The Crimson Campaign by Brian McClellan
Tamas got to his feet. He pulled on his shirt, long since yellowed and stained with blood – his own blood, and that of others – then on came his uniform pants and boots. Olem had polished the boots during the night, like he did every night. He understood that a field marshal needed to keep up appearances. Finally, Tamas put on his jacket, and he stepped out into the morning air with his bicorne tucked under one arm.
Gavril stared down at him from on horseback. Somehow, he kept that Watchmaster’s vest of his immaculate. His pants were ripped and stained, his arms and shoulders covered with powder burns, nicks, and cuts, but the faded colors of the Watchmaster’s vest showed no wear but that of time and washing.
Gavril had Tamas’s charger saddled and ready, and held the reins out to Tamas.
“I’m not going on some bloody jaunt with you,” Tamas said.
“Then why are you dressed?” Gavril looked around the camp. No one had stirred yet. Tamas let them off easy the last couple of days, sleeping until past eight in the morning. They’d earned their rest, and with the Kez cavalry broken, their remnants sworn to leave Tamas be, and the infantry still a week off, Tamas could afford to give his men some slack.
“The army is marching today,” Tamas said.
“We’ll catch up.”
Stubborn bastard. Why did Gavril need this? Why did he need to drag Tamas along with him? The dead were best left buried, undisturbed. They cared not for the sentiments of the living.
Tamas would rather have tipped his hat to the west and bowed his head in respect for a few minutes. It would have been more practical.
“Get on your damn horse,” Gavril said.
Tamas climbed onto his mount.
They rode west in silence along one of the many rivers that made up the Fingers of Kresimir. Tamas didn’t know if this one had a name. The locals probably called it something – not that there were many locals in this part of Kez.
Northern Kez, with its countless farms and ranches, had once been filled with people. The alternating droughts and floods of the last ten years that had caused Adro so many problems had also affected Kez, and huge portions of the Kez population had gone to the eastern cities in search of work. He imagined those cities even more crowded and dirty than Adopest.
Tamas wondered how Adopest had fared in the war. The canal over the mountains should be finished by this time, alleviating some of the strain off the Mountainwatch for trade. With war with the Kez, food would have to come from Novi and Deliv.
Tamas and Gavril came down out of the highest foothills to where Kresimir’s Fingers began to meet. The Fingers didn’t all converge, not all at once. It was several days’ ride to the place where they did, and their destination was not that far out onto the plains.
The ground turned rocky – great boulders and sudden ravines that made Tamas wonder if the mountains had once come out this far, and if so, what god or force of nature had knocked them down.
The terrain had provided a good place to hide from Ipille’s Wardens, long ago.
They crossed a rocky bluff and then descended into a gully where two of Kresimir’s Fingers met. Tamas rubbed at his shoulders, suddenly cold despite the summer sun beating down upon them.
He saw it then. A cairn, not more than fifty paces from where the two rivers met. It was about four feet high and six feet across, sandstone rocks gathered from the area and stacked.
It had changed little in the last thirteen years. The bloody fingerprints both Tamas and Gavril had left, their hands raw from digging the stony earth, had been washed away. A necklace – a treasured possession of the dead that Tamas had left on the highest stone – was gone, but the rest of the cairn remained undisturbed.
Tamas climbed down from his horse and tied the reins to a stunted tree. He approached the cairn slowly. Thoughtfully. Now that he was here, the dread he’d felt in coming seemed silly.
He turned to Gavril.
The big man, with all his stubbornness in making Tamas accompany him on this pilgrimage, seemed reluctant to get any closer.
Tamas took a shaky breath. He reached out and touched the top stone of the cairn.
“Camenir,” he said, and found it felt good to say it aloud.
A crunch of footsteps sounded on the rocky soil as Gavril finally joined him.
“I doubt anyone but you or me remember the name.” In his head, it had been a musing thought. Aloud, it sounded callous, and Tamas instantly regretted saying it. Gavril was the last of Camenir’s kin. His relatives on the Kez side, dead by Ipille’s orders. The ones on the Adran side not numerous, and those alive having long disowned him.
