by Ari Marmell
“Much good may it do her.”
Vorona sipped at her drink. Dignity idly lifted one of the sculpted glasses from the table, turning it this way and that, examining the light reflecting from its facets.
“How did you get in?” she asked, as though the question had just sprung to mind. “Forged invitation?”
“Oh, no,” Vorona said. “Quite genuine. Yours?”
“The same. I left the original recipient of mine alive, though.”
“As did I. It may startle you to learn, Garland, but I take no pleasure from the more violent aspects of our shared calling. I prefer to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”
“Good to know. I imagine you take a fairly liberal attitude when determining what constitutes necessary bloodshed, though?”
Again Vorona only smiled her acknowledgment.
“I suppose this invariably has to end with us trying to kill one another, then?”
Vorona shook her head. “Not at all. If you depart now and give up any claim on di Meryse’s formula, I would be absolutely delighted to let you go.”
“It’s not di Meryse’s formula. It’s ours.”
“I figured. Then yes, all paths do seem to lead toward a tombstone, or perhaps merely a shabby, shallow grave—for one or the other of us.”
The tension in the box was growing dense enough to muffle the words of the actors onstage.
“Of course,” Dignity pointed out, her tone still quite reasonable, “trying to kill me here, in a crowded theatre, is likely to attract attention, private box or no. And I don’t believe you want the authorities undertaking any investigation that might expose your presence.”
“And you, Garland, cannot afford even that much risk. Eliminate me, and the rest of my cadre remains to continue the mission. But you are alone, save for your newly arrived knight protector. Die trying to kill me, and your entire operation evaporates like a stagnant puddle.”
Dignity slowly stood, dagger and pistol feeling like fifty pounds of searing coal beneath her sleeves. “Some other time, then?”
“Absolutely.” Vorona made the same show of staying put as Dignity had of rising. “Quite soon, I would think.”
A few quick steps, never entirely turning her back on the Khadoran, brought Dignity to the door. Only when she’d opened it, and placed a foot outside, did she speak once more.
“Anything you’d like me to tell Laddermore when I see her?”
“Thank you, but no, that shouldn’t be necessary.” One final time, Vorona raised her glass in a mocking toast. “I’m certain any message I might concoct has been delivered by now.”
Dignity held herself rigid until the door clicked firmly shut, only then breaking into a mad sprint for the stairs.
***
It was her imagination—it had to be her imagination—but Katherine truly felt that her skin was chafed far more raw beneath her armor after a few hours at the theatre, in Halcourt’s company, than after an entire day of parade formation. Muscles ached as they hadn’t since her days as a squire in training. Sweat had soaked into the thick padding of her arming doublet, then frozen into irritating patches during the walk back to the manor.
The baron and his current favorites blathered the whole way about the performance, about its meanings and symbolism, its strengths and weaknesses as compared to Muir’s other works. Now that they’d returned to the manor, ditching their formal coats and sitting down for a nightcap with Baron Surros and his people, the conversation sounded unlikely to taper off until the wee hours of the morning.
For Katherine, who found the play bombastic and overblown—especially, good Morrow’s mercy, that endless bloody speech at the bottom of Act II!—participating any further in said conversation was a torture so unbearable that it could have taught the scrutators of the Menite crusade a thing or two. Thankfully, Halcourt was largely indifferent to her presence, and most of her lingering duties could reasonably wait until tomorrow. A polite goodnight to the baron, and then, Morrow willing, a good seven or eight hours wrapped in—
She stiffened as something jostled her arm; a hand, she saw, glancing down, closing tight about the steel rerebrace covering her upper arm.
“With me,” Dignity hissed in her ear. “Now.”
As much as the urgency in her tone, it was the fact that Dignity still wore her formal gown and snow-kissed shoes—an abominable lapse in professional etiquette for a spy maintaining two different personas—that set Katherine’s adrenaline pumping and a frisson of worry capering across her back.
