Wrath of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  “Now we wait.”

  Tenik rolled his eyes and returned to the corner of the room, slumping down on the floor. The familiar flicking sound of him flipping a coin soon began. Michel waited, nearly stepping back from the window when he saw a curtain flutter in Hendres’s safe-house room.

  “Now we know where she’s staying,” Michel said over his shoulder. “We can come back tomorrow morning and wait until she goes out, and then …” He paused as Hendres suddenly appeared in the tenement doorway. “Shit, never mind. Come with me, now!”

  Michel left the room at a run, heading down the hallway without waiting to see if Tenik had followed him. He went up two floors, then climbed out the window of an abandoned apartment and around the ledge, then hiked himself up onto the roof. He crossed it in a few moments and crouched down, searching the traffic below.

  It wasn’t long until he spotted Hendres heading north. He heard a clatter behind him, and Tenik joined him a moment later with a string of words in Dynize that were definitely curses.

  “Come on,” Michel told him, heading to the other side of the roof and quickly climbing down the chimney sweep’s ladder. He caught up to Hendres a few blocks later, falling into step a hundred paces back and pulling his hat down over his face. He indicated that Tenik do the same.

  “The trick to following someone,” Michel explained in a low voice, “is to stay far enough away that they won’t suspect you’re on their tail—but close enough that you won’t lose them when they inevitably turn corners or go into buildings.”

  “What happens when they go into buildings?”

  “Depends. If you’re trying to catch them, you make sure it’s not a trap, then set your own. It helps to have some thugs with you.”

  “And if you’re not trying to catch them?”

  “Then you wait until they come out again.”

  Tenik groaned.

  “Hold up,” Michel said, turning to face a shop window as Hendres stopped at an intersection and checked behind her. He watched her out of the corner of his eye while pretending to study a hat, then turned to follow her again once she’d kept going. “I dyed my hair after I last saw her,” Michel explained. “It won’t hold up to a close examination, but it’s enough to fool her at a distance.”

  “Is she that stupid?”

  “People are that stupid,” Michel responded. “You’d be surprised at what even a cautious person will overlook.”

  They soon left the industrial quarter, and passed the old dockside market and the ruins of the eastern face of the plateau. Out in the harbor, Fort Nied sat pitted and forlorn, mostly ignored by the occupying force. Hendres crossed the river and rounded the plateau to head into the northern suburbs.

  She stopped at two different buildings, both times briefly, before continuing her journey. One of the stops was at the bar of a known Blackhat contact, and the second was unfamiliar to Michel. He tried to put himself in her shoes, working through her route, trying to figure out what she was doing.

  “How do we know when we’ve followed her to the right place?” Tenik asked quietly while they waited for her outside yet a third stop.

  “We don’t,” Michel responded. “It might be obvious, or we might have to stake out all of these places.”

  “We’re trying to find this other Gold Rose?”

  “Exactly. If we’re lucky, she’ll have already made contact with him since my departure and she’ll lead us right to him.”

  “If we’re unlucky?”

  “If we’re unlucky, she’s spotted us and is leading us into a trap.” With those words, Michel double-checked his pocket to make sure his knuckle-dusters were still there. They were. He didn’t want to be caught unawares again like he had with Forgula.

  He stopped at an intersection to wait for a column of Dynize soldiers to walk by, tipping his hat to them. Tenik gave him a questioning look.

  “Force of habit,” Michel said. “You’re less likely to notice someone with good manners. Not great manners, mind you. Just good ones.” The column passed by and he swore under his breath.

  “I don’t see her,” Tenik said.

  “Me neither. Pit. Head down, keep walking. Watch to your right out of the corner of your eye. I’ll watch the left.”

  They continued straight down the street past a row of shops, half of which were boarded up. This was a residential area, lower middle class, and had maintained much of its population after the evacuation. No one paid them any mind, and after they’d gone two blocks Michel whispered to Tenik to turn around.

  They did a second sweep, coming up with nothing.

