The Silvered

by Tanya Huff

  “I owe you an apology.”

  Tomas sounded sincere, but Mirian couldn’t think of what he had to apologize for.

  “We should have left when you wanted to. Staying…” He waved a hand at the sky, or the buildings, or something Mirian wasn’t aware of. “…that was time we’ll never get back.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  “First level time travel?”

  “What? No!” If he’d been her sister, she’d have poked him for that. As he wasn’t, she settled for rolling her eyes. “If we’d left immediately, I’d be in my boots. Because we stayed, you had time to trade for the clogs. They’re not exactly comfortable, but I’m not crippled in them, so I can move significantly faster.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” His lips twitched. “That’s very sensible of you.”

  “Thank you.” She was rather impressed by how much she made it sound like shut up. After a moment, she added, “It wasn’t the porridge, though, was it? The reason you wanted to stay.”

  His cheeks flushed, and he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets.

  “And you still don’t want to talk about it. That’s all right.” Some people needed to ease into mornings. Yesterday, he’d been up long enough to steal clothes before she woke. “My father is always difficult before his first cup of coffee.” She stepped over a glistening gray lump with no idea of what it was. Or had been.

  “Your father drank coffee? That’s…”

  “An insanely expensive import from exotic lands far to the south that the neighbors couldn’t possibly afford? That’s why my mother insisted on it. And why only my father drank it. I thought it smelled amazing.”

  Tomas snorted. “You don’t know what amazing smells like.”

  And another chance to mention Jaspyr Hagen passed as they reached the market. The permanent stalls around the edges had already opened, and the first of the barrows were being set up. There were significantly more women around than men. Mirian didn’t know if that was because the men had died during the war or because the Pyrahn army had run for Aydori or because more men worked in the factories. The war itself didn’t seem to have touched this part of the city at all, but, as the newspaper had reported the Lord Mayor had surrendered with only a few shots fired, that was easily explained. Her mother had gone on about cowardice, but her father had only put down the paper and said, “Modern cities weren’t built to be defended. His Grace and the army were on the way to the border and Emperor Leopald wanted those factories in one piece. Smart thing to do. Saved a lot of lives.”

  Strangely, there were more men than women in the group gathered around the well and they were visibly stirred up about something. The distance combined with their excitement and their accents made it impossible to understand what all the shouting was about. They looked rough, although Mirian suspected she might not be the best judge of that. From the way others were watching them, they were trouble; she hoped they weren’t fomenting some kind of stupid rebellion because that would draw the soldiers.

  “Around or through?” Tomas asked, stepping out in front of her.

  Around more than doubled the distance. With the market still almost half empty and the crowd up against the well, they could cross in nearly a straight line. “Through.”

  “Stay close.”

  “So no wandering off to shop.” When he turned, showing teeth, she raised a hand. “I’m sorry. You didn’t say that. You didn’t even imply that. Assuming that was what you meant was unfair to you.”

  “I meant you should stay close.”

  “I know. It’s just, there’s people out there. Being out in public, like this…” The shirtwaist cuff protruding from beneath her jacket was stained with a thousand shades of dirt. “…awake enough to be aware of what people are thinking of me, unwashed, unkempt…it’s…unsettling. It makes me defensive.”

  “You’ll never see them again. Why do you care?”

  She could see he honestly didn’t understand. But then, he was Pack—in fur, in skin, clean, dirty, nothing changed that. If she were Mage-pack, she’d have that certainty, too.

  Lord and Lady, Mother, get out of my head!

  She didn’t need to be Mage-pack to know who she was. Unwashed and unkempt perhaps, but she was Mirian Maylin regardless. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I don’t care. It’s a long way to Karis; let’s go.”

  His nod held nothing but acceptance.

  Of course it was one thing to say she didn’t care and another thing entirely not to care. Mirian looked across the square, locked her gaze on the road that would take them out of Abyek, and tried not to think of her appearance. Tried not to think of that old bald man or that woman with the tanned, bared forearms or that gaggle of children watching her and judging. She wasn’t very successful until they came closer to the well and some of the shouted words grew clearer. Suddenly, she wasn’t thinking of her appearance at all.

