“You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“He’s got what you want tucked up that lizard-hide coat, too.”
“That right?” Castor asked. He didn’t recall keeping Osyrus apprised of his personal desires.
Vergun pointed his knife at the door that Osyrus Ward had just used to leave and spoke with a full mouth of meat. “Mark my words, whatever that man is planning, it will involve a paradigm shift within the Balarian Empire. Those who hold power now will lose it. Violently, I expect.”
“Seems like heavy work for such an old man.”
“Oh, I expect he’s got someone doing the heavy lifting for him back in Clockwork City. Same way he’ll have Wormwrot doing the lifting later. That’s how slimy creatures like him operate. But I couldn’t give a fuck so long as it ends with Bershad’s heart in my hand and his corpse at my feet.”
Castor grunted. He didn’t fully believe Vergun, but if there was a chance that his boss was right, he’d go along for the ride. One way or another, Castor was going to fill the rest of his days with black work. Might as well do the work that could make things hard on the top brass of Balaria.
The clock fuckers deserved it.
22
VERA
Balaria, Burz-al-dun, Imperial Palace
“Will you stop with that?” Kira said. “We’re late.”
It had taken many galas—and many favors—but Kira had finally formed the majority of ministers she needed to remove Actus Thorn from power. They were all waiting for her in an audience chamber to carry out the vote.
“Thirty more seconds,” Vera said, continuing to run Owaru across the sharpening stone.
“If the first hour of honing didn’t get the blade sharp enough, what’s an extra thirty seconds going to do?”
“Help me relax.”
“Are you nervous, Vera?”
Vera gave her a look. “Of course I am. Every man in that room is supporting you for a different reason, and if they start talking about the source of their manipulation, this deception will topple over.”
“Hm. Well, do not worry. I will be the anchor of composure for us both. Now can we please go?”
Vera sheathed Owaru, then began checking the straps of her armor.
“You know, the longer we leave the ministers in that room, the higher the chance one of them will say something they shouldn’t.”
Vera stopped fiddling with her gear. That was good point.
* * *
“You remember your part?” Kira asked as they moved around the familiar ring of the palace.
“Look angry and intimidate anyone who seems like they are getting cold feet?”
“Exactly.”
They reached the door. Kira stopped so that Vera could put her hand on the large metal handle.
“Ready, Empress?”
Kira took a breath.
“Do it.”
Vera opened the door to the ministry chamber. But instead of a crowded roomful of greedy, cowed ministers, there were only three men. Two of whom were fully armed and armored Horellian guards. Pij and Thrash—Ganon’s two favorite bodyguards.
The third was Emperor Ganon Domitian, smiling joylessly. There was a covered platter next to him.
“You’ve been fucking about, my muddy-haired wife.”
“Ganon? What a pleasant surprise. I had called the ministers here to—”
“Remove Actus Thorn from power,” Ganon finished. “Freemon informed me.”
Ganon removed the cover of the platter. Freemon’s head was on the plate beneath.
“It was that business with the surplus of fish that caught my attention. Freemon was never the generous type. A little extra juniper liquor and a few extra questions was all it took to learn that my savage of a wife has been playing all of my friends against me—concocting a scheme that would have gotten them all executed when Thorn came back. I forgave the others, but Freemon was my favorite drinking companion. Such a personal betrayal couldn’t be overlooked. To turn against me for some fucking tax breaks,” Ganon continued. “Terrible.”
“You’ve spoiled everything,” Kira whispered.
Ganon replaced the platter’s cover. Looked at Kira.
“I took you as a wife for two simple reasons. You’ve got the best tits in Terra, and because Almirans are famously dirty in bed. I put Actus Thorn in power for a simple reason, too. This empire is falling apart. My brother spent decades holding it together with his infrastructure and administration. He might even have saved it, but all that went to shit when Silas Bershad rammed a sword through his body. There is nothing to be done now but enjoy the final dregs of the great Balarian Empire before it disappears down a dirty gutter. Thorn will make sure we get our share.”
