Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

“Tan,” she said quietly.

“I know.” Taniel took a deep breath and bent to wipe his sword on Dorner’s body before handing it and his pistol to Vlora. “Get my rifle and pack out of my room,” he said to her. He showed his empty hands and belt to the sheriff and looked down at the bodies, dismayed. “I guess I am a smug prick. And you’re on your own until we can get this sorted out.”

The sheriff slowly put up her pistol. “You two are just a load of trouble, aren’t you?”

“Just trying to live our lives, ma’am,” Vlora said.

“We’ll get this sorted out before a judge,” the sheriff repeated, “and then I’ll ask you kindly to live those lives somewhere else. Understand?”

Vlora swore to herself, meeting Taniel’s gaze. This was going to be a problem, and both of them knew it. “How long will this take?” Taniel asked.

“Couple weeks.” The sheriff sniffed. “We’ve got just one judge and a damned lot of violence.”

Vlora could see in Taniel’s eyes that he was reconsidering his offer to go quietly. But the options were slim: Either he could sit in a cell for two weeks while Vlora searched on her own, or they could cut their way out through a lot of innocent people and end up being run out of town. She looked meaningfully at the sheriff and nodded.

“So be it,” Taniel said coldly.

The sheriff escorted Taniel out of the building, leaving Vlora alone with two corpses and a whole bunch of eyes staring at her. She left the rest of her wine and took Taniel’s weapons upstairs, then fetched his pack and stowed it in her own room.

She slipped out the back of the building, hoping to avoid any more unwanted attention. Halfway down the street she stopped and swore to herself, realizing that without that damned magical compass in Taniel’s head, she didn’t have a chance of finding anything. She muttered and swore to herself and continued on, trying to formulate a plan.

She found a secluded street in the Gurlish quarter and sat down in an alley to try and focus. She closed her eyes, and took a deep sniff of powder to enhance her senses and focus her mind. Once she was in a deep trance, she opened her third eye.

The world became a hazy, colorless place. Buildings and people seemed almost translucent, and she swept her gaze all around her looking for color. There was a little of it – small flames, like candles burning in windows, that she knew belonged to Knacked throughout the city. There were a few dozen of them, which was unsurprising considering the amount of money involved in such a town. Knacked, after all, were useful people.

There was nothing else, though. No bright flames of a Privileged, and none of the customary pastel smudges that indicated leftover sorcery. She tried to remember what the godstone in Landfall looked like in the Else, and realized that she’d never bothered to check. In the chaos of the battle and subsequent retreat, it had never even crossed her mind.

She cursed herself for her foolishness, and closed her third eye.

“I can’t do this on my own,” she said quietly to herself.

She returned to the main street and walked along, eyes on the signs above the storefronts. It wasn’t long until she found one that said EXPRESS MESSENGERS: YOUR LETTERS, CONFIDENTIAL AND GUARANTEED.

It was a company that she’d seen in Landfall, and she had made use of their services before. She went inside, where a single clerk waited behind a dusty desk, half-asleep with his chin resting on his fist. He roused himself as Vlora entered.

“Paper,” Vlora demanded.

She sat in the corner and penned a letter in Adran military code. She sprinkled the wet ink with black powder and then sealed it in wax with a signet ring she kept in her pocket. It was marked with the old symbol of the Riflejacks – a chevron over a powder horn. She gave the letter to the clerk.

“Where to?” he asked.

“That,” Vlora said, placing several coins on his desk, “might be difficult.”

She gave the clerk her hotel and room number in case of an answer and stepped out into the midmorning air, breathing in the stench. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bottle until Olem arrived with the army, but that didn’t seem like a very good use of her time. She needed a plan – any plan – that would keep her moving and looking.

Without Taniel’s sorcerous compass, she was going to have to depend on footwork. Luckily, she’d already done some thinking on the matter. She would walk each valley and examine each mine, combing the landscape under the pretense of looking for an employer who wasn’t the two big-boss fools here in town. It would be slow going, and there was a very real risk of attracting attention, but it was the best plan she had.

She would look for anything suspicious in this world and in the Else.

“Ma’am?”

Vlora was pulled out of her thoughts by a voice at her elbow. She turned and immediately stiffened, her hand falling to her sword arm. There was a Palo woman by her side, wearing a duster and tricorn, and the tight pants and loose shirt of a duelist. She was accompanied by seven men and women, most of them Palo, all wearing similar outfits and also armed with small swords.

Vlora ordered them in her mind, body prepared to work through the motions as she cut her way free of imminent violence. The process took her mere seconds, but it was interrupted by a friendly clearing of the woman’s throat.

She looked at Vlora’s sword hand. “No need for that, ma’am,” she said. “We’re here to talk.”

“About what?”

“Our boss wants to meet you.”

“And who is your boss?” She thought she had a pretty good idea.

“His name is Burt.”

Brown Bear Burt. Jezzy’s competition. Vlora considered her options. Eight against one were steep odds in a fair fight. She still had a buzz from her earlier sniff of powder, so she could probably take them without too much risk. But if even one was a skilled swordsman, she could be in trouble.

Her eyes narrowed as she realized that not one of them was carrying an ounce of powder. Odd, that. A coincidence? Or something else?

She thought of Taniel sitting in a cell in the Yellow Creek sheriff’s office, and decided that the mission had already taken a big enough hit. “When?” she asked.

“Right now, if that’s convenient.”

Vlora took her hand off her sword. “Then let’s get this over with.”

The Yellow Creek Picks, as they called themselves, were headquartered at a brothel not more than a few blocks from Vlora’s own hotel. It was on the edge of the Gurlish quarter, a sprawling, three-story wooden building with an enormous barroom and numerous hallways leading into the bowels of the establishment. Men and women of every nationality in various states of undress circled the room, chatting up the few miners who hadn’t yet left to tend to their claims.

Whores of both sexes eyed Vlora as she walked in, but she was spared the sales pitches and escorted straight upstairs to a spacious room that looked down onto the main floor of the brothel. The center of the room was taken up by a wide desk on top of the biggest bearskin Vlora had ever seen.

The man behind it, despite his name, looked nothing like a bear. Burt was only an inch or so taller than Vlora. He had flaming-red hair and muttonchops and a wiry build. He wore the kind of expensive suit Vlora only saw in the best parts of Landfall, with a gold chain hanging from the breast pocket and a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose. He had papers in one hand, reading them while toying with a big boz knife, the tip of which was buried in his gouged desk.

He set the paper down and looked up as Vlora came up the stairs. She waited for her escorts to take her weapons and frisk her, but instead the Palo guards retreated back down to the bar.