Sins of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  “Well,” Olem said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He had his own memories from the war, his own ghosts—many of them the same as hers. “I don’t think Mama Palo is a god. She’s clever, though. Stirs up huge amounts of trouble without ever provoking an outright battle with the Blackhats. The Palo worship her, the Blackhats despise her, and the rest of Fatrasta just hopes to stay out of the way when she and Lindet finally come to blows.”

  Vlora forced a chuckle. “Is Lindet pissed someone is challenging her for queen of Fatrasta?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I’ve no interest in a queendom,” Vlora said, dismissing the thought with a wave. “This Mama Palo … is she really that big of a threat?”

  “I won’t know for sure until I get my intelligence network set up.” Olem held up a hand, signaling a passing waiter, and ordered coffee. He frowned at the dark night sky. “Nobody can challenge Lindet outright. It’s not a winnable fight. But it looks like Mama Palo has no intention of fighting Lindet—simply annoying her to the point of giving up.”

  “Giving up what, though?” Vlora asked. “What does Mama Palo want?”

  “Palo rights?” Olem speculated. “Palo independence? Land, money? What does anyone want?”

  Vlora pointed at Olem’s chest. “Find out. It sounds like the Blackhats want us to go through Greenfire Depths kicking down doors until we find her, but you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If we can find out Mama Palo’s goals we might be able to track her down.” She ticked through half-formed plans in her head, examining each one briefly before discarding it—or storing it away for further consideration later.

  “You see this guy watching us?” Olem asked, lifting his chin.

  Vlora took Olem’s coffee from the waiter, handing it across, before following Olem’s gaze. She spotted the man quickly. He stood on the other side of the café, just inside the small partition between the coffeehouse and the boardwalk. He was big—no, enormous—with thick, broad shoulders and a bent back, his head held forward like a man used to hiding his height and still over six and a half feet tall. His left cheek had an old, pitted scar and his hair was gray, his jaw large and firm.

  He wore a shirt and trousers that were slightly too small for him, and an old Fatrastan cavalry jacket slightly too big. His only weapon was hooked to his belt—a boz knife longer than Vlora’s arm.

  He stared openly at her and Olem, only pulling his gaze away to take a coffee and newspaper from a waiter, before heading in their direction.

  Vlora tensed, not sure what to expect. She was a powder mage, faster and stronger than any four people in this café, but everything about the man, from his scars and limp to the casual way people moved out of his way as he walked through the crowded café, spoke of imminent violence. She found her heart beating a little faster.

  Olem shifted in his chair, spreading his legs so that his pistol could be drawn easily. “I saw him down at the keelboat landing earlier today. I thought he was watching us, but I wasn’t sure until now.”

  “Adom,” Vlora breathed, “look at the size of that knife.” She brushed her hand across the hilt of her sword.

  The man slowed as he approached them, looking around with a frown, before reaching over to an occupied table and gently removing the coffee cup and handing it to the startled owner. “Pardon me,” he said in a deep, quiet voice, dragging the table over between the three of them, then appropriating an empty chair and dropping into it, tucking his newspaper into one pocket.

  He looked around as if he had misplaced something, then tilted his head back, calling over his shoulder, “Celine!”

  A little girl detached herself from the café crowd, running between tables and chairs to join them. Without a word, he scooped her up and put her in his lap. His knee bounced her absently, and the girl laid her head on the big man’s chest. It was a strange image, like a lamb curling up next to a bear. Vlora found the girl almost as interesting as the man—she was dressed as a boy, a shifty, watchful look in her eye that Vlora had seen in every mirror when she was that age. She was an orphan; a street child.

  Vlora removed her hand from the hilt of her sword, but remained watchful. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Good evening,” the big man said. “My name is Styke. I’m looking for a job.”

  Vlora glanced at Olem, who seemed more than a little bemused by the whole situation. “I’m not entirely sure you’re in the right place,” Vlora said.

  “You’re General Vlora Flint,” Styke said, nodding at her and then Olem. “You’re Colonel Olem. You run the Riflejack Mercenary Company. I’m looking for mercenary work. Seems like the right place.”

