The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns

by Wexler, Django

  “You released her.” Ross followed his eyes. “One of my prisoners.”

  It wasn’t a question. Marcus supposed he’d gotten the story from the guards downstairs.

  “I didn’t release her. I paroled her, on my own responsibility, to attempt to negotiate with the leaders of the riot.” Marcus pushed himself away from the parapet and turned to face Ross. “And as I am in command here, she was one of my prisoners, Captain.”

  “Of course.” Ross’ lip quirked. “And what do you hope to accomplish with this . . . negotiation?”

  “To see if there is any mutually acceptable way of settling their grievances, and to buy time for the Cabinet to come up with a solution.”

  “Some would say that an offer to negotiate is an admission of weakness.”

  Marcus shrugged. “You said yourself, Captain, that we could hold off an army here. What’s the harm in keeping them talking?”

  “None.” Ross’ eyes went cold. “Provided you actually mean to fight when the time comes.”

  “When the time comes—”

  “Let me tell you what I think,” Ross interrupted. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked thoughtfully out at the river. “I think you are a coward. I think you have no intention of doing your duty and defending this fortress. I think you are ‘buying time,’ as you put it, to prepare for your personal escape while you leave the rest of the garrison and the prisoners to fall into the hands of the mob.”

  Marcus felt as though he’d been hit in the face by a bucket of cold water. He’d grown used to the gibes of the Concordat officer, but—

  “I suggest,” he growled, “that you retract that statement.”

  “Why? It’s only the truth. Or do you deny that your men are preparing boats for a getaway across the river?”

  “Captain Ross,” Marcus said, raising his voice. “You are relieved of your command, and I’m placing you under arrest for insubordination.”

  Ross glanced over his shoulder. One of the two Concordat men was staring down at the scene in the courtyard, but the other raised his musket to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer. The barrel pointed squarely at Marcus’ chest.

  There was a long silence.

  I should have expected that. God knew Ross had given him no grounds for trust. But this wasn’t the Khandarai desert, with thousands of miles of sand and ocean between them and the Ministry of War. This was Vordan, where laws were supposed to mean something.

  “Whatever you’re doing,” Marcus said, “you’re going to regret it.”

  “I very much doubt that.” Ross held out his hand, and after a long moment Marcus unbuckled his sword and handed it across. “His Grace always protects those who act in his interests.”

  “As does my lord the Minister of Justice.”

  “By the time this is over, I doubt Count Mieran will have much say in the matter.” Ross turned to his second man. “Ranker Mills, what do you think?”

  “Call it eighty yards,” the man said, unstrapping his weapon. “No problem.”

  It wasn’t a musket he was carrying, Marcus saw now. It was a longer-barreled weapon, slightly narrower, with a complex iron mechanism above the stock. A military rifle, he guessed. Probably one of the infamous Hamveltai Manhunters.

  “Ranker Mills is an excellent shot,” Ross said. “Once this Mad Jane shows herself, we’ll have an excellent chance to dispose of her. It may break the morale of the mob entirely.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Marcus hissed. “They’re not going to break. They’ll rush the door—”

  “And we’ll be ready for them,” Ross said. “My men have the mortar in place, and we’re well barricaded. It will be a slaughter.”

  He sounded pleased at the prospect. Marcus turned frantically back to the courtyard, where another group was working its way through the press to join Giforte and Abby. Jane and her companions, he assumed. Mills sighted carefully, tweaking the back sight of his rifle.

  It was probably too far for anyone to hear him, but it was worth a try. Marcus cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

  “Giforte! Jane! Up here—it’s—”

  A musket butt slammed against his jaw, slamming his teeth together with a clack and filling his head with shooting stars. He stumbled backward, grabbing at the parapet for support, and ended up flopping to the flagstones when his legs refused to support him. The Concordat musketeer stood above him, weapon raised for another blow.

  “Not very smart,” Ross commented. “Pick him up.”

