Empire of Rust

by Chambers, V. J.

  “Let me go after him.” The words ripped out of her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Give me a horse and let me go after him.” The gypsies had left only a short time ago. She could ride after them, catch up, follow them to their camp. Then she’d be able to speak to Nathaniel alone, and she knew that things would be different.

  “After him? But he’s not interested in you. He treated you like garbage.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.” He regarded her. “Get away from me. I don’t care what you do, or where you go. I don’t want to look at you anymore.”

  She waited for him to come at her, for the slap of his hands on her flesh. But it never came, so she picked up her skirts and ran out of the pavilion as fast as she could.

  * * *

  Nathaniel’s head was pounding. He was lying in the carriage, his hands tied behind his back. Zachariah was angry. Really angry. They’d ridden hard all through the afternoon and night to get back to their camp, and the jostling of the carriage had given Nathaniel a headache. Now they were back, and it was the wee hours, just before dawn.

  Zachariah yanked open the door to the carriage and hauled him out.

  Nathaniel had been waiting for the chance to explain himself during the whole ride. “Listen to me, Zachariah—”

  Zachariah slammed him up against the carriage.

  Nathaniel lost his breath, and he couldn’t speak.

  “You listen to me,” said Zachariah. “If anyone else had been there, they’d have you killed.”

  Nathaniel gasped, shaking his head. “That’s not true.”

  “You remember what we did to Thaddeus, don’t you?”

  “We didn’t kill him!”

  “We left him behind in the wilderness. He was as good as dead, and we all knew it. And what he did pales in comparison to what you’ve done.”

  “I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said what I said to the girl. But I was caught off guard. I never expected to see her, and she was saying that she was pregnant—”

  “As if you ever cared about that before. You’ve probably left bastards all up and down the empire. One in every village we travel to.”

  Nathaniel swallowed. He actually had never thought of that. Really, he’d hardly thought of what happened to the women in the villages once he was gone. He felt a sharp stab of guilt about it, suddenly. He felt like an idiot. Of course, he should have realized… And he was a bastard himself, how many poor wretches had he created? How many of them had even survived? How many of those women had died outside the walls of their villages and towns?

  “What’s wrong with you, Nathaniel? You’ve gone pale. Afraid I’m going to have you killed?”

  “It’s like none of us think about anything. We just do things, damn the consequences. Well, I’m not sure this revolution is such a good idea. Who do we think we are, Zachariah? We came up with this idea when we were little better than boys—just youths spinning yarns. And now we’re going about it the same way, like children playing a game. But this isn’t a game, Zachariah, and the things we do have consequences. We can get people hurt and killed and—”

  “You’ve gotten us killed.”

  “I haven’t—”

  “What do you think the emperor will do now that he knows about us? You think he’ll go back to his mansion and go about business as usual? No, Nathaniel, he won’t. He’ll come after us with an army. Maybe he’ll get his pet necromancer to come after us with revenants. We’re doomed, and it’s your fault.”

  “He won’t,” said Nathaniel. “Not if we take it back. We can go to the capital, and we can help him after all. We can help him make a better world. Because all we’re doing is bumbling around and hurting people.”

  “I should kill you,” said Zachariah. “You don’t understand anything at all, and you deserve it.”

  Nathaniel’s eyes widened. No. Not at the hands of his oldest, closest friends. It couldn’t be.

  “But I won’t. Because you and I have history,” said Zachariah. “Still, I can’t let you go. You’ll run back to the emperor, try to surrender, and you know all our secrets. He’d use you to find us.”

  “Zachariah—”

  “You’ll stay here as our prisoner. You and the faggot tied to the tree.”

  “Wait, just give me a chance to explain.”

  “I’ve given you so many chances, Nathaniel, but you haven’t been the same lately. I don’t know what happened to you. I really don’t.”

  Nathaniel slumped against the carriage. Everything was going wrong now.

