“You saw the Proprietor?”
Was that worry in SouSmith’s voice?
“I came as close as one gets. Sat in the same room with him behind a black screen. Spoke to him through some knitting woman, like he’s mute or something.” Adamat frowned. Maybe the Proprietor was mute. Maybe the woman wasn’t just a security measure but an interpreter. “Do we have any food?”
SouSmith jerked his thumb to a platter next to the sofa. Underneath the cover was a sandwich. The meat and cheese were warm, but it seemed like the best thing Adamat had ever tasted as he collected it and sank back into his chair.
Adamat felt a little strength return as he finished the meal. “He wants the same thing I want, it seems,” Adamat said between the final few bites. “Lord Vetas has been causing him trouble. The Proprietor’s boys only pulled me in because we were following the same woman.” Adamat licked his fingers clean. “But now that the Proprietor knows we’re after the same thing, it seems he’s content to just step back and let me go at Vetas. Which is a bloody shame, because I need his help!” Adamat heard his own voice rise as he finished the sentence, and he grabbed the platter the sandwich was on and hurled it across the room. It clattered into one corner.
SouSmith leaned back on the sofa, his game forgotten, watching Adamat.
“I’ve never wanted to kill a man so badly as I do Lord Vetas,” Adamat whispered. “I know where he is. I found his headquarters. I have a chance, and with the Proprietor’s help I could do it, and he just pushed me back on the street.” He took a shaky breath. “I’m going to do something very foolish, SouSmith, and I think you should walk away from me. Consider this the end of your employment.”
SouSmith’s eyebrows rose. “I’ll decide that.”
“I’m going to blackmail the Proprietor.”
SouSmith began collecting his cards in one hand. A moment later he was done and he stood up. “For once,” he said, “I agree with ya.”
Adamat closed his eyes. He didn’t blame SouSmith. Not one bit. But he’d been hoping against hope that SouSmith would once again refuse to leave. That he’d stay by Adamat’s side and see this thing through.
SouSmith fetched his jacket from the rack by the door. “Sorry, friend,” he said, “I’ll die for ya, but the Proprietor won’t stop with me.”
Of course. SouSmith had his brother’s family to worry about.
They shook hands, and Adamat heard SouSmith’s heavy step down the stairs and out the front door.
Adamat fell back into his chair with his head in his hands.
SouSmith was big and powerful and he was worth five men in a fight, but he was also a friend. Adamat couldn’t afford to have friends. Not with what he was about to do.
Adamat dragged himself to his feet just long enough to go find his bed. He didn’t bother removing his clothes before he dropped into it.
CHAPTER
14
Taniel rubbed at his eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to sleep.
Five times in three days he’d fought in a bloody melee on the front lines. Five times he’d been the last one to leave the earthen defenses when the Kez proved too strong. Five times he’d been forced to make the long trek across the corpse-strewn fields dragging the wounded and dying, furious that they’d once again let the front fall beneath a Kez onslaught.
How many times could they retreat before the army was nothing but dead and wounded?
Taniel paused to look to the south. Budwiel was getting farther away every day. The front—or what had been the front until half an hour ago—was about a quarter mile away and obscured in powder smoke. The Kez soldiers were already leveling the earthworks and carting away their dead.
This last offensive had been a bad one. The infantry from the Seventeenth Brigade was mostly green and they’d broken and run before the retreat was even sounded. Taniel wondered if there was a single man unharmed after that mess. The groaning of the wounded in the surgeons’ tents made his skin crawl.
He found Ka-poel sitting by the fire next to their tent. She stared at the coals, absently cleaning beneath her fingernails with the tip of one of her long needles. A pot of water boiled over the flames. She looked Taniel over once, then stared back at the fire.
Taniel dropped to the ground next to her. His whole body hurt. He was covered in countless cuts and bruises. A particularly nasty Warden had almost done him in, and he had a clean slice across the side of his stomach to show for it.
