Brian McClellan - Servant of the Crown

“Not yet,” Tamas admitted. He sipped the cordial, savoring the sweetness.

She took the glass from his hand and set it on the bedside table, moving into his lap. “Then we’ll have to think of something else.”

“Wait, wait. What do you mean, we? I’m not going to let you have anything to do with this.” Tamas tried to push her gently from his lap, but her arms were firmly around his neck.

“At what point,” she whispered in his ear, “will you realize that you will never be in the position to let or not let me do anything?”

“You can’t become involved any further. This is serious.”

“I already am involved. And I’m deadly serious, my love,” Erika said.

Tamas felt a shudder go down his spine at the word love . “Don’t say that,” he said quietly.

“Don’t say what?”

“Love. This can’t last.” As much as he wanted it to.

“Why not?”

Tamas looked away. “You know why not.”

Erika snatched him by the chin and jerked his face toward hers, staring him in the eye. “Am I wasting my time, Captain Tamas? Am I with a man who doesn’t want me?”

“Absolutely not,” Tamas growled. This was too quick, he told himself. They’d barely known each other for a couple of months. She was extraordinary, but she was still a noble. She would never be allowed to marry him. “But I want you more than a passing fancy. And I’m a commoner.”

“If I hear you say you’re a commoner once more, so help me Kresimir, I will pull out your tongue. You’re a man with ambition. With strength. Use it. And when you’re Field Marshal Tamas no one will question you taking a foreign duchess as your wife.”

“And in the meantime?” he asked.

Erika shoved him down and straddled him on the bed. He grabbed her by the waist and threw her aside, rolling on top of her, satisfied with a surprised squeal. She grabbed a hand full of his hair.

“In the meantime,” she said, “We have a Privileged to kill.”

Tamas watched from a second-story window as twenty-odd cabal guards crept down the street toward him.

He was back in Adopest, three weeks after the king had ordered him to kill Privileged Dienne. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning, the night lit by a full moon, and the streets in the factory district were all but silent.

The street below ended just a few yards past Tamas’s hiding spot in a cul-de-sac of four large, multi-story tenements. The lanterns were dark, nothing moving but stray cats fleeing before the cabal guards. The whole block had been struck by plague last year and remained abandoned.

A perfect place to kill a Privileged.

The guards passed below his window, and he wondered how many more were flanking the streets on either side of the tenements. Not many, he suspected. Privileged Dienne would want to keep this quiet until she was sure she had dealt with him.

He edged toward the window, as close as he dared, and looked toward the main thoroughfare. There, not fifty yards from where he stood, was the same carriage he had seen Dienne flee in a few weeks prior.

She had honored his request for a meeting, it seemed, even if she hadn’t come alone as he requested.

Not that Tamas had expected her to.

He double-checked his preparations. Set up just inside the open windows of the apartment were eight flintlock muskets. Each was loaded and propped to aim into the cul-de-sac. They would jerk and fall when he set them off, but accuracy was not important.

Only the illusion of conspiracy was important.

Tamas took his own musket and aimed it at the guard wearing a captain’s red epaulette on one shoulder. The man whispered and gestured to his troops, positioning them by the windows and doors of the center-most tenement. One of them braced himself and kicked the door in with a crash that rattled the windows, and about half the platoon of cabal guards rushed into the empty building.

Tamas lit a match and set it to the end of a quick-burning fuse. The spark traveled like lightning out the window, following the fuse between the tenements, above the heads of the guards.

One of them noticed the spark, shouting and pointing upward. By the time any of his compatriots had looked up, the spark was gone through the window of the tenement now filled with a dozen or more cabal guards.

Tamas lifted his musket again, sighted toward the carriage waiting at the end of the street, and pulled the trigger. The shot blew through the window, and the carriage rocked from the motion of a body collapsing against the wall. Chaos erupted.

Guards shouted in confusion, pointing at Tamas’s vantage. He reached out with his senses and touched the powder in each of the eight muskets, causing a volley to pepper the street. A second roar of muskets erupted from the windows across the street as Erika touched the powder of her own small firing line.

Cabal guards threw themselves through tenement windows and doors, looking for cover. Most of them wound up in the building at the end of the cul-de-sac, trying to regroup with the bulk of their platoon.

They did so just as Tamas’s fuse hit the stack of powder barrels in the tenement basement.

Tamas had dropped his musket and sprinted for the far end of the apartment, when the explosion blew him off his feet. He went right through a flimsy plaster wall, landing in a heap in the room next door.

He got to his feet, coughing on plaster dust, hoping that Erika was all right. His head pounded and his vision took a moment to clear. They had, it seemed, overdone it on the powder.

He went to the window and looked down into the main avenue on the other side of the tenement from the cul-de-sac he had just attacked. The street was lit by flames caused by the explosion, and a few passing night laborers stared open-mouthed before running off at a sprint, shouting about the fire.

A few dark shapes did not run away from the fire. Cabal guards crossed the avenue, and Tamas heard the door below him kicked open.

“Go around,” a gruff voice said, “Keep your eyes open! You two, see to the Privileged!”

Tamas didn’t bother with the window. He backed up and ran at the wall, shoulder first, bursting through the aged brick and plaster and soaring out into the cold night air. He hit the avenue below and rolled.

His shoulder ached as he regained his feet, and he questioned the wisdom of that maneuver even as he whirled to face the two cabal guards that rushed toward him. He drew his sword, waving dust out of his face, and parried the first swing of a guard’s heavy saber. He drew his belt knife with his off-hand and stepped inside the man’s guard, opening his throat.

The second guard was more wary. She circled Tamas, crouched, eyes shifting as she watched for his next move.

Tamas didn’t have time for this. Once she’d made a half circle, Tamas turned and sprinted, followed by the guard’s startled shout. He turned at the next intersection and surged ahead.

Privileged Dienne’s carriage nearly flattened him. The two horses, eyes rolling in fear of the explosion, plowed forward while the driver frantically tried to get them under control. Tamas threw himself out of the way of the panicked animals, then changed directions to chase after them.

Catching the carriage while in a full powder trance took little effort. Tamas leapt onto the running board at the back, snatching the rail with one hand, swiping at his pursuer with the sword in the other.

His swipe missed, but the guard could not hope to keep up as the carriage careened ahead. Tamas sheathed his sword and climbed on top of the carriage. Holding the roof rack, he swung feet-first into the compartment.

Tamas came into the carriage ready to grapple with an enraged, wounded Privileged. He drew his knife the moment his hands left the roof rack, and he landed heavily on the cloaked figure on the bench, ready to plunge the weapon into Dienne’s chest.