Blood of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  “Shit,” Vlora swore. “All right, Sabastenien, I want you to take this theory to Delia. Use it as leverage. Not even she’s bitter enough to let Adran expatriates die by the tens of thousands to spite me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And while you’re there, I want you to sit in on her little summits. She has more representatives coming in today to talk, right?”

  “She does,” Bo confirmed. “From the other two armies on our tail.”

  “Sit in on those,” she repeated to Sabastenien. “Keep notes. Don’t say anything unless Delia seems like she’s about to promise the world.”

  Sabastenien nodded sharply.

  “Bo, come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To meet with Burt’s irregulars.”

  Sometime in the last week, Burt and Bo had become the closest of friends. It shouldn’t have surprised Vlora at all, but this was the first time she’d seen them together, and she was pleased that the two of them were laughing, joking, and going on at length as they left the main army and headed toward Burt’s irregulars camp. They were even sharing Burt’s cigars.

  Vlora was playing this little visit safe. She’d brought Norrine, Davd, Bo, and three hundred of her cavalry with her. If the Dynize managed to get the drop on them, the tin-heads would be in for a pit of a fight.

  The trip was not as long as she’d expected, and they were only about three-quarters of a mile off the main highway when Burt’s messenger led them behind an abandoned plantation building and down into a steep, wooded ravine that separated the property between two of the plantations. The ravine looked innocuous from afar, but once they’d descended a narrow mule track, it seemed to open up and revealed a well-worn camp.

  They were challenged by a sentry who, once Burt and his guide had been identified, emerged to join them on the mule track. The young woman saluted Burt and regarded Vlora, Bo, and their escort with wide eyes. “You weren’t kidding when you said you were going for help, boss,” she said.

  “I’ve always told you the importance of making friends,” Burt replied, gesturing to Vlora with his cigar.

  Vlora scowled at the camp. “Where is everyone?”

  “They’re keeping the Dynize pinned down,” the sentry reported. “Those buggers have gotten awfully restless the last couple of days.”

  Burt swore. “Did they manage to get that damned pedestal out of the river?”

  “They did. Last I heard, they’ve got it into a keelboat and are preparing a flotilla to get them going again. Tomm and the lads are trying to sink it.”

  As if to emphasize the point, a distant boom reverberated through the ravine. “That would be them,” the sentry said.

  “Grenades,” Burt explained. “Some of my irregulars apprenticed with Little Flerring when we were in Yellow Creek. Made some improvements on the standard Adran army explosives. But they still have to get real damn close to use them.” He swore several more times. “There’s only so much we can do as skirmishers. If we’re close enough to use grenades, the Dynize might be able to wipe us out.” He turned his gaze on Vlora, asking an unspoken question.

  Vlora froze. She’d sworn to herself not to make any stupid decisions that put her and her men at unnecessary risk. With a whole field army less than a mile or two behind her, she was about to bring overwhelming force down on the Dynize. No need to endanger anyone. But the Palo Nation irregulars were putting their lives on the line to stop the Dynize. She couldn’t just let them all die.

  She nodded at Burt, then the sentry. “Lead on. Let’s go give them a bit of relief.”

  The sentry led their group down the ravine for several hundred yards before bringing them up the other side and out into the open again. They crossed yet another plantation, rounded a hill, and were suddenly in clear view of the Hadshaw River Valley.

  The river was perhaps three hundred yards down the hillside from them, flowing gently through the plantation fields that ran all the way down to its banks. The banks themselves were held by a Dynize brigade, which was camped on either side of the river and held a wide stone bridge that, unless she was mistaken, marked the crossing of the very highway Vlora’s soldiers were marching down at this moment. The river was packed with keelboats, lashed to the bank and to the bridge.

  It took her only a moment to spot their target—the largest of the keelboats, loaded with a rectangular stone roughly the size of one of the covered wagons frontiersmen favored for transportation. There was, at this distance, nothing special about the stone. It lacked ornamentation, and though it was the same color as the godstone they’d cracked back up in Yellow Creek, it didn’t give her the same sense of dread. Perhaps, though, that was simply because she had no sorcery.

