down at her clamp-covered hand.

She followed his look and, when she saw the clamp, her eyes widened as if it were a death adder. She turned her eyes back to him, an unspoken apology mingling with the realization and fear there.

For half an hour no one moved. Sweat beaded up and dripped down Dain’s forehead. He made no move to wipe it lest the chain rattle. The grasses skittered and shook and a loud snort came from off to their left. Then, finally, whatever beast lurked ahead, whatever they had disturbed, lay silent.

A second crane, one with gray in his hair, led the army back, away from the sound’s source. Later, when they were miles away, he and Dain’s captor stood alone. Both men faced each other. The older man jammed his finger into the younger man’s chest and spoke in firm tones.

Though he didn’t understand their language, Dain had seen soldiers disciplined before. The old warrior’s expressions reminded him of his father when he had dressed down one of his men.

At last the older warrior returned to the lead. The younger scowled and stomped off in a huff.

“Not happy, is he,” Nico commented.

She hadn’t spoken since Ox’s death. Her voice had grown higher in pitch now that she made no secret of her identity.

“No, I would say he made a pretty bad mistake back there. Did you see anything?”

“I thought…no, nothing. Did you?”

He heard the hesitation. Had Nico seen the tail, too? He was about to reply when the butt of a spear jammed into his side.

They walked on for another four days. Twice they found small lakes, and on the third day it rained all morning. Their captors didn’t care. Despite the mud, they led them on.

At last, when Dain thought they had traveled a hundred miles, they emerged into an open field. There was no warning; one minute they were in the stifling grass, and the next they stepped into the clear.

He looked out and stretched his vision as far as it would go.

Before them was a city. Not a small adobe village like the one they’d conquered, but a great sprawling city on a hill, with gleaming white buildings bristling skyward like quills on the back of an enormous hedgehog.

A city of this size must hold at least a hundred thousand Tyberons
, Dain guessed, his mouth falling open at the sight.

Like the village, but on a far larger scale, a patchwork of green fields and orchards reached out from the hill in all directions. Irrigation water poured through deep canals, linking the fields in a perfect web. The field’s runoff collected into a tranquil lake that surrounded the city like a castle’s moat.

At the clearing’s edge stood a solitary, flat-topped tower. On its roof was a gear-driven tripod and a telescope pointed toward the heavens.

Dain gawked at it. How could these people, seemingly primitive as they were, create such a thing? The village’s simple adobe huts he could believe. But this…this city, the precise layout of the fields, irrigation, and an observatory? It would take years—no, decades—of planning, coordination, and engineering. The Tyberons had to be much more sophisticated than they appeared.

The guards led the group around the edge of the fields. They talked among themselves, louder than before. A few laughed—a sound Dain had never heard coming from any Tyberon. They held their spears loose with a casual grace.

“Look at that pump,” Nico whispered. She stood at his shoulder.

Dain followed her gaze. Two robed Tyberons, unfeathered and indistinguishable from any other person, stood behind a white stone pedestal in a field of lettuce. The robed men had stopped working and were watching the new arrivals.

“What about it?”

“Look at the Magentite.”

A polished Magentite gem the size of Dain’s fist lay atop the pump almost haphazardly. A stone that size would sell for tens of thousands in gold, and yet the Tyberons had it laying out in the open on the edge of a field.

One of the robed men placed the gem into a shallow bowl atop the pedestal. The second cast a spell, and water poured from a hole in the pedestal’s side.

A gem of that size and they are using it to water their fields.

“With one of those, I could burn a path a mile wide from here to the river in a single night,” Nico said. “I could burn that entire city to the ground. I could burn anything.” Her eyes took on a frenzied light.

Dain rattled the chain gently and she looked down at the clamp on her hands.

“I could burn anything,” she mumbled, more to herself than to him. She kept her head down.

“Is Nico your real name?” Dain asked. When she didn’t answer, he asked again and nudged her with his elbow. She shook her head then looked up at him.

“Nicola.”

They continued around the city, skirting the field’s edges, until they were almost exactly opposite where they had first emerged. The Tyberons led them into a deep quarry.

Hundreds of shackled prisoners, mostly men and exclusively Tyberon, labored with chisel and hammer there, cutting blocks of white stone. Like the captured army, they too were chained in pairs.