  Vlora’s first reaction was annoyance. Barely five minutes into a pleasant evening with Olem, and this brute had come out of the woodwork to interrupt it. Her second inclination was suspicion—if he really wanted a job, why hadn’t he approached them down at the keelboat landing?

  “Styke, you said?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “If you’d like, Styke, I can give you the name of my quartermaster. Meet with him tomorrow and see if you’re a good fit for the company. We are hiring a few more men. But I’ll warn you, mercenary work isn’t kind to a cripple.”

  A torrent of emotions flew across Styke’s face, from confusion, to hurt, to anger, to rage, all in the course of a few seconds. Vlora would have been impressed if she wasn’t so busy making a mental check that her pistol was loaded. Styke shifted in his chair, the wicker creaking dangerously, and straightened his jacket as he visibly regained control of himself, squeezing the girl gently as he did. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but my name’s Benjamin Styke, and I’m looking for a job.”

  Vlora stuck her chin out. If this was a Palo or Blackhat plot of some kind, it was daft as pit. “Is that supposed to mean anything to me?” she asked.

  Styke frowned at her, his eyes hard, as if the scowl would jog her memory, then he suddenly sagged. “Been too long,” he muttered. “Maybe it doesn’t.”

  The girl, Celine, fidgeted in Styke’s lap and scowled at Vlora. “Ben’s a killer,” she declared. Styke shushed her gently.

  “I’m sure,” Vlora said. “Look. I don’t think the Riflejacks will be a good fit for you. You look like you can handle yourself in a scrap, but we’re real soldiers, not …” She trailed off, a light going on in the back of her head at the same time Olem touched her arm. “Ben Styke. Why do I know that name?”

  Styke perked up, but before he could answer Olem said quietly, “Taniel’s letters.” He leaned across the table, peering up into Styke’s face, showing the type of interest that he normally reserved for a brand-new pack of tobacco. “You’re Mad Ben Styke?” he asked.

  “I am,” Styke said.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Most do,” Styke replied.

  Vlora noted that Olem wasn’t just attentive. He was very interested, like he’d just noticed a half-price sign on a beat-up supply wagon. “You were watching us down at the keelboat landing earlier. Why?”

  Styke seemed taken aback. “Was just down at the market and saw you landing. Heard you were the best mercenary company on the continent and I recently became … unemployed. So I thought it was fortuitous.”

  Vlora spent Olem and Styke’s short exchange searching her memories, looking for the name Ben Styke. Taniel’s letters talked a lot about the people he’d met during his time fighting in the Fatrastan Revolution. She grasped on to one memory in particular, a letter regarding a battle in which Taniel had met a giant of a man, a lancer wearing enchanted medieval armor, who’d ridden into a torrent of enemy grapeshot, musket fire, and sorcery to save the battle and somehow come out on the other side.

  His admiring descriptions of Ben Styke had seemed a silly fancy. Until now.

  “You knew Taniel Two-shot?”

  Styke raised his eyebrows, seeming pleased. “I fought beside him once,” he said. “Pit of a fighter. He mentioned me?”

&nb
sp; “Gushed about you, more like,” Vlora said. She leaned back, reconsidering everything that had gone through her head the last few minutes. This wasn’t just some big cripple looking for an excuse for rape and pillage. This was Mad Ben Styke, one of the heroes of the Fatrastan Revolution. Celine was right. He was a killer. “You still a lancer?” she asked, eyeing the leg he favored with his limp.

  “No,” Styke said, his face hardening. “They killed my horse after the war. Took my armor. And then all this, and …” He drifted off, averting his eyes.

  There was a story behind that gaze, and Vlora felt the urge to ask him about it. But there were some wounds you could ask an old soldier about and others you had to wait for him to tell. She wanted to offer him a job here and now, but she couldn’t for the life of her think of what to do with him. He was in no shape to hold a line, probably not even ride a horse.

