Blood of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  The Dynize general was a stout woman in her midfifties, with a scar that traveled down the side of her face and one eye cloudy from what seemed likely to be the same wound. She wore a turquoise dress uniform and earrings of colorful feathers, as well as a cavalry saber at her side, the hilt festooned with ribbons.

  “Lady Flint,” the general said, swinging down from her horse.

  Vlora extended her hand. The general gripped it, hard enough that it hurt, though Vlora couldn’t tell whether the act was intentional or if she was simply that fragile. She smiled shallowly through the pain. “General Etepali?”

  “Correct.”

  Vlora felt her exhaustion weighing on her, chipping at what little restraint she still held. “General, I can’t help but wonder why you requested this meeting. It seems rather pointless, considering that we both know we’ll be fighting a battle tomorrow.”

  Several of the general’s retinue gasped audibly.

  “I’m not trying to be rude,” Vlora added, “just trying to save us both some time.” The words sounded forced in her own ears, and she realized how dismissive and angry she sounded—well past rude and on to insulting.

  Etepali took in a sharp breath and muttered something before finally saying, “You’d treat a fellow general with such disdain?” Her expression spoke of the same haughtiness as the other Dynize generals she’d met, and Vlora found herself letting out an irritated sigh.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said, fully ready to turn her back on the group.

  “Wait, wait.” The voice came from somewhere at the back of the retinue. A horse muscled its way through the small crowd ridden by the old woman who’d come as a messenger earlier. She rode up beside her general’s horse and swung down with the restrained enthusiasm of an experienced rider. She said something quickly in Dynize, and General Etepali gave a short bow and backed away.

  Vlora found herself frozen, one foot off the ground for her to turn back to her camp. “What’s this?” she asked cautiously.

  “She’s not General Etepali,” the old woman said. “I am.” She strode forward, taking Vlora by the arm like a grandmother. “Shall we leave the Privileged and the officers outside and go have us a conversation?”

  “I…” Vlora found herself dragged gently past her own guards and toward the general-staff tent. She waved off Davd with a subtle gesture and shot Bo a look before being pulled inside.

  The tent had been set up for twenty people. A table at the far end was laid out with Adran spirits and an assortment of breads, sweets, and salted meats that Bo had somehow magicked up from the camp followers. The old woman dropped Vlora’s arm just inside the tent and looked around with a critical eye. “This is very nice, thank you.” She made a beeline for the refreshment table, leaning down to peer at the labels on the bottles before pouring two drinks. She brought one to Vlora, then found a chair and pulled it around and took a seat.

  Vlora looked dumbly at the drink in her hand. “I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely certain what’s going on here.”

  “My officers,” Etepali explained, “were very insistent that I not meet you in person. I told them that I’d come as an observer and let someone else pretend to be me.”

  “You thought that I’d kill you under a flag of truce?”

  The old woman sipped her drink, examining Vlora with bright, intense eyes over the rim of the glass. Her silence answered Vlora’s question.

  Vlora rubbed her jaw to relax the muscles and crossed the tent, sitting down facing Etepali. “I didn’t mean to be rude out there. But I repeat my earlier question.”

  “Why waste time by meeting?” Etepali asked. “Because who wouldn’t want to? You’re Vlora Flint. Hero of the Adran-Kez War. Hero of the Kez Civil War. Mercenary commander extraordinaire!” There was an air of gentle mockery about the last title, as if it didn’t belong with the first two.

  “There’s no way that my reputation goes all the way to Dynize,” Vlora said flatly.

  Etepali gave Vlora a coy smile. For the second time, Vlora found herself trying to guess Etepali’s age. She couldn’t be any younger than sixty. Perhaps closer to seventy. “You’d be surprised.” She looked at her glass, smirked, and continued, “But no, it doesn’t. I have a biography of Field Marshal Tamas that a spy brought me a few years ago. It mentions you briefly, but otherwise I knew nothing about you before arriving in Landfall. I’ve been reading, though, and there is quite a lot of literature on the famous Vlora Flint.”

