“Last night. Anne from the bakery told me. They’ve got guardsmen out looking now. I don’t know the girl. Anne said her father is a tailor near the canal.”
Adolphus shot me a grim look, then turned to Wren. “Training is over. Wash up and help Adeline.” I could see the boy was unhappy to be excluded, but Adolphus can be a heavy character, and Wren kept his tongue resting in its cavity.
We waited until they were both inside before continuing. “What do you think?” Adolphus asked.
“Maybe she got lost playing rat-in-a-hole. Maybe she caught the eye of a slaver and is stuffed in a barrel on her way east. Maybe her father beat her to death and hid her body somewhere. It could be a lot of things.”
His one eye flickered across my face, performing double duty as always. “It could be a lot of things, fine. Is it them?”
It’s usually best to assume the worst and work from there.
“Probably.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll keep my nose clean and stay out of it.” Though I doubted I’d have that option. If this was the work of the same crew that got the last girl, there’d be trouble—the Crown would make sure of that. They might not care about the dead child of a Low Town dockworker but they sure as shit would want to know who was summoning otherworldly entities. Only the Crown gets to dabble in the dark arts—it’s a privilege they preserve with great rigor. As of right now I was the only connection to whatever had killed the Kiren, and that alone was enough to merit me a session below Black House.
“Will the ones that killed the girl come after you?” Adolphus asked.
“I’m done playing lawman.”
“And will your former comrades let you off so easily?”
I said nothing. Adolphus knew the answer.
“I’m sorry that I pushed you to do this.” I found myself very conscious of the gray hairs that speckled his beard, and of the sparse patches in his mane.
“I’m going to head over to the Aerie, see if I can’t get a better handle on the situation.” I left Adolphus in the courtyard and went upstairs to grab my satchel. I considered taking a blade, but thought better of it. If the girl turned up floating in the canal I was sure to get a visit from the law, and if that happened I’d never see anything I was carrying again. Besides, from what I could tell, steel wouldn’t do much against the abomination I had seen. I exited the bar and set out on a brisk walk, my mind drawn back to what I had long assumed would be my first and only encounter with the thing that had killed the Kiren.
The war was almost over—we hovered at the precipice of victory. Everywhere the Dren whore was on her back, her defenses breached, her castles defended by old men with bent pikes and boys too young to shave. Of the seventeen territories that had once made up the United Provinces, only four remained in Dren possession, and once we took Donknacht these remaining holdouts were sure to fold as well. My five long years of service, killing and bleeding and pushing for a hundred yards a day, were almost over. We’d all be spending Midwinter at home, drinking hot toddies by a roaring fire. At that very moment, Wilhelm van Agt, chief Steadholder of the Republic, was considering an armistice as prelude to complete capitulation.
Unfortunately it seemed the news of our conflict’s resolution had not yet reached the Dren themselves, who stood outside their capital city like lions, roaring defiance in the face of Allied might. A half decade of preparation and a mastery of siege tactics had enabled them to create what was likely the most perfect defensive perimeter in mankind’s long history of violence. It seemed they hadn’t heard of the famine and disease afflicting their forces, of the terrible losses they’d suffered at Karsk and Lauvengod, of the generally hopeless nature of their cause—or if they had, it had done nothing to weaken their resolve.
It was this collective intransigence, intransigence which bordered on outright foolishness, that I blamed for forcing me out of bed in the middle of the night to go on a covert mission. It was the stupidity of our own brass, however, that I blamed for the logistical failure that was to leave me and my squad absent appropriate camouflage during the operation.
Inwardly, at least. Outwardly, officers don’t grumble about these little administrative mishaps, even if they’re of the sort likely to get them killed.
