Page 240 of Scorched Earth

He frowned at the thought, then his eyes caught sight of a burned doorway, pieces of charred wood shattered across the floor. Curiosity filled him and Marcus approached, ducking under a broken beam that had fallen across the entrance. The walls of the room were stained with soot but the fire hadn’t moved beyond the doorframe.

The space was dominated by a large table covered with books, rain blowing in the broken window and chairs scattered across the floor. There were also a number of discarded female garments. A hair comb. A piece of soap that, upon closer inspection, smelled like lavender.

She was here.

Marcus dropped the soap, and it made a dull thud as it struck the stone floor. Interrogation of prisoners had netted some information about why theKairensehad lingered so dangerously long before fleeing with the Sultan and a Mudamorian woman.

A woman namedLydia.

Marcus’s frustration grew that the inconsequential daughter of a senator had caused him so much grief and seemed capable of surviving his every attempt to kill her.

How Cassius had discovered that she lived, he didn’t know. Possibly Teriana’s outburst as she’d fled Imresh had reached the wrong ears and the individual had sent the information back. Perhaps Bait’s loose lips had achieved the same result. However it had happened, Cassius knew that Lydia was still alive. Knew that Marcus had failedto kill her. And if he didn’t remedy his error, all the consequences that had driven him to try to murder her in the first place would rear their heads, not the least of which would be that he’d be destined for the noose.

“Why won’t you just die?” he growled, needing Lydia’s death with the same desperation as a drowning man needed air. Yet from the depths of his mind screamed the thoughtHaven’t you hurt Teriana enough?

His head began to throb, and he rubbed at his temples. With luck, the Mudamorians would be enticed to surrender Lydia on the nebulous promise of Empire aid against the blight; failing that, it wasn’t as though he didn’t have assassins at his disposal.

Kill her.

“I will,” he muttered sourly, knowing he was again arguing with himself. That he needed to pull himself together so that his men, most especially the other legion legati, didn’t realize that he was losing his mind and force him back to Celendor. Cassius would inevitably decide to punish him with a rope around his neck for his failure.

You deserve it.

“Oh shut up.” He picked up a pair of white cotton gloves that sat on the table, the fingertips darkened with ink stains, then discarded them in favor of examining the remains of a book that looked to have been purposely destroyed. Clearly ancient, it had been hurled against the wall with incredible force, reduced to fragments that had subsequently been blown across the floor.

Sitting cross-legged before the remains, he sorted through for pieces with text, and his curiosity flared as he recognized the language it was written in. He had more important matters to attend to, but Marcus instead picked through the pieces of the broken book, examining what remained of the artwork and text. Taking in what he could about a time lost to history when another nation had nearly fallen to the same blight.

“This reminds me of Lescendor.”

Marcus looked up from the fragment he’d been reading through a magnifying lens that he’d found. Felix ducked under the beam across the entrance and came into the room.

“I can’t remember the number of times I found you hunched over a book in a dark corner.” Felix crouched next to him. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met willing to take a beating for a chance to keep reading.”

Marcus set down the fragment he’d been translating. It was not lost on him that Lydia had very nearly sacrificed her life to read these books.

“Find anything interesting?” Felix righted two chairs and sat on one of them. Knees cracking from sitting on the floor for so long, Marcus joined him.

“The Mudamorians were researching ways to fight the blight that has consumed their kingdom. This isn’t the first time it has happened. Others defeated it, though it appears to have come at great cost.”

“Interesting.” Felix met Marcus’s gaze, visibly relaxing at whatever he saw. “Does it impact your thoughts on the Derin queen’s offer of alliance? The reports coming back from Mudamora about the nature of her army grow stranger by the day.”

An army of the dead.

That was what the reports said; every one of Marcus’s sources claimed in no uncertain terms that anyone who touched or ingested the blight died swiftly and then rose to fight for Derin’s queen. Puppets of the Seventh god. Logic demanded that he discount those reports, but Marcus had seen too many things that defied explanation to do so.

Rufina had offered an alliance, requesting his aid in quelling the Mudamorians in exchange for ownership of the gold mines on the western edge of the kingdom. The largest gold deposits on all of Reath and the very mines that Cassius had instructed him to secure. Marcus had no doubt that Rufina would throw Lydia’s death into the offer to sweeten the pot, thus giving him everything he wanted.

And yet he had not yet accepted. Not yet even responded.

“I think it safe to say that the blight is poison,” Felix said. “If the men come in contact with it, or if our water sources were contaminated, we’d lose men by the hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands, if what the spies say is true. If we do as Rufina asks, we might win Cassius those mines only to lose them back to her because we are all dead.”

Those risks were not lost on Marcus. “We’ll see if the Mudamorians will deal,” he said. “If Queen Kitaryia gives us what Cassius wants, we can aid them in their battle against the blight. Perhaps what they gained here”—he gestured around—“was the answers they needed.”

“You asked them to surrender control of their nation, their gold, and one of their marked,” Felix said. “Do you really think they’ll consider it?”

“It’s that or die, Felix,” he said with a sigh. “And people do desperate things to live. Which is why, if they decline, we’ll head to Mudamora and take what Cassius wants by force. Because if we don’t, he’ll execute every legati who refuses and give command to someone in the ranks who obeys. If Cassius had his way, we’d already have set sail for Mudamora’s shores, but I’ve been dragging my heels and giving every possible excuse to keep us here while we wait to see if Mudamora will give him what he wants without a fight.”

Which was a lie. Marcus was dragging his heels while all the other legion legati came to terms with Cassius’s goals. He hadn’t been the only legatus to receive a message from the Dictator—his spies had informed him that Cassius had sent missives to the commander of every legion in Revat. While Marcus did not know the precise contents of every letter, the grim acceptance that had grown on the faces of the men told him that the crux of each was the same as what he’d been sent: do what you are told or die on the gallows. The same threat that had been dangled over every legionnaire’s head since the moment they stepped through the gates of Lescendor.