The Price of Valor

by Django Wexler

  I did this to her. I drove her away.

  “I’m sorry,” Winter said into the darkness. There was no answer.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  MARCUS

  The wagon, pulled by a quartet of straining, panting mules, rattled slowly down one of the innumerable alleys that branched off the Green Road north of the Lower Market. The buildings on either side were two or three stories high, not the towering tenements of Newtown but the more modest, ramshackle brick-and-timber architecture of the Docks. Overhead, clotheslines ran between upper-story windows, with a few lonely sheets flapping in the chilly breeze.

  Two Patriot Guards, wearing their blue-and-black sashes, escorted the wagon, one on the box beside the driver and the other perched uncomfortably on the roof. Both had muskets, with bayonets fixed. A half dozen big men walked beside the vehicle, too, with the ragged blue armbands that had been adopted by the Civic Defense militia. Seedies, the Leatherbacks called them, and as far as Marcus could see the name fit. They looked like ordinary street toughs, dressed in leather and homespun, with cudgels and long knives at their belts. No pistols, though. That was a blessing. I don’t want to kill any more of them than we have to.

  He waited until they’d passed his position, behind the rag curtain of a second-story window. Once he was satisfied none of them were paying particular attention, he leveled Lieutenant Uhlan’s long rifle, the barrel poking through the gap in the curtain. It was heavier than a musket, and the balance was different, but Marcus had spent an evening practicing and felt he grasped the basics. He was no marksman, but the target was barely ten yards off.

  The kick against his shoulder when he pulled the trigger felt harder than a musket’s, and the sound was different, a high-pitched crack instead of the smoothbore’s bang. Clouds of acrid smoke billowed from the lock and the end of the barrel, momentarily obscuring his vision as shouting erupted from the street below. Marcus leaned forward and saw that the man he’d been aiming for, the Patriot Guard beside the driver, had slumped from his seat and tumbled into the road. The man on top of the wagon was aiming his musket, sighting on the window gushing powder smoke, and Marcus hurriedly jerked his head back. Two more reports sounded, almost simultaneously, and there was a crash of falling plaster from the rear wall of the abandoned apartment he was holed up in. When he risked another look, the second Patriot was down, swearing and clutching his gut.

  With both musketeers out of action, a loud whistle sounded, and attackers appeared at both ends of the alley. Walnut, eschewing weapons in favor of a pair of huge, iron-studded gauntlets and bracers, led one crew while Andy headed the other, waving a long wooden club. Their “troops” were a mix of Leatherbacks and refugee volunteers: Dockmen and women, some of the older boys and old men still hearty enough to swing a cudgel.

  Not much of an army. Marcus set the rifle aside and swung out the window. Iron bars hammered into the splintering brick made a kind of ladder, and he climbed down a few rungs before letting go and dropping the rest of the way to the street, yanking his sword free of its scabbard. Just ahead, a white-haired, heavily whiskered man and a boy who could have been his grandson were dodging the wild sweeps of a swearing, club-wielding seedie, trying to get in close enough to land a blow. Marcus stepped up behind the militiaman and smashed him over the back of the head with the hilt of his saber, dropping him like a sack of rocks.

  The melee was just about over. One of the seedies had climbed up to the top of the wagon, brandishing a long knife, a crazed look on his face. Walnut tried to grab hold of the edge and pull himself up, then hastily stepped back as the militiaman swiped at his face.

  “You’re all going to the Spike for this!” the man shouted. “We’re official, damn you! We work for the Directory!”

  “We know,” Marcus said, pulling himself up onto the box.

  The seedie spun, knife thrusting, but Marcus interposed his saber in a lazy parry that sent the smaller blade spinning across the alley and left the militiaman cradling a gash on his fingers.

  “Now,” Marcus said. “What’s in the wagon, and where’s it going?”

  The man blinked. He had deep-set, piggy eyes, and a scraggly beard that didn’t fully hide his sagging jowls.

  “I don’t know what’s in it,” he said.

