Sins of Empire

by Brian McClellan

  The Riflejacks and garrison seemed to get a second wind, redoubling their efforts and giving chase. The Dynize soldiers reached the water, some of them clamoring into the few remaining longboats while others realized the hopelessness of trying to swim away and turned to organize a defensive. It was too late, and Vlora’s men hit them from behind, forcing them back into the ocean.

  Vlora watched Dynize soldiers in their heavy breastplates drown by the score, unwilling to comprehend the horror of such a fate. She looked toward the wreckage of Vallencian’s ship, knowing it would be days before she would be able to mount a rescue, and took a deep breath.

  Somehow, some way, they had managed to win the day.

  Styke drew his carbine one-handed, sighting along it for half a second before pulling the trigger. He was past the puff of smoke a moment later, and accompanied by the crack of a hundred other carbines as the lancers and cuirassiers opened fire on the front line of the Dynize infantry.

  The Dynize, falling into a defensive formation, fired back a single volley. Styke felt a bullet slam into the meat of his left shoulder and pushed away the sharp, sudden pain, rotating his arm to make sure it would still work. Behind him horses screamed and fell, and he holstered his carbine without looking back and took his lance in hand, lowering it at the now-reduced Dynize front line.

  Amrec leapt a wounded infantryman and Styke lowered his lance, tearing out a Dynize throat with the tip and driving it into the face of the next Dynize. He kept his grip tight, aiming true until the lance was snapped just past the haft. He threw the useless weapon at an infantryman trying to bring his bayonet to bear on Amrec’s chest, then drew his heavy saber, swinging it with enough force to decapitate a Dynize officer.

  He spurred Amrec forward, unwilling to give up his momentum, and plowed through the front eight rows of infantry until he was among the Dynize who had not yet been ordered to lower their weapons. The Dynize scrambled to defend themselves, officers shouting and swearing while they attempted to halt the vicious charge.

  Styke hazarded a glance over his shoulder. Jackal was still right behind him, along with the Riflejack bannerman, but Ibana and a huge number of his remaining lancers had disappeared in the chaos. He gritted his teeth and bent from his saddle, slashing beneath the arm of an infantryman, then waved his sword. “Forward, you dogs!” he roared. “Forward!”

  His cavalry continued to plow onward. Styke caught sight of a Dynize Privileged, white gloves raised above his head, a scarf wrapped around his face to protect his nose from the powder smoke. Styke angled Amrec toward the Privileged, determined to run him down before he could do any real damage, only to watch him tumble from his saddle with a bullet wound through his chest.

  Two-shot, it seemed, was still hard at work.

  Styke forced his way through the press, Amrec leaping and kicking with the nimbleness of a Gurlish racing horse. They plowed through three more lines and then suddenly he was free, riding across open farmland behind the Dynize position. He pulled Amrec around and watched as a few hundred of his cavalry managed to extricate themselves from the tangle.

  He spared a glance in either direction, satisfied to see the flash of fire and lightning, along with the bloom of powder smoke, as the Blackhats and their Privileged tore into the Dynize flanks. The strategy, it seemed, had worked. The Dynize attention was split between both cavalry and skirmishers, and they didn’t appear to have any Privileged left to answer those accompanying the Blackhats.

  Styke counted to forty to allow enough of his cavalry to emerge from the Dynize ranks before waving his sword over his head. “Form up!” he bellowed, and spurred Amrec back into the fray before the Dynize officers could turn their lines around to face him.

  He rode roughshod through the confused Dynize columns as they attempted to fight both riders and the sorcery on their flanks. Halfway through he spotted Ibana, jacket bloody with a broken lance in one hand and a smallsword in the other, having formed up several dozen unhorsed cavalry into a loose circle, which was in danger of being overrun by the Dynize. Styke led his remaining cavalry straight to them.

