Soulblade (12 page)

An ominous growl, followed by a loud splash, came from fifteen or twenty meters downstream, and Tolemek jumped.

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll be sleeping in,” Cas said. “Not with prisoners to guard and a swamp full of creatures that want to eat them. And us.”

Tolemek also did not like the idea of leaving Cas and the others to keep watch over twelve men who would spend the next three days trying to escape or otherwise make trouble. The pilots had to worry about the imperial airship patrolling the coast too.

“It would be better for you if there weren’t prisoners to guard,” Tolemek said.

“We can’t let them go, and I don’t think anyone is going to agree to a mass throat slitting.”

“I wasn’t suggesting
that
, but I have an idea. One that relies upon my dreadful reputation, assuming it’s made it to this continent.” He wouldn’t know if it had until he saw how the men reacted.

“What is it? Have you run it by the colonel?”

“Not yet. I need to see if Captain Kaika will help, since she can speak the language here. But first, I need you to know that I have something of yours.”

“Oh?”

“Actually, it’s from Duck’s flier.” Tolemek opened his hand where she would see it. A warm yellow glow escaped from his palm.

“You were able to get it out? I thought your fancy blood might be useful.”

“Yes, my fancy blood and a screwdriver.” Tolemek closed his fist on the communication crystal, cutting out the light. “It’s smaller than I realized. I’ll need to fasten it to something so I don’t lose it, but we’ll be able to keep in touch with your group and let you know when we need company.”

“Good. I don’t think smoke signals would be effective here.”

“Not across forty miles.” Tolemek grimaced at the march they had ahead of them. Even if they followed the beach, it would take all day and into the night, and he didn’t know if they would be able to stick to the beach, not if enemy airships cruised by regularly. They probably couldn’t risk flying closer, either, lest they be spotted. “Let me see if I can get anything to come of my idea.”

He started to move away, but Cas caught his arm.

“Be careful out there,” she urged. “I wish I was going with you.”

“I wish you were too.” He bent his head and found her cheek with his lips.

“Just so you know,” Cas said, her voice so soft he had to lean closer to hear her, “Wolf Squadron’s orders are to protect the flier that’s carrying the emperor at all costs. Right now, the plan is for Blazer to get him. The rest of us may have to stay behind, deal with pursuit so they can get away.”

“So the rest of us are expendable?” he asked dryly.

“It would seem so. I hope you left the recipe for your healing salve behind.”

He snorted. “It takes magic as well as ingredients. Nobody would be able to duplicate it.”

Cas brushed his hair away from his face. “Then we should try to make sure you return home too.”

“Let’s all return home.”

“I’m amenable to that.”

“Good.” The second time, he kissed her on the lips, not pulling away until she lowered her head and murmured something about being on watch.

Not liking the way that kiss had felt like a goodbye, Tolemek hugged her and returned to the camp. He washed his hands thoroughly, a challenge in the muddy environment, then dug a lantern out of his pack, along with a scalpel, a spool of suture, and a few chips of calcite that would be harmless under the skin. To be on the safe side, he doused the chips with his healing salve, which should keep an infection from taking root.

“Captain Kaika?” he murmured, picking his way through the mud to where she slept on a knot of roots.

“Yeah?”

“Can I borrow you for translation purposes?”

“That’s not the usual proposition men give me in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not the middle of the night,” Tolemek said. “Only a couple of hours past dusk.”

“I guess that changes things.” She pushed herself to her feet with a soft splash as her boots landed in the mud. “What do you need?”

“I want to perform surgery on our prisoners and for you to tell them what I’m doing. What I say I’m doing.”

Kaika paused a moment, either to rub sleep out of her eyes or to regard him like he was a crazy man. “Does Cas ever tell you that you’re odd?”

“No,” he said.

“Huh. You should keep her then.” Kaika grabbed her rifle, having no trouble finding it in the dark. “Lead on, surgeon.”

Tolemek turned his lantern up to full strength, swinging it at his side as he approached the prison. He whistled to himself to draw attention. A few open eyes watched him, the light glinting off them. Tylie had healed everybody to the best of her ability, with his salve helping, so the men were not in pain now. This ploy might have worked better if they
hadn’t
healed the men, but he hadn’t thought of it until he had lain down to rest.

