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

by McClellan, Brian

  Sulem climbed slowly to his feet and set his report on his desk. He removed his reading glasses, then gave Doranth a long look. The Deliv cabal head lifted his chin, and some silent communication passed between them. “Out,” Sulem finally said.

  “My Liege…”

  “Out,” Sulem said again.

  Doranth left, his wide shoulder hitting Tamas on his way past.

  “You, too,” Sulem said to Vivia. The Privileged woman bowed to her king and retreated after the cabal head.

  Tamas searched Sulem’s face. Something was going on here, something under the surface. It wouldn’t bode well for either him or his men.

  “My generals are terrified,” Sulem finally said. “This phantom of a dragoon has them jumping at shadows. They’ve never lost so many cavalry in so little time. He’s quick, he has perfect timing, and his ability to nullify the sorcery of my Privileged has everyone in the army on edge. ‘The Kez Wolf.’”

  Tamas wasn’t sure whether to be more impressed by this Kez magebreaker or by the fact that the Deliv had managed to keep all of this a secret from him the past two days. After all, they were supposed to be working with Tamas. His own limitations had forced him to trust the Deliv entirely.

  “In just two days, this magebreaker has shattered the confidence of my cavalry.”

  “Losing over half their number will do that,” Olem commented quietly.

  The king examined Olem for a moment, as if wondering why a commoner would address him in such a manner, then snorted laughter. “My Privileged will not send out any more riders. They absolutely refuse. You may have seen that battle on the horizon?”

  “Yes,” Tamas said.

  “That was five of my Privileged letting loose on a raid by the Kez Wolf, just to drive him away from our baggage.”

  “Pit.”

  “Exactly what I thought.” The king drummed his fingers on his desk. “Those five Privileged barely killed three-score Kez dragoons. The rest of the company escaped. My generals won’t pursue. They fear a trap.”

  Tamas watched Sulem for several moments. Normally so serene, the Deliv king seemed uncharacteristically agitated. “We can’t stop to track him down,” he said. “We have to march for Budwiel. We can’t delay.”

  “And let this brigand dog our heels?”

  Tamas almost told him about Ka-poel and Kresimir. Sulem needed to know why Tamas was so desperate to march on Budwiel. But it wasn’t a tale he cared to explain, nor one that lent itself to believability. “I’ll deal with the Kez dragoons.”

  “I…” Sulem spread his hands.

  “I will deal with it.” Tamas understood that Sulem was not about to call his own men cowards. Sulem’s generals had rarely, if ever, experienced a battle in which they couldn’t rely on the power of their Privileged. Tamas had been training his men, and himself, to do so for decades—even when there was an Adran Cabal.

  Tamas left the king’s tent. It was well past noon, his army was poised to march for the rest of the day, and he knew he had to do something about this immediately. “Olem, I…” He paused. Doranth stood nearby, his big arms crossed, face livid.

  Tamas found himself less and less inclined to exercise restraint. He crossed to the Deliv magus. “All the power at your fingertips and you’ll let a single magebreaker shut you down?”

  Doranth opened his mouth.

  “No,” Tamas said. “No excuses. This is war, not some stupid bloody political game. If you can’t win it with the tools you have, you make new tools. Something you damned Privileged will never understand.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “And you’re a coward.”

  Doranth unfolded his arms to reveal he had put on his gloves. He threw his arms wide, like a bear ready to swipe, a snarl on his lips.

  Tamas stepped inside Doranth’s guard, even as Olem drew his pistol. He stared up at the towering magus. “No,” he said. “Not a good idea. I may be an old man, but I’m running a mighty powder trance right now and I’ll twist your balls off before you can twitch a finger. You might be able to kill me before I can end you, but you’ll die squealing a moment later. Remember what I did to the Adran Cabal.”

  Doranth’s arms shook with fury. Moments passed, and Tamas could feel the sweat rolling down his back and wondered idly if he really could take the magus with him. He was getting old. His reflexes weren’t what they once were.

  Doranth lowered his arms and tugged his gloves off. “I will kill you, Powder Mage.”

