Wrath of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  As quickly as he’d entered the vicious breakers, he was suddenly out of them again, climbing up on a stone shelf and turning to help the rest of the lancers as they emerged one by one, soaked and freezing, from the pitlike swell. Half of them had lost their carbines. A few had even lost their belts and swords. Little Gamble’s arm was broken, and Jackal helped him to safety and set the bone.

  Styke climbed along the ledge until he reached the sea gate. It was a heavy, iron-bar door like one might find in a dungeon. It was secured by chains thick enough to deter anyone lacking a smith’s hammer.

  “Belts!” Ibana ordered.

  They tied the soaking belts together, then wrapped them around the iron bars closest to the rusted, salt-wrecked hinges. Styke stood at the front, flexed his forearms, and set his feet, passing the belt along the group.

  “Heave!” Ibana shouted.

  The hinges cracked.

  “Heave!”

  The door shuddered and pulled away from the stone, clattering off the ledge and down into the sea, nearly taking Styke with it before he pulled his knife and cut the belt beneath his hands. The knotted belts were untied and passed back, and the group quickly filed inside.

  The corridor was dark and wet, cut out of the very rock upon which the citadel rested. Someone pressed a torch into Styke’s hands. He removed the wax cloth from the end, and Ibana struck the match and lit it. Several more torches were passed along, and soon the corridor was illuminated in a flickering light. Styke pressed his palm to the stone, feeling the shudder caused by the firing of the guns. Somewhere above him, he heard a distant scream. He began to run.

  The corridor was not long, and they soon emerged into a wider room—a pit at the bottom of a long, circular staircase, the base of which was littered with empty barrels, frayed ropes, shattered masonry, and corpses.

  The corpses were not old, and the smell of them reached Styke’s nostrils as he lowered his torch to let the light play upon their faces. They were two days dead, maybe less, and they wore the yellow jackets and pinned lapels of high-ranking Fatrastan officers. Styke only paused for a moment, a curse upon his lips. These were the missing brigadiers of the Third Army. They had died with knives to the backs and slit throats, and Dvory was not among them.

  “Up!” Styke urged.

  The circular staircase ended in a flat, stone ceiling, with the steps disappearing into a wooden trapdoor. Styke reached it first, pushing on the door. First tentatively, then harder, he pressed against it with his palms, attempting to lift it above him.

  Ibana squeezed up beside him on the staircase and pushed. The door rattled some, but did not give. “It’s barred,” she told him.

  “Willen could have damned well mentioned this,” Styke growled. He shoved himself between the door and the top few steps, bending his neck and placing his shoulders against the wood. Taking a deep breath, he attempted to stand, shoving upward like a man lifting a sack of grain on his back.

  The door held. He heard a creak, then a groan, and he continued to push until he could bear it no longer. He relaxed, taking a deep breath.

  “We’re going to have to go back out and scale the damned wall,” Ibana said. “Lindet’s going to have to damn well wait.”

  “Look for something down there to use as a battering ram.”

  “The angle isn’t going to work for a ram,” Ibana snorted. “This was made to withstand a siege. You’re not going to break it.”

  Styke reset his shoulders and braced his hands and knees. He took a deep breath and pushed upward again. He strained, grunted, shoving until every muscle trembled beneath the strain.

  “Ben, you’re going to damn well hurt yourself.”

  Styke heard another scream far above him—a scream of pain, no doubt from a soldier wounded by a sharpshooter. In his mind’s eye, though, it belonged to Lindet. He thought of all the years he’d spent in the labor camps, and he discarded them for the memory of a little girl tucking candies beneath his tongue when he was helpless, and he continued to push.

  He felt something pop, a terrible pain spreading across his chest. He shoved harder, tears running down his face.

  “Ben!” Ibana warned, but the voice seemed far away.

  Something touched his bare skin. It was a hand, small and delicate, snaking beneath his shirt and tracing a trail with its fingernails up his spine until it was just below where his shoulders met the wood of the trapdoor. Through his foggy vision, he saw Ka-poel’s face just beneath his left arm, her eyes once again young and mischievous. “What …?” he gasped.

