The Guns of Empire

by Django Wexler

  Bobby was waiting for her at the entrance to the camp, as always. She wore a captain’s stripes on her shoulders, and her frame had lost much of its teenage awkwardness in the year or so since Khandar. Looking at her now, it was hard for Winter to believe she’d ever thought Bobby was a boy.

  “Everything all right?” Bobby said. “We were expecting you an hour ago.”

  “Just a bit of traffic in the city that needed sorting out,” Winter said. “We may be a little late getting started tomorrow.”

  “Fortunately, we haven’t got too far to go.” Bobby dug a much-folded slip of paper from her pocket. “From Janus. He wants us at a town called Glarusk in two days. It’s just on the Murnskai side of the border, maybe twenty miles short of the Ytolin. Last word we got, Dorsay’s still camped not far north of there, so this could be it.”

  Winter nodded, though she wasn’t so certain. So far, the famous Duke of Brookspring had shown no inclination to try conclusions with Janus and the Grand Army. Since the breakup of the peace conference, he’d retreated grudgingly but steadily, abandoning several good positions. He had plenty of room—Murnsk was a vast country, and the rivers ran from east to west across the plains of the Split Coast, giving him any number of obstacles to hide behind. Bringing him to battle against his will was not going to be easy.

  But that’s Janus’ worry, not mine. All she had to do was get her soldiers where he wanted, when he wanted, and make sure they did their duty.

  “We’ll be well rested, at least,” Winter declared, studying the little note. “Any other problems?”

  “Nothing to speak of. Abby’s got a half dozen of the Girls’ Own on punishment detail for brawling in town.”

  “With each other?”

  Bobby shook her head. “The usual. Started out with somebody talking about the Girls’ Own and ended up with a bar full of bloody noses and black eyes.”

  Winter sighed to herself. It had become a Girls’ Own tradition to smash up a bar or wineshop in every town they visited; the veterans saw it as a kind of initiation. Drunken farmers and carters being what they were, they were never short of provocation. “If that’s the worst we have to deal with, we’ll count ourselves lucky. Has she tallied up the harvest?”

  “Yes, sir.” Bobby dug out another folded page. “Forty-six recruits, seventeen angry parents, one furious husband, and one sobbing fiancé.”

  Winter fought to hide her smile. “Seems like there might be a tale there.”

  “Probably, sir.”

  It had started in Desland, but it hadn’t ended there. Everywhere the Girls’ Own stopped for more than a night, they got volunteers, young women who’d heard stories of the female battalion and wanted to sign up. They came openly by day or furtively by night, with stories to share or just a quiet determination. Winter didn’t encourage them, but she didn’t stop them, either. And provided they were of age, she didn’t give them back when their parents inevitably turned up to demand their return.

  The women who’d fought to free Vordan City from the Directory were now the hard core of a larger regiment, passing along what they’d learned to the newcomers. Abby had proven to be an excellent commander, carefully promoting soldiers with promises to be lieutenants and sergeants and mixing the raw recruits into the veteran companies. The regiment still specialized in skirmish tactics instead of straightforward line-of-battle fighting, but maneuvers like forming square against cavalry were no longer beyond their abilities.

  “Make sure she gives Cyte the numbers when she gets in,” Winter said. The ex-University student usually stayed with the tail of the column, making sure no one fell too far behind.

  “Yes, sir.” Bobby fixed her with a meaningful look. “And dinner will be ready soon.”

  “I’ve got—” Winter caught Bobby’s expression and sighed. Bobby was insistent that Winter not miss dinners with the other officers. “All right. Do I have time to drop off my things?”

  Bobby saluted and stepped aside, fighting a smile. Winter glowered at her and stalked into the camp in search of her tent.

  —

  Dinner for the senior officers was in the large tent Winter used for maps and planning the rest of the time. The folding table was cleared away, and a circle of cushions was set up. The food was better than the army soup and hardtack that Winter had gotten used to as a ranker, but not by much. The long, fast marches Janus often demanded from his soldiers meant a lean kit and no portable kitchens or wagons full of fancy provisions, even for division-generals. The best she could say was that the meat and eggs were fresh more often than not and there was always enough salt.

