Powder Mage Trilogy 01 - Promise of Blood

by Brian McClellan

  The arch-diocel puffed hard on his pipe.

  “It’s a common practice,” the eunuch said softly, his high-pitched voice nearly drowned out by the crash of the surf on the beach. “In my native land there’s a whole caste of eunuchs, created at birth, who serve the Gurlan magistrates. They serve in the harems and the magistrates’ courts and see to their every whim.” He eyed Lady Winceslav. “Every whim imaginable.”

  “Disgusting,” Lady Winceslav said, turning away.

  Tamas watched the whole exchange without a word. Sometimes the council seemed to amount to nothing more than children thrust together at a boarding school that has no thought for class or upbringing. They were a motley assortment. “This is all quite interesting,” he said, “but the ambassador is here. I’ll greet him myself. Alone. No doubt he’ll bring up the Accords before he’s even off the boat. I’m going to tell him to stuff them up his ass.”

  “I think he’d respond better to a lady’s charm,” Lady Winceslav said.

  “I bet you do,” the arch-diocel grunted. “I have nothing to say here. The Church is neutral on matters of war in the Nine.”

  “Your unwavering support brings tears to my eyes,” Tamas said. “The Kez will have demands. I prefer peace, if possible. The only question is how hard we sue for it. The Accords are out completely. I’ll not have them take this country from us. Ricard?”

  “War will bring trade on the Adsea to a crawl,” Ricard Tumblar said. “The union doesn’t like the idea. Then again, the factories will grind into full use, employing thousands for munitions, clothes, and canned foods. It’ll be a great boon to industry in Adopest. Between that and rebuilding the city, we may completely solve unemployment in Adopest.”

  “Start a war to improve the economy,” Tamas murmured. “If only it were so simple. Lady?”

  “My mercenaries are at your disposal.”

  Until Adro ran out of land for her officers, Tamas supposed.

  The eunuch shrugged. “My master has no opinion on war.”

  “Will he hold the gangs in check?” Tamas asked. “If Adopest goes to war only to tear itself apart, things will be over before they start.”

  The eunuch took a draw at his pipe. “The Proprietor will keep things… under control.”

  “Vice-Chancellor?” Tamas said.

  The old man looked wistfully off over the sea and trailed a finger across the spiderlike birthmark on his face. “There hasn’t been a real war among the Nine since the Bleakening. I hope for peace but…” He wiped a hand across his brow wearily. “Ipille is a greedy man. Do what must be done.”

  The reeve was the last to speak. Ondraus pocketed his ledger and removed the spectacles from his nose, folding them and putting them inside his coat. “It’ll cost us more to pay the Kez back what Manhouch borrowed than it will to run a war for two years. They can go to the pit.”

  Sabon burst out laughing. Ricard and the eunuch grinned. Tamas swallowed a chuckle himself and nodded at the reeve. “Thank you for your educated opinion, sir.”

  Tamas headed down the dock to greet the ambassador. He removed a powder charge from his pocket, gently unwrapped it, and sprinkled a bit on his tongue. He felt the sizzle of power, the surge of awareness that came with a powder trance, closing his eyes as he walked, one foot in front of the other, the dock boards creaking underneath him. He opened his eyes twenty paces from the boat.

  A small delegation disembarked. Wardens scrambled up to the dock and then turned to help noblemen up, their sorcery-warped muscles moving like thick snakes beneath their coats. The Wardens were all big men, some nearly two heads taller than Tamas and each one worth ten soldiers in a battle. Tamas shuddered.

  He wouldn’t let himself be threatened. Whatever the Kez said in the coming negotiations, he needed to keep a level head. They would menace and insult and he would take it in stride. War was not the best course here. He would sue for peace, but not at the cost of his country.

  One by one the delegation climbed onto the dock. There were a number of them, all dressed in the finery of the nobility. He caught sight of a white Privileged’s glove as it reached up and took the hand of a Warden. Only one sorcerer, his third eye told him. Tamas took a deep breath, reaching out with his senses. This Privileged was not a powerful one, though such a thing was relative when speaking of men who could destroy buildings with a gesture.

