Into the Wild Read online

  Acosta halted. “A favorite, taught to me by a lovely red-headed woman aboard a ship named the Ill Fortune. Now that was a memorable voyage.”

  “Me, I heard some no-account dog singing it once, right before I left him with a gutshot to die in a Mercir whorehouse.”

  “That sounds quite impolite.”

  “He deserved it. The man had a horrible voice,” the gun mage said.

  Acosta smiled. “What is your name, gunfighter?”

  “Lambert Sayre. You know why I’m here. What’re you doing here? Trying to get caught?”

  “I assumed Baron Rathleagh would not trust me to keep my end of our bargain to retrieve his trinket. So, you are here to watch and make sure I don’t steal this treasure and then flee to keep it for myself.” Acosta sniffed. “I am inclined to take offense at this lack of faith.”

  “I’ve heard what happens when you take offense. Galloway was a friend of mine.”

  Sayre’s stance indicated he was ready. He would draw quickly and, even in the darkness, likely fire with accuracy. Acosta’s glaives were hanging unpowered, and, as far as the gun mage would know, would be slow to ready. The gun mage seemed certain he would win. Acosta liked it when his potential opponents were overconfident.

  “So, Lambert Sayre, do you really think you could be the one to defeat Savio Montero Acosta?”

  “Sure do. Believe me, I’d love to see if you’re as good as they make you out to be. Unfortunately, I’ve got the Baron’s affairs to see to. And I’ve got twenty hired guns aimed your way, so personal business will have to wait. The Baron pays me too good to let my feelings get in the way. You know how it is.”

  If Sayre said he had twenty men, then he probably only had ten, but even that was too many to pick a fight with. But Acosta had never been very good at such things. “I do not ‘know how it is.’ I’ve never been someone’s lap dog.”

  “Cute.” Sayre didn’t seem to like that much, but he was a professional and not so easily provoked. “Isn’t that what you are right now, though?”

  “It is a partnership. Your master has no need to worry. The treasure is of no use to me without an arcanist who knows how to unlock its power. I will take it to Rathleagh directly. If you cross my path again, I will take it as a personal insult.” Acosta turned and began to walk away.

  Sayre called after him. “Did your expedition find anything yet?”

  “Nothing of note.” He kept walking but made sure to raise his voice so all of Sayre’s men could hear him. “Oh, except the miners are missing, your comrades were slaughtered by an unknown force, and something eliminated a ranger patrol nearby as well. Not much else. Sleep well, my friends.”

  The last thing he heard of Sayre’s men was their fearful sniveling to their employer about monsters in the forest. It was a beautiful night, a sky filled with stars, all with just enough of a chill to let you know you were alive. Acosta began whistling again.

  She didn’t know where she was and couldn’t remember how she got here, but she was indoors and, for some reason, knew it was a good thing. There was a lantern on the table, mostly hooded but open enough to give a faint bit of light. The walls and floor were made of logs. She was lying on a cot, and blankets had been hung from the ceiling to give her some privacy. A man had been here a moment ago, dressed in blue, but he’d told her a few comforting words before leaving to fetch someone else.

  Flushed and drenched with sweat, she could feel her head throbbing. It hurt to even think. Her memories were disjointed and confusing flashes. She’d been in the forest with her patrol, but something terrible had happened. She tried to remember, but she was just too tired. She closed her eyes and tried to rearrange her disjointed memories into making sense. But she was so weakened and sick that her focus was only fleeting before she drifted off again.

  Fangs.

  She woke up screaming and thrashing against her blanket. Strong hands gripped her shoulders and tried to hold her down, but she lashed out against them.

  “Calm down. You’re safe.”

  Novak’s elbow caught the speaker in the face, hard. He grunted in pain but wouldn’t let go of her. It took a moment for his words to register, but his voice remained calm.

  “We’re friends. Please, be still. You’re safe here.”

