Brian McClellan - The Face in the Window

Taniel lowered the musket and tapped out a line of powder and snorted it; felt it calm his nerves.

Back to his vigil. There was some movement through the window, and the Privileged came into view.

She was not at all what he had expected.

She was thirty at the oldest, younger than Major Bertreau. Her face hadn’t been marred by years of sorcery and cruelty, like most Privileged Taniel had met. Her nose was small and pinched. She wore a night shift, sagging to bare one shoulder, her blond hair curled and wild around her head. She splashed water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment.

Taniel regretted his sorcerous sight; cursed the black powder that gave him the power to see his target with such clarity.

She looked like a girl Taniel knew from university. Soulin. In fact, she could have been Soulin’s older sister. She had the same color hair, the same slight features, and even looked to be a similar height.

The barrel of his musket wavered. His hands were shaking.

He let his head fall away from the stock and closed his eyes a moment.

Ka-poel was staring at him. She scowled and made a pistol with her fingers, pointing at Gladeside.

Shoot.

Taniel took a deep breath and slowly let it out, setting his cheek against the rifle stock.

The Privileged was still in her room. She had finished washing her face and stepped away from the window, only to reappear a moment later wearing a clean shirt.

She stepped to the window, fluffing her long hair with both hands.

Taniel remembered the Privileged’s dry, matter-of-fact voice as she had spoken of corpses. He thought of Dina, and the look of surprise on her face as Privileged fire cut her in half.

He thought of Dina’s husband and children, who would never even see her body.

And he could never forget that it had been a Kez Privileged who, long ago, had presented his family with his mother’s head in a box.

The crack of the musket startled him, as he had barely felt his finger pull the trigger. An expanding cloud of black smoke rose overhead, filling his nostrils with sulfur.

He counted silently, burning the extra powder in his powder horn to keep the bullet floating far longer than any regular musket ball. A slight pain began in the back of his head as the effort of keeping the bullet up taxed his sorcery.

Powder mages normally used small caliber bullets and rifles with a high muzzle velocity, to be sure that the bullet hit their target before their target could hear the shot.

But with a standard Kez infantry musket, the bullet would hit the target about the same time as the sound.

As long as she didn’t see the puff of black smoke rising above him, giving away his position.

She didn’t.

She was still standing at the window, enjoying the morning air, when the bullet entered her left eye and blew the back of her head across the mirror behind her.

Taniel didn’t wait for the sentries to figure out what had happened. The extra few minutes could mean the difference between getting away and being captured. He was on his feet in a moment, running half-crouched down the hillside in a straight beeline toward the Tristan Basin, with Ka-poel on his heels.

He heard his father’s voice in the back of his mind as Ka-poel led him into the swamp, the sound of Kez trumpets blaring the alarm behind them.

You’ll feel guilty about that first cold, calculating kill. After all, they never even saw the bullet coming.

Taniel was chilled, and it had nothing to do with the cold of the morning.

You’ll feel guilty on the second one, too , said his father’s voice. And the next. I lost that guilt around my twentieth, and I think part of my humanity died with it. Hopefully, my boy, you’ll keep it longer than I did.

“I didn’t,” Taniel whispered.

Ka-poel cast a questioning glance over her shoulder.

“Let’s get to your village,” Taniel said. “And get it prepared. They’ll send another Privileged eventually. I’m going to be here to kill that one, too.”