  He thought of the way Leah had looked at him, her eyes full of pain and hurt. Now he realized that the lies he’d told her weren’t harmless sweet nothings, the way he’d always thought of them. She’d taken them as real promises. He’d betrayed her.

  He’d betrayed his friends as well.

  And he’d betrayed Gabriel.

  He didn’t know where he belonged anymore.

  He didn’t offer much resistance when Zachariah forced him over to the place where Ezekiel was tied to the tree. He felt far too beaten already to have the will to fight. He wondered if perhaps it wasn’t better this way. He had destroyed everything, hurt so many people. Maybe punishment was the best he could hope for.

  He allowed Zachariah to lash him to the tree trunk on the opposite side of Ezekiel.

  Then Zachariah disappeared.

  Ezekiel chuckled behind him. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  Nathaniel didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say.

  As the dawn split the sky with bright reds and purples, Zachariah returned with the other men. They brought with them some barbed wire. It had obviously been part of a fence at some point, something that was strung up to keep out the revenants along the road. Now it was rusty and tangled. The air had turned cold in the night, and some of the barbs were coated in a layer of frost.

  The men stretched out the barbed wire fence in a circle around the tree, blocking both Ezekiel and Nathaniel within.

  A makeshift cell, then.

  Nathaniel rested his head against the tree trunk and looked up at the lightening sky. What had he done?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Gabriel sat in the middle of the pavilion with his head in his hands for a very long time. Finally, the carriage driver came in.

  “Sir?” he said. “Is there something I should be doing?”

  Gabriel looked up at him. He wanted to laugh. He was the newly crowned emperor, and his empire was already crumbling around him. He’d made a royal mess of things, hadn’t he? He’d somehow married a woman who was intent on bringing him down, destroying his whole world. And now he’d let her go.

  Off to find the rebels.

  Rebels. He couldn’t believe it. There hadn’t been anything like a rebellion in the empire in over a hundred years. That one had been crushed almost immediately, and it hadn’t been anything like what these men were trying to accomplish. The Kentuck Rebellion had been led by an upstart fourth son of the regent of Kentuck. He’d been angry because he had nothing to inherit, and had decided to raise an army and take over his own father’s regency. The full force of the empire had come down on him. He hadn’t stood a chance.

  But afterward, the practice of sending the non-heir sons of regents off to clear out the wilderness and expand the empire had begun. That gave second or third or eighth sons a chance to do something with themselves, to get their own land and make their own names. It kept them too busy to lead rebellions.

  Gabriel knew of rebellions from before the Scourge. He’d read of the ancient revolution when the land had been called America. He could only think that one of the masterminds of this revolution must have too. Possibly even Nathaniel, who seemed intelligent—even if he wasn’t exactly morally upright.

  But perhaps Gabriel had been too hard on him. He didn’t understand, not really. None of his sexual activity could lead to pregnancy. It was something he’d never had to
worry about. And he certainly didn’t take care of the men he slept with. Quite often, he never saw them again.

  Well, except for Ezekiel, that was. He’d come out here to negotiate with gypsies for Ezekiel. What the hell was wrong with him?

  When Leah got to the gypsies’ camp, she’d be able to tell them everything she knew about the capital and the mansion. Gabriel didn’t know what she knew. Maybe she had discovered several secret passages—ways into the mansion that he didn’t know about. Maybe the rebels would come at night and sneak inside. Maybe they’d murder him and every member of his family while they slept.

  No. No, that wouldn’t happen, because Gabriel had to stop them. He might sympathize with their assessment of the state of the empire, but that didn’t mean that he had to allow them to start their rebellion.

  He could crush it before it ever began.

  He stood up and addressed the driver. “Yes, there is something you can do. You can go back to the capital and gather reinforcements.”

  “Reinforcements, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “The entire garrison of the emperor’s guard. Leave only a skeleton crew behind to maintain order.” No. Wait. He had something better, didn’t he? “And the necromancer, Darius. Tell him I have need of him.”