  The keelboat was directly under the stone bridge, which was the epicenter of a sizable engineering project—cranes, counterweights, stabilizing equipment—that had clearly been used to bring the stone out of the water and plop it onto the keelboat.

  Even as Vlora took all of this in, she saw Burt’s irregulars engaged in a fierce firefight on the edge of the river. There were only a few hundred of them compared to the thousands of Dynize, but they had managed to push hard and bottle up a decent number of the enemy on the bridge itself. The irregulars fired and reloaded at an astonishing speed, powder smoke rising from their little group as they locked down the reeling Dynize. Occasionally a grenade would burst among the Dynize line, adding to the confusion.

  Even with their momentum, the irregulars couldn’t hope to reach the bridge. The Dynize were on the back foot, but they had the strength in numbers. Vlora reined in, took a deep breath of the powder smoke on the wind, and snapped off orders.

  “Captain,” she barked to the commander of her bodyguard, “take your dragoons and relieve the irregulars. Burt, pull your men out of there. My soldiers will provide covering fire.”

  “That keelboat is starting to move under the bridge,” Burt warned. “If it gets moving, there’s no stopping it.”

  “It’s not going anywhere. Go!” Vlora’s dragoons responded immediately, galloping down the hill at full speed while drawing their carbines. Burt urged his own horse after them. “Do we need to get you closer to sink that keelboat?” Vlora asked Bo.

  Bo wiggled his fingers like a father about to show his child a trick, then slipped on both of his gloves, tugging at the hems theatrically. “Not even a little. And I’ll do better than sink it.”

  For the faintest breath of a moment, Vlora thought that she felt something. It might have been a cold breeze, or it might have been muscle memory from watching so much sorcery, but when Bo’s fingers began to twitch, she could have sworn that a tickle went up between her shoulder blades. She drew out her looking glass and turned it on the keelboat.

  “Do you have orders for us?” Norrine asked. Both she and Davd had dismounted and prepared their rifles.

  “Wait,” Vlora said, watching carefully. Almost a minute passed, and she ignored the shouting of her dragoons and the sudden pop of carbine fire as they reached the irregulars. The keelboat emerged from beneath the bridge, but instead of gaining momentum, it began to slow again. Within seconds it had stopped entirely, and the Dynize soldiers on board frantically pushed and shoved with their poles to try to get it moving again. It took her another moment to see the band of ice forming around the base of the keelboat. The ice began to spread, locking the keelboat in place. “All right,” she told Norrine, “ignore their officers. Clear that keelboat of life. I want the three of you to keep it locked up.”

  It was almost fifteen minutes before Burt returned with his irregulars and Vlora’s dragoons. The former were badly mauled, hauling as many wounded and dead along with them as they had still walking. The latter had suffered light casualties, but their blood was obviously up as their captain requested permission to continue his skirmish with the Dynize.

  “Denied,” Vlora replied, listening to Davd’s rifle bark. A Dynize soldier attempting to board the big keelboat tumbled int
o the water. The Dynize brigade had crossed over to this side of the river and finally drawn up into lines. They waffled on the bank, as if undecided on whether they should charge Vlora’s small group or remain to defend their ward. Vlora rummaged in her saddlebags until she found a white handkerchief, and handed it over to the captain. “Put this on the end of your sword. I want you to let the enemy general know that I will give him generous terms to surrender if he orders his men to throw down their muskets immediately.”

  Vlora sat back and waited while the captain headed back down the hill with a few companions. A group emerged from the Dynize lines, and the two envoys began their meeting.

  While she waited, the head of Vlora’s army crested the road directly behind her. She was soon joined by General Sabastenien and Nila. Sabastenien snapped a sharp salute. “We heard fighting and brought the cavalry, ma’am.”