  The Privileged stepped up onto the dock and straightened his jacket. He laughed at something one of his delegation said and headed toward Tamas, alone.

  Tamas gripped his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking. He felt his heart thunder in his ears, his vision grow red in the corner of his eyes. He shrugged Sabon’s hand from his shoulder.

  Nikslaus.

  Duke Nikslaus was a small man, with the delicate hands of a Privileged and an overly large head that looked to wobble on his small frame. He wore a short, furred cap and a black, buttonless coat. His stopped a foot from Tamas and extended one hand, a smirk at the corners of his mouth.

  “It’s been so long, Tamas,” he said.

  Tamas’s fingers tightened around the duke’s throat before he could even think. Nikslaus’s eyes bulged, his mouth opening silently. Tamas lifted him, one-handed, from the dock planks. Nikslaus raised his hands, plucking at the air. Tamas slapped them away before sorcery could be unleashed. He was vaguely aware of Wardens running toward him, of his own bodyguard approaching hastily from behind, and of the cocking sound of Sabon’s pistol. He shook Nikslaus hard.

  “Is this what Ipille sends to negotiate?” Tamas demanded. “Is this their white flag? I told you if you ever stepped foot in my country again, I would nail you to the spire of Sabletooth by your hands.”

  “War,” Nikslaus wheezed.

  Tamas lightened his grip.

  Nikslaus gasped. “You risk war!”

  “You dare come here?” Tamas said. “Ipille has declared war. He sent his snake.” He threw Nikslaus to the dock. The duke squirmed along the planks, crawling backward, his hands working silently. Tamas pointed at him. “You try one thing and my Marked will gun you down.”

  “How dare you?” Nikslaus said. “This was in good faith!”

  “Eat your good faith, worm! Get out of my country. Tell Ipille to wipe his ass with the Accords.”

  “This is war!” Nikslaus shrieked.

  “War!” Tamas pulled a handful of powder charges from his pocket, crushing them in his hand. He ignited the powder as it fell, directed the energy. The dock boards beneath Nikslaus exploded upward, throwing the duke into the air and head over heels into the water. The Wardens leapt in after him, and Tamas spun around, ignoring Nikslaus’s sputtering cries for help.

  “What the pit was that?” the arch-diocel demanded.

  Tamas stiff-armed him, throwing him to the ground. The rest of the council stood aghast. He felt their stares on his back as he made his way up the beach to the lighthouse. His ears, tuned from the powder trance, picked up Sabon’s voice.

  “Go easy on him,” Sabon told the council. “That was the man who beheaded his wife.”

  Adamat pounded on the front doors of the Public Archives for twenty minutes until he heard the sound of bolts being drawn back. One of the big doors opened and the lantern-lit face of a young woman stared back at him.

  “Library’s closed.” The door began to shut.

  Adamat put his foot in the door.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” the woman said.

  “I need access to the Archives.”

  “Too bad. We’re closed.” She pushed the door open a little farther and then jerked back until it crunched on Adamat’s foot.

  “Ow. SouSmith, if you please.”

  SouSmith leaned against the door. The woman stumbled backward, lantern swinging.

  “I’ll call the guards!” she said as Adamat stepped inside. He motioned SouSmith in and closed the door.

  “Don’t bother,” Adamat said. “I’ve got a writ from Field Marshal Tamas.” He d
idn’t, but she didn’t know that. “I only need to do some research and I’ll be gone before you open in the morning.”

  “A writ? Let me see it.”

  Not for the first time in his investigation, Adamat felt a keen sense of loss that he’d had to send Faye away. She had many friends and would have gotten him into the Archives no matter the hour. Instead he was reduced to bullying his way in.

  Adamat peered at the woman. She was not what most people expected in a librarian. Her hair was down, curly and gold, and she was very young. Almost too young. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “Who are you?” he asked.

  She drew herself up like one who was used to having to justify her authority. “The night librarian! I tend the shelves and carry out research.”