“Which one first?” he asked Kaika.

She gave him a quick what-are-you-doing look, then nudged one with her boot. “This one tried to shoot me earlier. I think he was one of the ringleaders.”

“He should be punished then.”

“Of course.”

“Translate, please. Oh, and tell them my name, will you? My pirate name. In case they haven’t already guessed.”

Kaika nudged the closest man again and said a few words. He hoped one of them was Deathmaker.

A few of the men shifted on the ground and glanced toward the trees. One’s shoulders hunched as he tried to pull his tied wrists free. Tolemek found the reaction promising, at least for the purposes of this exercise.

“Will you assist me and hold the lantern, Captain?” Tolemek held up the vial of flakes and shook them. They tinked softly against the glass. “I plan to insert these devices under the skin of each prisoner before we free them. They will allow me to track them, and they will also allow me to kill them from a distance, should I deem it necessary. Such as if they attempt to inform anyone that they saw us.”

One of the prisoners cursed under his breath, leading Tolemek to assume at least a few of the people understood their language.

“Oh?” Kaika squinted at the vial. “For the rest of their lives or for a limited time?”

“For the rest of their lives. Translate, please.”

Kaika spoke in a casual tone to the men, as if she were discussing meal preferences. From the way some of the thieves’ eyes grew round, he trusted she was doing more than that.

Tolemek grew aware of someone behind them, and he glanced back to find Colonel Quataldo standing in the shadows, his arms folded over his chest. He did not say anything, but his lips were thin with displeasure. Perhaps Tolemek should have run this by him first.

He shrugged. He would perform the surgery. It would be up to the colonel if he wanted to let the men go. Tolemek just wanted to leave Cas with as few problems as possible back here.

“Nobody’s volunteering to be first,” Kaika said.

“No? A pity. The procedure is quite painless. Let’s do that one.” He pointed to the man she had nudged.

The thief rolled away from him. He bumped into one of his comrades and did not get far.

“Colonel,” Tolemek said. “Will you assist me by holding the subject?”

Quataldo walked over wordlessly. He shot Tolemek a narrow-eyed look, but that was his only objection. With ease that suggested more strength than it seemed his lean, wiry form should possess, he hauled the big thief to his feet.

“Where do you want him?”

“Close enough to the light that I can see what I’m doing.” Tolemek pointed to roots protruding from the water nearby. “Drape his arm across those and push his sleeve up.”

Quataldo did so while crouching behind the man with a knee in his back. He was very effective at making it so that his prisoner could not struggle. Tolemek remembered the way he had dropped three of the thieves before Cas had even started shooting. In Angulus’s atrium, he had seemed an unassuming enough man, but Tolemek had since decided Quataldo wasn’t anyone he wanted for an enemy.

Tolemek set about his work quickly, slicing a slender line in the man’s forearm. The prisoner gasped and tried to pull away, but Quataldo held him fast. The shallow wound should not hurt much, but it was good that the thief was worried about this. He would be less likely to doubt Tolemek’s words, less likely to tattle on the Iskandians. All they needed was three days of silence. Then his team would either be gone or captured. Or dead.

Tolemek inserted one of his flakes into the wound, digging in to make sure it would be embedded deeply enough that his prisoner could not easily scrape it out. The man gasped again. Considering the thieves had been trying to kill his group, Tolemek did not feel too badly about causing a little pain.

“If you try to take it out,” Tolemek said as he finished up, now stitching the cut closed, “it will send poison into your bloodstream that will travel to your heart.”

Kaika, who stood nearby while holding the light, translated.

“Your heart will stop within three minutes.” He held the man’s eyes as Kaika translated, making his face as grim as possible. Sometime after he had started working in his lab in Iskandia, he had tucked his pirate attire into a cabinet, shaved his goatee, and donned clothing typical of the locals. He’d left his hair long, though, the ropy locks tangled and wild, since he believed it made him look fiercer, less like someone people would want to chance irritating. He tried to summon all of that fierceness now as he held the thief’s eyes.

