Sins of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  “They should have run forever ago!” a nearby major shouted above the din, his looking glass focused on the point of the bay. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Why won’t they break?”

  Vlora shook her head and reloaded her rifle as a messenger reached the top of the fort wall and sprinted straight toward her.

  “What news from Olem?” Vlora asked.

  The messenger was pale, and for a moment Vlora feared the worst. But he gasped for breath and then said quickly, “I’m not sure about the colonel, ma’am. I just came from the capitol building!”

  “Good! Where’s our damned supplies and reinforcements?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the pit is that supposed to mean?” Vlora asked, snatching him by the collar of his jacket. “Where’s the Blackhats Lindet promised me?”

  “There’s no one!”

  Vlora released her grip, staggering back, and the messenger continued. “I’ve looked everywhere. The capitol building is all but abandoned, and I haven’t seen a single Blackhat except from a distance. It’s like they were never even there.”

  Vlora blinked in disbelief, feeling shell-shocked. Cannons roared around her, sorcery sputtering above the fort, her nostrils so thick with powder smoke that she thought the trance might overwhelm her. But none of that affected her like this news. Lindet had run. She’d sent Vlora down here to fight the Dynize, and she’d fled without so much as a warning.

  “We’ve been betrayed,” she whispered.

  “What was that, ma’am?”

  She grabbed the messenger by the shirt again, pulling him close to shout in his ear. “Colonel Olem is on the point of the bay. Tell him Lindet has betrayed us and the Blackhats won’t be providing relief.” She looked over the wall, seeing longboats rounding the breakers just a few hundred yards away. They’d reach the fort within minutes, or land and flank Olem.

  “What do we do?” the messenger asked, a note of panic in his voice.

  Vlora pushed him back, hating herself for fighting the urge to order a retreat. This wasn’t her fight. These weren’t her people or her city. “We do what we’ve been paid to do. We protect the city. Tell Olem … Tell him to hold the point of the bay.”

  CHAPTER 59

  The Mad Lancers hit the Dynize infantry from behind with enough force to break even the strongest-willed soldiers, but the bastards refused to run. They remained locked in combat with the garrison, faces flat in steely determination while Styke and his cavalry rode up and down the length of the battle, grinding the Dynize to a pulp beneath hoof, lance, and saber until the garrison—which had looked on the verge of retreat—finally found their spines and finished off the outnumbered Dynize.

  A cheer went up among the garrison as Styke re-formed the Riflejacks and lancers and rode through a gap in the Fatrastan lines. He reined in by the highest-ranking officer he could find—a lieutenant—and took a grim assessment of the garrison.

  They’d almost been shattered by half their number of Dynize. Men had fallen out of rank, broken their weapons, and some had even fled only to now come crawling back sheepishly while everyone pretended they’d never left. The lieutenant snapped a salute. “Timely charge, sir!”

  “You’re not getting another one,” Styke warned. “We’re heading to the city. I lost hundreds of dragoons clearing that beach but more Dynize are on their way. I’ll try to get Flint to send you help.”

  “We already requested more men,” the lieutenant said.

  “Right. Form up right and quick, and pull your wounded back behind the line.” Styke gestured to the edge of the suburbs, some half mile behind them. “Pull back behind the marsh dikes and make it harder for them to reach you. The assholes don’t have very good bayonets but that armor stops the better part of a good volley and they fight like sin up close.”

  “It’s, ah, pretty terrifying, sir. The bastards wouldn’t break, no matter how good we gave it to them.”

  “Nothing’s more terrifying than death,” Styke replied. “Make them pay for every step, and I’ll make sure Flint sends you more men.”

  He peeled off, joining his cavalry on their ride toward the city. Styke felt his exhaustion dragging at him and could see it in the eyes of his lancers. After two quick, bloody engagements they were sagging, already used up from a full day’s ride. They needed rest, and lots of it.

  They weren’t going to get it.

  “Your lance is broken,” Ibana said, slowing down to ride beside him.

  Styke blinked at the shattered, bloody lance that ended just a few feet from his hand. He discarded it and leaned over Amrec, checking the horse’s neck and chest for any damage. There were half a dozen nicks and cuts, but nothing major enough to cause concern. He gestured to Amrec’s underbelly. “Legs?” he asked.

