Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

“Up!” Styke urged.

The circular staircase ended in a flat, stone ceiling, with the steps disappearing into a wooden trapdoor. Styke reached it first, pushing on the door. First tentatively, then harder, he pressed against it with his palms, attempting to lift it above him.

Ibana squeezed up beside him on the staircase and pushed. The door rattled some, but did not give. “It’s barred,” she told him.

“Willen could have damned well mentioned this,” Styke growled. He shoved himself between the door and the top few steps, bending his neck and placing his shoulders against the wood. Taking a deep breath, he attempted to stand, shoving upward like a man lifting a sack of grain on his back.

The door held. He heard a creak, then a groan, and he continued to push until he could bear it no longer. He relaxed, taking a deep breath.

“We’re going to have to go back out and scale the damned wall,” Ibana said. “Lindet’s going to have to damn well wait.”

“Look for something down there to use as a battering ram.”

“The angle isn’t going to work for a ram,” Ibana snorted. “This was made to withstand a siege. You’re not going to break it.”

Styke reset his shoulders and braced his hands and knees. He took a deep breath and pushed upward again. He strained, grunted, shoving until every muscle trembled beneath the strain.

“Ben, you’re going to damn well hurt yourself.”

Styke heard another scream far above him – a scream of pain, no doubt from a soldier wounded by a sharpshooter. In his mind’s eye, though, it belonged to Lindet. He thought of all the years he’d spent in the labor camps, and he discarded them for the memory of a little girl tucking candies beneath his tongue when he was helpless, and he continued to push.

He felt something pop, a terrible pain spreading across his chest. He shoved harder, tears running down his face.

“Ben!” Ibana warned, but the voice seemed far away.

Something touched his bare skin. It was a hand, small and delicate, snaking beneath his shirt and tracing a trail with its fingernails up his spine until it was just below where his shoulders met the wood of the trapdoor. Through his foggy vision, he saw Ka-poel’s face just beneath his left arm, her eyes once again young and mischievous. “What …?” he gasped.

The fingers tensed, nails biting into his skin. He felt a surge of strength, the smell of coppery sorcery filling his nostrils. His muscles bent and flexed, bones threatening to snap from the strain, and then a sudden crack and the release of tension as he surged upward. His momentum took him up and through the trapdoor, where he took several steps and collapsed on the cool stone floor of what appeared to be a large pantry full of beer kegs and sacks of grain.

He lay there, hand on his chest, as the Mad Lancers swarmed up the stairs to fill the pantry. His head pounded, his muscles on fire, and he heard Ibana distantly as she snapped orders. “Jackal, take these eight and open the front gates. If you survive that, head up and clear the towers. You four, see what you can do about the docks. The rest of you are with me and Ben.”

Styke rolled over onto his back and gasped. Ka-poel crouched above him, her head tilted quizzically.

“That really hurt,” he told her between breaths.

She touched her fingers gently to his forehead, then tapped a fingernail against his ribs. The pain was suddenly gone, the fire diminished. She tapped his ribs again and made two fists in front of his eyes, then pulled them apart.

“I broke a rib?”

She nodded.

He prodded the area gingerly, but felt no pain. “Did you heal it?”

She shook her head.

Styke climbed to his feet, expecting the lances of pain at any moment, but they never came. “What did you do? Block the pain?”

Ka-poel pursed her lips and wiggled one hand back and forth. More or less.

“This is going to a hurt later, isn’t it?”

She grinned wickedly.

“Pit.” Styke stumbled to Ibana’s side. “Where are we going?”

“Up, I assume,” she answered, looking him up and down. “Pit, Ben. You just snapped an eight-inch beam of ironwood.”

“A few other things, too. Come on, we have to find Lindet. Then I’m going to kill whoever is in command here.”

“With ten men? I sent everyone else to try and open the gate. If Lindet is still alive, she’ll be with Dvory. And he’ll have his whole bodyguard with him. We need an army, Ben.”

Styke unwrapped the wax cloth protecting his carbine from the water, then hefted his knife. He could still feel that pain deep in his chest, but it was a light buzz beneath Ka-poel’s sorcery. His brain was on fire, his blood pumping. He felt like he was in his prime again, light on his toes and ready to grind stone with his hands. “We don’t need an army. We’re the Mad Lancers.”

Styke caught a bayonet thrust on his carbine, turning the blade so that it scraped across the stone of the stairwell, and reached over to drive his boz knife through the eye of the Dynize soldier attempting to hold the hall. He lifted the spasming body and thrust it up the stairs ahead of him, using it as a shield as musket blasts made his ears ring. He reached the top of the stairwell and jerked his knife out of the soldier’s skull, whipping it around to cut the throat of another as he passed and emerged into the great hall of the citadel keep.

Soldiers filled the great hall, turning bayoneted rifles and muskets on Styke as he entered the room. There were forty or fifty of them, a mix of Dynize with their morion helms and breastplates, and Fatrastan turncoats in their yellow jackets. Styke spotted Dvory at the far end of the great hall, and their eyes locked for a split second.

Dvory’s face turned white.

“You didn’t bring enough men,” Styke shouted over the blasts of musket fire. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, jerking him back a half step and setting a fire of pain across an old wound. He ignored it, flipping his carbine over his shoulder and surging forward with his knife, carving into the Dynize.

His lancers flooded out of the stairwell behind him. They were down to eight now, after having to fight out of the kitchens and through the halls. Most of them bled from multiple wounds, clothes and faces soaked in blood, but the enemy fell back before them as if staring into the teeth of a thousand riflemen.

Styke sidestepped a bayonet thrust, feeling the sharp rasp of the blade across his ribs, and jerked the owner by the lapel onto his knife. He threw the body to one side and slashed, blinding a Fatrastan turncoat and leaving him to fall beneath Ibana’s sword.

To one side, Ka-poel slid through the fighting like a snake in a den of rats. She stepped around bayonets and between gunshots, her machete in one hand and a long needle in the other. She thrust and sliced, and the men she killed didn’t even seem to notice her until their blood splashed her black greatcoat.

“Dvory! Where is your army now, Dvory?” Styke’s knife hand was slick with gore. He disemboweled a Fatrastan, then slid his knife beneath the breastplate of a Dynize and left the woman gurgling in her own blood. A pistol went off just over his right shoulder, and he felt the bullet take off his earlobe. He turned, skipping toward the owner of the pistol and cutting his throat, before returning to his march toward the traitor.

Dvory stood proud in his spot at the end of the great hall. His fingers gripped his sword with white-knuckled intensity, and he stared at Styke like a man staring down a charging boar. Styke wondered briefly if this was a trap – if Dvory had enough guts to fight him – before remembering that before all this the bastard had been a Mad Lancer. He had the guts.