Blood of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  He was able to reach Greenfire Depths without incident. He wanted nothing more than to head back to the safe house and crawl into bed next to Ichtracia, to try and catch up on some of the sleep that he’d missed. But the meeting with Tenik had rattled him and he doubted that sleep would come. He navigated the early-morning traffic and headed to the one post office in Greenfire Depths.

  The Dynize had kept the postal system open, oddly enough. Letters and packages wouldn’t leave Landfall, of course, but they would be moved around within the city without being molested. He’d heard that the Dynize themselves had begun to use the post for official, but unimportant, communication—just another way they had co-opted the previously created systems within Fatrasta.

  Michel flipped through the file once more, sitting on a stoop outside the post office. He read it carefully, blacking out the three times his name was mentioned and making sure there was nothing else that could lead back to him. Once he’d finished, he wrapped the file in paper and slid it into an envelope.

  He smiled politely at the woman at the counter and handed the package to her. “Hello. I’d like this delivered to the Yaret Household tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. No earlier. No later.” He slid her a hundred-krana note. “This is very important.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Styke rode alongside Ka-poel while he kept a wary eye on the dragonman at the head of the small column. Orz had not spoken to any of them for two days. It was a sharp contrast to his talkative self after the landing, and it left a worried knot in Styke’s stomach. He tried to ignore it. There wasn’t much else he could do.

  “You didn’t know your sister’s name?” he asked Ka-poel.

  Ka-poel started out of her own thoughts. She gestured for him to repeat the question, then leaned across the gap between her and Celine to tap the girl on the knee. Celine dutifully translated what she said next.

  No. I had a vague memory of a girl and a name I associated with her. Mara. Ka-poel paused for a moment, some unreadable emotion flickering across her face. I’ve actually spoken to her. No. “Spoken” is the wrong word. She tapped the side of her head. I’ve communed with her.

  “Is that another thing a bone-eye can do? Like when Ka-Sedial spoke through that poor bastard at Starlight?”

  It’s different from that. More direct. I discovered the ability a year or two ago when Ka-Sedial first tried to reach into my mind. I used it to find Mara, and to gain knowledge of the upcoming invasion.

  “You knew about the invasion?” Styke asked. “Did you bother telling anyone?”

  Who would have believed me? Lindet? No. Taniel and I began making our own preparations. But this communication. It is not perfect. It requires a blood link and a strong willingness, and even with those things it is less like speaking and more like—she made several gestures that Celine just shook her head at, then continued—It’s more like two mute children drawing pictures to each other. She smiled briefly at something. Taniel and I sent a man to find Mara. From what Taniel has told me through our own link, our man found her and brought her out of Landfall. I can only imagine what frustration he felt when he found out her name wasn’t actually Mara. But he succeeded. I hope my sister is safe. I hope I live through the coming months so that I may meet her.

  It was the first time Ka-poel had acknowledged that their mission had a chance of failing, and it caught Styke off guard. “You’re awfully introspective today.”

  Ka-poel frowned at him. I am learning who I am. Where I came from. I saw into the heart of my grandfather and saw his lust for power. It was an ugly thing, but worse—because I saw the same in my own heart when I took control of that group of dragoons in the Hock. Do you know what it is like to learn who you are? What you are?

  “Yes,” Styke said, sucking in a deep breath. He thought of the men he’d killed in his search for vengeance, and the men he’d spared. “Yeah, I think I might know what that’s like.”

  Then, you know how awful it can be.

  Ka-poel’s hands ceased flashing and she fell into a brooding stillness. Styke watched her for a few moments, then lifted his head to look along the column. The men had taken to their roles well and without complaint, though they still cast suspicious glances at Orz whenever the dragonman wasn’t looking. They remained silent when there was company on the road, didn’t sing or laugh into the night, and listened to the dragonman’s lectures. They were all old Lancers, though, and he would have expected nothing less. They’d endured harder times during the Revolution, though perhaps the stakes were higher now.

  They emerged from the swamp about midday, leaving the main highway and cutting west into some hilly terrain that took them up and around the back of a small mountain. The road was lined with houses here, creating an almost suburban feel. After a couple hours of climbing, Styke finally urged his horse up next to Orz, giving the dragonman a sidelong glance before speaking.

  “Have we turned to go around the city?”

  Orz shook his head. “Going around would take too long.”

  “Then, where are we headed?”

  “A western district. But I’ve taken a short detour.”

  Styke felt himself tense. “Why?”

  “To show you something.”

  “Which is?”

  “Soon,” Orz responded cryptically, pointing up the trail. Styke fell back to the rear of the column again and kept his hand on the butt of his carbine, watching the road carefully. If Orz was going to spring a trap, he would have done it already. Wouldn’t he? He tried to shake off the distrust, but signaled silently to Jackal to keep eyes open. The signal was passed up the column behind Orz’s back.

  They soon rounded a bend and climbed a crest in the road. Styke was so busy watching their flanks that he only heard the first gasps. His head jerked forward and he urged Amrec on quickly, only to come over the crest himself and pull hard on the reins.

