Conquering The Unbroken

Chapter 50

The last thing I expected to see when we arrived at Ducoria was a ghost town. The last thing I expected to smell was blood and that of decay. The last thing I expected to hear was utter silence, sliced through by the cawing of crows and yipping of coyotes through the streets.

I slide down off the saddle of the king's horse and hold my breath. Ducoria is laid out before us, but something is different. Something is wrong. The city that built itself on the horrors of isolation, thievery, and lies is no longer that. With ease, I remember what it was like to be here the first time and it wasn't this.

  We weren't greeted by nothing, by silence. Ducoria was waiting for us, it seemed, at that point in time when Renit and I came in search of the boxes. The people were actively watching us and searching over our belongings for anything they could snatch quickly. Rats meat veiled as beef was cooked over a fire and the smell was horrid, but people ate it for that was all they had.

The sight of the city was never splendid. Truthfully, after I left, I never wanted to come back. The endless rows of tarps and knapsacks hanging as curtains around merchant stalls were a mess, and even more so now. The buildings were leaning, but at least that is the same. Whatever came through here...it's not good.

Already, my mind is calculating and trying to take in everything before us. Renit comes to my side, furrowing his brows as he views a similar distaste to what is before me. We smell it; we see it; we hear it. Ducoria is dead.

Like a slap to the face, I'm hit with the reminder of what the king's soldier told me before I impaled him. The leader of Esaria would always be one step before us and there was someone within our ranks that was a spy for him. Not anyone I'm with at the moment, Bren's only hatred during childhood was the king for killing his family. He'd never side with such a cruel leader. Someone else, then. There's someone back in Arego that fed the king this information...but how? How could that information be transmitted so fast that they managed to get to Ducoria before us?

We left as soon as we could.

I take careful steps into the mud streets, that I quickly realize are not mud. Lifting my boot out of a puddle, it's clear from the blue sky overhead that I just stepped in a giant puddle of blood. The trail leaks from an alleyway and the heap of a body slumped against the side of a building. Dead. This is fresh. Every stench here, it couldn't have been more than a day ago.

Either the king was here...or he's achieved a new level of power that allows him to be there with his soldiers without actually being there in the first place. That has to be it. If he was able to deliver a message through one of his men, is it possible he was speaking and not the soldier in front of me?

My blood runs cold and my skin snakes over with chills. That's how he did this, then. If I'm correct, the king is viewing life through the eyes of his men and, therefore, cutting out the need for delivery of message. That's how he did this so quickly. Someone, whether a spy merely passing through or an infiltrator, caught word of what we planned to do, and with the remainder of their forces, struck Ducoria first.

The farther I walk into the streets, the worse the smell becomes. Coyotes, sensing the arrival of someone stronger and with a drive for blood, apparently, scatter and head back from where they came. I pull a handkerchief over the bottom half of my face and avoid stepping on anything I don't want to sink my toes into.

Renit and Bren are my eyes and ears at this moment. I'm too blind and too deaf to think about the right procedures to go about protecting myself. My entire being is filling with rage in the shade of red, of the king's blood, and I don't realize I'm shaking until my knees are wobbling and my hands won't clench into fists without a brutal effort.