  “I’ll probably be long dead before you get the chance.” Tamas stepped away. “Let’s go, Olem.”

  It wasn’t until they were out of the Deliv camp that Tamas allowed himself a relieved sigh. “Pit,” Tamas said, wiping his brow, “I should not threaten allied Privileged.”

  “I thought it was an interesting tactical choice,” Olem said.

  “And I thought you were around to keep me from doing stupid things.”

  “You looked in control from where I was standing.”

  “Then why did you draw your pistol?”

  Olem shrugged. “Just in case.”

  “You’re a man to inspire confidence.”

  “I try.”

  Tamas could sense a plan forming in his head. “Find me Beon je Ipille. And that Privileged girl. Meet me in my tent in twenty minutes.”

  “His name,” Beon said, “is Saseram.”

  Tamas watched Beon through narrowed eyes. He’d undone his jacket, as his tent felt warm and muggy despite the cool breeze outside. There was an ache deep in his bones, and he wondered how many years it had been since he last had a drink. “That’s a Gurlish name.”

  “That’s because he is Gurlish,” Beon responded.

  “A Gurlish cavalryman, fighting for the Kez? That seems a stretch.” Tamas glanced at Olem, who had raised a skeptical eyebrow. Nila stood beside him, looking uncertain of herself. She’d changed out of her scorched dress and now wore a white daydress with a violet scarf.

  “He changed sides during the third campaign—it was his defection that allowed us to take Delfiss. This was all when I was very young, of course. All I know is what I’ve heard from father.”

  “I’ve always wondered about Delfiss. So he’s a magebreaker?”

  Beon smoothed the front of his uniform. “Well, I didn’t want to give up any state secrets, but if you already know—yes. That was a condition of his defection. He was once a very powerful Gurlish Privileged. My father wasn’t interested in allowing a foreign Privileged the run of his army. The way he tells it, Saseram agreed almost too quickly. He willed away his Privileged powers and became a magebreaker.”

  “Magebreakers are former Privileged who are able to nullify sorcery,” Tamas said to Nila, who was looking more than a little lost. “Most of them had little power to start with, and that’s reflected in how close a proximity they must be to stop magic. I hired one once. He was fairly weak and had to be within spitting distance to stop sorcery. A powerful Privileged turned magebreaker can stop quite a bit more.”

  Beon glanced toward her. “May I ask who this is?”

  “So he’s a Gurlish Wolf rather than a Kez. Why have I not heard of this man?” Tamas asked, ignoring the question.

  Beon’s eyes lingered on Nila for a moment. “Because he changed his name when he entered Kez service.”

  “And who was he before that?” The Gurlish Wars had been a bloody series of campaigns half a world away involving most countries in the Nine. Tamas could think of half a dozen powerful Gurlish Privileged who had died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

  Beon smiled in response, and glanced at Nila, but Tamas shook his head. He wasn’t about to reveal Nila’s identity over this. Not just to sate his own curiosity. “Anyway,” Beon continued, “he’s been rotting in some border town for the last fifteen years. He’s a bloody good cavalryman, maybe even better than me—and an expert in guerrilla warfare. I imagine that you’ll have a very hard time catching him indeed.”

  Tamas did
n’t have time for this. A few hours ago, he had been ready to order his men to march through the night so he could catch the Kez forces at Auberdel. Now he discovered that his allies—fifty thousand strong, including a third of a royal cabal—had been cowed by a single regiment of Kez cavalry.

  “Thank you, Beon.”

  The Kez nobleman seemed to know he was being dismissed. He stood, brushing his hands together, eyeing Nila. She met his gaze, and Tamas chuckled inwardly. He had known that there would be a day when the Adran Cabal would need to be rebuilt. He had secretly hoped it would be long after his death. But he could do a lot worse than having Borbador and Nila as its foundation.

  With Beon gone, Tamas climbed to his feet and rebuttoned his jacket. “Olem, have you created a cavalry regiment for your Riflejacks yet?”

