Wrath of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  “Soreana, do you know where I can find either Marhoush or je Tura?” he asked.

  She drew herself up—as best as she could while kneeling with hands tied behind her back. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Michel rolled his eyes. “Let’s have a quick rundown of your options, Soreana. If you’d like, you can play the good little Blackhat. If you do that, I’ll be forced to hand you over to the fine gentlemen outside, who will torture you for every scrap of information and then execute you.”

  Soreana swallowed hard. The average Blackhat signed on to rough up neighborhood malcontents, not to embroil themselves in dangerous guerrilla warfare.

  “Or,” Michel continued, “you can tell me what I want and I’ll make sure your pockets are filled with gold. We’ll give you a job or put you on the next ship to the Nine or give you a whole slew of other options.” Michel removed his pocket watch and looked at the hands. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide.”

  Soreana looked from Michel to Tenik to the guard. She licked her lips.

  “Ten seconds left,” Michel told her.

  “I’ll be safe?” she asked.

  Michel smiled kindly. “I’ve eaten better since I switched sides than I ever did under the Blackhats. The brothels are better, the pay is better.” Not precisely true, but a good enough set of lies for the moment. “Five seconds.”

  He could see her waffling. He watched the last few seconds tick by, silently willing her to talk, then dropped his watch back into his pocket without bothering to hide his annoyance. “Sorry, Soreana. Take her away.”

  “Wait!” She awkwardly surged to her feet, stumbling into the wall. “I’ll take the offer. Please.”

  Michel glanced at Tenik, who shrugged as if to say, This is your game. “Yes?”

  “Just promise me that no one will find out I talked.”

  “I think that can be arranged. Where is je Tura?”

  “I don’t know where je Tura is, but I can tell you about Marhoush.”

  “Go on.”

  “He switched safe houses two nights ago. He moved to the house on King’s Street in Lower Landfall. But you won’t find him there, not now. He’s supposed to be meeting with someone important in an hour.”

  Tenik visibly perked up. Michel took a step closer to her. “Who? Je Tura?”

  “I’m not sure. I just know it’s supposed to be in Claden Park at four o’clock. He’s been going to these meetings every other day for two weeks.”

  “All right.” Michel took a deep breath. This was the next link in the chain, but he’d have to move fast. Claden Park was clear on the other side of the plateau. “I’m going to find you later and get everything you know about the Blackhats. For now, we’re going to make sure everyone downstairs thinks you’ve been executed. Give me your best scream.”

  The fastest route across the plateau turned out to be surrounded by a dozen Dynize soldiers on the backs of galloping horses. Michel clung to his saddle in terror as they rounded the western base of the plateau and then cut southeast. They arrived at Claden Park with just minutes to spare, which Michel used to get his feet back under him before borrowing a looking glass from one of the soldiers and scouting out the north end of the park.

  Claden was a bit of marshland that had, at one point, been part of a Brudanian lady’s estate. Early on in her life she’d filled in the marsh and had it planted with willows and beech as a garden for her sickly husband. Their great-grandson had bequeathed the land to the public—along with a generous endowment for policing and upkeep. Rumors had swirled for years that local industrialists were leaning on Lindet to develop it, and Michel wondered what would happen to the land under Dynize rule.

  For now, it was still a park about the size of six city blocks. Traffic passed through a narrow road running down the middle, and a few squatters’ tents had popped up in the overgrown lawns. Michel swept the looking glass back and forth until he saw a middle-aged man sitting on one of the benches, surreptitiously reading a newspaper.

  “Heads down,” he told the soldiers. “You need to look like you’re just passing by and not like you’re waiting for something. Do a circuit around the park, then head down that street there”—he pointed to a street leading to the industrial quarter—“and post someone at the corner to wait for my signal.”

  Michel split from the group, Tenik in tow, and headed in the opposite direction around the park.

