The Autumn Republic (37 page)

Her hand shot forward, taking him by the throat.

She would not allow Olem to die for her safety. She would not allow herself to be beaten and humiliated and used by foreign savages.

Blue fire shimmered and she felt his flesh give way beneath her fingers. She squeezed, feeling the melted flesh and warm, sizzling blood between her fingers. Her fingers wrapped around his spine and even that seemed to slide away, leaving the man’s head to roll down a hill and farther into the thicket.

Nila was up and running a moment later. She didn’t have time to think about the murder. It was just one more on top of the countless she’d committed over the past few weeks. She had to flee. The Kez magebreaker might have sensed her sorcery – he could be on her trail in minutes.

She navigated the hills with the use of her third eye, fighting down nausea. Between the darkness and the fog, her regular vision would be useless. She ran, forcing herself forward though each step made her want to scream in agony. Her thighs hurt from riding, her body from a night with her arms tied. Tears rolled down her cheeks from the pain, and her stomach pitched like she had been at sea for weeks.

Hours passed. She stopped on every hilltop to listen for pursuit, but no sound followed her. She ran blindly – she would be hopeless at getting her bearings in the misty darkness. She knew that, for now, she had to get as far away from the Kez as possible. Though every hilltop looked the same to her in the Else, she attempted to memorize each one, tearing up grass or piling rocks whenever she could. She hoped that in the light of day she would be able to lead the Adran cavalry back the way she’d come.

It was Olem’s only chance.

The earliest light of morning tinged the mist. Nila could no longer open her third eye. Exhaustion flooded her senses and it was all she could do to keep stumbling through the dew-soaked grass. Her uniform was ripped and sodden, her boots full of water. She clutched her arms to her chest, shivering violently.

She stopped to rest at the bottom of one of the countless ravines she had traversed. Her fingers stiff, she used what was left of her strength to coax a nimbus of flame from the Else. Kez pursuers be damned, she
had
to get warm! The flame sheathed her hands, then her arms, and she felt a dull warmth work its way into her bones. Her shivering slowly subsided. Steam rose from her clothes, and with a startled curse she realized that the flame now covered her whole body.

It winked out, leaving her standing at the bottom of the ravine, the world once again cold and wet. She wanted nothing more than to lie down in the muck and sleep. The Kez be damned. Field Marshal Tamas be damned.

A vision of Olem’s face, his beard matted with blood and his flesh torn to ribbons, sprang into her mind. That was all it took for her to begin to climb the side of the ravine.

The rising sun began to burn away the mist. If the fog cleared, she could get her bearings. She would head east in the hope that the rest of the Riflejacks were looking for the Kez camp to save Olem. It was risky, if the Kez were, in turn, looking for her. But she had no choice.

It was not long after her rest that she caught a distant sound on the wind. The neigh of a horse, perhaps? The peaks and valleys of Brude’s Hideaway played tricks on her ears, and she struggled on to the next rise, where she stopped to listen, peering into the thinning morning fog.

She thought she heard a shout. Whether Kez or Adran, she did not know. It was impossible to get a bearing on the sound.
Please
, she thought,
please be Adran
. She strained, head tilted to the side, until she heard it again.

The sound came from behind her. She began to move again, heading cautiously onward. An Adran scouting party could have gotten behind her. After all, she didn’t know north from south right now. She could be heading just about any direction.

Another shout. Nila’s senses pricked at the sound and a chill went down her spine. It hadn’t been quite intelligible, but that sounded Kez.

The clop of hooves on stone reached her ears. She had crossed a series of flat rocks a while back, hadn’t she? Those hooves were following her, and the shouts were getting closer.

She broke into a sprint, calling up every ounce of her energy for the run. They were on her trail now and when they found her, they would run her down like a tired dog in the street. A glance over her shoulder showed men on horseback less than two hundred yards behind her.

Leaping across a streambed, Nila scaled a steep escarpment and threw herself down the other side, tumbling head over heels down a hill. She was back up a moment later, ready to run, when the sight of a mounted figure brought her up short.

The figure was less than ten paces away. It sat silently, the fog barely seeming to touch it, the rider’s body cloaked against the weather. Steam rose from the horse’s nostrils, indicating it had just made a hard ride.