  A Dynize bayonet caught Styke on the thigh just as he reached Ibana’s men. The pain came quick and hot, and he snatched the musket out of the startled soldier’s hands and swung it around, cracking it across the man’s head with enough force to break the stock. Another bayonet was thrust toward his face, barely missing his eye, and then a musket stock, swung like club, slammed into his cheek. He reeled back, seeing stars, and swung his saber blindly.

  Lightning struck so close that it almost turned Styke and Amrec into a pillar of ash. Fire followed it a moment later in a column as thick as a man, crashing down from the heavens, zigzagging its way through the Dynize ranks. Infantry cooked instantly in their armor, and Styke’s nostrils were filled with the smell of burned flesh and hair. As suddenly as he’d been close to overwhelmed, the field around him was empty of enemies.

  He wheeled Amrec around, looking wildly. The Blackhats, their numbers greatly reduced, had managed to make it all the way around the Dynize flank and come up behind them. One of their Privileged was bleeding from a gunshot wound, but the fingers of them both continued to twitch and gesture, raining death among the Dynize. The fire and lightning spread outward from Styke’s position in the center, bringing ruin to the entirety of the Dynize infantry with startling speed.

  Styke slid from his saddle, watching the Privileged work, and limped over to Ibana. She knelt by the side of a Riflejack whom Styke did not recognize, holding the man’s hand as he writhed in pain. The better part of the Riflejack’s left arm had been taken off by an enemy sword, and the rest would have to be amputated.

  Styke looked around at the carnage, wondering if he would be sick from the sudden feeling of elation that rose within his chest. The smell of the dead, the wind in his hair, the blood on his steel: It made him feel vibrant and alive like nothing in the world had ever done for him. He thought about the guards at the labor camp and all the men he’d allowed to beat and belittle him just to try to reach parole.

  “I shouldn’t have stayed,” he said, breathing deeply of the smell of sorcery and burned corpses. “I should have fought my way out years ago.”

  “What are you going on about?” Ibana demanded.

  Styke lifted his chin to the chaos, watching as Taniel Two-shot, no longer on horseback, used a bayoneted rifle to tear through a whole company of Dynize infantry on his own. It reminded him of the grace with which Lady Flint fought, though somehow quicker and more terrifying. “If you can’t break them,” he said.

  “Grind their bones to dust beneath your hooves,” Ibana finished, not lifting her eyes from the wounded Riflejack. “Did we win?”

  Between the Blackhat Privileged, the remaining cavalry, and Taniel, they were mopping up the last of the Dynize. It was a stark reminder of just how quickly sorcery changed the tide of battle, and how easily it could have been Styke’s bones turned to ash from a Dynize Privileged, if not for Two-shot to even the odds.

  “Yeah,” he said, drawing his knife and kneeling down beside the Riflejack and sizing up the arm that needed to be amputated. “Bite down on your belt, son. This is gonna hurt, but it’ll be a cleaner cut. We won.”

  CHAPTER 64

  Vlora stood in the prow of a longboat as it did a circuit through the water surrounding Fort Nied. The slow strokes of the rowers left barely any wake behind them yet still managed to stir corpses to the top of the water, their bloated forms facedown, bobbing gently, their teal uniforms stained by the blood still seeping from their bodies. Somewhere off her port side the water suddenly exploded in movement as sharks emerged to fight over a corpse. Riflemen behind her stood, took aim, and shot into the water. The foaming frenzy increased for several seconds and then died down to leave the bay placid, gentle waves lapping bodies toward the shore.

  Vlora’s own body was a collection of aches, sharp pains, and developing bruises. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be trampled, and dug in
her pocket for a powder charge, pinching just the slightest bit off the top and snorting it from between her fingers. The stitches in the shrapnel wound in her leg stopped throbbing.

  “It’s a complete waste,” a voice said behind her.

  “I disagree,” a second voice responded. “We can rebuild this wall without lessening the structural integrity of the fort.”

  “Are you mad? We don’t have access to the kind of sorcery that made this fort as strong as it was. I say we level the whole thing and bring in the best stonemasons money can buy. We’ll build something better. With modern techniques we don’t even need sorcery to make the walls nearly impervious to straight shot.”