The man only held his gaze for a second, then whispered something to Kaika.

“He says he’s sorry,” she said. “They shouldn’t have been greedy. He has a family, two small girls, and he sends the money he earns from crocodile skins and meat home to them, so they can get by. The fliers were too good to pass up. It could have sent his girls to school.” Kaika snorted. “I don’t believe his story.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tolemek said, keeping his tone hard so the man would find him more daunting. “So long as he knows he won’t make it back to that family if he betrays our position. Make sure he understands.” He gripped the man’s forearm, his thumb pressing on the fresh sutures. “Do you understand?”

The thief’s head bobbed up and down.

“Get me the next one,” Tolemek said.

“Do you want them retied?” Quataldo asked, the quirk to his lips suggesting he found it odd that he, the mission commander, was asking
Tolemek
what he wanted done.

“I’ll leave that up to you, Colonel, as to whether you want to release them or not before we go.”

Quataldo tied the thief’s hands behind his back again. Probably not a bad idea since that would keep him from scratching at the sutures even more effectively than Tolemek’s threat. “We’ll decide in the morning.”

In a slow parade, Quataldo fetched him thieves, bringing each one over and holding the man while he received a supposedly magical tracking flake.

Tolemek was tired by the time he finished, but he walked away from the lantern and the eyes of the thieves before cracking a yawn. A sleepy Deathmaker wouldn’t be as frightening of a man, he suspected.

“Do you think they’ll believe it?” Cas asked quietly from behind him. She must have been relieved from her watch by one of the others.

He wondered how long she had been observing. He grimaced, wishing she hadn’t witnessed him being cruel. It might save the group trouble, so it was worth it, but it bothered him that his reputation still worked so well, all these thousands of miles from where he and the Roaming Curse pirates had worked.

“Would you want to risk it?” Tolemek asked.

“Probably not. And we don’t need them to believe it forever.”

“If your colonel agrees, you can set them free in the morning. Letting them go back to wherever they came from will mean you don’t have to worry about feeding them either.”

Cas nodded. “We’ll likely move the camp so they wouldn’t be able to find us again, if they decide to risk telling someone. Make sure to keep the communication crystal close, so we can let you know where we go. We’ll try to get closer to the city, as originally planned.”

“I understand.”

Tolie?
Tylie whispered into his mind.

He looked toward the woods, where she slept against Phelistoth’s side. He couldn’t see them from here, but his senses told him the dragon was back in his usual form, the swamp creatures going nowhere near him. Tylie was in the safest place on the continent.

Yes?
He hoped she wouldn’t censure him for playing the role of deranged scientist. She had such a gentle soul. Being a healer would be a good career for her.

Phel senses something
, she told him.

Another airship?

Another dragon.

Chapter 5

S
ince Ridge had already been sore when he and Mara started their trek out of the mountains, he did not know how many of the aches, pains, and blisters he could blame on the walking and climbing, not to mention the unwise command decision he had made to slide down a steep slope on a sled improvised from a large piece of bark. The infantry soldiers back home would laugh at him if he admitted to finding the trek difficult, so he would never speak of it, but pilots weren’t meant to use their feet so much. Especially when one of those feet was missing a sock.

When the smoke of a campfire or perhaps a hearth came into view, Ridge doubted they had gone more than twenty miles as the dragon flier flew, but they must have covered two or three times as much ground to get there, winding around mountains and through irritatingly indirect valleys.

“There’s a settlement ahead,” Mara said.

For the first time, they followed a hard-packed, man-made trail with branches cut back along either side. Unlike the animal paths they had used for much of the journey, the trail was also wide enough for them to walk side by side. Instead of leading, as she had been doing for most of the trip, she dropped back to walk at his shoulder.

“That’s good to know. I worried some bears might be up ahead, making a bonfire in anticipation of a succulent Ridge roast tonight.” In truth, they hadn’t had any trouble with animals, to his surprise. At times, growls had sounded in the foliage nearby, and coyotes had cried to each other from the sides of the trail, but Mara had glared defiantly into the woods, her hand on her knife, and nothing had come out to bother them.