“She fucking shot me!” Ban yelled.

He was propped up against a tree, holding his hand to his shoulder to stem the bleeding. Elizabeth was gone, taken off into the jungle after she put a bullet through Ban’s collarbone and, despite the pain in his ribs, Calris laughed. It was a bitter laugh, and even he could hear the borderline mania in it.

He should have listened to Ban from the start. Here they were, sword arms useless, bleeding out in the middle of the jungle, no Key and no hope of making it to Levi’s village. Instead of being the saviours, their only hope left was for Rory to pull something spectacular out of his arse, kill Maw’Groth and the other drakes, then rescue them.

Which seemed unlikely, given the state Rory had been in the last time Calris saw him. Calris’ laugh petered out, and he slumped down against the tree next to Ban. The old rush was well and truly gone, replaced with the now familiar helplessness and frustration. They had victory in their hands, and he let it slip away because he was cocky. He felt shame and regret, but mostly he felt fear. Fear of what might happen to the others. Fear of what might happen to Jasmine. Because of his mistake.

He found his feet with a groan and well-deserved pain, and shooed Ban’s hands away so he could check the wound.

“You’ll live mate. Far as I can tell, it’s buried in your clavicle, no ricochet. Alincia will have you patched up in no time… assuming they’re still alive.”

Ban laughed, the humourless sound turning into a dry cough, and he winced. “Still hurts like a son of a bitch, though,” he said, then looked up into Calris’ eyes. “The others will be fine, Cal. Rory’ll get patched up and he’ll turn that giant lizard to dust. You don’t need to worry.”

Calris couldn’t say anything in response as he produced a strip of clean linen from a wax sealed bag on his belt and started packing the wound. Ban clenched his jaw, but otherwise made no sound. When he was done, Calris tore a dirty strip from his undershirt and bound the dressing tight, then stood back to admire his work.

“You’ll be right. Might even keep the arm. Sixty-forty on the outside.”

“Oh bugger off, you know I’m gonna be fine. Elizabeth deliberately missed anything vital. Shows she fancies me.” Ban said with a smile, and Calris wasn’t sure whether he was being sarcastic or was just that delusional.

“Mate, if I’m perfectly honest, I think your relationship might be somewhat toxic.”

“Love is pain, my son. You, of all people, should understand that. Didn’t Jasmine send you to the healer when you first met?”

“Yeah, good point. So, when are we going to bring them back to meet the family? Think mum will approve?”

“Probably never, at this rate. And I dunno about mum, though the three of them are disturbingly similar, now I think of it.”

“Shit… You don’t think what’s-his-name was right? About the Oedipilius complexes?”

“Gods, I hope not,” Ban replied, shaking his head, then holding out his good hand. “Come on, help me up. We need to get to the village.”

Both men grunted from the pain as Calris pulled, fire lancing through his ribs.

“Not sure we’re going to get far in this state,” he replied. He froze when a high-pitched but undoubtedly male voice answered from behind him.

“No, I don’t think you will.”

Calris whirled to find the hooded figure from before standing before them, just a few paces away.

“You again!” he said, awkwardly drawing his sword with his one good hand and brandishing it menacingly. He reflected, with much chagrin, that menacingly brandishing was about all he could do at this point. In fact, he probably didn’t look all that menacing since it was obviously his off-hand and his ribs were shattered. But he sort-of-menacingly brandished it anyway, while beside him Ban did a much more effective job of brandishing an axe. One perk of being ambidextrous. The other didn’t need to be specified.

The figure cocked its head to one side.

“Me again? Ah! I see you’ve already met Gh’elen.”

“He the bloke controlling the big one?”

“Yes. Bastard beat me to it. I was looking forward to having such a destructive puppet under my control, but I had to make do with most of the other drakes instead.”

“Slept in that day, huh?”

Behind the figure, Calris saw the trees swaying, betraying movement through the jungle. It was too subtle to be a swamp drake, though, and raptors didn’t disturb the canopy at all. Something else was rapidly approaching.