Up two flights of stairs they hurried, Katherine easily keeping up despite her exhaustion and her armor, spurred on by a growing worry she couldn’t begin to name. The third floor was silent, every member of Halcourt’s retinue and every household servant either asleep or downstairs attending the pair of jabbering lords.
Katherine never did figure out how, but she managed to be both violently shocked and utterly unsurprised when her companion led her to the sleeping quarters shared by Sadler and Pruscott.
“Oh, no. Dignity . . . ?”
“I’m sorry, Katherine.”
The knight found herself oddly grateful that she still wore her armor; the heavy gauntlet hid the trembling in her fingers as she opened the door.
It was all as neat and tidy, as meticulously organized, as a knight’s dormitory should be. Pruscott lay on one of the paired mattresses, the sheets tugged to his chin somehow straighter than most people could arrange even on an empty bed. His eyes were closed, his features relaxed, even peaceful. He might have been sleeping . . .
Save for a single stiletto, inserted so neatly the wound barely bled, protruding just below the knight’s left temple.
Katherine leaned over, placed one hand on Pruscott’s head and bowed her own. “I’ve got another letter to write,” she whispered.
“What do you plan to tell his Lordship?” Dignity asked her, after a respectful moment of silence.
“The truth; the parts he needs to know, anyway. We’ll have to dramatically increase security on the manor.”
“Just as well. They know my face now, too.” Then, before Katherine could ask her to expand on that, “Halcourt travels with a contingent of household guards. They’ve not been doing much since we arrived; there was no need.”
“Then it’s time they started.” She looked up from the dead man’s face. “They were good, Dignity. It doesn’t look like they even woke him up.”
“No sign of forced entry at the door or window, either. You know this was a message, don’t you?”
Katherine had already moved back to the doorway. “I didn’t think the location of the wound was a coincidence, no.”
“I spoke to her this evening,” Dignity admitted. “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to kill her.”
“Don’t be.” She had to break the news to Sadler, then the baron; had to prepare missives, arrange a funeral and shipment of the body; work up new patrol schedules for the guards, shore up any obvious holes in the manor’s security . . . And of course, there were the events of Dignity’s evening, which she obviously needed to hear. Sleep, it seemed, was no longer on the night’s schedule. “I’m really hoping for the opportunity to do it myself.”
“Sergeant Bracewell! Sergeant!”
The door exploded open beneath the young soldier’s pounding, and he stumbled into the tiny cabin that the leaders of the fifth squad had been using, cramped as bullets in a bandolier, for their sleeping quarters. Normally, Benwynne would have chewed him out for the breach in etiquette. In this case, as she’d been awakened by the first of the detonations and was already yanking on her boots, she figured the situation warranted a bit of forbearance.
“Report, Private!”
The trencher drew himself upright, tossed off a quick salute, and tried his damnedest to pretend he wasn’t gasping for air after his quick sprint below decks. “Incoming artillery, Sergeant! Probably a Khadoran battery, according to Corporal Cadmoore.”
Benwynne reached for her oth
er boot. “Distance?”
“Pretty far, Sergeant. They haven’t found our range yet . . .” She nodded; if the boat had taken a direct hit, she’d certainly have felt it. “. . . but the snows are heavy enough to make pinpointing their location a—”
Smoky Rose rocked as another round landed closer than any before, spraying mud and water over the cabin’s porthole.
“—challenge,” the private finished lamely.
Fully shod, she crossed the room in a single step, snapping open the breach in her carbine and testing the mechanism’s play. Then she was past the soldier and pounding up the steps.
The air outside was a haze of falling snow and swirling smoke, glowing in the reflected glory of the unseen winter sun. Benwynne stepped from the hold and her feet promptly skidded beneath her, unable to find steady purchase in the half-frozen river water coating the planks. Behind her, Smoky Rose’s paddlewheel roared, churning the froth as it lurched into reverse, hauling the boat back from the incoming fire and turning her toward the eastern bank.
