“Uh-huh. I’m sure you meant to get yourself surrounded by five men in a narrow alleyway where the closest Tick-Tock Grunt is half a league away.”
“Who hired you to guard Aeternita’s Grace?” Vera asked.
“We’re the ones asking the questions,” responded the man with the goatee.
Vera shrugged. “Ask them.”
“Who tipped off the Madman’s spies?”
Vera knew who they meant. Even among the ministers who frequented the palace, the Madman was a perfectly acceptable and well-known term for Osyrus Ward.
“You’d have to ask the Madman.”
“So, he is the one who sent you here. Why?”
Vera smiled. There was no reason to mince words at this point.
“Because selling dragon oil on the black market is illegal.”
“It is. But since when does the empress’s widow get sent to deal with that kind of thing?”
“My duties are expanding.” Vera opened and closed her right hand. “There’s no reason to make a mess of this. If you give me the name of the merchant who hired you, that’ll be the end of it.”
“Who, Trovis?” The man with the goatee smiled. “Everyone in the fourth district knows who that sweaty weasel is. Wasn’t no need to get yourself cornered down here to learn his name.”
Vera assumed he was referring to the merchant in the white robe who’d disappeared.
“Not Trovis. The man Trovis gets his orders from. You know, the silk magnate who’s stockpiling dragon oil and preparing to send it to Taggarstan on the next full moon?”
The man’s smile disappeared. Vera did not trust Osyrus Ward any more than she trusted a Red Skull dragon, but in this case his intelligence was clearly accurate.
“Oh,” Vera said. “Was that supposed to be a secret?”
“If I were you, I’d be less concerned with that man’s name, and more concerned with the orders he gave regarding you, widow.” He motioned to his men. “We’re to make sure your trip up the alley only goes the one direction.”
Vera tapped her thumb against the guard of the sword. She was willing to carve answers from this man’s hide, but once steel was drawn things became unpredictable. Gold was a more reliable method for getting questions answered.
“How much do you get paid to follow that order?” she said. “Might be there’s more coin to be made as a friend to Empress Domitian.”
The man with the goatee shook his head. “No chance.”
Oh well. Worth a shot.
“Very well,” Vera said. “Let’s do it your way.”
The man nodded. Then stalked forward, slipping into a low guard. The two men behind him followed.
Vera waited until the man with the goatee was between steps, then she darted forward and rammed the pommel of her sword into his teeth, turning them to splinters. He fell on his ass. With her left hand, she drew the scabbard off her sword and threw it at one of the thugs behind her, forcing him to bat it away with his sword. Then Vera hurled the sword itself like a spear and skewered the man through the heart.
She followed the momentum of her throw, ducking a clumsy swipe by the second thug from the tavern. She drew Kaisha and ran the blade in and out of the side of his neck, severing both of his main arteries.
The other two were on her, but they moved like turtles. She dodged a sword jab, which went past her and into a copper pipe that released a spray of hot steam onto the man’s arm. He howled in pain but was silenced when Vera slashed his vocal cords apart.
The last man tried a sideswipe. Vera stopped it by stabbing him through the forearm. When he recoiled, he took the dagger with him, so Vera drew Owaru and rammed it through the bottom of his jaw and into his brain. She pulled her daggers out of the dead man before he fell to the ground, then stalked toward the man with the goatee. He was still on the ground and shuffling away from her like a crab, blood pouring from his broken mouth.
Vera kicked him between the thighs hard enough to make him curl his legs and moan, but not so hard she made him vomit or pass out. There was a thin line between those two results, but Vera knew it well. Her widow’s training had involved several weeks focused solely on the unpleasant things you can do to someone’s manhood to produce a desired behavior. Right now, she wanted him to start telling secrets.
She squatted in front of the man.
“Let’s try this one more time,” Vera said. “Who hired you?”