  “So what about me?”

  “You’re interesting. Fiery. Loyal. Principled. Conflicted. You remind me of me.”

  At another time, Vlora would have liked this woman. She knew that right away. But she was tired and irritable, and that terrible urge for violence was still planted firmly inside of her. All she could think about was a few hours of restless sleep and the inevitable battle that would come tomorrow. “I suppose I should take that as a compliment.”

  The old woman puffed out her cheeks, letting a breath blow through her lips slowly before answering. “I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing, but you don’t know who I am. You couldn’t. So I’m going to tell you.” She drained the last of her drink—single-malt Adran whiskey, now that Vlora had taken a chance to sip her own—and continued. “I, too, was a young general. Decorated to the rank at thirty-five, during the height of the violence of the Dynize civil war. I’ve fought in over sixty battles. I’ve commanded half of them, and I’ve only lost two.” She held up a pair of fingers to emphasize the point.

  “Are you trying to intimidate me?” Vlora asked, slightly taken aback.

  “Of course not. I’m just giving you context. When I read that biography of Field Marshal Tamas, it was like seeing a ghostly reflection of myself in a mirror. Not his life experiences and campaigns, of course. But the way he thought. His passions. His strengths and weaknesses. It was startling. And then I found out that he had three children: a warrior, a mage, and a general. Now, I would be as interested as anyone else to meet the warrior and the mage.” She cast a glance toward the flap as if to indicate she knew exactly who Borbador was. “But the general…” She shook her head with a small smile. “I never had children of my own. Men aren’t my interest, if you catch my meaning. If I had a daughter, however, I like to think she’d be a lot like you.” She leaned back, took another sip of whiskey. “That, my dear, is why I wanted to meet you.”

  Vlora blinked at the old woman in surprise. “That’s it?”

  “Of course that’s it. I’m old, Vlora. Can I call you Vlora? Yes, well I’m old, Vlora, and I’ve fought so many battles that I’m far less interested in the results than in who fought them.”

  “You’re not like the other Dynize generals I’ve met.”

  “Sedial’s lapdogs? Of course not. Assholes, the lot of them—just like their master.”

  Vlora snorted.

  “You’re surprised I’d call the Great Ka an asshole?” Etepali shrugged. “He is. I’ve told him to his face, and I’m not the only one who wishes that someone else had gotten credit for ending the civil war. My cousin Yaret, well, he…” She laughed. “Sorry, I’m going too far off topic.”

  “No, no… this is quite interesting.”

  Etepali gave her a knowing smile. “Looking for Dynize gossip? Somewhere to twist the knife? I’m not going to defect, Vlora. We will have a battle tomorrow. It’s possible that one of us will die during the fighting, and I wanted to meet you before that happens.”

  Vlora frowned down at her glass. She thought about the silver powder keg at her lapel, and she set down her glass and carefully unbuttoned the powder keg, holding it up to the lamp light. “What happened to the man who took this from me?” she asked.

  “I had him shot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because by his own admission he led a cavalry charge against a single, half-dead woman and then played dead when it didn’t work out for him. I don’t have room for that kind of cowardice in my army.”

  “He was
following orders, I assume.”

  “Then he should have followed them all the way. He should have died trying to finish you off instead of pulling a corpse over himself and hoping your Privileged friends didn’t notice him. By the way,” she said, swirling the amber liquid in her glass, “this is very good. May I have the rest of the bottle?”

  Vlora made a fist around the powder-keg pin. “It’s yours.”

  Etepali beamed. “Wonderful. I appreciate your generosity.” She fetched the bottle and stood behind her chair as if to signal that the meeting was over, and shook the bottle at Vlora. “If I win tomorrow, I hope that you’ll share the rest of this bottle with me in the evening.”

  “Before you take my head for Ka-Sedial?”

  Etepali snorted. “As much as he thinks he is, Ka-Sedial is not the emperor. And I’m not a barbarian. You won’t be mistreated in my care.”

  “That’s something, I suppose.”