  Cyte had still not returned, presumably trudging up the darkened road with the end of the column once they’d finally made their way out of Talbonn. Aside from her and Bobby, the others were all colonels, the commanders of the regiments that made up the Second Division. Some of them had served with Winter since her time in the Army of the East. David Sevran now commanded the Second Infantry Regiment, which included the “royals” who’d once been paired with the Girls’ Own; and Neal Archer, the boyish, serious Khandarai veteran, had brought his battery of guns to her rescue at the Battle of Diarach.

  Others were less familiar. Parker Erdine, who’d been assigned to the division with his three squadrons of light horsemen from the Army of the West, was an opera writer’s idea of a dashing cavalryman. He was almost ridiculously handsome, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, and sandy brown hair of just the right length to stream dramatically in the wind as he charged. His uniforms fit so well they had to be custom-tailored, and he’d traded the standard-issue officer’s cap for a broad-brimmed hat, pinned up on one side and equipped with a long red feather. To Winter’s slight disappointment, he appeared to be a genuinely kind and competent officer, if a bit inclined to blowing his own trumpets.

  Right at the moment, he was once again telling the story of his escape from Ecco Island, where he’d led two score cavalry from the garrison over the mountains when Borelgai warships seized the harbor. The details seemed to get more inventive and exciting each time.

  “We’d pushed far up into the hills around Mount Ecco,” Erdine said, “hoping they’d think we weren’t worth the trouble. But they came on, a hundred lobsters after my poor, ragged three dozen. Our horses were exhausted, and we had to lead them up the rocky slopes, the hunting horns echoing in our ears. I understood how one of the Borelgai foxes must feel when it has the hounds after it.”

  Sevran listened politely, while Archer looked a bit skeptical. Abby—Winter avoided looking at Abby.

  “Just when I was ready to give the order to turn and sell our lives as dearly as we could,” Erdine went on, “we crested a hill and saw smoke rising from the chimney of a little cottage, with a few sheep wandering about outside. I bade my men halt and went to the door. My knock was answered by a pretty shepherd girl of no more than twenty, wide-eyed to find a pack of bedraggled soldiers on her doorstep.

  “‘My lady,’ I said. ‘In the name of the queen and the honor of Vordan, I need your help. The enemy are not an hour behind us.’

  “She turned a pretty shade of pink at my words, but her jaw set, and I could tell at once that she was determined to be a credit to her country and her sex. She pulled me inside the cottage and said, ‘Get in the bed and pull the covers up. If they ask, I’ll tell them you are my father, sick nearly to death.’

  “‘That may do for me,’ I said, ‘but what about my men?’

  “‘There’s a narrow ravine not far from here, where we graze the sheep in bad weather,’ she said. ‘I’ll guide your men there, and they’ll be sheltered from prying eyes.’

  “The horns sounded again, and I had no time to argue. I dove beneath the heavy sheepskin blankets, and the brave girl went out and led my men to safety. She returned in the nick of time, just before the heavy boots of the Borels clomped into her yard. A sergeant pounded on the door, and
I lay as still as I could, one hand on the hilt of my sword. I was ready to defend the young lady to the death, if it came to that, but she stood in the doorway as cool as snowmelt and told the Borel sergeant that she’d been tending her father for days and hadn’t seen another living soul.

  “Soon after that the rain began, and the lobsters gave up the chase as a bad job. My men camped in the shelter of the ravine and sent up prayers to Karis for our deliverance. As to how I spent the night, well . . .” He coughed, and looked at Abby and Bobby. “Present company forbids me from elaborating.”

  “Oh,” Abby said, “don’t let my delicate femininity interrupt your tale of heroic fucking, by all means. I’m all agog to hear the details. Tell me, when you were done, did you happen to get this girl’s name? Did you bring her with you, or leave her behind for the first Borel who took a fancy to her?”

  It was safe to say, Winter thought, that Abby did not care for Parker Erdine.