  Safe. She believed him, if only because she wasn’t on that cursed mountain anymore. The screams of her dying friends still lingered in her ears, like the ringing aftermath of an artillery shell, but the monsters were gone. It took all of her rigid self-control, but Novak forced herself to push aside the horrific visions to concentrate on the task at hand.

  Slowly, the man took his hands from her shoulders and stepped away from the cot. “Nobody is going to hurt you here.”

  “Damned right they’re not.” Her throat was so sore the words came out as a harsh whisper.

  “Fetch her water,” the man ordered. One of the curtains moved aside as someone left. Her vision was so fuzzy that she’d not even realized there was anyone else nearby besides the man speaking to her. “I’m Lieutenant Cleasby, commanding officer of the 6th Platoon, 47th Storm Knights. Second Army.”

  That had to be a trick—Second Army was stationed along the eastern border. A platoon of Storm Knights would more than likely be at Fort Falk or Caspia, and there was no way she’d been unconscious so long that they’d carried her all the way back to the capital. “And I’m the Duchess of the Midlunds.”

  He walked to a small table and lifted the shade on a lantern. The light stung her aching eyes. The man who called himself Cleasby was tall and thin to the point of gawky awkwardness. He was wearing odd clothing made of padded canvas stitched together in a diamond pattern. Then she recognized it as the electrically insulated suit Storm Knights wore beneath their plate. It could still be a trick. Suddenly the loud clomping of a man carrying a mug of water into the room with her overshadowed everything else she was thinking—he was dressed in full storm armor.

  “I understand your hesitance. We’re normally stationed in Caspia, but I am who I say I am, and we’ve been sent here on a mission. You and I have met before. You might have been too feverish to recall, but you took one of my charges hostage earlier.”

  “I don’t remember that.” She wasn’t lying; the last few days had been nothing but a fevered blur. The last thing she could remember clearly was taking shelter inside some old ruins. Until she knew for sure these men weren’t frauds, spies, or in league with the monsters, however, she’d be careful not to give them too much information.

  “Actually, you manhandled a baron and threatened to slit his throat.”

  She certainly hoped that was a lie. “The hell you say…” She rubbed her throbbing temples.

  “If you’ve got a headache, I apologize. That’s more than likely the result of one of my men giving you a concussion. We’ve cleaned your wounds and given you medicine to break your fever. You should be fine. What happened to you? It looks like you fell off a cliff.”

  “More like jumped.”

  Cleasby accepted the mug from the soldier and offered it to her. “Here. You’re dehydrated.”

  The observation made Novak painfully aware of the thirst creeping up her throat, weighing down her tongue and making her gums tacky. While she drank, Cleasby took a cleaning rag from his belt and wiped at his nose. It came away bloody. She’d struck him a good one.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It isn’t the first time I’ve been hit in the face, and I suspect it won’t be the last.” He honestly didn’t sound offended. Despite looking more like a librarian than a soldier, he could certainly take a punch. “What’s your name and rank, ranger?”

  “Corporal Arabella Novak.”

  “What happened to the rest of your patrol?”

  “They’re all dead. Killed by…some things.”

  “Things?”

  “I don’t know what they were,” Novak muttered. For all she knew, these men were in league with the beasts. The Cygnaran Reconnaissance Service had
warned her people of stranger things happening in these parts. “They were like animals but too smart.”

  “She was mumbling in her sleep, lieutenant, going on about claws and teeth and men being ripped limb from limb. I put up the blankets to dampen the sound because she was scaring everyone else in the bunkhouse.”

  “Good thinking, Allsop.”

  The officer was scowling at her. She had only been in the rangers for two years and had joined young, but even with that, she was likely still older than Cleasby, or perhaps he was one of those men who looked perpetually young. Ranger officers tended to be hard as nails with skin like leather from the sun and wind. She’d assumed Storm Knights would be the same, but this one looked downright bookish. He wasn’t a bad-looking man at all, but he had a physical awkwardness about him she wouldn’t expect from someone in the infantry.

  “Describe your attackers, please, corporal.”

  “We never got a good look at them, but they were humanoid, hairy, very strong, and very fast. They communicated but not in any tongue I’ve ever heard.”