Tamas tried to picture Camenir in his mind, and found he could not. He looked a lot like Gavril, he thought. Not as big. Quite a bit younger. A sloppy, casual manner and a genuine smile that most found endearing.
“How did you do it?” Gavril stood beside the cairn, head bowed.
“Do what?”
“How did you go on? After what happened?”
Tamas was surprised to hear accusation in Gavril’s voice.
“What choice did I have?”
What did Gavril want him to say? Did Gavril want him to admit he’d slept his way through half the eligible ladies in Adopest, and quite a few ineligible ones? Did Gavril want him to point out that he’d killed more men in duels in the short time following Erika’s death than he had in all his angry youth?
“I saw grief in you,” Gavril said. “I saw it eating through you after Erika’s murder. After Manhouch denied your demands that we go to war. When you came and said you wanted to kill Ipille, I knew it had to be done. But… but after we failed, after Camenir died, you changed. All those signs of grief I’d seen in you were gone. You went back to society. Smiled at all those fools who’d laughed behind their hands at the box containing Erika’s head. You entertained guests and walked the streets laughing.”
“What choice did I have?” Tamas repeated.
Gavril gripped his shoulder and turned him around to look him in the eye. “You never grieved for Camenir. You never cared that my little brother died.” Tears sprang up in Gavril’s eyes, his face red.
“What did you want?” Tamas was suddenly angry. Had Gavril held this against him all these years? Did Gavril think that Camenir meant nothing to him? “Did you want me to turn to the bottle, like you did?”
“I wanted you to show some decorum!” Gavril’s voice rose sharply. “Show some regret. Any sign of emotion for my brother! A man who died for you!”
This close, Gavril towered over him, but Tamas felt no fear. Only rage and regret. “That’s rich, coming from you,” Tamas spat. “Do you think climbing into an ale cask showed decorum?”
Tamas barely saw the fist coming. One moment it loomed, big as a ham, and the next his ears rang as he stared at the ground from his knees. He blinked away a sudden haze. Blood leaked from his mouth and nose, spattering on the dusty ground. Not the first blood he’d left on this spot.
He climbed to his feet, wobbling on his knees. Gavril glared at him, daring him to hit back.
So he did.
The look of surprise on Gavril’s face as Tamas’s fist connected with his stomach gave Tamas a jolt of satisfaction. He followed it up with another punch, doubling Gavril over.
“I lost my wife, you bastard,” he growled.
Gavril wrapped his arms around Tamas and lifted him with a bellow. Tamas felt a thrill of fear as his feet left the ground. To a man with Gavril’s strength, he might as well have been a child.
He brought his elbow down on Gavril’s back, eliciting a yell from the big man.
Gavril lifted him high, then pounded him into the ground. Tamas felt the air leave his lungs, the feeling leave his legs, and his vision blurred. He hacked out a cough and dug one hand into the fat of Gavril’s stomach.
They rolled in the dirt for what felt like hours. Swearing, kicking, punching. It didn’t matter how hard Tamas hit Gavril, nothing seemed to stop him. Even without a powder trance, Tamas stil
Tamas climbed to his feet and kicked Gavril. His brother-in-law shoved him backward, and Tamas felt his back hit the rocks of the cairn.
“Stop!” he said.
Gavril looked up, his face bruised, one eye blackened and his nose bloody. He saw the cairn behind Tamas and lowered his fist.
Tamas limped away from the cairn and lowered himself against an old fallen log.
He felt along his ribs. One of them might have gotten cracked. His face felt like a rug after the housekeeper had beat it for an hour. The back of his jacket had ripped – he could tell just by moving his shoulders. One of his boots was on the other side of the cairn, and Tamas didn’t even remember it coming off.
“You want to know what happened to me?” Tamas said.
Gavril grunted. He lay on the ground across from Tamas, legs splayed.