  “Fine,” Marcus said. “How about we set it on fire?”

  “No!” the seedie screamed. “No fire. Please. It’s . . . it’s powder.”

  Marcus found Andy in the group near the rear of the wagon and met her eye. She nodded grimly. Just like the others.

  “And where is it going?” Marcus said, raising the tip of his sword until it was level with the man’s eyes.

  All the fight had gone out of the militiaman. “Over to Kara Doulson’s place, just up the road. I don’t know why. I really don’t!”

  “I believe you.” None of the other Patriots or seedies had known the purpose of their cargoes. Maurisk is playing this one close to the chest. “Walnut, can you handle dumping this in the river?”

  “No problem,” the big man said. “What about this lot?” He indicated the unconscious and captive seedies.

  “Take their weapons and turn them loose, unless they need a cutter.”

  Marcus looked at the wounded Patriot Guard, who had subsided into a sobbing ball. Gut wound like that, he’s a dead man. He caught Walnut’s eye and jerked his head in the dying man’s direction, and Walnut nodded, his expression souring.

  “These seedies aren’t much in a fight,” Andy said as Marcus hopped down from the wagon and the other volunteers gathered around them. “Boys and fat old men.”

  “That makes us just about even,” Marcus said, grinning at his little squad. They laughed, including the boys and the old men.

  One of the women sniffed. “Hardly even,” she said, provoking another round of laughter.

  Marcus had to admit that without the Docks’ women, they’d be dangerously undermanned—outnumbered, he corrected ruefully. The Borelgai refugees were no fighters, being mostly domestic servants accustomed to a quiet life, but the Docks seemed to have an extensive supply of stocky, muscular matrons who were used to hard labor beside their husbands and not averse to cracking skulls when necessary. At Raesinia’s insistence, he’d taken on any who volunteered, along with men older than his father and boys who’d never needed a razor. So far, their confrontations with the seedies had been extremely one-sided, but that wouldn’t last. Maurisk will send more Patriots, with better weapons.

  It didn’t have to last, though. Not long. Janus was coming. We just have to figure out what the hell Maurisk is planning to do when he gets here.

  “More powder?” Viera said.

  “More powder,” Marcus confirmed, setting the long rifle down on the table. Viera was working in the church’s ever-busy kitchen, chopping vegetables for the endlessly boiled cauldrons.

  “Flash powder, or ordinary gunpowder?”

  “I wouldn’t be able to tell by looking,” Marcus said, “but the barrels looked the same as all the others.”

  “Flash powder, then.” Viera’s faced twisted in thought, and Marcus found himself watching her hands to make sure she didn’t remove a finger. “What is he going to do with that much flash powder?”

  This was the third convoy they’d ambushed, with the same result. The Patriots had taken possession of nearly all the larger buildings along the Green Road, but they weren’t fortifying them as Marcus had expected. They ought to be blocking up the entrances, loopholing the walls, that sort of thing. Instead the actual defenses seemed to have been delegated to the seedies, who were throwing up barricades in the streets with a great deal of enthusiasm but little actual military skill.

  And flash powder was flowing, from the mills north of the city through a seemingly endless chain of wagons, all destined for one building or another along the road.

  “Presumably he wants to blow somethi
ng up,” Marcus said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Viera said.

  “I don’t know.” Marcus shrugged. “Hide barrels of powder in the buildings by the side of the road, wait until the army is marching up it, then set them off.”

  Viera rolled her eyes in a way that was becoming depressingly familiar. “How much would that actually accomplish? You’d collapse a few buildings, maybe hurt some people with flying bricks, but he hasn’t got that much powder. As a trap, it’s not worth much, not the way he’s setting it. If he really wanted to do some damage, he could bury it under the road—with as much as we’ve seen, that would leave quite a crater when it went off.”

  “Even that wouldn’t be enough to stop Janus,” Marcus said. “He might wreck a company or two, but that’s not going to make a difference in the long run.”

