Twig

by wildbow

  I would settle for a half-second of realization as that foot came down on the loose stair, clicked the mechanism, set off the explosive, and brought fire and violence down on his own head.

  The bomb expert opened the door. One of the soldiers in our squad flashed a light at him, giving him our location. He crossed the street.

  All the rest of us crammed into an alley. Jamie, just beside me, was careful not to get pushed into my arm, which was still in the sling. Lillian, surrounded by soldiers who were invading her personal space, hurried to the side with my good arm, taking my hand.

  “I’m not going to get this right at first,” Jamie said. “I might not get it right at all.”

  “Close as you can to what you remember,” I said, giving him the whistle.

  He nodded.

  Whistle to mouth. He blew, shrill, long, with lungfuls of air through a Crown-manufactured whistle that was designed to be heard over long distances.

  After roughly a minute of ear-splitting whistles, he figured out the modulation of it, how to make it higher or lower.

  Imagine, I thought. The Baron’s face. He hears the whistles. What are they? Then the cadence becomes familiar. His men are set up and ready to attack. He’s reluctant to pull them away, but it’s his sister. Someone he relies on, as much as any swordsman relies on their sword.

  As if I was dreaming, I could see him moving, imagine his expressions, based on what I knew of him. I didn’t know his mind, but it wasn’t a complex one. Power and control, with an undercurrent of fear and deep, black-in-the-heart resentment.

  I could imagine the ground he covered, from the likely positions he’d chosen to set up his small army, how far away he was, the instructions he would have given his men. What if the signal came while he was away, looking for that sound, which sounded so much like his sister crying for help or screeching in rage?

  One of Mauer’s men spoke, “He’s here.”

  I wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

  You took my eye, you bastard. Let’s see how much of you this takes out.

  A whistle cut through the air. Not Jamie’s.

  It was the Baron, calling out to his sister. Crown soldiers spoke, calling out to each other. The door banged against the wall as they shoved their way through.

  I heard the whispered words, “He’s not going inside.”

  I closed my eyes. I listened, and I heard the Baron call out. “Sisters!”

  His voice rang through the night.

  I prayed, not because I truly believed, but because in this moment, I really would have liked it if there was a bloody, vengeful sort of god looking down on us.

  The explosion was a rollicking walloping series of hits, one after another, building on each other to rip away all my hearing and most of my breath. As my hearing returned, my vision went, dust rolling out to blanket everything and choke the air.

  “Move!” one soldier called out. A hand shoved me. The soldiers ran, and the Lambs were dragged with them. “That hit him!”

  “He’s dead!?” Lillian cried out.

  “No, but that’s going to hurt ‘im!”

  “We should go back, finish him, pick through—”

  “No!” was the one word response.

  “If we can damn well finish him off—”

  “He’s a noble! If he needs finishing off, he’s too dangerous to get near! Only noble that’s safe to be near is a dead one!”

  Frustration welled up in me.

  “If he’s hurt, he’s not going to be attacking! It’s good, it’s good!” A hand clapped on my back.

  He’d tried to call out to his sister twice, and when he hadn’t gotten a response, he’d been suspicious.

  We were letting him live, and I knew for an absolute fact that the man would recover and he would plague us.

  We made our way toward Mauer’s lines, and as we sighted Crown soldiers, we were forced to make a detour. The retreat had been more significant and more severe than I’d anticipated. The retreat was becoming a rout.

  Yet in the midst of that, the sound of gunfire and the regular noise of explosives was quickly dwindling.

  It became almost silent, but for the periodic sound of a building crumbling as fires rose too high.

  I heard a voice.

  “…dangers the primordial poses.”

  Mauer’s voice.

  “A primordial you created,” was the reply.

  My heartbeat was intense enough to rock my body and make swallowing hard. We drew nearer, and took cover, looking in from a side street.

  Mauer stood atop a ruined wagon, staring down the length of the street.