  She glanced at Olem, hoping for some levelheaded advice, but Olem was still staring at Styke like a starstruck boy. “Did you really ride down a Privileged at the Battle of Landfall?” Olem asked.

  “Put my lance through his eye,” Styke said, prodding a finger at his own face. “Nothing better than watching a Privileged die. They always have the stupidest looks on their faces, like how dare I murder him before he could murder me.”

  Olem slapped his knee, guffawing, rocking back in his chair, and took one of his pre-rolled cigarettes from his pocket, offering it to Styke.

  So much for levelheaded advice.

  “You know they’ve written books about you?” Olem asked.

  Styke snorted. “Probably a bunch of bullshit.”

  “We’re soldiers,” Olem said. “It’s always a bunch of bullshit. Except when it’s not.” He turned to Vlora, with a face like a child asking to keep the puppy he’d just brought in off the street. “I’ll give him a job if you don’t,” he said.

  “We run the same bloody company,” Vlora said.

  “Pit,” Olem said, “I’ll put him on retainer just to sit around and tell war stories. The boys would love that.”

  Vlora glanced at Styke out of the corner of her eye. His face had soured at the mention of war stories, and he said in a pained voice, “I’d rather be a little more useful than that.”

  Vlora jerked her head at Olem, pulling him away from the table, and said quietly, “What the pit are we going to do with a big cripple? Even if he can fight, our boys are infantrymen. A guy like that is a brawler. No use putting him in a line.”

  “We can make use of him,” Olem said. “Didn’t you say earlier we needed some locals to do some dirty work?”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “I’m pretty sure you did,” Olem insisted.

  Vlora sighed. Did she have a bad feeling about this Styke, or was she just avoiding saying yes because Olem was so insistent? “If you can figure out something to do with him, then we can …” Vlora stopped, holding up her finger, and looked at Styke. “You’ve been around a while?” she asked.

  Styke nodded.

  “Do you know anything about the Palo?”

  “Probably a little more than the average veteran,” Styke said. “A lot of them were our allies during the war. Before all this.” He gestured at the city around them.

  “Do you speak their language?”

  “I’m a little rusty,” Styke said. “But yes. I can write it, too, in a pinch.”

  “Useful,” Olem observed, a little too eagerly.

  Vlora shot him a look to be quiet. “All right, Ben Styke,” she said. “I’ve got a task for you. It might sound stupid but if you can dig me up an answer you’ve got yourself a job.”

  The relief was plain on Styke’s face. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know anything about a Palo warrior wearing swamp dragon armor and fighting with bone axes?”

  Styke leaned back in his chair, regarding his coffee for the first time and downing it in a single gulp before wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He snapped his fingers, ordered another coffee and some spiced chocolate for Celine, then looked at a point of empty air between Vlora and Olem, considering. “Stories,” he said.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Sounds like a dragonman—Palo warriors descended from the Dynize emperors that used to rule these lands. The Kez wiped them out sixty or seventy years ago for being such a nuisance, and they haven’t been seen since. They were a fairy tale when I was a kid. ‘Eat your soup or the dragonmen will take you to the swamp.’ That kind of thing.”

  Vlora felt the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. She knew all about old stories and fairy tales, and just how true they could end up being. “One of them inflicted almost forty casualties on my men at Fort Samnan,” she said. “We killed him in the end, but I’ve never seen anything like that short of a powder mage or a Privileged.”

  Styke ran a hand through his short, gray hair. “Pit,” he swore gently. “I didn’t think they still existed.”

  “Yeah, well it sounds like they do.” Vlora spat. The last thing she wanted was old fairy tales coming to life before she could finish her contracts and get out of this damned country. “I want to know if there are any more of them hanging out in the city. We’re about to piss off the entire Palo population of Landfall and I’d rather not have more of these blasted dragonmen show up after we do it.”

  “I can take a look,” Styke said. He took his new coffee and spiced chocolate from the waiter, offering the latter to Celine, but the girl had fallen asleep. Vlora resisted the urge to shake her head at the sight. A bloody lamb and a lion.

