The Crimson Campaign by Brian McClellan
“No,” Oldrich said.
“‘No’ what?”
“Privileged Borbador has a gaes to compel him to kill the field marshal.”
“I know. I’m the one who told Tamas about the gaes.”
“Then why would you ask me that? Releasing him would endanger Tamas and I won’t do it.”
Adamat held his head in his hands. He felt like he was doing that a lot lately. “It’s our only chance against a Privileged under Lord Vetas.”
“You could ask Taniel Two-Shot,” Oldrich said. “He kills Privilegeds as a hobby, and rumor has it he’s in the city.”
“Newspaper said this morning he left for the front.” Adamat realized his mistake as the words left his mouth.
“So you have seen a paper?” Oldrich nudged a spittoon from beneath the table with one toe, leaning over to spit into it. “Was there something in it you wanted me to see?”
“Sir,” one of Oldrich’s men called from the doorway. He was a young man, probably not much older than Adamat’s son Josep. “Sir, you should see this.” He rushed over to Oldrich and dropped a paper into his lap.
Oldrich lifted the paper. The headline read, “Budwiel Sacked, Field Marshal Tamas Dead.” Oldrich was silent for several minutes as he read the article. The young soldier stayed by his side the whole time. When Oldrich finished, he handed the newspaper back to the soldier.
“You weren’t going to tell me?”
Adamat felt like a child who’d been caught robbing the pantry. “I was,” Adamat said. “After I figured out how to convince you to stay and help me.” Adamat swallowed hard. He was about to lose the last bit of help he had to get Faye back. Once Oldrich was gone, it would be just Adamat with eight children to look after, and a wife and son still in his enemy’s hands.
“There’s no convincing,” Oldrich said. “I was given an order. Tamas is my commanding officer and an old friend. He told me to see this thing through to the end regardless of whether he lived through the war.”
“And you will?”
“Yes.”
Adamat couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief, realizing that he’d been sweating. “Thank you.” He paused. “You seem to be taking this awfully well.”
“The headline is sensational,” Oldrich said, pointing to the paper. “It’s actually ‘presumed dead.’ Tamas went behind enemy lines with the Seventh and Ninth and hasn’t been seen since. Those are the two hard-as-nails brigades in the Adran army. Until I see a body, I’m going to believe that Tamas is in Kez, chewing up their army and spitting them out like toothpicks.”
“So I won’t be able to convince you to release Privileged Borbador with Tamas dead?”
“Sorry. You’ll have to think of something else. And do it quick, because I can only help you take down Vetas until there’s an army knocking on Adopest’s front door.”
Adamat stood. “I’ll think of something.”
“Also,” Oldrich said, “with Tamas presumed dead, that means the clerks will tighten the noose on the checkbook he gave you. We’ll need money for bribes or supplies sooner rather than later. If you’ve got some money stashed away…”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Adamat said. He reluctantly said good-bye to his children and headed for the door, only to have Oldrich join him in the hallway. “Sergeant?”
“I wanted to tell you something,” Oldrich said in a hushed voice. He glanced into the mess. “If only to make you feel a little reassured. I don’t want you to worry about your children. The boys have taken a real shine to them. Anyone finds us, comes in here looking for those kids, my boys’ll scramble ’em good, and they won’t be kind about it.”
Adamat fought back the sudden tears in the corners of his eyes. “Thank you,” he managed. “It does… it does mean a lot. Thank you.”
Adamat got to his safe house by about one in the morning. He wearily climbed the stairs to the apartment above the landlady’s, listening to the creak of his boots on the old wooden steps. Had it really been five days since he’d been here? He’d slept on a park bench, a hospice bunk, and a chair in a bar over the days since his meeting with the Proprietor as he planned his next move on Lord Vetas.
He needed a bath.
SouSmith sat next to a low-burning lamp on the sofa. The boxer looked up from a game of cards laid out in front of him, his brow furrowed.
“Bloody worried,” SouSmith said.