  The old woman wagged her finger at Vlora. “It’s more than something. It’s my promise. A word is worth a lot, Vlora. Don’t forget it in your grief and anger.”

  Vlora looked up sharply, but Etepali had already turned her back. She disappeared out through the tent flap in a few strides, leaving Vlora alone in the large tent, a half-finished glass of whiskey in her hand. A few moments of loneliness passed before the flap stirred again and Vlora was joined by Bo.

  “That was awfully short,” he said.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Vlora asked distantly.

  “Did she make demands?”

  “None.”

  “She left here with a two-thousand-krana bottle of whiskey.”

  “I gave it to her. For this.” Vlora held the powder-keg pin up to the light.

  “So what did she want? Don’t tell me she came all the way over here to pilfer some Adran booze.”

  “She wanted to meet me.”

  Bo scrunched up his nose. “The whiskey was more worth her time, I’d say. Is something wrong?”

  Vlora swirled the glass under her nose absently and then finished it in three large gulps. The burning sensation in the back of her throat felt good. “I have the oddest feeling that I’m missing something.”

  “About Etepali?”

  “About this entire meeting. A subtext I didn’t read.” She set her glass on Etepali’s chair and struggled to her feet. “Tell them to clean this up. I’m going to bed. We have a battle to win in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Do you know who she really is?”

  The question came unexpectedly as the Mad Lancers set up camp, fumbling in the dark around the only empty site they’d spotted for several miles. Styke looked up from lighting the tiny lantern he kept in his saddlebags to find Orz’s shadowy face staring at him hard through the darkness. It was very clear which “she” he was talking about.

  Styke finished lighting his lantern. He’d found a spot on the edge of the campground for himself, and the only person within earshot was Celine. He rounded his horse, ignoring the question while he used his lantern to light Celine’s and then helped her get her saddlebags down from Margo. Once he’d finished, he returned to Amrec and hung his lantern from a tree branch overhead.

  “I’m not sure if she knows who she really is,” he finally replied.

  “Don’t be cryptic with me, Ben Styke,” Orz said. “I need to know.”

  At first, Styke hadn’t been sure if Orz was asking because he wanted to discuss Ka-poel’s lineage or whether the dragonman wasn’t actually certain. This made it clear it was the latter. Styke opened his mouth, a reply on his tongue, and thought back to his own relation to Lindet. He’d kept that secret his entire life. “It’s not my place to say,” he finally said.

  “Do you know?” There was an urgency to Orz’s tone.

  “I do.”

  Orz’s jaw tightened in the shadows cast by the lamp. Styke imagined that if he were anyone else, Orz would resort to casual violence to get his answers. Styke wondered if he still might, and let his hand rest lightly in his saddlebag, fist tightening around one of the extra knives in his pack. A long silence stretched between them.

  “It’s something I didn’t consider important at first. A foolish oversight on my part,” Orz finally said. “I assumed that Palo had their own bone-eyes and that she was one of them.”

  “They do,” Styke replied. From what he’d been told, there were a few blood sorcerers in the deep swamp, but most Palo were bone-eyes in name only—elders of the tribe, wise men and women.

  “Perhaps they do. But I’ve been studying her face since we encountered those soldiers. She is not Palo. She is Dynize. I don’t know how I missed something so obvious.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Styke said. He pulled his hand from his saddlebag and worked to relieve Amrec of his burdens, setting up his bedroll and laying the saddlebags beside it.

  Either Orz didn’t notice the flippant remark or he chose to ignore it. He continued, “Knowing that she is Dynize brings up so many questions. Why was she in Fatrasta? How did I not know that such a powerful bone-eye existed? Is she a member of Sedial’s cabal, broken from her master and changed sides? Is she a hidden weapon of the Fatrastans? Is she a member of another Household?”

  Styke disregarded the barrage of questions and continued to work in silence, getting the saddle off Amrec and then taking some time to brush the beast down and check his hooves. Orz watched, a frustrated look in his eye, squatting at the edge of the lamplight like a creature who’d crawled out of the swamp and wasn’t certain he liked what he saw.