  “You’ve been reading too much of that idiot Yaddel,” the second voice said. “Modern construction is incredible, but it can’t beat sorcery.”

  “Yaddel is a visionary!”

  “Yaddel is a quack.”

  Vlora eyed the walls of Fort Nied, noting three complete breaches and at least fifteen spots of heavy damage. No doubt the engineers behind her saw more damage with their experienced eye. She gave a soft sigh at their arguing and tuned it out, glancing over the bay as some thirty or more longboats just like hers traversed the waters, fishing out corpses with hooks and nets, riflemen shooting every shark that surfaced.

  Beyond the bay, well past the range of her few remaining cannons and the flotsam of what used to be their flotilla, the rest of the Dynize fleet sat at anchor, swarming with sailors making repairs. She counted just eight capital ships and two times that number in support frigates.

  Since the Dynize army had finally routed last night, she hadn’t heard a word from Ka-sedial. No white flags. No suit for peace. Not even a request to barter for the dead and wounded. The Dynize fleet simply waited, and Vlora didn’t mind admitting to herself that their silence was unnerving.

  She tried to forget it, at least for the moment. She and her men had won a damned hard battle last night, and she allowed a smile to creep onto her face. The melancholy that gripped her now would be gone in a few days’ time, and her head would be back to the logistics of running an army—providing food, shelter, and pay, and bringing their numbers back to a full brigade.

  She scowled at the Landfall docks and the smoke still rising from several destroyed ships. Only a few remained untouched by the fires, while dozens were a complete loss, no doubt representing the imminent bankruptcy of several shipping companies. Fortunately, none of that was her problem.

  Vlora’s absent-minded inspection of the fort and environs suddenly focused on a body washed up on the shore not far from the causeway that attached Fort Nied to the mainland. She turned to her rowers. “Over there,” she ordered.

  “But ma’am,” an engineer said, “we’re not done with our inspection of the fort.”

  “You can finish after you drop me off,” Vlora said. “I want a full report by the end of the evening—one from each of you.” Conscious of the sharks prowling beneath the layer of flotsam and bodies, she waited until the longboat had reached the shallows, then she leapt into the water. She waded ashore and fell on her knees beside a body.

  It belonged to an enormous man with a dark, soaked beard, colorful clothes, and the thick tatters of a bearskin still clinging to his shoulders. His face was pale as death, his chest still.

  “Damn it, Vallencian,” Vlora muttered, feeling the first real pang of horror that had struck her through the sea of bodies. “You were about the only decent person in this whole damned city.” She called to a nearby squad from the garrison that was sorting corpses by uniform on the rocky beach. A sergeant with a squat, ugly face and shaved head waddled over, hooked spear thrown over his shoulder.

  “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

  “This is one of mine,” she said. “I want him put in the morgue with the other Riflejack officers.”

  The sergeant scowled appraisingly at the body. “Right you are, ma’am, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to put him in the morgue.”

  “Why not?”

  The sergeant produced a mirror from his pocket and knelt down, thrusting the mirror up in front of Vallencian’s nose. A thin film of fog appeared. “Because he’s not dead.”

  Vlora felt a wave of relief sweep over her. Finally, some good news. “He’s half-drowned. Get me a surgeon. Go!”

  The sergeant scurried off, and Vlora bent over Vallencian, searching his chest for the barest hint of movement. If she held very still, and squinted, she could see it. “Crashed one of your ships into the Dynize and then managed to swim all the way back against the tide. You’re a damned workhorse, you know that?”

  One of the garrison doctors soon arrived with assistants. He pumped Vallencian’s lungs carefully with glass tubing, then they carried him back toward Fort Nied on a stretcher. Vlora remained out on the beach, telling herself that she should accompany Vallencian until she knew whether he was going to survive, but unwilling to watch him die if it came to that.

  The shadows began to grow long, and Vlora smelled the familiar scent of tobacco before she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. She turned to find Olem picking his way gingerly over the rocky terrain, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling.