  “…Imperial courier said…”

  “…how it is now!”

  “Why shouldn’t we get…?”

  “…Imperials don’t need the fucking money!”

  “…enough to risk…”

  “Fuck it, for that much I’d…”

  “…abomination!”

  Tomas growled low in his throat and Mirian grabbed his hand. “They don’t know.” She was proud of how steady her voice sounded. “Just keep walking.”

  But it was already too late.

  “There! There it is!” The crowd parted, exposing the man at the well. The farm worker who’d stopped them on the road pointed at Tomas. Still huge and flushed and jowly, but triumphant, not afraid.

  Mirian tried to yank Tomas away, but he growled louder, hands going to his jacket.

  “Hold him!”

  An elbow slammed into the side of Mirian’s head. She stumbled back, fell, and from the ground saw the farm worker clamp one enormous hand down on Tomas’ shoulder and wrap the other around his face as the men who’d been holding him stepped back. Tomas could change in clothes. He’d be tangled in the fabric, but he’d have teeth and terror…and why didn’t he change!

  “Silver pin!” The farm worker bellowed. “That Imperial courier gived out a handful yesterday!”

  “To you, Harn?” one of the other men laughed.

  The farm worker’s name was Harn. Not that it mattered now.

  “No, but I got one anyway, don’t I? Shoved it right into him and he’s helpless.”

  Tomas fought and snarled, got an arm free and closed his hand around the front of Harn’s throat.

  The big man banged their foreheads together, and Tomas sagged. “I should’ve stuck the pin in your fucking eye!” he bellowed, stepping back and allowing the crowd to take Tomas to the ground.

  Mirian threw herself at one of the men holding Tomas’ leg, trying to knock him off balance. A hand in her hair threw her back. She landed on her side. Cried out as a boot caught her under the ribs, once, twice.

  “Three silver emperors for the pelt! That’s what the courier said!”

  “Then he has to change, Harn!”

  Coughing and crying, Mirian rolled up onto her hands and knees.

  “I don’t fancy that!”

  “Let him change! We kill him and takes his pelt!”

  “No, no, I heard the stories! We let him change, we all die.”

  “He don’t need to change!” Harn dropped to one knee and dragged Tomas’ head up. Blood from his nose ran down over his lips and teeth. “This here, it ain’t hair. It’s fur. And the courier says it’s good enough!”

  Harn waved a knife, the blade long and thin.

  “Kill ’em quick, Harn!”

  “Kill him?” The big man laughed. “Maybe after!”

  Pain stabbing up under her ribs, Mirian didn’t have breath enough to scream.

  If you can light a candle…

  * * *

  Reiter had just swallowed his last mouthful of toasted bread when the screaming started. Unwilling to spend the mo
rning kicking around the garrison, he’d gone back into the city just after dawn looking for an alehouse one of the other officers had mentioned enjoying down in the working class part of town. “Safe enough,” he’d said. “We haven’t changed their lives any. At their pay grade, it’s all pretty much shit. Why should they care which bastards they work for?”

  In the older cities of the empire, Reiter would have gone to a coffee house. If such a place existed in Abyek, he wouldn’t be able to afford it, given the prices of the commonplace out by the new border. Fortunately, he had no problem settling for ale and was pleasantly surprised to find he could have a mug of tea so strong it nearly ate the plating off the spoon. In spite of speaking no Pyrahn and the waiter no Imperial, they’d managed to find enough common ground for him to order and negotiate a price in Imperial coin. Commerce always found a way.

