Wrath of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  Styke took a deep breath. Ka-poel would be there, no doubt. She was resourceful enough that she was probably still alive—unless the enemy commander had orders to kill her in particular. He lifted his head, seeing Ibana emerge from the woods. “Go find Jackal for me,” he told her.

  “Are we going to attack?” Ibana asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Styke and Jackal were led to the dragoon camp by Ferlisia, arriving just before sunrise. Too late to work beneath the cover of darkness, he sent Ferlisia back to camp and he and Jackal huddled down in the Hock and waited and watched throughout the day.

  The dragoon camp was much as Ferlisia described it: packed onto a long, wooded hill just inside the Hock. The hill was surrounded on all four sides by steep, rocky cliffs, between ten and fifty feet high, making it a solid defensive position against any force and doubly impossible to attack with cavalry. There appeared to be only one easy way up—a gentle slope pointing east less than two dozen feet wide and guarded heavily.

  The cries of wounded men and horses could be heard throughout the day, and the occasional carbine blast sounded as they put down lame animals. It became abundantly clear that the dragoons didn’t care if Styke knew where they were. Their defensive position was unbreakable by less than a brigade of infantry, and they knew that Styke didn’t have that kind of firepower at his command.

  Nor, they must have surmised, did Styke want to take the time to starve them off their high ground. The Dynize could wait for as long as their supplies held out, tending to their men. The ambush must have cooled their commander, making Styke doubly angry at Ka-poel for sneaking off. If she’d stuck around, the lancers would already be on their way to the coast.

  Styke lay on his stomach in the underbrush about a hundred yards from the entrance to the hill, watching the dragoons change their guard as the daylight began to wane. Jackal lay beside him, apparently asleep, until his eyes suddenly opened and he got up onto his elbows, pointing at the hill.

  “It’s an old Palo settlement,” he said.

  “Eh?”

  “I’ve been talking to the spirits. That hill. It was home to a village once. It’s been a few hundred years, but there are some old spirits left hanging about. They fled because your bone-eye is there.”

  Styke snorted. The idea that Ka-poel could scare long-dead spirits still seemed preposterous. But at least it confirmed that she was, indeed, here. “Is she still alive?”

  “According to the spirits, yes. It’s hard to coax them to come this close to her.”

  “Can they tell us anything about the hill?”

  “They called it the Castle, back when they lived there. Or their word for ‘castle,’ anyway. As long as they held it, their tribe could not be ousted from their land.”

  “What happened?”

  “Brudanian soldiers. They wanted to clear the Hock so that trappers could use it. Lost half their regiment taking the Castle from the Palo.” Jackal waggled a finger at the entrance to the Castle. “They tried to assault that and failed. Ended up putting ladders on the lowest cliff on the south side and overwhelming the occupants with sheer numbers.”

  “Show me.”

  Styke and Jackal pulled back beneath the closest ridgeline and took a long, circuitous route around the Castle. The dragoons had plenty of scouts, but they seemed to focus their efforts deeper in the Hock, at the halfway point between their camp and that of the Mad Lancers. Other than hiding on occasion, Styke and Jackal reached the south side of the Castle without issue.

  The cliffs here were indeed the lowest—perhaps ten or fifteen feet of near-vertical rock. A single dragoon stood watch at the top, peering into the forest as darkness began to spread, cradling his carbine. Styke continued along the south side and looped around to the west, searching for better spots to climb the cliffs and finding nothing that looked promising. He returned to Jackal, falling onto his hands and knees to watch that one dragoon patrol the top of the shallow cliff.

  “Do you remember the fortress at New Adopest?” Styke asked.

  Jackal’s placid face wrinkled, the hint of a smile on his lips. “I remember it.”

  “I’m not as spry as I used to be,” Styke said. He wanted very badly to climb the cliff and do the job himself, but he did not have confidence in his own abilities to do so in silence. He shot a glance at the wound on Jackal’s leg. “Are you?”

  “None of us are,” Jackal replied. “But I think I’m up to the task.” He touched his leg. “This looks worse than it is, and there were a lot more guards at New Adopest.”