  “Well done.” She gestured to the meeting below them. “Hopefully they won’t be necessary, but…”

  She trailed off as the meeting adjourned, far quicker than she would have expected. The captain returned with his report.

  “They won’t surrender.”

  “They saw that we have more cavalry alone than they have soldiers?”

  “They did. The general…”

  “Doesn’t trust me?” Vlora guessed.

  “Not exactly,” the captain replied. “I got the impression that he’s more scared of whoever is giving him orders back in Landfall than he is of you.”

  “Damned fools,” Vlora muttered. “All right. We do this the hard way. Nila, burn out the front lines. Don’t let your fire hit the keelboats, I want those intact. Sabastenien, I want you to ride down whatever hasn’t burned. Send a thousand dragoons downriver to find a ford. I want them to flank the Dynize and kill or capture everyone who tries to run.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Nila tugged at the cuff of her sleeves, frowning down toward the enemy. “You don’t want me to give them a warning shot?”

  “They’ve had their warning. The Dynize general is more scared of Ka-Sedial than he is of dying by our hand. Besides, I want that stone secured by nightfall. We’ve got three enemy field armies coming up behind us and I don’t want anything left of this rabble by the time we put our back to the river. Nothing left to do but get to it. Oh, and Sabastenien?”

  “Yes?”

  “If they throw down their weapons, I want them spared.”

  “Better for our own morale,” he agreed, switching the reins from one hand to the other and drawing his sword and calling out to his officers. The column of cavalry began to split up, forming into groups and spreading out across the valley. Vlora forced herself to turn and watch the coming battle.

  CHAPTER 48

  It took the Adran Army longer than Vlora expected to crush the Dynize. Despite Nila’s flames raining down on them from above, they held their line against Vlora’s cuirassiers for the better part of the afternoon and well into the evening. It was dark by the time her dragoons managed to flank them and the Dynize finally fell apart beneath the two-sided onslaught. Weapons were thrown down, and Vlora’s infantry finally came over the hill to make camp, organize the prisoners, dispose of the dead, and secure the keelboats and the stone pedestal that had been the focus of all this effort.

  Vlora slept fitfully that night and was up early, heading down to the river’s edge with Davd in tow. The ground still smoldered from Nila’s sorcery, but at least the corpses were cleaned up—one of her brigades had spent most of the night transporting the bodies downriver a mile and burning them all so that they wouldn’t spread disease as her own soldiers dug into the position.

  “What’s this bridge called?” she asked Davd, leaving the riverbank and gaining the stone bridge, where early-rising infantry were in the midst of moving aside all of the engineering equipment so that they could use the whole span.

  “Ferrymore, I believe,” Davd told her. “Sight of an old ferry. The bridge is relatively new.”

  “And well made.” Vlora kicked a stone. No wonder Burt’s irregulars hadn’t destroyed it. They probably had no way of doing so. She walked across the bridge, returning salutes from her soldiers, and descended to the opposite bank, where she found that the keelboat containing their prize had been lashed to the opposite bank. She spotted Nila’s colorful dress moving around the side of the pedestal and Bo standing on the bank with a number of Dynize prisoners. Vlora joined him.

  “Who are these?” she asked.

  Bo took a step away from the prisoners. “Officers,” he reported. “Their general died in the melee, but we have a colonel and three majors. I’m trying to find out what the bloody pit this stone is for.”

  “Burt thought it was a pedestal.”

  “Yes, and he might be right. But… might also be wrong.”

  “What else could it be used for?”

  He shrugged. “Not a goddamned clue. Nila was up all night trying to get something out of it by lamplight.”

  “Are these any help?” Vlora jerked her chin at the prisoners. Three men and a woman, all of them staring at their feet in dejection. They’d been disarmed but were not bound, though a rifleman with fixed bayonet had been assigned to watch each of them.

  “Remember how Etepali told you that every army has their own orders?”

  “Yes?”

