Page 209 of Scorched Earth

The torchlight cast dancing shadows over his mentor’s face as she narrowed her eyes. “Are you going after Lydia? Are you leaving us to this fight?”

Every part of his soul wanted to go south to Lydia, but that was not how to best serve his queen. “I’m going north.”

“Why?”

Killian swung into his saddle. “Because it’s time that we went on the offensive.”

With only Baird racing at his side, Killian rode north through the night, the thick, rotten stench of blight growing stronger with each passing hour until it became a struggle to breathe.

“Did Bercola forgive you?” Killian asked during one of the stretches he allowed his horse to walk. “I was a little worried she might kill you.”

“Of course she didn’t forgive me.” Baird shot him a look of disgust. “Forgiveness must be earned with acts of valor, but by allowing me to live, my wife has given me a chance at redemption.”

“Fair enough.” Killian loosened his reins so that Surly could stretch his neck. “Well, this might be your chance.”

The giant blew a breath out between his teeth. “What precisely do you intend, Killian?”

A plan was forming in his head, but Killian needed to see the scope of what the Mudamorian army faced before it would come together. “The enemy’s forces keep growing. The Cel seem to be almost without limit in the soldiers they can bring over from the Empire. Every time the blight slips past our barricades, more Mudamorians are lost to rise as blighters, who join Rufina’s ranks. With luck, your people and the Anuk will join our forces. With luck, Lydia and Malahi are on their way to Serlania with a solution for the blight. But we need to strike a blow that doesn’t rely on luck. A blow that sets Rufina back a step so that we have time to take a breath.”

“That’s all wonderful,” Baird said. “But not one word of that speech spoke of a specific plan.”

“Soon enough.” Gathering his reins, Killian drove his warhorse into a canter, the chance for conversation over.

They met the first scouts just after dawn, the men immediately recognizing Killian. Their uniforms were stained and torn, armor dented, and their dirty faces grim with exhaustion. “We heard that blighters had risen behind the lines,” one man said. “Niotin brought word that you and Lady Falorn were riding to combat them.”

“Niotin fell,” Killian replied. “But so, too, have the blighters. Have you found the sources of the leak?”

The scout shook his head. “Near as we can tell, it wasn’t the riverthat was infected, my lord. Our best guess is that Rufina sent agents with barrels of blight to poison wells. Every town and village is supposed to keep their water sources under guard, but one moment of distraction is all it takes.”

“It’s what she did in Derin,” Killian muttered, remembering the glass of water that he and Lydia had found. How the blight had swirled within it, sentient.

“It won’t spread through the land that way.” The soldier wiped a dirty hand over his brow. “But it kills anyone who drinks it, sure and true.”

Baird stepped closer to Killian, voice low. “All it will take is her agents poisoning every well they can find and this war is over.”

The thought had already occurred to Killian, but it had only reaffirmed that he needed to act now.

The army’s camp was quiet and grim, a sea of tents on fields so churned up that they were nothing more than mud at this point. Men and women sat quietly around fires, but most lifted their heads as he passed.

“It’s the Dark Horse,” he heard them say. “It’s Killian Calorian.”

The weight of the hope that he’d be able to do something felt like a lead shirt.

“We’re holding it back with trenches and rubble,” the scout told him as they walked through the camp. “We have patrols traveling east and west of our position every day, searching for veins of blight breaking off from the main stream. Dogs have proven the best at finding them, and then it’s a matter of trenching and barricading it off. But it’s like plugging a leaking dam with your fingers. Plug a hole and another springs open, and we’re running out of fingers. And while we’re doing the plugging, the blighters attack us. We’re losing men in droves.”

Ahead rose a wall of rubble that ran as far as Killian could see in both directions. Wagons were moving slowly toward it, men unloading what looked like the dismantled remains of homes and pasture walls. Every bit of rock that could be stripped from the land brought here to hold back the main flow of the blight.

“Lord Calorian!” A captain in a uniform as stained and torn as his subordinates approached. “Were you able to stop the spread?”

“We killed the main horde,” Killian answered, deeply aware that it was Mudamorian blood that stained his own clothes. “Dareena and my brother are working to track down the rest.”

There was a large structure behind the dam, and Killian felt himself drawn toward it. Baird and the others followed, the captainsaying, “That’s one of our lookout towers. We have five of them up and down the dam. Dogs patrol the length hourly with their handlers, looking for leaks.”

Handing off the reins to his horse with an added warning to watch for Surly’s teeth, Killian climbed the wooden tower. It creaked and swayed as Baird followed him, both of them struck silent as they reached the top and stared out at the lake of blight stretching out before them.

Black and viscous, it seethed and swirled, bubbles occasionally rising from its depths to pop with loud snaps. That it was sentient, Killian could not deny. Not with the malevolent purpose that radiated from it, strands rising like fingers to pick at the rocks of the dam, dragging them back into its depths with loud gulps. The captain handed him a spyglass, and Killian took in the dried and cracked land surrounding the lake, dead forests with trees that had been leached of color, black veins rising their trunks. Nothing lived: The grass, the brush, the very air seemed to be the antithesis of life.

Yet on the far side was the true horror.