  One bullet, well placed, might have finished him. It would have needed to be a high-quality weapon, but the Crown did have those.

  “What will it take to save the lives of the people in this city?” Mauer called out. “My own life? My surrender?”

  His voice carried so well. He’d always been at his best on the stage, addressing a group. Now he addressed the Crown forces. The Duke was near enough to respond with his own powerful voice.

  One voice natural, the other artificial.

  “I don’t think you have any plan to surrender,” the Duke responded. “To give your own life? Perhaps. With the explosives you planted on either side of the street? Did you hope to take me with you? Or just to take me? Because you won’t have either of those things.”

  Mauer reacted. He backed away a step.

  “When you rule over rabble, Reverend,” the Duke said, “You lose sight of who the individuals are. There is no organization, the people in command do not know the people who are subservient to them. Clever, talented individuals can blend in with the rabble. They can fan out through the area, they can watch your men, and they can surreptitiously disarm those explosives.”

  Mauer took another step back. When he raised his good hand to his head, it moved in a jittery way. He clenched his bad hand, the same one he had used to hold me over the fire.

  “You’ve lost,” the Duke said. His voice had changed slightly. “And now I’m going to kill you, and I’m going to kill everyone in that army of yours.”

  I heard the sound of a sword leaving its sheath.

  Mauer sank to his knees. Head bowed.

  “The Crown wins,” the Duke said. “It is a constant in this universe, understand?”

  Mauer reached out with his monstrous limb, as if supplicating, then let it drop, heavy.

  I heard the gunshots, loud, crystal clear, and high. So many of Mauer’s guns had been lower quality, older. The Crown’s good quality but in such a way that it could be mass produced.

  These shots were different, and the sound was oddly disconnected from the Duke’s reaction, as he took a step back, staggering.

  My right hand found Lillian’s, squeezing it. I would have held Jamie’s too, but my arm was in the sling. When I looked at him, his eyes were as wide as mine were.

  Fray and Mauer hadn’t just been working on the primordial. I thought of the Engineer, and the others they’d had with them. Powerful people, ones with resources and connections. Mauer, all this while, knowing that spies might be looking, had been holding this card up his sleeve.

  One shot sounded after another. And as the Crown forces heard and saw what was happening, they began to open fire as well. Mauer was already retreating, taking cover behind the wagon he’d been using as his stage.

  Through the chaos that quickly billowed out of the silence, the sweet song of those guns could be heard.

  I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d sensed us somehow, or if it was sheer luck, as bullets punched through him and tore out the other side, casting out sprays of blood and bone as they exited, but the Duke looked our way.

  A bullet passed through his skull. Fragments of metal joined bone and brain on making a messy exit.

  I heard Mauer’s forces cheering. To them, Mauer had won, proven the lie. That the Crown didn’t always win.

  I wasn’t so sure it was about to play out that
way, and from Mauer’s body language, as he strode through the lines of his people, he wasn’t so sure either.

  The Duke might still be in play. The primordial almost certainly was. Together, they were disaster, but either one alone was a problem, a chance this fight might still continue.

  The Duke’s last words might prove true yet.

  Previous Next

  Counting Sheep—9.17

  A noble just died in the public eye.

  The nature of our vantage point meant that running out and straight toward Mauer would have put us right in the line of fire. We had to circle around to reach him.

  I half-expected the Baron’s forces to have chased us, or for his unit to have moved on our back line. The explosion had done its work. The coast was largely clear.

  The snow was really falling, now. I’d dismissed it as ash, and it had been easy to miss with the hot smoke and the heat in the sky dissolving snowflakes into simple rain, but we were further away now, and there were fewer fires set in the midst of Mauer’s new camp. The wind blew in over the water and up into the city, driving the heat and the smoke away and paving the way for the snow to fall. I couldn’t smell anything so much as I felt the cold air and smelled only the smoke that had invaded and polluted my sinuses.

