The Guns of Empire

by Django Wexler

  “Saints and martyrs,” Winter said, coming up short. She looked up at Give-Em-Hell, who nodded grimly.

  “What happened here?” Abby said.

  “One of our foraging columns came this way.”

  “Our foragers did this? Which regiment? Janus will be furious.”

  The cavalry commander shook his head. “It was like this when they got here. The embers were still warm. They heard we were coming, you see. Apparently the damn Sworn Priests have been telling them the Vordanai are here for their children’s souls and it’s their holy duty to burn and destroy everything that might be of use to us.” He gestured at the well. “They even stuffed a rotting goat down there, so the water’s no good.”

  “Balls of the Beast,” Winter swore. “I thought the Redeemers were crazy.”

  “At least the damned Redeemers would come right at you!” Give-Em-Hell agreed. “Give me a good charge out in the open any day of the week.”

  “What happened to the people?” Abby said. “There’s no bodies here.”

  “That’s where these irregulars come from, we think,” Give-Em-Hell said.

  “It makes strategic sense, in a sick way,” Winter said. “Get the villagers to burn everything they have, and then tell them you need men to help fight the heathens. What are they going to do except sign up?” She looked at Abby. “Tell your soldiers to be careful if they see any priests.”

  “I think we’ll be careful regardless,” Abby said. “Which way to this cave?”

  “About a mile that way,” Give-Em-Hell said, pointing northwest. A hillock of bare rock broke through the forest canopy, like an island rising out of the sea.

  “We’ll come at them from three sides,” Winter said. “Abby, send two companies out to swing around until they’re southeast of that rock. You and I will take two more to the north side. General, can you and your troopers take the direct approach if we give you a company for backup?”

  Give-Em-Hell nodded. “Of course.”

  “Give us an hour, then.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  WINTER

  Winter took the First Company, led by a Lieutenant Malloy, and the Seventh, led by a beanpole of a girl who introduced herself as Lieutenant d’Orien. Winter remembered Malloy vaguely from the Velt campaign, a short, dark-haired woman from the Transpale, with that region’s soft, breathy accent. D’Orien was a more recent recruit, and seemed awestruck to be in Winter’s presence. Some of the Girls’ Own, the newer ones, were inclined to treat Winter as a kind of demigod, which she’d never gotten accustomed to.

  They walked around the devastated village, skirting the edge of the clearing, and then plunged back into the woods on the other side. This time there was no track to guide them, and without the bulk of the hill visible off to their left, Winter would have been instantly lost. Fortunately, the forest here was old growth, with little ground cover under the massive, high-canopied trees.

  Abby signaled a halt after forty-five minutes, comparing the position of the hill with that of the sun. She called the two lieutenants over.

  “This should be about right,” she said. “Malloy, you take your company right and spread out, call it five hundred yards. D’Orien, you take the left. Each of you send me a half dozen muskets I can keep here as a reserve. Tell the girls to hold fire until they’ve got a target, you understand? I don’t want any blind shooting. Any Murnskai try to run, you stop them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Malloy said.

  “Sir?” d’Orien said. “What if they won’t stop?”

  “Shoot,” Abby said. “If we let ’em run, they’ll just come back at us tomorrow.”

  “What if they surrender?” Malloy said.

  Abby hesitated and glanced at Winter. The two lieutenants followed her gaze. Winter swallowed.

  “We’ll accept surrenders, obviously,” she said. “But be careful.”

  “Tell them to lie facedown, well in front of the line,” Abby said. “I don’t want anybody to ‘surrender’ and then run off when we’re not looking.”

  “Or knife us in the back,” Malloy muttered. She and d’Orien saluted and went in opposite directions, to relay the orders to their squads.