  “Glad to see you’re up and walking,” Vlora said.

  “I’m not glad to see you are,” Olem replied. “You should be resting.”

  “There’s work to be done.”

  “Like standing out here, staring at the bodies?”

  Vlora snorted. She wanted to reach out and take Olem by the hand, retire to a hotel room up on the plateau, and spend the next two weeks with him recovering in each other’s arms. “I went with the engineers to examine Nied’s fortifications from the water.”

  “And?”

  “Doesn’t look great. Any news from the Dynize?”

  “Not a peep. I’d hoped you saw some sort of indication that they were ready to talk.”

  Vlora turned back toward the ocean. The Dynize ships remained, quietly menacing, as if daring any of the unburned ships in port to make a run for it. “Not that I’ve heard. Do we have casualty reports?”

  “Thirty-five hundred wounded, seven hundred dead.”

  Vlora perked up. “That’s far better than I expected.”

  “It’s only Riflejack numbers,” Olem responded sourly.

  “Oh.” Vlora fought the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That meant that only a few hundred of her soldiers had escaped the battle unharmed. Recovery would be weeks at best, and they’d lose a number of the wounded to disease, infection, or blood loss. “The garrison?”

  “The garrison,” Olem said slowly, “was hit hard. They’ve got fewer wounded than us, but about eight thousand dead. They’re not used to this kind of fighting.”

  “Nobody is used to this kind of fighting,” Vlora responded, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it—soldiers that just would not break, no matter how many dead we piled in front of them. I saw Ka-poel a couple of hours ago. She told me that it was definitely blood magic, spread out across half a dozen bone-eyes. The ship Vallencian plowed into must have contained one of the more powerful practitioners, and his death shattered their concentration.”

  “At least that’s a mystery solved.”

  “I’m not sure I like knowing,” Vlora said. “All my training—pit, all Adran strategy—is based off breaking a less-well-trained enemy. If the enemy will not break, then how do we win?”

  “We won yesterday.”

  “Barely.”

  “Can Ka-poel replicate the Dynize sorcery?”

  “She’s powerful enough, that’s for sure. But she’s not formally trained. Everything she can do is self-taught, and she says providing a backbone to ten thousand men is a challenge she’s never even considered before. All her attention right now is focused on the godstone.”

  “And?” Olem asked, ashing his cigarette and lowering himself with a groan to the sand beside Vlora.

  “And what?” Vlora said with a frustrated shrug
. “None of us are Privileged. The two remaining Privileged that the Blackhats left behind don’t want to go near the thing. We don’t know exactly what it is or how it works. I don’t even want to think about it.” She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Speaking of the Blackhats …”

  “We don’t know where they are,” Olem answered. “I sent out riders. Best guess is Lindet retreated to a safe distance and, once she finds out we’ve won, she’ll return to the city.”

  “And bring thousands of angry, armed men with her.” Vlora gritted her teeth, wondering if she was strong enough for a power struggle so soon after the end of this battle. “I’ll kill her before I let her take control of the godstone.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “I told her as much when I threatened to arrest her.”

  “So much for the element of surprise.” Olem flicked a cigarette butt toward the water. “I saw them carrying Vallencian toward the fort. They said he’s still alive.”

  “For now,” Vlora responded.

  “I’m going to go check on him. Come find me when you decide to stop watching them collect the bodies.”

  Vlora helped Olem to his feet, then watched him head back toward Fort Nied, before attempting to collect herself emotionally. Seven hundred men dead. Too many names to memorize, but she’d read through the lists before they were laid to rest. She wondered if they had died hating her for putting them in front of the Dynize.

  “They knew the risks. They signed up for the coin,” she told herself. “You didn’t bring a bunch of greenhorns out into the wild. You brought the best damned riflemen in the world, and it’s the only reason most of us are still alive today.”

  Somewhere down the beach, members of the garrison had started a driftwood bonfire. Fire for the Dynize dead. Earth for the Riflejacks and garrison. The price of victory.

  The price of saving a city of a million people.

  CHAPTER 65