  “Exactly.” Viera shook her head. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s playing at.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t know what he’s doing?”

  “He must have some engineers.” She pursed her lips. “If I were him, I’d think about bringing down the Grand Span. That would keep Janus off the Island for a while.”

  Marcus paused for a moment, taken aback. The Grand Span was part of Vordan City, and had been since before he was born. It was a monument to the foresight and perseverance of the builders, a triumph of modern science, bridging a distance long thought to be impossible. The idea that Maurisk might destroy it to gain a temporary military advantage seemed almost sacrilegious.

  “Do you think he’ll do that?” he said after a moment.

  “From what you’ve brought me, there’s no evidence that he’s going to try. It’s a big bridge, and all stone. He’d need a lot of powder, and the preparations would be pretty obvious.”

  “He might be worried people wouldn’t stand for it. The seedies might turn on him.”

  Viera nodded, pushed aside the bits of potato she’d been cutting, and reached for a bunch of slightly wilted-looking carrots. Marcus looked around. The population of the church had thinned out considerably since Raesinia took charge, and Mrs. Felda was taking the opportunity to give it a thorough cleaning. The smell of salts and vinegar was strong in the air, as were the shouts of the apparently tireless old woman as she ran after her charges.

  “So what should we do about it?” Marcus said.

  “The powder?” Viera paused in her chopping, shrugged, and went back to it. “It depends. It’s not going to hinder Janus much, so from that point of view we don’t need to do much more than warn them when they get here.”

  Marcus nodded, feeling a little relieved, but she went on.

  “On the other hand, if they are mining the buildings, and they know what they’re doing, then they’re going to bring down an awful lot of masonry. And I doubt they’ll give the game away by warning the people who live there. So from that point of view”—she separated the top of the carrot with a particularly sharp whack of the knife—“it might be worth our trying to stop them.”

  “Damn,” Marcus said quietly. Janus, if he were in command, might weigh the pros and cons of rescuing the people in the rigged buildings. Raesinia would not. And Raesinia’s in command now.

  “One thing we should definitely do is have a firefighting crew ready,” Viera said, starting on another carrot. “It’s too cold and wet to get a serious blaze going, but flash powder burns spread a lot of hot sparks around.”

  Marcus nodded absently, distracted by a commotion at the front door. Raesinia had returned. Cora and Walnut went to greet her—the teenager was half a head taller, and the huge man dwarfed the queen, but it was clear nonetheless who was in charge. Marcus had seen it a dozen times now, but he still marveled. I always wondered how a girl like her managed to put together a conspiracy that toppled the government. It no longer seemed so mysterious.

  It reminded him of Janus, in an odd way. People around Raesinia were drawn into her orbit, the same way the general exerted a palpable force on nearly everyone he met. The difference, Marcus thought, was that where Janus was well aware of the extent of his personal magnetism and used it to his advantage, Raesinia was almost unconscious of hers. She doesn’t plan like Janus. She just keeps moving forward, one step at a time, and we fall in behind her.

  Marcus wondered, uncomfortably, what would happen if these two heavenly forces directed their gravities in opposite directions, and shook his head to banish the thought. Janus would never allow that to happen. He picked up his rifle again and raised his hand in greeting as the queen’s party approached.

  * * *

  RAESINIA

  “You convinced him?” Andy said incredulously. “You convinced Smiling Jack to help us?”

  “Well,” Raesinia said, “I doubt I had much to do with it. Cora did all the real work.” She put an arm around Cora’s shoulders and squeezed her tight. “I just had to go in and say the magic words.”

  “What?” Andy said. “What magic words? They say the last man who asked Smiling Jack for charity was found spiked on the weathercocks of six different buildings!”

  “Ah, but we weren’t asking for charity. We were making an offer.”

  Andy looked from Raesinia’s smiling face to Cora’s blushing one and gave her a pleading look. Cora shrugged awkwardly.

