At the back of the campus, the University grounds blended imperceptibly into the Old Woods, a tag end of ancient trees that was the last remnant of the primeval forests that had covered the valley of the Vor before the city had been founded. Between the tree line and the manicured lawns was a large field of tall grass, a kind of no-man’s-land between natural antiquity and modern perfection. It was here that the Preacher had set up his cannon, aiming it south so that any stray balls would splash into the Vor or hit the uninhabited slopes of Thieves’ Island.
Marcus paused at the edge of the grass as the company of young men by the gun, perhaps thirty in all, simultaneously ducked and put their hands over their ears. Only Captain Sevran Vahkerson remained stolidly upright, shading his eyes with one hand to observe the flight of the ball. The cannon bucked and roared, spitting a momentary gout of flame and a huge cloud of powder smoke, and a moment later a puff of dirt downrange marked where the shot had struck. There was a square of red cloth there, Marcus noticed, a dozen yards past the point where the ball impacted.
“Short,” the Preacher said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Far too short. You sprayed a bit of dirt in their faces, but that’s all, and now they’re going to come over here and gut you with bayonets.” He turned to the young men, who were slowly straightening up. “Can anyone tell me what Ranker Quilten did wrong?”
“He must have fucked up the angle—” said one student, in the front of the crowd, only to be pinned to the spot by a furious glare from the Preacher. “Sorry. He must have gotten the angle wrong.”
“I had the angle dead-on!” said a powder-blackened young man, presumably Quilten. “And Tart checked it.”
“It did look right,” another man admitted.
“I think,” Quilten said, turning on the Preacher, “that your godda—that your darn cannon is broken.” He held up a sheet of paper. “My calculations were quite precise! At that arc the ball should have landed precisely on target.”
“And,” the Preacher said, “in the course of your calculations, did you examine the cannonball?”
“What?” Quilten looked down at where a small pyramid of cannonballs stood beside the gun. “Why?”
“Because that ball was at least a quarter inch smaller than the last one.”
“That’s not fair!” Quilten said. “You can’t hand me a dud and expect me to make the shot.”
“You think cannonballs are all the same?” the Preacher roared. “You think they get finished by master artisans in some china shop? You think, in the field, you’ve got the luxury to pick and choose?” He shook his head. “Be grateful to God if you have enough balls, let alone good ones. You’ll get shot that’s too small, too large, misshapen, scored, or worse. You’ll capture the enemy’s ammunition, and only Karis knows where he gets it. You need to be able to feel a ball, and know what to do with it. If it’s too small, you’ll get more windage, which means you need a bigger charge to get the same force! But give thanks to God if your balls are too small”—he ignored a chorus of sniggering—“because if they’re too big, and you cram them in, this gun will explode in your face!”
At the end of this monologue, he caught sight of Marcus and acknowledged him with a nod. Glaring at the young men, he said, “I want you to go through this stack of shot and tell me which ones are heavy and which are light.”
“Can we have a balance?” one of the students said, doubtfully.
“You think you’ll have a balance with you in the field?”
“We might be able to rig one up,” said another man, “with a rock and some sticks. We could use a known-good ball to calculate the mean error—”
The Preacher sighed and stalked through the long grass toward Marcus, shaking his head. Marcus suppressed a smile.
“Karis preserve me from boys who think they know what they’re doing,” the Preacher said. “I liked it better working with rankers straight from the farm. At least it was easy to put the proper fear of the Lord into them.”
“I assume this was the colonel’s idea?” Marcus said.
“Yes. And it’s not a bad one, in truth. You can teach anyone to load and fire a gun, but being able to lay a shot properly takes a bit more skill. This lot”—he waved at the young men clustered around the cannonballs, now arguing about how to make their decision in the fewest number of trials—“gives everything strange names and talks a lot of rubbish about parabolas and acceleration, but at least they know what goes up must come down. We might make a couple of decent gun sergeants out of them.”