  “Yes sir. Six hundred dragoons and three hundred cuirassiers.”

  “Excellent. Take another five hundred cuirassiers—the Fifteenth won’t miss them—and hunt this Gurlish magebreaker down.”

  Olem straightened. “Sir!”

  “You wanted a command, Olem. You’ve got it now. Don’t let me down.”

  “I won’t, sir!” Olem grinned proudly, his shoulders squared.

  “And Privileged Nila.”

  Nila swallowed hard, but she met Tamas’s eye. He held his hands behind his back so that she couldn’t see his nervousness, and wondered if he was making the right decision.

  “You’re going with Olem. Burn those bastards to the ground.”

  He had the brief satisfaction of her eyes growing wide before he strode out into the sunlight to let his men know they would be leaving at first light.

  CHAPTER

  32

  A few hours into her ride, as her legs began to cramp and her ass began to hurt worse than anything she’d ever felt, Nila wondered if Tamas would have allowed her to say no.

  Perhaps he might have, if it had occurred to her to refuse. She had her doubts. It seemed likely that few people told Tamas no. This was the same man who had slaughtered the Adran royal cabal in their sleep and then guillotined his own king. One didn’t say no to a man like that. Instead of refusing what sounded like a horribly dangerous mission, she had asked him to give a hastily written note to Privileged Borbador. Tamas had seemed slightly put off by the request, but Nila didn’t know who else in the camp she could have asked, and in the end, Tamas agreed.

  She had an ever-growing notion that this expedition was a terrible idea and that it would end with her corpse lying in some farmer’s field. The darkness on the horizon that sorcery could not penetrate, the darkness that had tied her stomach in knots, had been a magebreaker, and she was now riding toward him.

  “What the pit good am I going to do?” she asked, trying not to let the pain come through in her tone. Back straight. Act like the Privileged you want to be.

  Olem stood in his stirrups, looking annoyingly at ease in the saddle, his eyes scanning the horizon. “The idea,” he said, “is that we go straight for the throat. We identify and kill the magebreaker and then you unleash your sorcery on his cavalry.”

  Behind them, a trail of dust rose over thirteen hundred Adran cavalry. They were a stunning sight, she had to admit. The uniforms of the dragoons were dirty and rumpled from the road, but their swords were held straight and their carbines laid across their saddle horns, while the breastplates of the cuirassiers shone in the setting sunlight. She now wore a uniform that matched the dragoons—Adran blues with silver trim and red cuffs, and pants, which were so much better for riding than a dress.

  “Didn’t the Deliv already think of that?”

  “Likely,” Olem said.

  “And they failed.”

  “We’ll just have to succeed where they failed.”

  “Are you going to get me killed?”

  Olem stroked his beard and lowered himself back into his saddle. She wondered briefly how her life would be different if she had let him court her and had given up on her obsession to protect Jakob Eldaminse. Would she still be just Nila the laundress, another soldier’s lover, toiling with the rest of the camp followers? Or would she have been captured along with so many others when Budwiel fell, and now be either dead or enslaved?

  “I’ll try not to,” Olem said. He began to roll a cigarette. “If—when—we catch these bastards, I want you to stay near the middle of the column, where it’s safest.” He paused to lick his rolling paper. “To be honest, nowhere is safest in a cavalry skirmish, but that’ll have to do. The magebreaker will have heard about the Battle of Ned’s Creek, but if we’re lucky, he won’t suspect that we have a Privileged with us.”

  And he won’t see my glow in the Else because of my limited experience, Nila finished silently. “What if I can’t do sorcery?”

  “Keep your head down.”

  “Easy for you to say. You have a sword.”

  “And a pistol and carbine,” Olem said.

  “You’re very reassuring.”

  “That’s what Tamas says, strangely enough.”

  “Tamas? Are you on a first-name basis with the field marshal?”

  Olem grunted. “That was inappropriate of me. Sorry. Nerves are a bit frayed. I’ve ridden with cavalry before, even been in a few skirmishes, but this is my first command.”

  “Oh, now that is reassuring.”