“Our share?” Kira repeated. “Actus isn’t preserving your fucking share, he’s stealing this country out from underneath you!”
“You were doing the same thing!”
“No, I was trying to take it back for both of us,” Kira seethed. “You might have married me for my tits and the way I suck your cock, but I married you so that I would stop eating shit day in and day out. I married you so that I would finally have a say in the way my life went. And all that I’ve gotten is a drunken moron who isn’t even smart enough to stay out of my way!”
Ganon shot up from his seat and backhanded Kira so hard that the crack of leather on flesh echoed across the large chamber. The empress fell to the ground, holding a hand on her red cheek.
Vera drew her daggers in the blink of an eye. The Horellians were half a heartbeat behind her with their own blades.
“Give it a try, widow,” Pij growled. “After I slit your throat, I’ll use that armor of yours to wipe my ass.”
“Gah!” Ganon cried.
They all looked over to see that Kira had gotten up from the floor, drawn Ganon’s ornamental dagger from his belt, and rammed it through his eye.
The eye without a dagger in it was wide open. Ganon’s gray iris had disappeared due to the panicked dilation of his pupil. The two rulers of Balaria stood there for a moment—locked in what could have almost been a lover’s embrace, minus the blade through Ganon’s brain—before Kira dropped him.
She looked at Vera, face full of bitter rage, but quickly shifting to abject panic.
Vera threw Owaru and Kaisha at the same time. Owaru caught Pij in the throat and put him on his back, gurgling and grasping for the blade. He’d bleed out in twenty seconds. But Kaisha glanced off the collar of Thrash’s breastplate.
He grunted. Dropped his guard for a spit second. That was all Vera needed.
She drew her sword and dashed across the room before Thrash recovered. Cut his head off.
Kira was staring at Ganon’s corpse. Her eye was starting to swell shut.
“I’ve killed us both.”
“No, you haven’t,” Vera said, checking the room. Empty. There hadn’t been any guards outside the doors, either. Good. That was good.
“But the ministers will know he was going to confront me. There’s no way to explain what happened in this room.”
“We’re not going to explain anything.” Vera used a scrap of cloth to wipe the blood off Kira’s face. “Come on, Empress. We need to find Osyrus Ward, and hope he finished that engine.”
23
JOLAN
Almira, Dainwood Province
“You’re lifting your heels,” Oromir said.
“What?” Jolan asked. He’d been running potential Gods Moss concoctions through his head for hours, and was barely paying attention to the road.
“Your heels,” Oromir said patiently. “They should point at the ground.”
“Oh, okay.” Jolan adjusted his posture. The wardens were all expert riders—and of them, Oromir was the best—but Jolan hadn’t spent more than a few hours atop a horse in his life.
“Better. You should pay more attention to your surroundings, too,” Oromir said.
“I pay attention,” Jolan responded.
“To the plants and mushrooms and animals in the trees, maybe. You should be looking for soldiers in the woods. We’re safe enough on this side of the Gorgon, but that’ll change soon. The gods only know what we’ll run into as we get closer to Black Rock. If they left that skyship above the city, the whole province might be crawling with Balarians.”
“I’m not sure I’d know what to look for.”
“Flashes of metal reflected from the sun. Shifting shadows between trees. Twitching ferns. But those are all from sloppy soldiers. We run across a decent crew, first warning you’ll get is the sound of a crossbow clicking as it locks. If you’re setting an ambush and waiting around for hours, you generally leave that to the last moment, otherwise all the tension drops out and the bolt won’t punch through a thick napkin, let alone armor.”
Jolan swallowed. “Got it.”
Oromir saw that he’d scared Jolan. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for you. If we run into trouble, just stay close to me.”
“I will.”
