The Powder Mage Trilogy: Promise of Blood, The Crimson Campaign, The Autumn Republic

by McClellan, Brian

  Adamat was slapped awake with rough hands. He jerked forward, reaching for a cane that wasn’t there, and groggily took stock of his surroundings.

  He was in the back of a carriage with one other man—the same pickpocket who’d pistol-whipped him before taking him to the Proprietor’s. The carriage wasn’t moving. Outside, he could hear the general bustle of an evening crowd.

  “Toak, was it?” Adamat asked.

  The man nodded. He held a pistol in his right hand, hammer back, pointed at Adamat. “Get out.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Quarter mile north of Elections Square,” Toak said. “Get out.”

  Adamat climbed from the carriage and held his hand up to shade his eyes from the afternoon sun. As soon as he was off the running board, the carriage took off, disappearing down the street. Adamat rubbed his eyes and tried to get his mind working. He felt nauseous. What had they given him? Ah, yes. Ether. He’d be in a fog for hours yet.

  He spent until just before dark at a nearby café, nursing a soda water to settle his stomach.

  Why had the Proprietor offered him employment and then simply dumped him back on the street? A very strange way to act. The Proprietor was known for secrecy and efficiency. For keeping his promises and destroying his competition. He was not known for behaving strangely.

  It had to be something Adamat had said.

  Adamat blamed the ether when it took him well over an hour to realize the obvious.

  The Proprietor had intended on paying him to go after Lord Vetas. But why pay a man to do something he already plans to do? Adamat shook his head. Stupid. On both his part and the Proprietor’s. If Tamas was truly dead, Adamat would lose the few soldiers Tamas had granted him. Adamat couldn’t take Lord Vetas alone.

  Adamat knew where Lord Vetas was holing up. The house with the woman in the red dress. The house where he had seen the Eldaminse boy.

  Now that he knew that, a frontal assault would be necessary. The same as they had done to rescue Adamat’s family. Smash open the doors, take them by surprise. A man like Lord Vetas would have guards. What had the Proprietor said? At least sixty men and a Privileged.

  Adamat needed manpower. He needed help. The Proprietor’s help.

  No doubt the Proprietor would have had him followed. The location of Adamat’s safe house, and the errands he needed to run, were not things he wanted the Proprietor to know. Adamat climbed to his feet and called for a hackney cab.

  He changed cabs three times and cut through half a dozen buildings before he felt confident no one was following him anymore.

  It was well after dark when he arrived at the textile mill. The looms were still working despite the late hour. Adamat talked his way inside and climbed rickety wrought-iron stairs up to a room overlooking the mill’s work floor. Inside he could see a woman leaning over a brass microscope. She was about forty, with hair dyed black to hide the gray roots. The walls of her office were lined with fabric samples of every kind—from cheap canvas to fine silks that cost a hundred krana for a yard.

  He rapped on the door.

  The woman waved him in without looking up from her microscope.

  “Hello, Margy,” Adamat said.

  The woman finally looked up. “Adamat,” she said in surprise. “What a pleasure.”

  “Good to see you.” Adamat removed his hat.

  “You as well.”

  Adamat took her hand a moment. Margy was one of Faye’s oldest friends. Adamat considered telling her about the whole predicament before dismissing the thought. “I need some help,” he said.

  “Not a social visit, then?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Margy turned back to her microscope. “Don’t you usually send Faye on these kinds of tasks? How is she, by the by? I haven’t heard from her all summer.”

  Adamat cringed. “Not well. What with everything going on with the revolution and all that. It’s played like the pit on her.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Margy suddenly spit on the floor, her face turning sour. “Damn that Tamas and his damned coup!”

  “Margy?” Adamat couldn’t keep the shock from his voice. Margy had always been outspoken, but he wouldn’t have put her as a royalist by any means. She’d risen to be head foreman of the biggest textile mill in all of Adro by her own hand, not by any kind of appointment.

  “He’s gonna take us all to the pit,” Margy said, wagging her finger at Adamat. “Just you wait. I hope you don’t buy into all this nonsense about him trying to make a better world. It’s just a power grab, that’s all.”