  “I—” Erdine’s face fell. “I’m sorry, my lady. I didn’t mean to give offense.”

  “Oh, I’m not offended,” Abby said, grinning like a wolf. “But if you call me ‘my lady’ one more time, I’ll show you how we take offense in the Girls’ Own.”

  Into the silence that followed, Colonel Nate Blackstream injected a harrumph. “I’m sure the girl was fine,” he said. “Borels are civilized. They abide by the rules of war.” His face went sour, heavy mustache quivering. “Not like where we’re going. The Murnsks are damned savages. Keep a knife in your boot, is my advice. That way you can at least cut your own throat if you’re going to be captured.”

  Blackstream was cut from a rather different cloth than Parker Erdine. He was the oldest man at the table by a considerable margin, in his fifties at least, with his gray hair grown long and tied back in an elaborate braid. His jowly face was dominated by a luxurious mustache and canny, deep-set eyes. He didn’t smile much, which Winter counted as a blessing, given the state of his teeth. Blackstream had been a captain in the old Royal Army, a War College graduate with a long service record. Something in that record must have impressed Janus, since he’d given the man an infantry regiment.

  “Then again,” he went on, “we’ve got to go through Dorsay before we get much farther into Murnsk. So maybe we won’t have to worry about getting captured by the Murnskai after all.”

  “You were at Vansfeldt,” Sevran said, apparently eager to change the subject. “Is Brookspring as formidable as everyone claims?”

  Blackstream blew out a breath, lifting the ends of his mustache. “He’s clever,” he said, after due consideration. “Patient, cautious. When he was fighting Prince Dominic, he waited until the prince was frustrated enough to do something rash, and then pounced.”

  “That’s unlikely to be a problem,” said Colonel Martin de Koste, the last member of the party. “First Consul Vhalnich won’t give him that kind of opportunity.”

  If Blackstream represented the old army, de Koste exemplified the new. The son of a noble house from the Transpale, he was young, well educated, and utterly besotted with the ideas of the revolution. This translated into an admiration for Janus that bordered on hero worship; he was the only soldier Winter had met who insisted on addressing their commander by his full title. Of all her new subordinates, de Koste made Winter the most uncomfortable, since he seemed to regard her as some kind of demigod orbiting the prime divinity.

  “Janus has done fine against a bunch of creaky old merchants,” Blackstream said. “We’ll see how he fares against a proper commander.”

  “I don’t know about the Hamveltai commanders,” Abby drawled, “but I assure you the yellowjackets aren’t made up of creaky old men.” She looked from Erdine to Blackstream. “Some of us spent last year fighting instead of squatting on the south coast or heroically running away.”

  “I go where the Ministry wills,” Blackstream said phlegmatically. “For my sins. I had my fill of fighting ages past.”

  “And I for one am looking forward to an honest battle,” Erdine said. “Not much fun in it when you’re outnumbered twenty to one.”

  “There’s not much fun in it in any event,” Blackstream said. “Whatever Janus does, it’s us who’ll do the bloody work.”

  De Koste jumped in again, presumably to insist that Janus would win the battle single-handedly. Winter abruptly got to her feet.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I have work to do.”

  Abby tried to catch her eye on the way out, but Winter kept her head down. The conversation picked up behind her as the tent flap closed.

  Abby. The circle of people Winter trusted had shrunk considerably over the past few months. Marcus was back with Janus, second in command of the whole Grand Army. Feor was still in Vordan, studying the Thousand Names. Of the men and women at her side, only Bobby and Cyte were privy to all her secrets. And Abby . . .

  The ghost of Jane hung between them, a dark specter of guilt and loss. Winter and Jane had been lovers at Mrs. Wilmore’s Prison, before Jane had been dragged off to be “married” and Winter had escaped to join the Royal Army. They’d been reunited when she returned from Khandar, and Jane’s Leatherbacks had formed the core of the Girls’ Own. As what had been a rough-and-tumble dock gang had forged themselves into professional soldiers, though, they’d left their leader behind. In the end, desperation had driven Jane into a mad attempt to kill Janus.