  Winter watched them go, feeling oddly apprehensive. She’d gone into battle so many times now it felt like it ought to be routine, especially against an outnumbered gang of partisans, but something nagged at the corner of her mind. This is the first fight since Gilphaite. But the Girls’ Own, at least, seemed to have shaken off the setback they’d suffered there, and they didn’t seem reluctant to be going back into action. Then—

  It was something else entirely, she realized. Something she hadn’t felt in months, not since leaving Vordan and Feor. Deep in the pit of her soul, there was a flicker of motion, like a dozing dragon opening one curious eye. Infernivore, the demon that devoured its own kind, had come awake, and there was only one possible reason for that.

  Winter closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling. Feor had told her that any naathem—her Khandarai word for what the Church called a demon’s host—could sense another naathem. Feor could track demons at a considerable distance, though she said that the ability to do so varied both with the naath and the training of the naathem. Winter wasn’t sure which was missing in her case, but she’d never been very sensitive to Infernivore’s nudges. This wasn’t the full-fledged attention it paid when another demon was nearby, but it couldn’t be too far, or she wouldn’t be able to feel it at all.

  She turned, slowly, trying to see if the feeling strengthened when she faced a particular direction. She thought it was a bit stronger facing roughly southeast, back toward the ruined village, but the difference was too subtle to be sure. Hell. As far as she knew, Feor was in Vordan and Raesinia was with the Grand Army’s main camp. Apart from the two of them—and the occasional wild demon, like the unfortunate Danton Aurenne—the only demon-hosts she’d encountered were the Penitent Damned, the supernatural servants of the Priests of the Black. If one of them is here, this is going to get a lot more complicated.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Abby said.

  “Fine.” Winter opened her eyes. Just a tiny handful of people knew the truth about demons; among the Girls’ Own, she’d shared what little information she had only with Jane, Bobby, and Cyte. Janus had insisted she keep the knowledge close, but at times like these she wondered if he really understood what he was asking. How am I supposed to tell Abby to be careful if she doesn’t even know what to watch out for? “Just . . . thinking.”

  Abby raised one eyebrow, but didn’t comment. A dozen women formed a loose knot around the two of them, all looking up the slope toward the rocky summit. Is the demon with the partisans? If so, there was only one thing Winter could think to do. I’ll have to grab it as soon as it shows itself. Infernivore could devour any other demon, as long as she could manage to touch the demon’s host for a few seconds. Unfortunately, if they’re better at sensing than I am, they know I’m here, too. If there was a demon up there, she had to hope it would come her way instead of attacking one of the other Girls’ Own companies. Damn.

  As if to punctuate the thought, there was a single crack, like a distant handclap. It echoed through the trees for a moment, then was followed by two more, then a dozen all together. The woods on both sides of Winter were suddenly full of motion, the Girls’ Own taking positions behind trees or against fallen logs, anything that looked like it would stop a musket ball. Several of the soldiers methodically checked the powder in their pans, making sure it hadn’t spilled or gotten wet during the trek.

  “Here goes,” Abby said. “You think they’ll dig in up there or try to get away?”

  “Digging in is suicide,” Winter said. “They have to know that. They’ll run.” The question, though, was in which direction. The Girls’ Own companies were arranged in a rough triangle around the hill, but Winter was acutely aware they were spread
thin. “Be ready to move if we get word from the others.”

  “Hey!” a shout came from down the line. “Somebody’s up there!” It was quickly followed by a shot, a stab of yellow fire and a roil of smoke.

  “Hold fire!” Abby shouted, shading her eyes with her hands. “You couldn’t hit a barn at that distance!”

  “There,” Winter said, pointing. Two or three hundred yards upslope, standing in the crotch of a split tree, was a tall, heavily bearded man in drab leather and homespun. A weapon hung over his shoulder, but he made no move to reach for it, nor to take cover. Abby was right—with a musket, at that range he might as well have been on the moon.

  After a leisurely few seconds of observation, the man dropped back out of sight. A moment later a dozen people in similar dress started down the hill, dodging through the trees as they came closer. Abby’s shouts reminded the Girls’ Own to hold fire, and no further shots greeted the partisans. When they got to about a hundred yards’ distance, they stopped, spreading out behind a stand of close-growing birch trees. The barrels of muskets emerged from amid the cover, and flashes and smoke spread among the trees as they opened fire. Musket balls whined past or hit the dirt with thok sounds, and splinters flew where they clipped the trees.

