Blood of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  The fourth assassin was on her feet by the time Styke turned. She raised her crossbow, catching the blade of his knife across the stock. He reached past both weapons with his left hand and snatched her by the throat, whipping her around and tossing her at the dragonman. The dragonman, extricating himself from the first body Styke threw at him, simply ducked and darted at Styke fast as a bullet.

  Styke managed to catch the dragonman by the wrist, blocking a knife headed for his ribs, while the dragonman did the same to his own knife hand. The two remained locked that way for several seconds, struggling in a contest of strength. Styke felt his arms begin to tremble and had a brief vision of Ka-poel’s smug face looking down at his corpse.

  He slammed his forehead against the dragonman’s nose. The dragonman’s head snapped back, blood exploding across both their faces. Styke managed to bury an inch of his Boz knife into the dragonman’s thigh, while the tip of the bone knife zigzagged a bloody line down his own arm. They spun, grappling, tripping and slipping on the corpses. Styke jerked his knife downward and sideways to open the wound, using the momentum to shove the dragonman backward against the now-hot stove.

  Neither the sudden smell of cooking flesh nor the knife tearing through his thigh brought more than a grunt from the dragonman. Styke tried to lean harder, working his blade for an artery, but the dragonman suddenly slipped to one side and rolled backward across the stove and out the very window the crossbow bolts had come through less than a minute before.

  Shouts came from the street, and Styke could picture the dragonman going for one of those strange crossbows. Kicking the dying assassins out of his path, he snatched Orz by the back of his shirt and lifted him onto one shoulder as he ran through the front door. He caught sight of people standing on the path, gawking at him, as well as a single shadowy figure in the space between the houses. Styke didn’t waste time trying to get a closer look. Jamming his knife into its sheath, he sprinted for the end of the road.

  “I hope whatever bone-eye sorcery they carve into you guys keeps the swamp dragons away,” he huffed as he ran. He threw Orz ahead of him just as his feet left firm ground and he turned the leap into a sloppy dive, hitting the dark, murky water hard enough to take the breath out of him.

  CHAPTER 25

  Vlora stumbled through the chaotic haze of the Dynize camp, choking on smoke and bewildered by the harsh glow of flares combined with the flickering flames from burning tents. It was all too much to process, shapes and shadows leaping through the night as Dynize staggered from their tents only to be bayoneted by a wave of Adran soldiers.

  This was the first time Vlora had fought in a battle without her sorcery—ever—and it was the absolute worst circumstances she could have chosen. She had no conditioning for this sort of thing, no experience with the heightened cacophony of bloodshed, for the confusing nature of the sounds and sights of a fight in the dark. Her sorcery would have slowed it all down, given her time to think and adjust. Without it she felt as helpless as a fresh recruit, and it terrified her.

  “Ma’am! One of our Knacked has located a bone-eye!” someone shouted in her ear.

  Vlora tried to rein in her senses, to grasp enough of what was going on around her to give orders. Her bodyguard consisted of ten grenadiers—eight men and two women, the biggest and meanest of her infantry corps. Joining the fray had essentially cut them loose, and they expected her to sweep along with them as they joined in the bloody slaughter. She could see the confused looks in their eyes when she didn’t move readily, react quickly, and bark orders. She wasn’t behaving like a powder mage, and they knew it.

  “Where?” she demanded, focusing on one of the grenadiers. “Lead on!”

  She struggled to keep up as they began to jog through the smoke. A coughing Dynize infantryman crawled from his tent only to take a bayonet between the shoulder blades. An officer emerged from the haze, half-dressed and waving a sword. Her grenadiers swarmed him before he even had the chance to call out.

  “Here, ma’am,” one of the grenadiers barked, running toward a tent. She could see a shape inside, the silhouette struggling to buckle on a breastplate.

  “Take care of it.”