  Ibana shook her head. “Good as gold.”

  He ran his eyes over her mount. “Deep cut on the left flank. Will need stitches. Where’s Jackal?”

  “Appropriating a horse from one of our fallen,” she said. “His broke a leg and had to be put down.”

  Styke cringed. The death of men rarely bothered him, but the loss of a good horse always struck him as a tragedy. He turned Amrec around, standing in the stirrups, hoping the garrison looked in better shape from behind. They didn’t.

  “Another attack like that one and they’ll break,” Ibana observed, shaking gore from the tip of her lance and raising it above her head.

  Styke couldn’t help but agree. The garrison was slowly pulling itself together and drawing back in the lancers’ wake toward the marsh trenches as he’d suggested. Styke dragged a sleeve over his nose, trying to get the smell of powder and death out of his nostrils so he could breathe properly. That strange hint of sorcery was still there, touching his senses, but not quite comprehensible. “I smell something,” he said.

  Ibana frowned. “Sorcery?”

  “I don’t know. It’s there, just nothing I can identify. It feels like it’s in us, around us.”

  “Bone-eye?” Ibana asked.

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Styke. “The Dynize are known for the bastards, aren’t they?”

  “And we have no idea what they’re capable of.”

  Styke thought back to his encounter, real or imagined, with Ka-poel yesterday afternoon, and the blood that had disappeared from his face. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he now felt distinctly marked. He tried not to think about it and drew his heavy saber, checking the blade with his thumb.

  “Don’t insult me like that,” Ibana snapped. “I sharpened it myself.”

  “Just checking!” Styke assured her. “One of yours?”

  “Dad’s actually. He still makes a common blade from time to time, just to keep his edge.”

  “Is he …?” Styke asked, letting the rest of the sentence waver off in uncertainty.

  Ibana didn’t meet his eyes. “When we left yesterday he was recovering. The Privileged healing almost killed him.” She frowned into the distance. “Is that smoke over Greenfire Depths?”

  Styke’s whole attention had been on the coast until this point. He looked toward the plateau and was surprised to see thick black columns rising above the western half of the city. He felt his stomach clench. If Greenfire Depths went up in flame, they might lose the entire Palo quarter. Not that many Kressians would care, but that’s where Old Man Fles was now. “I’m sure his apprentices will get him out,” he said softly.

  “I know they will,” Ibana retorted. She checked the pan of her carbine and then began to reload. “The last thing anyone needs is a riot in Greenfire Depths while we’re under attack.”

  “If the fighting just started a couple of hours ago, does anyone in the Depths even know?” Styke wondered aloud. He couldn’t help but wonder how Lindet was dealing with all of this—she thrived under multiple pressures, and she had a lot of Blackhats in the city. She would probably draw them in close and use them only as a last resort. If the Dynize reached the suburbs the brutality of the fighting w
ould make these engagements look like light skirmishes.

  Styke pulled himself out of his thoughts and joined the vanguard, where he found Jackal now riding a blue roan beside a bloody-faced Major Gustar. The lance holding the Mad Lancers’ standard had been broken, then mended with a belt, and now flew just a little lower and more crooked.

  Somehow it seemed fitting.

  “Orders, Colonel?” Gustar asked, trying to salute but only managing to bring his hand halfway to his face.

  Styke admired the man’s dedication but didn’t show an ounce of pity. These Riflejacks were no Mad Lancers, but they definitely had guts. “Hug the coast. We’ve got flatland between here and the port, and the garrison’s going to have their hands full with Dynize troops. We’ll sweep the beach and report to Lady Flint for orders.”

  “Taking orders now, are we?” Ibana asked in a low, only slightly sarcastic voice. “Either you’re getting old, or you actually think Flint has judgment worth a damn.”

  “Both,” Styke replied. “But we’ll find out for sure if we’re still alive at the end of this.” He cast his eyes around once again at the tired faces, the worn-out horses, and stood up in his stirrups, raising his saber into the air. “Ride for blood!” he ordered.