  Her name had become taboo, never to be spoken, not just between Winter and Abby but all through the Girls’ Own. For Abby and the others, it was simple: Jane had betrayed them. That she’d escaped afterward and murdered a Girls’ Own guard in the process had been the final straw. All the ex-Leatherbacks seemed determined to pretend that their former leader had never existed.

  If only it could be that simple. It felt like there was a dark pit at the bottom of Winter’s thoughts, a hole that threatened to suck her in whenever she relaxed her guard. I could have helped her. I could have saved her. If I’d only talked to her sooner, said something different, she wouldn’t have done what she did. All she wanted was me. I should have . . .

  She closed her eyes, standing in the darkness of the early evening outside the command tent, and jerked herself back from the abyss. Enough. There were things that needed doing.

  —

  Winter’s pen scratched and popped across the cheap paper.

  Reports, as far as she could tell, were the one constant of army life, across ranks and continents. She’d now served at virtually every position there was, and only as a ranker had she escaped the constant need to write reports. That was because rankers weren’t required to be literate; if they had been, Winter had no doubt the Ministry of War would have made them write detailed summaries of their progress cleaning up horseshit or peeling potatoes.

  The higher she rose, the more subordinates she had to help her, but the more subordinates she had to write reports about, so the whole thing was pretty much a wash. Cyte took care of much of the administrative work, with the same thorough competence she applied to everything, but there were always pieces that required the commanding officer’s sign-off or opinion.

  Outside, the last of the infantry had finally made it into camp. Laughter and shouts filled the night air, still chilly with the memory of winter. They were headed toward a battle and everyone knew it, but if it bothered the rankers they buried it under bravado. The veterans, those from the Girls’ Own and the royals who’d been with the Army of the East, acted unconcerned to show off their blooded status. The rest, new recruits and transfers from the less active armies, followed their lead so as not to look weak by comparison. Morale seemed high. It’s amazing what a little time training and getting enough to eat can do for an army’s confidence.

  There was a scratch at the tent post. “Yes?” Winter said.

  “It’s Cyte, sir,” Cyte said.

  “Come in.” Winter laid her pen down.

 
Cyte pushed the tent flap open and ducked inside. Unlike Bobby, the ex-University student had never looked entirely comfortable in uniform. She wore a captain’s stripes now, serving as Winter’s chief of staff. There wasn’t much staff to be chief of, truth be told, just Bobby and a cadre of messengers, and Cyte did the work of translating Winter’s general orders into specific timetables and routes with meticulous attention to detail. Winter had long since stopped wondering what she would do without her.

  Cyte’s raven-dark hair was longer than it had been in her University days, tied into a tail that hung past her shoulders, and she’d set aside the dark makeup that had given her a vaguely haunted look. She was rarely without a slate or stack of paper in hand. In this case, it was the latter.

  “Reports,” she said, putting the sheaf on Winter’s desk. “From Erdine’s scouts.”

  Reports. Winter sighed. “Can you summarize?”

  “Nothing major,” Cyte said. “This is a bit of a no-man’s-land between Vordan and Murnsk. The official border is around here somewhere, but it’s never been completely clear where. There’s some villages, and the people there say they’re very happy to see us finally putting a stop to Murnskai tyranny.”

  “And they probably tell the emperor’s riders they’re happy to see someone putting a stop to Vordanai tyranny,” Winter said, but not unsympathetically. Being a farmer in a place that had seen as many wars as this one had bred pragmatic sorts. “No sign of the enemy?”

  “Not so far. Dorsay’s still pulling back.”

  “Maybe he’ll pull back all the way to Borel.”

  “Colonel Erdine will be disappointed.” Cyte smiled for a moment before the expression faded. “Bobby told me you barely said a word all through dinner.”

  “I didn’t have much to say.” Winter shrugged. “Erdine talks enough for a dozen by himself. Besides, whenever I say anything . . .” She trailed off.

  “Yes?” Cyte prompted.

  “They all listen.” Winter ran her fingers through her hair and gave a humorless chuckle. “Like I’m a priest delivering the holy word.”