Blood Tempered: Book 1 of the Sword Monk Saga

Blood Tempered: Part 4

They moved on before dawn, Olvera grumbling and stamping when Caida woke him. By mid-morning they had arrived at the Lintel, the natural stone formation that soared thirty feet above the trail and marked the end of the northeastern corner of the Empire and the beginning of disputed Wyeth. To the north-northwest lay Roumney, pale green and tan, indistinct in the morning haze. To the east, beyond the horizon, began the Ardesh steppes.

Unmolested, they would descend the northeastern slope before nightfall. What happened then was the unspoken question.

"A scout should be waiting at the base of the trail," said Olvera, "if all has gone according to plan. Either he will have news of the Lady Anya or he will not. We cannot determine a course of action until then."

"That may be so," said Caida, "but whatever news waits for us below, you must go back across the border after that."

"What?"

"You asked for an Andine, Sier Olvera. You know what we are. You know what we do, we do alone."

"Not this time, I'm afraid. I'd like nothing better than to go back to Axumwiste and sleep in a real bed, drink chilled Lacreeshan wine and flirt with chamber maids, but I have orders. I come back with the Lady Anya, or I do not come back at all."

"Then wait at the monastery. I will bring her to you if she is able to be brought."

"I will not."

Caida sighed. "You are not fit for what lies ahead, Sier. Truth be told, I'm not certain I am. Forgive my plainness."

"I don't have a choice, Brother. Nor do you."

Caida shook his head. Time was wasting while they argued. He decided to see what the scout had to say, and then try to convince the soft courtier to depart once the facts were laid plain.

"We will speak on this again," said Caida, and nudged his mare down the trail. Olvera followed, uncharacteristically silent.

~ ~ ~

The sun lay hidden behind the bulk of the Timors by the time they came down to the end of the trail, and shadow pooled in every recess among the rust-red boulders scattered around the skirts of the low mountains. Caida scanned his surroundings with wary eyes, and strained his hearing. It was a perfect place for ambush.

He and Olvera had dismounted an hour before, the trail being littered with loose stone that threatened to turn under the horses' hooves. Ahead, at about twenty yards, a russet boulder rose out of the ground like a giant's tooth, a massive incisor poking from the dusty gums of the earth. Caida's eye passed over it–then back, having caught the barest hint of a man-shape standing in its sheltering shadow.

"I think I've spotted your scout," Caida murmured to Olvera, who had no eyes but for the ground beneath his feet.

"What? Where?" Olvera asked, and Caida winced at the carrying volume of his voice.

"Just ahead, in the shadow of that great rock."

"I see nothing."

"Nevertheless, he is there. Or at least, someone is."

Olvera called out to the man, who did not move. Caida felt an unease slither through his gut, a sense of some wrongness. He unharnessed his great-sword from his back with a quick tug at the straps, but did not loose the weapon from its sheath, only held it, scabbarded, close to the hilt. Olvera walked a few paces forward, but halted himself before Caida uttered a cautioning word.

"Sword monk," he said in a low voice, "Something is wrong here."

Caida slipped past Olvera, feeling as he did so a wave of nausea creep up on him. He flared his nostrils, smelled rock dust... and rotting blood. The closer he came to the giant's tooth and the shadowed figure at its base, the more certain he was that they were dealing with something unnatural. Something twisted. He grasped the hilt of his sword with his right hand and with his left slid the scabbard back and away to fall to the ground.

The thing shrieked as it flew at him in a savage burst of motion. Caida caught a blurred impression of leathery wings, gray eyes with side-slitted pupils, and then it was on him. He had no time to bring his weapon's point to bear; in fact the thing had trapped his sword and his right arm, still gripping the hilt, between their bodies as it grabbed him up in a bear hug. Talons ripped into his back. Those chilling, inhuman eyes stared into his from a dark, leathery, humanoid face devoid of any emotion Caida could read. Its strength was immense.

It hissed something at him, almost a word, and then another. And then Caida slammed his forehead against the creature's nose with enough force to splinter cartilage and send it reeling away, talons gouging furrows through the flesh of his back. Ignoring the pain, he brought his sword around in a whistling arc that unerringly found the creature's neck and parted its head from its body in a spray of rotting blood. The head dropped at his feet while the body, wings spastically twitching, toppled slowly backward.

Caida dropped to one knee, trembling in the aftershock of unexpected violence, to see the head still looking up at him, still emotionless, lips moving. Mouthing other words, over and over.

Burn me, Andine.

The creature's leathery wings beat the dusty ground for long minutes afterward.

~ ~ ~

Olvera tended Caida's wounds, following the monk's instructions with more skill than Caida expected. Once the rents in his back were cleaned, sewn and bound, Caida looked over at the body of the creature.

"I think it best we burn it," he said, trying to rise.

Olvera pushed him back down. "With what?" he asked. "An armful of kindling and a flask of oil? No, we can either leave it as it is, or bury it under stone and hope that's enough. Or chop it to bits, I suppose."

"We burn it," said Caida, pushing the other's hand from his shoulder and rising to retrieve the oil from the packs. "Oil will be enough, I suspect."

"What makes you think so?"

Caida shook his head, but said nothing more. He doused the body, then dragged flint across his sword's edge. Sparks floated down on the corpse, and the oil caught. There was no conflagration, yet in moments the creature was ash. Olvera came up beside Caida and poked a toe into the creature's leg, whereupon the corpse collapsed inward in a cloud of greasy ash, and then swirled out onto the twilight breeze.

"Well aren't you the canny one," muttered Olvera.

Not canny enough, thought Caida. Not enough to puzzle this out, not yet at any rate. For he had seen in the bed of ashes that had been the creature a scrap of flesh that had not burned, and it had been in the shape of the tattooed sigil of an Imperial agent. And the more he thought on it, the two words the creature had hissed at him before he'd slain it had sounded suspiciously like beware betrayal.