  “Hold fire,” Winter said, in response to Abby’s questioning look. “They’re not going to do any damage that far out.”

  “We could work our way around either side and flank them out of there,” Abby said.

  “Not yet.” The birch trees were rapidly becoming obscured in the smoke of the shooting. Winter squinted. “They want us distracted. Hold tight.”

  The orders were passed down the line, and the Girls’ Own clung to their cover, ignoring the partisans’ musketry. For the most part, the balls passed harmlessly overhead, but Winter heard at least one shout of “Fuck!” from her right, indicating that a lucky shot had found a target. She was almost ready to give Abby the go-ahead to move in when the fogbank around the birch grove started to boil.

  “Here they come!” she shouted.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to determine if the demon was coming, too, but the feeling was still distant. When she opened them again, the slope was alive with movement. The men who’d been shooting at them were in the lead, bounding downslope as fast as they could, but they were followed by at least a hundred more emerging out of the smoke. A few of the newcomers had muskets, too, or antique shotguns with long, flaring muzzles, but most of them seemed to be armed with nothing more than crude spears or axes. Some of them looked shorter than the leaders, but it wasn’t until they all began shouting a battle cry that Winter realized there were women’s and children’s voices mixed in.

  Oh, saints and fucking martyrs—why—

  The Girls’ Own opened fire at fifty yards. Running figures went down, punched back off their feet or tripping and rolling down the hill until they came to rest. Some of the battle cries turned to screams, but most of them kept on coming. The men with muskets halted, dropped to one knee, and fired, then stood up again and continued the charge. More shots came from the Girls’ Own line as soldiers farther along turned to add their fire to the carnage.

  It wasn’t going to be enough; Winter could see that immediately. “Bayonets!” she shouted, voice straining to be heard above the tumult.

  In front of her, Abby’s reserve soldiers fixed bayonets, just as the first of the partisans threw themselves forward. There were men in leather coats with huge, bristly beards, and women with long, drab skirts tied up between their legs to leave them free to run. A boy not yet old enough to shave was coming straight for them, until a shot from the side spun him around and he tumbled to a halt against a tree. A few more partisans fell, brought down by soldiers who’d reserved their fire for point-blank range, and others halted to shoot back. One of the soldiers in front of Winter staggered back, screaming, her face torn to shreds by a hail of shot from a blunderbuss. The first partisan to reach the line was a girl, her long hair tied back with a red kerchief, an ax raised in both hands over her head. A Girls’ Own soldier stopped her with a bayonet thrust to the stomach, the butt of the musket set against her own midriff, and they stood frozen for a moment, separated by the length of the weapon.

  Then Winter tore her sword free of its scabbard, and had no attention to spare for anyone else. Two men and a woman came at her, one of them burying an ax in the ribs of a Girls’ Own soldier as he passed. The other man had a spear, just a long length of wood with a sharpened point, and he aimed it at Winter like a lance with all the momentum of his downhill charge. She danced aside, and he couldn’t adjust his strike in time. As the point slipped past her, Winter stuck a foot in his path; he didn’t fall, but it took him a few moments to recover.

  The second man and the woman came at her together. He was big, with a woodsman’s muscles and a long-handled log-splitting ax. He used it well, swinging in wide horizontal sweeps that kept her outside his reach. Winter feinted left, dodged his swing, and brought her sword down on his hand as the ax went past. Something went flying—his thumb, she thought—and he dropped the weapon with a hoarse shriek. The woman pushed past him, swinging a carving knife with wild abandon, and Winter hastily spun aside, her sword licking out almost automatically in a backhanded slash across her attacker’s face. As the woman screamed and stumbled away, Winter closed on the axman, who was scrabbling for his weapon with his off hand, and sank her blade in his ribs. He keeled over with a moan.

