by K. Eason
Veiko had gotten himself up. Hauled Snow up ungently, starting dragging her back toward the hall.
“No,” Snow said, and shoved at his hand. “Come on. Yrse is right there.”
She pushed him off and ran into that forest of dangling hooks, following under the straight line of the godmagicked bar. Fast and low, past the ghosts, bent almost double. She had both eyes on Yrse when she loosed the winch. Saw Yrse’s grimace-grin turn on her.
Another click overheard, another rattle of chain coming loose.
Snow clenched her teeth. If the godmagic failed, well, it wouldn’t hurt much. All that steel coming down, yeah, that would end it quick. The God could find another right hand. Run faster, that was all, never mind the gutters and the slope on the floor.
But the bar stayed up, and Yrse’s eyes got round. A pallid purple glow bloomed in Yrse’s hand. She flung her arm out, splayed her fingers. She shouted a tangle of syllables that ricocheted off Snow’s ears and wits. The air itself convulsed, a ripple more like water than wind.
Snow jagged aside as the bolt whipped past. Her seax flicked out, laid Yrse’s arm open from wrist to elbow. Long cut, shallow, nothing crippling. But the blood welled up, and the other woman’s godmagic dissolved into sparks.
Yrse gathered her arm against her chest. Hissed like a scalded cat, pain and fury together. “Fucking half-blood, motherless God-loving—”
Veiko’s voice rose then, rough-edged and low and with all the force of a river crashing its banks. Cold syllables that sank into Snow’s bones, prickled under her skin, chilled her breath in her lungs. Kjotvi, she heard among them, and Stig.
Yrse heard, too. Stopped mid-breath, mid-curse. Fear blanked her face. Her mouth shaped a no that never found breath.
Mist rose up from the tiles, and an airless chill. Snow grinned and held her ground as Kjotvi and Stig flowed around her. Yrse tried to run. Crabbed a couple of steps along the wall before the ghosts caught her. Their fingers curved like talons. Thrust into Yrse’s chest, into her belly. She screamed then, and kept screaming.
Veiko made a move to mercy. Axe raised, eyes narrow. Snow stuck an arm out. Patted the solid wall of his chest.
“Let them have their revenge, yeah?” She had to pitch her voice past the screaming.
He frowned at her. Argument smoldered in his witchfire eyes. Then he turned away, flat-lipped, and stared at the wall.
The closed door rattled. There came a pop, and a curl of smoke. Then Istel shoved the door open. He came straight for Snow. Skirted Yrse’s dying with a casual glance sideways. His eyes flickered orange.
So, not Istel, then.
Snow leaned over and said near his ear, “Where’s Ari?”
Yrse let out a particularly piercing shriek. The God grimaced. Mopping up. Yrse had a household.
“Fuck and damn. Bondies, too?”
The household, the God said again. Tsabrak’s smirk, metal-cold. Then, as Yrse choked to bubbling sobs, Tsabrak’s Suburban accent: “You know the histories. You taught them to me, yeah? Bloodfeud leaves no one alive.”
“Right.” Snow turned back to Veiko. “That’s enough vengeance, yeah?”
“Yes.” He took a short step. Angled past Kjotvi and brought his axe down. Neat and precise and sudden quiet.
Somewhere else in the house, more shouting. The histories talked about the great House feuds using bondies as soldiers, but that meant training and outfitting. Yrse hadn’t done any of that. In the Tiers, though, in the Houses—whose godsworn had Senate sanction now—that kind of preparation might be underway. Tal’Shik was after Illharek. But not just the city, no, she wanted the whole Illhari Republic back. Starting, evidently, with the Suburba.
Well. That fight would spread. Would move up, whatever appeasements the Senate offered to highborn godsworn. The blood would run in the Tiers, just like it did in Suburban alleys. So maybe it was time to go see Szanys Dekklis and remind her of that.
Snow traded a look with the God. “Help me find a sack, yeah?”
That fast, the God fled. Tsabrak didn’t run errands. Those, he left for Istel. Who blinked. Frowned. “A sack?”
Snow pointed. “Taking her with us, yeah? Or part, anyway. Veiko. Need your axe.”