  Marcus’ head swam as they dragged him to the stairs. More Concordat men were waiting down below to take hold of his feet and lower him like a sack of potatoes. As they bound his hands behind his back and dragged him away, he heard the sharp crack of the rifle.

  WINTER

  “I think,” Winter said, “that getting them started tearing down buildings may have been a mistake.”

  “We needed a timber for the ram,” Jane said. “Besides, I didn’t tell them to—”

  She was interrupted by a drawn-out crash as the second story of an engraver’s shop leaned drunkenly out over the street, wobbled, and collapsed into a pile of broken beams and brick dust. A cheer rose from the crowd, and before the rubble had settled, looters were swarming over the wreckage. Larger groups milled around, uncertain what to do next, until someone shouted that a handsome marble-fronted building up the street was the headquarters of a Borelgai fur importer. With a shout, the mob rushed in that direction.

  “I didn’t tell them to start pulling down the whole damned street,” Jane finished, lamely. She gave a halfhearted shrug. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “This was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Rescuing Abby and the others was my idea. Not all this . . .” She waved one arm to encompass the carnival of destruction and shook her head, at a loss for words.

  Winter felt as though she should have been horrified, or even terrified, but a night without sleep and the stress of worrying about Jane made her simply numb. The rescue mission—or mob, or riot, or revolution, whatever it was—had grown beyond any possibility of control; that much was clear. She could feel the circle of her cares contracting, as it had done in Khandar when the Redeemer cavalry had come over the rise. The regiment, the country, the city, and even Janus would have to look out for themselves. Winter only had enough energy to concern herself with what was within arm’s reach.

  That meant, primarily, Jane. She’d been bouncing from one extreme to the other, alternating between a strange, manic energy and moments of black, vicious temper. The exhaustion Winter was feeling had to be a hundred times worse for her, with everyone looking to her for answers. Winter remembered all too well how draining that could be.

  Another crash, from farther down the street, barely registered. The mob had quickly learned the best technique for demolition: a rope, tied tight around key beams, could be tossed out into the street and drawn by hundreds of hands until the whole front of a building came crashing down. Other groups were wandering about with sacks of broken bricks, looking for unshattered windows, or collecting scraps of wood to feed to the bonfires. Anything associated with the Borelgai or the duke was the target of special ire, and Winter had watched furious rioters feed thousands of eagles’ worth of fur or fine fabrics to the flames.

  Jane’s Leatherbacks brought in scraps of information, but their picture of what was going on outside the immediate area was sketchy. The Armsmen had rallied on the east side of the Island, protecting the Sworn Cathedral and the bridges to the Exchange. As best Winter could tell, they seemed uninterested in challenging the mob west of Farus’ Triumph, in spite of a few attempts by the North Bank rabble-rousers to gather a force to attack them, and she was happy to leave them be.

  The sun was disappearing behind the buildings of the western skyline. Jane half turned, attention caught by some distant act of destruction,
and its orange light caught her hair and made it shine like beaten gold. For a moment the sight of her took Winter’s breath away.

  “I didn’t want this,” Jane repeated. The shadow of the buildings reached out for her, snuffing out the fire in her hair, and she crossed her arms and looked down. “I just wanted . . .”

  “I know.” Winter slipped an arm around her shoulders. “It’s all right.”

  Jane turned her head away. “I should never have let her go. Fucking Danton. I should have known.”

  “There’s no way you could have known today was going to be the day Orlanko would bring the boot down,” Winter said. “But it’s all right. They’ll be fine.”

  “What if they aren’t?” Jane’s jaw tightened. “What if they’ve hurt her? Or if she’s . . .”

  “I trust Captain d’Ivoire,” Winter repeated. “He won’t let anything happen to Abby or the others.” Though God alone knows who’s going to protect him when we get to storming the place.

  Jane nodded, miserably, and took a shaky breath. She took Winter’s hand in hers and squeezed. “Balls of the fucking Beast. I’m glad you’re here.”

