“Four!” Jadar screamed. “Four men held against TWENTY?”

  The new First looked to the new Third, a lean woman with ropes of muscles making raised ridges down her arms. “They did, great one. We did as we were taught: we dug in, shot when we could, and waited for them to run low on chakra. But they did not. Their weapons never stopped thundering. I accept full blame for ordering the withdrawal.”

  The Third was from some race that Jadar was unfamiliar with. Probably one of the newly conquered races from the campaigns out past the Rilstep Gate. That meant she likely hadn’t been a helot all her life, had only served perhaps two years at most.

  To reach third at such a relatively low level of experience meant she had skill. That stayed Jadar’s hand, and saved Third’s life.

  Moreover, this wasn’t the first time Jadar had judged the punishment necessary for a failed sortie. She’d learned to look to the other survivors, to weigh the hate and satisfaction in their eyes as they regarded their commander, who had brought them to face a wizard’s wrath.

  There was no hatred or eagerness here: only fear of Jadar.

  That told Jadar that they thought the new Third had most likely made the correct call. Or at least the one the most agreed with.

  All this ran through Jadar’s mind as the survivors of the sortie stood at attention, sweating in the heat of the green sun.

  “Recount all that happened. Leave nothing out,” Jadar commanded, after her anger faded and her head cleared.

  Third’s posture didn’t change, but she couldn’t keep a faint tone of relief from her voice as she spoke of the cautious approach to the ruins. The thunderous and deadly ambush and First’s decision to use a fogger. Of how the helots had slain one green wizard but at least three more kept them pinned down with seemingly unending magical blasts.

  “Thirsty-four caught this, when his healing charm pushed it out of his wound,” Third said, showing Jadar a small, bloody lump of dull metal. “When we were struck, some of our charms depleted. Whatever magic they are using, there is a charm that makes it survivable, at least.”

  Jadar studied the small metal lump, weighed it in her palm. It was heavy for its size… lead perhaps? Or some element or compound unique to a world, perhaps? Was all this caused by a single wizard with the ‘lead’ rune?

  A quick examination of the charm arrays on the survivors showed that the wounded had depleted boltblunt charms. Those were designed to counter impacts from high-speed small things, typically arrows, bolts, slingstones, anything like that.

  So her helots hadn’t died to direct magic. No, by the sound of it, some wizard had either worked a spell or handed out charms that made lead go really, REALLY fast. Fast enough to blow through a charm with a single strike or two, instead of the five to eight hits a full one could handle from typical arrows.

  Arrows… This thought made Jadar remember there were still some assets who had not yet reported back. She turned from the helots, and pulled her sleeve up as she stared at the Evergreen bracelet and let her mind wander and her eyes unfocus.

  Voices began to whisper in the distance, elven words too far away to understand.

  “I am here,” Jadar breathed. “Attend.”

  Attend… attend… attend… even at a whisper, the word echoed and reverberated across the strangling space that the bracelet unlocked. It would not reach the whisperers, not in any understandable form, but it should suffice for the rangers in the vicinity.

  “I hear and attend,” came the answer. It came from… the north? Yes. One didn’t hear the voices in this realm with one’s ears, but direction was somehow still a factor. The voice had come from north of her position, well east of the ruin.

  “Did you scout the enemy, at least?” Jadar fought to keep frustration out of her tone. If the elves had changed plans and stayed out during the assault, then no wonder it had failed.

  “We did,” the voice replied. “But I must ask you now, wizard, are my two siblings among you? Are they hurt, or unconscious, perhaps?”

  Unease worked its way up Jadar’s spine. “They are not.”

  The silence that followed spoke volumes.

  The elf eventually responded. “They are fallen, then. I shall escort my prisoner to you and take my leave of your company.”

  Jadar let her attention shift away from the bracelet. Two dead elves… she no longer felt the urge to punish the helots. Clearly, they had been outmatched.

  Then her fatigued brain realized that she had not given the elf’s words the attention they deserved.

  A prisoner!

  Jadar studied the position of the sun in the sky. They had some time, yet.

  She could spare some of that time for an interrogation.

  “You,” Jadar told one of her guards, “fetch the hunting kit. And pack up the rugs in my tent. I do not wish them bloodied.”

  The fear that crossed the listening helot’s faces made her smile. They probably assumed she would punish them for their failure.

  She saw no harm in letting them dread that a bit. Scared helots caused less mischief.

  Perhaps twelve minutes later, the elf arrived. The prisoner was not what she expected. He was tall, thin, with obsidian-black hair and sharp, green eyes. He wore mottled green, and carried a large crate under one arm, straining to keep a smaller carrying case of leather and metal atop it, using his free hand to keep things as steady as he could. Dappled with sweat, he moved with confidence, unconcerned about either the elf at his back, or the helots slowly surrounding him.