  The man with the spear had dropped it, running pell-mell down the hill. He made it a dozen paces before an earsplitting crack rang out and he fell forward, thudding face-first into the turf. Abby stepped up beside Winter, lowering her smoking pistol.

  “Are you all right, sir?” she said, through the ringing in Winter’s ears.

  Winter nodded, looking around. Bodies littered the slope, but there were only a handful in blue. Fury had not helped the partisans make up for their lack of weapons or tactics. She saw one boy in leathers straddling the corpse of a Girls’ Own soldier, stabbing her over and over with a short-bladed knife. He was sobbing and shouting something—Winter, who’d been spending some time with a Murnskai phrasebook, thought it was “You killed her! You killed her!”—but before she could say anything, a sergeant came up behind the youth, jerked his head back by the hair, and slashed his throat. Blood bubbled forth, and when she let go, he collapsed atop his victim, gurgling.

  “Balls of the Beast,” Winter swore, letting her sword fall to her side.

  “I certainly wasn’t expecting that,” Abby said. “I’m sorry, sir. We should have been more careful.”

  “It’s all right,” Winter said. “That wasn’t a charge; that was mass suicide. I didn’t think . . .” She shook her head.

  “I’ve got runners out to the others,” Abby said. “But I think that was about all they had.”

  Winter nodded. She reached down to the body of the man she’d stabbed, wiped her sword clean, and sheathed it again. Her arm felt numb, and her ears were still ringing; it took her a moment to realize the woman she’d cut was still screaming.

  “Gather up the wounded,” she said. “Ours and any of theirs that will make it. Janus will want to question them.” She looked up at the looming bulk of the hill. “Then we need to push on. This may not be over.”

  A half hour later, after they’d confirmed there’d been no attack on the other two forces and detached half a company for the grisly duty of going over the battlefield, the remaining soldiers picked their way past the bodies of the fallen and up the hill. The Girls’ Own moved in silence, Winter noted, not so much from a desire for stealth but in a kind of numb shock. The skirmish—massacre, more like—had felt different from a battlefield encounter. This wasn’t an army. This was a village coming after us with pointed sticks and kitchen knives.

  At the peak of the hill, where the rocks broke out of the tree line, there was a crude camp, lean-tos and
other makeshift shelters surrounding a circle of campfires. It took a few moments of searching to find the cave Give-Em-Hell had spoken of, a narrow cleft in the rock that led back and out of sight. Winter glared, waiting to see if Infernivore reacted, but the demon she’d sensed still seemed to be quite a ways off.

  “I don’t like it,” Abby said, looking at the opening. “Anybody could be waiting in there, just around the corner.”

  “I know,” Winter said. “But we can’t just leave it.”

  She wished, feeling guilty at the thought, that she’d brought Bobby along. If someone has to walk into an ambush, it would make sense to send the woman who can’t die. In the event, Abby asked for volunteers, and one of d’Orien’s soldiers stepped forward. She was a slender girl named Liz, and from the way she moved Winter guessed this wasn’t her first time sneaking into dangerous places in the dark. She crouched low, edging around the cave wall, and tossed her torch in ahead of her. When that produced no reaction, she slithered out of view in a low crouch, a brace of pistols in her hands.

  A long moment passed. Two dozen soldiers had their muskets ready and trained on the opening, and Winter waited for the crack of a shot. Instead, there was a scrabble of booted feet, and Liz came running out, her eyes wild. She took two steps, fell to her knees, and vomited.

  “Saints and martyrs,” Winter said. “What—”

  Abby pushed forward, through the ranked soldiers, and knelt at Liz’s side. They spoke in low tones, but the closest women heard, and there was a chorus of gasps. Abby stood up, white-faced, and came back to Winter.

  “It’s . . . There’s nothing alive in there.” Abby took a deep breath. “It’s the rest of the village.”

  “What?” Winter said. Another soldier had stepped forward, peeking around the curve, then hastily retreating, eyes wide.