  Twilight was quickly upon them, and Styke and Jackal got to their feet. They moved slowly through the underbrush, careful not to make too much noise, until they were at the very base of the Castle cliff. The guard had changed, and another man now patrolled this small section, torch in hand.

  Jackal waited until the guard had passed, and began his ascent, climbing the cliffside in almost complete silence. He shimmied up, grasping the old roots and reaching the top in less than a minute, just as the guard came back in his direction. Styke pressed himself against the cliff to hide from the light of the torch.

  Silence followed, though Styke strained to listen for a grunt or a yell. A few moments later he heard a distinctive “Psst” and began his own ascent. He reached the top to find Jackal standing over the body of the sentry. Jackal stood stiffly, his posture all wrong, like a deer too scared to run.

  “Everything okay?” Styke whispered.

  Jackal nudged the body with his foot. “He just offed himself.”

  “What?”

  Jackal came close, leaning in to whisper in Styke’s ear. “I stepped on a twig. He turned to look at me and instead of shouting out, he drew his knife and slit his own throat.”

  The hairs on the back of Styke’s neck stood up, goose bumps spreading on his arms. He knelt beside the body and found the guard clutching his own knife, still lightly convulsing as he silently bled out onto the dirt. Styke reached out to touch him but pulled his hand back, thinking better of it. He leaned over, putting his nose up next to the body. He took a deep breath, catching hints of copper.

  He stood up to find Jackal’s knife out, breath held, staring toward a pair of Dynize dragoons about thirty feet away. Styke held his breath, waiting for a shout, as the pair slowly approached them.

  Styke readied his boz knife, preparing to spring forward when they got close enough, but was arrested when they spoke out in unison in perfect Adran. “You’re wanted at the commander’s tent, Colonel Styke.”

  Jackal’s lips were pulled back in a snarl, nostrils flared. “I can’t see a spirit for a mile,” he said. “Even the ones I was talking to back in the forest have fled.”

  “Please,” the pair of dragoons said again. “You’re wanted at the commander’s tent.” Their words were mechanical, their backs straight and faces forward, though they stood at an angle to Styke and Jackal. “Follow us.” They turned in unison and marched into the camp.

  Styke kept his knife handy, looking at Jackal and seeing the whites of his eyes. He’d never seen Jackal this startled, not even facing down Privileged sorcery on an open battlefield.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jackal whispered. “Is this her sorcery?”

  “I think it is,” Styke said. “Or the sorcery of a bone-eye who wants us to think it’s Ka-poel. But I didn’t know the bone-eyes are capable of this kind of control.” Hesitating just a moment longer, he followed the pair of guards into the camp, Jackal bringing up a reluctant rear.

  The camp was quiet, with the occasional cookfire burning to coals and only a handful of Dynize up and about. None of them seemed to notice Styke and Jackal, and he wondered if they were also under some kind of sorcery or if they were just that inattentive within their own camp. He heard the occasional scream or moan from the east—the wounded from the other day’s ambush—and they passed a corral in the open center of the hill where nearly three hundred horses were tied
up for the night.

  The two guards suddenly stopped in between a row of tents, stepping in different directions and gesturing for Styke to go ahead. He looked over his shoulder at Jackal, who still looked like an animal who wasn’t sure whether to attack or run. With a shrug, Styke continued between the two guards.

  There was a large clearing in front of a tent bigger than all the others around it—no doubt belonging to the company commander. A well-stocked fire and a handful of torches illuminated a macabre scene in the middle of the clearing. Two dozen Dynize soldiers—all of them wearing epaulets that marked them as officers—sat cross-legged in two rows on either side of the clearing. They didn’t look up when Styke approached, or seem to move at all. They were so inhumanly still that he wondered if they were still alive.

  Across from the tent stood the officer that Styke had brawled with when they ambushed the Mad Lancers a few weeks back. Her hands were clasped behind her back, her spine straight. She had the same expression as Jackal with eyes wide and lips pulled back, but hers was as strangely frozen as those of the men flanking her.