She was cut off. The Kez had her now. Nila stiffened and waited for the figure to draw his or her pistol and fire.

“Why do you run?”

The voice startled her and she nearly fell. It was speaking in Adran. A male voice. “What?”

The figure slapped his saddle horn angrily. “Why do you run?” he demanded.

Horses rounded the far side of the escarpment thirty paces to Nila’s left. There were a dozen of them, coming hard, and she saw carbines raised to fire.

“Bo?” she asked, breathless.

“You aren’t a fox, fleeing before the hounds! You are a goddess of fire to these ants.”

What was Bo doing here? How had he found her? “The magebreaker is chasing…” Nila ran toward him. The two of them might have a chance of escaping on his horse.

“He’s not with them. You should have stopped to check. Turn and defend yourself. Show them what you are!” Bo’s voice rose to a bellow at the end. Nila stared at him, astonishment freezing her in her tracks.

The crack of a carbine snapped through her thoughts and she found herself whirling in response. She made a flinging motion with her off-hand and fire like liquid gold spewed from her fingertips. The flames crossed the space in the blink of an eye and cut through men and horses like a bullet through paper. Black powder exploded on contact with the flames, and a single cry of dismay reached her ears before the entire party was gone, reduced to a black, smoking skid on hissing soil.

Nila stared at the spot for several moments, trying to process what she’d just done. There had been no thought, no concentration. She’d just killed a dozen men and horses purely by instinct. The air hung heavy with acrid black smoke and the smell of burned meat.

“Well done.”

“I…” She turned to look up at Bo and could instantly see that something was wrong. He slumped in his saddle, his face pale and sweat on his brow. He swayed back and forth, knuckles white on the saddle horn. “Never run from a fight you can win. By the saints, you’re going to be powerful. I’ve never seen such… beauty.” His words were labored and breathless.

“What are you doing here? Are you all right?” Nila rushed to his side and put a hand on his leg, from which she immediately recoiled. She had touched something hard and thin, and when she reached forward to lift his pant leg, she found not flesh, but a wooden prosthetic where his calf had once been.

He didn’t seem to notice. “I got your… note.” He fumbled at his jacket pocket and removed a creased paper. It fluttered from his fingers and he made a weak attempt at catching it.

Nila snatched it out of the air, barely remembering the angry words she’d scribbled down before riding off with Olem. All thoughts of the charred remains behind her were gone. Memories of the way she’d been treated by the Deliv Privileged were shoved aside. “Bo. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing.” He frowned at the paper now in her hand. “I’ve… I didn’t think… it proper… my apprentice off on her… own.” His words were halting and disjointed.

“Bo?”

He waved away her concern, and promptly slid from his saddle. She threw herself beneath him and they both went down in a heap beside the horse. She looked up in horror at the prosthetic still stuck in the stirrup, and the empty pant leg beneath his knee.

“Sorry,” he said. “Feeling a bit fuzzy.”

Nila felt tears in her eyes. Bo was her only hope of getting away, and here he was, crippled and sickly. How would they be able to find the Adran cavalry and return to rescue Olem? She briefly considered leaving him here and taking his horse, but that could very well be the death of him, and she couldn’t do that. Not after he’d brought himself out here to find her.

Bo’s eyes were closed and she could see his chest rising and falling slowly. It hurt her deeply to see him like this, so vulnerable after everything he had done for her. She fought back her tears, angry at herself. This was the kind of weakness he despised, wasn’t it?

“That’s enough of that,” Bo whispered. His eyes remained closed. “You’re safe now.”

“You’re not, you bloody idiot!”

“Oh, I’ll be… fine.”

Nila held him close and knew she had to act soon. She could only save one of them – Bo or Olem. And Olem might already be dead.

“Where are the Adran cavalry?” she asked.

“I got a bit ahead of them,” Bo said, seemingly able to keep his sentences coherent only when he whispered. “I rode hard when I saw your sorcery in the Else.”

“Ahead of them?”

“They’ll be along… ah. There they are.”

Nila raised her head. The creaking of saddles and the jostling of weaponry suddenly reached her, and from the depth of the fog emerged hundreds of cuirassiers, their breastplates beaded with morning dew, carbines resting across their saddles.