Perched atop the wheelhouse, spyglass pressed to his eye for all the good it would do in this miasma, Private First Class Markham struggled to pinpoint the enemy emplacements. With his other hand he held tight to a small smokestack, occasionally letting go just long enough to brush snow from his fuzzy moustache.
He was a good man, Markham, and an excellent gunner, but Benwynne couldn’t help wishing Corporal Dalton were here, rather than leagues away with Oswinne Muir’s delegation. She just couldn’t be sure how Dalton’s temporary replacement would hold up.
A spray of frigid water lashed her face, the whip of a phantom slavedriver, and she turned her mind to far more urgent matters than wishful thinking.
“Cadmoore!”
The trencher corporal waved from his position at the railing. As best as the slick surface allowed, she jogged to his side. “Status?”
“Mostly what you see, Sergeant. Captain Jankis is trying to get us to land, so we can get the ’jacks and the fuel out of here before the Reds get our range.”
“Any indication that they might know we’re aboard?”
“I don’t think so.” He jabbed his own carbine upward, indicating the wheelhouse without aiming straight at it. “Markham reports a whole mess of half-sunken riverboats strewn along the banks ahead. I think they’re shelling anything that comes upriver.”
“Fantastic. Their position?”
“Northwest.”
West. Good. At least the emplacement wasn’t between the squad and their destination. “I assume Habbershant’s already got the ’jacks fired up?”
“Below decks, ready to disembark as soon as we hit dry land.”
Benwynne rubbed at the back of her neck. “There’s no way we’re going to get them off the boat without being seen by Khadoran spotters. If they have to learn we’ve got a full military detail aboard anyway, we might as well make the most of it.” She could have shouted her commands directly, but as Habbershant—the only other ’jack marshal in the squad—currently had control, the last thing she needed to do was confuse the machines with conflicting orders.
“Get below,” she told Cadmoore instead. “Tell the Master Sergeant that I want Wolfhound standing ready beneath the cargo door. As soon as we get a precise position on the enemy, he’s to return fire. Right now, they think we can’t hit back. If they have to dive for cover, we might have time to get out of here with our hides intact.”
Roland saluted and took off, practically skating across the deck.
It all went as Benwynne predicted, and as well as she had any right to expect. Tracking the incoming shells, Wolfhound succeeded in pinpointing the battery before the enemy had put any significant holes in Smoky Rose. The resulting pause in the fusillade, though brief, was more than enough for the squad to abandon ship and for the craft to head back the way she’d come.
None of which made the sergeant particularly jovial about it. Lucky as they’d been to escape Smoky Rose unharmed, she didn’t feel all that fortunate. They’d known they would have to abandon the Black River eventually, finish the journey overland, but she’d hoped to get a lot farther before it became necessary. When they’d commandeered a vessel with a military-grade engine, they’d also requisitioned two wagonloads of coal for the warjacks. Even with that extra fuel, however, trying to march the machines overland was certain to prove a laborious, complicated, and agonizingly slow process.
And that was assuming they didn’t have to engage the enemy en route—a stroke of fortune on which Benwynne was absolutely unwilling to rely.
With Atherton’s commandos scouting ahead and the two warjacks hauling the coal-laden wagons, the squad moved at a glacial pace away from the banks and into the snow-swept lowlands beyond. The thick flurries Benwynne had cursed earlier were their allies now, for no other cover would present itself for many miles.
They had covered only a few hundred yards when one of the rear guard gave a shout. Benwynne and the others turned in time to see the sky light up far behind them, flickering various shades of red before fading once more to gray. Benwynne couldn’t even imagine how bright the phenomenon must have been, for it to be visible from so far away.
“Flare!” Master Sergeant Habbershant’s voice carried clearly enough from farther back in the formation. “Sergeant, that was a signal flare!”
“You don’t say.” Benwynne exchange grim looks with her other seconds. “Nothing for it,” she said firmly. “We move on, and we hope we’re able to avoid anyone who was near enough to see it.”