“Will you have enough time?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” The Preacher shook his head. “If I had even a week, I’d be thankful, but the colonel tells me we might not get that long. We’ll manage, I expect, with the Lord’s help.” He paused. “It’s good to see you again, Senior Captain.”
“Likewise. I hope you had a pleasant voyage.”
“I don’t know about pleasant, but we’re here, by the grace of God. And none too soon, it seems.” The Preacher scratched his nose. “Are you going to be taking over the First, then?”
“No,” Marcus said. “Fitz is doing a fine job, I think. I’ll be assisting the colonel.”
“Too bad. Fitz is a good boy, but a bit too clever for his own good. I’ll miss having your hand on the tiller.” He shook his head. “God’s will be done, of course. And the colonel’s.”
“I’m supposed to give him a report on the artillery.”
“We’ll manage something here, if we can find enough metal. I’ve got men pulling guns out of the water batteries, but those are siege pieces. If we go into the field, it’ll be a hard job getting them in place. Val is out rounding up everything he can find.”
“I’ll check up on him. Do you know where he is now?”
“On the Island, somewhere near the cathedral. Someone said there were old guns out in front of some of the big buildings there. Shouldn’t be too hard to track him down.”
“Right.” Marcus looked at the squabbling students and shook his head. “Anything else I should tell the colonel?”
“Not from here.” The Preacher hesitated. “You’d best know, about—”
“Jen? Fitz told me.”
“Ah.” The Preacher coughed. “Well. I’d better get back to it before someone drops a ball on his toes. God’s grace go with you, Senior Captain.”
“And you,” Marcus said. He turned about and went in search of Val.
—
The eastern end of the Island felt strangely empty. Marcus crossed over the Saint Uriah Bridge and walked through the Exchange, where the great multistory trading houses with their rooftop cranes and pulleys were all shuttered and silent, the crowd of frantic traders in hiding. Crossing one of the little shop-lined bridges that separated the Exchange from the Island proper, he could see the spires of the cathedral looming up like stone masts amid the surrounding buildings.
The square in front of the cathedral—where the deputies were entertaining Orlanko’s messengers—was nearly empty, with the crowds having moved a few blocks west to watch the recruits drilling in Farus’ Triumph. There were carriages and cabs about, though, and a few pedestrians. Marcus, conspicuous in his blue uniform, collared the nearest and asked where there was a Royal Army party looking for cannons.
A few minutes later he’d tracked down Val, who was accompanied by Lieutenant Archer of the artillery, a dozen rankers, and another dozen burly civilians waiting by an empty wagon. They were clustered around a tiny cannon, only a few feet of gleaming bronze with iron-bound wheels, standing on a small plinth outside an impressive-looking building. One of the rankers had one hand on it, looking as proud as a boy with a new puppy, but Val was shaking his head. Marcus caught the tail end of his remarks.
“I know we’re looking for cannon, Ranker Servus,” he said, “but you have to realize that not everything that looks like a canno
n is, in fact, a cannon. This, for instance, is a statue.”
“But it’s got wheels, look! And it looks old!”
“Look at the barrel, Ranker. A cannon needs a hole in the barrel. Otherwise where are we going to put the balls?”
Servus looked crestfallen. He rapped the solid muzzle of the little gun with his knuckle, and sighed.
“Right,” Val said. “Where next?”
“Fellow I talked to said he thought there were two or three down on the riverfront,” one of the rankers said. “He said he used to eat his lunch there, and they were so covered in pigeon shit he didn’t realize they were cannon for years.”
“I hope you’re up for scraping off some pigeon shit, then.” Val turned around, and his eyes widened at the sight of his long-absent senior captain. “Balls of the Beast! Is that really you, Marcus?”
“Last I checked.” Marcus grinned, and Val grabbed his hand and shook it with unnecessary force, slapping him on the shoulder with his other hand for good measure. He had quite a grip. Captain Valiant Solwen had been one of Marcus’ longest-serving companions in Khandar, and probably his best friend after the dead Adrecht Roston. He had the florid face of a serious drinker and a pencil-thin mustache of which he was inordinately proud. “Good to see you, Val.”
