She had joined other girls her age, begun combat sparring. From the very first day, it was more exhausting and painful than anything she’d ever experienced. At first, the recruits treated one another as friends, but when the girls didn’t fight hard enough, or strive with all their might to hurt their opponents—their comrades—other morazeth would come in with clubs, gang up on the entire team, and beat them senseless until the girls understood. Or at least most of them did.
Two of the new trainees died in the first week. By the second month, Adessa killed one of them herself, a young girl who had tried to make friends, but showed a core of weakness. After Adessa did that, she’d been rewarded with the first protective rune branded on her upper arm.
She remembered the expressionless morazeth standing close, nodding encouragement, whispering, watching as the training leader removed a white-hot branding iron from an intense brazier fire. Adessa braced herself, knowing that if she cried out, she would be punished for her weakness. She thought she was prepared, but nothing had readied her for the searing bolt of heat that screamed through her skin, into her nerves, until it exploded in her mind. Adessa gritted her teeth and made no sound, listened to the sickening sizzle, smelled the burning meat of her own arm. The pain lasted forever, but it was done as swiftly as the morazeth could manage. Someone splashed a bucket of cold water on her arm and another doused her eyes to wash away any hint of tears that might have leaked out of her squeezed lids.
“It’s all right,” said the training leader, replacing the still-smoking brand in the brazier. “You can faint now.”
With her trainer’s permission, Adessa collapsed.
Over the years, each branded mark had been just as painful, but Adessa never screamed, never flinched, never cried. And now, her skin was a complete leatherwork of art. No part of her was vulnerable to a magical attack.
Adessa was proud of the ancient tradition, a carefully bonded society of women warriors, guardians. According to very old legends, some morazeth had gone north as mercenaries, but they were long departed, and if any of their teachings survived, the women must have changed dramatically in the intervening millennia. Adessa and the morazeth of Ildakar remained unwavering.
Now when darkness fell in the swamps and Adessa could no longer be sure of her path, she found a place to camp, resting on the ground against a wide tree trunk beneath dangling beards of moss. She let herself doze, her senses alert for any creature that might consider her an easy meal. As she sat motionless, she heard a rustle in the grasses. She peered out from behind the mossy veil to see a serpent as thick around as her thigh gliding through the underbrush.
When the snake broke through the reeds, sensing Adessa, it rose up to reveal not one serpent head, but three of them branched like a trident from its neck, tasting the air with black tongues. Each had only a single eye, and when they struck forward, the three mouths yawned open to reveal curved fangs.
Adessa prepared to fight. Even with three heads, a snake was just a snake. She felt no fear.
The central head plunged down to strike her, but she ducked to the side, letting the fangs sink into the moss-covered tree trunk. In the instant it was trapped, Adessa struck off its head with her sword, and dark blood spurted out of the stump.
The other two serpent heads attacked. The thick main body rolled forward, rising up as the remaining pair of heads lashed out. She lifted her sword overhead and brought it down with a single stroke, splitting the snake at the juncture of the last two heads. The sharp blade cut down along its spine, and the snake flopped in two halves like a split ribbon. The separated heads, not knowing they were dead, kept trying to bite her. She continued sawing downward and finally cut through the snake’s heart, or one of its hearts, and its entire body collapsed.
Adessa grimaced in disgust as she found herself covered with serpent blood as well as insect bites, mud, and sweat. Standing over the dead hulk of the snake, she used her dagger to skin off the scaly hide. Snake meat, even raw, was nourishment.
As she chewed on the moist reptilian flesh, Adessa withdrew into her makeshift shelter again, resting, pondering. She still felt the blood magic from the unborn infant within her, enhancing her senses and powers, and she knew that boost would last until she tracked down and killed Maxim.
But she had to sustain herself. She made sure she drank enough water, ate enough food, to keep her body strong. Over the years, she had given the same admonishment to all trainees in the combat arena. Adessa had never thought of the fighters as slaves, but as her pets, and pets needed to be disciplined.
Now, in the dark buzzing swamp, she recalled the champions she had made and the lovers she had rewarded over the years. When she was finished with them, those men were completely loyal to her, wrapped around her finger even when she sent them into the combat arena to die. Many had been kidnapped from outside villages, taken when they were young and broken, sold by Norukai raiders, or born of other slaves inside the city.
Ian, her last champion, her last lover, had been a devoted young man who never disappointed her, always defended her, until the end, when that outsider Bannon had made him remember his past. Though Bannon seemed a weak and naive young man, he created hair-fine cracks in Ian’s armor of duty and eventually turned her champion against her.
Adessa still didn’t understand what she had done wrong. She had taken Ian into her bed and had shown him true passion, primal lovemaking like the rutting of wild animals. His pleasure had been so great he nearly fell unconscious after satisfying himself. Adessa had even let herself grow fond of him, sometimes holding his sweaty body against hers after he was sated and after she, too, had let herself release that inner thunder of pleasure. She’d let him plant his child in her, and Adessa had felt it growing, the energy of the unborn part of her.
If not for the uprising, she would have given birth to Ian’s baby, but Ian had betrayed her, and so she killed him. Instead, that child growing within her had proven to be a powerful resource, an innocent life. In addition to the protective runes that covered her skin, Adessa now had that blood magic, the life magic of the unborn child, a sacrifice as potent as any slave on the great pyramid. As a woman she had given life, and as a morazeth she took it back.
Now, as the hours of the night crawled along, she sat against the mossy bark of the tree, sensed the emptiness in her womb and compared it to the fresh strength throughout her muscles.
She waited several hours for the moon to rise, and under the silvery light, she emerged and sprinted off again in pursuit of her quarry.
CHAPTER 31
Sitting inside her dark dungeon cell, Sovrena Thora wished she could become a statue again and let time slide past until this nonsense was over. Since her hardened body had no need to eat or drink, the guards had stopped bothering to deliver her meals.
The dank cell remained silent, a stillness so deep that when she concentrated Thora could hear the delicate movement of spider legs. She once heard a rat skitter across the floor until it found a hole somewhere and escaped. No vermin had any interest in her partially petrified body.
After hearing the rat, she ignited a small flame in her hand and spent hours inspecting her chamber, touching each stone block from floor to ceiling. Eventually she discovered a small chink in the stone that made a crack just wide enough for a skinny rat. It wouldn’t help her escape at all.