  The order was carried out quickly and savagely, bayonets pincushioning the hapless bone-eye in his own tent, then dragging him out into the light, where someone slit his throat to make sure the job was finished. Vlora found herself horrified at the process.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if her sorcery had given her some sort of cushion against these horrors. Had it calcified her? Kept her from seeing the blood of battle for what it truly was? Or was this something different—nothing that could be called a battle. These Dynize weren’t even vaguely ready to defend themselves. Her soldiers poured over them with ease. She turned her attention on her surroundings, looking at the faces in the flickering light. Some of them attacked the helpless infantry in their tents with childish joy. Most seemed steely-eyed, acting with methodical, mechanical effort. They knew that every soldier they didn’t kill was one that would have the opportunity to shoot back at them in the morning.

  Vlora grasped onto that thought. This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? Minimizing danger to her own people was all that mattered. The Dynize infantry were just so many sacks of meat to churn through.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am!”

  Vlora focused on the face of one of her female grenadiers. She realized that she didn’t even know any of their names. These people were here to protect her life. How could she not have bothered to learn who they were?

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “Yes, yes. What is it?”

  The grenadier pointed to the horizon. It took a few moments for Vlora to tell the difference between the various lights in the sky—sorcerous conflagrations had now joined the flares. An experienced eye was good enough to see that this wasn’t just Nila and Bo adding to the fireworks; they’d gotten into it with someone, likely General Etepali’s Privileged. “Bo and Nila are on it,” she told the grenadier. “Focus on this camp.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  As the night wore on, the mood of the conflict shifted. Pockets of Dynize appeared, usually organized by a sole officer, offering token resistance to the rampaging Adrans. Vlora pushed herself through her own muddled mind, urging her bodyguard toward these pockets, making sure they put them down as quickly as possible to keep the Dynize from forming a coherent backbone.

  Sorcery continued to rage on the northern horizon, and it helped Vlora orient herself in the confusion. Messengers passed through the haze on horseback, sometimes looking for her and other times just informing captains and sergeants of developments. She learned through these that Etepali had indeed counterattacked. Her Privileged had engaged Bo and Nila and her infantry was pushing hard at Vlora’s flank. So far, the men she’d left to protect those heavy fortifications had managed to hold the line.

  She lost all track of time and space. One of her grenadiers fell to a Dynize officer. Soldiers in one of those pockets of resistance had managed to leave her limping with two new cuts on her left thigh. Her own inability to do more than raise her sword left her with an inner terror and the continuing knowledge that she shouldn’t be here in the thick of things. She risked not just her life but also her reputation.

  She shoved herself onward, forcing herself to be an avatar that she didn’t feel she was any longer, pushing harder toward those pockets of resistance. She even began to run, shouting at her men. It felt surreal, like she was floating above herself and watching someone else control her body.

  Vlora was so caught up in the chaos around her that she barely noticed the orange-lacquered breastplate on a Dynize officer less than twenty feet from her. She had to backpedal mentally, turning her head toward that breastplate, words of caution on her lips.

  The enemy general was a small man with a long, braided mustache. He wore the morion helm and lacquered breastplate, and he shook a cavalryman’s sword over his head. His eyes fell on Vlora at almost
the same moment that she looked back to examine him, and the two froze in the heat of the moment. Unfortunately for Vlora, the general’s bodyguard was quicker.

  Two forms erupted from the night, hitting her grenadiers like a pair of cannonballs. She saw flashes of bone knives, of ashen-freckled bare chests covered with snaking black tattoos. The dragonmen cut through three of her grenadiers before the group even had the chance to react.

  “Form up!” Vlora yelled, far too late. “Dragonmen on the left flank; keep them at the tips of your bayonets!” She threw herself backward, dropping her sword and snatching up the bayoneted rifle of a fallen grenadier. For the first time all night, her vague feelings of stupidity burned into something sharper—the terror of knowing she could die within moments.