  The fingers tensed, nails biting into his skin. He felt a surge of strength, the smell of coppery sorcery filling his nostrils. His muscles bent and flexed, bones threatening to snap from the strain, and then a sudden crack and the release of tension as he surged upward. His momentum took him up and through the trapdoor, where he took several steps and collapsed on the cool stone floor of what appeared to be a large pantry full of beer kegs and sacks of grain.

  He lay there, hand on his chest, as the Mad Lancers swarmed up the stairs to fill the pantry. His head pounded, his muscles on fire, and he heard Ibana distantly as she snapped orders. “Jackal, take these eight and open the front gates. If you survive that, head up and clear the towers. You four, see what you can do about the docks. The rest of you are with me and Ben.”

  Styke rolled over onto his back and gasped. Ka-poel crouched above him, her head tilted quizzically.

  “That really hurt,” he told her between breaths.

  She touched her fingers gently to his forehead, then tapped a fingernail against his ribs. The pain was suddenly gone, the fire diminished. She tapped his ribs again and made two fists in front of his eyes, then pulled them apart.

  “I broke a rib?”

  She nodded.

  He prodded the area gingerly, but felt no pain. “Did you heal it?”

  She shook her head.

  Styke climbed to his feet, expecting the lances of pain at any moment, but they never came. “What did you do? Block the pain?”

  Ka-poel pursed her lips and wiggled one hand back and forth. More or less.

  “This is going to a hurt later, isn’t it?”

  She grinned wickedly.

  “Pit.” Styke stumbled to Ibana’s side. “Where are we going?”

  “Up, I assume,” she answered, looking him up and down. “Pit, Ben. You just snapped an eight-inch beam of ironwood.”

  “A few other things, too. Come on, we have to find Lindet. Then I’m going to kill whoever is in command here.”

  “With ten men? I sent everyone else to try and open the gate. If Lindet is still alive, she’ll be with Dvory. And he’ll have his whole bodyguard with him. We need an army, Ben.”

  Styke unwrapped the wax cloth protecting his carbine from the water, then hefted his knife. He could still feel that pain deep in his chest, but it was a light buzz beneath Ka-poel’s sorcery. His brain was on fire, his blood pumping. He felt like he was in his prime again, light on his toes and ready to grind stone with his hands. “We don’t need an army. We’re the Mad Lancers.”

  Styke caught a bayonet thrust on his carbine, turning the blade so that it scraped across the stone of the stairwell, and reached over to drive his boz knife through the eye of the Dynize soldier attempting to hold the hall. He lifted the spasming body and thrust it up the stairs ahead of him, using it as a shield as musket blasts made his ears ring. He reached the top of the stairwell and jerked his knife out of the soldier’s skull, whipping it around to cut the throat of another as he passed and emerged into the great hall of the citadel keep.

  Soldiers filled the great hall, turning bayoneted rifles and muskets on Styke as he entered the room. There were forty or fifty of them, a mix of Dynize with their morion helms and breastplates, and Fatrastan turncoats in their yellow jackets. Styke spotted Dvory at the far end of the great hall, and their eyes locked for a split second.

  Dvory’s face turned white.

  “You didn’t bri
ng enough men,” Styke shouted over the blasts of musket fire. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, jerking him back a half step and setting a fire of pain across an old wound. He ignored it, flipping his carbine over his shoulder and surging forward with his knife, carving into the Dynize.

  His lancers flooded out of the stairwell behind him. They were down to eight now, after having to fight out of the kitchens and through the halls. Most of them bled from multiple wounds, clothes and faces soaked in blood, but the enemy fell back before them as if staring into the teeth of a thousand riflemen.

  Styke sidestepped a bayonet thrust, feeling the sharp rasp of the blade across his ribs, and jerked the owner by the lapel onto his knife. He threw the body to one side and slashed, blinding a Fatrastan turncoat and leaving him to fall beneath Ibana’s sword.

  To one side, Ka-poel slid through the fighting like a snake in a den of rats. She stepped around bayonets and between gunshots, her machete in one hand and a long needle in the other. She thrust and sliced, and the men she killed didn’t even seem to notice her until their blood splashed her black greatcoat.

  “Dvory! Where is your army now, Dvory?” Styke’s knife hand was slick with gore. He disemboweled a Fatrastan, then slid his knife beneath the breastplate of a Dynize and left the woman gurgling in her own blood. A pistol went off just over his right shoulder, and he felt the bullet take off his earlobe. He turned, skipping toward the owner of the pistol and cutting his throat, before returning to his march toward the traitor.