7
JOLAN
Almira, Dainwood Province
Jolan and the wardens traveled across the northern rim of the Dainwood for a day and a night. They walked in a loose formation—alternating between game trails and streambeds to stay off the main roads. Jolan passed the time by foraging for mushrooms and trying to make his loose orbit around Oromir appear natural and casual. But every time he came close to the young warden, a lump formed in his throat and his pulse quickened. He couldn’t stop thinking about what they’d talked about in the barn.
“What day is it?” Willem said, switching the shoulder that he was carrying the pigeon cage on. Each warden had taken a turn carrying the bird through the backcountry. “We’re not gonna miss the Clear Sky markets, right? Umbrik’s Glade has a good one.”
The Clear Sky markets only came every five years, during the autumn after the Great Migration. While the dragons were mating in the eastern warrens, the farmers of Almira enjoyed an entire season of clear skies. Without the looming threat of lizard attacks to interrupt their harvests, the reaping was far more bountiful and rich than other years. All the big cities in Almira—Umbrik’s Glade included—ran a special market for the occasion.
“Don’t worry yourself,” Sten responded. “It’ll be running strong for another week, at least. They’re probably still bringing in all the crops. Pineapples. Bananas. Oranges. And the Glade always has the best salt pork you can find.”
“Gods, but I love Dainwood pineapples,” Willem said. “Need to get myself some more preserves this year. Miscalculated on the last Clear Sky and my stock was spent before the first winter solstice.”
“How are you going to carry around jars of preserves with a war on?” Sten asked.
“I’ll bury ’em somewhere. That’s obvious.”
“I’ll take three-to-one odds whatever jars you bury, you can’t locate the following morning. Forget lasting until the next solstice.”
“Fuck yourself, Sten. My memory for buried caches is rock solid.”
“Spend a lot of time burying things besides your own turds?”
“Maybe I do,” Willem said cryptically.
“Willem the squirrel,” Sten said. “Kind of has a ring to it.”
They reached a ridge that looked down on a wide valley. From their vantage, they had a nice view of the entire settlement.
Umbrik’s Glade was a new town that had sprawled around an ancient holdfast. The small fortress was made from heavy slabs of dark granite, but the mortaring had decayed in some places and been repaired, giving it an unbalanced and vaguely unsettling look. In contrast, the town’s houses and shops and taverns had all been cut from fresh lumber and roofed with expensive red slate. They spread out from the holdfast in five concentric circles. The innermost road that ringed the holdfast was packed with massive crates of different food: corn, beans, wheat, rice, and dozens of different fruits and vegetables. It was enough to feed the city and surrounding countryside for weeks. Hawkers stood in front of the massive crates, shouting and bargaining and selling to buyers.
“I see a pineapple pile!” Willem shouted, pointing at a mountain of fruit. “Still plenty left.”
A coffee plantation dominated the eastern hills. To the west—where the Dainwood forest thickened in earnest—there were half a dozen lumber mills and wide roads leading into the dark forest. A team of oxen was hauling a long, flatbed wagon filled with freshly cut lumber out of the forest and into the town.
“Fucking Umbrik.” Cumberland spat. “Bastard’s still running his mills.”
“
Of course he is,” Oromir said. “With the Grealors dead and the jaguars in rebellion, there’s nobody to come collect taxes from this operation. It’s pure profit.”
“It’s a fucking disgrace,” Cumberland said, turning to Oromir. “You’re too young to remember what it was like before, when the Bershad lords ruled and there wasn’t a single mill in all of the Dainwood.” He looked off into the distance. “It was beautiful. The heavy fog of the early morning. Jaguars napping in the trees. Bird songs thrumming down from the canopy like a swelling storm.”
“There are still birds,” Willem said.
“It’s not the same.”
“Those annoying motmots have been following us all day,” Willem said.
Jolan listened for a moment. Frowned.
“I don’t hear any motmots,” Jolan said.
Everyone went silent. Listening.
“You’re right,” Sten said. “They went quiet. When did that happen?”
“Not interested in when so much as why,” Cumberland said, scanning the trees, then the sky.
