37. LOSSES MOUNTING

  When I retreated, I called out to Erik and the other mages, and they escaped behind me.

  I heard Greer to my right covering our retreat with a volley of explosive spells detonating in the market square. Bend fell in behind me launching a series of spells of his own. Others fired off covering spells to distract or disable those trying to follow us. Ehren whirled around sending streams of fire from his hands as he ran backwards.

  All around us, Uof’s men fired all manner of weapons at our Spellcasters as we ran, using a variety of motorized weapons. Explosions hit the air behind me. In front of me, through blurred vision, I saw Shade to my left holding off a man wielding a short sword, blood already covering her face from some injury or other. We scrambled back toward the city gates, a haphazard bunch of rebels retreating fast. This was not how I'd wanted this attack to go.

  Where were Dirk and his fighting men? I glanced back through the smoke and fire, and I didn’t see them—they may still have been engaged in battle back in the square.

  I had to help them, I thought.

  Dizziness washed over me and I nearly lost my footing again. Instead of turning around, trying to go back, and passing out, I kept running toward the city gates, men pressing in on all sides of us, shooting, coming in close with attacks, even some wielding swords and clubs. Every step was painful now, and every move jarred the wound in my side and my mind spun. Someone came up and supported me as I wheeled around and helped me continue to put one foot in front of the other.

  At one point, I stopped in an alleyway seeking cover, men surrounded me, some Spellcasters and some of Dirk’s fighters, all engaged with the enemy. As I gasped in the alley, sweat streaming down my face, blood on my clothes, I realized that they'd surrounded me to protect my hasty retreat.

  A nearby explosion knocked many of us to the ground.

  I didn’t have time to consider how this looked to the crowds, or how it would serve our resistance, seeing us running from Uof in full-out retreat. Certainly, it wouldn’t inspire confidence in anyone who hoped for our success, or was considering joining the resistance. Oh well. I couldn't worry about that now.

  Through gritted teeth, I moved on, leaving the alley and hobbling East toward the city gates.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have come to Vale after all, I thought. I'd known it would end in death, eventually, the deaths of the people I’d meet here, and probably my own death, though I was less worried about that. In this moment, all I thought as I hobbled toward the gates was, Where was Dirk? Where were the others? Had they fallen in the market square?

  Somehow, after long moments trapped between buildings or stopped by explosions or patrols of men cutting off other retreats, we made it through the gates and into the outer city. Men and women ran around me, sweat dripping off their soot-covered faces — each of them exhausted, some bloody and badly wounded.

  I stumbled past lines of people in the outer city, watching us limp past, their mouths agape. Fewer soldiers met us here, but the people of Vale were all around.

  We moved fast and darkness closed in on my vision once again, and I wanted so badly to surrender to the darkness and the peace it promised. I breathed as deep as I could without causing more pain. I heard shouts as more of our men ran up to us. I carefully searched their faces, finding it hard to focus, but saw no Dirk, no Greer, and no Bend.

  “Bend is gone,” someone muttered nearby. Not Bend.What does that mean, gone? I wondered, my mind hazy. What does “gone” feel like? Sounds peaceful.

  One of our men swept us quickly into a dark hole in the ground, a hidden tunnel entrance in the outer city, and another group covered our exit so as not to give away the location. I had no time to take it all in before I blacked out.

  I opened my eyes.

  The light was bright. It must be morning, I thought as I squinted while my eyes adjusted. I could tell I lay in our outpost far outside the city. As the light grew more bearable, I slowly scanned the room, moving my arms to see if everything worked.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  My head felt groggy, and my vision swam before my eyes. I closed my eyes again and rested them for a moment.

  Opening my eyes again, slowly everything came into focus. My body felt brutally sore and the wound in my side throbbed as it had right after I'd wounded it the first time. During the escape, I'd moved between consciousness and the darkness at the edges of my vision—but I did recall one moment from the retreat, hoping I'd only dreamed what I heard.

  Bend. He was gone? Had Uof captured him, killed him? What did that mean?