CHAPTER TWO
The fields in the valley should have been ready for harvest. Wheat or barley in tall stalks. Vines in neat rows. These held another crop, rows of bodies on spikes, lined up legion straight, black and stiff and naked. That was probably K’Haina’s fourth daughter, there on the end. She’d overseen this estate. Probably her consorts and children beside her. Maybe the bondies, too.
Dekklis squinted. Had been a time she’d’ve been able to tell, from this distance, from this vantage. Now they all looked the same. Body-shaped smudges that could be Dvergir dark or Alvir fair or—
“Those are Taliri, First Legate. Not our people.”
Dekklis started. Scowled. Rolled her eyes sideways to gather in the man standing beside her. First Tribune K’Hess Rurik, former First Spear of the Sixth Cohort, her commander when she had been a First Scout in Cardik. When she had worn sensible armor, patches and panels of leather, scraps of black metal. Minimal. Quiet. Not this legion armor, standard-issue, with a breastplate that every crow within a league could see.
“Other Taliri,” Rurik repeated, a little louder. “First Sc—First Legate. Did you hear me?”
“I heard you, First Tribune.” Impertinence, that tone from any other man. From K’Hess Rurik, it was damn near good manners. “So, they’re killing each other now, too. That’s nice. Too bad they had to fire the fields first and murder all the residents.”
“I’m sure they killed plenty of Illhari, but that’s not who they spiked. Those’re all Taliri. And they’re where anyone coming down the road could see them.”
“Not just the road.” Dekklis flipped a hand at the trees around them. Manicured forests, this close to the villas and the farms. Nothing like the Wild outside of Cardik. “Anyone on approach from Illharek will see this. They’re expecting an audience.”
“They’re expecting us. The legions.” Rurik shook his head. His breastplate winked and flashed where the sunlight checkered through the trees. “That they’re showing us Taliri corpses, rather than our own, suggests—”
“That the godsworn are fighting amongst themselves. That their alliance is breaking down. And they want us to know it. Or—that they want us to think they’re fighting amongst themselves.”
K’Hess Rurik was unaccustomed to interruption. He folded his arms. Creaking leather, scraping metal, a deep draw of air through his nose, in and out again. “Yes, First Legate. Exactly.”
Looking at her like she was still his First Scout, one of a dozen in the Sixth Cohort. Old habit said drop your eyes and apologize. Dekklis grimaced. Stared, unblinking, at Rurik. “You’re certain those are Taliri bodies.”
“Of course I am.” There, the old Rurik, who hated his authority questioned as much as he hated interruption. Who remembered the limits of that authority now, when Dekklis hoisted an eyebrow. He coughed. Winced. “My apologies—”
She waved them off. “Hell with that. I don’t care about formalities. You know it.”
“Your troops care.”
“Hell with them, too,” under her breath. That was a sentiment better suited to Snowdenaelikk, heretic and outlaw, than Szanys Dekklis, Senator and First Legate of Illharek. And louder, while Rurik pretended he hadn’t heard her: “What do you suppose they expect us to do now? Trot back to the city and debate a new course of action?”
“That would be the Illhari way. Debate things to death.” Rurik shrugged. “I think the Taliri want someone—want us—to go investigate. Which,” he added, “I don’t recommend. It’s likely an ambush.”
Was a time he’d’ve sent her and Istel down first thing. Part of her still expected that order. Waited for it, while the silence stretched and Rurik cocked a brow at her. While she remembered that she gave those orders now, and Rurik had to follow them.
“I think we need to see what’s written on those poles.”
That got her a frown. “It’s not a good idea. We don’t know if they’re still out there, or how many there are.”
First Spear Rurik had been less cautious. Maybe his new title weighed on him like hers did. Or maybe he still wanted to be the one giving orders, even if he had to frame his as advice.
Foremothers grant her patience. “What’s not a good idea is slinking back to Illharek with no more knowledge than we left with, except the Taliri have burned more of our harvest. If they really have turned on each other, we need to know it. Now listen,” whip-crack, command-voice. She strangled a grin at his twitch. “Go collect the adept. We’re taking a squad from the Sixth down there. If you’re right, and it’s an ambush, the rest of the camp can get to us in plenty of time to help.”