  “Yes, well, miss, do you understand where the funding comes from for the Public Archives?”

  “The king… oh. Grants from the nobili—oh.”

  “And do you think Field Marshal Tamas will be pleased about one of his agents being turned away from research on which may rest the safety of the state? Do you think he’ll stand up for funding for the Public Archives when his agent was so poorly treated? Funding that may end up going to another library, say, to the Adopest University Library, which I know for a fact I’d have access to right now except that it’s very far out of my way.”

  Employees given the night shift were often easily talked around. They tended not to be too bright. This one followed Adamat’s every word. He could tell by her eyes. He was just lucky the argument made some sense.

  “All right,” she said. “But only for a few minutes.”

  Adamat followed her into the archives. A few lanterns hung from the walls—but only enough to just light the way. Fire hazards were taken very seriously in libraries. He paused when they reached the tables.

  “You said you tend the shelves?”

  “That is one of the functions of a librarian.”

  “So you put away the books?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember a pile of books on that table that was here about ten days ago? The books would have been left out after Tamas retook the library from the royalists.”

  She rounded on him fast enough to make him take a step back.

  “Those books were vandalized,” she said, waving a finger under his nose. “Did you do that?”

  He heard a snort of laughter from SouSmith. “No,” Adamat said with a sigh. “This is very important. Where are they?”

  She didn’t drop her glare for a good thirty seconds. “This way,” she said primly. “They’ve been taken to repair.”

  He followed her into the back rooms of the library where a repair bench had been set up in one corner. The bench was well worn, the wood polished from countless hours under a librarian’s behind. Stacks of broken and old books lay all around the bench ready to have covers or spines mended. Adamat recognized the books that Rozalia had been reading, all stacked neatly near the end of the piles. Adamat sat on the bench and picked the first one up.

  When it became clear he wouldn’t actually be “only a moment,” the librarian reluctantly left him to his own devices. He sped through the paragraphs, though even with a perfect memory, reading was more than just glancing at the page. It was only when the room was just beginning to receive light that wasn’t from the lantern, and he was on the fifth book, that he was satisfied. He gathered three of them into his arms and woke SouSmith.

  “We’ve got to see Tamas,” Adamat said.

  The Public Archives were only a twenty-minute walk from the House of Nobles. Adamat was amazed as he went through the center of the city. Rubble had been cleared from the main thoroughfares, buildings damaged by the quake had been pulled down, and preparations for rebuilding were under way. The newspaper said that the Noble Warriors of Labor had employed fifty thousand men and women to help with the reconstruction efforts.

  Adamat was ushered in to see the field marshal almost immediately. When they reached the top floor, Adamat was almost bowled over at the door. A young woman with dark hair and a powder mage’s keg pin on her breast shoved past him. Her mouth was set in a hard line, her face red from yelling. Inside, the room was filled with people who looked like they wanted to be elsewhere. Adamat recognized two of Tamas’s councillors—the city reeve and the vice-chancellor. Two men and a woman were brigadiers of the Wings of Adom. A half-dozen Adran soldiers sat around a table to one side, their ranks denoting captain or above.

  Field Marshal Tamas sat behind the desk, his head in his hands. He looked up when Adamat entered. He looked like he’d just been shouting at someone.

  “You have a report for me?” he asked in a surprisingly calm voice.

  “Yes.” He hefted the books in his arms. “And more.”

  Tamas jerked his head toward the balcony. “Forgive me a moment,” he told his officers.

  Outside, the sun was shining. The breeze made Adamat wish he’d worn a thicker jacket. It was windier up here than at street level.

  “What do you have for me?”

  Adamat set the books aside. “Kresimir’s Promise.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve just returned from the South Pike Mountainwatch. There I interviewed Privileged Borbador, the last remaining Privileged of Manhouch’s royal cabal.”

  “Formerly of the royal cabal,” Tamas said. “He was exiled. Otherwise he’d be buried in an unmarked grave with the rest.”