Adamat closed the door with a sigh. He was hoping he’d have a good night’s sleep before having to face SouSmith. He felt like the pit. His body hurt, he’d had little sleep in ten days, and he needed a good meal. He’d felt like this only once or twice before in his life, back when Manhouch succeeded his father and the commoners were restless and all police officers were working eighteen-hour days.
He never thought he’d feel like that again. He thought he’d left it all behind.
“Sorry,” Adamat said.
SouSmith looked back at his game. He moved one card on top of another and pulled two off the table, setting them beside him on the sofa.
“Look like pit,” SouSmith said.
“Feel like it, too.”
“Where you been?” His beady eyes searched Adamat’s face.
“The Proprietor reeled me in.” Adamat limped over to a chair by the sofa and collapsed into it. “His boys worked me over all night before I got to see him. Turns out the whole thing was a big bloody mistake. Tossed me back out on the cobbles with ‘sorry.’”
“You saw the Proprietor?”
Was that worry in SouSmith’s voice?
“I came as close as one gets. Sat in the same room with him behind a black screen. Spoke to him through some knitting woman, like he’s mute or something.” Adamat frowned. Maybe the Proprietor was mute. Maybe the woman wasn’t just a security measure but an interpreter. “Do we have any food?”
SouSmith jerked his thumb to a platter next to the sofa. Underneath the cover was a sandwich. The meat and cheese were warm, but it seemed like the best thing Adamat had ever tasted as he collected it and sank back into his chair.
Adamat felt a little strength return as he finished the meal. “He wants the same thing I want, it seems,” Adamat said between the final few bites. “Lord Vetas has been causing him trouble. The Proprietor’s boys only pulled me in because we were following the same woman.” Adamat licked his fingers clean. “But now that the Proprietor knows we’re after the same thing, it seems he’s content to just step back and let me go at Vetas. Which is a bloody shame, because I need his help!” Adamat heard his own voice rise as he finished the sentence, and he grabbed the platter the sandwich was on and hurled it across the room. It clattered into one corner.
SouSmith leaned back on the sofa, his game forgotten, watching Adamat.
“I’ve never wanted to kill a man so badly as I do Lord Vetas,” Adamat whispered. “I know where he is. I found his headquarters. I have a chance, and with the Proprietor’s help I could do it, and he just pushed me back on the street.” He took a shaky breath. “I’m going to do something very foolish, SouSmith, and I think you should walk away from me. Consider this the end of your employment.”
SouSmith’s eyebrows rose. “I’ll decide that.”
“I’m going to blackmail the Proprietor.”
SouSmith began collecting his cards in one hand. A moment later he was done and he stood up. “For once,” he said, “I agree with ya.”
Adamat closed his eyes. He didn’t blame SouSmith. Not one bit. But he’d been hoping against hope that SouSmith would once again refuse to leave. That he’d stay by Adamat’s side and see this thing through.
SouSmith fetched his jacket from the rack by the door. “Sorry, friend,” he said, “I’ll die for ya, but the Proprietor won’t stop with me.”
Of course. SouSmith had his brother’s family to worry about.
They shook hands, and Adamat heard SouSmith’s heavy step down the stairs and out the front door.
SouSmith was big and powerful and he was worth five men in a fight, but he was also a friend. Adamat couldn’t afford to have friends. Not with what he was about to do.
Adamat dragged himself to his feet just long enough to go find his bed. He didn’t bother removing his clothes before he dropped into it.
CHAPTER
14
Taniel rubbed at his eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to sleep.
Five times in three days he’d fought in a bloody melee on the front lines. Five times he’d been the last one to leave the earthen defenses when the Kez proved too strong. Five times he’d been forced to make the long trek across the corpse-strewn fields dragging the wounded and dying, furious that they’d once again let the front fall beneath a Kez onslaught.
How many times could they retreat before the army was nothing but dead and wounded?