Private Carolinus had no such qualms. “Lieutenant, how are we expected to go on a mission at night with no faceblack?” he asked angrily, as if I had an explanation or a vat of the stuff hidden beneath my sleep roll. Carolinus was red haired and ruddy cheeked, a northern Rouender, one of that peculiar breed of men whose ancestors had invaded Vaal three centuries prior and never left. As squat and hard as the coal he had grown up mining, he was nearly as quick to complain as he was to go over the top. He had become, frankly, a constant source of annoyance, but with Adolphus invalided home he was the only man I thought capable of taking over if I caught a stray bolt. “Lieutenant, the Dren have eyes like owls. We’ll be porcupined for sure if we aren’t inked.”
I cinched tight the straps of my leather armor, making sure my weapons were in place and my trench blade hung loose at my side. “They aren’t expecting you to do anything, Private. I, however, am ordering you to shut that flapping cunt mouth of yours and gear up, because you’re going over the wall in a quarter hour whether you’re butt-fucking naked or covered in soot. And don’t worry about the enemy, from what I hear they only fire at men.”
The others laughed and even Carolinus smirked, but their humor was forced and so was mine. It wasn’t just the absence of faceblack—I hadn’t even known we were on until forty minutes earlier, when an aide to the company commander had roughly woken me from the first decent night’s sleep I’d had in a week, telling me to grab a crew of my finest and report to the major.
Truth was, none of it felt right. Donknacht the Unbowed was the capital of the Dren States, and for a millennium and a half it had stood free of foreign yoke. When the rest of the Dren provinces had been swallowed up by their neighbors, Donknacht alone had remained a free city. And when the surge of Dren nationalism seventy years past had unified these disparate states into one mighty confederacy, Donknacht had been the pivot around which the commonwealth had formed.
I couldn’t speak for the remaining provinces, but the soldiers facing us across a half mile of no-man’s-land died on suicide missions cursing our mothers. Their defenses wouldn’t be carried without a full-scale assault preceded by artillery and sorcery, and even then, it was likely to cost us half a division. This assumed the bastards didn’t fall back into the city and fight us for each house and street. Like everyone else, I was hoping the rumors of the armistice were true, and we would stop our long advance here, on the plains outside the capital. Either way, I was hard-pressed to see what five lone grunts were going to do to alter the situation, with or without faceblack.
I turned to Saavedra, our point man since a stray artillery shell had taken off the top of poor Donnely’s skull. His dark eyes and the stern set of his face betrayed his Asher ancestry, though why he had signed up as a member of our mixed unit instead of with the regiments of his own people none of us could say. Saavedra refused to discuss it, or much else for that matter, and the men of the First Capital Infantry were not the sort to look closely at a man’s papers, as long as he took his turn over the top. Despite his exile among us heathens, Saavedra hewed close to the standards of his race, taciturn and unreadable, the best card player in the regiment and a terror with a short sword besides. He’d have enough faceblack stashed somewhere to darken his own features, but sure as the single god of his people was a grim one, he wouldn’t have enough for two.
“Get the rest of them ready. I’m to see the major.” Saavedra nodded, silent as usual. I headed back toward the center of camp.
Our major, Cirellus Grenwald, was a fool and a coward but not an outright lunatic, and that alone placed him distinctly in the top half of the officer corps. If his primary talent consisted of being born at the top of a ladder, it was something at least that
he’d yet to fall from it. He was talking to a man in a leather coat with silver trim, whom I took for a civilian at first glance.
The major offered me an ingenuous smile that, more than any actual competence, had hastened his ascent through the ranks. “Lieutenant, I was just telling Third Sorcerer Adelweid here about you. Head of the fiercest platoon in the division. He’ll provide an impregnable defense for your … undertaking.”
Sorcerer Adelweid was pale faced, thin but with a wormy film of excess flesh. He had found the time to slip his raven black, shoulder-length hair into a jeweled clasp, an adornment which, along with his gilded belt buckle and silver cuff links, seemed singularly inappropriate to the situation at hand. I didn’t like him, and I liked less the discovery that my mission involved his protection. The Crane aside, I hated sorcerers—everyone in the force did and not just because they were showy and whiny and got their requisitions for arcane items filled in a hot minute while we scavenged for boot leather and millet. No, every grunt in the force hated sorcerers because, to a man and with vituperate language, each could tell of losing comrades when some spell-slinger got careless directing battle hexes and annihilated half a unit in a spray of blood and bone. The brass thought them great fun, of course, certain that each new scheme they proposed would be the secret weapon that would win us the war.