  A fireball struck the ground with the force of a mortar shot just a dozen feet in front of Styke. Amrec went up on his hind legs, screaming in terror, and Styke—a sword in one hand and carbine in the other, his numb legs a poor purchase on Amrec’s sides—was thrown from his saddle. He hit the ground, ears ringing, breath knocked out like he’d been hit by a boulder.

  Horses thundered by on the rocky sand of the point of the bay, and his surroundings were almost entirely obscured by the thick pall of powder smoke, lit from time to time by sorcery and exploding mortars. The shore was pounded by enemy guns as if the Dynize cared little whether they struck their own men.

  To Styke’s right, crimson-coated Riflejacks and yellow-clad garrison soldiers fought like mad dogs against the never-ending, if inconsistent, tide of Dynize soldiers coming in from his left. Corpses of all three groups lay scattered on the beach.

  Styke gained his feet, discarding the carbine that had snapped in half beneath him on his fall, and grabbed the hot muzzle of a charging Dynize soldier, redirecting the short bayonet over his shoulder and felling the soldier with a single blow to the neck from his saber.

  “Amrec! Amrec, damn it!” Styke searched the bodies of nearby horses for Amrec, but none of them was nearly big enough. He heard a horse scream somewhere in the smoke but could not pinpoint the source. He threw himself toward the closest skirmish between Dynize and Fatrastan forces.

  The Dynize breastplates, like a cuirassier’s, were only armored on the front, held on by leather straps over the shoulders and around the back. Styke severed a Dynize spine from behind, laying about with the blade of his saber. A nearby Riflejack fell beneath a Dynize bayonet, and Styke grabbed the Dynize soldier by the back of the neck, squeezing until the woman went limp, then throwing her body onto the poor bastard she’d just skewered.

  Another blast—a mortar—exploded nearby, and Styke felt the hot sting of shrapnel tear through his jacket, scoring his side and legs. He staggered from the force of the blast, nearly losing his head to a cannonball that glanced off the sand twenty yards away and bounced over his shoulder, blowing a hole clean through the breastplate of a Dynize musketman.

  He continued fighting his way along the point of the bay, navigating by keeping the source of the sorcery to his left and the higher, rockier ground on his right. Occasionally a riderless horse ran through the smoke, bucking and crying, but none of them was Amrec.

  The fighting grew more fierce, the more organized Riflejacks keeping the Dynize at bay at the end of their long bayonets. Styke found a uniformed body, crushed by the eviscerated corpse of a horse, and recognized the rider as one of his Mad Lancers, though the name escaped him after so many years.

  A Dynize suddenly tore through the smoke, leaping bodies with the agility of a gazelle, a pair of bone axes in hand and torso protected by the now-familiar dark green leather of a swamp dragon. Styke coughed, spat up blood, and gave chase as the dragonman tore into a pair of Riflejacks, leaving them dead in his wake faster than either of them could raise a bayonet.

  Styke caught up to the dragonman with long, painful strides, slashing with his saber. He missed, then leapt fully into the dragonman’s side as the warrior reached a squad of Riflejacks, sending them both tumbling through the group of soldiers.

  The dragonman came out of the tumble on top, spitting sand and blood, and slammed the haft of an ax into Styke’s nose. Styke, his saber lost, punched the dragonman in the jaw, causing the Dynize to lurch back, dazed, before he caught Styke’s second punch and twisted his arm painfully to one side. Styke fought back, flexing, using every ounce of his strength, until the dragonman’s head suddenly snapped back and the sound of a pistol being fired at point-blank range left Styke’s ears ringing.

  Styke shoved the body off him and got to his feet, only to find Olem—one arm bloody and bandaged, a deep slice along his left cheek, and his hat gone—standing with the smoking pistol among a squad of Riflejacks.

  “I would have won it,” Styke spat, half-joking, half-serious. Blood pounded in his ears, and he felt every tendon tight and ready for movement, his body like an oiled spring.

  “I believe you,” Olem said. “But we don’t have time for their shit. One of those assholes already wounded Davd.”

  Styke didn’t bother asking who Davd was. “I lost my horse,” he said. “See a big bastard come through here?”

