Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140

by Brian McClellan

  “The Kez burned Little Starland to the ground.”

  Taniel let his hand fall away from his sketchbook. He’d sailed into Little Starland less than two months ago. It had been his first experience in this new land—a trade city of some eighty thousand souls and growing by the day. Little Starland had financed the university in Fatrasta. A university not all that different from the one Taniel attended in Adro.

  “To the ground?” Taniel heard himself echo.

  “Nothing left.”

  Taniel felt anger burning in his chest. His finger itched to pull the trigger of his rifle, a Kez Privileged in his sights. A shot of fear followed it, and a small voice asked: What if I miss?

  “The Kez,” Mapel said, “win wars through shear force and brutality. They use fear to keep....”

  “I know all about the Kez,” Taniel snapped. He closed his sketchbook and stowed it in its seal-skin pouch, fearful that he might tear it apart in a rage. “I know the Kez are a vindictive, cruel people who seek to master everything in their sight.” He fell silent, his hand resting on the butt of the pistol tucked in his belt. He’d bought it in Little Starland.

  “Taniel,” a soft voice said.

  “What!” Taniel rounded on Dina, the word coming out far louder than he’d meant. He took a deep breath. “What?” he asked again, quieter this time but unable to force the impatience from his voice.

  “Bad time for it, priestess,” Mapel said to Dina. “I just worked the captain here into a lather.” Mapel had pushed back his bench as if ready to run. “Seems he has a particular hatred for the Kez.”

  Taniel shot Dina a warning glance. Don’t you say a damn word....

  “The Kez executed his mother,” Dina said, dropping onto the bench beside Taniel.

  Mapel made an “oh” expression with his mouth.

  “You have no right.”

  Dina met his anger with her head cocked to one side in a challenge. “She was my cousin,” she said. “I have every right.”

  “And so you avenge her by trying to convince me to turn back every night? To sail back to Adro, where I’ll have to look my father in the eye and tell him I had the chance to kill Kez and I didn’t take it?” Taniel knew he shouldn’t yell at her. She was just trying to do what she saw as right. Besides, she was almost old enough to be his grandmother.

  Dina hesitated, and Taniel knew that’s exactly what she had come over here to do.

  “I’m a priestess, not a warrior. War is a young man’s folly, and I have children, and my children have children. I’m only here now because your father asked me to chaperone you, and I’m a woman of my word.”

  “Don’t you want to protect your children from the Kez?” Taniel glanced toward Mapel for an agreeing nod, only to find that the sergeant had slipped off. He cursed the man silently.

  Dina raised an eyebrow. “I am Kez,” she said.

  “But you’re....”

  “With you? Here, now? I know. I told you, I’m a woman of my word.”

  Taniel blinked in confusion. “But the Kez will execute you if they find you with the....” Taniel trailed off, suddenly realizing what a risk she had taken coming out here with him. All the while hoping to convince him to leave the war.

  Taniel said, “If the Kez catch me trying to slip out of the country, they’ll execute me on the spot. You know how they feel about powder mages.” He refused to associate Dina with the Kez as a whole. She was family, after all.

  “Do you think they’d risk your father’s wrath a second time?”

  Dina had no idea how little Taniel’s father cared for him. “I think they’d jump on the opportunity to bring him to his knees.”

  “I have a friend who’s been smuggling tobacco for years, to get around Kez tariffs. He could get you back to Adro safely.”

  “I....” Taniel broke off.

  He was going to get his first chance at Kez blood. He’d sworn to himself that he’d not return to Adro without at least a dozen notches on his rifle. If Dina got herself killed by the Kez, he wasn’t going to let that weigh on his conscience.

  “I’m going outside,” Taniel said.

  He snatched his rifle and knapsack and headed out onto the front porch of the common house.

  Outside, the rain had managed to clear the air of the swamp smell. Half a dozen militiamen lounged under the awning, smoking pipes or cigarettes and staring sullenly out into the deluge. They knew they had to go out into the swamp in the morning, and none of them were relishing the idea.