  Years ago, Styke had been present when a gift had been sent from the king of Kez to then-governor Lindet of Redstone. The gift consisted of several life-sized facsimiles of Kez soldiers done up in wax. They were so well done that they looked like the real thing, until they began to melt in the Fatrastan heat. This scene had the same uncanny strangeness to it.

  Sprawled in a camp chair like a bored queen receiving guests was Ka-poel. She lifted a hand in greeting to Styke, the other propped under her chin as she gazed at the dragoon commander.

  Styke put away his knife and gestured for Jackal to do the same.

  “I thought you were going to come for me this morning.”

  Styke nearly jumped out of his skin. The words came from the mouth of the commander, but they were spoken in perfect Adran and in a voice that did not belong to a burly, war-weary dragoon officer. The tone was soft-spoken, the voice a gentle soprano with a hint of a laugh to it. He looked at Ka-poel, who hadn’t moved except to adopt a rather smug smile. He pointed at the officer. “Is that you?”

  Ka-poel nodded.

  Styke forced himself to relax. He walked down the line of frozen officers, leaning over to feel the soft breath coming from their lips and wave a hand in front of their eyes. He even pushed one over, watching him topple like a statue and remain cross-legged without so much as a flinch. Styke finished his examination by walking around the dragoon commander, examining her flushed face. Upon this closer look, he found her just as frozen as her men—except the eyes. They stared straight ahead, but there was life in them, and if he was forced to guess, he would say that she was still there, under the surface.

  Styke wondered at this show of power. He’d been told that Ka-poel was more powerful than her fellow bone-eyes by several orders of magnitude, but that she was unpracticed. Could an enemy bone-eye do this to Styke? Could she do this to Styke? The answer to that second question was an obvious yes, and it made Styke’s skin crawl.

  He considered what Ji-Orz had told him earlier this week, likening the sorcery of a bone-eye to rape. The thought—and all these frozen faces—made Styke uncomfortable.

  Jackal still stood outside the clearing, looking like he wanted nothing to do with any of this. Ka-poel barely seemed to notice his presence, and Styke waved him off. “Go back to camp,” he told Jackal. “Tell Ibana that everything is in control here. We’ll be back soon.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when Jackal took off into the darkness.

  “Will he be attacked leaving the camp?” Styke asked Ka-poel.

  “No,” she answered through the mouth of the commander.

  “Do you have control of the whole camp?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” Ka-poel said. “I have about a third of them. Enough to remain unmolested.”

  Styke walked around the commander once more, then over to Ka-poel. Despite her smugness, he could see she was uneasy. He wondered how much practice she had being up close and personal with the people she controlled. “We didn’t find this camp until almost light this morning,” he said in answer to her earlier question. “I didn’t know you had things under control, so I didn’t want to risk coming during the day.”

  Ka-poel pursed her lips, nodding as if this were a satisfactory explanation. “I’m almost done here. We can go soon.”

  Styke faced her, leaning over her until their faces were inches apart. “I want to know why you’re here.”

  “Answers,” she replied shortly. She was unintimidated by his size, returning his look coolly. Styke reminded himself that he was just as unintimidated by her sorcery. Disconcerted by it, yes. But it did not scare him, and he wanted her to know that.

  “What kind of answers?”

  That uncertainty that he had seen in her eyes suddenly came to the forefront. She scowled distractedly into the darkness. “The kind that I cannot get from anyone else but a Dynize officer,” she said.

  “Such as?”

  Ka-poel did not answer. She sighed heavily, and Styke left her to stand in front of the commander. “Is she still in there?” he asked.

  “Yes, she is. They all are, to different degrees.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  Ka-poel’s eyebrows rose. She shrugged, and a sheen of sweat suddenly sprang to the face of the Dynize commander, her eyes widening further, face tensing. “What do you want?” she snarled in Dynize. This, Styke realized, was her real voice.

  “Who are you?” Styke asked in Palo. He repeated the question slowly to make sure she understood.