  And when he spoke, Jadar’s frown deepened. A barren-worlder? Here?

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “I am an envoy of the United States of America. Do you understand me?”

  Behind him, the elf turned and left.

  Jadar looked left and right. “Take his boxes and arms and hold him,” she commanded.

  Incongruously, the man smiled even as he was relieved of his cargo, and forced to the ground. “I understood that! Good, this’ll make things easier. Do they understand me as well, or just you?”

  Jadar took the hunting kit from her guard. She squatted down to look the barren worlder in one green eye.

  He was still smiling. Jadar did not smile back. She loosened the straps of the kit, and showed him the tools.

  “You will tell me everything I wish to know now, or I will take you into that tent and you will scream quite a lot before you tell me everything I wish to know later.”

  The man still smiled. “I agree. I will talk now. But first, please tell me if they understand me as well, or if I can speak without fear of spies?”

  Jadar felt her lips curl. This one seemed too confident. Was it arrogance, or was there something to it? Was he more than he seemed?

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  After weighing the options and seeing no harm in the course, she nodded to the helots, but kept her eyes on the man. “They understand me. They do not understand you.”

  The man nodded. “Good, good. I don’t know how much you care about impressing them with your ruthlessness. Do you want me to put on a show of fear while you beat me or cut me a little, or beg for mercy and grovel? Or shall we cut to the chase where I betray everyone in those ruins in exchange for a little leverage in our negotiations?”

  Jadar’s eyes narrowed. Nothing was going as expected today.

  If one of the other wizards had been here, Jadar knew they would have broken him on the spot to keep the upper hand in the interrogation, and generally engage in dick swinging to make themselves feel more important.

  But Jadar was a blooded battle mage of House Manticore. She had nothing to prove, and no dick to wave.

  Still, the prisoner wasn’t wrong about maintaining appearances.

  Jadar stood and backhanded him, watched his head snap to the side as he rocked in the helot’s implacable grip.

  “Later, then,” Jadar said. “Bring him to my tent and shackle him to the post.”

  The man’s smile was gone now, and there was fear in his blazing green eyes as the helots obeyed.

  “Leave us,” she commanded, drawing a flensing knife from the kit.

  Once they were out, she felt along her necklace of charms until she found the translator, and concentrated, shutting off Helspeak. This would suffice. “We can speak freely now,” she told the stranger. “But if you lie or waste my time, I will make you regret it.”

  The stranger blinked, and Jadar watched his fear depart, his body and face relaxing. “Good. I don’t have much time to waste, either. What do you want to know?”

  Basics first. “You were in the northwestern ruin, yes?”

  “Assuming that’s the ruin just visible through the treeline, then yes, I was.”

  She decided to try to catch him in a lie. “How many of mine did you kill?”

  “I didn’t stick around long enough to tally the dead. If I had to guess, maybe ten or twelve of your soldiers. Oh, and two green men.”

  He hadn’t lied about the elves. That had been the trap, so he was probably honest, so far. “How did the elves die?”

  “From the traps, I expect. There weren’t enough assets to guard both ends of the ruin, so we put up a lot of traps there. With one veteran minding them, just in case.”

  Jadar didn’t know if she believed him or not. She put the flensing knife against her leg, as she let the silence hang. “Where is the Lion?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. We’re looking for him, too.”

  “You say the Lion isn’t there?” Jadar said, sliding a hand around his bound shoulder, and slowly, slowly bringing the knife to rest blade-first on his nose.

  His eyes crossed as he considered it.

  “The Lion is not in the ruin, and I do not know where he is. I have never met or seen him.”

  She pressed the blade in, just a little, and he gasped as blood welled up around the edge of the knife. “Then how did four defeat twenty and two elves? Did the Lion give your people charms? A handful of trinkets to lure you to fight and die in this soggy shitstain of a world?”

  “Oh no. He didn’t. As to how we won that fight… I could tell you, but you probably wouldn’t believe me, and I’d get my nose cut off.”

  “Speak anyway.”

  “All right. We have better weapons than you do. Like repeating crossbows, only much better. And little traps that make big explosions.”

  Jadar WAS very tempted to slice his nose open. But… his explanation was possible. When Terathon had set the gate to the barren world, and she and her companions had cleared out the locals at the gate sites, one of them had tried to kill her with some little device of metal and curved wood. She’d turned the hapless farmer’s insides to his outsides before he could do much more than make noise with it.

  The noise from the distant ruins had been louder. Much louder.

  Jadar withdrew the knife.

  “How did you come to this world, if you have not met the Lion?”

