THE REALM

Chapter Thirty

  A day into our journey we found what was left of the caravan. There wasn't much.

  The bandits had been thorough and merciless in their cleanup of the forward caravan. Buzzards lifted off the ground from the scattered corpses that littered the desert.

  The caravan had been caught strung out and on the move, with no chance of mounting a defense. Strangely I felt no sympathy for the dead as they, by their own actions, had sold us down the river to die in their place. It hadn't worked out that way though.

  A pair of jackals broke away from the carcass of a camel and sped off a distance to wait for us to pass by. It was a large camel and instantly I knew it to be that of the caravan master.

  The big man had impressed me and it didn't surprise me that I didn't see him lying on the ground. Bruton would have taken out a lot of the enemy and yet I saw no sign of a struggle. I did see spots of blood though, leading up a dune.

  I paused and the caravan stopped. While the others waited behind me I debated about what to do.

  I owed the man nothing. He'd had little to say to me and yet I had respected him. He'd run a tight ship when it came down to doing his job. Somehow, leaving him behind to bleed out or die of dehydration in the desert didn't seem a fitting end for such a man.

  I dropped the rope of my camel and headed toward the dune. Without saying anything, several of the others followed along.

  I crested the dune and saw more blood. Following the trail, I came to the gully bottom between two dunes and the trail of blood abruptly ended. The hair on the back of my neck lifted. How did a blood trail just disappear like that?

  The only possible solution was that he…..I jumped to the side as a blade thrust up out of the sand directly at me. I felt the breeze of it pass by and had instant reflection on just how short life could be. I seized hold of the black wrist that was easily twice the size of mine and held on for dear life.

  The man was desperate to survive and sickeningly I saw him bringing up his other fist to smash into my head. Jarken seized hold of the incoming hand and together we immobilized the weakened man, who at full power would've smashed our heads together and pulped our brains.

  "Bruton it's us! Friends!" Thanuel yelled out, trying to reach into the caravan master's panicked consciousness.

  Some part of me couldn't believe what the man had done. Wounded, he'd buried himself here in the sand and waited patiently for a chance to either kill one of his hunters or buy the time needed to survive. The broken off haft of a javelin still protruded from the man's left side. He'd been smart not to remove it as he would have bled out by now, but it was doing him no favors to leave it in.

  Sand clung to Bruton's sweaty body as evidence of the fever that now gripped him. His eyes traced from one to the other of us in disbelief as he breathed hard.

  "You should kill me, for that was what I did to you by leaving you at the oasis!"

  "And yet we're not. Jarken, go get some wood. That spear needs to come out and the wound's going to need to be cauterized or he'll bleed out," I said matter-of-factly.

  We let Bruton settle back to the ground as the majority of those who had followed rushed off to get supplies and wood. Bruton's bloodshot eyes had never left me and he continued to probe for an answer, "Why?"

  I shrugged, "Why not."

  He snorted sharply and I could tell he wasn't content with my answer so I gave him the truth, as much as I knew of it, "It wouldn't have been right to just ride on and let you die out here in the sand."