But it wouldn’t do to let this animus play across my face. I saluted the man crisply, an obeisance he returned apathetically and without comment. Major Grenwald continued, “Welcome to Operation Ingress, Lieutenant. Your orders are as follows. You and your men are to take Sorcerer Adelweid four hundred yards into no-man’s-land, halting at a place of his choosing, at which point the sorcerer will perform a working. You are to detail one man to protect him, then you and the remainder are to travel another two hundred yards toward Dren lines, where you will place this talisman”—he handed me a small black jewel—“on an overlook within sight of the enemy defenses. You are to hold that position until Sorcerer Adelweid has completed his part of the mission.”
Adding up the distances I came to the unfortunate sum of six hundred yards, closer to the Dren’s territory than to ours and well within the range of even short-distance patrols. Nor did it escape my notice that Grenwald had offered no estimate as to how long Adelweid would need to complete his task. Was it ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? For that matter, why did we all assume this slippery piece of black glass would even work? From what I had seen of the Art, it was just as likely to blow up in my hands.
I didn’t imagine I’d get answers, even if I was foolish enough to ask the questions. Instead, I snapped a hand at Grenwald, praying it wouldn’t be the last time I’d salute the vainglorious motherfucker, then turned to Adelweid. “Sir, our unit is grouped at the front trench. If you’ll follow me.”
He nodded vaguely toward the major, then fell in line behind me without comment. I took the opportunity to make one. “Sir, now might be a good time to remove any reflective gear you have. That hair clasp in particular will give away our position to any Dren sniper we run into.”
“Thank you for the suggestion, Lieutenant, but my garments will remain as they are.” His voice was every drop as oily as I expected, and he rubbed at the gleaming bangle possessively. “Our mission would be quite impossible to complete without it. Besides, I have no wish to return to camp victorious, only to discover that someone has made off with the cuff links given to me by the head of the Order of the Twisted Oak.”
Better than not coming back at all, I thought, and better than sacrificing me and my men to your bloated sense of vanity. Although he was right: someone would have stolen them.
By the time we reached the outskirts of camp, the men were in position, weapons at the ready, armor pulled tight. The six of us stood in a circle and I repeated our orders. It was clear they weren’t happy, not with the job and not with Adelweid, but they were professionals and kept quiet. When I was finished, I ordered a last equipment check and then we were up the ladders and alone in the wasteland between our camp and the Dren.
“From here on out, full light and noise restrictions are in effect.” I nodded to Saavedra, his face predictably soot colored. He shifted into a practiced stalk and fifteen seconds later I could barely make him out. Carolinus fell in behind him, and I followed with Adelweid a few steps ahead of me.
Behind me was our crossbowman, Milligan, a bright, decent-natured Tarasaihgn who could prick the Queen’s face on an ochre coin at a hundred paces. I wasn’t sure what good he would do us—it was pretty dark to be sending off bolts. He was calm in a melee at least, nothing special but steady and reliable.
Taking rear was Cilliers, a dour-faced Vaalan giant who smiled little and spoke less. He was about the only man in the company who hadn’t switched exclusively to a trench blade, still carrying a double-edged flamberge across his back, the weapon passed down from father to son since before his ancestors had sworn fealty to the Rigun Throne. His frame was too broad to make him much use for covert operations, but we’d be happy to have his sword if we needed to make a stand on open ground.
Years of fighting had turned the once lush landscape into a barren desert. Bombardments, artillery and magical, had destroyed most of the vegetation and all fauna of the non-rodent variety. Even the topography had been altered, explosives leveling hills and thrusting up piles of debris to replace them. Beyond any aesthetic concern, the devastation meant there was little cover to be found. Without faceblack, on a moonlit night we were easy prey for any patrol that came within fifty yards.