Bo gave a groan and rolled out of her arms. He snatched the prosthetic from the stirrup and rolled up his pant leg. She caught sight of a leather harness attached to the healed, but ruined remnants of his knee. He strapped the prosthetic to the harness. Nila got to her feet, drying her cheeks, and helped Bo up and, at his insistence, back in the saddle.

A cuirassier rode forward holding the reins to Nila’s horse. “Privileged Nila,” he said, his voice booming in the quiet of the morning. “Thank Adom we found you.”

“Indeed,” was the only reply she could manage. Her knees felt like jelly beneath her, but she knew that this morning wasn’t over. She took the reins, never having thought she’d be so relieved to see a horse. Raising her voice, she said, “They have Colonel Olem. He couldn’t escape with me because they had flogged him half to death.”

An angry mutter spread through the cuirassiers. “Can you lead us to their camp?” one of them asked.

Nila closed her eyes, trying to picture every rise and valley she’d crossed in her desperate flight. It was a jumbled haze in her memory, but she knew the Kez cavalry that had chased her would leave a trail more easily followed.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“I
never thought I’d see the day when I assaulted one of my own cities.”

Tamas stared at the walls of Budwiel. The city sat in the narrowest spot in Surkov’s Alley, flanked on either side by the immense, sheer cliffs called the Gates of Wasal. There was no way into the city but over those formidable granite walls, each stone protected by sorcery as old as the city itself. If not for what he now knew to be Hilanska’s treachery, the same walls on the south side of the city would have withstood months of bombardment by the Kez army.

And now Tamas had to take the city in a single day.

General Arbor eyed the city, leaning on his heavy cavalry saber the way a gentleman might lean on a cane. The ancient general looked older than ever, but there was an excited fire in his eyes. He flexed his jaw, popping his false teeth out into one hand. “Aye. It’ll be a pit of a fight.”

“Ipille has lined the walls with his personal guard,” Tamas said. “They’ll fight tooth and nail for their king. Once we breach the city walls, every street will be a bloodbath.”

“I can give you some good news on that,” Arbor said. “I’ve dug up Ket and Hilanska’s spy reports, and if they’re to be believed, the Kez have left few enough of our people inside unmolested. Most were slaughtered in the initial attack and the rest have been sold as slaves.”

“That’s the worst good news I’ve ever heard.” Tamas wanted to spit, but he knew it wouldn’t remove the bad taste in his mouth.

Arbor gave him a toothless grin. “Just trying to say that there’s no harm in shelling the city! You have to look at the bright side of these things, sir.”

“You’re not making me feel any better.”

Doubt assaulted Tamas on all sides. Where was Taniel? There hadn’t been word or sign of him yet. If he had succeeded in his task of rescuing Ka-poel, Tamas would have heard by now. He didn’t want to think of the alternatives.

Around Tamas, his camp swirled with motion. Artillery that they had sent south on the Addown River was being moved into position as earthen fortifications went up. Ladders and hooks, spare ammunition, and fresh rifles were all being unloaded from the barges. Tents had been pitched, and his tired men were taking shifts to get a couple hours’ rest before the attack.

Last night they had taken Midway Keep, making enough noise to draw Ipille’s personal guard out of Budwiel and into a half-dozen skirmishes throughout the earliest hours of the morning. The guard had slowed him down by a couple of hours before they retreated into the city, and now their silver conical helmets lined the tops of the walls three men deep.

A puff of smoke rose over the walls and a moment later Tamas heard the report of cannon fire. The ball slammed into the earth several hundred yards in front of Tamas’s foremost artillery pieces.

Arbor gave a mirthless chuckle. “Those walls aren’t designed to hold heavy cannon. They won’t be able to shoot back at us with anything bigger than short-range six-pounders.”

“I’m more worried about the grapeshot when we assault the walls,” Tamas replied. “More’s the pity that we don’t have time to wait them out. We’re going to have to charge straight into their teeth.”

“Really?” Arbor held his false teeth at arm’s length and picked something out from between them. “I’m all for a good charge, but we won’t hope to put a scratch in that wall today, not if we had fifty more cannon than we do. And, uh, no offense meant, sir, but sending twenty thousand men over those walls will be just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

“I’m a desperate man, Arbor.” He glanced over his shoulder, craning his head to look back up Surkov’s Alley. He wondered if the main Kez army had grown wise to his plan and were coming up fast behind him. Sulem was to have joined them in battle yesterday afternoon to keep them from marching back down to pinion Tamas against the walls of Budwiel. If the Kez had escaped the Deliv, this would end in disaster. “Come with me.”