  The soldiers we were with were faster on foot. Boots tromped on a road dusted with snow and ash, and we had to work to keep up. I was slower than usual, running in time with Lillian and Jamie, instead of having to slow myself down or tug them along to get them to keep up. One soldier hung behind, likely to keep an eye on us.

  The soldiers cleared the way for us to enter Mauer’s camp. By the time we caught up, they had found Mauer. They were filling him in.

  “You said he would go up to the roof,” Mauer said. There was an undertone of accusation to his voice.

  “That was a mistake. He communicated with the dummy we set up, she couldn’t respond. He hesitated.”

  “How many soldiers were with him?” Mauer asked.

  “Ten,” a soldier answered.

  “Not many. Okay. Rally people for the front line. We fight as hard as we can, I want to surprise them if we can. If they don’t have anyone at the helm, then we might be able to rout them. The perches are targeting the officers in charge of the stitched, wherever they’re spotted. If we can’t decide this in the next few minutes, then we retreat again and we regroup. Either they don’t pursue and we wait and see, or they pursue and we watch to see if they stretch themselves too thin.”

  “Yes sir,” the soldiers said, in near-unison.

  “Jamie,” I said, under my breath. “The whistle.”

  Jamie extended a hand my way, the whistle in his fist. I gestured in Mauer’s direction, and Jamie held it out for Mauer.

  Frowning slightly, Mauer took it.

  “Can you get your people to their back lines? Or their flanks?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The whistle. Jamie can tell you the signals they use. Get people behind the stitched, use the whistles to signal retreat. Even if the stitched don’t respond to that specific whistle, the handlers will. They’ll hear what sounds like others sounding the retreat and get worried. They’re pretty alone out there. One man surrounded by twenty dead soldiers that are following his orders, the next guy barely in earshot.”

  Mauer’s eyes lit up with interest. He indicated a soldier, then looked to Jamie, “Show him?”

  Jamie nodded, giving me a glance. I watched Jamie walk off to the edge of the little clearing with the soldier.

  When I looked back at Mauer, he was staring me down.

  “If you’d moved a finger, I would have assumed you were using one of those hand-signs Genevive Fray told me about.”

  I shook my head and jostled my sling as much as I was able—and I regretted it at the pain that flared in my wounded shoulder. “Only one hand, right?”

  “I wonder if you’re any closer to making the decision,” Mauer said, staring at me.

  “Decision?” Lillian asked.

  When he’d grilled me over the fire, Lillian had been in the process of passing out. I’d been wanting to get her help, and I’d let Mauer know too much. For a man so able to control others, it was a spooky prospect. I was used to being the one in control, pulling the strings.

  “I thought helping you here would come across as decision enough,” I said.

  “The whistle is more convincing than your effort against the Baron,” Mauer said. “We’ll see how things unfold.”

  “If your men can get to the back line or flanks—”

  “We already did, once. The guns that shot the Duke have a distinctive sound. That sound was the signal for an attack on his rear lines. Our elite soldiers have already signaled that they successfully opened fire on the Duke’s home tent.”

  “So they can’t heal the Duke,” Lillian said.

  “A precautionary measure, in case he was faster to react. It doesn’t matter. We hit him. The noble has been slain.”

  From a range that he didn’t think guns could shoot from. Longer range, high accuracy. Something special. Still…

  “I’ve seen him get shot before and survive,” I said.

  “Nobles favor a layer of something like armor, an interskeletal barrier between their skin and their muscle or bone structure. Normal guns are meant to ricochet, their bullets move slowly, to pass into the subject and bounce around, doing grievous harm. Few think twice of this. But the Crown has reasons for perpetuating this standard. Those slower, bouncing bullets aren’t so effective against the nobles.” Bullets sink in and stop at the armor, or they bounce right out. The noble bleeds but doesn’t stop. They appear immortal, and enemy morale suffers. The myth that surrounds them grows.”

  I nodded. I’d seen the Duke in battle.