  Adamat raised his hands. “I stay out of politics.”

  “We all have to choose sides one day, Adamat.” She tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear and cleared her throat. Adamat could tell she was a little embarrassed by her outburst. “Now what did you need?”

  Adamat removed the fibers from his pocket carefully, hoping he was giving her bits of the Proprietor’s rug and not string from his borrowed jacket. “I need to find this rug,” he said.

  She took the fibers carefully. “This isn’t pocket lint, is it? Faye brought me pocket lint more than once.”

  “I do hope not.”

  Margy put the fibers under her microscope and spent a moment adjusting knobs on the side. “Vanduvian wool,” she said.

  “High grade?”

  “The finest. Whoever owns this rug is very, very rich.”

  “Any chance of tracing the rug?”

  Margy stepped away from her microscope. “I’d say so. Only a few rug dealers sell Vanduvians. I’ll ask around. Stop by in a couple weeks and maybe I’ll have something for you.”

  “That long?” Adamat said.

  “You need it sooner?”

  “If at all possible. It’s a rather urgent matter.”

  Margy sighed. “It’ll cost you.”

  “I don’t have much money on me.”

  “I don’t want money,” Margy said. “You tell Faye that she’s taking me out for dinner at the Café Palms sometime before the leaves turn, and we’ll call it square.”

  Adamat swallowed and forced a smile on his face. “I’ll do that.”

  Margy turned back to her microscope. “Come by in a week and I’ll know where the rug is from.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  As Taniel drew closer to the front, he realized that the Privileged sorcery he saw from afar was in fact coming from the Wings of Adom mercenaries.

  The Wings of Adom held the western edge of the front, sandwiched between the rising mountains and the Adran army. They had four brigades on the front, their uniforms brilliant in red, gold, and white.

  The Privileged sorcery from both sides was weak at best. Fire splashed against shields of hardened air, and lightning sprang from the sky to strike among the ranks, but the blasts of power seemed halfhearted. Even a mercenary army as prestigious as the Wings couldn’t pay as well as a royal cabal, and it seemed the Kez were making use of the weakest and the youngest sorcerers. After the carnage at Kresim Kurga, who did they have left?

  Taniel swung his kit over one shoulder and frowned at the west side of the Addown. The hillock on which he stood would make a good marksman’s spot—high above and several hundred paces behind the fighting. But from what he could tell, the Kez had been pushing back the Adran army every day.

  The front was about five miles north of Budwiel. The city smoked, flames visible over the poorest quarters of the city. Taniel wondered what the Kez had done with all those people. Many, certainly, had fled north when the city fell, but not all of them could have gotten out. Now they were slaves, or dead.

  The Kez had a reputation for brutality toward the people they conquered.

  Ka-poel sat down on the hillock and opened her satchel in her lap. She removed a stick of wax and began to shape it slowly with her fingers. Taniel wondered who she was making this time.

  “Can you do sorcery without those?” Taniel lowered himself cross-legged beside her. “Without the dolls,
I mean. And some bit of a person?”

  She raised her chin and looked down her nose at him for a moment before returning to her work.

  “And where the pit do you get the wax? I never see you buy anything. Do you even have any money?”

  Ka-poel reached inside her shirt and withdrew a roll of banknotes. She shook it under Taniel’s nose before putting it back.

  “Where did you get that?”

  She flicked him on the nose. Hard.

  “Ow. Hey. Answer me, girl.”

  She raised her fingers, ready to flick again.

  “OK, OK. Kresimir, I’m just asking a question.” Taniel pulled his rifle into his lap and ran his fingers along the stock. No notches. A clean barrel. Brand-new, this was. Test-fired, according to the soldier who’d given it to him. Never take a rifle you didn’t fire yourself into battle. It was Tamas who’d told him that. Tamas, who was most likely dead and buried in a mass grave along with the rest of the Seventh and Ninth.