  A bayonet skewered one of the dragonmen through the belly, but the dragonman barely flinched, using the opportunity to jerk the grenadier closer and slice her throat with one of his knives. He soon fell to the bayonets of the others, but the gap gave his companion the opening he needed to slide around to the side of the mass of grenadiers, hitting them in the flank. All but two went down, and those last threw themselves between the dragonman and Vlora with a pair of angry roars. Blades flashed, bayonets jerked.

  The entire confrontation lasted for mere moments, passing so quickly that Vlora could barely follow it. She stood stupidly with the recovered rifle hanging loose from numb fingers as the last of her grenadiers fell to a dragonman’s knife. The enemy general stood just behind his champion, shouting something in Dynize, waving that saber at Vlora. The dragonman had not come out of the fight unscathed—he was covered in cuts, stabbed through at least twice. He would have been an easy target if Vlora had had her sorcery, and perhaps an even fight even if she was in better health.

  The dragonman brushed off his wounds and began to stalk toward Vlora. It took all of her courage to stand firm, renewing her grip on the rifle in her hands. They circled each other for a few moments before the dragonman ducked and lunged, coming in under the point of her bayonet, knife flashing forward. She backpedaled hard, feeling the blade nick through her jacket and flesh. She tripped, slid, and fell so hard that the dragonman stumbled over and past her.

  Flashes of the battle of the Crease passed through Vlora’s mind, those moments when she knew her fate was sealed hitting her between the eyes. Her hands trembled. She clutched the rifle to her chest, trying to get a good enough grip on it to stab upward at the dragonman who now loomed over her, knife poised for the killing blow.

  There was a sudden thunder in her ears, and her eyes filled with the flash of hooves. She shook and shivered in the onslaught, not daring to move. As quickly as they arrived, the hooves were gone, and she craned her neck to watch the rear of a platoon of Adran cuirassiers as they thundered back into the fire-licked darkness.

  The dragonman and his general were both gone. Vlora slowly staggered to her feet, casting about until she found her opponents—both of them reduced to a pulp beneath Adran hooves. She widened her gaze, taking in the horror of her slaughtered bodyguard, and then further to look around at the bodies of Dynize infantrymen that coated the grounds of their camp for as far as she could see.

  She bent and was sick all over her own boots. Clawing at her throat, trying to breathe, she began to stagger back to camp.

  History, she realized in a moment of clarity, would call this a victory.

  CHAPTER 26

  Michel and Ichtracia moved to a damp overhanging roof that viewed the exits of their former safe house. It was recessed beneath another walk, a good place to watch without being seen, but wildly uncomfortable. Ichtracia settled down next to him and scowled into the darkness, placing one hand on his knee. He reached down and squeezed it.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Of course.” Her tone was confident. Her face—what little of it he could see in the shadows—was not.

  He cleared his throat. “You, uh, sure?” he asked slowly.

  There was a long silence. He finally felt her gaze turn on him and heard the soft tremble of a sigh. “Just remembering,” she said with a shake of her head. “It’s been a few years since I’ve had to deal with an assassination attempt. You never really get used to them.”

  “That’s right. You’ve dealt with this sort of thing before?”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Been woken up by an assailant? Once. It wasn’t pleasant, and I’ve slept lightly ever since.”

  Ichtracia remained quiet for several more minutes. He could sense her reluctance to speak, and was surprised when she finally did. “I barely slept between the ages of eight and thirteen. I was so scared of them coming back to kill me. Then I started taking mala.”

  Michel had always assumed that she took the mala to deal with her contentious relationship with her grandfather. It had never occurred to him that it was for a far more practical—and personal—reason. He let out a soft ah and put an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him, her head resting on his shoulder.

  “How do you switch sides so easily?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s not actually easy.”

  “It looks easy for you.” She paused. “Dahre and his people. They all seem so… decent. Average. Just normal people living their lives. I’ve been with them for just a couple of days and I’ve stayed aloof, but I find myself wondering more about them—their home lives, their loves and hates, their inner thoughts. I wonder where they’ll be next year or in a decade.”

