Wrath of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  The realization hit him just as the door opened and Tenik reappeared: Everyone here thought that Michel was responsible for Yaret’s death. He felt a trickle of sweat roll down the small of his back, and the behavior of Tenik—and the angry stares of the guards—now made so much more sense. This bank was the Household’s staging point, where they’d all gathered to recover. Michel was the man responsible for this, or so they all thought, and he had little doubt who’d spread that rumor.

  Tenik stood in the open doorway for a moment, his expression troubled, obviously trying to read Michel. For his part, Michel could do little more than sweat openly, knowing how pale and frail he looked. He knew what guilt looked like, and it wasn’t all that different from a man trying to keep himself together when he is physically and emotionally empty.

  “All right,” Tenik said, “come in.”

  Michel stepped through the door and into the bank manager’s offices, which he could tell in a single glance had been co-opted by whoever was taking over Yaret’s position as the head of the Household. Michel wondered briefly how the line of succession affected the Name, and if Yaret would fade into obscurity, forgotten by all but a few dusty history books.

  It was with some surprise that he entered a second doorway and found Yaret himself sitting behind the manager’s old desk, leaning forward, fingers steepled, brow furrowed as one of his cupbearers spoke earnestly. At the sight of Michel, Yaret raised his hand, and the woman beside him fell silent.

  There were four other people in the room besides Michel, Tenik, and Yaret. Michel recognized each of them as Yaret’s top lieutenants. He tried to figure out who was missing and couldn’t come up with anyone. Had none of them died in the bombing? His pleasure at the news—and the sight of Yaret alive and well—was tempered by the fact that everyone in the room looked at him with the same weighing, anger-tinged way the guards outside had. He was, he realized in an instant, on trial.

  “Michel,” Yaret said by way of greeting. “We’re all rather surprised to see you alive.”

  Michel was about to answer that the feeling was mutual, but realized how bad that would sound before the words left his mouth. Instead, he just nodded. “I have the feeling I’ve missed a lot.”

  “Indeed. There are quite a lot of rumors swirling around about you right now.”

  Michel glanced at Tenik, but the cupbearer was clearly going to be of no help. He felt a spark of anger and grabbed on to it, using it to prop himself up in the face of silent accusations. He didn’t know exactly what was going on, but he had a pretty good guess. He’d almost killed himself just attempting to warn them of the bombing, and here they were turned against him. “I’m going to guess that those rumors include my involvement with the bombing of your Household.”

  “Do you deny them?” Yaret asked.

  Michel glanced around at the hostile faces. He’d begun to think of these people as his colleagues, Tenik even as a friend. He didn’t deserve this. He was too tired, in too much pain. “Of course I deny it. You want an explanation for my absence the last week? Here it is.” He launched into a quick summary of his adventures, starting with his search of Forgula’s house, then his shooting by Hendres, and his recovery with Emerald. He finished with his attempt to warn Yaret about the bombing, and his time spent locked in Ichtracia’s townhouse. He glossed over a few key details, like Emerald’s name and occupation, but kept everything fairly true to reality.

  Yaret and his people listened without interrupting, watching him carefully throughout the whole story. Michel ended with a sigh and, without being invited, took an empty chair from the corner of the room and dragged it over in front of Yaret’s desk before collapsing into it.

  “Ichtracia saved you from Forgula?” Yaret asked.

  It was not the first question Michel expected to be asked. “She did. I have no idea why.”

  “She’s taken a liking to him,” Tenik interrupted, clearing his throat. “She has ever since Michel tagged Forgula at the war games.”

  Yaret snorted, burying a half smile, the closest thing to humor to enter this room since Michel’s arrival. “No telling what’s in a Privileged’s head. Especially that one.” He squinted at Michel, then suddenly produced a piece of paper. It was hastily scrawled with the words Evacuate Household. Bomb.—Michel. He set it in the middle of the desk so that Michel could see it. “That,” he said, “is the only reason you’re standing there right now, and not already handed over to the bone-eyes for questioning. Because of this note, we were able to get everyone out of the townhouse in Chancellor’s Court before several barrels of gunpowder were detonated in the basement. The house was destroyed. The Household was saved.”

  There was a note of gratitude in Yaret’s voice that made Michel’s heart sing. He reined in his elation. This was still a trial, and it could still go bad.

  Yaret continued. “Forgula has openly accused you of being responsible for the bombings that have taken place across the city. She and several witnesses claim you were present just before the destruction of my house. From your explanation—and from this note here and the witness of the child who brought it to me—you were attempting to warn us.”

  “I was.”

  “Good. Then I think we both see what Forgula is up to. Without evidence, though, Sedial will demand that I hand you over to the bone-eyes for questioning.”

  Michel glanced between the faces. They were all a little gentler, but cautiously so. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think you do understand what Forgula is up to.”

  “Oh?”

  Michel produced the list of addresses that he had taken from Forgula’s house. The paper was stained black with his blood. He handed it to Tenik, who examined it with a frown. “That,” Michel said, “is what I found among Forgula’s papers. It struck me as important at the time, so I confiscated it, but I was shot before I could give it a second thought. In my weakened state, I didn’t grasp the significance of the addresses until the morning of the bombing, and that’s when I attempted to reach the house to warn you.”