  Olem flinched, and Nila wished she could take it back. “You’ll do fine.”

  “Thanks, mother,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m leaving the heavy lifting to my officers. If I do one thing well, it’s pick good men. If I don’t do fine, at least they will.”

  “You should give yourself more credit.”

  “Should I?” Olem put the rolled cigarette to his lips, then checked the carbine holstered to his saddle.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Nila jerked back. What was that supposed to mean? “Now wait a moment.”

  He held up a hand. “Ancient history,” he said. “Forget I said a word.”

  She scowled at him while he called over one of his officers and gave the order to stake camp. When the man had ridden away, Olem ashed his cigarette.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Nila said.

  “Oh?”

  “I had my reasons,” she continued. Jakob had needed her protection. She hadn’t trusted Tamas at that time, and then she had been carried away by Lord Vetas and caught up in Bo’s battles. She wanted to tell him all of that, but she hardly knew where to begin. “I really did like you.”

  “Well, that’s a nice consolation prize.”

  “Don’t be such a dense ass.” Nila’s voice rose. “I wanted to be with you, but I said no because I knew I had to protect Jakob.” Her jaw snapped shut, and she blinked at him for several moments, not able to believe she had just said that.

  “Oh,” Olem said, both eyebrows now raised, his head cocked back in surprise.

  Nila brushed some dirt from her uniform. “It’s just… I’m sorry. Part of me wishes I had said yes, but as you said—ancient history.”

  Olem remained silent for several minutes, watching his men dismount and set up a picket line for the horses, readying the area for a campsite. When the silence was approaching the point of madness for Nila, he finally crushed his cigarette on his saddle horn and flicked the butt into the long grass. “I’ll have one of the boys find you some good stones that we can warm in the fire. It’ll help the ass-ache.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hot stones, wrapped in the leather. You put them between your legs and all the fiddly bits downstairs won’t hurt as much in the morning.”

  Nila decided she’d liked Olem more when he was being bashful back in Adopest. This seemed entirely too… forward. “Thank you.”

  Olem merely nodded a reply. His eyes were on something on the horizon.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Olem removed the looking glass from his saddlebag and held it to his eye. Nila squinted to the west and thought, beneath the glare of t
he half-set sun, that she could see a rider. She heard a sharp intake of breath, and Olem lowered his looking glass.

  “Pack it up, boys!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Kez to the west!”

  The speed of it all made Nila’s head swim. Within five minutes the whole regiment was back in the saddle, the thunder of their hooves ringing in Nila’s ears and the adrenaline of the chase drowning out the pain from a day’s worth of riding.

  Olem ordered out dozens of scouts and formed his men with the bulk of the cuirassiers in the middle and the dragoons on the wings as they crested the hill in the waning light of dusk.

  Nila could see the distant speck of the Kez rider galloping across the plains.

  “Is there anything you can do?” Olem asked.

  “What? I mean, no, what could I do? He’s too far for Privileged sorcery, even if I was confident I could hit him at all.”

  He gave a stiff nod and ordered his men to advance, all while eyeing the scouts fanning out across the plains ahead of them. She could see the indecision in his eyes—was this an opportunity or a trap?

  They proceeded on the trail of the Kez rider. Nila watched as the dragoons on their right flank swept up and over a hill to the north, out of sight, and their left flank proceeded along a matching arc a quarter of a mile out past a distant wheat field. She felt cold, apprehensive of the disappearance of those five hundred cavalry. What if it was a trap? Would they return in time?

  The sun had nearly set by the time the cuirassiers crested a short hillock to look down suddenly into a steep valley cut into the hills. Less than a mile distant, Nila could see the flickering of campfires and groups of picketed horses.

  “We’ve found the enemy camp!” a breathless scout told Olem.

  “I can see that.” Olem gazed through his looking glass, a look of consternation on his face.

  “Could it be a trap?” Nila asked.

  “They’re scrambling like a kicked anthill down there,” Olem said. “It could be a trap… but we may have gotten lucky. Form up!” he bellowed. “Three lines, flanking formation!”