“No, unfortunately I was dear Elizabeth’s designated chaperone,” the figure replied, ignorant to whatever was behind him. “While I followed her around Port Pirie making sure she didn’t get up to anything too seditious, he went out and found the beast’s lair.”

“She needs a chaperone? Seems like a grown woman to me,” Ban said, an air of wistfulness to his tone.

“Let’s just say that there were, doubts, about her abilities after the last run in she had with you lot. I am assessing her suitability for… continued employment.”

Something told Calris that being sacked in their line of work was a tad worse than a handshake and a reference letter. But the disturbance was getting closer, and this bloke seemed keen to talk. Couldn’t hurt to keep him going until the newcomer came on the scene. Calris was holding out hope it was one of the mages. It certainly couldn’t make matters worse if it was another threat. If this assassin had skills even close to Elizabeth’s, they were already royally fucked.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“She gave us a solid going over and she has the Key. I’m guessing she passed with flying colours,” he said, stalling for time.

“Her abilities are definitely above reproach, but unfortunately, we will still terminate her. She actually tried to warn the rest of your company before we came out here. Not to mention she spared you two. It’s safe to say her loyalties are compromised.”

“That’s probably my fault,” Ban said, raising his hand. “Women can’t help themselves around me, it’s a serious problem.”

“I’m sure. Either way, her life is more or less finished once I report back. If you wish to feel responsible for that as you die, be my guest.”

“Fair, but it seems to me, if you die, then there won’t be anyone to taddle on her,” Ban said, lowering his axe to the ground and leaning heavily on the handle.

“I doubt you can defeat me in your current state.”

“Maybe. What’s your name, friend?”

The hooded figure regarded them coldly for a moment before he replied. “Xh’elen.”

“Nice to meet you, Xh’elen. Goodbye.”

The blade erupted from Xh’elen’s chest as Olic rammed it through his back. The assassin spasmed as Olic lifted him off the ground and hurled him into the swamp. When Xh’elen broke the surface of the murky water, he was face down and not moving. Sergeant Olic hurried over to the two marines and inspected their wounds.

“You bloody fools. Can’t be trusted to do the simplest tasks without me there to hold your hand,” he said, clicking his tongue at the blood and bruises as the rest of the Sixth materialised out of the jungle.

“Nice to see you too, sarge,” Calris replied. “Thanks for the rescue, but why are you here? How are you here?”

“Like that gobshite said, Elizabeth warned us something was going to happen, so we came out to fix your inevitable fuck up.”

“But how? Did the entire company come? How did you get out here?”

“We built barges and took them up the river system. Made landfall near Levi’s village and then came here.”

“And that worked?”

“We brought all the harpoons from the ship, better for fending off drakes and much easier to handle when you don’t have to walk with them.”

“I feel like we should have done that from the start.”

“I won’t lie, it was rough going. And we may have inadvertently declared war on some villages as we passed through their territories. Levi certainly wasn’t impressed when he found out, apparently as his guests he is accountable for our actions, but we couldn’t afford to let the Key fall into the wrong hands.”

Ban coughed and looked down at his feet. Calris looked everywhere else except at Olic. Even so, he could sense the sergeant looking between them, his growing rage like a physical force. This was going to be painful.

“You little shits lost the Key!” Olic roared, grabbing them by their collars and shaking them like dolls. Calris gasped as everything broken started burning with renewed vigour.

“We did our best, sarge!” Ban begged.

“Aye, I should have known better than to send you two out alone. Especially when there was a little girl on the loose!”

Calris finally found his voice. He was bleeding, broken, and at the very end of his rope after everything that had happened. And so he said something incredibly foolish.

“That ‘little girl’ kicked your arse last time, Sarge,” he said as best he could. It was tricky, though, since his teeth kept clacking together as his head flopped around.

The thrashing abruptly stopped.

Thwump.

This time it was Olic’s fist connecting with Calris’ temple. It was far, far worse than Elizabeth’s dagger handle. Calris went down into the dirt and lay there, his eyes rolling into the back of his skull.