Ka-poel stood silently and moved around behind him, where she began to pull him out of the jacket. He didn’t like when she undressed him—well, he liked it, but he’d heard officers muttering about the impropriety of their relationship already—but tonight he was far too tired to argue. She unbuttoned his shirt and cleaned his neck and torso with a hot, wet washcloth.
He lay on his side while she stitched the wound on his stomach, wincing every time the needle went in.
“Pole,” he said while he lay there, “do you remember something being mentioned about Tamas putting together a school for powder mages in Adopest?”
She drummed two fingers on his arm. Yes.
“I think Sabon was in charge of it. I wonder if he’s still up there. Pit, I could use his help.” Taniel paused to think. Sabon’s face floated in front of him, perfect teeth standing out against his black skin. Sabon was the only one Tamas ever listened to. He’d taught Taniel to shoot. A good soldier; a good man. “Damn it, I should have asked Ricard. Even if Sabon is with Tamas, there had to be a couple other powder mages left in Adopest. We need them on the front.”
Ka-poel finished the stitching and Taniel climbed to his feet. His shirt was nearly black, stiff with dried blood. He smelled like a slaughterhouse. He left it on the ground. Ka-poel would find someone to wash it for him. He fetched his one spare shirt from the tent and buttoned it up.
His tent was on the side of one of the mountain ridges that frames Surkov’s Alley. It meant he had to sleep at an incline, but he also had a vantage over most of the valley, and right now he watched the Wings of Adom camp. The Wings’ camp sat closer to the front than the Adran, and they held the east side of the valley with their flank against the river.
Reports were that the Wings were holding their front every day, but were forced to withdraw when the Adrans retreated so that the Kez couldn’t flank them.
Tamas would have been furious had he been here to see it, that the mercenaries were putting forth a better defensive than the Adran army.
A pair of Wings brigadiers were making their way from their own camp toward the big, white-and-blue command tent at the rear of the Adran army. A few other officers seemed to be heading in the same direction. A meeting, it seemed. If Tamas were here, Taniel would be at that meeting.
A great many things were different with Tamas gone.
Not far from the command tent was the mess tent. In most armies the cooking was done by soldiers for their company, or sometimes even their squad. Here at the front, all the cooking was being done by one chef, or so the rumor went.
Mihali.
It wasn’t hard to pick out the tall, fat figure making his way between the cookfires, checking on his small regiment of female assistants. Taniel frowned. Who was this man who claimed he was a god? Taniel had seen a god’s face—Kresimir’s—and put a bullet through his eye. Kresimir had looked like a god. Mihali did not.
Taniel took his jacket and headed down the mountainside toward the command tent.
Soldiers seemed to watch him everywhere he went. Some tipped their hats. Some saluted. Some just stared as he walked by, but Taniel didn’t welcome the attention. Was he some kind of curiosity for them to gawk at? For years he’d always felt at home in the army, but now, with Tamas and the powder mages gone, Taniel felt alone, a foreigner.
He wondered what he looked like to them. He smelled like the alley behind a butcher, and he probably looked like one too. His body was covered in nicks and cuts, his black hair singed from a powder blast yesterday, his face dirt
y and bruised.
And he wondered what he was. He’d managed to escape serious injury in five hard, bloody fights. He’d been grazed by bullets seven times in the last two days. He’d been inches from being run through on half a dozen occasions. Was he just that fast? Or something else?
That kind of luck didn’t happen. It was uncanny. Had it been like this in Fatrasta? No, he’d never been in an ongoing fight this bloody. He remembered ripping a rib from the Warden in Adopest and wondered if this luck was somehow connected to his newfound strength.
He reached the command tent, ignoring the guard who asked him to stop.
The tent was filled. There were perhaps twenty officers inside—what seemed like all the Wings brigadiers and Adran generals and colonels. Voices were raised, fists being shaken. Taniel slipped along the edge of the tent, trying to make some kind of sense of the argument.
He caught sight of a familiar face and moved up through the crowd.
Colonel Etan was ten years older than Taniel. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and brown hair cut short over a flat, ugly face. Not that anyone would tell him that he was ugly. The grenadiers of the Twelfth Brigade were the biggest, strongest men in the Adran army and one word against their colonel would find you at odds with all two thousand of them.