“That night we buried Camenir is the night I decided to kill Manhouch.” Tamas gathered up a wad of spit and hawked it into the dirt. It was red. “I decided to start a war. Not for the people’s rights or because Manhouch was evil or any of the other drivel I tell my supporters. I started a war to avenge my wife and my brother.”
Tamas took a deep breath and stared at his stockinged foot. His sock had ripped a week ago and his big toe stuck through it. “I couldn’t do it in a world of grief. I had to feel out my friends. Charm my enemies. That was the first step: to convince them I was still Adro’s favored son. Manhouch’s protector. The next step was putting Manhouch’s head in a basket.
“Then, of course, the war. Which” – Tamas held up one finger – ”I almost didn’t go through with. The earthquake and the royalists nearly knocked me off my course. My heart bled when I saw the shambles in which Adopest had been left. But Ipille sent Nikslaus and put me back on my path to vengeance.”
Tamas let his finger drop. “The path will end when I cut out Ipille’s heart for taking my family.”
The air was still. The only sound that of the water where the two rivers met.
“That was a nice speech,” Gavril said.
“I thought so.”
“Had that memorized long?”
“Most of it for years,” Tamas said. “Had to do a little improvising. Never thought I’d be giving it to you.”
“Who, then?”
Tamas shrugged. “My grandchildren? My executioner? Taniel’s the only one who knew the real reasons I planned the things I did.”
The sound of a horse whinnying brought Tamas’s head around. Up on the bluff, perhaps a hundred feet away, were two riders. He squinted into the afternoon sun as his fingers looked for his pistol. It had come out of his belt and lay a dozen paces to his left.
The riders began to head down the bluff toward him. The glare of the sun lessened, and he recognized two familiar faces: Olem and Beon je Ipille.
“Company,” Tamas said.
Gavril craned his neck and looked toward the bluff. “Is that Beon and Olem?”
“Yes.”
“I could break Beon’s neck. Bury him next to Camenir. Would be poetic justice in that.”
“My – our – quarrel isn’t with Beon. It’s with his father.”
“I’ve heard Beon is Ipille’s favorite.”
“Ipille’s ‘favorite’ son changes every six months or so. Beon just lost a major battle with me. I think if we killed him now, Ipille would say he deserved it.”
“Not a loving father.”
“No.”
Olem and Beon came to a halt some dozen paces off. Olem looked down at Tamas’s dislodged boot, then around the gully. “Seems there was a fight,” he said.
“Ambushed. We dumped the bodies in the river,” Tamas said.
“Of course,” Olem said. He didn’t sound convinced.
“I thought that you were given orders to stay in the camp?” Tamas said to Olem.
“Sorry, sir,” Olem said. “The general here asked me to accompany him as his chaperone so that he did not break his word of honor in leaving the camp.”
“And why did you feel the need to follow me?” Tamas turned to Beon.
Beon frowned toward the cairn. “I have heard a story,” he said. “Regarding a powder mage, and two huge brothers with great strength.” His eyes flicked to Gavril. “An old story, passed around in my father’s court. One that my father has taken great pains to stamp out.”
“So?” Gavril said, his tone petulant.
Beon seemed unperturbed. “The story caught my childhood imagination. It comes to an end when an entire company of my father’s Elite disappeared in the Fingers of Kresimir. Some of their bodies were found. Some weren’t. I always wondered if that was really the end of the story.”
Tamas and Gavril looked at each other.
Tamas asked, “And you thought you might find the end of the story by following us out here?”
Beon was looking at the cairn again. “I thought, perhaps. I see a powder mage, a widower by my father’s orders, and one very large man with great strength. I predict that the story I heard has a sadder ending than my childhood imagination would have hoped.” He bowed his head toward them and turned his horse around. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
“It did,” Gavril called out.
Beon stopped and looked back. “Did what?”
“The story. It had a sad ending.”
“No,” Beon said. “The story is not over yet. But the ending will be very sad regardless.”