  “Marhoush is waiting on the bench there—don’t look!” Michel told Tenik. “Whoever he’s meeting hasn’t arrived yet, and will probably wait for your soldiers to go before they approach.” Michel kept walking at a leisurely stroll. After he reached the midpoint, he stopped behind a tree and kicked at a rock, hands in his pockets like any loitering Palo on a hot afternoon. “Flip your coin,” he told Tenik.

  They had to wait only a few moments before a figure approached Marhoush, sitting down on the bench next to him. Michel watched out of the corner of his eye for a moment, then moved a few dozen yards down the road to get a profile look of Marhoush’s contact. He slid the soldier’s looking glass from his sleeve and held it up to his eye. He blinked, rubbed the lens, and looked again.

  Without a word, he handed the glass to Tenik.

  The figure sitting next to Marhoush was one who had burned herself into Michel’s memory a week earlier. She had a soft face and medium-length red hair, and she lounged with a casual ease next to Marhoush. She was dressed like a Palo in a low-quality brown cotton suit. It was, without a doubt, Devin-Forgula.

  “Why is she meeting with a Silver Rose?” Michel whispered.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do we bring her in?” Michel asked.

  Tenik lingered with the looking glass to his eye for an uncomfortably long time before finally lowering it. His face looked like he’d just eaten an unripe lime. “You’re certain that this Marhoush is still a loyal Blackhat?”

  “Mostly certain,” Michel replied.

  “Mostly.” Tenik chewed on the word. After a few moments, he said, “No. She is one of Sedial’s and if we make accusations we must be prepared to back them up. We take this to Yaret as soon as he can see us.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Styke, Ka-poel, and Celine arrived in a tiny town called Granalia a few days after leaving Tenny Wiles. Granalia was nestled between two forested hills in eastern Fatrasta, and though it was a long way from Landfall, it appeared to be abandoned as they came over the hill and rode down the main street.

  “Ka-poel is going to teach me her sign language,” Celine told Styke proudly.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. That way she won’t have to write everything down. I can translate for her.”

  “And when did you decide that?”

  “This morning, when you were taking a piss.”

  Styke rolled his eyes. It would, he admitted, be useful to have a translator. Celine was a quick girl—she already knew Adran, plus a lot of Palo and Kez and a smattering of half a dozen other languages. He had little doubt she would be able to pick up a sign language in no time.

  As they drew closer, Styke was surprised to find signs of violence: doors hanging from broken hinges, smashed locks. He dismounted to examine a few of the buildings, only to find the inside of the pub a mess of broken bottles. The general store was cleared of anything useful, as were all the houses and shops. He found a half-eaten meal on more than one table and sniffed at the fly-covered contents. Whatever had happened here was recent.

  “They haven’t been gone for more than a couple of days,” Styke said as Celine followed him into one of the houses.

  She frowned at the contents of the table. “I don’t like this town. I gives me the creeps.”

  “It’s just empty,” Styke told her. “Nothing here is going to hurt you.”

  “I didn’t say anything would hurt me,” Celine replied defiantly. “I just said it gives me the creeps.” She rubbed her arms, looking around, and followed closely when Styke went back outside
. “How long do we have to stay?”

  “Until the Mad Lancers catch up. They should be here today, tomorrow at the latest.”

  “What if they already passed?”

  “I’d see signs of a thousand cavalry having passed through town.” Styke returned to Amrec and rubbed his nose. He wouldn’t admit it, but the empty town had unsettled him. They were far from Landfall—much closer to Little Starland—and if the Dynize were raiding all the way up here, it meant that Jackal’s spirits were right about the fall of the other big coastal cities.

  If things were serious enough, it might spell trouble for the Mad Lancers.

  He turned his attention to Ka-poel, who squatted in the dirt road, running her fingers through the ruts from a wagon wheel.

  “Any idea what happened here?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “The Dynize obviously took the people who lived here,” Styke said. “But we haven’t seen any evidence of that anywhere else. Why take these people?”

  Only silence answered his question. Ka-poel touched her fingers to a spot on the ground and crossed over to Styke, showing him the gooey blackness on her fingertips. Blood, a couple days old. She seemed to feel at the air with those two fingers, then led them around the back of the church to a small, fenced-off graveyard, where someone had neatly stacked half a dozen bodies like firewood.

