Брайан Макклеллан - Blood of Empire

With an Adran Field Army , he’d written during the Gurlish Wars, if it was stripped of buffoons and properly supplied, I could conquer the world.

She thought, for that moment, that she felt the thrill that must have compelled him to such a conjecture. “My friends,” she finally said to the general staff, “my voice is not up to a speech, but please pass on to your soldiers that this is the finest army I’ve ever seen.” She lifted her head just as a rider crested the top of the hill. The rider paused, clearly taken by what he saw, but Vlora lifted an arm and waved him closer.

It was one of her scouts. The man swung from his horse by the command tent and approached with a sort of reverence, saluting Vlora and then the general staff. “What news?” Vlora asked. “Speak up so the generals can hear you.”

“I come from the southeast,” the scout reported. “With word from New Adopest.”

“And how does it look?”

“They’re still under siege by the Dynize. They beg for aid from Lindet, but none of the Fatrastan armies have been able to break north. The messengers I met claim that the city won’t last out the week.”

Vlora glanced at the general staff, knowing what must be going through their heads. She’d already told them that they weren’t here to take sides, but Fatrastans were almost entirely Kressian, with an enormous population of emigrated Adrans. Some of the general staff probably had friends or relatives in New Adopest. It had, after all, been settled by their ancestors.

Vlora needed to teach a lesson – a lesson to her officers, to the Fatrastans, and to the Dynize. She raised her voice. “Send orders to the fleet. They’re to brush aside the Dynize sea blockade, but I don’t want them to make contact with the city.”

“And us?” one of the brigadier generals asked.

“Most of these men haven’t seen blood since the Kez Civil War. I don’t want to reach Landfall with rusty troops. Let’s go give them some practice.”

Styke knelt in the thick, clinging underbrush, trying to ignore whatever creature was crawling across the back of his neck, and watched as two squads of Dynize naval infantry splashed through a streambed almost close enough for him to touch. The soldiers seemed alert, watchful, each of them looking in a different direction to cover all approaches while the two leads tracked Styke’s Lancers across mud, water, and rock.

He pressed his back against one of the mighty stone outcroppings that rose sharply from the swamp. Not a sound – not a breath. He was too close. One of the soldiers looked right past him, stabbing a short bayonet into the foliage and missing Styke’s knee by inches. Satisfied, the woman moved on. A few moments later the last soldier paused right beside Styke. He said something in Dynize that Styke couldn’t quite catch, then turned directly toward him and began to undo his trousers.

Styke was willing to put up with all sorts of creeping things for the sake of an ambush. He would not, however, allow a man to piss on him. He grunted, knife flashing up, and slashed the man’s throat before he could say a word. Styke lunged from the underbrush before his first victim had hit the ground. He thrust into the next soldier, cut the throat of a third, and took two steps back before the rest of the squad could turn to face him.

“Now!” he yelled, flinging himself back into the underbrush.

Farther up the stream, twenty carbines fired at once, cutting through the two squads of infantry. Styke listened to the bullets whiz by and crack against the stone mere feet from his head, then counted to ten before he returned to the open.

Only six members of the original two squads remained standing. The Lancers fell upon them, swinging carbines and knives, but to their credit the Dynize infantry did not go down without a fight. Wounded to a man, they closed ranks and returned fire, then brandished their bayonets. Styke waited for them to route and retreat toward him, but not a one of them did.

Within the minute they were overwhelmed, but at least four of Styke’s Lancers had taken wounds, and two of those were on the ground. He joined the group, taking a moment to wipe his blade on the jacket of a fallen Dynize before barking out, “No time to slow down. We’ve got at least six more squads on our heels. Jackal, get the horses. Sunin, see to the wounded. We’ve got to stay ahead of these bastards or this swamp will be the last thing we see.”

As they jumped to follow his orders, Styke let out a piercing whistle. A few moments later both Ka-poel and Celine emerged from the trees farther up the streambed. Celine looked around at the bodies like a child unimpressed by a bunch of broken dolls, while Ka-poel’s study was far cooler, almost academic.

“If one of these is still breathing,” Styke said, “I need him to talk. Can you do that?”

Ka-poel’s hands flashed. Celine translated. I thought you don’t like my methods.

“I don’t. But I’d like to stay alive right now.”

Ka-poel rolled her eyes and headed around the sixteen-or-so fallen Dynize. She checked three of them before finally squatting beside one, a man with the haggard old face of a seasoned veteran. The man’s mouth was full of blood, his teeth clenched tightly, but he grinned defiantly at them as he clutched a length of intestine falling from a gaping stomach wound. Ka-poel dipped her fingers in his blood, then dabbed them on his forehead and cheeks. The soldier’s eyes narrowed, then widened in realization, and he began to shiver violently, clawing at his own stomach as if to hurry his own demise.

“Seems like they know what a bone-eye is capable of,” Styke commented. He looked over his shoulder to make sure that his orders were being carried out. The men had already begun to bring their horses back to the streambed and out of the rocky recess where they’d been hidden.

Ka-poel pressed two fingers against the dying soldier’s throat. The man’s struggles weakened, his eyes glazing over. She nodded.

Styke knelt beside him, looking over the soldier, the coppery scent of Ka-poel’s sorcery in his nostrils. “Can you understand me?” He spoke in Palo, throwing in the few Dynize words he knew.

“Yes,” the soldier responded.

“Good. How many of you are on our tail?”

“Nine squads.”

“How many in a Dynize squad?”

“Eight to ten.” The answers were mechanical, spoken in that Dynize that sounded so much like heavily accented Palo.

“Your orders?”

“Kill you. Capture a few. Find out why you’re dropping such a small group on the homeland.”

“Is your ship continuing in pursuit of ours?”

“Just the escorts. Our ship of the line will return to port to let them know about a possible invasion.”

“Of just twenty men?”

The soldier blinked blankly. “We are very cautious. The homeland is not well defended right now.”

Styke tried to think of any other questions that a common soldier might be able to answer. That last bit was good news, but he knew better than to take the man at his word. It was very unlikely that he actually knew how many soldiers the Dynize had left to garrison their own cities. “Not well defended” – could be relative, considering the size of the Dynize invasion force.

Still, this meant that someone would be told that Styke had put to shore. Whether the Dynize cared enough to come looking was another matter. But they needed to hurry.

“How far behind us are the rest of your comrades?”

Sweat poured down the soldier’s forehead. He was dying, and quickly. Styke wondered how long Ka-poel could keep him alive. “I don’t know. We spread out to entrap you. The others may already be on your flank.”