Near the quarry’s bottom, a group of mages directed four towering rock elementals, and the man-shaped beings lifted the finished blocks and then carried them away with little effort. Dozens of lark-feathered guards milled around, watching the prisoners.

Each of the paired army survivors were led past the quarry’s iron gates and into a small adobe building. Dain and Nicola fell into line there and slowly advanced toward the back.

Their first stop was a group of grimy blacksmiths. Without a word, they adjusted Dain and Nicola’s shackles. Dain’s was moved from his wrist down to his ankle. Nicola’s hands were freed from the clamps then reshackled into wrist cuffs lined with grape-sized Magentites.

If she attempted to cast now, the gems would amplify her spell and burn off her arm. A long length of chain was attached from her left cuff to Dain’s ankle.

One of the guards motioned with his spear and they joined a second line that headed out the building’s rear.

A pair of Tyberons waited for them at the doorway, along with a man chained to the wall. His clothes were threadbare and the Magentite-encrusted shackle about his wrist loose. His ribs showed beneath the thin clothing.

He must have been larger when they first chained him, maybe Wilhem’s size,
Dain thought.

The prisoner spoke in perfect Common when they reached the line’s end.

“You are now property of the Frexe Tyberons. Graciously they have allowed you to live and pay penance for your crimes. Doing so will earn forgiveness and mercy from the gods.” He spoke without emotion, voice drained of all hope.

A Tyberon handed Dain a rolled leather pouch. It clanked when he took it.

“These are your tools. You will cut stone. Your partner,” the man shifted his gaze to Nicola, “will measure the blocks. One rod in every direction, then split in half. Complete two per day. The first is for forgiveness, the second for your life.”

To Nicola the Tyberons handed a long measuring rod and water pouch.

Without further ceremony, a guard led them to a section of the quarry and the labor began.

Six months they worked. Nicola measured and marked. Dain cut. They always finished the first block before noon. After that, the pace slowed. The second block wasn’t due until morning, and there was no reward for cutting extra blocks, no slack the following day. That was one of the first lessons the slaves learned.

As a pair they worked well, outlasting many of the others. Dain used his Light-given abilities to strengthen himself and to heal Nicola’s scrapes and cuts. Nicola, with some innate ability she possessed, could drive off the multitude of pests that plagued them from the grasslands.

“A connection through the mind’s fire,” she said simply when asked about it.

“Did you drive them off as we marched? I noticed we seemed to avoid the snakes and insects that bit the others,” Dain asked.

Nicola smiled.

“Is that how you could ride the bats?”

“The Kalang are intelligent—impossible to control by will alone. It is a combination of the mind’s fire and simple training. Like dogs and horses and all manner of animals performing tricks in one of the traveling shows.”

Early on Dain found that hard work—pushing himself to the limit—worked as well as Bix’s potions, and he slept deep and dreamless.

The work was brutal. They cut and measured and then cut again. Their muscles grew stiff and sore. More than the work, the mindless repetition ground them down. Their motions became mechanical, requiring no thought at all. They wore through the first set of tools and the guards replaced them.

At first, they could see a handful of the other captured mercenaries around them. Over the passing months these others were all replaced by Tyberons as the captives grew weary and died.

At least the view is nice
, Dain thought. He and Nicola worked on the quarry’s highest level. They could see fields and canals and the bristling city on the hill. For the most part they were above the chalky dust below; they were also exposed to the worst of the elements.

The nights grew colder as winter drew near. Snow fell in stinging little flakes as the howling winds swept over the browned grasslands, flinging its chilly bite at them. Nicola found her cuff would allow a thin trickle of power, and used it to heat loose rocks around them. These warded off the worst of the cold.

Dain and Nicola never left their work area. It became home. Unsha, a Tyberon prisoner from another city, was their only visitor. Twice a day, sunrise and sunset, the bent old woman struggled with her sloshing pots and doled out their ration of tough bread and tasteless gruel. From her they gradually learned the Tyberon language.

At one point, Dain wondered if he and Nicola had built half of the city. He lost count of how many blocks they had cut.

He worried about Nicola. The girl was made of iron, of that he had no doubt, but filed at by labor and boredom, even iron could be worn away. She never spoke of her past, the other Riders, or anything really. He didn’t mind. He didn’t share anything of his own history either. They told stories instead, or sang songs, or talked about the Tyberons, or shared what their plans were once they escaped.