Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

“But we have a building to trace for ownership records. More people to question who might know where he lives. You’ve got a damned good start. Now don’t foul it up.”

He carefully returned the lids to their spots, pressing down on the nails with the handle of his knife and hoping no one noticed they weren’t hammered. He finished the last and crept quietly back toward the trapdoor, wondering how he was going to flip the latch back shut behind him.

A sudden noise made him jump, and his heart leapt into his throat at the realization it was the lock on the bay doors. He threw caution to the wind and ran toward the trapdoor, lowering himself down and pulling the door shut over his head just as he heard the bay open up and the old Palo man’s voice say something muffled.

Michel let out a soft sigh. Well, that was that. Time to head back to his cab, and…

“We don’t like snoops, mister,” a voice said in Palo.

Michel spun awkwardly to find a Palo woman easily a foot taller than him with shoulders like an ox crouching just behind him. His feet scrambled for purchase in the soft, sandy peat beneath the warehouse, and he opened his mouth to let out a shout, only for her fist to connect hard with his jaw. His head jerked back and he caught himself on a pair of stilts, trying to grasp for his knuckledusters as the Palo woman’s fist rose and fell one more time.

The blow knocked the sense out of him, throwing him to the ground, and he could only watch, stunned, as she grabbed him by the leg and pulled him back toward the trapdoor. “I got him!” she shouted up. “Here, come take him. We don’t know if we’re being watched.”

Michel looked up into the faces of five Palo, including the old man, and felt himself lifted under the arms and handed up.

“Well,” he said, his eyes going in and out of focus. “Shit.”

“No,” Styke said.

He sat in the corner of the Loel’s Fort mess hall, watching as more than a thousand soldiers cleaned away the remains of dinner and broke out dice, darts, cards, and beer. He found himself impressed by the orderliness of the process, and how it contrasted with normal military procedure – sending the men out on the town for their entertainment – in a way that focused their attention inward. For any other military company such a habit might drive the men mad with cabin fever, but here it just seemed to build the bonds between them.

Styke glanced up at the young soldier in front of him. Well, he thought of the woman as young, but she was probably in her thirties, thin as a rail and looking sharp in her crimson uniform with its dark blue cuffs and the crossed muskets and shako of the Riflejacks pinned to her breast. By the pins on her lapel, she was a sergeant. She held her hat in one hand, as if in supplication, and gave Styke an almost flirtatious smile.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Word’s been going around about you, Mr. Styke, and the boys are itching to hear about the time you fought beside Taniel Two-shot. Most of us served with him in the Adran-Kez War, you know. We don’t know much about his time in Fatrasta.”

Styke rolled his tongue around in his cheek, considering. There was a time when he liked telling stories – when he liked being the center of attention in a hall full of heroes. Not anymore. His eyes found Lady Flint, sitting at the other end of the hall with Colonel Olem and surrounded by soldiers of all ranks, and he wondered what she’d think of hearing about the heroism of her dead ex-fiancé. “I don’t think –”

He was cut off by a tug on his sleeve. It was Celine, sitting beside him with her feet dangling from her chair, red sauce from tonight’s spiced mutton all over her cheeks. “I want to hear about it, Ben.”

Styke hesitated long enough for the sergeant to try again. “The rumor is you killed a Warden with your bare hands,” she said. There was a bit of a challenge to her smile, as if she suspected such a rumor was nothing more than soldierly bragging taken to the extreme. “Taniel Two-shot aside, we’d damn like to hear about that Warden.”

“Please,” Celine said, drawing the word out.

Styke sighed. This felt a lot like he was being ganged up on. He wondered if he could safely get out of this without having to make a fool out of himself, but dozens of glances were being tossed in his direction. This sergeant wasn’t acting alone. Word really had gotten around. He leaned over to Celine. “You get me that horngum I sent you out for earlier?” Celine handed him a package from a local apothecary, and he gratefully unwrapped it and broke off a bit of horngum root, tucking it into his cheek. Celine smiled up at him, and he wiped the sauce from the corners of her mouth with his sleeve. “All right,” he conceded.

The sergeant beamed at him, then turned around and put two fingers in her mouth, letting out a shrill whistle that brought silence on the hall. “Oi! We’re gonna get a story, lads!”

Styke felt a flutter in his belly as all eyes suddenly turned toward him. “Right,” he muttered to himself. “You’ve done this before, big man. Just tell it like it happened.” He went to the center of the room and climbed onto the longest table, looking around at the sea of crimson uniforms and grizzled faces. These weren’t green kids heading to war. These were veterans. And veterans were always harder to please. He fiddled with his ring – one of the few things that reminded him who and what he once had been – and locked eyes with Lady Flint from across the hall. She looked particularly unimpressed, and suddenly Styke decided he wanted to tell this story.

He drew his knife and pointed it at the sergeant, then raised his voice to be heard throughout the mess. “If you don’t know who I am, I’m Ben Styke. I was a lancer back during the Fatrastan War for Independence.”

“A Mad Lancer!” someone shouted from the back of the mess.

“Aye, that’s right. A Mad Lancer. But this story isn’t about them. It’s about Taniel Two-shot.”

There was a round of cheers, and the sergeant shushed everyone.

Styke continued. “I met Taniel Two-shot about a year into the war. I’d heard the rumors – some hotshot powder mage, the son of Field Marshal Tamas, making life miserable for the Kez army by killing any officer or Privileged to set foot in the Tristan Basin. I’ll be honest, I expected a green-faced squirt dappered up in local buckskins, strutting around the Tristan Basin like he owned the place. Which he was.”

A few chuckles rose from the back of the room.

“But by the time I got to him he was already a cold-blooded killer. I could see it in his eyes; smell the blood and powder on him from a mile away. He carried his father’s reputation on his shoulders like a millstone, but gods be damned if he had to. They called him Two-shot, a ghost of the Basin, and he earned his reputation with the blood of his enemies. I wish I could say I knew him well. I would have liked to. We rubbed shoulders less than a week before and after the Battle of Planth. I bought him a beer, because the son of a bitch had lost his wallet in the swamp.”

A few more laughs, these a little more enthusiastic.

“Some of you may have heard of the Battle of Planth, having spent time up in that neck of the woods yourselves. The official story spins a heroic last stand against all odds. What it doesn’t tell you is that the people of Planth were abandoned by the interim government and only Two-shot’s company decided to stay behind to give the people a fighting chance. It was going to be him and a few hundred of his irregulars against an entire brigade of Kez infantry. It was insane. He asked me to stay and” – Styke shrugged – “what could I say? They didn’t call me Mad Ben Styke for nothing.”