  An immense valley spread out before them, cradled in low mountains on the western side and spilling out into the Jagged Fens on the east. It was at least five miles wide and ten miles long, at a guess, and it was filled by a lake that stretched for most of the length and breadth of it, though the geography was clearly not what had elicited gasps from the Mad Lancers.

  A city had been built upon the very waters of the lake—an immense metropolis constructed along causeways of raised dirt and stone, crisscrossed by canals as thin as alleys and as wide as thoroughfares. Both roads and canals were lined with stone villas, cornered by marketplaces, pierced by the sharp angles of archaic city walls and huge temples that rose half a dozen stories above all the other buildings.

  “Talunlica,” Orz announced, gesturing expansively with one hand at the entirety of the valley.

  Styke rode several paces out ahead of the other Lancers, until Amrec’s hooves were at the edge of a cliff, and leaned forward to stare at the city. It was infinitely complex at a glance, divided into sectors that themselves were divided. He’d seen planned cities before—some of the more purposefully founded towns on the Fatrastan frontier—but none of them gave even the slightest inkling of what lay before him now. Even to his untrained eye, the entirety of the place had been laid out with purpose, every stone planned, every road with a destination.

  It was a city that had been created not just to live in but to be seen.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Orz spoke with a smugness that seemed unfitting to his character.

  “It is.” Styke was genuinely impressed, and he immediately saw why Orz had chosen to make this detour. If they had ridden directly into the city, it would have been a hard thing to explain, a hard thing to grasp. Even now, staring at it from above, he felt like there were patterns to the design that his eye couldn’t see, like the finest of Gurlish rugs in a rich man’s house.

  His eyes traveled to the center of the city, to the one large island from which the rest of the man-made avenues and canals seemed to radiate. The island was walled off with immense stone facades, each sharp angle punctuated by squat
turrets that looked big enough to hold entire gun batteries. He felt his vision pulled beyond those walls, to a great black monolith that sprouted from the center of the island. At this distance it looked small, but based entirely on perspective the thing had to be at least as tall as the Landfall Plateau.

  “Is that it?” he asked. His voice came out as a harsh whisper.

  “That’s it,” Orz answered.

  For the first time Styke became conscious of Ka-poel at his side, sitting forward in the saddle in the same pose as himself. Her eyes jumped around the city as if to take in every detail. If she had noticed the monolith in the center, the goal of their expedition staring them in the face, she gave no indication of it.

  “Come,” Orz finally said. “We’ll head to one of the western districts. I know of an inn that caters to slav—to foreigners. It’ll be the best place to bunk down for a night or two while we take care of business in the city.”

  “Shouldn’t we go around the city? Maybe just you and I can go in to retrieve your parents?”

  “We could,” Orz agreed, “but it would take far too long. If we want to reach the rest of your army with any amount of speed, we’ll have to cut through Talunlica.”

  Styke nodded absently, his eyes still glued to the godstone. Even at this distance he thought he could smell the coppery tinge of blood sorcery on the wind, but dismissed it as his imagination.

  Orz rode off, followed slowly by the rest of the Mad Lancers, until Styke was left alone.

  No, not alone.

  Ka-poel nudged her horse closer to his and reached out, giving his hand a quick squeeze. She signed briefly—a simple set of gestures that needed no translation.

  Thank you for bringing me home.

  They descended from their mountaintop vantage and skirted the base of the lake for several miles before turning into one of the long, straight avenues that connected the city of Talunlica with the shoreline. The crowds grew thick, the stares less interested, as the Mad Lancers entered a place where foreigners were a more common sight than in the rest of Dynize.

  Despite the grids, canals, and walls, Styke was surprised to note that the city itself did not seem to be built with self-defense in mind. The aesthetics were for beauty and civilian function. There were as many barges and canoes traveling the waterways as there were carts and carriages traversing the avenues. Aqueducts lined each street, bringing fresh water from the mountains and, according to Orz, taking black water down to where the lake fed a river into the Jagged Fens. There was lush greenery everywhere, from small squares filled with towering cypress tress to floating islands of loamy soil that acted as community gardens.

  The inn Orz had promised was a sprawling compound in one of the western districts. Orz explained that it was one of the older buildings in the city, built on one of the many islands and originally a headquarters for a Household that had grown rich off trading foreign slaves during the war. Now it was used as a stopping point for slaves traveling to and from the city. An old brass placard outside the gate was easy enough to translate: THE KRESSIAN INN AND BOARDING.

  The owner was a middle-aged man with a bored expression whose eyes widened briefly at the sight of Orz before taking on a businesslike calm. He sat behind a low stone desk in the corner of the compound courtyard, wearing a thin cotton shirt and a single feather hanging from the one braid in his long hair. A handful of stable boys played dice nearby.

  Orz swung down from his horse, gesturing Styke to follow, and the two approached the owner. Orz produced a coin—stamped copper by the look of it—and set it on the innkeep’s desk. It was the first time Styke had seen such a coin, but the innkeep simply nodded as if it were proper currency.

  “These are my wards,” Orz told him. “Give them somewhere they can drink and not be bothered.” Or bother anyone else seemed to be the implication.

  “Of course, Servant.”