  “We figured out how to open the gates. One of your former Chosen Ones helped. Carmina’s her name. Sound familiar?”

  Jadar planted the knife into his wrist and he howled and writhed.

  “Liar! We did not teach HER to open the gates!” Jadar snarled, and withdrew the knife. She’d taken care to avoid the artery, acted angrier than she actually was. Though not by much… Carmina had been one of hers. The child’s treason had reflected poorly upon Jadar.

  “Of course you didn’t teach her to open gates!” The stranger shouted. “But who knows what the Lion taught her? But it doesn’t matter now,” he said, calming himself, breathing hard even as blood flowed and pattered down his tied arm. “We found a way to open the gates without using magic.”

  Jadar almost stabbed him again. Such nonsense!

  But…

  They WERE clever little tinkerers over in that barren world of theirs.

  And his answers were outlandish. Almost absurd! But he was remaining consistent.

  Jadar cleaned the knife, put it back into the case. “Why do you seek the Lion?” she asked.

  “I was ordered to find either agents of the Lion or agents of the Unicorn, and open negotiations. And you’re the one that found me first.”

  “Negotiation… you think you have something to offer the Kingdom of the Unicorn that we cannot simply take?”

  “YEs.” His eyes flicked to his wrist, and the steady stream of blood dribbling down it. “Though I don’t know how coherent I’ll be if that doesn’t get bandaged.”

  Jadar gave him a cruel smile. Touching her leather wristband to the wound, she spoke a word and the charm sewn within it sealed the wound. “I could carve your stomach out and replace and heal it twenty times over. I could take your eyes, your nose, and leave you begging for restoration. I ask again, what can you offer we cannot simply take?”

  The smile was off his face, now. But his eyes were hard chips of cold emerald, and he showed no fear as he said, “My life.”

  “Oh, we can take that. But that is worthless to use.”

  “On the contrary, you want me alive. And here’s why: By now the expendable assets in the ruin will have sent a report back. They’ll report that you attacked us. And if I don’t go back and report successful negotiations to my masters, then they will realize that you cannot be negotiated with. And we will send our armies to war to help the Lion.”

  “As if that matters. Your people are insignifi—”

  “Thirty-six thousand!”

  “What?”

  “That is how many soldiers our empire lost in the last war. And to us it was a pittance.”

  “You lost an entire world’s worth of people?” Jadar sneered, groping for the knife. “Now I know you are lying!”

  “Look me in my eyes and say that,” the stranger said, staring, his bloody nostrils flaring wide.

  Jadar had known many liars in her time.

  If he was lying, then he was the king of them all.

  “Of course, we’ve reduced our army a bit since the last war,” he said, softly. “The largest branch of it is under a million, now. But not by much.”

  Jadar checked her translation charm. It was still working. A MILLION?

  Cold dread set into her bones. “Perhaps you have something to offer after all,” she said, trying to keep a facade of composure.

  “Oh, yes. And we don’t want much in return. That ruin? You can have it back. You’ll want to kill the people in it, of course. That’s fine, we’re done with them anyway. And we’ll keep our armies off-world. We honestly don’t care about your little war with the Lion. So long as you let us move unhindered through a few gates, we’re good there. But there is one more thing.”

  “You assume we find your requests acceptable.”

  “Ask your superiors then, if you like.” The stranger smiled a cold smile. “But given how time works here, you’ve got a lot less of it than we do.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  “What is that one more thing you want?” Jadar asked.

  “A map and directions from here to the Guatemala gate.”

  Jadar drew back, felt the cold in her bones dance up her spine. “How did you know of that?”

  His smile grew teeth. “Oh, we’ve been watching you for a while now. Five eyes… never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure we don’t know about every gate you use, but we know enough. And the Guatemala gate is useful to us. We want it.”

  “Why? There is little of use down there,” Jadar frowned. “Just some villages and a lot of jungle.”

  “Yup. And a road big enough to handle trucks. Trucks chock full of crates of Bolivian marching powder.”

  “What?” Jadar checked the translator again.

  “Never mind. Anyway, time’s wasting for both of us. So either cut me loose and you get everything you want with the ruin, or kill me and the next guy who comes after me goes to see the Lion. And Lady? He’ll show up bearing gifts.”

  Jadar looked to the knife in her hand. Then to his thoat.

  She cut his bindings.

  He sagged against the pole, tested the small cut on his nose. “Good,” he smiled.

  “Do not think me a fool,” Jadar said. “I am prepared for any betrayal you can bring against me.”

  “Oh yeah, speaking of betrayal, let’s get that taken care of. Just put that Guatemala gate map in my hands and I’ll tell you everything about how they fortified that ruin over there…”