Arbor followed him from their vantage point down toward the largest artillery battery, Andriya shadowing them the whole way. Tamas’s newest bodyguard was coated in dry blood and smelled like a slaughterhouse. Anyone else but one of his powder mages, and Tamas would have had the man forcibly washed. This afternoon, though, he needed Andriya’s gun and blade.

“Colonel Silvia,” Tamas called, catching the attention of one of the artillery crews. Silvia was a middle-aged woman with brown, short-cropped hair and a mouselike face stained with black powder. The cuffs of her uniform were almost black with the stuff as well. Tamas had to go all the way down to a captain to find an experienced artilleryman that hadn’t been a friend or student of General Hilanska, and Silvia had in a single day found herself a colonel in command of Tamas’s bombardment.

“Sir!”
S
he stood, snapping a salute.

“You almost ready?”

“Getting there, sir. A few more mortars to move into position and then we’ll start the bombardment on your order. We’ll sweep the walls and just behind them with the mortars and focus direct fire on the main gate.”

“Cancel that. You have a spyglass?”

“Yes sir.” She produced a spyglass from her kit and snapped it open, then waited for Tamas’s instruction.

“Go about three hundred yards to the east of the main gate. Do you see a pattern of discolored stones? They look almost like a face. It’s very faint.”

“I don’t… wait, I see it. Adom, looks like a grinning skull.”

“Fire a pattern of straight shot right at the nose. Hit, wait seven counts, hit, wait two counts, hit, and wait another four. It might take you a few tries.”

Silvia had lowered her spyglass to look curiously at Tamas. “Sir?”

“What is that?” General Arbor asked. “Some kind of combination?”

“In a manner of speaking. The royal cabal that wove the wards into that wall so many hundreds of years ago left a backup plan in case Budwiel ever fell to the Kez and we were forced to take it back. Do this, and that section of the wall will be vulnerable to our cannon fire.”

“And how the bloody pit do you know that?” Arbor asked.

Tamas snorted. “I was the Iron King’s favorite, Arbor. It came with some perks.”
And if this doesn’t work,
he reminded himself silently,
I’ll look like a complete idiot
.

“When do you want me to start, sir?” Silvia asked.

“Begin your shelling of the main gate as soon as you’re ready. Have a grouping of cannons standing by to wait for my signal to fire at that particular spot. We won’t be ready to attack for at least an hour.”

Tamas strode back to his command tent, Arbor at his side. “Sir, what happens if Ipille has already fled toward his capital?” Arbor asked.

“Then we’ll hunt him down like a bloody dog,” Tamas said with a confidence he didn’t feel. Ipille might have left two days ago. He could be so far ahead as to make it impossible to catch him. It was a risk Tamas was willing to take.

“Keep everyone working,” Tamas said as he reached his tent. “And keep formations loose. I don’t want the Kez to suspect that we’ll assault today until the very last minute.” He slapped Arbor on the shoulder, and the general saluted him, false teeth still in one hand.

Tamas ducked inside and let himself sag against the main tent post, squeezing his eyes shut. His nerves were raw, his body strung out from too much powder and too little sleep, and the effort of hiding his exhaustion from the men. “One more day, Tamas,” he muttered to himself. “It’ll either all be over tonight or you’ll be dead at the foot of Budwiel’s walls.”

“That’s why most commanders don’t lead the charge themselves.”

Tamas drew his sword and whirled toward the voice. Gavril sat on Tamas’s cot, his whole body caked with road dust, the sleeve of one arm sliced through and stiff with dried blood.

“Bloody pit,” Tamas said, sheathing his sword. “That’s about the closest I’ve ever come to a heart attack. What the pit are you doing here? Where’s Taniel? Get out of my bed.”

Gavril threw up both hands but made no motion to stand. “I’m resting. I just rode all the way down the Counter’s Road, dodging Kez patrols. Reached the Deliv camp a few hours after you left and commandeered a canoe and paddled the whole way here on the Addown.”