  “I saw your second in command a few moments ago,” Olem said. He suddenly lurched sideways, caught by a sergeant on his left. He shook his head, as if he wasn’t sure where he was, then pointed. “Well timed on the cavalry, but you’re useless in this smoke. If you can rally your men take them west. Flint will have use for you.”

  “You’ll be able to hold the shore?” Styke asked.

  Olem managed a smile, causing the deep gash on his cheek to weep blood. “We need infantry, not dragoons. I’m pulling my boys back before this gets any worse. Go on, get out of here.”

  Styke found Ibana less than fifty feet away. She was still on her own horse and held Amrec’s reins in her teeth, forcing both horses to twirl, hooves flashing, battering at the Dynize infantry that stabbed at her with their short bayonets. Her saber rose and fell, dripping gore, and within moments she’d cleared the Dynize and stopped her spinning. She spotted Styke and raised her sword in a greeting.

  Styke limped over and snatched Amrec by the bridle, the shrapnel from the mortar starting to sting. He grabbed the saddle horn and pulled himself up, just as Major Gustar emerged from the smoke. Gustar’s horse had a definite limp, and his hand was bloody and hastily wrapped.

  “This isn’t going well,” Ibana reported.

  “We’re to pull back,” Styke said. “Get everyone out of this blasted smoke. Olem is letting the Dynize have the point of the bay.”

  Gustar just nodded wearily, riding into the smoke. A moment later an Adran bugle sounded.

  “Try not to forget you’re not wearing your armor anymore,” Ibana said, appraising the cuts on Styke’s side and arm.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Styke asked.

  “It means you need to not ride into bloody sorcery and artillery fire, that’s what it means. Sorcery and grapeshot are going to kill you as easily as any other man.”

  Styke looked at the blood soaking through his clothes. The pain was sharp, acute. It lit his senses like a fire. “I’ll try not to do anything stupid.”

  “Letting the Dynize have any ground at all seems foolish.”

  “No choice,” Styke replied. “They’ve paid for it in blood.” He urged Amrec into a gallop, racing west, and within a minute the smoke had all but cleared. He watched over his shoulder as Riflejacks, the Fatrastan garrison, and his own cavalry emerged from the haze, clear relief in their eyes at being
given the order to withdraw. The Dynize didn’t seem to follow them out of the smoke, and he wondered if they’d finally used up all their men—or if they were just happy to take the beachhead and prepare for their next attack.

  He ignored them all and set his sights on the causeway leading to Fort Nied.

  CHAPTER 60

  Messengers streamed in and out of Fort Nied, leaving Vlora with an increasingly uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. The garrison was under heavy fire from troops that had landed north of the city, while Olem faced heavy losses at the point of the bay, and the smoke from musket fire over his position continued to rise as fast as the breeze blew it away, making it next to impossible for Vlora, Norrine, or Buden to give Olem any support fire.

  Greenfire Depths was in flames, and the Blackhats had been seen fleeing the city en masse. She ordered the garrison to bring any and all cannons from the old forts scattered around the city to the eastern edge of the plateau, and diverted two thousand men from the southern side of the city to reinforce the north, and another nine hundred to help Olem.

  “All of them!” she shouted at a messenger in a yellow Fatrastan jacket. “We’re not going to hold the bay, and I intend on making it next to impossible for the Dynize to take the plateau. Get me every weapon not nailed down inside the city. Raid Blackhat depots, I don’t give a damn!”

  “But the Blackhats …”

  “Are gone! Damn it, I’ll have my own men do it. Bloody pit, get out of my way!” She ran to the other end of the wall, taking a spare rifle from a wounded private she’d assigned to load her weapons. She searched the Else for a Dynize Privileged and, when she couldn’t find one, put a bullet through the eye of what looked like a Dynize officer.

  She paused, lowering her rifle, and returned to the Fatrastan messenger. “Wait!” she shouted. “I want this rioting put down, and the fires in Greenfire Depths extinguished. Anyone in the garrison who isn’t dedicated to direct combat needs to do that. Get me newspapers, city criers, everything. If the rioters know the city is under attack by a foreign force, they might abate.”