  If Bend had been captured, considering what I’d seen, The Grinder had been the culprit, not Uof. Uof seemed more of a show, or a figurehead of some kind, than the brains behind the Vale's power. The Grinder, whoever he was, seemed to be the true power in Vale. He appeared both mage and warrior, and as such he was certainly the primary anchor or commander of Uof’s forces.

  I sat up quickly in the bed in our makeshift house, and the headache came on swiftly. I laid back down slowly. In the room, I saw one of Uof’s formerly imprisoned mages sitting in the corner of the room, whittling himself a Spellcaster’s staff very much like my own. This mage had been locked in The Factory, working day-in-and-day-out on one of those machines, creating hybrid weapons for The Motorized, and now here he sat, a free man.

  He saw me wake and stood up with a grim smile. I recognized him but I didn’t recall his name.

  The mage came over and applied a wet cloth to my forehead. My ribs were sore, and my side had been bandaged up again, likely packed with a medicinal root of some kind. This felt like Déjà vu.

  “How are you feeling, Mage?” he asked me calmly.

  “Terrible,” I managed to grumble. “How long have I been out?”

  “A day and a half,” he said evenly.

  “What’s the report?”

  He looked at me, “I’m not sure how much you remember, but it’s not good. Many mages and men dead, though Dirk is alive, and they got as many out as they could, and they’ve all gathered here. We lost nearly a third of our men.”

  I stared at him, thoughts racing. What a nightmare. That attack was poorly conceived. Why had I gotten these poor men and women into this disaster of a rebellion?

  “Bend?” I asked.

  “Gone, but we don’t know where,” he said, a grimace on his face. “Either dead or captured.”

  “Do we know how?”

  “Someone saw him go down in the fighting, but we couldn’t find his body afterward. While you were out, Dirk’s scouts chased down a rumor and they discovered a much larger factory, further up the mountain, apparently tucked in a dead stand of forest. Much bigger than the one I’d been in.”

  I nodded. Another factory. I was still struggling with the fact that we’d lost a third of our forces and couldn’t fully process the implications. I wish I’d done more training in battle and strategy in my early apprenticeships with other Mages of The Way, years before. If I were a general in an army, this would be an unacceptable loss—even though the odds had never once been good.

  That didn’t make it any better, and now we’d lost Bend. It felt as though lead weights had deposited in my stomach. I took a deep breath and slid my legs off the bed and readied myself to stand.

  “What’s your name, man?” I asked, catching my breath.

  “Jame,” the mage replied.

  “And where did you come from Jame?”

  “I came from a small village several day’s ride from here called Peregrine,” he said. “It was built into some rocky outcrops out East. Lots of hunting birds lived in the area.”

  He paused for a moment, glancing at me. I returned his look.

  “I loved that place,” he said, continuing. “But it's been many years—I was taken from Peregrine when I was a teenager. Motorized buffoons arrested me for casting spells, and they told my family that I’d been killed. I haven’t seen anything of that place in many years, probably decades, I don’t even know how many years I’ve been here. Have you been through Peregrine by any chance Mage?”

  “Yes,” I said. The place was a ghost town last I’d seen it, desolate and burned out. “Your family probably emigrated to Vale long ago. Last time I came through Peregrine, the village was deserted.”

  He nodded. “I assumed as much.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ve seen more death and loss in my life than I ever anticipated possible. The world sometimes seems as if it is fading away like it's sick. If it’s not disease or starvation, we humans seem to attack ourselves. And I wish we could remove The Motorized from this world, but it’s been more difficult than I realized possible.”

  He looked up at me, a hint of emotion in his eyes. “Mage, you may not realize this, but you’ve brought more hope to this place than Vale has seen here in decades. Of course, I’m just seeing it now. But the men talk about this fight with such passion—despite the losses we’ve seen—we all believe in what we’re doing.”

  “Good, Jame," I said, nodding. "That’s good. Well, if your family is here in Vale, maybe we can find them when this is all done.”

  Jame smiled, moved toward me as if to help me rise. But I grabbed him in a bear hug as I moved to the edge of the bed.

  And he stopped for a moment, hugging me back and sobbing.