  “She’s got to be in one of these buildings,” Michel said. “But the longer we linger, the more chance she’ll look out a window and notice us standing around. Over here.” Michel headed into a nearby bakery, following his nose into the front of the shop where hot loaves had just come out of the oven. “Don’t stand out,” he said quietly. “Buy something.”

  Tenik went up to the counter while Michel turned to watch out the front window.

  “We don’t take those,” a voice said loudly.

  Michel turned to find Tenik offering the baker a Dynize rations card. Tenik opened his mouth, but Michel stepped in to intercede, handing over a couple of Fatrastan coins. He thanked the baker and pulled Tenik back outside, where he tore the loaf in half.

  Tenik scowled back at the door. “These are valid,” he said, shaking the rations card under Michel’s nose. “The government has ordered that all businesses accept them.”

  “Don’t worry too much about it,” Michel said, bemused by Tenik’s indignation. “You look like a Palo and dress like a Palo. They’re going to treat you like one. Which means they won’t let you pay with a currency that might not be any good in a few months.”

  “He thinks Dynize will lose the war?” Tenik looked like he was ready to march back inside. Michel took him by the arm and led him away.

  “Hedging his bets, probably. Like I said, don’t worry about …” Michel trailed off as he spotted someone over Tenik’s shoulder. “Don’t turn around,” he said in a low voice, lifting his half a loaf of bread up to his face but keeping his eyes fixed down the street. “Loosen up,” he told Tenik. “Your shoulders are hunched and your body tense. That’s going to be obvious to anyone who knows what to look for. Now, I see Hendres just over your left shoulder. She just came out of that alleyway next to the cobbler’s. We’re going to stay here until she moves again. If I say turn, I want you to casually look at that playbill plastered on the wall to your left. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Michel watched for several moments as Hendres spoke with someone just around the corner. He silently urged them to step out into the street so he could see the other party, but Hendres was suddenly on the move again. “Turn!” he hissed at Tenik.

  They waited as Hendres walked past them. Michel forced himself to breathe evenly, watching out of the corner of his eye until she rounded a corner. He glanced over Tenik’s shoulder once and then took one step after Hendres before freezing in place.

  “Should we follow her?” Tenik asked.

  Michel didn’t answer. Slowly, casually, he swept his gaze back across that alley Hendres had been standing in a moment ago. A man had emerged to chat with one of the shopkeeps, smoking a cigarette carelessly.

  “She’s getting away!”

  “Forget about her,” Michel said. “We got lucky. Damned lucky.”

  “How?”

  Michel took Tenik by the arm and led him down a nearby alley without answering the question.

  “Where are we going?” Tenik asked.

  “To find a lookout spot. The man who Hendres just met with is named Marhoush. He’s a Silver Rose, and he’s the right-hand man of Val je Tura. Not only is je Tura Lindet’s personal enforcer, but he also spent most of the Fatrastan revolution killing Kez soldiers and civilians with explosives. I’m willing to bet je Tura is the one bombing your soldiers, and Marhoush will lead us right
to him.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Styke, Celine, and Ka-poel rode for three days in near silence, broken only by Celine’s occasional questions about the people and horses they passed on the road. They traveled against the flow of traffic as thousands of refugees left their homes and businesses and fled northwest in an attempt to stay ahead of the Dynize invaders.

  Stories traveled with them: a thousand rumors that painted the Dynize as everything from blood-drinking monsters who snatched away Kressian youths, to liberators who brought with them freedom from the oppressive rule of Lindet and her Blackhats. Regardless of which rumor was carried by the passing travelers, everyone seemed to prefer taking their chances with the evil they knew—Lindet—rather than the evil they did not.

  By the third day, Styke found the spring that gave birth to the Cottonseed tributary, a small river that meandered between plantation fields for about thirty miles, growing bigger until it joined the Cottonseed River and eventually poured into the Hadshaw. Styke stopped at the spring, washing the road dust off his face and instructing Celine to do the same before making sure his carbines were loaded and his knife was sharp. After a brief lunch, he lifted Celine back into the saddle and followed the banks of the tributary.

  “What are we looking for?” Celine asked.