Tamas paced his tent. He had planned to plug his ears with wax and catch a few hours of sleep before the attack, while his artillery scattered Ipille’s men from the walls. No chance of that now. “And Taniel? The girl? Where are they? Spit it out, man!”

“Taniel’s alive, Vlora too and Norrine. We lost everyone else in an ambush.”

“And the savage?”

“No sign of Ka-poel. When I left, we still hadn’t caught up to the Privileged.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Had Taniel followed the Kez Privileged down here and slipped inside Budwiel? Had he been captured by Kez patrols? Tamas found himself growing more nervous every moment Gavril didn’t speak.

“You should probably sit down,” Gavril said.

“I’ll sit when I damn well feel like sitting!”

“The Kez didn’t break the parley. It was the Brudanians in disguise.”

Tamas stumbled to his chair and fell into it. “No,” he said, the word coming out as a gasp.

“Afraid so. Captured a couple grenadiers in the fight. Imagine our surprise when not one of them speaks a word of Kez. What’s more, they weren’t heading south. They were heading north, going far out and around to avoid any of our people between the army and Adopest. Vlora and Taniel are on their trail now, but we suspect they’re going to meet up with the rest of the Brudanians in Adro. Are you all right?”

Tamas stared at his brother-in-law for several moments, his mouth hanging open. How could this have happened? He had been played like a fool. The Kez hadn’t broken the parley.
He had
. Blinded so thoroughly by his own righteous anger, he had ignored Ipille’s pleas for another meeting and dismissed the Kez messengers.

He was too old for this. Too proud, too angry. He had made mistakes in his time – even the best officer did – but the magnitude of this…

“You couldn’t have known,” Gavril said quietly.

“No.” Tamas let out a mirthless laugh. “I’ve become what I most despise. Am I nothing more than a warmonger, Gavril? Another dictator with an army and a grudge? You know, that’s what the old tales say that the Nine was like back before Kresimir came. They were just a collection of squabbling warlords.”

“It’s not like that.”

Tamas went on. “I see a vision of the future, revolutions spreading out across the lands as people pull down their monarchs. The strongest men, unordained by saints or gods, rise to the top and carve out their own petty empires. Men and women die by the millions and all the progress that our world has made in the last thousand years is lost in the dust of time. All because of me.”

Tamas held his fingers in front of his face, watching them tremble.

“I think you give yourself too much credit.”

The vision floating before Tamas’s eyes slowly faded and he felt older than time itself. Every muscle ached, every bone remembered its old breaks and bruises.

The thump of artillery brought Tamas back to the present. “Are you wounded?”

Gavril glanced at his blood-soaked sleeve. “Just a scratch. I gave myself stitches while I rode.”

“You should have them redone. Probably looks like they were made by a blind monkey.”

“Poked myself a few times, but they’re straight and the wound is clean. You forget I’ve spent far more time in the saddle than you.”

“Mostly running from jealous husbands.”

“Some of them were very dangerous. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The Deliv have engaged the main Kez force, but I passed a column in the middle of the night.”

“Kez?”

“Yes. Coming for you. Didn’t look like more than a few thousand – they’re far more worried about the Deliv infantry – but it’ll be enough to put you in a damned tight spot.”

“How far?”

“A couple hours.”

“You should have probably mentioned this earlier.”

Gavril yawned. “It was a long night.”

“You hear any news about Olem?”

“No,” Gavril said. “Should I have?”

“He’s chasing Kez cavalry that got behind us up north. Never mind that. Andriya!” Tamas shouted.

The powder mage put his head in the tent. “Sir?”

“Tell Arbor we have company coming up behind us. He has forty-five minutes until we assault the walls, and we’ll only have time for one attack.”

“Yes sir!” Andriya left to find Arbor, looking as giddy as a schoolboy.

“There’s something wrong with that boy’s head,” Gavril said.

“You know, he’s one of the ones Erika saved. A year before she was…”

“That doesn’t explain the blood all over him.”

“He revels in killing his former countrymen. Perhaps a little too much, but people like that have their uses. For instance, there are few soldiers I would want more clearing the way for me as we go through the breach or over that wall.”

Gavril ran his fingers gingerly over his shoulder. “I don’t think you should take part in the attack,” he said.

“I always have.”

“You’re not a young man anymore.”