Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

“Even if it gets you killed?”

“I’ve fought worse.”

“I know,” Taniel said softly, “but you’re my friend. I don’t want you to die.”

Vlora almost told him her thoughts, overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt over her mistrust of him. She bit her tongue. “I’m glad,” she managed.

Taniel paced the cell. “The Palo Nation definitely has a presence in the camp, but I can’t figure out how big. According to my Palo friend, their representative is an underling to one of the big bosses. Most of the Palo have aligned with Burt, so I’m guessing it’s one of his lieutenants. If I can get word without raising any suspicions, we might have ourselves some allies.”

“I would suggest,” Vlora said, “not telling the Palo Nation about the godstones.”

“I hadn’t intended on it,” Taniel replied. “Have you heard from Olem?”

“Nothing yet,” Vlora said. “They can’t be far off.”

Taniel took a deep breath and fell onto the cell bed, arms outstretched. He still wore long sleeves and his right glove to hide his reddened skin. Despite his earlier claim of not needing much sleep, he looked tired, with deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. She wondered what was going on with Ka-poel. Taniel claimed he could sense her, even at a distance. She imagined that was as stressful as it was useful.

Her own exhaustion – and separation from her lover and partner – were dragging at her. Her bruises hurt all the time; her body was exhausted from too little rest. She had to run a light powder trance and drink a bottle of wine just to think clearly.

Vlora turned to Taniel, remembering her thoughts about Prime from the other day. “You said the sorcerous compass Ka-poel gave you isn’t working?”

“That’s right,” Taniel responded. He chuckled. “Compass. Right. That makes sense. Well, it’s behaving like I’ve put a magnet underneath a real compass. I know that the stone is here, but it’s not pointing in any direction in particular.”

“Maybe that’s Prime’s doing.”

“How?”

“Perhaps Prime is hiding the stone on purpose, to keep anyone from finding it until he’s finished with it.”

Taniel stroked the two-week-old stubble growing on his chin. “That sounds right. So if you find Prime again, you can follow him to the stone.”

“I don’t want to find Prime. I want to find the stone, then deal with him once I have you with me.”

“That seems wiser,” Taniel said.

Vlora pushed herself away from the cell glass. She felt like a wagon stuck in a muddy rut, unable to pull out of it even with her best effort. She had to get back to work before she went mad. “I’m going,” she told him, holding up a single finger. “One week. You’ll be out without having to kill, and I’ll have found the stone.”

“One week,” Taniel agreed reluctantly.

Vlora left him there, ducking out of the jail and weaving into traffic, her eyes on the rooftops for the telltale puff of smoke from a fired rifle. By deciding to do this alone, she hoped she hadn’t just proclaimed her own death warrant.

Walking up the stairs of the Landfall City Morgue was the most painful thing that Michel had ever done.

He rested for as long as he dared – until early in the morning on the eleventh, when last night’s injection of mala had finally begun to wear off. Pulling himself out of the bed in a dark corner room of the underground morgue was almost painful enough to put him on his back, to not care if the entire Yaret Household was about to die to a Blackhat bombing. But he managed to make it out of the bed and even find a bit of horngum in Emerald’s laboratory before slipping out behind the backs of Emerald’s assistants.

“Slipping,” Michel considered as he climbed the stairs up to the street, was probably a poor word. He dragged himself along the walls, then along handrails, up every excruciating step. Emerald had been very clear that he shouldn’t move if he wanted to recover quickly – that leaving the morgue too early might put him back in it as a corpse. Emerald had also made it clear that he would keep Michel tied to the bed if he needed to.

But Michel didn’t have time for any of that. If he didn’t act, Yaret would die, and with him the Household. It would kill Michel’s best chance of finding Taniel’s elusive informant – and it would also kill people whom Michel had come to think of as friends.

Michel stopped on the second landing and bit off a piece of horngum large enough to make his mouth go numb almost instantly. It helped with the pain without dulling his senses, but he needed another bite after just two more flights of stairs.

He mentally detached himself from his body as he climbed, in a vain attempt to ignore the pain. It was something he did when he wanted to get into the right mind-set for a new job – when he had to become a totally different person. It involved floating mentally, a sort of forced high where he envisioned himself outside his earthly body looking in, trying to find a different perspective that would help him infiltrate the next mission.

In this case, he simply attempted to meditate, and he couldn’t help but consider the complexity of becoming these different people – that the man whom his Dynize allies would call Michel Bravis was a different man than the Blackhats, or Taniel, would refer to by the same name. They were all still him , of course, but … not. He couldn’t help but think of his mother, of deceiving her for all those years into thinking he was a loyal Blackhat when in fact he was still the Palo loyalist that she’d always wanted for a son.

He wondered if the guilt of that one deception was what drove him to keep climbing these stairs, even through the pain that cut past the vestiges of last night’s mala and a healthy chunk of horngum. Perhaps saving the Yaret Household – people who had taken him in, given him trust, and defended him to their own allies – would somehow absolve him of all the instances of so-called friends that he’d betrayed in the past.

At some point, he realized, he would have to betray Yaret. He would add Tenik, the Household, and all of Dynize to the long list of people who wanted to kill him.

But not yet.

He finally reached the top of the stairs and froze, staring at the open door of the morgue’s front entrance and Emerald, who had stopped with his foot halfway in, a loaf of bread under one arm.

“So you’re going, then?”

Michel couldn’t find the strength to speak. He nodded.

“You look paler than me. We have an elevator we use to bring the corpses up and down. I would have let you take it.”

“I didn’t think you were going to let me leave,” Michel managed, taking strength from a surge of anger. An elevator would have saved him so much pain.

Emerald nodded solemnly. “I would have advised you stay. But if you’re determined enough to climb five flights of stairs, I won’t stop you.” He tipped his hat. “Best of luck,” he said, heading down the stairs.

Michel hated Emerald for the extra little skip in his step, then pushed out the door and into the streets. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light and get his bearings. He would have to go directly to Yaret’s House in Chancellor’s Court. It was risky – either from running into Sedial’s people or because he might get caught in the blast himself.

Walking on flat ground was easier than up the stairs, but Michel still found himself moving with frustrating slowness. Each step seemed like another mountain to climb, and whenever he couldn’t find a wall to lean on, he was forced to concentrate just to keep from falling over.