The Devil’s Confluence was the place where three branches of the Upper Gorgon River met in a surge of current. The middle branch was the widest, and flowing with silt-packed, brown water from the lowland mudflats. The other two came down from the mountains, clear and pure. But those two mixed with the lowland waters and within a few hundred strides the whole thing was a brown, churning torrent.
“On me,” Cumberland called to their line of horses. “We’ll ford the river branches in chapters.”
The first river was easy—their horses didn’t even get their bellies wet. But the muddy middle was far wider and deeper. And warmer, which wasn’t good. Lurkers liked the warm water.
“Armor off,” Cumberland said, already working on the straps of his breastplate. His crew followed suit. Cumberland gave Shoshone a look when he saw that the widows weren’t following suit.
“What, you widows can breathe underwater or something?” Willem asked.
“Not quite,” Iko answered. She had hazel eyes that reminded Jolan of a cat’s eyes. “But our armor does not double as an anchor, like yours.”
“Can it stop an axe to the chest, though?” Willem smiled, tapping the hatchet on his belt.
To Jolan’s surprise, the widow smiled back. “Depends on the axe. And the strength of the arm swinging it.”
Once the wardens had their armor tightly bundled onto the backs of their horses, Cumberland spurred his mount forward.
“Follow my line exactly,” he called.
Jolan’s heart was thundering as he looked at the opaque current, scanning for the black hump of a Lurker cutting through the surface. But he didn’t see anything.
Before long, Cumberland’s horse was chest deep in the water, then swimming—keeping his head high and snorting hard from the effort. Willem and Sten entered the water after him without any hesitation from their mounts. But when Jolan got his horse far enough into the water to get his boots wet, his nag stopped. Jolan froze. He was afraid to push her too hard and spook her.
“It’s all right, girl,” Oromir cooed, coming up alongside and patting the horse’s neck. He gently took the reins from Jolan and started leading them across. “Just follow me now. It’s all right.”
Oromir looked back at Jolan and smiled. “Nice and easy, yeah?”
To Jolan’s immense relief, his horse obeyed and after a few heart-pounding minutes, they reached the opposite bank.
Shoshone forded next. Everyone gathered up near Cumberland while they waited for Iko—the last in their line—to finish crossing. Jolan could feel everyone relax a little, start planning the last crossing, which looked shallow and straightforward.
Then Iko disappeared.
It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment she was there, astride her black horse, then something sucked both widow and beast beneath the surface.
“River Lurker!” Jolan called, pointing.
Everyone turned. Saw the expanding ripples where the widow used to be.
“Iko!” Shoshone called, spurring her horse back toward the river. “Iko!”
A plume of blood blossomed out of the water close to where she’d gone under, but nothing else came to the surface.
“Iko!” Shoshone shouted again. Nothing.
There was a blur of movement to Jolan’s left, followed by a splash. Jolan flinched, thinking the Lurker was surfacing. But nothing had come out of the water.
Willem had gone in.
“Are you fucking thick?” Cumberland hollered. “Get out of the water!”
Willem ignored him. Kept paddling toward the blood plume. Oromir leapt off his horse and moved to follow him.
“Don’t even think about it, boy,” Cumberland growled, stopping him with a strong hand on the back of his neck. He turned to the water. “Willem! Get back here. That is a fucking—”
Willem dove beneath the surface. His feet kicked once and then he was gone.
For a long stretch, nobody moved or said anything. Just scanned the riverbank, eyes darting to different areas, waiting for movement. It went on until Jolan couldn’t imagine anyone being able to hold air in their lungs for that long.
“They’re gone,” Shoshone said eventually. “Nothing to do except—”
Willem burst to the surface with a gasp and a sputter. He had one arm wrapped around a black figure.
“I got her!” he shouted, starting to kick back to shore. “I got her!”
Oromir waded out to meet them, despite Cumberland growling for him to stay put. They met in waist-deep water and hauled Iko out together. Oromir put his ear to her chest.
“She’s not breathing!”
Jolan was off his horse an instant later and digging through his pack.