  Dvory stood proud in his spot at the end of the great hall. His fingers gripped his sword with white-knuckled intensity, and he stared at Styke like a man staring down a charging boar. Styke wondered briefly if this was a trap—if Dvory had enough guts to fight him—before remembering that before all this the bastard had been a Mad Lancer. He had the guts.

  Suddenly Styke was through the press of bodies, stumbling into the open. He took a deep breath, a growl in his throat, and felt the pain of a thousand tiny wounds. His jacket was soaked with blood and cut to ribbons, and rivulets of blood streamed down his neck. He licked his lips, relishing the pain, breathing in the stench of death, powder smoke, and sweat. He ignored the carnage of the battle still raging around him and took a step toward Dvory—only they existed now, and only one of them would leave this room alive.

  Dvory shook his head. “You’re a wreck, Ben. I’ve never seen you bloodier.”

  Styke hesitated. Dvory was too composed. He gripped his sword, his face was ashen, but he stared at Styke as if he expected to leave here alive. “You think I should change sides?” Styke asked.

  “I think you should,” Dvory answered. His sword remained in its sheath as Styke stepped closer and closer. “It’s worked out for me so far.” Dvory’s pallor deepened, and a sheen of sweat appeared on his brow.

  Styke glanced behind him. Only a few of his lancers remained standing. Ka-poel crouched over a wounded Dynize, fingers working the air before the man suddenly leapt to his feet with jerky motions and attacked his companions. Styke took another sidelong step, uncertain. Something was wrong here. “How has it worked out?” he asked.

  Dvory attempted a smile. Styke could see now that his lips trembled. They moved, slowly, and Styke thought he heard a whisper. His hair stood on end as he realized that the coppery smell in the room was not all Ka-poel’s sorcery. It belonged to someone else, another bone-eye.

  “Where’s Lindet?” Styke demanded.

  “Here,” a voice responded.

  Styke skipped to the side, turning the blade of his knife just in time to catch the thrust from a short, powerful man wearing black leathery armor. As he deflected the thrust, he snatched the carbine from his shoulder and smashed it across the side of the man’s face, snapping the butt just below the trigger. The man staggered to one side, shook his head, and righted himself.

  A dragonman. And not just any, Styke realized as three more figures emerged from a hidden door to Dvory’s right. The dragonmen he’d faced outside Granalia. Ji-Orz held Lindet by the back of the neck easily, his hand cocked as if ready to snap her spine with a flexed muscle. Lindet herself wore the same jacket and skirt that he’d spotted her in disembarking her ship. There were bruises on her face, but she looked no worse for wear. She lifted her chin toward Styke, as if unconcerned by the dragonmen around her.

  The dragonman who’d attempted to blindside Styke took a step back, reassessing him, and licked his lips.

  “Drop the knife or she dies,” Dvory said, gesturing to Lindet.

  Styke eyed Dvory for a moment, watching him tremble and sweat and tasting that smell of sorcery. “Are you really a traitor?” he asked Dvory. “Or did a bone-eye get his fingers in you?”

  Dvory’s tremble turned into an outright shake. “I told you to drop the knife.” The voice that emerged did not belong to Dvory. It belonged to someone elderly, the accent biting and educated. Styke realized that Dvory’s eyes were no longer on him, but directed over Styke’s shoulder. He didn’t have to look to know what had transfixed Dvory’s attention.

  “A bone-eye it is, then,” Styke said. “Is it that piece of shit Ka-Sedial?” He gestured with his knife toward the dragonmen. “The one who sent these?”

  “Ben, I didn’t—” The voice belonged to Dvory for a split second before a look of annoyance crossed Dvory’s face and the voice changed back to that of the old man. “We’ll talk about your respect when you belong to me, Styke. Drop the knife or I kill Lindet. You won’t let her die, will you? That’s why you fought your way through all of these. For her.” There was a flicker of a smile on Dvory’s face. “Blood sees blood, Styke. Drop the knife, or I kill your sister.”

  “Your what?” Ibana demanded, stepping up beside Styke, her eyes wide.