A long shadow fell over the valley. Despite the season, instinct told Jolan it was a dragon, but instead of the quick flicker of a Blackjack or a Verdun, this shadow dropped over the valley and stayed there. Lumbering and slow. A cloud?
Jolan looked up and saw something that he didn’t understand.
At first, he thought it was some strange species of undocumented dragon. Twice as large as a Naga Soul Strider, but with black and gray coloring and a massive hump on its back.
No. Not a hump. It was a massive, bloated sack made from a patchwork of dark leather. Hanging beneath it was the unmistakable shape of a ship’s hull that was made from dragon bones instead of oak. But that was impossible. Nobody could have preserved so many remains of a great lizard. At that size, it would have taken dozens of cobbled-together dragons. Maybe hundreds.
“It’s a flying ship,” Jolan said, not quite believing the words coming out of his mouth. Steel support beams and copper cables ran along the belly of the flying object like the twisted roots of a messy winter garden. The sound of metal hammering echoed down from the ship, as if a hundred blacksmiths were inside, pounding away on blades. The piney smell of burning dragon oil filled Jolan’s nostrils.
“Demon’s breath,” Sten muttered, gaping up at the ship as it cut across the sky. Jolan glanced back to the city. People were leaning out of windows. Pointing. Shouting. One man had dropped his haul of raspberries and rice and fled toward the tree line, leaving his two small boys to fend for themselves.
The ship lilted, turned, and then stopped above the holdfast. A square hatch at the bottom of the ship opened. Scores of black cables dropped to the ground.
Cries of fear from the citizens of Umbrik’s Glade rose above the mechanical din of the flying ship. Now they all fled in a panicked mass—rushing down side streets and alleys, heading for the cover of the jungle. The man who’d reacted first had already disappeared into the gloom.
Armored men started sliding down the cables. When they reached the ground, they scattered around the market, hooking those same cables to the massive crates of food.
“I know that armor,” Cumberland muttered. “Those are Balarian soldiers.”
“Clock fuckers?” Sten asked. “What are they doing here?”
Nobody responded. Nobody knew. But less than a minute later, it became obvious.
The soldiers jumped onto the crates of food. There was a shout, and the cables started retracting upward, carrying the men back to the ship, along with the entirety of Umbrik’s Glade’s Clear Sky harvest. They disappeared into the ship’s hull, but the hatch remained open. The ship hovered in the sky.
A steel orb the size of a horse dropped from the hatch and landed in the square. There was a mechanical box on top of the orb that was sprouting copper wires and pipes that ran in and out of the orb’s innards.
“Is that a clock?” Willem asked.
“Dunno. Never seen anything like—”
There was a blinding flash that forced Jolan to shield his eyes. Then, an earsplitting boom. It was as if a hundred bolts of lightning had struck the city at the same time.
When Jolan opened his eyes—blinking to regain sight—the holdfast was gone. In its place, there was a smoldering crater of rubble. Any building within a hundred strides of the crater was on fire.
Everyone gaped at the ruination, unable to believe what they’d just seen.
A mechanical roar boomed from deep inside the ship. It flew east at a fast clip. Before long, it was just a black dot on the horizon.
“The merchant’s stories were true,” Willem muttered. “I didn’t believe them. Not really. Gods.”
“We move,” Cumberland said, starting down the ridge.
“What if it comes back?” Willem asked.
Cumberland didn’t answer. Just picked up his pace.
* * *
The first body they came to was a woman in a yellow dress. Half her face was untouched, but the rest was blackened and burned beyond recognition. On instinct, Jolan knelt and shrugged his pack off. Started pulling out ingredients for a burn tonic.
“Leave her,” Cumberland growled.
“But she needs a tonic for the—”
“She needs a seashell, boy. But there will be others you can save. C’mon.”
Jolan took a closer look at the woman. Saw that she was dead. Sten was kneeling beside her and fishing out a seashell from behind his breastplate. He muttered some words as he placed it in her mouth.