  “The closest plantation.” Styke handed the reins to Celine and removed a skull-and-lance banner from his saddlebags before tying it to the tip of his lance and raising it above him.

  They crossed several streams and a mile of plantation fields full of bonded Palo working desperately to harvest the half-grown fields. No one challenged Styke as he rode past, but Ka-poel received more than a few curious glances.

  “Who are we going to kill?” Celine asked.

  “Try not to sound so eager when you ask a question like that,” Styke retorted. “I’m going to kill a man named Bad Tenny Wiles.”

  “And who is that?”

  “One of the Mad Lancers,” Styke answered. “At least, he used to be. Sometimes he was a clerk, sometimes did some cooking. A mean son of a bitch—mean enough to keep the men from pilfering the rations when times were lean. But we were all mean back then.”

  “Why do you want to kill him?”

  He felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Over the years people had called him a brute, a murderer, even a monster. He’d been all those things and more, but the idea of killing someone who’d once ridden at his side was distasteful. Murdering Agoston had sated his rage the other night, but it had also left him feeling queasy. He supposed he could just forget the whole thing, but … vengeance needed having. “It’s complicated.”

  “So?” She looked up at him expectantly.

  “Do you know what ‘precocious’ means?”

  “I know I’m one. Ibana said so.”

  Ka-poel grinned openly at Styke.

  “Of course she did.” Styke checked his knife and drew the blade down his whetstone a few times before stowing them both, taking the reins from Celine’s hands. He wondered if he was getting such a young child too used to the idea of blood and death, and had to remind himself that she’d seen men gut each other over a biscuit in the labor camps, and she’d watched her own father drown in the fens. He pointed to the sorcery-healed scar on his left hand between the knuckles of his third and fourth finger. “This,” he said, then pointed to his leg, then his face. “This, and this. All from the firing squad ten years ago.” The sorcerous healing of his wounds had come ten years too late, and they all still ached every day—and those two fingers still didn’t like to obey him.

  Celine took Styke’s hand in hers, running her fingers over the wound, then across his knuckles. Her hands were tiny compared to his. “Did Tenny Wiles shoot at you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Styke ignored Celine’s further questions as he spotted a nearby driveway and directed Amrec away from the riverbank. The drive ran beside the river for a few hundred yards and then across an open lawn to a manor house. The manor had the typical flat facade in the common style of Fatrastan plantations. As far as those went, it wasn’t immense—though it was obviously the home of a rich man. The fountain out front was in disrepair, the paint on the shutters peeling, but otherwise the house and grounds were in decent condition for an older home.

  Styke felt his queasiness increase, and he thought about Agoston’s blood on his hands and arms and pictured the look on Tenny Wiles’s face as he gutted him. Killing old comrades. A dirty business, even for him.

  A carriage and a dozen wagons filled the drive just outside the front door, and a flurry of activity filled the vestibule as servants rushed to load the wagons with furniture and supplies.

  Styke caught sight of Bad Tenny Wiles standing on the front step, directing the whole thing. Tenny was probably five years younger than Styke, and hadn’t borne the rigors of the labor camps, but he did not look good. His split nose was red and runny, and the side of his face with the missing ear was covered in the scars of a past infection. But it was definitely Tenny—just wearing expensive clothes.

  Everyone was so focused on packing the house that they didn’t seem to notice Styke as he came up the drive, rounded the fountain, and dismounted. He pulled Celine down and set her next to Amrec, handing her the reins. “Stay here,” he said. The knot in his stomach was still there, but he could feel it loosening beneath the resolute feeling of a job that needed doing.

  “I could come with.”

  “You don’t need to watch me skin a man.” He pointed at Ka-poel. “You stay here, too.”

  He left Celine scowling at his back as he headed through the bustle of the servants and toward the front door, stopping just a few feet from the bottom step. He sighed, a hand on the hilt of his knife, and let his weight fall on his good leg as he waited for Tenny to notice him.

  It didn’t take long. Tenny directed two servants maneuvering a feather mattress out the door, pointing to one of the wagons. On noticing Styke, his mouth opened and he blinked in confusion. Slowly, the blood drained from his face.