  “What is that?” Yaret asked Tenik.

  Tenik’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a list of addresses—corresponding to every single one of the bombings, including the one that destroyed our house.”

  “You’ll find that the handwriting matches the writing in Forgula’s pocketbook,” Michel said, trying not to sound smug.

  Three of Yaret’s lieutenants began to mutter. A fourth gasped openly. Yaret stilled them with a raised hand. “And?”

  “I propose that Forgula has been working with Marhoush and the Blackhats. She struck a deal with them to kill as many of Sedial’s enemies as they could. I have no idea what the Blackhats are getting in return, but it’s clear from that list of addresses that she knew ahead of time where they would occur. I’d be willing to bet that Marhoush or je Tura has a matching list.”

  Yaret nodded at Tenik, who slipped out of the room without a word. Michel opened his mouth to ask where Tenik was going, but Yaret cut him off. “You’re accusing Ka-Sedial of treason.”

  “I am,” Michel said. “Forgula ran the errands, but it’s too convenient of a pattern for Sedial not to have given the order.”

  “Would he dare?” one of the lieutenants asked.

  Yaret tapped a finger against his chin, staring over Michel’s shoulder at nothing, a scowl etched on his face. “Sedial has dared an awful lot. He would never risk the empire—if all of this is true, he probably has a plan to eliminate the Blackhats as soon as they’ve served their purpose. But he has never been above destroying his enemies.”

  “All of that was supposed to change with this war. We were supposed to be united,” another of the lieutenants growled.

  Yaret didn’t answer him. Somewhere in the bank, Michel thought he heard a scream. He tried to ignore it. He was completely certain of this conspiracy now. It made too much sense, and it was clear from Yaret’s body language that he wouldn’t be hard to convince. Not with the evidence Michel had
just put in front of him.

  Yaret meditated in silence for several minutes, his eyes half-lidded in thought while his lieutenants avoided Michel’s gaze. When the quiet had almost become unbearable, the door opened and Tenik returned just as suddenly as he left. He held a leather pocketbook—Forgula’s—in one hand. He plucked the bloodstained address list off the table and compared the two, then nodded. “The handwriting is a match.”

  “And Marhoush?” Yaret asked.

  “He’s changed his story.”

  Michel perked up at this. “Marhoush is here?”

  “You can tell him,” Yaret said to Tenik.

  Tenik nodded, then turned to Michel. “We brought Marhoush in the evening after the bombing and handed him over to our own Household questioners. His story has corroborated the story Forgula told us—that you are still a loyal Blackhat, spying on the Dynize—but I just went to him with the story you told us and he broke down. He said that Forgula has been funneling the Blackhats supplies in exchange for conducting bombings at the addresses and dates she gave him. He even told me where to find a copy of that list you brought us.”

  Michel allowed himself to close his eyes and let out a sigh of relief. When he looked up, Yaret was smiling at him thoughtfully. “I’m glad you’re still one of us,” Yaret said.

  Michel swallowed his guilt, pushing his real self deeper into the back of his head. “I’m glad I had evidence that Forgula is a lying sack of shit. What do we do now? Is this enough evidence to accuse Sedial?”

  “I think it is,” Yaret replied.

  Tenik raised his eyebrows. “That will be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous or not,” Yaret said with a shake of his head, “Sedial must be brought to heel.”

  Michel was hit with a sudden sense of foreboding. “Perhaps Tenik is right,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “That it’s damned dangerous. Too dangerous. Sedial is the emperor’s man, right? And he commands the armies and the Privileged? If we go after him openly—if we force him into the light—he may just crush us underfoot. It would be his only option.”

  “He tried to kill me,” Yaret said quietly. “He tried to kill my Household. I will not let this stand.”

  “We won’t,” Michel assured him. “But I think I know of a way we can punish him without forcing a more deadly confrontation.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Michel took a deep breath. This idea would lessen the ugliness, but it would also make Michel another very powerful enemy. “When is the next public event where both Sedial and Forgula will be present?”

  CHAPTER 42

  Vlora did as she’d promised Taniel and changed hotels. She rushed a new order of clothes from a local tailor and changed her look, and generally kept her head down so that she could gamble her week on the only real chance she felt she had to find the stones: reconnoitering Nighttime Vale.

  Flerring’s description had been spot-on. The Vale was approached by a steep hill on the northern edge of town and entered through a narrow valley between two great pillars of stone. Because the Vale was entirely the property of Jezzy’s Shovel gang, the valley was closed to outsiders and guarded by eight armed men at all times.

  Vlora watched them for two days and nights, attempting to find some kind of chink in their routine that would let her slip into the Vale and back out again without being noticed. She grew more and more frustrated at the situation—the approach was out in the open, the guards were rotated in shifts without a gap, and every wagon that entered and left the Vale was guarded to and from the destination. According to a few old prospectors she asked, climbing around the other side of the Vale would take her four or five days.