  The eggs had been just the way he liked, the sausage a little short of actual meat but still tasty, and if he couldn’t get a decent biscuit and gravy, he was reasonably content with the thick slices of toasted bread that replaced that staple in this part of the world. The meal had cost more than he’d normally put down—one way or another that could be tracked back to the war—but his back pay had caught up to him in Abyek and he had nothing else to drop it on. As he cut and chewed and swallowed, he tried not to think of it as a last meal. He wasn’t particularly successful. He didn’t need to be one of Colonel Korshan’s company, smart enough to invent rockets and balloons and whatnot, to know he’d be lucky to survive reporting back without the sixth mage. A smarter man might think about deserting, but he’d given the army his entire adult life; if he couldn’t believe they’d give him back a fair chance to be heard, then he’d thrown that life away. Besides, the Soothsayers had tossed him into this pile of shit. There was nothing that said they wouldn’t find him if he ran, and that made reporting his failure the smarter thing to do.

  Although, he allowed, spreading honey on a fourth slice of toasted bread, that didn’t mean he was in a hurry to get it done.

  At the first scream, he put his knife and fork down on his empty plate. At the second, he stood, and threw a handful of coin on the table. As three, four, and five heralded a rush of noise blending terror and rage under what sounded like explosions, he ran for the door. People out on the street stared toward the rising smoke, but they’d just lost a war and had learned better than to run toward a battle.

  Reiter had been on the winning side.

  Three streets down, a new sound had him glance left, and he spotted half a dozen young soldiers coming out of an alehouse somewhat shabbier than one he’d just left.

  “Corporal!”

  The corporal jerked around to face him, his expression as much guilty as startled. “Sir!”

  “With me!” Reiter didn’t give a crap what the corporal or his friends were guilty of. They were there.

  “We’re off duty, sir.”

  “Did I ask?”

  “No, sir!”

  He heard their boots hitting the cobblestones behind him, but he didn’t look back. If he’d needed to look back, the Imperial army had no business winning so much as a darts tournament.

  The road spilled him out into a small market square although he had to shove his way through a small huddle of weeping civilians to actually enter it.

  A man burned in the center of the square. Reiter had seen more war than he cared to remember, and men were too wet to burn like man-shaped torches—although as this man was burning like a man-shaped torch, Reiter found himself grateful for the presence of the unnatural, masking flame.

  Behind the burning man, the well shot a pillar of water up into the air.

  Barrows and stalls had collapsed. Every piece of board in the market had grown thorns.

  What looked like a small cyclone had just reached the square from one of the narrow side streets.

  Whatever was happening, it was centered around the well.

  He’d nearly reached it, one arm up over his nose to block the stink, when he recognized a familiar spill of gray skirts. Up on her knees, one hand pressed to her side, she crawled toward a body lying near the feet of the burning man.

  Young, dark-haired, male—probably the beastman who’d helped her escape. The abomination. Ignoring for the moment that they were in Abyek, because that made no sense at all, Reiter added up the pieces. Seemed a local tough had tried to collect the emperor’s bounty on abominations and had tossed the girl aside as harmless because she had no mage sign in her eyes.

  Screaming grew louder all around the market as the cyclone came out from between the buildings and began flinging debris.

  Reiter grabbed the girl by the back of the jacket, hauled her up onto her feet, and punched her as hard as he could. Her head snapped back, and he barely caught her before she hit the ground. He’d just had his career, and possibly his life, handed back to him.

  The cyclone vanished, white-painted bricks clattered down onto the cobblestones. A piece of charred meat shaped like a man stood for a moment then collapsed and sizzled. The pillar of water pouring from the well dropped to barely six inches high.

  “Sir?”

  Straightening, he handed the girl into the arms of a large young private staring wild-eyed at the destruction. “Get her back to the garrison. Tell them they’re to use that stuff the surgeons use to keep her out. Captain Reiter’s orders.” He was a Shield. Anyone who could read insignia had known he was there on the emperor’s command. His orders would be obeyed. “Take him, too!” The beastman wasn’t in pieces. If the stories were true, that meant he was still alive. “Find a barrow that’s not been destroyed, pile them both into it. Get them to the garrison, quickly, and keep them both unconscious.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Corporal!”

  “Captain Reiter, sir!” The state of the corporal’s boots declared he’d already lost his breakfast.