Rurik scowled at her, and snapped a perfect salute with exactly as much sincerity as Istel had when she’d given him an order he didn’t like. Exactly that same cool-voiced “Yes, First Legate” that meant fuck you.
Except Istel would’ve said First Scout, not First Legate, because Istel didn’t know yet she’d gotten promoted. Dekklis hadn’t seen her partner since she’d sent him into the Suburba to find Snowdenaelikk. Since then, the Senate had turned on itself and she’d been arrested and released and, in an act which proved luck’s perversity, ended up warming the same Senate seat as her mother had before her sister Maja had committed matricide in fine Illhari tradition. Before she, Dek, had killed Maja in the same afternoon and inherited two toadshit titles.
What do you think of that, Mother?
Szanys Elia had never commanded the legions. Szanys Elia had been a politician and a mother and the head of House Szanys. But her fourth daughter, soldier by choice, had ended up in the Senate seat and First Legate. That meant Illharek’s legions answered to her: the First, its cohorts scattered across the southern and eastern territories, and the Second’s remnants, its northern cohorts, including the Sixth, having died at Cardik, during Tal’Shik’s first uprising.
Istel would sneer at the former
soft like rabbits, Dek
and wince at the latter
that’s all we’ve got left?
and probably laugh outright that she’d got a promotion out of killing her sister.
You like telling people what to do. It fits.
Rurik was stomping back toward the camp, loud-footed rattling of all the damn Illhari metal. She looked down at her own cuirass. Rubbed the Illhari sigil stamped into the steel. Any good archer could find that, and the Taliri had many fine archers in their ranks. Even if they were fighting amongst themselves, didn’t mean they wouldn’t shoot at a convenient target.
“K’Hess!” she called after him.
He stopped. Spun on his heel. “First Legate?”
“Find a different set of armor, savvy? And find me one, too. Let’s not announce ourselves.”
“Sir.” That might’ve been a smile on his face as he spun round a second time. Grim little peeled-back-off-teeth expression. The man might want to meet a Talir or two in the woods, take some revenge for Cardik. Foremothers knew she did.
Dekklis returned to camp more slowly, working at the first of several buckles on her cuirass. The southern Illhari troops weren’t accustomed to half-measures or small camps. They’d learned their tactics in the wars before and after the Purge. Wanted earthworks and fortifications for every camp, as if the Taliri might swoop down and lay siege to them. Dekklis cut through the lines of milae with their shovels. Past the optio overseeing the digging.
Rabbits, Dek. What’ll they do if the Taliri hit ’em now?
Not that the Taliri were showing signs of hitting anyone who might hit back. They were confining their attacks to the villages and the farmsteads, refusing any contact with the legion. Refugees had been streaming into the city since the first thaw. Some of them kept going south and east, toward Riku and Vaasyl, but most of them ended up in Illharek’s Suburba. That was Taliri strategy.
And it would work. Dekklis had seen just how well last winter, up north. There had been riot, the night the Taliri had come at Cardik’s walls, the garrison there divided between maintaining order in the streets and defense. The Taliri had breached the walls with godmagic, chased Rurik and the survivors of the Sixth most of the way back to Illharek, and then—smoked away into the forests. Dissolved, while all of Illharek braced and waited for a massed attack.
The Taliri were waiting now, too, Dek reckoned. They could harass travelers on the Illhari roads. Burn the farms all summer long. Ensure that Illharek wouldn’t have full larders when winter came. Give the refugees time to spread their misery and fear, just like they’d done in Cardik, so that the city rotted from the inside.
Not as if Illharek wouldn’t help that rot along. It teetered on the edge of civil war already, thanks to Tal’Shik’s godsworn, united only in fear of a Taliri invasion that seemed less and less likely before the first frost. Be damn nice if the Taliri had developed their own internal troubles, too. Only fair.
Dekklis swore as the armor’s buckle came loose of a sudden, sliced her knuckle with a hard metal edge. She sucked the split skin. It would be worse for Illharek if the Taliri threat did disappear. If she told the Senate the Taliri were infighting, she’d have House K’Hess moving on House Stratka next thing, and a dozen enemies coming at her. The old ways, pre-Purge, when the Houses fought amongst themselves.
