Powder Mage Trilogy 01 - Promise of Blood

by Brian McClellan

“At best you’ll wind up a soldier’s wife,” Rozalia said. “What a waste.”

  “It’s better that,” Nila said quietly, “than to die here for a lost cause.”

  “What did you think Tamas’s soldiers would have done if they’d have caught you smuggling Jakob out of the duke’s residence? You have courage, child, and don’t try to pretend that you don’t love that little boy. If you cared only for yourself, you’d be halfway to Brudania by now.

  “Stay here,” Rozalia continued. “Watch over Jakob. If the parley tomorrow goes well, you’ll wind up a rich woman. If it doesn’t… you may need to save his life again.”

  If she stayed by Jakob’s side, she could, like Rozalia said, become a wealthy woman. Or follow him to the guillotine block. She remembered the soldier’s hands holding her down, the feelings of helplessness and horror. No bearded sergeant would save her the next time Tamas’s soldiers came through a door. She had silver buried in the corner of a graveyard just outside of the city. She would never have to feel that fear again.

  Nila couldn’t help but wonder if Rozalia had other motives for wanting her to stay. A Privileged used the common folk. She didn’t help them. There had to be a reason she was showing such interest in Nila.

  Jakob came into sight over Rozalia’s shoulder. His pallor had improved despite the stress of the last two weeks. Rozalia had done something for his cough. He smiled and waved to Nila, then was distracted by a butterfly flitting through the rubble of a building knocked over by the earthquake. She watched him dance off after the insect, followed by a pair of vigilant Hielmen.

  “I’ll stay,” she said. “For now.”

  “You can end this quickly,” Julene said.

  Tamas examined the woman lounging in the chair on the other side of his desk. She’d come alone on her own initiative, leaving Taniel and the magebreaker who knew where. She wore a low-cut shirt that revealed enough cleavage to get the imagination going but that was tight enough for her to move quickly when she wanted. Tamas knew the effect was not accidental. Yet he was not a man to make the same mistake twice. Julene was a dangerous woman. She was the type to use any weapon available to her in order to get ahead. He looked away from her chest and at the scar running from the corner of her mouth to her brow.

  He wondered at that scar. There were Privileged who dealt in healing sorcery. It was a tricky art, and they were rare, but with the amount Julene charged for her mercenary services, she could easily afford it. Perhaps she just liked looking deadly.

  “How?”

  “Assassins,” she said. “Send men behind the barricades. Wipe out all their leadership and the rest will surrender easily.”

  Tamas snorted. “I’ve been trying my best to scrape together Manhouch’s old spy network with little success and you want me to find enough assassins to bring down those barricades? You’re mad.”

  “Use the Black Street Barbers,” Julene said.

  “The street gang?”

  Julene nodded. “They will be expensive, but they’re the best at what they do. They’ll end this civil war.”

  “Gangs can’t be controlled.”

  “They can with the right amount of money,” Julene said. “The Barbers are different. More organized. They report to Ricard Tumblar. He uses them to police the docks.”

  “Assassination is risky. It could turn the people against me.”

  “You’re being a fool.”

  “Careful.”

  “If you won’t consider that, then you need me at the parley.”

  “Why?” Tamas checked his watch. The parley was set for ten o’clock. Two hours from now.

  “Because General Westeven is in league with this Privileged we’re hunting. She’ll be there. It wouldn’t surprise me if she makes a move against you.”

  “I have my powder mages for that,” Tamas said.

  “Your boy has shot her three times and put an arm’s length of steel through her stomach. Do your other Marked have anything new to bring to the table?”

  This confirmed Taniel’s reports. This Privileged was something else. Something more.

  “You know her, don’t you?” he said. “This is personal. I can tell by the way you talk. You want this woman dead.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “I’ve had you kill seven Privileged in the last two years. Each time you’ve been cold, mechanical.”

  “And each time I’ve been able to kill them within a day or two,” Julene said. “This is getting personal. I want the bitch dead.”

  “So you don’t know her?”

  “Of course not.”