“What’s going on?” Taniel whispered.
Colonel Etan gave him a quick glance. “Something about…” He paused to look again. “Taniel? Pit, Taniel, I heard you’d joined us at the front, but I didn’t believe it. Where have you been?”
“Later,” Taniel said. “What’s the argument about?”
Etan’s welcoming grin faded. “A messenger from the Kez. Demands that we surrender.”
“So?” Taniel snorted. “There’s nothing to argue about. No surrender.”
“I agree, but some of the higher-ups don’t. Something has them scared.”
“Of course they’re scared. They’ve been retreating from every fight! If they’d hold the line just once, we could break these Kez bastards.”
“It’s not that,” Etan said. “The Kez are claiming they have Kresimir on their side. Not just in spirit, either, but that he’s there in their camp!”
Taniel felt his whole body go cold. “Oh, pit.”
“Are you all right? You don’t look well.”
“Kresimir can’t be there. I killed him myself.”
Etan’s attention was now fully on Taniel. “You… killed him? I heard some wild rumors of a fight on South Pike before it collapsed, but you…”
“Yes,” Taniel said. “I put a bullet in his eye and his heart. Watched him go down in a spray of godly blood.”
“General Ket!” Etan shouted. “General Ket!” He grabbed Taniel’s arm and shoved his way through the assembled officers. They all scrambled to get clear of him—no one stood their ground before a grenadier of his size.
“No, Etan…”
Etan pulled him out into the opening in the middle of the room, where the unfriendly faces of two dozen officers waited in tense expectation. “Tell them what you told me,” Etan said to Taniel.
Taniel was once again terribly conscious of his frayed, bloody clothes and dirty face. The room seemed to spin slightly, the air hot and close.
He cleared his throat. “Kresimir is dead,” Taniel said. “I killed him myself.”
The clamor of voices made his head hurt worse than the sound of a musket volley. He looked around, trying to find an ally. He saw General Ket in the group, but she was no friend of his. Where was General Hilanska?
“Let him speak!” a woman shouted. Brigadier Abrax, of the Wings mercenaries. She was ten years younger than Taniel’s father with a face twice as severe and short hair cropped above her ears. Her uniform was white, with red-and-gold trim.
General Ket took the sudden silence to sneer at Taniel. “You can’t kill a god.”
“I did,” Taniel said. “I watched him die. I fired two ensorcelled bullets. I saw them hit. Saw him crumple. I was on that mountain when it began to collapse.”
“Oh?” Ket demanded. “Then how’d you get down?”
Taniel opened his mouth, only to shut it again. How did he get down? The last thing he remembered was cradling Ka-poel’s unconscious body as the building they were in began to buckle and fall.
“That’s what I thought,” Ket said. “The powder has gone to your head.”
“He’s a hero, sir!” Colonel Etan said.
“Even heroes can go mad! Provosts! Get him out of here! This meeting is no place for a captain.”
Taniel was shoved to the side by someone, and he heard another voice say, “Kresimir isn’t here! What kind of poppycock is that?”
“I’ve seen him.”
Everything went still. Taniel recognized that voice. General Hilanska.
Hilanska was still seated while everyone else stood. He wore his dress uniform, decked out in dozens of medals, the collar freshly starched, his empty left sleeve pinned to his chest. The general looked tired, his immense weight sagging over the edge of the chair, his face pulled down from weariness.
Hilanska went on, his voice deep and level. “You’ve all seen him! At the parley this morning. He was there, you bloody fools, and you ignored him. The man at the back, who didn’t speak. He wore a gold mask with only one eyehole. If any of you had bothered to listen, the Wings Privileged said he reeked of sorcery, more powerful than any they’d ever witnessed.”
“That was only a Privileged,” Ket said. “Not a god.”
Hilanska struggled to his feet. “Call me mad, Ket. I dare you. Tamas believed Kresimir had returned. He believed Two-Shot here had shot him. But the bullets weren’t fatal. Kresimir is, after all, a god.”