  “Seems that Sedial takes the old ‘Don’t let one hand know what the other is doing’ approach very seriously. Not only are the officers in the dark, but it turns out they didn’t even know where they were going until they got to Yellow Creek. Once there, they dug this thing out of the mountainside and were told to get it back to Landfall. No other information.”

  “Who was giving the orders?”

  “The Privileged that Burt’s irregulars killed in their ambush.”

  “Ah.” Vlora made a sour face.

  “Turns out that they did have a bone-eye with them, too, yesterday.”

  Vlora stiffened. “Neither you nor the powder mages noticed?”

  “Nope. He wasn’t very powerful, and apparently he killed himself rather than be taken prisoner.”

  Vlora threw her arms up. “Have we just stumbled across Sedial’s most devoted blind followers?”

  “We might have at that,” Bo said seriously.

  “Pit on a stick. Where is Burt?”

  “Probably still sleeping.”

  “Have you been up all night, too?”

  Bo nodded. “Baggage train is just arriving. We don’t even have our tent yet.”

  “Well, see if you can get anything else out of them. Oh, and do me a favor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Make sure no one tells Delia a damned thing about this stone.”

  “Done.”

  “Thanks.” Vlora turned and, with a deep breath, boarded the keelboat with the pedestal. As she’d expected, she felt nothing from the stone. No dread, no sorcerous aura, not even a sense of preternatural foreboding. It was just a cut rock. She had been wrong about one thing—up this close, she could clearly see that the stone was covered in script and symbols that, unless her memory was playing tricks on her, matched quite well with those on the godstone.

  She rounded the end of the stone and crossed to the other side, where she found Nila squatting beside some writing, her lips pressed into a firm line, eyes narrowed. “Shouldn’t Prime Lektor be here?” Vlora asked.

  “He was with the baggage train last night,” Nila answered without looking up. “I’ve sent someone to fetch him, and if he’s not here in an hour, I’ll go myself.”

  Vlora snorted. Nila was wildly powerful, but the fact that she was so dismissive of one of the ancient Predeii pushed past amusing and bordered on madness. Was Nila stronger than even she let on? Or did Prime’s inactivity just bother her that much? “Anything yet?” Vlora asked.

  “Not a bit.” Nila pressed her palm against the stone and shook her head. “I haven’t actually seen a complete godstone yet, but this piece here is entirely unlike the capsto
ne we have with the fleet. They’re made of the same material and they’re covered with the same writing, but unlike the capstone, this is entirely inert. Not even an inkling of sorcery coming off it.”

  “Burt claimed it was writhing with dark sorcery.”

  “Perhaps. It might have gone dormant somehow. Or whoever had given him that report was overreacting. I won’t know for sure until I’ve had more time to study it.”

  Vlora frowned, wondering if she’d made an enormous mistake. This quick march from the coast had cost them lives, time, positioning, and easy contact with her fleet. She had three field armies bearing down on her. Had she done all of this for a piece of rock that held, at the end of the day, no importance? She couldn’t believe it. No, Sedial had sent his soldiers to retrieve it for a reason. Now it was her task to find out why.

  She watched Nila’s examination and was just about to head back across the river to check in with her general staff when she caught sight of Prime Lektor walking slowly over the bridge toward her. “Speak of him and he shall appear,” she muttered.

  Nila snorted and still didn’t look up.

  Prime paused on the bank just off the bridge, examining the pedestal with a sour look. He avoided Vlora’s gaze and seemed to be avoiding even looking at Nila. He was rooted in place, and even when Vlora gestured for him to join them, he didn’t respond. Irritated, Vlora left the keelboat and went to him.

  “What is your problem?” she demanded.

  The Predeii started. “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you standing here with a constipated look on your face? Nila and Bo have been at this thing all night.”

  “I’m sure they’re doing a fine job,” he said.

  “And I’m sure the only reason we brought you with us is to figure out what the pit this is and why the Dynize want it.”

  Prime turned his face toward Vlora, but his gaze remained locked on the stone slab. He didn’t answer.