  “Could your attackers have been Tharn? They’re described as bestial.”

  “I’ve fought Tharn—these weren’t Tharn.”

  It was obvious Cleasby doubted her, but Novak couldn’t tell if he was going to blame it on feverish imaginings or just good old-fashioned dishonesty. He shook his head. “I find it strange that a ranger, trained in wilderness survival and educated about every type of creature found in their area of operation, wouldn’t recognize what manner of beast attacked her patrol.”

  “And here I was, wondering how a platoon of Caspian Storm Knights found me in the wilds of the Wyrmwalls.”

  “A reasonable question.” Cleasby shrugged. “Neither one of us trusts the other. But I can remedy one side of that. Allsop, tell Pangborn I want him to charge up Headhunter and fire a boosted, full-power galvanic shot, straight into the sky.”

  “You got it, sir.” The armored man hurried away.

  Novak watched him go before she asked, “What’s a Headhunter?”

  “Something imposters would be extremely unlikely to have,” Cleasby said. “So, Corporal Novak, what was your patrol looking for?”

  They’d been dispatched on a secret recon mission, so even if Cleasby truly was a Storm Knight, he wasn’t part of her chain of command, making it none of his damned business. “It was just a routine patrol out of Ironhead Station.”

  “Neither Baron Rathleagh nor any of his people mentioned a ranger patrol in the area.”

  She doubted the CRS had briefed the local authorities at all. “The Army probably forgot to mention us. You know paperwork.”

  “I’m something of an expert on military paperwork.” Cleasby chuckled. Now that she could believe. He made a more believable clerk than a knight. “You’d think that a soldier, rescued in the wilderness and nursed back to health, would be more thankful than suspicious, especially since we’re nowhere near enemy territory.”

  Novak finished her water. “What are you getting at?”

  “The only people I know who are that suspicious of everything are usually on some manner of secret errand and not a routine mountain patrol.”

  She didn’t say a word.

  “Let me level with you, corporal. I’m no stranger to the Reconnaissance Service and their secrets. If I’m not cleared to know, then I don’t really want to. I don’t care what they sent you here for, nor do I care what you were looking for. The only thing I do care about is the safety of my men and the people we’re supposed to protect.”

  There was a brilliant blue flash and a thunderous boom, so bright and loud that it startled Novak to her feet. The blast was powerful enough to shake the cot and nearly rattle the lantern off the table. The sudden change in pressure caused the curtains to sway as if there had been an unexpected, isolated breeze.

  “What in Morrow’s name was that?”

  “My Stormclad warjack.”

  Cries of alarm rose outside the log cabin. Apparently the one named Allsop hadn’t bothered to warn anybody else that lightning was about to strike.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, they don’t exactly sell that kind of military equipment on the surplus market. Having a working Stormclad should confirm I am who I say I am, so how about we skip over the state secrets and you just tell me what the hell happened here?”

  She was still shaking from the unexpected lightning bolt. Between that and what was left of her fever, it took her a moment to realize the implications of what Cleasby had just said. “Here?” Novak glanced over the log walls. She’d assumed they’d carried her away from that cursed place. “You mean we’re still—”

  “We’re a few hundred yards from where we discovered you.”

  “You said we were safe here!” Novak’s blood ran cold. “There’s nothing safe on this mountain.”

  Rains and Thornbury made their way down the trail by the light of one hooded lantern and the blue glow of two charged storm glaives. He was no ranger, but Rains had learned a little about how to track and hunt as a boy on the plains north of Sul. Luckily, following Acosta was easy, as the man had made absolutely no attempt to conceal his tracks. His boot prints were obvious in the soft dirt.

  “Even I could follow him, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to live in places where the only thing unpaved is the garden,” Thorny muttered. “This doesn’t strike me as the behavior of a man who has anything to hide.”

  “That’s your problem, Thorny. You’re too trusting.”

  Thorny snorted at the absurdity of the statement.