“And damned good to see you,” Val said. “Damned good to see the old city, too. Though truth be told, I was just happy to see solid ground after all those months with nothing to look at but blue. I’m never getting on another ship as long as I live, I swear it by Karis the Savior.”
“That bad?”
Val rolled his eyes. One of the rankers sniggered and said, “The captain gets seasick.”
“That’s enough of that,” Val said. “Archer, take them down to the waterfront and see if those are guns or stones under all the guano. I’ll catch up after I have a word with the senior captain.”
Archer nodded and started barking orders. The wagoneers got on the bed of their vehicle and rumbled off, followed by the soldiers.
“Have you seen the others?” Val said.
“Briefly,” Marcus said. “Fitz and the Preacher, anyway.”
“Mor’s tearing the city apart looking for muskets,” Val said. “And Give-Em-Hell has been culling out anyone who says he can ride from the recruits, and trying to turn them into cavalry.”
“Small hope there,” Marcus said. “It takes more than a few days to make a trooper.”
“What about you?” Val said. “The way I hear it, you’re the colonel’s right-hand man now. Has he got you on some secret errand?”
“Just checking up on the guns. Are you getting anywhere?”
“There’s some siege pieces in the water batteries,” Val said. “And so far we’ve pulled maybe a dozen smaller guns from places like this.” He gave the little gun sculpture a kick. “A lot of banks have them out front, for some reason. Popular decorations, or at least they were a hundred years ago. Some of the pieces we’ve got have to date back to the Civil War.”
“Are they still serviceable?”
“That’s the big question.” Val pulled absently at his mustache, first one end and then the other. “Preacher says he’s going to scour them, load them up, then set them off with a torch on the end of a long pole. Anything that doesn’t explode, we’ll keep.”
Marcus chuckled and shook his head. The ingenuity of the Preacher and his men when it came to cannons and explosives was notorious; he trusted they’d come up with something.
“Is it true the colonel made you captain of Armsmen?” Val said abruptly. “Before all this started up, I mean.”
Marcus nodded. “He landed me right in the thick of it. I don’t know if you’ve heard what happened at the Vendre.”
“Only rumors. You were there?”
“I’ll tell you the story, when we’ve got more time.”
“Right.” Val sighed. “Hell of a thing, to spend three months at sea and then pitch back into it as soon as we get here.”
“You think the men are up for it?”
“Oh, they’re up for it, just a little ticked off. I feel sorry for whoever gets in their way. Some of them aren’t crazy about fighting Vordanai, but after Khandar . . .” He shrugged. “I think every man of them would follow the colonel if he told ’em to march into the river.”
“Does that include you?” Marcus said. Of all the Colonial officers, Val was the one who had retained the most connection to home. He was a nobleman of sorts, the younger son of a lesser branch, but those kinds of ties went deep. He probably has cousins on the other side.
“I don’t know about the colonel,” Val said, “but I’d follow you if you said we were going to storm the moon. If you say this is the right side to be on, then it is.” He coughed to cover this moment of unexpected candor. “Besides, I hear we have the queen with us, so that makes it all right.”
“We’ve got her,” Marcus confirmed. “I saw her at breakfast this morning, in fact.”
Val blinked. “You’re staying with the queen?”
“Actually, she’s staying with me. Or we’re both staying with the colonel, I suppose.” He didn’t mention that he’d helped the queen escape her own chambers and led her personal guard into an ambush. Val might have fainted.
“Now, there’s something I never thought I’d hear. What’s she like?”
“A bit odd. She looks younger than she is. Smart, pretty in an awkward sort of way. I’ll introduce you when we get the chance.”
“After the battle, please,” Val said. “If we’re getting ready to fight, the last thing I need to worry about is a royal interview.”