  Adamat grimaced. “We’ll get to that in a moment. When I mentioned the Promise, Bo laughed at me. It’s an old legend, passed down among members of the royal cabal. It says that Kresimir promised the original kings of the Nine that their progeny would rule forever. If their lines were cut off, he would return himself and take vengeance.”

  “A fairy story meant to scare children,” Tamas said.

  “Bo said the same thing. The legend was perpetuated by the kings in order to keep the royal cabals in line. Their fear was that as soon as Kresimir left, the Privileged would seize power themselves.”

  “I don’t see how it could be true. What educated man would take that seriously?”

  “Apparently the older members of the royal cabal.”

  Tamas grunted at this.

  “It did get me thinking,” Adamat said. “Bo made a vague reference to the notion that the kings had other ways to keep the royal cabals in line—something that would make Kresimir’s Promise unnecessary.”

  This piqued Tamas’s interest. “Go on.”

  Adamat picked up one of the books. He found a page he’d marked, and handed it to Tamas. When Tamas had finished reading, Adamat had another passage in a different book for him, then another in the third.

  Tamas handed the last book back, his face troubled.

  “A gaes,” he said.

  “A compelling, of sorts. Every Royal Privileged has it. If the king is killed, they are compelled to avenge him. It gets stronger and stronger over time until they either succeed or it kills them out-right. The gaes is manifested by a demon’s carbuncle—a large gem worn on the Privileged’s person that they cannot take off. When I spoke with Bo, I saw him fiddling at a necklace repeatedly. And this.” He flipped to a different page in the third book and handed it to Tamas.

  Tamas scowled as he read. When he’d finished, he flipped the book shut and handed it back to Adamat. “So the gaes is permanent. Nothing can remove it, not even being exiled or removed from the royal cabal.”

  “Indeed. One other thing,” Adamat said. He quickly explained his run-in with Rozalia and the message she’d sent to Bo. “As soon as he heard that message, he bolted back into the Mountainwatch. When I went to find him to ask him what it meant, he refused to see me. I saw him head out of the north gate of South Pike an hour later.”

  “The north gate…?” Tamas said.

  “The mountain gate. The one pilgrims use to reach the South Pike’s peak, where Kresimir first set foot on the mountain. It’s the only route up there.”

  Tamas leaned
against the balcony railing and looked up toward the sun. “What do you think of all this?”

  Adamat had thought hard on this question the entire five-day journey back from South Pike. “I’m a reasonable man, sir. A modern man. While the last words of sorcerers give me the chills, there’s no going around it. The whole thing is rubbish. It smacks of religion. There’s a reason the royal cabals distanced themselves from the Kresim Church five hundred years ago.”

  “I agree,” Tamas said. “And this thing with the gaes?”

  “There’s religion and then there’s sorcery. I confirmed this with secondary sources,” Adamat said, gesturing to the stack of books. “Sorcery is deadly serious.”

  “Looks like I can’t spare Borbador after all.” Pain crossed Tamas’s face quickly enough that Adamat thought he’d imagined it. Tamas gave him a look up and down. “You’ve done a commendable job,” he said, offering his hand. “You went above and beyond what I asked.”

  “I’m sorry it came to nothing,” Adamat said, shaking the field marshal’s hand.

  “No need to be sorry about it. Better to know it’s nothing than to not know it’s something. See the reeve about payment. I’ll make sure he’s not stingy. Good day.”

  Taniel jerked awake, a pistol in his hand. He struggled to focus on the figure looming above him.

  “You’re going to blow a foot off sleeping with that.”

  Taniel sagged back to his bed and dropped the pistol on the floor.

  “What do you want?”

  Tamas pulled the only chair over and sat down, kicking his boots up on the edge of Taniel’s bed. “That’s no way to talk to your father.”

  “Go to the pit.”

  There were a few moments of silence. Taniel could barely think. He’d tried not taking powder last night. He’d lasted until about two in the morning before he went looking for his powder horn. Ka-poel had hidden it, along with his snuffbox full of powder and all his spare charges. His pistol wasn’t even loaded. Savage bitch. He’d just barely fallen asleep.