  The smell hit them as soon as they rounded the building, and Styke was surprised he hadn’t caught it earlier. The corpses stank of shit and death, coated in flies as thick as molasses. Piling them unburied in a graveyard seemed like someone’s idea of a twisted joke.

  Styke appreciated that kind of humor.

  Ka-poel wiped the old blood off her hands on the grass, then cleaned her fingers with a handkerchief and pulled out her chalkboard. They did not resist, she wrote.

  That was Styke’s first impression as well. He stepped over the graveyard fence to get a closer look and was surprised when Celine followed him. Maybe the place genuinely did spook her. Bodies, on the other hand, were something she’d grown used to.

  He squatted beside the pile, running his eyes over them. If this had been a normal raid, or a looting gone bad, the bodies would have been left where they’d fallen, not stacked here in a bizarrely orderly fashion. These men and women had been executed—some with musket blasts to the back of the head and others bayoneted to death. They hadn’t fought back.

  It had to be the Dynize. But this town was much bigger than six people. Why lead off the rest, but not these?

  Ka-poel joined him, writing something on her slate. This is a Palo town.

  “So?” Styke asked.

  She pointed at the corpses, forcing him to look once more. Slowly, it dawned on him. The dead were all Kressians. “So they killed the Kressians but led away the Palo?”

  Ka-poel nodded.

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. A few moments passed, and she headed off on her own, poking around in the grass and walking into one of the nearby houses—no doubt looking for clues as to the fate of the town. Styke remained with the bodies for a moment, studying them thoughtfully, then did a circuit of the church.

  He wandered through several more buildings in a half-hearted bid to discover a survivor before finally giving up and returning to the front stoop of the general store with an overlooked bottle of gin and a fresh horngum root from the apothecary’s garden at the end of the street.

  He broke off a piece of horngum and chewed it thoughtfully, feeling the numbness spread through his jaw. After a swig of gin the numbness spread to his back, hips, and ass to happily relieve so many weeks of riding tension. He leaned back on the stoop and offered the gin to Celine. She took a sniff of the bottle, shaking her head.

  The silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves in the distance. He listened to them approach, waiting for the shout of one of Ibana’s scouts.

  But there was no shout, and the hoofbeats grew louder. He frowned, looking over at Celine. The sound was coming from the east. Unless Ibana had found a shorter route, she should be coming from the north. “What kind of horse is that?” he asked Celine.

  She tilted her head to listen. “It’s light,” she said. “Maybe an Angland racer?”

  “It’s not an Angland.” Styke got to his feet. The road from the east was on the other side of the church. The problem that unsettled him was that he did not recognize that hoofbeat, not entirely. It sounded like …

  He rounded the church to spot a small group coming toward him on Dynizian mounts. There were six of them—four men and two women—wearing regular Fatrastan traveling clothes and not outwardly armed. They had the red hair and freckles, but their horses precluded them from being Palo. Styke felt the hair on the back of his head stand on end as they came to a stop on the other side of the graveyard, barely sparing a glance for the pile of corpses.

  “Who are they?” Celine asked.

  “Go back to the horses,” Styke said. “Find Ka-poel. Both of you go to the edge of town and wait for me.”

  “What do you …?”

  “Now!”

  Celine set off at a run. One of the horsemen broke off from the others and began to trot after her. Styke put himself in the man’s path. That seemed to be enough, as the rider simply switched his attention from Celine to Styke. All of the riders were staring at him.

  “Are you Ben Styke?” one of them asked in heavily accented Adran. The woman speaking had a scar across her left eye. Whatever had caused it had barely missed leaving her half-blind.

  “Who wants to know?” Styke slowly reached for his knife.

  The man whose horse Styke had blocked pointed at Styke’s chest. He spoke in Dynize, but it was close enough to Palo that Styke could understand most of it. “Look at his size. He’s a crippled giant with gunshot wounds. Has to be him.”