  * * *

  Ezekiel craned his neck around the tree trunk, trying to see Nathaniel. He couldn’t really get a good look. The trunk was too big, and he couldn’t twist far enough, because he was tied too tightly. Didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see him anyway. “Was it so important that you escape the dungeons that you had to kill innocent women?”

  Nathaniel didn’t say anything.

  “I know you were fleeing, but when you sent those revenants the other direction, surely you could see that there was no one over there but frightened servants and my sister?”

  Still nothing.

  Ezekiel sucked breath in through his nose. “I’m going to get free, you know. The others aren’t watching us very closely, now that they’ve got that fence up around us. When I do get free, I’m not going to run. I’m going to stay here and strangle you to death.” It was important, somehow, that he get revenge for Honor. She had been caught up in everything that happened, paid with her life. Maybe Ezekiel felt guilty because he’d been intimate with her intended. Maybe he felt guilty because her fiance was like him—a faggot who could never love her, who wouldn’t marry her. Or maybe it wasn’t so complicated. Maybe he was simply a brother who loved his sister, and he was angry that she’d been taken from the world.

  Nathaniel cleared his throat. “I don’t know what it is he sees in you.”

  “What?” Ezekiel thought that was an odd response to a death threat. Nathaniel clearly wasn’t the least bit frightened of him. That frustrated him. Was it because Nathaniel knew Ezekiel liked men? Did that make him seem like a pansy? Ezekiel would show him differently.

  “Gabriel,” said Nathaniel. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why he’s attracted to you. I don’t see why he would have come to negotiate for you. You’re nothing like him. You’re an oafish brute. What use would he even have for you?”

  Ezekiel swallowed. “He came to negotiate for me?” He had thought it a possibility, but he hadn’t really believed it would happen. He didn’t think that Gabriel really cared about him that much. They’d had a dalliance together, nothing more. Gabriel had taken a big risk to do that—and he was the emperor now.

  “He did. Well, he showed up, anyway. I don’t know if he ever had any intention of giving us the necromancer.”

  That made a bit more sense, Ezekiel supposed. Still, what Gabriel had done for him was considerable and meaningful. Ezekiel was affected. “Well, I’m still here, though,” he said. “So, I suppose he wasn’t successful.”

  “It was a mess,” said Nathaniel. “An absolute disaster.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But Nathaniel didn’t say anything else.

  “I suppose I’ll have to strangle it out of you.”

  Nathaniel laughed bitterly. “Go ahead. I don’t suppose it much matters anymore.”

  Ah, well, that was it, then. Nathaniel’s attitude didn’t stem from his lack of fear of Ezekiel, but from the fact he’d given up. He was broken.

  The two men sat in silence for a long time.

  Finally, Ezekiel spoke up. “Is he all right? Gabriel?”

  “I suppose so. He seemed to be when we left.”

  That was good to know. Ezekiel didn’t want anything bad to happen to Gabriel on his account. He couldn’t bear that.

  It was quiet again.

  Ezekiel stared straight ahead. It was late afternoon, and it was the time of the year when the days could get quite warm, but the evenings and nights were very cold. The last rays of the warm afternoon would be receding soon. Earlier, he’d been sweating and uncomfortable, but now he was glad of the sun. Once the sun went down, he wouldn’t be able to feel his fingers.

  For right now, he wriggled his fingers, trying to keep them as warm as possible. He thought about the way it had felt to have his fingers on Gabriel’s skin. He thought of Gabriel’s mouth kissing his fingertips, Gabriel’s mouth on his stomach, his tongue tracing the trail of Ezekiel’s hair down past his belly button to his—

  “About your sister,” said Nathaniel.

  Ezekiel actually jerked, he was so startled.

  “It wasn’t the way I wanted things.”

  Ezekiel snorted. “You think saying that makes it better?”