They moved down the main street, which was still half mud from the storm two days earlier. Eventually, they reached the square. The air was cloudy with soot. Jolan could taste copper and smell scorched flesh. Four unplucked chickens that had been hung outside of the butcher shop were smoldering. All their feathers singed black.
There was a crash from inside the shop, and a moment later a man in a dirty apron stumbled out. He was holding both hands over his face. Blood streamed from between his fingers. He collapsed in the road.
Jolan started to run over to him, but saw another man across the square lying on his side. One of his legs was gone, the other torn to shreds. And a dozen paces away there was a woman kneeling over a child, pressing down on the girl’s stomach to try and stop the bleeding of an abdominal injury.
You can’t run from person to person, Jolan realized. They’re too far apart. You need to make a plan before you act.
Jolan had never worked a battlefield, but he’d read all fifteen volumes of The Alchemists’ Field Guide to War Contracts. He knew what to do. He’d just never done it before.
Focus. Work smart.
Jolan unslung his backpack and started removing supplies.
“I’ll set up my treatment center here,” he said, pulling on Master Morgan’s sealskin gloves. “Bring everyone to me. If someone is too hurt to be moved, break down a door, gently roll them onto it, and drag them over. Arrange them so those with the most serious injuries are the closest to me.”
Jolan looked up. The others were frozen in place. Overwhelmed with the destruction.
“Hey!” Jolan shouted, breaking their trance. “They need help. Bring them to me!”
* * *
Five hours later, Jolan had done everything he could.
Sixty-three were killed by the explosion. Another twenty-nine died while Jolan was treating them—or while they were waiting for their turn. Twenty-two had critical burns and probably wouldn’t live out the week. Nineteen had severe wounds but would probably live. Fifty-three had minor injuries and would make full recoveries.
“Keep this on for three days,” Jolan said, as he finished packing a Gods Moss poultice against a man’s shoulder, which had been scorched in the explosion. “It will prevent infection.”
“Thank you,” the man whispered. “For everything.”
Jolan had used half of his Gods Moss. He knew that he’d given away a fortune, but many of the burn victims were just children. Some were babies. Even if they
died—and the Gods Moss was wasted—he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t give them the best possible chance at survival.
When the man was gone, Jolan sat back on his haunches. Closed his eyes. Blew out a sigh. It was almost dark.
“That was incredible.”
He looked up to see Oromir standing in front of him. One hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Not sure incredible is the right word,” Jolan said. He motioned to the line of bodies. Sten and Cumberland were giving them shells. “So many dead. So many that I couldn’t save.”
“There would have been far more heading down the river if you hadn’t been here.” Oromir squatted in front of Jolan. Took his hands. “You have a gift, Jolan. The way you stayed calm in all the chaos. The way your hands move so fast when you’re mixing tonics and stitching. Doing seven things at once without screwing any of it up. It was amazing. Truly.”
Oromir looked down at Jolan’s palms. Squeezed them.
“Thanks,” Jolan said. He’d never been praised like that. If Master Morgan had been here, all he would have done was give Jolan a curt nod and an extra cup of coffee the following morning.
Oromir opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped short. His hand moved back to his sword as he stood and looked to the left.
A woman had appeared. She had jet-black hair pulled into a tight bun and was wearing a strange kind of black armor with rivulets and grooves across the surface. There was a forked scar along her face and a meat cleaver in her hand.
“Who is in charge here?” she asked with a thick Papyrian accent.
“Who’s asking?” Oromir said, voice guarded.
“My name is Shoshone Kalara Sun. I am here to help the Jaguar Army.”
“Help us do what?”
She motioned to the sky. “Deal with the Balarians.”
* * *
Oromir brought Shoshone to Cumberland. Cumberland decided they should all take shelter in a cobbler’s workshop to talk. It was one of the few structures that hadn’t been damaged by the explosion.
Sorcery of a Queen Page 9