  Given the smell of burned meat and hair and offal that coated nose and throat, Reiter didn’t blame him. Not as long as he followed orders. “Until more troops arrive, we’re it.”

  “Sir! We don’t have our weapons!”

  “We won’t be shooting anyone. You know how to put together a work party?”

  Indignation took a shot at replacing horror. “Yes, sir!”

  “So put one together. Get people out from under collapsed stalls. Find casualties. Apply field dressings. Can you talk to them?”

  “A little, sir!”

  “Good. They won’t care that we’re Imperials. They need someone to pull order out of chaos.”

  “No, sir! I mean, yes, sir!”

  As the corporal barked orders, and the beastman and mage rumbled toward the garrison in a salvaged barrow, Reiter moved to take a closer look at the burned body. His fingers were gone. What could have been a wooden knife hilt had been cooked into the palm of his hand. Reiter slid the toe of his boot between the charred wrist and the pavement and lifted.

  Six-inch thorns jutted out through the back of his hand and explained why he hadn’t dropped it.

  A glint of metal caught Reiter’s eye and he splashed through the water back to where he’d found the girl. Radiating out like a sunburst from the place she’d been kneeling, the cracks in the cobblestones were filled with metal. Metal that appeared to have been molten moments before but had already cooled to the touch.

  “Did you have any idea of what you were doing?” he wondered, the question unheard amid the surrounding grief and profanities.

  The voice of a heavyset woman rose above the rest as she backed a boy into a corner and started beating him with a belt. “You have fire eyes—don’t tell me you didn’t do it! Don’t lie to me! Don’t lie to me!”

  As Reiter ran to save the boy, he realized this neighborhood was going to become brutal for anyone with even the minimal mage marks found outside Aydori.

  Nearly three hours later, the moment Reiter stepped onto land claimed by the garrison, before he’d even got through the gate, a private barely old eno
ugh to shave separated himself from where he’d been leaning against the fence and stepped into his path.

  “Captain Reiter, sir, Major Halyss wants to see you in his office.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there immediately after checking my prisoners.”

  “No, sir. Sorry, sir, but he said you’re to go right to him.”

  It had been worth a shot.

  The major was on the second floor at the far end of the garrison building from the transport sergeant’s office. Reiter hadn’t met him, but he knew Major Halyss was Intelligence and had just arrived from Karis. Soldiers’ gossip said that General Reed, the garrison commander, had been giving the major as much leeway as wouldn’t undermine his command. The major’s father was evidently a power at court.

  The office was surprisingly bare, the major sitting at a nearly empty desk writing quickly. The boy came to attention, but Reiter fell into parade rest and waited. After filling a third sheet of paper, Halyss tossed his steel-tipped pen back into the inkwell, blew on the last sheet until the ink would take the pressure of his finger, then folded all three and sealed them, pressing his signet into the wax.

  “Brendon.”

  “Sir!”

  “Sergeant Pine. For immediate courier.”

  “Sir!”

  Halyss watched the boy leave, then turned a dark-eyed gaze on Reiter. Who came to attention.

  “Never mind that, Captain. In fact, sit. It’s a borrowed office, I don’t plan on staying long, but we might as well make use of it.”

  He sounded hail fellow well met. His eyes said trust no one. Reiter sat, but he didn’t relax. Expecting another Lieutenant Lord Geurin, he was pleased to see that while the major had all the innate airs and confidence of the aristocracy, he appeared to lack an obvious sense of petulant entitlement. Of course, appearances could be deceiving.

  “So, your prisoners.” The major leaned back in his chair and smiled. The smile made Reiter think of Aydori. “I hear they were wheeled out of what a very incoherent young private seemed to think was a riot or a sacrifice or flame knows what and into the custody of the Imperial army. They’re boxed and drugged. So I was wondering, just out of curiosity, you understand, why you would ask they be drugged with a substance even the surgeons admit is experimental. Useful, definitely,” he added, “but experimental.”