  “That’s called empathy,” Michel said, trying not to sound condescending. “It’s an important tool for a spy.”

  “So you’ve told me. But the deeper I get into these people, the more I care about them.”

  Michel didn’t reply. It was something he struggled with for every person he had to deceive. He’d felt it so strongly just the other night when he saw Tenik again. “It’s hard,” he whispered.

  “I never imagined.” Ichtracia’s voice trembled. “I think… I think I’m beginning to see why you do it.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re deceiving them, but we’re also down here among them. The Palo, that is. I’m beginning to feel the bottled-up anger. The way that you eat and breathe the oppression by stronger people. I can see it in everyone’s eyes. Even the well-to-do have it—like Dahre. There’s a little pain that’s in the eyes of all the Palo that isn’t there for the Kressians or Dynize. It’s…” She trailed off for a moment, then continued thoughtfully, “It’s like I’ve found an entire people who know what it’s like to live beneath my grandfather. It’s terrifying but… wonderful at the same time. Does that make sense?”

  “Misery loves company?”

  She laughed softly. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  Michel was surprised when she suddenly leaned in and kissed him, then settled back against his shoulder to wait. He fell into his own thoughts, considering her words, turning over what it meant to be of a people but also of none. He eventually had to push those thoughts away before they took a dark path.

  Over the next few hours, his anxiety began to lessen as no one returned. No assassins. No Dynize. Just no one. Frustrating, but not deadly. He was just beginning to think it might be time to abandon their hiding spot and move on to a new safe house when he caught sight of Devin-Mezi approaching one of the tenement exits. She paused just outside, beneath a gas lantern, looking around furtively. Michel nudged Ichtracia. “Our friend is back.”

  “I still think you should have let me kill her.” Ichtracia yawned.

  “We’ll find out if you were right soon enough.”

  Devin-Mezi headed inside. Michel remained rooted to his spot, watching for any sign of hidden companions, until he was satisfied that Devin-Mezi had come alone. He slid back from the ledge. “With me,” he told Ichtracia, heading down a narrow staircase and then dropping onto the next level down. A steep ramp led them to the exit, and they arrived at almost the same moment that Devin-Mezi reappeared, her face screwed up in a look of frustration.
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  “You’re late,” Michel said.

  Devin-Mezi jumped and whirled, drawing a knife. She eyeballed him for a moment, then Ichtracia, before putting her knife back. “You said three hours.”

  “It’s been three and fifteen.”

  “I had to get Kelinar to a doctor.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “I have no idea.” Devin-Mezi glared at Ichtracia.

  Ichtracia smiled back at her softly. “Careful who you try to knife, next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Michel intervened. “Well. You’re back. I take it you’re here to fetch us to Mama Palo?”

  “I am. I was told to take the Privileged’s gloves, first.”

  “Over my dead body,” Ichtracia snapped.

  “Either I get your gloves, or I don’t take either of you anywhere.” Devin-Mezi folded her arms. Michel had to give it to her—she had guts. To come back and say that to a Privileged took both courage and stupidity. Just as it would be stupid for Ichtracia to give up her only pair of gloves just before heading out to meet with strangers. Luckily, Ichtracia had several pairs hidden about her person. He pretended to hesitate before turning to Ichtracia. “I’m going to give her your gloves,” he said, swinging the pack off his shoulder. He dug inside for a moment before handing them to Devin-Mezi.

  Ichtracia’s lip curled, but she didn’t respond.

  “Good enough?” Michel asked.

  Devin-Mezi held the gloves up to the light suspiciously.

  “Like I said,” he continued, “we’re on the same side. If that doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what will.”

  “All right,” Devin-Mezi replied hesitantly. “Follow me.”

  They were led through the twists and turns of the Depths at an alarming rate, heading up, down, across, and under a dozen different levels. Michel stopped trying to keep track of their path and instead watched for landmarks. By the time they reached their destination, he had only a vague idea that they were deep in the center of the Depths—very deep, with real ground beneath their feet.