  Styke locked eyes with Lindet. He saw the corner of her mouth twitch upward and couldn’t help but smile. A chuckle escaped his lips, and within moments he was laughing outright. He dropped his broken carbine and slapped his knee, then threw his head back in a roar. Across from him, her neck still in the grip of Ji-Orz, Lindet laughed with him.

  Dvory stared at him in puzzlement. “What is so funny?”

  Ka-poel stepped up to Styke’s right. A dozen walking cadavers, their eyes blank, their bodies bloody, swayed behind her. She stared at Dvory, fingering her machete, and Dvory stared back. Ka-Sedial, it seemed, could be distracted.

  “He’s laughing,” Lindet said softly, forcing Dvory to turn toward her, “because you have no idea who we are. Ben will save me if he can, just as I would him. But death? We’ve stared at our own deaths since childhood. You think to cow us with fear?” Lindet gave a warm, almost happy chuckle. “If you kill me, I am dead. I doubt Ben will mourn me long. I don’t deserve it. But I am his blood, and he will avenge me.” She paused, looking up into the eyes of Ji-Orz. “We laugh because whatever happens to me, the rest of you are already dead. Ben, kill them all.”

  Several things happened at once. The closest dragonman took a step toward Styke, knife thrusting, while a second dragonman broke for Ka-poel. A third jumped for Ibana.

  Styke caught his opponent’s thrust with his boz knife. The dragonman was ready for the counter and stepped close, drawing a second knife in the blink of an eye and ramming it, underhand, at Styke’s side. Stepping into the blade, Styke felt it bite into his buttock, and the tip hit his pelvis. He wrapped his off arm around the dragonman’s neck, pulling him against his breast, and squeezed with all his might. The dragonman jerked once, dropping his knife and slapping weakly at Styke’s shoulder before slumping.

  Styke cast the body aside as the third dragonman closed with Ibana. She fired her pistol point-blank, barely slowing her attacker, and drew her knife. Ibana was strong, but she was not as fast, and she fell back beneath three quick thrusts that threatened to overwhelm her. Styke swallowed the pain burning in his leg and leapt, tackling her assailant from the side just as he buried his knife between Ibana’s ribs.

  The dragonman squirmed beneath Styke, reached for a
nother knife, and Styke bit off his nose and spat it in his face. He rolled off the dragonman and came up with his own knife just a fraction of a second quicker, burying it into the soft flesh just above the dragonman’s armor and sternum.

  Styke turned to find that the second dragonman had cut through Ka-poel’s ensorcelled soldiers with ease, and now pressed her violently. Styke forced himself to his feet, barely able to move, and took a step toward her.

  “Don’t kill her!” Dvory yelled in Ka-Sedial’s voice.

  The dragonman attacking Ka-poel faltered for a split second, trapping Ka-poel’s machete with his own knife and turning his head just a fraction toward Dvory, as if in question. Ka-poel’s other hand darted up, striking as quick as an adder, and rammed a long needle into the dragonman’s eye.

  Styke took a second step as the dragonman fell, and then stumbled down to one knee. He looked at Dvory, at the expression of horror on his face, then toward Lindet, who smiled softly in the grip of Ji-Orz.

  “Kill her,” Dvory ordered. “Kill Lindet, kill Styke, and bring me the girl.”

  Styke looked around the room. Everyone was dead or dying. Ibana clutched at the knife stuck between her ribs, struggling to breathe. Lindet was fodder for the dragonman. Ka-poel was quick, but she would not be able to handle Ji-Orz on her own. And Dvory still stood unwounded, unfluttered, his body being controlled by someone a continent away.

  “Kill her,” Dvory hissed.

  Ji-Orz pursed his lips. There was no fear in his eyes as he looked across the carnage, but there was something else. His eyes met Styke’s, and he gave a long-suffering sigh and let go of Lindet’s neck. “No.”

  “What?” Dvory demanded.

  “Your hold on me has broken. You are weak, Great Ka. You are spread too thin, and I am no longer compelled.” Ji-Orz drew the bone knife from his belt, then a bone knife from beneath his jacket, and lay them both on the ground. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired of this. I’m tired of you. I’ve watched Ben Styke kill three dragonmen. In all my life, I have never and will never see such a thing again. I may fight him someday, but I refuse to slaughter an artist like this when he is barely able to fight.”