  They stood for a long moment in companionable silence, broken by the crackle of bonfires and the shuddering crunch of collapsing buildings. There was a distant scream, suddenly cut off. Jane frowned.

  “At least the Borels had the good sense to run away when they saw us coming,” Winter said. “Along with everybody else.”

  That got a weak chuckle. It wasn’t strictly true, of course, and Winter suspected Jane knew it as well. Most of the buildings on the Island were shops or businesses, whose inhabitants had indeed fled at the approach of the mob, and the few residences were mostly abandoned as well. Jane had even used her Leatherbacks to conduct a few families to safety. Now, with the arrival of the Dregs contingent and thousands more from the Docks and the other poor quarters of the city, matters had gotten out of hand. Most of the inhabitants had fled, but Winter had carefully steered away from some groups of rioters who looked as though they’d been engaged in more than mere drunken destruction. Here and there, pathetic bundles hung from the lampposts, like gory decorations. Winter tried to keep Jane pointed in the other direction. She doesn’t need any more on her conscience.

  “We should get back,” Jane said. “They must be nearly done with the ram by now.”

  “I wish you’d take the chance to sleep.”

  “You think I could sleep?”

  Winter shrugged. “I could. It’s been almost two days.”

  “That must be your soldier’s instincts.” Somehow they’d shifted to walking arm in arm, like a young couple strolling out for a night on the town. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” Winter said.

  “Why Khandar? Why did you go so far away?”

  There was a long pause. Winter swallowed hard.

  “I wasn’t . . . thinking clearly, after I ran away.” Winter paused. “I had this idea that Mrs. Wilmore was some all-seeing monster, I think. Like the Last Duke, only worse. I felt like I had to get as far away as I possibly could, or else they’d come and drag me back.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Jane said. “I remembered her as this huge, evil person. But when I went back there, she was . . . nothing. Just a little old woman.”

  Winter nodded. They lapsed into silence again, and she couldn’t help wondering what Jane was thinking. If I hadn’t been such a coward, if I hadn’t run away, she might have found me again. Hell, I might have rescued her. If I hadn’t—

  “That’s Min,” Jane said, raising her hand. Across the street, the slight girl waved back and hurried over. She was breathing hard.

  “We need you at the gate,” Min said. “Now.”

  “What’s happened?” Winter said.

  “Someone came out to negotiate. Abby’s with him. But Peddoc and the others—”

  Winter grabbed the girl’s arm and dragged her into a run. Jane was already a half street ahead of them, and accelerating.

  —

  The courtyard of the Vendre was even more crowded than they’d left it, with both dockmen and University students pressing in as tight as they could without actually mixing with one another. In spite of the agreement between Jane and the council leaders, tensions between the groups remained high, and by the sounds of argument coming from the center of the yard, they weren’t getting any better.

  Winter broke away from Min as the girl pressed through the mob to join a crowd of Jane’s Leatherbacks clustering around their leader. Winter herself stayed on the periphery, but she was close enough to catch Peddoc shouting.

  “Of course it’s a damned trap! This is the Last Duke we’re dealing with! He lives and breathes treachery.”

  “Besides,” said another councilman, “why should we negotiate? Just the fact that they’re offering means they’re at our mercy. We’ve finished the ram, and once we break down the door—”

  “First of all,” said another man that Winter didn’t recognize, “I am Vice Captain Alek Giforte of the Armsmen. I am here on behalf of Captain of Armsmen Marcus d’Ivoire, and I do not answer to the Ministry of Information.”

  “Everyone knows this is a Concordat prison!” shouted a dockman from the crowd.

  Winter was too short to get a decent view from the floor of the courtyard. She worked her way to the edges, where crates and barrels of supplies were stacked. Chris, who was already perched there, recognized her and obligingly gave her a hand up to share her vantage point. From there, she could see Giforte standing in the center of an angry circle of council people and dockmen. Beside him, a tight-packed mass of young women was centered on Jane, who was hugging someone tight. Winter sighed with relief when she recognized Abby.