  She was lying. Tamas could tell by the way her eyes hardened when she spoke. It was a small tell, and he’d only recently figured it out, but Julene put a little extra fire into her lies when she wanted to be believed. Now, why wouldn’t she tell the truth?

  “You think you can handle her if she tries something?” Tamas said.

  “Of course. Every time we’ve begun to fight, she’s run. At the very least I will scare her off.”

  “Be there,” Tamas said. “In an hour. Bring Gothen and Taniel and his pet savage. And don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I’ll only be there to protect you,” Julene said.

  Tamas stood next to a repaired field gun and watched a line of men make their way over the barricade under a white flag. Olem was on the other side of the gun, leaning against the barrel, speaking quietly to Sabon. Vlora stood somewhere behind him with Brigadiers Ryze and Sabastenien, the only two mercenary commanders posted in the city. From a building across the street Taniel trained his rifle on the barricades. Julene tugged idly at her gloves, her magebreaker partner beside her. A whole company of Adran soldiers stood at attention twenty paces back. Tamas wanted General Westeven to know exactly how bad his odds were.

  This would be a crucial meeting. Tamas felt he held most of the cards, but General Westeven was an incredibly capable commander. He could ruin Tamas’s plans simply by protracting the civil war.

  “A sorry lot, sir,” Olem said, motioning toward the approaching royalists.

  Tamas withheld judgment. The royalists had been crouching behind their barricades for eight days. They were dirty and disheveled, but they showed no signs of imminent starvation or even fatigue. Behind ramshackle barricades they may be, but General Westeven would see that every man and woman at his disposal slept on a good bed and had plenty to eat—not hard, when they had captured the city’s main granaries. The royalists were eating better than most of the city right now.

  Tamas floated in a light powder trance, allowing him to examine faces at a distance with ease. He knew General Westeven, a tall, bald man with bloodspots on his scalp. Age had reduced the general to little more than skin stretched over bones, his whole body moving slowly from advanced rheumatism. Still, that was no reason to underestimate him. His mind was sharp as a fine dagger.

  Tamas didn’t recognize a single one of the men with the general. They were nobles, judging by their bedraggled finery. Men who’d slipped through his soldiers’ nets the night of the coup, or were too minor to warrant attention.

  He did recognize the woman with them. It was the Privileged who’d killed Lajos and the rest. She looked none the worse for the wear despite the wounds Taniel had supposedly given her. Perhaps Taniel was wrong. Maybe he’d missed. Tamas locked eyes with her for a moment. She returned his gaze unflinchingly.

  Taniel wasn’t known to miss.

  There was a pause among the royalist group and a brief argument before they finished their trek down the street and formed up opposite Tamas and his mercenaries. There were twenty of them, and Westeven was the only soldier of the whole lot. This wasn’t opposition, Tamas realized with disgust. This was a committee.

  “Field Marshal Tamas,” said a fat noble with a stained cummerbund. “Order your men to stand down! We’ve come beneath a flag of truce.”

  Tamas glanced at the soldiers behind him. They were at attention, their rifles shouldered. “Westie,” he
said. “Good to see you.”

  Westeven returned his nod. “Would it were under different circumstances, my friend.”

  “There’d be no hard feelings if you stepped away from this lot right now. You’d be a formidable ally in rebuilding the country.”

  “The way I see it,” Westeven said, “is that you are the one destroying it.”

  “Surely you can see the corruption?” Tamas said. “Nothing short of the destruction of the nobility would have saved Adro.”

  Westeven’s eyes were tired, his face strained. He seemed as if he desperately wanted to say yes. “There is more at stake here than you know. And you killed my king, Tamas. I can’t forgive you for that.”

  “Your king was about to give the whole country to the Kez!” Tamas’s voice rose sharply. Westeven was a smart man. No, a brilliant man. How could he not see what Tamas was trying to do? How could he stand in the way? “I could not allow the Accords to be signed and this country sold into servitude. What more important is at stake than the people?”

