Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

Vlora tried to dredge up some sympathy. There wasn’t much to find, so she walked up the side of the hill and sat down next to him. “Tell me about where we’re going.”

“I don’t know much myself,” Taniel admitted. “All I could find in Lindet’s private archives was a reference to a place called Yellow Creek. As far as I could tell, she’d been working off old Dynize texts to pinpoint the location of the other godstones using translations and some sort of mathematical formula her Privileged had cooked up.”

Vlora felt a sudden weight in her stomach. “You mean this could be a wild-goose chase?”

Taniel lifted his hands defensively. “If I thought it was a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have offered to pay you a rather large fortune for your help. Lindet’s not the only one who’s been looking for all three godstones, and the two guesses she’s mapped out for our missing artifacts are in the same area as my own estimates. That can’t be coincidence.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.” Vlora mulled it over. No use wishing to be somewhere else – the deal was struck, and she and her men were in this for the long haul. “Yellow Creek. The name sounds familiar.”

“It’s a mining town,” Taniel said. “They –”

Vlora cut him off, remembering an article she’d read in the newspaper almost a year ago. “They struck gold there, right? A big-time haul. Thousands of prospectors from all over the world have gathered there.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“That’s about all I know.” Taniel grimaced. “Well, maybe not all I know.”

“What?” Vlora asked, her eyes narrowing involuntarily. Taniel himself was enough of a surprise and a mystery that she didn’t need anything else. She wanted this job to be as straightforward as possible; track down the godstone, smash anything or anyone who gets in the way, then figure out how to destroy the thing. The moment it was in a thousand pieces she intended to be on a boat back to Adro.

“There’s a complication with Yellow Creek. Technically, the land it’s on is claimed by three different countries.”

“Who?”

“Fatrasta, Brudania, and the Palo Nation.”

Vlora wasn’t surprised about the first two. Lindet had claimed the entire continent for her country and was fighting for the legality of her claim with half a dozen colonial powers who still held some land in Fatrasta. But the other? She tried to search her memories. The Palo were spread out in a thousand tribes over a landmass almost as large as the Nine. The actual nation of Fatrasta claimed the whole continent of the same name, but in reality only controlled pieces on the eastern and southern coasts. There were millions of square miles of dense forest northwest of the Ironhook Mountains that only a few Kressians had ever managed to penetrate.

The Palo Nation was a coalition of those northern tribes, but she’d never heard anything about them beyond conjecture. To Vlora’s knowledge, Lindet’s frontier armies had only ever fought tribes who themselves had opposed the Palo Nation, bringing back rumors of walled cities, farmland, and even organized government. It seemed like a fairy tale back when Vlora was putting down insurrections by tribes still living in huts in the swamps.

“I didn’t know the Palo Nation claimed land. In fact, I don’t know much about them at all.”

“No one does,” Taniel said, kicking at a clod of dirt with his heel. “Which makes them dangerous. Last I heard, they were contesting gold claims in the Ironhook Mountains. I’m not actually sure what that means, though.”

“So we might reach Yellow Creek and find a Palo army waiting for us?”

“I’m guessing we’re more likely to find the town being harassed by a skirmishing party. Either way, we should be ready for violence.”

Vlora pursed her lips. “I suppose that’s my job, anyway.” She considered the facts for a few moments, realizing how little she knew. “I don’t want to march into contested territory without scouting it first.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Taniel said. “But if you want to make camp and scout out Yellow Creek, you can’t take long.”

“Why not?”

“Because at some point, Lindet is going to find out what we’re up to and send a whole field army to come bury us.”

“Or,” Vlora mused, “the Dynize will crush Lindet’s troops and try to figure out where we went.”

“Either one.”

Vlora got to her feet, dusting off her trousers. “It’s settled, then.”

She had the brief satisfaction of seeing Taniel surprised as she got on her horse. “What is?” he asked.

“We have to get moving. I’m going to find Olem.”

Olem was at the rear of the army, riding along behind the last few carts of provisions in the long and winding column. He wore a thoughtful expression, leaning back in his saddle with a hand gently patting his horse’s flank as he hummed a tune.

“I just sent someone to find you,” he said by way of greeting.

Vlora waited by the road and then nudged her horse up next to his, letting them walk together. “Anything important?” she asked.

“Another of our rear scouts just reported in. The Dynize and Fatrastan field armies skirmished all afternoon, but it looks like they’ve made camp on either side of the river and are content to feel each other out – for now.”

“That could be ideal for us.”

“Could be,” Olem agreed. “Both armies have a handful of scouts following us. They want to know where we’re headed.”

That was decidedly not ideal. They couldn’t hide a whole army, of course, not even up in the Ironhook foothills, but she’d hoped to make a clean break that would keep their location a mystery for at least a few weeks. “How many horses did we keep for ourselves?”

“Sixty dragoons,” Olem said. “Everyone else went with Styke.”

Vlora chewed on the number, watching as Taniel rode over a nearby hill and joined them. “Leave twenty of them behind to set some ambushes,” she told Olem. “Scare off the scouts or delay them; just buy us a little more time until they figure out where we’re heading. I don’t want either the Fatrastans or Dynize following us to Yellow Creek.”

“Will do.”

“With any luck, the two armies will be so tied up with each other that we’re an afterthought. At least for now.” She glanced at Taniel, who’d hung his rifle from his saddle and pulled out a sketchbook. He began to sketch quickly, his eyes on the hillside to their left, expertly dashing bits of charcoal against the paper along with the cadence of his horse’s gait. “We have a problem,” she said to Olem.

“Which is?”

“We know nothing about what we’re walking into.”

“Yellow Creek?” Olem produced a prerolled cigarette from his pocket and offered it to Vlora, then to Taniel. They both shook their heads. He shrugged and lit it for himself. “It’s a gold-rush town. I’ve got nothing more than that.”

“That’s what Taniel said, too,” Vlora said, jerking her thumb at Taniel, who’d covered half the page of his sketchbook in charcoal markings in less than a minute. “But that doesn’t really help us.”

“What do you propose?” Olem asked.

Vlora hesitated. “You’re not going to like this.”

“You want to go ahead and scout it yourself, don’t you?” Olem ashed his cigarette and scowled at Vlora. “I definitely won’t like that.”

“We can’t just ride in at the head of an army. At best the locals will send runners to all the closest cities asking for help, thinking we’re trying to move in on their claims. At worst, we’ll run into a stubborn militia and won’t even be able to get into the town without bloodshed.”