—
He spent a bit longer with Val, catching up on the regimental gossip and relating a few choice tidbits from his time in the city. At first they were able to banter as though nothing had changed, but something uncomfortable gradually crept into the conversation. It took a moment for Marcus to realize what it was. Val had work to do, and Marcus was keeping him from it. When Marcus had been in command, whatever he’d had to say to his subordinates was by definition the most important thing in their lives at that moment, at least as far as their duties were concerned. Now he could sense Val’s nagging feeling that he ought to be off with Lieutenant Archer looking for cannon. Marcus eventually let him off the hook with a promise that they’d finish their catching up sometime later, and rustle up Mor and Fitz for cards as they had done in the Ashe-Katarion days.
What the hell has Janus done to me? Marcus walked, hands in his pockets, back toward Cathedral Square. If the Colonials were a single living thing—and Marcus often thought of them as one—then Marcus was a tiny piece of that creature excised by a surgeon and carried across the sea. The regiment had survived, and even thrived, but the place where he’d been had scabbed over and turned to scar tissue, and he didn’t fit back into it anymore.
It’ll be different, once we win. If they lost, of course, none of it would matter. At best they’d be fugitives, on the run from Orlanko’s secret police. And at worst . . . well, that was always a risk on a battlefield. But if we win . . . then what? He couldn’t picture it. But the queen would find something for him to do, wouldn’t she?
It was well into the afternoon by now, and he decided his aching legs weren’t up to the long walk back to the Twin Turrets. Instead he hailed a cab, which turned out to be occupied by two other men also headed north across the bridges.
“We’re all doubling up these days,” the cabbie told him. “Half the boys have hidden their rig and taken their horses to the countryside until all this is over. It’s only a few minutes out of your way.”
The man was eyeing his uniform, and Marcus probably could have evicted the other passengers with a word of command and a pointed look. But he was in no hurry, so he climbed in and took his seat beside two young men wearing the restrained but expensive clothing of professionals or successful merc
hants. The door closed, and the horses started clip-clopping up the cobbled street.
“It’s true,” one of the men said to the other, taking no notice of Marcus. “One of my kitchen boys has a cousin who’s a carter, and he’s been making the run up to Ohnlei. He said he saw them in the field, muskets and trousers, bold as brass.”
The other man snorted. “Whores drumming up business. Girls acting like men does it for some people, I suppose. I can see the appeal. It’s cute, like putting a little coat and hat on your dog and pretending he’s a gentleman.”
“This carter talked to some of the new soldiers,” the first said. “They said one of the men asked for a price, and got a kick in the fork for his troubles.”
The other laughed. “Probably tried to lay a hand on the merchandise without paying cash up front. I met this girl in a Southside tavern once, and she would slit you as soon as look at you until you crossed her palm with gold. After that, well, it was a different story . . .”
Marcus pressed his head against the window and tried not to listen. He was certainly no stranger to prostitutes—no soldier was—and he’d had his share in Ashe-Katarion, before the Redemption. There were always girls willing to fawn over the Vordanai soldiers in those days, for the status and protection from the prince’s law, but Marcus had preferred the honesty of a straightforward commercial transaction. Then there had been Jen, and after she’d betrayed him . . .
And now she’s dead. He still wasn’t sure how to feel about that. There had always been the wild hope, in the back of his mind, that she’d wake up and beg forgiveness. Janus said whatever Ihernglass had done had stripped her of the demon she’d borne for the Church, so she’d be no further use to them. She could have stayed with me, and—what? Marriage? His mind balked at the idea.
It doesn’t matter now. He swallowed a lump in his throat and shook his head. Fantasies never helped anybody.
After letting the two young men off at a fashionable town house south of Bridge Street, the cab rumbled around to the Twin Turrets. The sun was still up, but already the house was ablaze with light, torches burning beside the doors and candles showing in the windows. Marcus paid the fare, exchanged salutes with the Mierantai guards, and went inside.
The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns Page 56