***
It seemed, for a time, that their luck might actually hold.
For hours they navigated empty plains and gently rolling hills, taking the occasional detour around random rocky outcroppings or scattered towns. Smoke poured from Wolfhound and Shepherd in ever thickening swirls, until the surrounding air smelled like a foundry and a canopy of shadow followed overhead. Benwynne cursed, and muttered, and cursed some more, and prayed the weather would hide them.
They were drawing slowly near a darker smudge in the foggy distance, most likely one of Llael’s many forests of pine and yew, when Wendell struggled up to Benwynne’s side, gasping in the cold.
“We need to halt for a while, Sergeant.”
“Not a chance. I want to at least make the tree line before dark.”
“Sergeant, the ’jacks—”
“Didn’t we just refuel them two hours ago? They should have at least—”
That Wendell interrupted her was clear sign of his own frustration and fatigue. “It’s not about coal,” he insisted. “The engines need some down time for regular upkeep now and again. Cleaning soot out of the ports, tightening seals . . .” Then, at Benwynne’s sour glare, “Sergeant, these things aren’t made for this sort of continuous operation. You know that.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “All right. How long?”
“If you only plan to run them another few hours before we bunk for the night, about thirty minutes should do.”
“Fine. Squad, halt!” she called. “Cadmoore, quick perimeter. Just spread the men out, overlapping fields of fire; we shouldn’t be here long enough for fortifications. Dalton—ah, Markham, I want at least one rifle with each chain gun team.”
Soldiers scattered as the sergeant barked orders. In minutes, they’d arrayed themselves in concentric rings, weapons bristling in all directions. Wendell’s team hovered around the languishing warjacks, ready to stoke the fires and get them back on their feet at a moment’s notice.
Only Atherton and his men continued onward, scouting their route to the forest. The commandos’ footsteps traced a somehow maudlin path in the snow, eventually vanishing into the haze.
“I’m not crazy about this.” Wendell settled himself beside the tiny fire, one of several now coughing and spitting throughout the camp.
“I don’t think any of us are exactly thrilled to be here, Master Sergeant,” Roland grumped, warming his asymmetrical hands frighteningly close to the flame.
“I mean the overland travel. We’ve got leagues and leagues to go, some through pretty thick forest. There’s going to come a point where it’s too much for the ’jacks, even with cool-down intervals.”
“What would you suggest?” Benwynne asked bitterly. Her normally dusky complexion was almost gray with weariness and cold, as was Cadmoore’s own; the others, far paler of feature, were chapped and chafed an almost festive pink. “Leave them behind?”
“No, of course not! But—”
“Khador holds the river. So unless you’ve built something to fly us the rest of the way, Master Sergeant, we get to walk.”
“Um . . .” Private First Class Markham, still unaccustomed to serving as a unit commander, actually half raised his hand.
“You don’t need to ask permission to speak, Private.”
“Right. Well, I’m just wondering . . . What about the wagons?”
“What about them?” Benwynne replied.
“Couldn’t we, I don’t know, spread some of the coal out among the boys’ supplies and use the wagons to transport the ’jacks? Not both at once, of course, but . . .”
Everyone was staring at him, eyes so wide they were in danger of freezing over. Wendell actually slapped a hand to his forehead, dislodging tiny crystals of frost from his beard.
“I’m such an idiot!”
“Can we actually do that?” Benwynne asked, clearly skeptical.
“Not yet. Still too much coal to carry. But later, when we’ve burned through a chunk of it? Might be doable. We’ll have to reinforce the wagons with local lumber, lash them together to make a large enough platform, but that should be pretty simple. Then the ’jacks can take turns playing chauffer for each other.
“Sergeant?” He aimed a finger squarely at Markham’s forehead. “Promote this boy.”
The long-gunner beamed.
“I just might—”
The four of them abruptly scattered, leaping to their feet, hands darting to weapons, as a sparking cobalt comet arced from the blowing flurries to bury itself at their feet.