We needed to move quick and we needed to move quiet. Unsurprisingly, Adelweid was having difficulty with both of these, his gait more appropriate to a morning stroll than our clandestine mission. I winced every time the light caught on his silver and noticed Milligan doing the same. If one of us got bled because this idiot wouldn’t take his jewelry off, I didn’t think I could stop my men from friendly-firing him. I didn’t think I’d try.
After a quarter mile I leaned in close to Adelweid and whispered, “Four hundred yards. Let us know where to set up.”
He pointed to a low hill and responded in a voice that did little to maintain our stealth. “That will do nicely. Take me there, then deploy the talisman.”
I signaled to Saavedra, and we swung our line toward the mound. I’ll give this much for Adelweid, the bastard knew his craft. No sooner had we reached the top than he pulled a pack of arcane materials out of his bag and began drawing intricate symbols into the dirt with a short branch of black oak. His movements were sharp and natural, and I knew enough of the Art to appreciate that it wasn’t such an easy thing to draw a pentacle in the pitch-black, not when a mistake meant opening yourself up to forces that would fry your brain. In the midst of his work he turned to me. “Continue the mission, Lieutenant. I’ll take care of my end.”
“Private Carolinus—you’re on guard. If we aren’t back in three quarters of an hour, take the sorcerer and return to base.” Carolinus drew his trench blade and saluted. Saavedra went back to point, and the four of us who remained pushed onward into Dren territory.
Two hundred yards and we crested a small incline, its geometry too sharp to be anything but the result of an artillery shell. In the distance I could see the first line of the enemy trenches and the lights of their campfires beyond. Signaling to the men to form on me, I pulled the talisman from a pouch on my armor and dropped it in the dirt, feeling a bit foolish as I did so.
“That’s it?” whispered Milligan. “Just stand on a hill and leave a pebble in the middle of it?”
“Private, shut your mouth and keep your eyes open.” Milligan’s nerves were understandable—this was the part of the mission I had liked least, and I hadn’t been particularly crazy about any of it. On top of this ridge we were easy targets for any Dren patrol that wandered by, and they were a lot closer to reinforcements than we were.
In the dark, in those circumstances, every shadow hides a sniper and every glint of light reflects off steel, so I wasn’t
certain I saw anything until Milligan signaled down the line. We grabbed dust, hunkering beneath what little cover we could find. Twenty yards out from the base of our hill one of them noticed us and let out a cry of warning and I knew we were fucked.
Milligan sent off a bolt at the front man, but it went spinning off into the night, and then they were sprinting up the dune and we preparing to meet their charge. Saavedra took the first one and I took the second, and after that it was hard to concentrate on the general arc of the battle, my attention occupied by the particulars.
Mine was young, barely old enough to pleasure a woman, and I winced at his lack of skill. Five years of killing anyone in a gray uniform had overridden any natural aversion toward murdering a virtual child, and my only thought was to finish him quickly. A feint to his side and a counter of his awkward defense and he was down, blood spurting from a killing strike through his abdomen.
It was a good thing I dropped him because it wasn’t going all our way. Cilliers was showing one of the enemy the reason he had never abandoned his ancestral weapon, and Saavedra was his usual self, holding down a pair of Dren with a display of coldly efficient sword work. But Milligan was on his last legs, a squat Dren with a trench blade in one hand and a hatchet in the other steadily pushing him back toward the slope of the hill. I unstrapped a throwing knife and sent it sailing into the back of Milligan’s attacker, hoping it would be enough to even the odds. I didn’t have time to do more, as one of the men facing Saavedra disengaged and came toward me. I hefted my trench blade and drew the battle club that was swinging from my belt.
This one was better, good in fact, and I didn’t need to see the scar that separated his nose into two uneven masses of flesh to place him as a veteran of our conflict. He understood how to kill with a short blade, wary circling interrupted by the rapid exchange of blows, off hand poised to settle the business firmly. But this wasn’t my first tumble either, and my own weapon stayed close on his, and the spiked rod in my left hand waited for an opening.
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