  “I’m not trying to make it better. I can’t make things better. Everything’s ruined.” He sighed. “I’m only saying that I never wanted it all to go down the way it did. When the others were scheming to get us out of the dungeons, I said we should wait. Gabriel had been to visit us earlier that day. He said he was doing everything he could to get us a pardon, and I trusted him. If we could have waited for his solution, no one would have been killed, and I… I don’t want people to die.”

  “But you got my sister killed.”

  Another bitter laugh from Nathaniel. “I may have sentenced more women to death than I ever thought about.”

  “More than just my sister? Because—”

  “I don’t know how I could have been so dense. I knew how it worked. I’m a bastard child myself. Why didn’t I care, when I was bedding those women? Why didn’t I think? At the beginning, I suppose I could blame it on the fact that I was a child, just a stupid boy testing his luck and trying to get women to raise their skirts. But I’m not a boy anymore, and I should know better. I should never have been so irresponsible.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ezekiel was thoroughly confused.

  “He had a woman with him,” said Nathaniel.

  “Who did?”

  “Gabriel.” Obviously, Nathaniel’s tone implied. “A woman that I had been with. But she’d somehow gotten herself married to him, and she said—”

  “Wait, you’re the one who’s the father of Leah’s child?”

  “You know about this?”

  Ezekiel chuckled. “I knew there was something off about her. I knew it. She’s associated with you gypsies, isn’t she?”

  “She’s just a girl,” said Nathaniel. “She’s in trouble, and it’s my fault, and if it hadn’t been for Gabriel, she’d have been thrown out of the city. She might have died. And it’s my fault.”

  “This is what you choose to feel guilty about? Not my sister, who’s actually dead, but some girl who’s alive and well and married to the emperor?” Ezekiel twisted his lip. “I really am going to strangle you.”

  * * *

  Leah had ridden as hard as she could, but she’d never caught up with the gypsy carriage. She wasn’t particularly good at horseback riding. She hadn’t done it much in her life. It wasn’t something that common people in Sarrasarra had a lot of use for. Anyway, she suspected that her best, fastest riding wasn’t nearly as fast as the carriage had gone.

  At first it was easy to follow. There was only one
road, and it was flanked by barbed wire fences on either side. But then she came to a large stone wall. These walls had been built years and years ago to keep the revenants out. Someday, she supposed the entire empire would be surrounded by them.

  The gate was unlocked, so she let herself through, latching it behind her. The latch seemed far too complicated for a revenant to understand.

  Inside the wall, there was no city or sign of life, just the wilderness stretching out ahead of her.

  However, the gypsies had left behind tracks. She followed the tracks, going after the gypsies. Sometimes, the tracks disappeared and there was nothing to see, and then she panicked. But then the tracks would come back, and she’d follow them again, her elation returning.

  When she’d traveled for some time, however, the tracks abruptly stopped, and she could see that they’d been obscured in some way, deliberately removed so as to avoid detection. When she saw that, she fell into a despair deeper than panic. She’d taken some provisions when she left Gabriel’s camp, but she didn’t have an infinite amount of food. She was also exhausted, both from traveling and from pregnancy. She could hardly think.

  She half-wanted to lie down on the ground and give up, just let it all end.

  But then she thought of the baby. She’d fought off the revenants in the mansion to save her tiny little one. And she’d have to fight this too. She couldn’t let anything happen to the baby. She’d fought so hard for it already.

  So, she kept going. She chose a direction at random. Not the one that the tracks seemed to point towards. She felt sure that was a trick. And not the one that would take her back the way she came. Beyond that, she didn’t put much thought into it.

  She went on for some time in that direction before she saw the fire off in the horizon.

  It wasn’t directly ahead of her, so she had to course correct a bit, but she could see the camp. She rode for it, feeling her spirits rise. At the time she saw the fire, it was only barely dusk. By the time she reached the camp, it was full dark, and it had been for some time.

  Leah shivered in the cold as she approached.