Брайан Макклеллан - Blood of Empire

Sixty-four men, slaughtered in what must have been less than an hour as they were strung out through the swamp. Styke hadn’t heard a single gunshot in that time. He twirled his ring thoughtfully, pressing his thumb against the tip of the silver lance until it hurt. “What do you need to get us past Talunca?”

“Talunlica,” Orz corrected. “Dynize colors, for a start. Passports. Weapons. Whatever we can’t get off the dead, we will acquire at the next large town. And I’ll need your men to stay completely silent for the next week – we cannot risk anyone finding out they don’t speak Dynize.”

“Right.” Styke glanced once more at Ka-poel. She gave him a small nod. He wished that Ibana were here to hash this out with him. She was more level-headed about this sort of thing. “Backtrack, boys. Let’s strip the dead and get ourselves cleaned up. Orz here is going to teach you all how to write ‘I’ve taken a vow of silence’ in Dynize. Once we’re on the main road, the first of you to talk to anyone but me gets my ring through the front of your skull. Got it?” There was a round of reluctant nods, and the Lancers began heading back the way they came, most of them giving Orz a reluctant glance as they passed.

Orz snorted. “That might work in an emergency.”

“Good. Because I damn well don’t trust you, but I know you’re telling the truth about at least one thing.”

“Oh?”

“That this is a fool’s errand,” Styke said quietly, “and we’re probably all going to die.”

“You’re sure about this?”

The question was, Michel knew, about three days too late. He stood in front of Ichtracia in a hired room on the outskirts of Lower Landfall, where their Dynize passports had gotten them past the last of the major roadblocks that governed all highways in and out of the city. The room was tiny and cramped, most of it taken up by a big, flea-ridden bed that usually slept six strangers so that the boarding house could accommodate more bodies when the dockside inns were full.

What little space remained was occupied by a short wooden stool. On the bed was a razor, a bowl containing a small amount of lime-and-ash mixture, and an actor’s face-painting kit. Ichtracia’s clothes – the black mourning vestments that she’d worn for almost a month – lay on the floor to be burned. Ichtracia sat straight-backed on the stool, like a princess sitting for a portrait.

Her gaze flickered up to him briefly. “I said I was, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“You question me a lot.” There was a note of warning in her voice.

Michel clenched his jaw and tried to ignore it. “I do, because most people only think they can become a spy. Actually doing it is a different matter altogether.” Her forehead wrinkled, her mouth opened, and Michel held up his hand to forestall an argument. “Yes, I know that you’d rather just smash your way back into Landfall and demand answers. But by your own admission you are loath to kill your own people – and even if you weren’t, Sedial is surrounded by dragonmen, bone-eyes, and Privileged. We’re not going to smash anything. We’re doing this my way. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Ichtracia said after a long hesitation.

“Good.”

“I have a question first.”

Michel paused, frowning at Ichtracia. “What’s that?”

“Why didn’t you tell me about the sacrifices?”

“Because…” Michel hesitated. Telling her that he hadn’t been sure if he could trust her was not going to help their relationship. A half-truth, then. “Because I couldn’t confirm it, and I didn’t think you could, either. It was just something told to me by a dying Blackhat.”

Ichtracia stared at him for a few moments – long enough that he feared she would question him further – before giving him a curt nod. “Go ahead.”

“All right,” Michel said, trying not to sound relieved to move on. “Training. We’re going to move as quickly as we can, which to an outsider might seem positively sluggish.”

“How so?”

“Spies don’t run. They saunter. Everything we do needs to be calculated but look casual. We need to blend in, operate with thoughtful consideration. Our second job will be to make contact with Emerald and find out exactly what’s going on in the city – if he has any evidence of the blood sacrifices. Once we’ve confirmed how, exactly, the Dynize are exploiting the Palo… Well, that’s when the fighting begins. We rally the Palo. We fire them up.”

Ichtracia cocked her head. “You skipped the first job.”

“Our first job is to make you into a spy. It’s not going to be pretty.” Michel picked up the razor, took her long auburn hair in one hand, and began to cut. He talked as he worked.

“We’ll start by changing your appearance. Your mannerisms will be next. I don’t have time to teach you to act like a Palo, so I’ll have to correct you as we go. Your Adran accent is excellent, which is a major boon to us. Your Palo… well, we’re going to have to work on that. We can pass you off as from a northern family with Adran connections and an Adran education. It’s not too far-fetched.”

He worked the razor carefully around her ear. Locks of hair fell to the floor, forming a skirt around the feet of the stool. He was careful to leave about an inch on the top, half an inch on the sides – a common northern look for city Palo women. The shade of her hair was fine, but he wanted to convince both the Palo and Dynize that she was a native – that meant making her unrecognizable. The fact that most of the Dynize upper crust knew her face made this particularly difficult, so he’d need to lighten her hair with the lime and ash mixture.

“We’ll need a name for you.”

“I don’t know Palo names.”

“I was thinking ‘Avenya’?”

Ichtracia repeated the name several times. “I like it.”

“I had a great-aunt named Avenya,” Michel told her. “She helped raise me for a few years before she died. It’s not a common Palo name, but it’s known.”

“Avenya,” Ichtracia said out loud again. “Yes, that will do.”

“Good.” Michel continued his instructions. “When you’re infiltrating a group, confidence is easily half the job. Talk, walk, and act like you belong. Be useful, engaging, charming. Avoid confrontation.”

“Be like you,” Ichtracia said.

Their eyes met for a moment. She had made it very clear that despite their continued codependence and cohabitation, she had not forgiven him for lying about who and what he was. “Yes. Like me.”

She nodded for him to continue.

“Because we don’t know who to trust, we’re going to approach the Palo under our pseudonyms. We’re not their enemies, but if they discover our real identities, they will think that we’re their enemies. So we, in our own minds, must consider them the target of deception. The Dynize probably have hundreds, maybe thousands, of spies and informants in Greenfire Depths, and that makes it doubly difficult to decide who we can trust.”

“Is there anyone?” Most people would have had a tinge of despair in their voices when asking such a question, but Ichtracia seemed to take it as a matter of course.

“To trust?” Michel asked. “There will be. Starting with Emerald.” He finished with the razor and tossed it on the bed. “It’s a hack job, but I couldn’t find scissors on short notice. I can tidy it up when we get to the Depths.”

“You couldn’t find scissors, but you could find a face-painting kit?”

“You’d be surprised at how many people have one on hand at all times, even in a Palo fishing village. Doesn’t matter where you are – people want to look nice for a day at the fair or to impress a loved one.” He picked up the kit and rummaged through it until he found a bit of charcoal. He stepped back, looking closely at Ichtracia’s face. “Your features are distinctly Dynize. Anyone with half a brain can tell by looking at you.”