“I can help her!” he shouted. “She needs a Sailor’s Cough.”
Gods Moss, wicker root, and salt fumes, he thought, remembering the tonic recipe from an obscure tome in Morgan’s apothecary. Two grams per stone.
He glanced at the widow, approximated her weight, and mixed the concoction as fast as possible. While he worked, the others crowded around with worried, helpless expressions. Sten was on his knees, pinching a totem together from river mud.
“Fuck, Jolan, hurry!” Willem shouted.
Jolan finished, corked the vial, and shook it rapidly as he rushed over. That would produce vapors that—when inhaled—caused a strong series of muscle spasms that could expel water from a person’s lungs.
“Get her on her side!” he said as he uncorked the vial, careful to hold it away from his own face.
He held the vapors just beneath the widow’s nostrils. A moment later, her entire body twitched and thrashed and then she retched up what seemed like two complete lungfuls of brown water. She sucked in a huge, ragged breath.
Jolan stumbled back on his ass, breathing almost as hard as Iko.
“Black skies,” Iko rasped. “I thought I was going down the river.”
“You were,” Willem said, looking at her. “Literally.”
Cumberland grabbed Willem by the collar and lifted him off his feet.
“You ever disobey my orders again, and I will drown you myself,” Cumberland said. Then he dropped Willem, spun, and went to his horse in a huff. Started unstrapping his armor from the beast’s back.
“Some thanks,” Willem muttered. “Fuck.”
“Thank you, Willem,” Iko rasped. Then she turned to Jolan. “And you.”
Jolan nodded. He decided it wasn’t worth mentioning how lucky Iko was that he was carrying Gods Moss, or how expensive that tonic was. “The spasms might have broken a few of your ribs.”
Iko smiled. “I can handle broken ribs, kid. Drowning is a different story.”
* * *
After the river crossing, they moved fast and hard through the backcountry, only stopping to rest their horses and nap in short shifts. Jolan had no idea that his ass and back and thighs could endure so much pain.
But the brutal pace paid dividends. Two weeks later, they reached the outs
kirts of Black Rock—Cedar Wallace’s old city. They stopped just shy of the tree line so as not to be noticed by anyone who might be on one of the nearby farms, but they still had a good view of the valley.
The Black Rock fortress was built on a wide hill that overlooked acres of fertile farmland. Its walls were obsidian black, and stood out from the green, ripe fields like a circle of advanced gangrene on otherwise healthy flesh. Jolan remembered reading a book of histories several times that Morgan kept. Black Rock’s fortress was one of the oldest in Almira, but for generations, the Wallace high lords had poured an enormous portion of their tax revenue into maintenance and improvements. They also built roads in the Balarian fashion going to and from the fields, which allowed them to quickly move provisions behind the fortress walls in the event of an attack. By many accounts, it was the only truly impregnable fortress in the country. From the land, anyway.
Thing was, there was an enormous skyship filling the sky above it.
This one was at least three times the size of the skyship that had attacked Umbrik’s Glade. The bloated sack that hung above the actual ship and seemed to keep the whole thing in the air was large enough to fit all of Otter Rock inside of it. Jolan was pretty sure the sack was made from Blackjack leather. The hull of the ship was armored in gray steel and had long wings made from dragon bones stretching out from both sides. There were black sails tucked underneath.
“Well, we got you here,” Willem said, looking up at the ship. “How in the name of all the forest gods’ assholes are you going to pluck that thing from the sky?”
“I am not sure yet,” Shoshone said. “Iko and I will go find out.”
She nodded to Iko. Without a word, they dismounted and started unbuckling their armor. There was a shallow ravine just behind the tree line, where they stacked their sharkskin in neat piles, then pulled off the linen shirts and pants underneath without a moment of hesitation or modesty.
They undressed so quickly that Jolan was still looking at them when their flesh was revealed. Iko had three noticeable and severe scars on her body. Shoshone had dozens of them.
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