  I knew Marcus wouldn’t let anything happen to his prisoners. She glanced up at the forbidding bulk of the fortress, now in shadow as the sun sank behind its towers. There were only a few men visible, up on the highest parapet and looking down at the scene below.

  “Second,” Giforte thundered, in the voice of a sergeant on a parade ground, “the captain is well aware that we are, as you put it, at your mercy. However, if you insist on storming the gates, we will be forced to defend them, and the waste of life will be enormous.”

  Winter, looking at the gate, was inclined to agree. A narrow approach against prepared positions, with no way to outflank the defenders. An attacking force might lose ten for one and consider itself lucky.

  “The captain has asked me to speak to you to attempt to avoid this bloodshed. He recognizes that we are all, after all, Vordanai, and he is no more eager to begin the killing than you are.” Giforte looked around. “In particular, he asked me to speak to the leader named Mad Jane. Is she here?”

  “I don’t see why—” Peddoc began, but Jane cut him off, emerging from the crowd of girls with Abby behind her.

  “I’m Jane,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “And Abby tells me I can trust you.”

  There was an odd note of humor in Giforte’s voice when he replied, “I’m glad she thinks so.”

  “So what terms does your captain propose?”

  A hush fell across the courtyard, as everyone strained to hear what Giforte would say. In that instant, another voice floated down from afar, so distant as to be barely a murmur.

  “. . . Jane . . . up here! . . .”

  Giforte started to speak, but Winter was no longer listening. She couldn’t tell if anyone else had heard the distant warning, but all eyes but hers were on Jane and Giforte. Winter looked up, to the parapets of the Vendre tower, where—

  “Jane!” Winter screamed, loud and shrill. Heads snapped around.

  The crack of the shot was like a distant handclap in a crowded theater, almost inaudible. But Winter’s whole being was tensed and waiting for the sound, and in her mind it was as loud as a cannon. Someone had fal
len in the center of the crowd. Winter could no longer see Abby or Jane as the Leatherback girls closed in around them while the rest of the crowd opened outward like a blossoming flower. The courtyard began to fill with shouts and screams.

  “There! Fire!”

  Walnut’s enormous voice cut through the babble. The Leatherbacks had brought a few muskets and carbines, and a few more had fallen into their hands when they took the courtyard. Jane had stationed men who had some experience with the weapons on the outer wall, to watch both the approach to the fortress prison and the towers. Now they fired a ragged volley, aimed at the parapet of the tower. It was too long a shot for a musket, nearly a hundred yards in the gathering darkness, but the roar and muzzle flashes were obvious to whoever was up there. Dark figures scurried for cover.

  Winter jumped from her perch, twisting at the last minute to avoid colliding with a student scurrying for cover, and landed badly. One ankle gave way, and pain shot up her leg, but she forced herself back to her feet and sprinted as best she could to the center of the yard. Behind her, the musketeers kept up an enthusiastic but erratic fire, drowning out the screams. Ahead, the Leatherbacks had formed a tight, huddled mass, interposing their bodies between their leader and the shooter on the parapet.

  That has to be eighty yards, Winter told herself. No chance. Not in the dark. Even with a good rifle, that’s too long a shot—Jane was moving—she can’t—

  She came to the edge of the group and started prying surprised young women aside. Her voice of command would have been instantly recognizable to any soldier of the Seventh Company.

  “Get out of the fucking way! Now!”

  A path cleared. Someone was down, two people, and Winter’s heart lurched at the sight of blood. It was everywhere, in dark spray patterns and a great pool soaking into the dirt.

  Jane lay on her stomach, atop another girl. Her face was dark and slick with blood.

  “Jane!” Winter fell to her knees and grabbed Jane’s shoulder, pulling her up, dreading and praying all at once. Please, please, please, God, not now, not—