Taniel paused to look to the south. Budwiel was getting farther away every day. The front – or what had been the front until half an hour ago – was about a quarter mile away and obscured in powder smoke. The Kez soldiers were already leveling the earthworks and carting away their dead.
This last offensive had been a bad one. The infantry from the Seventeenth Brigade was mostly green and they’d broken and run before the retreat was even sounded. Taniel wondered if there was a single man unharmed after that mess. The groaning of the wounded in the surgeons’ tents made his skin crawl.
He found Ka-poel sitting by the fire next to their tent. She stared at the coals, absently cleaning beneath her fingernails with the tip of one of her long needles. A pot of water boiled over the flames. She looked Taniel over once, then stared back at the fire.
Taniel dropped to the ground next to her. His whole body hurt. He was covered in countless cuts and bruises. A particularly nasty Warden had almost done him in, and he had a clean slice across the side of his stomach to show for it.
Ka-poel stood silently and moved around behind him, where she began to pull him out of the jacket. He didn’t like when she undressed him – well, he liked it, but he’d heard officers muttering about the impropriety of their relationship already – but tonight he was far too tired to argue. She unbuttoned his shirt and cleaned his neck and torso with a hot, wet washcloth.
He lay on his side while she stitched the wound on his stomach, wincing every time the needle went in.
“Pole,” he said while he lay there, “do you remember something being mentioned about Tamas putting together a school for powder mages in Adopest?”
She drummed two fingers on his arm. Yes.
“I think Sabon was in charge of it. I wonder if he’s still up there. Pit, I could use his help.” Taniel paused to think. Sabon’s face floated in front of him, perfect teeth standing out against his black skin. Sabon was the only one Tamas ever listened to. He’d taught Taniel to shoot. A good soldier; a good man. “Damn it, I should have asked Ricard. Even if Sabon is with Tamas, there had to be a couple other powder mages left in Adopest. We need them on the front.”
Ka-poel finished the stitching and Taniel climbed to his feet. His shirt was nearly black, stiff with dried blood. He smelled like a slaughterhouse. He left it on the ground. Ka-poel would find someone to wash it for him. He fetched his one spare shirt from the tent and buttoned it up.
His tent was on the side of one of the mountain ridges that frames Surkov’s Alley. It meant he had to sleep at an incline, but he also had a vantage over most of the valley, and right now he watched the Wings of Adom camp. The Wings’ camp sat closer to the front than the Adran, and they held the east side of the valley with their flank against the river.
Reports were that the Wings were holding their front every day, but were forced to withdraw when the Adrans retreated so that the Kez couldn’t flank them.
Tamas would have been furious had he been here to see it, that the mercenaries were putting forth a better defensive than the Adran army.
A pair of Wings brigadiers were making their way from their own camp toward the big, white-and-blue command tent at the rear of the Adran army. A few other officers seemed to be heading in the same direction. A meeting, it seemed. If Tamas were here, Taniel would be at that meeting.
A great many things were different with Tamas gone.
Not far from the command tent was the mess tent. In most armies the cooking was done by soldiers for their company, or sometimes even their squad. Here at the front, all the cooking was being done by one chef, or so the rumor went.
Mihali.
It wasn’t hard to pick out the tall, fat figure making his way between the cookfires, checking on his small regiment of female assistants. Taniel frowned. Who was this man who claimed he was a god? Taniel had seen a god’s face – Kresimir’s – and put a bullet through his eye. Kresimir had looked like a god. Mihali did not.
Taniel took his jacket and headed down the mountainside toward the command tent.
Soldiers seemed to watch him everywhere he went. Some tipped their hats. Some saluted. Some just stared as he walked by, but Taniel didn’t welcome the attention. Was he some kind of curiosity for them to gawk at? For years he’d always felt at home in the army, but now, with Tamas and the powder mages gone, Taniel felt alone, a foreigner.
He wondered what he looked like to them. He smelled like the alley behind a butcher, and he probably looked like one too. His body was covered in nicks and cuts, his black hair singed from a powder blast yesterday, his face dirty and bruised.