  Only one bothered to acknowledge Taniel.

  Damned sloppy discipline.

  Taniel stared into the night for a few moments. The rain managed to conceal most everything that the dark did not, and nothing but rough shapes stood out—the town buildings, most of their lanterns doused for the night.

  His eyes caught a shadow in the middle of the road. He frowned and focused on that shadow. A person, maybe? Why would they be standing there in the rain?

  Taniel kept his eyes on that shadow, afraid it might disappear if he looked away, and tapped a line of black powder out on the back of his hand.

  He snorted it.

  The shapes of the town buildings sprang into sharp relief as the powder trance washed over him, the rain brightening as if he’d shone a lantern on it, and the shadow became a girl.

  She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, her shoulder-length hair soaked through, a satchel slung over one shoulder. Her skin was pale and covered with small grey freckles like tiny flecks of ash, and Taniel guessed that in the light of the day her hair would be red.

  A savage girl, nothing more.

  Then why was his heart racing? An instinct deeper than any of his senses screamed danger at him, and without realizing he was doing it, he found himself poised to run.

  The girl met his eyes across the space, through the rain, and Taniel began to lift his rifle, not quite sure what he was going to do with it. Shoot a little savage girl? He didn’t kill children, and it would surely turn their guides against them, ruining this entire expedition.

  Taniel braced himself and opened his third eye to look in to the Else and see where sorcery was touching the world. Everything suddenly shifted, the darkness brightening to become a myriad of pastel colors that revealed the presence of nearby sorcery.

  The girl glowed with a dull light.

  She was a sorcerer.

  He’d heard of savage sorcerers. Bone-eyes, they called them. No one knew much about Bone-eyes, beyond that they had a magic different from Privileged elemental sorcery or powder mages’ gunpowder trance.

  What was she doing out in the rain like that?

  Taniel turned to ask one of the men smoking under the awning if they could see the girl, when something caught the corner of his vision.

  Halfway up the road, on the hillside above the town, Taniel could see a strong glow of color in the Else.

  “Privileged!” Taniel screamed, and threw himself to the muddy street as lightning sliced through the air and slammed into the common house behind him.

  * * *

  The explosion left Taniel’s ears ringing, and he struggled to get to his feet. Most of the common house was scattered across the street in pieces of debris not more than a foot long. What remained was on fire, and Taniel could hear the screams of the dying and wounded.

  He helped pull someone to their feet—one of the militiamen who’d been smoking on the porch—and struggled to open his bayonet case. Where there was a Privileged there would be Kez soldiers.

  He struggled to blink the echo of the lightning from his eyes, willing them to adjust to the darkness once again. A few moments later, and he saw the Kez soldiers running down the road into the town. They wore canvas ponchos over their tan uniforms and they had their bayonets fixed.

  The Fatrastan militia was heavily outnumbered. Even without the Kez Privileged, the entire company would be decimated in minutes.

  “Run for the swamp!” Taniel said.

  “Are you mad?” a mi
litiaman asked.

  “It’s the only chance, damn it. Into the cypress!”

  Taniel rushed into the smoldering remains of the common house. Survivors were picking themselves up off the ground, their weapons in hand. Taniel couldn’t find Major Bertreau in the chaos, but he snatched Sergeant Mapel by the shoulder.

  “The swamp,” Taniel said, pointing in the direction opposite of the charging Kez soldiers.

  Mapel nodded and began bellowing the retreat.

  “Dina,” Taniel shouted. “Dina, damn it!” He kicked a bench out of the way, checking the charred bodies that had taken the brunt of the sorcery.

  “Here.”

  The old priestess was already on her feet, directing others after Sergeant Mapel.

  Taniel suppressed a sigh of relief. He didn’t want a relative’s life on his hands, even if she was a Kez. “Have you seen Bertreau?”

  “Out front,” Dina said.

  Taniel dashed back into the street to find Major Bertreau organizing a line of some twenty men to meet the advance of Kez infantry.

  “We have to lose ourselves in the trees,” Taniel shouted at her.