  The general glanced at the members of Tamas’s guard. “I won’t speak of it here.” His eyes hardened. “We’re here to negotiate,” he said.

  “From what grounds,” Tamas asked. “You’re completely surrounded. I have more men—”

  “I have twenty thousand behind those barricades.”

  “—including women and children, maybe,” Tamas snapped. “You might have a few dangerous Knacked at best, and this.” He gestured to the Privileged. “Yet I have a dozen powder mages and enough field guns to destroy half the city.”

  “You mean the half that wasn’t destroyed by the quake?” Westeven’s calm was infuriating. Tamas gritted his teeth.

  “I have time,” Westeven continued. “I hold the main city granaries and armory—food and weapons you need, because the Kez ambassadors will arrive any day now, and if they see that we are at war among ourselves, then they will smell blood, and a Kez army will be knocking on our door within weeks. Even if they don’t, the people will begin to tire of this civil war. They will see your soldiers and mercenaries as a burden. They will turn on you when you can’t feed them, when you can’t rebuild their city.”

  The bastard could read his problems like a book. Tamas sized up the collection of noblemen. “What do you propose?”

  The man with the soiled cummerbund stepped forward. “I am Viscount Maxil,” he said. He lifted a length of paper and looked it over. “We have a list of demands.”

  Tamas snatched the paper before Maxil could object. He ran his eyes down the list.

  “You expect me to step down? To arrest myself?” He gave the nobles a look of disbelief.

  “You committed high treason!” one of them said. “You killed our king!”

  Tamas stared them down until another man said quietly, “We’re willing to negotiate on that point.”

  Tamas went back to reading. Before he’d gone another paragraph, he was shaking his head. “You want all the king’s land and that of the executed nobility divided up among yourselves? What do you take me for, a fool?”

  “These are points of negotiation,” Maxil said.

  “A moment ago you said they were demands.”

  “More like negotiation,” Maxil said, looking away.

  Tamas gave the list back. “Westie, surely you can talk some sense into them?”

  Westeven shrugged. “Negotiate, Tamas. I beg of you.”

  “Give me a moment.”

  Tamas stepped back behind the cannons and beckoned over the brigadiers. He was joined by Olem, Vlora, Sabon, Brigadier Ryze, and Brigadier Sabastenien. Julene still stood off to the side, staring at the other Privileged with the intensity of a cat.

  Brigadier Sabastenien spoke first. “They have no grounds to negotiate from.” The man was young, barely older than Taniel, and Tamas had a hard time taking him seriously. Yet one did not become a brigadier of the Wings of Adom at that age for nothing.

  “I’m afraid they do,” Sabon said. “Westeven is right. We don’t have time. If the Kez ambassadors arrive and see us in this state…”

  “Not to mention the granaries,” Tamas said. “We’ve reduced rations by a third for the army just to have a bare minimum for the city breadwagons. The people are starving. They won’t put up with this for long.”

  “Your council will be angry if you make any decisions without them,” Vlora pointed out. “Sir,” she added.

  “This is a matter of war, Captain,” Tamas said, “and in that they have given me full power. I’ll negotiate as I see fit.” He turned to Ryze. “Can we take those barricades without losing a few thousand men?”

  Ryze considered a moment. “Only if we give them a good shelling first. Even then… it will be costly.”

  Tamas rolled his eyes. Ryze had been an artillery commander before joining the Wings of Adom. He saw shelling as a solution to everything.

  “If we don’t shell them?”

  “It will be a bloodbath,” Ryze said. “On both sides.”

  “Shit.”

  Tamas returned to the royalists. “Give me an offer,” Tamas said. He motioned to the paper in Maxil’s hand. “A serious offer. Not that list of pig shit. And it will include her”—he pointed at the Privileged—“giving herself up to await execution for the murder of my men.”

  The Privileged gazed back at Tamas with the severity only old women are capable of. To her, they were all children playing at children’s games.

  “That won’t happen,” General Westeven said. “Be realistic, Tamas. This is war. Casualties are a fact of that war.”

  Tamas gritted his teeth. “Give me an offer.”