“Remember who you’re talking to, arsehole. Who do you think kicked her scrawny arse when she came to warn us?” he said, glaring down at the crumpled marine.

“I wouldn’t have thought her arse needed kicking if she was just there to warn you,” Ban replied, since Calris was still indisposed.

Thwump. Ban went down as well.

“I don’t know what I did to piss the gods off, but it must have been bloody heinous for them to saddle me with you two,” he said before gesturing to the rest of the squad. “Get them on their feet. We’ve still got a battle to fight. What are we facing?”

Calris was still seeing stars as Badger and Mouse hauled him to his feet.

“Drakes and raptors, sarge,” he slurred.

“What?”

“Drakes and raptors,” he repeated.

“Well fuck me. How many?”

“Uh… all of them.”

*

Jasmine lashed out with tongues of flame, driving back hissing drakes and turning raptors to ash. She had beaten the main body of the horde to the college, just, and had been holding the doorway ever since.

But she was tired. She was keeping the monsters at bay with raw power and sheer will, but sweat poured off her as she fought, and she knew she couldn’t keep this up for long. Her reserves were almost spent. The only thing that surprised her was that she had held out for so long.

While she fought, Asim stood beside her, halberd at the ready, while around them the surviving Gundagaal warriors waited with steely eyes for their saviour to inevitably falter. They were fine fighters, one and all, but Jasmine knew they couldn’t stand before what was coming through that door when she ran out of Talent.

They had tried to buy time by barricading the doorway, but the drakes had ripped it down within minutes. When it had fallen, Ferez had been upstairs with Alincia and Rory, and Jasmine couldn’t afford to call him back down. Alincia needed him to support her flagging reserves of Talent, since she was completely spent after healing the wounded at the gate, and Rory was their only hope when Maw’Groth arrived.

But a direct transfer of Talent from one mage to another was a slow process, at least if done safely. If Jasmine couldn’t buy them enough time to do the transfer and heal the Umbral mage, they would all be dead before noon.

She wished Calris and Ban were here. Sure, they were just men, same as the others who stood beside her, but when they were near, she felt like everything would be alright.

Gods, she hoped they were still alive.

Jasmine swore and unleashed another sputtering gout of flame as a raptor tried to rush through the door. Her marines were missing, Rory was on death’s doorstep, and she fought alone against an unnatural army of creatures. She fought the urge to cry as the hopelessness of their situation threatened to overwhelm her.

How did it come to this?

The horde surged again, and Jasmine pushed back as hard as she could, but as the rest of the flock burned, a pair of raptors made it through the doorway, using the corpses as cover and plunging into the Gundagaal warriors. The tribesmen slew them, but were themselves driven back by a large drake that drove forward through the flames. Jasmine screamed, pouring everything she had into her fire to stop the beast, but it kept pressing until Asim drove his halberd through its skull, finally bringing it down.

And then she was done. The last of her Talent was gone and, hard as she tried, she could not coax any more flame. Asim and the others rallied to her defence, hurling themselves at the beasts, and the air filled with screams as the warriors fought and died. Jasmine saw Asim in the thick of it, halberd rising and falling, blood fountaining in the air with every blow, but still the beasts came on, and Asim cried out in pain as a raptor struck him from behind.

The mighty warrior fell, and she lost sight of him in the fray. The Gundagaal redoubled their efforts to retrieve him, dragging him clear, though they lost many of their number to claws and teeth doing so. Only a handful remained.

Jasmine dropped to her knees, that same feeling she had buried since the Keep resurfacing. The fear and powerlessness as people died horrible deaths around her. She had failed them. Without her magic, she was as helpless as she had always been. She collapsed on to her hands and knees, tears falling from her eyes to the floor.

On to a spear dropped by a fallen tribesman. She reached out a shaking hand and grasped it, feeling the rough, hard wood scratching at her palm.

No. No more tears.

She was not weak.

She didn’t have magic anymore, but she still had her life.

She was still The Desert Rose.

She took up her spear and plunged into the fray.