Ket regarded Hilanska warily. “And yet Tamas still led the Seventh and Ninth behind the Kez lines to their deaths.”
“He’s not dead,” Taniel said, feeling his blood rise.
Ket turned on him. “Says our dead field marshal’s whelp.”
“Whelp?” Taniel’s vision went blurry. “I’ve killed hundreds of men. I’ve nearly held that damned line out there by myself the last two days. I feel like I’m the only one who wants to win this war, and you call me a whelp?”
Ket spat at his feet. “You’ll take all the credit yourself? What an ego! Just because you sprang from Tamas’s loins doesn’t mean you have his skill, boy.”
Taniel could barely think. He’d been on the front line every day fighting for this? Rage took control of him. “I’ll kill you, you stupid bitch!”
Taniel felt his muscles tense to leap at General Ket, when something struck him in the side of the head. He staggered and tried to run at Ket. Hands grabbed him, arms pulled him away. He was hit again in the head. Thrashing and yelling, he was forced out of the command tent.
“Taniel,” he heard Colonel Etan say in his ear, “calm down, Taniel, please!”
It took the sight of a half-dozen sharpened pikes leveled at his face to bring Taniel back from the brink of rage. The provosts—Adran military police—behind those pikes wore expressions that said they’d poke him full of holes in an instant.
“That’s enough of that,” Etan said, pushing away a pike. He was able to get the provosts to back off a few steps.
Now that the rage had passed, Taniel felt cold, weak. His whole body began to shake. Had he really just called Ket a bitch in front of the entire General Staff? What had come over him?
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Etan demanded. “I’ve heard rumors that there was a powder mage out on the front each of the last few days, throwing himself into the teeth of the enemy like he wanted to die. I’d never imagined it was you. You’ll be lucky to get off with a flogging for this. Attacking General Ket! I can’t believe it.”
Taniel pulled his knees to his chest and tried to get his body to stop shaking. “Are you done?” Why was he shaking so much? It scared him worse than looking down the wrong end of a Warden’s sword. Was it the mala withdrawal? His powder?
“
Taniel…” Etan stared at him, and Taniel could tell there was genuine concern in his eyes. “Taniel, you dragged me five feet before I managed to clock you in the side of the head. I’ve dropped men twice your size with that punch, and I had to do it three times to even faze you. Pit, I’m twice your size! I know that powder mages are strong, but…”
“I’ll take full responsibility,” Taniel said. “Hopefully you’ll not be reprimanded.”
“I’m not worried about me.”
“Captain?”
They both looked up. General Hilanska stood over them. The provosts were gone.
“Colonel, I’d like a word with the captain in private, please.”
Etan left them, and Taniel slowly climbed to his feet, unsure as to whether he’d be able to stand but certain that General Hilanska might be his only ally left in this camp. “Sir?” He swayed to the side and stumbled. Hilanska caught him with his one good arm.
“Ket wants your head,” Hilanska said.
“I’d imagine.”
“You know,” the old general said, “with Tamas gone, powder mages don’t have any pull anymore. Some of the ranking officers seem to want to pretend you never existed.”
Taniel leaned his head back and looked up at the darkening sky. Some stars were beginning to show, and the moon glowed bright on the eastern horizon. “Do you believe he’s dead?”
Hilanska began to walk, forcing Taniel to follow him on wobbly legs. Taniel’s hands were shaking a little less, now.
“I don’t want to believe it,” Hilanska said. “None of us do, despite how the others are acting. We all loved your father. He was a brilliant strategist. But all contact was lost. We haven’t heard from any of our spies in the Kez army for three weeks now. We have to face the facts. Tamas is likely dead.”
If Tamas was dead, so were Vlora and Sabon and the rest of the powder cabal and the Seventh and Ninth. Taniel felt his chest tighten. No tears. There wouldn’t be any of those. Not for Tamas. But for him to be gone forever… “And Kresimir?”
The Powder Mage Trilogy: Promise of Blood, The Crimson Campaign, The Autumn Republic Page 68