  Bertreau drew her sword. “This is the rear-guard. Go on with the rest!”

  “It’s suicide!” Taniel’s words were swallowed by a blast of lightning striking a nearby building and the accompanying roll of thunder. In the light, he thought he saw the same savage girl standing off to one side, her back to the swamp.

  Then the Kez were on top of them.

  Taniel turned a bayonet thrust with the stock of his rifle and cursed himself for not fixing his own bayonet when he had the chance. His heart hammered in his ears as he spun his rifle to hold it by the barrel, the way he’d been taught, and brought the stock down across the Kez soldier’s face.

  Steel clashed and screams filled the air. Taniel drew the pistol from his belt, his powder mage senses telling him that the powder was still dry, and fired it into an infantryman.

  Major Bertraeu turned suddenly and thrust her sword, and Taniel was bowled over by the dead weight of the Kez soldier that had taken her blade to the heart.

  He pushed the man away and, not taking the time to thank Bertraeu, deftly slipped his bayonet out of his pouch and over the end of his rifle, twisting the ring to feel it slide into place. He dropped his weight onto his back leg and set himself, slipping past an infantryman’s thrust and driving his bayonet into the man’s eye.

  With the powder in your veins, his father had said, you’ll be faster than other men—it’ll be as if they are moving under water and you are not. You know this feeling from your training, but you won’t in truth understand until you’re in a real melee.

  Taniel suddenly knew what his father had meant. He could feel himself reacting faster than the others around him, even than Major Bertreau’s experienced sword. It was like battling children.

  They didn’t stand a chance.

  Don’t let yourself become overconfident. Trust yourself to react quickly, and you’ll kill them before they even realize what they’re fighting.

  Taniel cut through three more infantry before there was no one else to fight. More Kez were coming down the road, but the militia had managed to fend off the first platoon.

  Bertraeu stared at him, wide-eyed. “Pit, you’re fast,” she said.

  “The swamp,” Taniel said.

  “To the trees!” she yelled. “Run for it. Leave the wounded.” She winced as she said it.

  They sprinted down the town streets, chased by sorcery. Lightning flashed, and fire soared overhead in streaking balls that detonated among the buildings with the strength of exploding mortar shells. Taniel considered finding a place to hide from the pursuing infantry and taking a shot at the Privileged, but he knew that it would be a stupid risk. He might be able to try once he’d lost the infantry in the swamp.

  He caught sight of an old woman limping ahead of him.

  “Come on, Dina, you have to move faster!”

  Taniel threw his shoulder under Dina’s arm and half-carried her onward. The limp was a bad sign—an open wound in the swamp would put her on her way to a slow death by disease or a quick death by natural predators.

  Fatrastan militiamen passed them at a sprint, trying to save their own skins in the relative safety of the swamp. Taniel recognized several members of Bertraeu’s rear guard. He and Dina were the last of the survivors to retreat.

  Taniel could see the edge of the cypress forest looming out of the darkness just ahead. He was ready for the land to drop beneath him, the water of the Tristan river splashing beneath his boots, but the steep slope came up so quickly that he still tripped and tumbled down it. He landed on his back in the water, sputtering and cursing.

  He scrambled about for his knapsack and rifle, recovering both. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Dina croaked.

  His powder mage senses told him that most of his charges were wet. He paused only long enough to snort a pinch of powder from one of the few dry ones, renewing his trance.

  Go easy on the powder, his father had always said. Even the strongest mage risks dependency and powder blindness.

  Taniel banished that thought. No time for that kind of caution now.

  The darkness left few secrets for him with his trance-enhanced sight, but the tumble down the hill had reminded him to be cautious. Slowly, he and Dina began to navigate into the swamp.

  “Keep to the solid ground,” Dina said. “You won’t be able to see anything beneath the water. Sinkholes are common—they’ll pull you right down. Take it one step at a time, and if you feel your one foot start to sink, step back to firm ground.” Her voice came out as a raspy rush. “One foot at a time... oh, Kresimir, give me strength.”