  Maxil launched into it immediately, and Tamas realized it was what he’d expected all along.

  “We have a cousin of the king’s within our barricades,” Maxil said.

  “His name?” Tamas interrupted.

  “Jakob the Just.”

  Tamas blinked, trying to remember the royal line. “More like Jakob the Child, he’s a fourth cousin, at best, and he’s barely five.”

  “He’s the closest living relative to Manhouch.” Maxil went on. “We propose that we put him on the throne as Manhouch the Thirteenth. You and General Westeven will remain in control of the army, and we along with your council will combine to form the core of the king’s new advisory board. Your powder mages will be the new royal cabal.”

  “And the king?” Tamas asked.

  “We will advise him until he comes of age.”

  Tamas looked to Westeven. There was a levelheadedness to this proposal that spoke of his influence. The nobility would leave most of the control in his hands. Yet it could not stand.

  “I will never allow a king to have power over Adro again,” Tamas said. “I simply won’t have it. If you want a king, he will be that in name only.”

  Maxil scowled. “A puppet monarchy?”

  “At the very best, and I’m stretching my patience to offer that.”

  “No,” Maxil said. “Adro must have a proper king.”

  “Never again,” Tamas said.

  “You’re refusing us? That’s it? No negotiation? We’ve left the army in your hands. We’ve made you the next royal cabal head. You’d be the second most powerful man in Adro. Are you that greedy that you must keep it all to yourself?”

  Tamas chuckled. “You poor sods. I didn’t do this for power. I did it to destroy the monarchy. I did it to free the people. I’m not going to turn around and put a boy king on the throne so that you can go back to your country villas and continue to bleed the country dry.” He looked at Westeven. “I’m sorry, my friend. No king, no foreign country must ever have power in Adro again.”

  “I will fight you to the end,” Westeven said.

  Tamas bowed to his old friend. “I know.” Tamas felt someone touch his shoulder. Julene was there, her face serious.

  “There’s something wrong,” she said.

  “What?” Tamas said. He exchanged a frown with General Westeven.

  Th
e familiar popping sound of fired air rifles erupted from the barricades. Julene leapt between Tamas and General Westeven, shoving Tamas back. Bullets crackled against an invisible barricade. Julene fell back, throwing fireballs as quickly as she could summon them. They smashed into the barricade, causing blooms of fire.

  The other Privileged launched herself into action just a moment after Julene. Hardened shields of air stopped the crack of bullets from Tamas’s quickest soldiers, covering the sudden retreat of the royalist delegation. The ground rumbled, the air seemed to shake, and the cannon closest to Tamas suddenly cracked, the wheels falling off, the broken metal hitting the ground with a thud.

  Tamas leapt to his feet. They’d attacked him. They’d attacked him under a flag of truce! Westeven knew better than that. Westeven… Tamas’s eyes found his old friend. Westeven’s body was being dragged toward the barricades. He was missing an arm, his whole chest blackened. Was he already dead? He’d been hit by one of Julene’s fireballs. Tamas felt sick.

  “Senseless,” he spat. “Brigadier Ryze! Prime the artillery. We attack at once!”

  Chapter 11

  The Public Archives are just above us,” Adamat said. Somewhere behind him, SouSmith’s lantern wobbled to a stop, and the sound of sloshing stilled.

  “You sure this time?”

  Adamat held his own lantern up to the rusted iron ladder rungs in front of him. There was a plaque on the bricks between the rungs, supposedly to say which building this accessed, but the letters had been worn away long ago. The storm drains beneath Adro were not kept in the best of shape. It was a miracle most of them had survived the earthquake—and a testament to Adran engineering.

  “I may have a perfect memory,” Adamat said, his voice echoing in the long, shoulder-height tunnel, “but all these damned drains look alike.”

  “Heh. I liked the women’s bathhouse.”

  “I bet you did,” Adamat said. “Wonder anyone’s using it, what with Tamas lobbing shells all over this section of town.” He rubbed his finger over the plaque, trying to make out any kind of letters. “This has got to be it.”