  She reached across the table, offering Styke her hand. “Welcome to the Riflejacks, Ben Styke. I look forward to seeing what you can do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Michel waited outside the office of Captain Blasdell—the head of the public side of his investigation—his pocket watch ticking away the minutes, and made a mental note that he needed to call upon a handyman. The cracks in his mother’s roof needed to be patched, as well as the chair fixed. He considered the fact that he’d been given an unlimited budget to find the Iron Roses and wondered if anyone was actually going to check his budget expenditures on the case, or if he could get away with paying the fixer with Blackhat money.

  “Jes called me expendable. An investigation shouldn’t need an expendable investigator,” he said to himself quietly as he watched Captain Blasdell’s door.

  He answered with a cynical voice. “He did threaten to kill you if you fail.”

  “He did not.”

  “The man murders people for a morning workout, and those final words were awfully ominous.”

  “The Blackhats don’t waste resources, and a Silver Rose like me is a resource. We’re all in this shit together.”

  “Maybe you’re expendable because he expects this to be dangerous.” Michel forestalled replying to himself, considering the implications. Investigations could be dangerous. Someone willing to impersonate a Blackhat had to know the risks involved. Once they were found they would be tortured and executed, their friends and family sent to the labor camps. If they were willing to chance that, then they’d be willing to resort to violence.

  “Or,” he considered out loud, “expendable means that he could bury my career if this goes wrong for some reason.” He couldn’t foresee a way of this going wrong, but Michel readily admitted that Fidelis Jes was a smarter man than he. One didn’t run the Landfall Secret Police without being able to see many possibilities for the future of every decision.

  Michel took a deep breath. No need to waste his energy on worrying. He needed to focus on the task at hand, and to do so he needed to talk with Captain Blasdell.

  The thought had barely entered his head when the door to Captain Blasdell’s office opened. Blasdell was a thin woman in her forties, with a thoughtful, narrow face and a pair of armless spectacles balanced on the brim of her nose. A former police captain, she’d been brought into the Blackhats to help impose some sort of organization on their investigations. She was te
chnically a Silver Rose, but everyone treated her like a Gold. She was the type of person Michel had heard referred to as the backbone of the Blackhats: incorruptible, unambitious, and competent.

  She would never be promoted, yet never lose her rank. She was, in a few words, not going anywhere.

  “You’re Michel Bravis?” she asked, ushering him into her office.

  “I am, ma’am. Thanks for seeing me.” Michel had met the captain on several occasions but wasn’t surprised that she didn’t remember him. There were a lot of Blackhats, after all, and he was very good at blending into crowds. He could thank his late father for a face so plain most people forgot it within minutes.

  “I didn’t have much choice.” Blasdell took a seat behind her desk and gestured to a few crates stacked on the corner. “Orders came straight from the grand master’s office. I understand you are to have access to any information regarding my case.”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  Blasdell drummed her fingers on the desk, fixing him with a look that said she would not be handing over information willingly. “Why?”

  “I think that’s classified, ma’am.” Michel had no idea how much Blasdell had been told, and frankly he didn’t want to have to explain everything to her.

  “You think?”

  “Pretty sure. All that matters is I need any information you’ve dug up in the last couple of days.”

  Blasdell leaned back, putting her boots up on her desk, the put-off look remaining fixed on her face. “The case is a farce,” she said. “I’ve only got a skeleton crew working it, and in a few days we’re going to trot out a scapegoat and put the whole thing to bed. Why do you need our information?”

  Blasdell had an odd relationship with the Blackhats. She was one of them, and well regarded within the Millinery, but she never seemed to actually trust the people she worked with. Rumor had it Fidelis Jes found it amusing, but also that it made her difficult to work with. Michel didn’t have time to deal with her mistrust. “Because, ma’am, the grand master is letting you do your job up until the scapegoat comes into play. Knowing your reputation, the skeleton crew has been working around the clock to come up with leads in the hope you’ll solve this before Fidelis Jes makes the whole thing go away. Am I correct?”