  “We can’t stop,” Taniel said as Dina began to fall.

  “I’m all right,” Dina insisted. “Keep going. There will be frequent hummocks of dry land rising above the water—that’s the best place to rest.”

  Taniel’s next words died on his lips as he caught sight of the savage girl he had seen in the street before the battle. She stood a couple dozen paces off, just like she had back in the town, facing him, catching his eye, her face emotionless. Taniel felt like cold fingers were tracing their way up the small of his back.

  “Do you see....”

  “I can’t see a blasted thing in this darkness,” Dina said. “You’re a powder mage, you’ll have to guide us on.”

  “Here, I....” Taniel looked away for just half a moment, and the girl was gone.

  There was shouting behind them, and Taniel knew he had two choices: move faster and risk stepping in a sinkhole, or take it slowly and let the Kez soldiers catch up with them.

  A quick glance back showed that the Kez had entered the swamp about a hundred yards behind him. They carried lanterns, hooded against the rain.

  Taniel would have to outrun them, risking the sinkholes and swamp dragons.

  There, up ahead. The savage girl again. Taniel fought his fear with anger. Who the pit was she? What did she want? Why was she haunting him?

  “There’s a girl,” Taniel hissed.

  Dina clutched at him. “What did you say?”

  “A savage girl. She’s up ahead, watching us.” He wanted to say the word “spirit” but fought against it. He didn’t need to scare Dina. Priests were notoriously excitable about this kind of things. “I’ve heard stories....”

  “This is no time for superstition,” Dina said. “She must be one of the tribe, here to guide us. Follow her!”

  Taniel stepped forward, only to feel his leg sink into the mud up to his knee. “Sinkhole!” He tried to step back, but too much of his weight had been on his front leg, leaving him with no leverage.

  “Don’t move,” Dina said. Her raspy breathing filled Taniel’s ears, and he could feel her grasp him by the shoulder. “I’ve braced my feet,” she said. “I’ll pull on you now. Just wait until....”

  Light suddenly blinded Taniel, searing Dina’s face into his vision.
He felt the grip on his shoulder disappear, and he fell back into the mud, arms flailing for purchase. His right arm sank through the murk and he thought he might be sucked down forever, before one fingertip touched something solid.

  He forced himself to freeze. Struggling would only make it worse. He focused on floating in the water above the sinkhole, one hand with a firm grip on a rock beneath the water. It was the only thing keeping him from being pulled down.

  Pushing with that one hand, he felt his face break the surface and took in a ragged breath.

  Calm, he reminded himself. He had to breathe slowly and work his way away from the sinkhole.

  He remembered Dina’s face in the lightning—mouth open, eyes wide, features ashen—and he knew that she had likely been dead by the time she hit the water.

  His eyes were caked shut by mud, and there was a pain in his side that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Had he been shot? Perhaps he had twisted something when he fell.

  He could hear the splash of footsteps near, and his heart thundered like a volley of musket fire. All his training and his magery yet here he was, helpless to move in the mud and water. Someone could just walk up and push him down.

  “Look at that, my lady,” a male voice said in Kez. “Cut right in two. Excellent aim.”

  Another voice, female, and educated by the enunciation, said, “Is it the powder mage?”

  “Hard to tell, the body is sinking fast. Can’t see the face.”

  The body. Dina.

  The woman sniffed. “There were two out here. Did I get them both?”

  A few moments passed, and Taniel knew they were looking for him. From their voices, they had their backs to him. Taniel forced himself to breathe as quietly as possible and prayed to Kresimir they wouldn’t turn around.

  “This is a deep sinkhole, my lady. Can’t feel the bottom with this pole. He must have been sucked down into the mud. See how quickly the corpse disappeared?”

  “I want evidence of the powder mage’s death. Mark the spot. I’ll come back in the morning and raise the corpses.”

  “The swamp dragons or snappers might have them by then, my lady.”

  “Just mark the spot. We have more hunting to do.”

  “Yes, my lady.”