  “Hello, Tenny,” Styke said.

  Bad Tenny Wiles, the scourge of unwary Kez infantry, began to tremble. It started in his hands, then moved through his body until Styke thought he might convulse and fall to the ground in a fit. He waited for a weapon to appear in Tenny’s hands, and the quick exchange of blood to follow. He did not expect Tenny to turn and flee into the house.

  The pounding of retreating footsteps surprised Styke, and it took him a moment to follow. He passed startled servants, listening to Tenny’s shouts, and followed them up the grand staircase to the second floor. He paused for a moment on the landing, the house suddenly silent.

  “You there!” a servant called, mounting the stairs below Styke with a firepoker in his hand.

  Styke pointed his knife at the man, then continued upward. No one followed.

  He prowled the second floor, glancing in each room, moving with slow, deliberate steps. He expected the blast of a blunderbuss as he opened every door, or the ring of a pistol shot. But he found the master bedroom without encountering an ambush.

  Tenny stood in the center of the room alone, supporting himself on one corner of a four-poster bed. He’d stilled his trembles, and he held a pistol in one hand, pointed at Styke. “Not another step,” he growled. “I don’t care if you’re a ghost or the real thing, but I will pull this trigger.”

  “Do you think you can finish with one bullet what a firing squad couldn’t with twenty?” Styke asked. He entered the room, glancing around for a bevy of servants waiting to jump him. There was no one else, so he let himself relax slightly, glancing around at the furniture and ceiling as if he meant to buy the place. “What was your price, Tenny?” he asked. “How much did Fidelis Jes pay you to betray me? Was it this place? A whole plantation? I’ll admit you got a good deal. I hope you enjoyed the last ten years more than I did.”

  Tenny’s pistol didn’t waver. “How did you know? Pit, how are you still alive? Jes told me they finished
the job!”

  Styke had once watched Tenny kill a whole squad of grenadiers with a broken sword after one of them cut off his ear. He’d never heard that edge of panic in Bad Tenny Wiles’s voice. But seeing a ghost will do that to a man.

  “I spent ten years in the labor camps thinking that Fidelis Jes had arranged my failed execution—then disappearance—without any of my men knowing. I shouldn’t have been so naive. I got out two months ago, re-formed the Mad Lancers, and helped defend Landfall. So how do I know? Turns out you didn’t come to my funeral. Markus and Zac noticed, and they found out that you and a few others got paid off by the Blackhats. Doesn’t take much math to figure out why.”

  “I didn’t—”

  Styke cut him off. “I know, Tenny. I killed Agoston a few days ago.”

  “Does everyone else know?” Tenny whispered.

  “Me, Ibana, Jackal. Markus and Zac,” Styke said. “I haven’t decided whether to take your head back to show the rest. You’re lucky Ibana isn’t here. She would—”

  As Styke spoke, the muzzle of Tenny’s pistol suddenly dipped, then jerked up toward his mouth. Tenny grabbed the muzzle in his lips and squeezed his eyes shut.

  Styke crossed the room in two quick strides and jerked the pistol out of Tenny’s hand. He tossed it on the bed, grasping Tenny by the front of his suit and shaking him hard enough to rattle his teeth. Tenny reached for a knife at his belt, but Styke slapped it away and lifted Tenny off the ground. He drew his boz knife and held the tip to Tenny’s throat. A quick jerk, and Styke would have another traitor’s lifeblood spilling down his arms.

  “You don’t get to take your own life,” Styke snarled. “You gave up that privilege the moment you betrayed me and the lancers.”

  “I didn’t want to, damn it! Agoston and Dvory talked me into it. They said we were better without you, and Fidelis Jes, he—”

  Styke shook him again. “Don’t mention that piece of shit. You know what I did after Landfall last month? I found Jes and cut his damned head off and sent it to Lindet.” He looked around the room, feeling angry and sick. “You traded me for this, Tenny. Don’t worry, because you only have to live with it for a few more minutes.”