  Where did that leave the Adran army? Where did that leave Taniel? He wondered briefly if Tamas had left behind a will of some kind. Taniel had never thought about that before. Since he was a boy he’d always thought Tamas would live forever.

  The fighting below consisted of nothing but an exchange of artillery. Some of the shells hit the soft ground, skipping through the Adran ranks, while others smacked into unseen sorcery and split apart, falling harmlessly to the ground.

  The exchange seemed almost like a formality. Neither side was losing more than a few men, and none of the artillery pieces were being hit.

  “Do you have any redstripes?” Taniel asked.

  Ka-poel shook her head.

  “Can you make me more?”

  She scowled at him and pointed at the wax in her hand as if to say, Can’t you see I’m working on something?

  “I need my powder now,” Taniel said.

  Ka-poel stopped shaping the wax and looked at him for several moments, her green eyes unreadable. She nodded suddenly and pulled his powder horn from her pack.

  Taniel’s hands were shaking when he poured the first bit of powder into the paper to make a powder charge. The black grit between his fingers felt good. Almost too good. It felt like… power. He licked his lips and poured a line out on the back of his hand, lifting it to his face.

  He stopped. Ka-poel was watching him.

  One long snort, and it felt like his brain was on fire. Taniel rocked back, his body shuddering, shaking. He heard a whimper—pitiful and low. Did he make that noise? Taniel put his head in his hands and waited for what seemed like several minutes before the shaking finally stopped.

  When he raised his head, the world glowed.

  Taniel blinked. He hadn’t opened his third eye. He wasn’t looking into the Else. But everything seemed to glow regardless. No, he decided. Not glow. It was like the lines stood out sharper than they’d ever been. The world was clear in a way that a regular man could never understand. As if every moment out of a powder trance was spent under water and only now had he surfaced.

  Was it like this when he took the powder to fight that Warden in Adopest? Had he just not noticed?

  How had mala ever felt like a good alternative to this? How could any drug compare?

  Taniel felt the grin on his face and didn’t try to hide it. “Oh, pit. That’s good.” He finished loading a dozen powder charges before stowing them in his kit and hanging his powder horn from his shoulder. He got down on his chest and began to scan the enemy lines.

  There were Privileged on the east side of the Addown. Most of them wore colorful uniforms and were surrounded by bannermen and bodyguards. A lot of Wardens, too. The Kez weren’t scared of powder mages, not with Tamas gone. They’d relearn that fear in the coming days.

  Primary targets.

  There were officers. Practically anyone on a horse, it seemed. Where were all their cavalry? Strange that the Kez hadn’t brought any of their cavalry north of Budwiel. Oh well. The officers would do.

  Secondary targets.

  There were artillerymen.

  Tertiary targets.

  Taniel felt the rumble in the ground before he heard the sound of hoofbeats. A few dozen yards to his left a group of some twenty Adran cavalry had gathered. Adran officers. A couple of generals. Taniel recognized a few of them.

  General Ket was a handsome woman of about fifty—handsome, that is, if he didn’t account for the ragged bit of skin where her right ear had been. Her broad face seemed somehow familiar, as if Taniel had seen her recently, when he knew for a fact it’d been years since their last meeting. She was the general of the Third Brigade.

  Ket wasn’t the only member of the group to have lost a bit of herself in battle. General Hilanska of the Second Brigade was morbidly obese and was missing his left arm at the shoulder.

  None of them noticed Taniel.

  They seemed agitated about something. Pointing and gesturing, all of them watching the battlefield through their looking glasses. Hilanska shouted for the artillery to be moved back.

  Moved back? That was tantamount to conceding ground. Why would they…?

  Taniel saw it now. Movement among the Kez lines. Whole companies coming up just behind their artillery. An assault. The Kez intended to push them back this day.

  Taniel narrowed his eyes. There were huge men among those companies. Giant, twisted forms.

  Taniel didn’t know if these were regular Wardens, or the new kind made from powder mages, like the kind that had attacked him in Adopest.

  Either way, this would go poorly for the Adran army.