  “Ji-Orz, go keep watch,” the woman with the scar said. One of the men broke off and headed back the way they’d come, remaining on horseback on a nearby hillock. “You are the man they call Ben Styke, correct?” she asked.

  Styke’s feeling about these Dynize grew worse and worse. He took a half step back. The group was far too at ease to be soldiers. Styke could see the bulge of knives beneath their coats, but none of them carried a firearm. He tried to remember the Dynize title “Ji,” but he didn’t think he’d ever heard it before. “I am.”

  The nearest one leaned over in his saddle, peering at Styke. “You think it was just a story? I can’t imagine an old cripple like him killing Ji-Kushel.”

  Styke’s blood ran cold as he remembered the name. Kushel. The dragonman he’d killed in Lady Flint’s muster yard. “Ji” was the title for dragonmen. He felt a small bead of sweat break out on the back of his neck and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his knife. Six dragonmen. Styke nearly died fighting one.

  “We were sent by Ka-Sedial,” the woman said, “to kill the man who murdered one of our brothers in single combat. You killed Ji-Kushel?”

  Styke had the sinking feeling that he was about to die. He fought the feeling, flinging it from his mind with a growing annoyance. Six dragonmen. Whoever this Ka-Sedial was, he had no intention of underestimating Styke. “Yeah,” he said. “I killed him. I popped his head like a zit.”

  One of the other dragonmen snorted in derision. They glanced from one to the other, barely suppressing smirks. They didn’t seem all that worried that Styke had murdered one of their comrades.

  “Ji-Matle,” the woman said, “go secure that girl.”

  Ji-Matle flipped his reins, urging his mount forward into a casual trot that belied any kind of urgency. He came abreast of Styke and looked down at him, shaking his head. “I still don’t believe it.”

  Styke stepped sidelong in front of the horse, jerking his head back from Ji-Matle’s quickly drawn blade, and rammed his boz knife through the neck and up into the brain of the horse. It spasmed, and blood fountained from the wound to cover Styke’s arms. He shoved, pushing the dying creature over as Ji
-Matle leapt free with startling dexterity.

  The dragonman landed in a crouch, looking at his horse in dismay. “You’re strong,” he noted, looking over his shoulder at his companions.

  “Finish him quickly,” the woman said, “and we can be back in Dynize by the end of the month.”

  “You really think they’re going to let us go home with a war on?” Ji-Matle asked.

  “We have Ka-Sedial’s word. Would you question that?”

  “Of course not.”

  Despite Styke’s display of strength, none of the dragonmen seemed at all concerned about the danger. While they spoke, Styke circled around to the horse and knelt by it, sawing at the neck with his blade as if making sure the creature was dead. The warmth of its blood felt slick between his fingers, and he whispered an apology.

  “Come now, Ben Styke, you have already killed my horse,” Ji-Matle said, gesturing with a bone knife.

  “I’ve got a knife like that,” Styke said, still kneeling by the horse. “It belonged to your friend Kushel.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. Ji-Matle looked to her once again, as if for guidance. “Where is that knife?” she asked.

  “Left it with a friend on the other side of the country,” Styke lied. “I just want you to know that I used it to cut out Kushel’s tongue and eyes before he died, then I took a shit in his mouth.”

  The woman spat. “These Kressians are all damned savages. Kill him, Ji-Matle, and we will be gone.”

  Ji-Matle frowned, appraising Styke for several seconds before darting forward and drawing a second knife. Styke caught sight of the dragonskin armor beneath his duster just as Ji-Matle leapt over the dead horse, swinging his knife downward.

  Styke whipped his left hand out of the horse’s neck, flinging warm blood into Ji-Matle’s eyes and then rolling out of the way of the swipe. He came out of his roll and reversed directions as Ji-Matle barely managed to stick his landing and stumble toward the graves. He dropped one of his knives, pawing at his eyes. Styke ran at him on the balls of his feet, boz knife forward. Ji-Matle swiped blindly, slashing through the left arm of Styke’s jacket, the blade biting into his skin. Styke did not slow, ramming his own knife into Ji-Matle’s groin and plowing him over.