Then it might come down to the Academy’s involvement. The Academy, whose neutrality was a matter of law and custom and myth. Conjurors, all of them, to some degree—but the Academy made chirurgeons, too, apothecaries and scribes and scholars, who might not live in Academy walls any longer but who had lingering loyalty. And those people were everywhere in Illharek. The Tiers, and Midtown, and the Suburba. Women and men. The Academy’s inclusiveness was, Dekklis knew, not an egalitarian gesture. It was practical. Pragmatic.
If only the Academy’s official liaison with the First Legate matched that practicality. Uosuk Belaery, the second conjuror in Dek’s acquaintance, sat on a camp stool, her robes gathered to avoid touching dead leaves and dirt. The sunlight poked its fingers through the branches. Burned off the rings in Belaery’s ears that said adept, by color and count. Midtowner accent that said respectable. Belaery was up and coming in the Academy. Loaning her to the First Legate was a signal of cooperation.
“Adept,” Dekklis said. “We’re going down. Need you with us.”
Belaery stood, carefully, and dug her eyes into Dek’s face—because Belaery had never been ten steps outside Illharek, before a few weeks ago—and raised her chin. “You need me?”
Something about the woman made Dekklis trim her own sentences back to bones. Offer as little explanation as possible.
“There are poles down there. Need you to take a look at what’s on them.”
“Prayers to Tal’Shik, I imagine. Same as the last two lots.” Belaery cut a glance toward the farm, as if she could see through the hill and dirt and tree. “Prayer-poles are nothing unusual, First Legate.”
Belaery wasn’t used to fieldwork. Or fields. Or, Dek had learned, corpses, fresh or otherwise. “These poles have Taliri stuck on them.”
“Ah.” Belaery’s gaze skipped sideways. Settled on a mid-distance nothing. Her lips came together in what Dekklis had learned to recognize as her conjuring face. She never announced what she was trying to do.
Well, a scout didn’t forget all her patience just because of a promotion. Dekklis shrugged out of the cuirass. There should, by rights, be someone there to take it from her—Mila Eshki, highborn and green as grass, who counted it her special honor to serve the First Legate. Except Eshki was probably digging earthworks right now, or latrines. Something more useful, certainly, than playing body servant to a woman who’d cared for her own gear her whole career. Dekklis looped the cuirass’s straps across her arm. Rolled her neck and watched Belaery, who was still frowning, and caught movement past Belaery’s
shoulder—Rurik, already in scout’s leather, with an armful of the same, and a pair of grim-eyed veterans trailing in his wake. She dropped the cuirass. Took the worn leather from Rurik and shrugged into it. Felt like getting her own skin back.
Rurik dipped his shoulder. Leaned close and arrowed a glare past Dekklis. “The hell’s she doing?”
“You think she told me? Conjuring something.”
“I am scouting.” Belaery straightened. Brushed imaginary dust off her sleeves. “There are people down there hiding in the trees.”
Hell and damn. Listen to that silence, watch three veterans going wide-eyed. Feel nerves coming off them, where there hadn’t been. Dekklis grimaced.
Rurik folded his arms. Squeezed a sigh through his nose. “Taliri?”
Belaery shrugged. “Bodies. Warm and living. I presume they’re not our friends.”
Dekklis raised a hand. Brushed the troopers’ muttering aside like cobwebs. “Conjuring doesn’t work like seeing,” she told them. Not that she had any idea if that were true, but if Belaery wasn’t going to volunteer, she could make something up. “But the adept’s right. If there’re people down there, they’re Taliri, not bondies hiding in the weeds. So, we go careful.”
She crossed stares with Rurik. One beat, two. “Spear,” she said, knowing he’d know what she meant. Knowing Belaery wouldn’t.
His mouth settled into a line. “I will take point. Remi, Tulikki.” He pointed, one side and the other. “Behind me. Adept, you stay with the First Legate.”
That direction was for Belaery’s sake, who had no idea of marching order, or how a spear-tip formation worked. Who couldn’t, Dek suspected, be trusted to avoid low branches. That was her job, shepherding Belaery. She could have taken point herself, claimed command prerogative and used the senior troops as her backup. But Remi and Tulikki were Rurik’s people, from the Sixth. They were not hers, no matter that she’d fought alongside them, no matter what rank she carried.
