Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

“And?”

“Doesn’t look great. Any news from the Dynize?”

“Not a peep. I’d hoped you saw some sort of indication that they were ready to talk.”

Vlora turned back toward the ocean. The Dynize ships remained, quietly menacing, as if daring any of the unburned ships in port to make a run for it. “Not that I’ve heard. Do we have casualty reports?”

“Thirty-five hundred wounded, seven hundred dead.”

Vlora perked up. “That’s far better than I expected.”

“It’s only Riflejack numbers,” Olem responded sourly.

“Oh.” Vlora fought the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That meant that only a few hundred of her soldiers had escaped the battle unharmed. Recovery would be weeks at best, and they’d lose a number of the wounded to disease, infection, or blood loss. “The garrison?”

“The garrison,” Olem said slowly, “was hit hard. They’ve got fewer wounded than us, but about eight thousand dead. They’re not used to this kind of fighting.”

“Nobody is used to this kind of fighting,” Vlora responded, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it – soldiers that just would not break, no matter how many dead we piled in front of them. I saw Ka-poel a couple of hours ago. She told me that it was definitely blood magic, spread out across half a dozen bone-eyes. The ship Vallencian plowed into must have contained one of the more powerful practitioners, and his death shattered their concentration.”

“At least that’s a mystery solved.”

“I’m not sure I like knowing,” Vlora said. “All my training – pit, all Adran strategy – is based off breaking a less-well-trained enemy. If the enemy will not break, then how do we win?”

“We won yesterday.”

“Barely.”

“Can Ka-poel replicate the Dynize sorcery?”

“She’s powerful enough, that’s for sure. But she’s not formally trained. Everything she can do is self-taught, and she says providing a backbone to ten thousand men is a challenge she’s never even considered before. All her attention right now is focused on the godstone.”

“And?” Olem asked, ashing his cigarette and lowering himself with a groan to the sand beside Vlora.

“And what?” Vlora said with a frustrated shrug. “None of us are Privileged. The two remaining Privileged that the Blackhats left behind don’t want to go near the thing. We don’t know exactly what it is or how it works. I don’t even want to think about it.” She put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. “Speaking of the Blackhats…”

“We don’t know where they are,” Olem answered. “I sent out riders. Best guess is Lindet retreated to a safe distance and, once she finds out we’ve won, she’ll return to the city.”

“And bring thousands of angry, armed men with her.” Vlora gritted her teeth, wondering if she was strong enough for a power struggle so soon after the end of this battle. “I’ll kill her before I let her take control of the godstone.”

“Does she know that?”

“I told her as much when I threatened to arrest her.”

“So much for the element of surprise.” Olem flicked a cigarette butt toward the water. “I saw them carrying Vallencian toward the fort. They said he’s still alive.”

“For now,” Vlora responded.

“I’m going to go check on him. Come find me when you decide to stop watching them collect the bodies.”

Vlora helped Olem to his feet, then watched him head back toward Fort Nied, before attempting to collect herself emotionally. Seven hundred men dead. Too many names to memorize, but she’d read through the lists before they were laid to rest. She wondered if they had died hating her for putting them in front of the Dynize.

“They knew the risks. They signed up for the coin,” she told herself. “You didn’t bring a bunch of greenhorns out into the wild. You brought the best damned riflemen in the world, and it’s the only reason most of us are still alive today.”

Somewhere down the beach, members of the garrison had started a driftwood bonfire. Fire for the Dynize dead. Earth for the Riflejacks and garrison. The price of victory.

The price of saving a city of a million people.

Styke lay on his back in the long grass of a Fatrastan floodplain and stared up at the blue, cloudless sky, meditating on the events of the last two weeks. Somewhere off to his left Ibana was yelling at someone , though he couldn’t imagine who because the rest of the Mad Lancers were either laid up in the surgeries or off in the city looting Blackhat munitions depots. In his head, he imagined the look on Fidelis Jes’s face when he realized how much shit the lancers had managed to steal before the Blackhats returned to the city, and then he remembered that Fidelis Jes’s face was attached to a head in a bag, quite possibly still tied to Ibana’s saddle.

The thought brought a smile to Styke’s face. Jes’s corpse was probably already burning on a mass pyre, anonymous, with a thousand others south of the city. A fitting end for a man who dedicated his life to making sure everyone knew and feared him.

“What are you grinning about?”

Styke turned his head to find Ibana standing over him, hands on her hips, looking nonplussed. “Thinking about Jes.”

“Of course you are. By the way, that head is starting to stink. What do you want to do with it?”

“Would it be crass to ram it on the end of my lance and ride through Landfall all day tomorrow?”

“Sounds perfectly suitable to me. We have a problem, though.”

Styke sat up, fighting a brief dizzy spell. “What is it?”

“The Mad Lancers always ride with three hundred. We started off with two hundred and forty-three yesterday, and now we’re down to a little over a hundred and fifty. Where are we going to find more men?”

“That’s your job.”

“Like the pit it is,” Ibana said. She stalked away, then stalked back. Her pacing continued for a few moments before she stopped. “You know, those Riflejack cavalry were quite good.”

“I’m not sure what Flint would do to you if she found you recruiting from her ranks, but I wouldn’t blame her.”

“As if,” Ibana scoffed.

“You want to fight her?”

“… No.”

Styke turned, feeling the crack and pop of his spine, then lay back down on the soft grass. He took off his ring and rolled it over his fingertips, examining the scuffs and nicks in the silver, most of them too deep to polish out. “Didn’t think so. Find them somewhere else. In fact, what about those Blackhats that rode with us against the Dynize? Go round them up, see if a few have a spine.” He put his ring back on.

“I could try for one of those Privileged,” Ibana mused. “We haven’t had a Privileged with us since… I forget her name.”

“Jain? Jaim?” Styke asked. “I don’t remember, either. Pit, she was good-looking, though.”

Ibana kicked him in the ribs. He clutched at them, laughing, until it felt like the movement had burst a couple of stitches on his shoulder. He checked his shirt, noting a new splotch of blood, and went back to staring at the sky.

“Why the pit are you down there?” Ibana asked.

“Can’t smell the burning corpses,” Styke answered. Which was true. But he also liked the peacefulness of it, and the way that not a single cloud marred the sky and he was allowed, for the first time in more than a decade, just to lie there and do nothing. Besides, he was cut to pit, and it hurt to move.

“Ben!” a voice called.