  “These bullets penetrate that layer. That armor helps strips the outer shell off as the bullet passes through, and what remains unfolds and expands as an umbrella might,” Mauer said. His hand, all fingertips and thumb meeting, tapped my chest, hard, then opened up, fingers splaying. “The final part of the projectile sometimes punches through on exit, or joins the expanded metal in complicating the efforts of doctors and staff. Especially uncareful or hasty doctors might even do further harm to themselves, if an expanding bullet finishes expanding too near a prodding finger or working hand.”

  “It wouldn’t be as effective against an ordinary person,” Lillian said.

  “It might, if it hit hard bone, but no, it isn’t meant for ordinary people,” Mauer said. “The guns are long range, they’re accurate, and they’re felt before they can be easily reacted to. This incident isn’t the important part of what I’m doing. Killing the Duke, it means something. But after one or two more incidents, they’ll realize what it really means.”

  “That unless they find you and stop your group from manufacturing these things,” I said. “No noble can ever show their face in public again.”

  “And they need to show their faces,” Mauer said. “It’s why they go to such efforts to tailor themselves and make themselves into dangerous weapons. That was why I could be sure the Duke would show himself in one way or another, when he was positive the scales were tipped and victory was in hand.”

  “And you knew he’d come here because—”

  “He invited him, specifically. Leaked information about the primordials,” Jamie said, returning from the other side of the clearing.

  “They’ll respond,” Mauer said. “At some time in the next year, they’ll finish arguing among themselves, rally, and arrive in force. Newly augmented, so they can be more confident against these guns. Things are going to change, and they’ll fear that. That’s a fear that makes them predictable.”

  I felt a mingled fear and excitement at the idea. The nobles, all here, the idea of change. The pain in my shoulder and my eye, and the pain in my heart at the loss of Gordon, it fed into that fear and excitement.

  That’s a fear that makes them predictable. It didn’t sound like Mau
er talking. It sounded like me.

  Had Mauer gotten a read on me? Had I allowed him enough of an idea of my vulnerabilities, that he now understood who I was and how I operated? Because it damn well sounded like he was tailoring his words to evoke that fear and excitement. To manipulate me.

  The soldier Jamie had been talking to exchanged murmured words with Mauer, who nodded, gesturing with his good hand. The man left, pointing to others in the clearing, beckoning. Well oiled. Men who understood how they each operated, no questioning, no debate. Everyone had a role and they carried it out like the experts they were.

  It was Lillian who spoke up to Mauer. “What happens next?”

  “Next?” Mauer asked.

  “With the Lambs. To the Lambs. I was hurt before, I didn’t hear everything, and then I was busy trying to get ready to help Sy and Jamie. Maybe you made an agreement and I didn’t hear, but… are we your prisoners?”

  Mauer didn’t have a ready response to that.

  “Sy?” Lillian asked, a little more emotional than she’d been when she had addressed Mauer.

  “He thinks I’m going to defect,” I said. “That you guys will come with me, or you’ll join me in defecting.”

  “We can’t,” Lillian said, without a heartbeat’s pause. “You can’t. No.”

  There was that lack of inhibition again. I glanced up at Mauer, who seemed to be studiously ignoring us, his attention apparently on other things, who was moving where, getting the attention of soldiers and giving them the go-ahead.

  The people who Mauer was sending to the front line now were people who had clearly already been in combat. Tired, now fully aware of the realities of fighting, their reluctance was clear, and it was a reluctance tempered only by the fact that the Duke had died before their very eyes.

  “I want to see my parents,” Lillian said. “Please. Jamie—Jamie said we were doing this so the Baron and the Twins wouldn’t hurt my parents or the other Lambs.”

  “We are,” I said. “We did. I don’t know.”

  If the Baron lives…

  She clutched my hand, revealing the emotion she was keeping bottled up within, squeezing so hard her hands shook. She mouthed words, but they didn’t pass through her lips. Please.