24. The Rally Camp
Chapter twenty-four
The Rally Camp
Mud-spattered and sweating through his tunic, Imalroc stood between two hissing torches staked into the dirt at the edge of the camp called River.
At his back, the jungle roiled like a dark storm cloud, sizzling with the noise of bugs and frogs and all manner of creeping things he’d rather not get a look at.
The jungle was as dense as a wall, so much so that they had to leave the horses in the nearest village and trek the rest on foot. There were no marked roads to River.
The camp stretched before him, line after line of neat green tents as far as he could see. It was more orderly than he expected after Almatra’s ominous hints.
She appeared at his shoulder and wrinkled her nose in distaste at the identical tents. “Ah. I meant for us to come out further south. Let’s go.”
He followed her through pools of torchlight and across ground flattened by countless feet. “How can you tell what part of camp you’re in? It all looks the same.”
Almatra snorted. “This part belongs to the free soldiers. They’re fools with no experience or brutes with too much of it. It’s easy enough to tell the difference between their part of camp and ours. You’ll see.”
That didn’t bode well for a functional fighting force. “Why aren’t the battleboxers mixed in among the soldiers?”
She gave him a dubious look. “Would you want to be? The problem starts with Edim Morbank, and we’ll get nowhere with him.”
“The Medallion.” He remembered the way Galada had said the man’s name, like Morbank was something unfortunate stuck to the heel of her boot.
“The spoiled brat who was put in charge because of his mother’s onyx and his father’s pedigree,” Almatra corrected.
“And Galada wants us to build a connection with him?”
“Waste of time. Forget about the soldiers. Our problem to fix is the other half of camp.” She jerked her chin forward, pace quickening. They crossed an open stretch of ground delineated by a long line of pike-mounted lanterns.
Imalroc squinted into the dark expanse ahead.
There were no more trim tents in identical rows.
Instead, scattered lights illuminated a wild maze of leaning, haphazard structures.
Most appeared to be constructed from branches and leaves ripped from the jungle.
Some were little more than a scrap of fabric stretched between two sticks. His stomach sank.
“This is still part of the army camp?”
“I know it looks a mess, but there are plenty of good fighters here. This is our side.” She said it with unmistakable pride as they plunged into the labyrinth.
“We’ve got lots of fighters from the battleboxes in Kibo.
They’re fresh, which is good, but they’re inexperienced.
Some of them were just their master’s pets and wouldn’t know how to fight off a mosquito. ”
Imalroc grimaced at the memory of Widran and Tamasyad. He remembered well the battleboxers that had haunted their masters’ footsteps through the streets in Kibo. Rough though the camp looked, he was glad to see evidence of so many fighters who had escaped the desert city.
“We’re about to cross into Eastern feld ground. Stay close.”
“Why? What’s—”
“Tell you in a moment,” Almatra muttered.
Only a few steps into the Easterners’ area, and he understood why she’d cut him off.
Sly movement caught his attention, and he spotted a few battleboxers emerging from their shelters.
They regarded him with the eyes of marksmen and followed him from a distance.
His skin prickled. There were more of them keeping pace on the other side of the shelters.
The Eastern battleboxers moved like gathering shadows, with the silent coordination of a pack of wolves.
“Not particularly welcoming, I take it?” he breathed.
Almatra didn’t bother to reply, just broke into a trot. She kept precisely to the middle of the path.
Imalroc smothered his instinct to whip around and glare at the wraiths behind him.
He stayed on Almatra’s heels and refused to look at the figures flickering alongside him, leaving just enough distance between them to set his pulse thrumming in his neck.
His back was slick with sweat from heat and nerves by the time Almatra let out a heavy breath and slowed to a walk.
He glanced back. The Easterners had stopped on some invisible line. Their expressions ranged from open hostility to an eerie blankness that was far more unsettling.
“They won’t be that aggressive once they know where you stand in the camp,” Almatra said.
It was the first time he’d heard her come close to sounding apologetic.
“The Easterners are a tricky bunch. They’re great fighters, but they think all other battleboxers are soft.
Honestly, I can’t say I blame them. I’ve never seen people broken the way those bastard handlers break their fighters.
We aren’t able to rescue too many survivors from the Eastern felds. ”
“What about the North? And Kirinoll?”
“There’s a solid contingent of Northerners. Weak security in the Northern battleboxes has been good for us. But Kirinoll... we don’t get many.”
“There are too many of the Red Guard in the capital?”
“The Guard are everywhere. No, the problem is Kirinoll is known for its champions. And champion battleboxers rarely make good rebels.” She grinned at him.
“Present company excluded. But the others…” Her expression hardened.
“Too many of them swallow the poisoned dream of glory. You’ve seen them, the kind who love their masters.
They want to stay with them and win. Slaves. Traitors.” She spat into the mud.
An uncomfortable weight lodged beneath his breastbone. He couldn’t meet her gaze and turned his attention to the surrounding mess.
A bunch of splintered groups who refused to work together could not become the new Southland Army, even if they all wore the legendary uniform. And no army meant Kuraya would crush them when she struck. The rebellion was on a worse footing than he’d imagined.
He lost track of the pathways they followed by the time he finally emerged into a large circle.
A fire pit took up most of the center. It smoldered with low flames, and the smell of food rose with the coiling smoke.
Beyond the pit was another shelter, bigger than the others, with a roof of tightly woven leaves.
“And now, the very best part of River. You’ve met her before, you know. Lucky you get to meet her again.” Almatra cupped both hands around her mouth and shouted. “Dola! Stop napping and come and greet me!”
It took a moment, but a woman rushed out from Almatra’s shelter and into the firelight.