  The sweating grew more severe. He wondered if she was struggling against Ka-poel’s hold on her, and if it was possible to break it. “Can you force her to answer?” he asked Ka-poel, forestalling the answer by holding up a hand to Ka-poel and speaking to the officer directly. “No, wait. I don’t give a shit who you are. Tell me why you’re after me. Didn’t Ka-Sedial think the dragonmen were enough?”

  “Dragonmen?” the commander echoed.

  “The ones who’ve been following me. They’re not with you?”

  The commander let out a hissing breath. “They’re after you? If I had known that, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “What do you mean? What do you know of them?”

  “All I know is that six disgraced dragonmen were freed by Ka-Sedial after Landfall fell. They were given the task of assassinating a Fatrastan officer in order to redeem themselves in the eyes of the emperor. That’s all I was told.”

  “So if you’re not with them, who are you?”

  The sweating intensified again, her eyes flicking from Styke’s face to Ka-poel and back again. “My name is Lin-Merce,” she said in a low voice. “And I’m here because you killed my sister.”

  “You weren’t commanded to come after me?”

  “No. I took my command and deserted the army.”

  Styke paused. Over the years, he’d had plenty of people come after him for revenge. He was, after all, a fairly prolific killer. But he’d never had someone abandon their post for the express purpose of vengeance. “And the consequences?” he asked.

  “I can never go home.” The voice came out in a whisper. Lin-Merce stared into Styke’s eyes with more hatred than he’d ever seen in a human being, and he was suddenly struck by a rare moment of real compassion. She had given up everything for her vengeance. She had ambushed him; she had crossed swords with him. She’d even managed to outsmart him more than once over the last few weeks. Without Ka-poel’s interference, she might have bounced back and still managed to kill Styke.

  He could see in her eyes that she knew she was dead. She knew the power a bone-eye was capable of, and she clearly knew by now that Ka-poel was something special. But that hate was still there. Her whole body trembled as she fought for even a fraction of control so that she could strike at the man who’d taken her sister.

  He wondered if he would feel the same about his own.

  “Whe
n did I kill her?” he asked.

  “She was with the cavalry you fought north of Landfall.”

  “When you first landed?”

  “No. After your general fled the city. I was told you ran her down, trampling her beneath the feet of your horse like a dog.”

  Styke recalled that battle quite well. Windy River, Flint’s men had called it afterward. The Mad Lancers had attempted a flanking move only to run into a superior force doing the same thing. The battle had been brutal, but the lancers had prevailed. “In battle,” Styke said thoughtfully, “we’re all dogs.”

  “She was everything to me,” Lin-Merce whispered.

  Styke gave a heavy sigh, walking around Lin-Merce and letting his eyes run over the lines of men sitting obediently, under the thrall of Ka-poel’s sorcery. In another life, Lin-Merce might be him. These men might be Mad Lancers. And Ka-poel might be on the Dynize side.

  “I have more to ask her.” The voice came from Lin-Merce’s mouth, but it belonged to Ka-poel.

  “Every moment she lives is agony,” Styke replied. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do.” Styke stepped swiftly up behind Lin-Merce and took a solid grip on her hair. “You’re the only cavalry commander who’s ever gotten the best of me,” he said in her ear, before drawing his boz knife across her throat. He pulled, going deep, the metal rasping along her spine, and he held her body as the blood soaked them both, until well after she stopped convulsing. Finally, he lowered her to the ground.

  He knelt next to the corpse for a few moments before looking up at Ka-poel. “Oh, stop glaring at me,” he told her. “You’re like a goddamn child playing with ants compared to these. Either let them go, or let me kill them.”

  The glaring continued, and Styke stepped over the corpse and approached Ka-poel. “I know exactly what kind of a monster I am, but I don’t approve of suffering. You can find your answers from someone else. She earned herself a quick death.” He turned away, then thought better of it and swung back around to face Ka-poel. “If you have this kind of power, you should be using it to keep my men alive. You should strike first—not wait until we’ve taken such a damned battering. Figure out what you are, and be it. But don’t toy with people beneath you, and don’t waste the lives of my lancers.”