  She began to wonder if maybe Jezzy was in on the recovery of the stone—or if it was just that gold mines were more thoroughly guarded than some military armories. Bad luck either way.

  On the third day she picked up a copy of the Yellow Creek Caller to find a surprising bit of information on the front page. The headline read MERCENARY ARMY MARCHES ON YELLOW CREEK. Below was a snappy story on the Riflejacks that said they were spotted in the region marching toward Yellow Creek. She returned to the newsie boy who’d sold her the paper and pointed at the headline. “Is this from this morning?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Fresh information.”

  “Do you know anything else about this?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Vlora fished a coin from her pocket and flicked it off her thumb. The boy caught it, looked over his shoulder, and took two steps closer. He spoke in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Rumor has it the big bosses are frantic with worry. Each of them thinks the other hired a whole mercenary army to take their gold, and both of them are denying it. I heard that it was Jezzy who hired them. Supposedly the army’s led by that Flint lady—you know, the one that the Lady Chancellor has put a bounty on?”

  “I’ve heard of her,” Vlora said cautiously.

  “Well, everyone is arming up to protect their claims. The big bosses are forcing a production increase and offering huge amounts to anyone who carries a weapon. The guards are doubling. The mayor wants to close all the roads, but Jezzy and Brown Bear Burt want to keep them open to get their gold out. They say it’s chaos in the mayor’s office, and no one knows what to do.”

  Vlora left the newsie with an extra coin and strode off swearing under her breath. This was exactly why she’d come ahead of the army—exactly why she’d given herself an extra couple of weeks to try to find the stone before they were forced to bring in a few thousand soldiers and dig it up with violence. She originally thought that the town’s defenses would be little more than an inconvenience, but now she wasn’t so sure. Roadblocks in the harsh terrain could keep the Riflejacks from approaching the city for days or weeks, and when they finally arrived, they would have to deal with street-to-street fighting with people who thought they were there to steal the gold.

  Vlora headed to the main street and checked in with the messenger service that she’d used to try to find Olem. The man behind the desk recognized her immediately and went to a locked box in the corner of the room, returning a moment later with a letter.

  “It came yesterday,” the clerk said apologetically. “We checked with your hotel, but they said you had left and not given them a forwarding address.”

  Vlora tipped the man and took the letter to the corner. She recognized Olem’s writing immediately.

  Progress has been slow. Took a circuitous route to approach from the east. News from Landfall. We are five days out. I fear word has gone ahead of us. Expect panic. We will hold at six miles and wait for orders.

  “A little damned late,” she said, lighting the edge of the letter with a match and letting it burn down to her fingertips. She did some quick mental math and decided that they were probably getting close to that six miles. Making camp six miles out could be good, though—it would give the city residents longer to worry about why they were here and who had hired them, which in turn would give Vlora more time to find the stone.

  If the Picks and Shovels began fighting among themselves, the Riflejacks might have an easier time of mopping things up.

  But none of this, she decided, was ideal.

  CHAPTER 43

  Michel sat in the hallway outside of the war game arena in the capitol building, listening as the cheering came to a great crescendo before tapering off into the general cacophony of loud conversation that he normally associated with the period at the end of a boxing match. He wondered briefly who won, before reminding himself that he didn’t know who either of the players were, or most of the rules of the game.

  Maybe if he stuck around here long enough, he would learn how to play.

  Michel took a coin out of his pocket. He flipped it, caught it, and looked at the result. How, he wondered, did Tenik resist looking at that result every time? It was a natural human urge, wasn’t it? To know how something ended?

  Before Michel could ponder the que
stion further, the doors opened and a stream of people began to pass him. No one seemed to really notice his presence, which, he decided, was probably for the best. He recognized most of the people either from the game he had attended the other week with Tenik or from figures he’d seen stalking these very halls over the last couple of weeks. The cream of the Dynize crop. If je Tura really wanted to cause some damage, he would toss a couple of grenades into that room during a war game.

  Michel wondered if that would be on the list, eventually.

  Michel spotted his target and climbed to his feet, body still hurting from Ichtracia’s healing, the pain kept partially at bay by horngum. His hands shook slightly from a case of nerves, and he wondered why he was here rather than standing in a dark corner to watch the proceedings. He reminded himself that he had made plenty of accusations before. This was just far more public than he was used to. He would just have to get used to it.

  “Forgula,” he called sharply.

  The people closest to him stopped in their tracks and turned, some of them doing a double take as they saw him. Forgula, her head bowed to listen to the words of a woman beside her, searched for the source of the summons until her eyes met his. All around her, the stream of people gradually ground to a halt.

  Her lip curled slightly, but she bowed her head again and nodded to the man to go on, turning a cold shoulder toward Michel.

  “You probably shouldn’t enjoy this,” Michel whispered to himself, stifling a smile. “Devin-Forgula a Sedial!” he barked.

  Everyone had stopped by now. People were looking curiously between Michel and Forgula, the latter of whom finally pulled herself away from her companion and strode through the crowd toward Michel. She came up sharply, chin raised, glaring down her nose at him. “Shouldn’t you be in a cell, spy?”