Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

“What are you going on about?” Ibana demanded.

Styke lifted his chin to the chaos, watching as Taniel Two-shot, no longer on horseback, used a bayoneted rifle to tear through a whole company of Dynize infantry on his own. It reminded him of the grace with which Lady Flint fought, though somehow quicker and more terrifying. “If you can’t break them,” he said.

“Grind their bones to dust beneath your hooves,” Ibana finished, not lifting her eyes from the wounded Riflejack. “Did we win?”

Between the Blackhat Privileged, the remaining cavalry, and Taniel, they were mopping up the last of the Dynize. It was a stark reminder of just how quickly sorcery changed the tide of battle, and how easily it could have been Styke’s bones turned to ash from a Dynize Privileged, if not for Two-shot to even the odds.

“Yeah,” he said, drawing his knife and kneeling down beside the Riflejack and sizing up the arm that needed to be amputated. “Bite down on your belt, son. This is gonna hurt, but it’ll be a cleaner cut. We won.”

Vlora stood in the prow of a longboat as it did a circuit through the water surrounding Fort Nied. The slow strokes of the rowers left barely any wake behind them yet still managed to stir corpses to the top of the water, their bloated forms facedown, bobbing gently, their teal uniforms stained by the blood still seeping from their bodies. Somewhere off her port side the water suddenly exploded in movement as sharks emerged to fight over a corpse. Riflemen behind her stood, took aim, and shot into the water. The foaming frenzy increased for several seconds and then died down to leave the bay placid, gentle waves lapping bodies toward the shore.

Vlora’s own body was a collection of aches, sharp pains, and developing bruises. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be trampled, and dug in her pocket for a powder charge, pinching just the slightest bit off the top and snorting it from between her fingers. The stitches in the shrapnel wound in her leg stopped throbbing.

“It’s a complete waste,” a voice said behind her.

“I disagree,” a second voice responded. “We can rebuild this wall without lessening the structural integrity of the fort.”

“Are you mad? We don’t have access to the kind of sorcery that made this fort as strong as it was. I say we level the whole thing and bring in the best stonemasons money can buy. We’ll build something better. With modern techniques we don’t even need sorcery to make the walls nearly impervious to straight shot.”

“You’ve been reading too much of that idiot Yaddel,” the second voice said. “Modern construction is incredible, but it can’t beat sorcery.”

“Yaddel is a visionary!”

“Yaddel is a quack.”

Vlora eyed the walls of Fort Nied, noting three complete breaches and at least fifteen spots of heavy damage. No doubt the engineers behind her saw more damage with their experienced eye. She gave a soft sigh at their arguing and tuned it out, glancing over the bay as some thirty or more longboats just like hers traversed the waters, fishing out corpses with hooks and nets, riflemen shooting every shark that surfaced.

Beyond the bay, well past the range of her few remaining cannons and the flotsam of what used to be their flotilla, the rest of the Dynize fleet sat at anchor, swarming with sailors making repairs. She counted just eight capital ships and two times that number in support frigates.

Since the Dynize army had finally routed last night, she hadn’t heard a word from Ka-sedial. No white flags. No suit for peace. Not even a request to barter for the dead and wounded. The Dynize fleet simply waited, and Vlora didn’t mind admitting to herself that their silence was unnerving.

She tried to forget it, at least for the moment. She and her men had won a damned hard battle last night, and she allowed a smile to creep onto her face. The melancholy that gripped her now would be gone in a few days’ time, and her head would be back to the logistics of running an army – providing food, shelter, and pay, and bringing their numbers back to a full brigade.

She scowled at the Landfall docks and the smoke still rising from several destroyed ships. Only a few remained untouched by the fires, while dozens were a complete loss, no doubt representing the imminent bankruptcy of several shipping companies. Fortunately, none of that was her problem.

Vlora’s absent-minded inspection of the fort and environs suddenly focused on a body washed up on the shore not far from the causeway that attached Fort Nied to the mainland. She turned to her rowers. “Over there,” she ordered.

“But ma’am,” an engineer said, “we’re not done with our inspection of the fort.”

“You can finish after you drop me off,” Vlora said. “I want a full report by the end of the evening – one from each of you.” Conscious of the sharks prowling beneath the layer of flotsam and bodies, she waited until the longboat had reached the shallows, then she leapt into the water. She waded ashore and fell on her knees beside a body.

It belonged to an enormous man with a dark, soaked beard, colorful clothes, and the thick tatters of a bearskin still clinging to his shoulders. His face was pale as death, his chest still.

“Damn it, Vallencian,” Vlora muttered, feeling the first real pang of horror that had struck her through the sea of bodies. “You were about the only decent person in this whole damned city.” She called to a nearby squad from the garrison that was sorting corpses by uniform on the rocky beach. A sergeant with a squat, ugly face and shaved head waddled over, hooked spear thrown over his shoulder.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“This is one of mine,” she said. “I want him put in the morgue with the other Riflejack officers.”

The sergeant scowled appraisingly at the body. “Right you are, ma’am, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to put him in the morgue.”

“Why not?”

The sergeant produced a mirror from his pocket and knelt down, thrusting the mirror up in front of Vallencian’s nose. A thin film of fog appeared. “Because he’s not dead.”

Vlora felt a wave of relief sweep over her. Finally, some good news. “He’s half-drowned. Get me a surgeon. Go!”

The sergeant scurried off, and Vlora bent over Vallencian, searching his chest for the barest hint of movement. If she held very still, and squinted, she could see it. “Crashed one of your ships into the Dynize and then managed to swim all the way back against the tide. You’re a damned workhorse, you know that?”

One of the garrison doctors soon arrived with assistants. He pumped Vallencian’s lungs carefully with glass tubing, then they carried him back toward Fort Nied on a stretcher. Vlora remained out on the beach, telling herself that she should accompany Vallencian until she knew whether he was going to survive, but unwilling to watch him die if it came to that.

The shadows began to grow long, and Vlora smelled the familiar scent of tobacco before she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. She turned to find Olem picking his way gingerly over the rocky terrain, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling.

“Glad to see you’re up and walking,” Vlora said.

“I’m not glad to see you are,” Olem replied. “You should be resting.”

“There’s work to be done.”

“Like standing out here, staring at the bodies?”

Vlora snorted. She wanted to reach out and take Olem by the hand, retire to a hotel room up on the plateau, and spend the next two weeks with him recovering in each other’s arms. “I went with the engineers to examine Nied’s fortifications from the water.”