  Taniel noted that the Adran artillery was staggered every couple hundred feet. The artillery out front could be pulled back while those beside kept firing. This was planned. Perhaps this was what they’d been doing the last ten days. It made sense, if they knew they were going to lose the front line anyway.

  Taniel didn’t like it.

  He left Ka-poel and headed down the hillock to join the officers, approaching General Hilanska.

  “Sir, what’s going on?”

  The general gave Taniel a dismissive glance, then a second, longer stare. “We’re pulling back, son.”

  “That’s foolish, sir. We have the high ground. We can hold.”

  General Ket brought her horse around behind Taniel, looking him up and down. He wondered if she remembered him. He must look different after four years.

  “Are you questioning your betters, Captain?” General Ket asked.

  “It’s a stupid tactic, ma’am. It assumes loss.”

  “Captain, you’ll earn yourself a demotion without an instant apology.”

  Another general, a blond man with a stiff bearing, added, “I’d imagine this is why he’s still a captain.”

  General Hilanska held up his remaining arm. “Calm down, Ket. You don’t recognize our boy here, do you? Taniel Two-Shot, hero of the Fatrastan War for Independence. I’m glad to see you among the living.”

  “General.” Taniel dipped his head. Tamas had told him a tale or two when he was a boy about what kind of man Hilanska was—loyal, passionate. The best kind of companion to have with you on the line. He was fat and old now, but Taniel imagined him to be the same kind of person.

  “I don’t care who he is,” Ket said. “No one disregards rank in this army and gets away with it.”

  “Tamas—” Hilanska began.

  “Tamas is dead,” Ket said. “It’s not his army anymore. If you’d—”

  The argument was cut off by a messenger.

  “Sirs, the enemy is advancing.”

  Ket spurred her mount down the embankment toward the front, shouting orders.

  Hilanska’s stallion pranced to one side as if in excitement. “Get my artillery out of there!” He looked down at Taniel. “I wouldn’t go down there,” he said. “They’ve got a new kind of Warden. Smaller. Smarter. Faster. Never seen anything like it. ‘Black Wardens,’ we’ve been calling them.”

  “They’ve been turning powder mages in
to Wardens,” Taniel said. “They sent two to kill me in Adopest.”

  “Glad to see they failed. Powder-mage Wardens. How is that even possible?” Hilanska gave him a weighing gaze. “All right, Captain. Go down there and hold that line and I’ll move my artillery back.”

  Taniel returned to Ka-poel at the top of the hillock. She was making progress on her doll.

  “The Kez are attacking,” Taniel said. “I’m going to fight.” Why was he telling her? Was she going to stop him? Go with him?

  She didn’t answer him, so he grabbed his kit and headed down toward the front. Ka-poel would be safer back here out of the melee, he decided. But would he? Ever since Shouldercrown, he had wondered who was protecting who.

  The Kez soldiers were already on their way, marching to the steady sound of the snare drums. Trumpets were sounding in the Adran camp, and more men rushed toward the front.

  Taniel paused and scanned the approaching Kez. None of the Kez Privileged were advancing, but… there.

  The Wardens in their black bowler caps and black jackets came through marching Kez infantry like dogs running out ahead of the pack. They practically flew across the empty field. Some carried small swords, others long pikes. They howled like animals, an eerie sound that lifted above the cannon fire and the snares and trumpets and made Taniel shudder.

  Taniel dropped to one knee and sighted along his rifle. One breath. Two. Fire.

  He willed the bullet on through the sky, burning the smallest bit of powder to keep it in the air. He focused on one of the Black Wardens. The bullet took only two or three seconds to bridge the space and…

  He missed.

  Taniel couldn’t believe it. He was far behind the line, steady as a rock, with no distractions. How could he miss?

  He reloaded his rifle. The Wardens were coming fast. Once they reached the Adran line they’d cause untold chaos. Taniel lined up another shot and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet tore through a Warden’s eye, laying the creature out on the ground. None of the Warden’s companions seemed to notice. One even snagged the small sword out of the still-twitching hand, barely slowing his charge.