  The two walked in silence for a bit. Rains was nervous about what they would find. It wasn’t so much that he disliked Acosta, but it was more that the Ordsman unnerved him.

  Rains was no stranger to conflict. He had fought against his own church, been an apostate in the land of the devout then a refugee among his people’s traditional enemies, and finally a soldier who’d invaded the city he’d grown up in. Yet through it all, Rains had always fought for a cause. Looking back on his life, most of the battles he’d found himself in had been to protect someone else—usually those who couldn’t do it for themselves. The innocent, the weak, the helpless. Maybe that was why he still carried around a shield that bore the symbol of a god he didn’t worship—he carried it neither for Morrow nor even for Wilkins, but for what that shield had been used to defend.

  Acosta, on the other hand, fought only for Acosta. He said he fought to learn and to test himself, but Rains suspected he just enjoyed killing.

  “What do you think Acosta’s up to?” Thorny asked.

  “I don’t know.” But if it was anything that threatened the safety of his men, Rains intended to find out.

  Thorny said, “He probably found a dire troll’s cave and went to taunt it. All right, so let’s say you’re right and he’s up to no good, and then we catch him in the act. What’s to keep him from cutting us down when he sees us following him?”

  Honestly, Rains knew, not much. He knew he was an excellent swordsman, and Thorny was, at best, passable, but Acosta was a killing machine; however, despite the unpleasant suspicions he had about Acosta’s presence here, he did not think Acosta would stoop to outright murder his compatriots. They’d shed too much blood together. It may have been a twisted one, but the Ordsman did have a code of honor.

  “If Acosta is doing something that endangers the safety of this expedition, then we’ll order him to be on his way.”

  “Great plan, Rains. How about next time you take somebody else along with you to provoke the crazy duelist?”

  “If he becomes that angry, then there’s an old Idrian saying that applies. When you are being chased by a lion, you don’t need to be faster than the lion, just faster than your slowest companion.”

  “Well, since you could probably take me in a foot race, don’t be terribly offended when I stab you in the knee.”

  Suddenly the forest was lit up by a brilliant flash, followed a second later by a tremendous boom. A f
lock of dark birds burst from the surrounding trees and flapped away, shrieking into the sky.

  “Headhunter!” Thorny spun back toward the fort. The forest was deadly quiet after the deafening galvanic discharge. Thorny began to head back the way they’d come.

  “Hold on.” Rains was unsure, but he thought the flash had illuminated something suspicious on the path ahead of them.

  “But they might be in danger.”

  “I don’t think so.” Rains could tell: Headhunter hadn’t fired on an actual target. Plus there were no other sounds of commotion from the fort, and certainly nobody had ever accused the Malcontents of having good fire discipline. “If something was happening there, we’d know.”

  Thorny nervously looked over his shoulder toward the fort. “You’d better be right. I don’t want to return to find nothing but more severed feet.”

  “Give me the lantern.”

  Thorny handed it over. Rains opened the shutters aimed its glare up the path.

  The light reflected against sharp, white teeth.

  Acosta’s whistling was interrupted by the Malcontents’ warjack firing a lightning bolt into the air. He paused, wondering if they were having a battle without him. It would be very disappointing to miss a fight because he’d gone to confront Rathleagh’s men. If that were the case, he’d have to take out his frustrations on the snooty gun mage later.

  Then Acosta realized someone stood in a moonlit clearing along the path ahead. It was a woman and from her shapely figure, a beautiful one at that. As he got closer, he saw she was carrying a spear and wearing buckskins trimmed with furs.

  “Enjoying the fireworks?” Acosta asked.

  She showed no surprise at coming across another traveler in the dark. Instead, she looked him over and sauntered toward him until she was only a few feet away. He’d been correct: this one was a beauty. There was a shine to her black hair and a gleam in her dark eyes. White lines had been painted across her face, perhaps for decoration or perhaps as war paint, but he did not know anything about the ways of strange forest women in Cygnar. She ran her fingers across a necklace of feathers and small animal bones, which was lying across her chest, and then down the open top of her buckskin shirt.