  “This man here is named Ben,” Orz jerked a thumb at Styke. “He speaks with my authority. Understood?”

  The innkeep gave another brisk nod and barked a series of quick orders to the stable boys. Within minutes the horses had been taken, clean water provided to the soldiers, and they were all led to a building in a far corner of the compound. It was two stories with a flat, shaded roof, a large great-room, and several dozen cells that each provided a small sleeping compartment. A couple of slaves—Gurlish women in their late fifties—were whisked away to another part of the inn.

  “Can we relax here?” Styke asked Orz quietly as the innkeep flitted around the room, making sure that everything was made right and all the soldiers comfortable.

  “For now,” Orz answered. “We shouldn’t stay more than a day or two, or we will attract attention. But that’s all the time we need.”

  Styke gestured Jackal over. “They’ve been good. Let them kick their feet up tonight. Gamble, drink. But keep away from the locals.” He caught the eye of the innkeep and said one of the first words Orz had taught them in Dynize: “Beer!”

  A small smile played out across Orz’s face. “Dynize spirits aren’t great,” he told Styke, “but our beer is some of the best.”

  “I need some myself,” Styke replied. He could already taste it.

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Bring Ka-poel and Celine. We’re going out.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Vlora’s quick march off the Cape of New Adopest was arrested by the arrival of a messenger from General Sabastenien. The messenger was a young man coated in sweat and dust, looking tired and vaguely shell-shocked. His salute was halfhearted and his horse was limping.

  “Message from our cavalry, ma’am,” he said before he’d even come to a stop near Vlora and a small group of officers with whom she’d been conferring.

  Vlora blinked at the messenger through a haze and wondered if she looked as tired and strung out as he did. She hadn’t slept in almost thirty-four hours. Olem’s abandonment was still forefront in her mind, despite all she’d done to bury it beneath loads of work. It took all of her energy just to keep her face neutral, her eyes dry, and her mind focused on the duties of commanding a field army. She wondered how she managed to stay upright in her saddle. “Report,” she barked.

  “Yes, ma’am. We managed to catch up with the Dynize earlier today. Got in a few good hours of dogging their rearguard and harassing their train. Unfortunately they reached their reinforcements just a couple hours ago and we were forced to pull back when they about-faced on us.”

  “Reinforcements?” Vlora echoed.

  “Yes, ma’am. Another Dynize field army has joined them. They’ve arrayed themselves to give battle at a bit of hilly ground just as we’re coming off the Cape and onto the mainland. General Sabastenien says they’re trying to use the terrain to neutralize our superior cavalry.”

  “It sounds that way.” This was one of the things Vlora had feared about heading onto the Cape in the first place—that the Dynize would try to bottle them up here. Now it had come true, and they were outnumbered two to one. She would have cursed herself for a fool if she didn’t know that the alternative would have been leaving Etepali to run rampant behind her. “Anything else?”

  “General Sabastenien has found a defensible position for us to camp tonight and is waiting there—it’s about two miles from the head of the column. That’s all.”

  “Good. Get some rest, Private. I’ll send one of my own messengers with a reply.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Vlora turned her attention back to her officers. They whispered among themselves, brows wrinkled, already talking strategy of fighting two field armies at once. She wondered if they blamed her for letting Etepali slip away. She certainly blamed herself.

  “My friends,” she said, “you heard the report.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” came the echoed reply.

  “Any suggestions?”

  A colonel whose name had slipped her mind said from the back, “We can just go around them. Cal
l in the fleet to ferry us down the coast.”

  “Maybe,” Vlora said, “but that’s risky. It’ll force us to break up our strength.”

  “We can swing around to the north and try to hit them one army at a time,” someone else suggested.

  “We’d have to be damned fast,” Vlora replied, shaking her head. She’d already decided to acknowledge Etepali as a clever commander, and that meant assuming she was smart enough to counter any of the simpler strategies that Vlora might attempt. The way she saw it, she had two choices: to punch them hard and fast, giving them little time to prepare; or to pull up into a defensible position and draw the enemy to her. The former was risky and would throw them right into the maw of an enemy that outnumbered them. The latter could waste precious weeks and depended on the general of this new field army to be aggressive and daft.

  Vlora fell into her own thoughts, half listening while her senior officers discussed possible strategies. The only bright side to all of this was that none of them seemed particularly bothered by the idea of fighting a superior Dynize force. Several minutes passed while she listened and slowly grew alarmed by their cavalier attitude. She finally roused herself.

  “Gentlemen and women,” she said loudly, quieting the group. “I’d like to remind you that while we have the edge on the Dynize technologically, they have more Privileged and they have bone-eyes. If any of you doubt the effectiveness of the bone-eyes, I invite you to speak with the officers from my mercenary company. They’ll tell you how the Dynize refused to break at Landfall.”

  The group fell into a rocky silence.

  “We’ll still beat them,” Vlora added, injecting as much confidence as she could bring to bear. “I would just prefer to do it with fewer casualties. So I remind you to not plan anything stupid in the assumption that we’re going to walk all over a bunch of backward savages. The Dynize are neither of those things.”