And he wondered what he was. He’d managed to escape serious injury in five hard, bloody fights. He’d been grazed by bullets seven times in the last two days. He’d been inches from being run through on half a dozen occasions. Was he just that fast? Or something else?
That kind of luck didn’t happen. It was uncanny. Had it been like this in Fatrasta? No, he’d never been in an ongoing fight this bloody. He remembered ripping a rib from the Warden in Adopest and wondered if this luck was somehow connected to his newfound strength.
He reached the command tent, ignoring the guard who asked him to stop.
The tent was filled. There were perhaps twenty officers inside – what seemed like all the Wings brigadiers and Adran generals and colonels. Voices were raised, fists being shaken. Taniel slipped along the edge of the tent, trying to make some kind of sense of the argument.
He caught sight of a familiar face and moved up through the crowd.
Colonel Etan was ten years older than Taniel. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and brown hair cut short over a flat, ugly face. Not that anyone would tell him that he was ugly. The grenadiers of the Twelfth Brigade were the biggest, strongest men in the Adran army and one word against their colonel would find you at odds with all two thousand of them.
“What’s going on?” Taniel whispered.
Colonel Etan gave him a quick glance. “Something about…” He paused to look again. “Taniel? Pit, Taniel, I heard you’d joined us at the front, but I didn’t believe it. Where have you been?”
“Later,” Taniel said. “What’s the argument about?”
Etan’s welcoming grin faded. “A messenger from the Kez. Demands that we surrender.”
“So?” Taniel snorted. “There’s nothing to argue about. No surrender.”
“I agree, but some of the higher-ups don’t. Something has them scared.”
“Of course they’re scared. They’ve been retreating from every fight! If they’d hold the line just once, we could break these Kez bastards.”
“It’s not that,” Etan said. “The Kez are claiming they have Kresimir on their side. Not just in spirit, either, but that he’s there in their camp!”
Taniel felt his whole body go cold. “Oh, pit.”
“Are you all right? You don’t look well.”
“Kresimir can’t be there. I killed him myself.”
Etan’s attention was now fully on Taniel. “You… killed him? I heard some wild rumors of a fig
“Yes,” Taniel said. “I put a bullet in his eye and his heart. Watched him go down in a spray of godly blood.”
“General Ket!” Etan shouted. “General Ket!” He grabbed Taniel’s arm and shoved his way through the assembled officers. They all scrambled to get clear of him – no one stood their ground before a grenadier of his size.
“No, Etan…”
Etan pulled him out into the opening in the middle of the room, where the unfriendly faces of two dozen officers waited in tense expectation. “Tell them what you told me,” Etan said to Taniel.
Taniel was once again terribly conscious of his frayed, bloody clothes and dirty face. The room seemed to spin slightly, the air hot and close.
He cleared his throat. “Kresimir is dead,” Taniel said. “I killed him myself.”
The clamor of voices made his head hurt worse than the sound of a musket volley. He looked around, trying to find an ally. He saw General Ket in the group, but she was no friend of his. Where was General Hilanska?
“Let him speak!” a woman shouted. Brigadier Abrax, of the Wings mercenaries. She was ten years younger than Taniel’s father with a face twice as severe and short hair cropped above her ears. Her uniform was white, with red-and-gold trim.
General Ket took the sudden silence to sneer at Taniel. “You can’t kill a god.”
“I did,” Taniel said. “I watched him die. I fired two ensorcelled bullets. I saw them hit. Saw him crumple. I was on that mountain when it began to collapse.”
“Oh?” Ket demanded. “Then how’d you get down?”
Taniel opened his mouth, only to shut it again. How did he get down? The last thing he remembered was cradling Ka-poel’s unconscious body as the building they were in began to buckle and fall.
“That’s what I thought,” Ket said. “The powder has gone to your head.”
“He’s a hero, sir!” Colonel Etan said.