Imalroc’s gaze raced across a high forehead, cheeks rounded in a smile, swinging rows of neat braids, and the smooth, dark skin of the newcomer’s bare arms and shoulders.
She wore a bright column of fabric decorated with mismatched buttons and tassels.
She flung herself into Almatra’s arms and kissed her thoroughly enough that Imalroc was suddenly intruding. He pretended to be very fascinated by the overlapping roofs that made up their tent structure.
“Apologies, goodness, my manners!” The woman gave him a gap-toothed smile. “I’m Dolasarra, but everyone calls me Dola. I cannot believe you’re here.”
“Imalroc,” he said, eyeing her and trying to think where he might have met her. Unless Almatra was mistaken.
“I know!” She beamed.
Dola didn’t look like a battleboxer at all. Too many soft curves and too much unmarked skin to have been in the boxes. Yet there was something strangely familiar about her.
“Do you remember me?” she asked. Her voice was gentle and lilting, like someone singing under their breath. “I’ve seen you before. In the Arble. You spared my life, and that of my love.”
His eyes narrowed. Then he blinked. “You’re the archer,” he said faintly. He remembered slamming the Draalish sword into the red earth beside her head. She had flinched, her eyes squeezed shut, and he had told her to stay down if she wanted to escape the box alive.
Imalroc swung his hands to his hips. “You fucking shot me.”
“Sorry,” Dola said quickly.
Almatra waved the hand she didn’t have around Dola’s waist. “It barely broke the skin on your leg, champion.”
“I take it you’ve never been hit with a crossbow bolt!”
“Quit whining and go eat.” Almatra shoved his shoulder.
Imalroc gave her a startled look. So few people touched him, and normally he’d be bristling, but that had felt… playful. And odd. He hid his reaction by ducking into their tent.
The shelter was larger than it appeared at first glance, each little room bounded by dyed scraps of curtains and woven palm mats. Braided raffia palm hung from the roof and dangled over a low-set table already crowded with food.
Almatra settled eagerly on a mat beside a low table.
Imalroc sat opposite, but then wished he hadn’t when Dola curled next to Almatra, leaning into her with such obvious affection it sent an ugly spurt of jealousy into his chest. He dropped his gaze to the food in its baskets and bowls.
Hunger expanded in his stomach. He had a horrible feeling that food alone would not satisfy it.
“You were gone so long,” Dola murmured. “I was worried.”
“Sorry, love. Didn’t mean to be. It took us longer than we thought to get through the Midlands, and then this one was summoned to the Advocate, so we went to Sol Serene instead of directly here.” Almatra nodded at Imalroc.
Dola looked at him brightly and heaped more food into his bowl. “You met the Advocate! What was she like?”
Imalroc considered. “Fearsome, in her own way,” he said slowly. His hostesses were watching him curiously, but he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to tell them. “She was after information.”
“Why?” Almatra asked.
“Seems like she needs more support from the feld council than she’s getting. She’s looking for a way to convince them to go to war.”
Almatra shook her head. “What more reason do they want? The queen hates them already. They’re not going to be able to reason with her.”
“But,” Dola said quietly, “there isn’t currently a force capable of taking on the Red Guard, and the feld council can see it. They will not leap into a fight they can’t win.”
If he’d left Rerdas just to muck around in the jungle in the hopes of a rebellion that never emerged, he was going to murder someone. Imalroc stubbed his bread into his bowl. “The Medallion here… Is his main problem that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?”
“It’s worse than that. He’s foul. Playing at being a general, chasing all the women around camp, treating everyone like his servants,” Almatra said.
Dola sighed. “He’s young and doesn’t take this seriously enough. And I’ll agree that he doesn’t have the best, um, temperament. But if we can gain his trust and show him we want to work with him toward common—”
Almatra rolled her eyes. “Dola. He’s a waste of effort. And he and his people want nothing to do with battleboxers.” She shrugged. “Which keeps them well out of our way.”
“Out of our way… while we do what?” Imalroc asked.
“We’ve plenty of work to do among our own kind,” Almatra said. “Some of them are far too soft.”
Dola’s mouth twisted unhappily at that characterization before she turned to Imalroc.
“It’s true there are divisions among the battleboxers.
Not as bad as between the soldiers and the freed fighters, but enough for us to trip over.
We don’t know how to fight together yet.
” She smiled eagerly at him. “It’ll help to have you here. People will listen to you.”
He narrowly avoided choking on his food.
The idea that an entire army would, or should, listen to him was laughable.
In all the days and nights he’d spent on the move since Drida, he hadn’t pictured much of what joining the rally camp would be like, but he’d vaguely imagined training a handful of young battleboxers in the techniques that Master Xavian had taught him.
Dola was asking for something much more than that.
He didn’t know about fighting in large groups where people were meant to work together.
Military strategy and battle planning seemed like a completely different problem than fighting in a battlebox.
If this Medallion had any training at all in the workings of a real army, they couldn’t dismiss him.
“They’ll listen to him if he passes their tests,” Almatra said.
Imalroc looked up. “Tests?”
“They’ll test you somehow. Especially the Easterners.”
“By doing what?”
She shrugged. “It’s not a planned test. They’ll do something, just to see how you conduct yourself. We’ll find out tomorrow at the training grounds.”
His expression must have given away some of what he thought of that, because Almatra reached across and rapped the table in front of him. “Don’t vanish off in your head worrying. It’s nothing to be concerned about. You’re made of the exact steel they want to see. Nothing to hide from these folk.”
Almatra would probably boot him right out of the tent if she knew what sort of things he’d gotten up to with his handler. The things he’d done willingly for him.
He tucked his face back toward his bowl and reminded himself he was here to put sword calluses on fresh hands, that was all. Tomorrow, he’d go to their training grounds and prove it. They didn’t need to know any of the rest.