Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

“Marhoush is waiting on the bench there – don’t look!” Michel told Tenik. “Whoever he’s meeting hasn’t arrived yet, and will probably wait for your soldiers to go before they approach.” Michel kept walking at a leisurely stroll. After he reached the midpoint, he stopped behind a tree and kicked at a rock, hands in his pockets like any loitering Palo on a hot afternoon. “Flip your coin,” he told Tenik.

They had to wait only a few moments before a figure approached Marhoush, sitting down on the bench next to him. Michel watched out of the corner of his eye for a moment, then moved a few dozen yards down the road to get a profile look of Marhoush’s contact. He slid the soldier’s looking glass from his sleeve and held it up to his eye. He blinked, rubbed the lens, and looked again.

Without a word, he handed the glass to Tenik.

The figure sitting next to Marhoush was one who had burned herself into Michel’s memory a week earlier. She had a soft face and medium-length red hair, and she lounged with a casual ease next to Marhoush. She was dressed like a Palo in a low-quality brown cotton suit. It was, without a doubt, Devin-Forgula.

“Why is she meeting with a Silver Rose?” Michel whispered.

“I have no idea.”

“Do we bring her in?” Michel asked.

Tenik lingered with the looking glass to his eye for an uncomfortably long time before finally lowering it. His face looked like he’d just eaten an unripe lime. “You’re certain that this Marhoush is still a loyal Blackhat?”

“Mostly certain,” Michel replied.

“ Mostly .” Tenik chewed on the word. After a few moments, he said, “No. She is one of Sedial’s and if we make accusations we must be prepared to back them up. We take this to Yaret as soon as he can see us.”

Styke, Ka-poel, and Celine arrived in a tiny town called Granalia a few days after leaving Tenny Wiles. Granalia was nestled between two forested hills in eastern Fatrasta, and though it was a long way from Landfall, it appeared to be abandoned as they came over the hill and rode down the main street.

“Ka-poel is going to teach me her sign language,” Celine told Styke proudly.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. That way she won’t have to write everything down. I can translate for her.”

“And when did you decide that?”

“This morning, when you were taking a piss.”

Styke rolled his eyes. It would, he admitted, be useful to have a translator. Celine was a quick girl – she already knew Adran, plus a lot of Palo and Kez and a smattering of half a dozen other languages. He had little doubt she would be able to pick up a sign language in no time.

As they drew closer, Styke was surprised to find signs of violence: doors hanging from broken hinges, smashed locks. He dismounted to examine a few of the buildings, only to find the inside of the pub a mess of broken bottles. The general store was cleared of anything useful, as were all the houses and shops. He found a half-eaten meal on more than one table and sniffed at the fly-covered contents. Whatever had happened here was recent.

“They haven’t been gone for more than a couple of days,” Styke said as Celine followed him into one of the houses.

She frowned at the contents of the table. “I don’t like this town. I gives me the creeps.”

“It’s just empty,” Styke told her. “Nothing here is going to hurt you.”

“I didn’t say anything would hurt me,” Celine replied defiantly. “I just said it gives me the creeps.” She rubbed her arms, looking around, and followed closely when Styke went back outside. “How long do we have to stay?”

“Until the Mad Lancers catch up. They should be here today, tomorrow at the latest.”

“What if they already passed?”

“I’d see signs of a thousand cavalry having passed through town.” Styke returned to Amrec and rubbed his nose. He wouldn’t admit it, but the empty town had unsettled him. They were far from Landfall – much closer to Little Starland – and if the Dynize were raiding all the way up here, it meant that Jackal’s spirits were right about the fall of the other big coastal cities.

If things were serious enough, it might spell trouble for the Mad Lancers.

He turned his attention to Ka-poel, who squatted in the dirt road, running her fingers through the ruts from a wagon wheel.

“Any idea what happened here?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“The Dynize obviously took the people who lived here,” Styke said. “But we haven’t seen any evidence of that anywhere else. Why take these people?”

Only silence answered his question. Ka-poel touched her fingers to a spot on the ground and crossed over to Styke, showing him the gooey blackness on her fingertips. Blood, a couple days old. She seemed to feel at the air with those two fingers, then led them around the back of the church to a small, fenced-off graveyard, where someone had neatly stacked half a dozen bodies like firewood.

The smell hit them as soon as they rounded the building, and Styke was surprised he hadn’t caught it earlier. The corpses stank of shit and death, coated in flies as thick as molasses. Piling them unburied in a graveyard seemed like someone’s idea of a twisted joke.

Styke appreciated that kind of humor.

Ka-poel wiped the old blood off her hands on the grass, then cleaned her fingers with a handkerchief and pulled out her chalkboard. They did not resist, she wrote.

That was Styke’s first impression as well. He stepped over the graveyard fence to get a closer look and was surprised when Celine followed him. Maybe the place genuinely did spook her. Bodies, on the other hand, were something she’d grown used to.

He squatted beside the pile, running his eyes over them. If this had been a normal raid, or a looting gone bad, the bodies would have been left where they’d fallen, not stacked here in a bizarrely orderly fashion. These men and women had been executed – some with musket blasts to the back of the head and others bayoneted to death. They hadn’t fought back.

It had to be the Dynize. But this town was much bigger than six people. Why lead off the rest, but not these?

Ka-poel joined him, writing something on her slate. This is a Palo town.

“So?” Styke asked.

She pointed at the corpses, forcing him to look once more. Slowly, it dawned on him. The dead were all Kressians. “So they killed the Kressians but led away the Palo?”

Ka-poel nodded.

“Why?”

She shook her head. A few moments passed, and she headed off on her own, poking around in the grass and walking into one of the nearby houses – no doubt looking for clues as to the fate of the town. Styke remained with the bodies for a moment, studying them thoughtfully, then did a circuit of the church.

He wandered through several more buildings in a half-hearted bid to discover a survivor before finally giving up and returning to the front stoop of the general store with an overlooked bottle of gin and a fresh horngum root from the apothecary’s garden at the end of the street.

He broke off a piece of horngum and chewed it thoughtfully, feeling the numbness spread through his jaw. After a swig of gin the numbness spread to his back, hips, and ass to happily relieve so many weeks of riding tension. He leaned back on the stoop and offered the gin to Celine. She took a sniff of the bottle, shaking her head.

The silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves in the distance. He listened to them approach, waiting for the shout of one of Ibana’s scouts.