  “If she has connections with the Dynize,” Orz voiced his thoughts again, “then she would have known about the capital. She would have known about the Jagged Fens. Did she warn you?”

  “She didn’t know,” Styke answered quietly.

  “She is not of Dynize, but she has a Dynize name and a Dynize face.” He scowled. “I’ve heard rumors of Dynize fleeing the mainland from the very beginning of the civil war until the very end. Is she a lost Household? Are those common in Fatrasta?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  Styke finished his work and turned to face Orz. He’d noticed that the dragonman was guarded with his expressions, choosing when to let his inner thoughts play out upon his face. At the moment he appeared deep in thought, looking inward, the wheels of his brain in motion. Nearly a minute passed and no spark of understanding appeared in the dragonman’s eyes. He straightened suddenly and snatched Styke’s lantern. “Come with me, girl. I need you to translate,” Orz said to Celine before striding across the camp.

  Celine looked at Styke, startled. Styke felt his heart flutter. There was going to be a confrontation, and he needed to be there. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “But if he starts to get angry, I want you to get behind me.” They followed in the dragonman’s footsteps.

  Ka-poel was down by the stream, no more than thirty yards from the edge of the camp. She was alone, sitting in the dark, her legs pulled up with arms wrapped around her knees. It was the position of a fearful child, and even with the dragonman standing above her, lantern swinging, she stared into the middle distance as if her mind was in another place.

  “Ka-poel,” Orz said.

  Her eyes flickered to him briefly. A finger twitched—such a small gesture, but it held the venom of a person who preferred to be left alone. What do you want? the movement demanded.

  He seemed to get the gist, though if he read the subtext, he didn’t care. “I need to know who you are and what you plan to do with the godstones.”

  Styke approached slowly with Celine, and urged her with one hand to move around to where she could face Ka-poel and see her hands easily. Ka-poel looked at all of them without moving her head, her expression darkening before being overtaken by something akin to resignation. Her hands flashed. It’s a long story, Celine translated for her.

  Orz hunkered down next to Celine. “I have time.”

  I don’t wish to discuss it right now.

&
nbsp; “I don’t care.”

  Ka-poel looked up sharply to meet Orz’s eyes, but the dragonman did not flinch away at her glare. They froze into a sort of battle of wills, and Styke found himself holding his breath, wondering which of the two would break first. If Orz made a move toward violence, Styke would need to step in. But he was also aware just how much they needed Orz’s help. He wanted to take the two of them by their collars and shake them, but he imagined that such an attempt would just earn him a pair of knives in the gut.

  Neither of them broke the staring match, but slowly Ka-poel’s hands began to move.

  I don’t know it all.

  “Explain.”

  Ka-poel hesitated. She was not nearly as good as Orz at concealing her thoughts, and her face was writ with irritation. Styke wondered if she would refuse just out of stubbornness, and found himself letting out a breath he did not know he had held once she continued.

  I’m an orphan. I grew up in a Palo tribe in the Tristan Basin in western Fatrasta. I’ve always known I was different. I’ve always known that I was Dynize, and that my sorcery was strong. The rest I have only begun to piece together. She made a downward sweeping gesture of uncertainty that Celine either did not know how or did not bother to translate. Most of what I know about who I am has come in just the last few months.

  “If you’re Dynize,” Orz asked, “how did you come to be in Fatrasta?”

  That is one thing I’m still trying to discover.

  “But you know who you are?”

  Mostly. I know who, but not why. I know that my nurse brought me out of Dynize. She told me stories of wars and palaces whose names are lost to my memory. She told me to fear other bone-eyes—to fear the men of the dragon and to fear the turquoise soldiers.

  Celine broke her translation for a moment and looked at Ka-poel curiously. “Dragonmen and Dynize soldiers?”

  Ka-poel nodded, giving Celine a sad smile before continuing on. I know that my name is Ka-poel. I know that I have a sister named Mara. I also know that my grandfather is the bone-eye you call Ka-Sedial.