  “Smiling Jack is having . . . liquidity problems,” she said. “A lot of the Oldtown gangs are suffering under the blockade, and now with the seedies cutting down on nightlife. I did some research on where he’s been going for coin, and bought an appropriate stake in some of the larger institutions.”

  “In other words,” Raesinia said, still grinning, “Smiling Jack is up to his eyeballs in debt, and thanks to Cora a lot of that debt is now owed to us.”

  “Or to banks that we control,” Cora said. “It’s safer that way. Less of a chance he’ll resort to extralegal measures.”

  “That is, that he’ll decide his problems would be over if we were found floating facedown in the river,” Raesinia translated. “Once we got him to understand the situation, you should have seen him grovel.”

  In truth, Raesinia had found the meeting with the crime lord disappointing. She’d heard endless stories of the famous gangs of Oldtown, criminal dynasties that stretched back into antiquity. Some supposedly occupied premises that dated from before the founding of the Vordanai monarchy, give or take the odd citywide fire. While crime in Newtown rarely rose above the level of petty theft and vendetta, the loose alliance of gangs, families, and guilds that ruled the city’s oldest district had loftier ambitions. They ran the brothels and gambling houses of the Cut, and controlled empires of smuggling, corruption, and vice stretching from Essyle to the Jaw.

  So she’d always been told, anyway. Smiling Jack had been a middle-aged man with a paunch and thinning hair, bedecked in gaudy jewelry and silks. He’d met her in the back of his tavern, the Lion’s Den, where he had what amounted to a throne room. To other criminals, the ostentatious display of wealth in the furnishings was probably impressive; to Raesinia, who’d grown up in the vast, gilded halls of the Palace at Ohnlei, it felt like an overcramped storage closet.

  Smiling Jack’s bluster and crude threats had deflated quickly enough when Cora explained the situation, and he’d been almost pathetically eager to deal. The prospect of a suspension of interest on his loans was enough to wring the promises they needed out of him, and Raesinia had taken pains to point out that in the event of her and Cora disappearing, the arrangement would vanish with them, leaving Jack once more at the mercy of the banks of the Exchange. Even crime lords can’t stand up to countinghouses, it seems.

  The upshot was that Smiling Jack undertook to open some unused property of his to the refugees who were still streaming into Mrs. Felda’s, and to keep them safe from the seedies, at least until Janus’ army arrived. Similar arrangements, on a smaller scale, had already relieved the pressure a bit, but this would improve con
ditions considerably.

  “And,” she said, “according to Cora we’ll even make a profit on the deal.”

  “Smiling Jack’s ventures seem basically sound,” Cora said. “We purchased the debt at a discount, but I’m convinced it’s viable in the long term. Of course, it does tie up those assets for a while.”

  Andy shook her head and looked at Raesinia. “Where did you find her?”

  “Working as a messenger for the Exchange,” Raesinia said. “If I hadn’t distracted her helping me save Vordan, she’d probably own half the world by now.”

  Cora, already red, blushed further and looked at her feet.

  “What about your side?” Raesinia said. “Any progress?”

  “We grabbed another seedie wagon,” Andy said. “More gunpowder. Marcus and Viera are trying to figure out what they’re up to.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “Not seriously. They had more guards this time, though. We had to shoot a couple of them.”

  “Have you seen Sothe?”

  “Upstairs.” Andy gestured at the balcony, which with the decreased crowding had been cleared to allow planning in private without resorting to the attic. “She’s waiting for you.”

  “I’d better go, then.” Raesinia patted Cora one more time, waved to Walnut and some of the other Leatherbacks who’d come to greet their returning party, and fought her way to the stairs.

  Sothe was waiting in what had become an impromptu conference room. A big dining table, donated by one of the refugee families, bore a hand-drawn map of the Docks on big rolls of butcher paper, annotated and scribbled on to represent what they knew of the seedie and Patriot Guard activities. Most of the handwriting was Marcus’, but when Raesinia came up the stairs Sothe was adding a few notations in her precise handwriting.