CHAPTER
30
The Flaming Cuttlefish was a fisherman’s pub. Like The Salty Maiden, it was located out at the end of a pier, suspended about ten feet above the water. Unlike The Salty Maiden, it was packed with all kinds. There were factory workers, seamstresses, millers, and even a few gunsmiths. The pub was known throughout the city for cheap, delicious freshwater oysters. In one corner of the room a fiddler was sawing away a seaman’s tune, and the whole pier swayed with the stamp of a hundred feet.
The barmaid had assured Adamat that that was normal.
Adamat nursed his beer and let his eyes wander around the room again. He sat with his back to the wall, watching the exits. No signs of the slaver, Doles, or any of his men. No sign of Adamat’s son.
It was near midnight. Doles was supposed to meet him here yesterday, but had never come. Riding out his optimism, Adamat had come back and waited all day, a case filled with two hundred fifty thousand krana in cash sitting on his knee. He was tired and nervous, and every minute that passed he grew angrier.
SouSmith, sitting beside him, stifled a yawn. He was drumming his fingers to the tune of the fiddler, his eyes wandering. Adamat could tell he was losing focus.
“Pit!” Adamat swore, getting to his feet.
SouSmith started. “Huh?” He came alert, looking around for signs of danger.
“He’s not coming,” Adamat shouted above the music and stamping. “We’re done here.”
SouSmith followed him out into the night, and for the second time in a week Adamat found himself standing in the dark, on a pier, with nothing to show for himself. He kicked a pier piling and swore when it bruised his toe. He nearly threw his case into the water, but SouSmith grabbed his arm.
“You’ll be sorry ’bout that.”
Adamat looked down at the case. All of his money; his savings, the money Bo had given him, plus another fifty thousand from Ricard. Yes. He would have been sorry.
“I’ll have to go to Norport now,” Adamat said. He was already doing the math in his head. He’d have to charter a boat – and not just any boat, but a smuggler to get him into the Kez-held town – then he’d need to locate Josep and free him from the Kez. There might be Privileged involved, though rumor had it Taniel Two-Shot had killed most of the Kez Cabal on South Pike. Then he’d…
SouSmith shook him by the arm.
“What is it?” Adamat asked, annoyed that his thoughts had been interru
“Norport? You mad?”
“No. I have to get my son back.”
SouSmith sighed. He pulled a pipe from his pocket and set it between his teeth, then packed it with tobacco. “Have to let it go,” he grunted.
“He’s my boy,” Adamat said. “How can I let him go?” He slumped against the same pier piling that he’d just kicked.
“He’s outta reach,” SouSmith said gently.
“No. He can’t be.” Adamat tried to resume his previous train of thought. So much he’d have to do. “Will you come with me?”
SouSmith puffed on his pipe for a moment. “Yeah.”
“Thank you,” Adamat said, relief washing over him. Norport would be dangerous, but going alone into Kez territory might be suicide.
“One condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Sleep on it.”
Adamat hesitated for a moment. He should prepare tonight. Get his supplies together, find a smuggler… then again, finding a smuggler would be far easier in the morning. Most of Adamat’s contacts were asleep by this hour. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll sleep on it.”
SouSmith accompanied Adamat home before taking his own leave. Adamat watched SouSmith’s hackney cab clatter down the street, then headed inside.
The house was quiet but for the soft sound of one of the children crying. Adamat removed his boots and hat, and hung his jacket by the door. He passed the children’s rooms, pausing briefly beside Astrit’s. She was the one crying. Fanish sung softly to her, holding her tight and rocking her back and forth. Neither of them saw Adamat.
He crept into his own room. The lamp was burning low, like it always was when Adamat was still out late.
Faye sat up in bed. Her eyes were red, her long, bedraggled curls framing her haggard face. The faint light of hope in her eyes died when she saw him, and Adamat felt his shoulders slump in defeat. He sat down on the bed beside her and buried his face in his hands.
“You tried,” Faye said. She was better, he thought. Despite her appearance, she’d been growing stronger over the last week, spending time with the children. She still stayed away from the windows and avoided going outside, though Adamat couldn’t determine the reason. Perhaps she feared being seen by one of her former captors?