Shadow War: Book 3 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy (WIP Rough Draft)

31. Kar for Short

34th of Uirra

My foot scuffed over a rock embedded in the dusty dirt of the road and I winced. After six weeks spent lying down in the bin, my feet had become tender, and the lightweight canvas shoes didn't offer much of a barrier between my heels and the ground. Keeping pace with the other women was getting harder, my breath burning my throat as I jogged along behind the tall woman, desperate not to fall behind.

It was a losing battle.

The road wound down the side of the mountain in a series of switchbacks hewn out of a sheer sheet of rock, and as we came around the first bend, the sheet of rock created a gap in the trees to the right.

Through that gap, I got my first glimpse of the valley.

My breath left me in a rush, and I stumbled, my mouth falling open.

At the farthest end of the valley, rising in the gap between two craggy mountain peaks, so huge it was clearly visible even miles away, stood a colossal dam that held back the mighty river that must have once flowed through the valley. The dam dominated the landscape with thick, rigid, unnatural lines, and the water that was allowed to go over the spillway was strictly metered into a vast canal system that spanned the entire valley bottom, gouged into the old riverbed as if stamped into the earth by a gigantic machine.

Because that was what it was. The entire thing was a machine geared for only one purpose: war. There were green hectares of cropland for feeding it, great smokestacks and furnaces to fuel it, storage yards full of monstrous weaponry to arm it with, mills and warehouses for assembling it, barracks for housing it, all connected by an engine line that ran over the ground like an endless black ribbon, silvery engines shooting along the rail.

It was a visual punch to the gut.

How in all the seven blue blazes was a merchant's daughter from Edon going to bring that to its knees? It took everything I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other as the full force of what I was up against hit with all the weight of a sledgehammer.

Focus. One task at a time. Survive first. Blend in. Watch. Listen. Learn.

They were Orrelian's words, but in my head, I heard them in a deep, rough brogue.

Watch. Listen. Learn.

I staggered forward again, teeth bared as my aching feet carried me after the tall woman, heading around a final bend and up to a set of wide metal gates set in a towering length of chain fence topped with zigzags of thorny wire.

On the other side of the fence lay a broad mountain meadow that had been completely given over to a series of livestock barns. Armed guards watched from the lofty platform of a heavily fortified gatehouse as our chain leader stopped at a checkpoint just inside the walls. More guards manned the checkpoint, and even more patrolled the road that ran between the barns.

Any one of those guards might have seen one of those fugitive bulletins. Any one of those guards might recognize my face.

You're going to die.

~~~

"New blood gets Meera's quota. In't that right, new blood?"

I stared down at the haft of the shovel that had just been dropped into my hands.

"'Yes, Chain Leader,'" the well-muscled woman in front of me said, high and mocking. Her voice dropped an octave. "That's what you say, New Blood."

I glanced up at her. She was medium height, but well-built, with a round face tending toward softness under the chin. There was a ruthless, razor-sharp edge to her, nonetheless, and in this place of hollow eyes and protruding cheekbones, that softness only meant one thing: she got more food than anyone else. The only way to do that was to take it from others.