Brian McCLELLAN - The Autumn Republic

He set his musket carefully down on the bank of the stream and took three long steps forward, snaking one arm around the soldier’s neck and putting the other against the base of her spine. He squeezed instantly, flexing his arm to cut off the flow of air and blood to the brain.

She made a quiet choking noise and dropped her rifle with a clatter into the stream. Taniel’s heart leapt at the sound, and he watched over her shoulder for signs of alarm in the camp below them while he counted quietly in his head.

Twenty seconds for unconsciousness. Four minutes to be sure of a kill.

Her desperate clawing slacked off after just eight seconds. Taniel continued to count, and when it was apparent that no alarm would be raised, he squeezed his eyes shut.

Why should he spare any of these soldiers who were hunting him? If a single one lived through the night, they’d raise the alarm with the company back down the valley and Taniel would have two hundred men or more coming straight for him. For Ka-poel.

The soldier stopped struggling entirely at eighteen seconds. Taniel kept his grip tight, pulling her close. The killer’s embrace, Tamas had called it.

He felt moisture on his cheeks.

He remembered a time not so long ago, in the mountains far to the east of here, looking down the barrel of his rifle at his best friend, marked for death because he was a Privileged sorcerer.

At thirty seconds he let go of the woman, his rage not enough to fuel his strength. He let her sag in his arms and lowered her gently down to the bank of the stream.

A hand over her mouth felt her shallow breathing. Taniel cursed his weakness and made his way quickly down and around the camp. He paused once when one of the sleeping soldiers stirred, but the soldier merely mumbled something unintelligible and rolled over, going back to sleep.

Taniel could hear his heart thumping in his ears. His original plan, tenuous at best, relied on removing the sentries and then killing them all in their sleep. Brutal, but efficient.

Now what could he do? They’d wake in the morning and find they’d been attacked. They would know they had found him, and what would his attack have accomplished? Nothing.

His steps became hurried and careless as he approached the second sentry from behind. A rock turned, the scree moved, and Taniel cursed out loud.

The man turned toward him, a question on his lips.

Taniel sprinted forward and slammed a fist against the base of the soldier’s jaw. Taniel snatched at the front of his uniform and caught his air rifle as it dropped. The man slumped to the ground.

Taniel examined the man at his feet as the moon flashed briefly from behind a cloud. The sentry’s features were soft, young, unworn by years on campaign. He looked about eighteen. A recruit?

He picked up the soldier’s air rifle, running his hands over the length. It had a long, smoothbore barrel not unlike a musket, with a firing mechanism where the flintlock would be and a rounded air canister instead of a stock. Terrible weapons to a powder mage, their expense and unreliability had kept them from becoming more common in the Kez army. Tamas had banned them completely from Adro.

To break the mechanism on the weapon was no terrible difficulty. But Taniel needed to send a message.

He held his hand up to the night sky, looking at the moonlight through the gaps in his fingers. He remembered killing those Adran soldiers – the Dredgers. Remembered putting his hand into the man’s mouth after he spoke of raping Ka-poel and curling his fingers around his teeth, grasping and pulling. He remembered feeling the tendons of the man’s jaw snap as he’d ripped his jawbone from his body.

And all of that without the powder. Only his rage and Ka-poel’s strange sorcery to spur him on.

Taniel grasped the barrel of the air rifle in both hands and flexed. Slowly, the barrel gave way. He bent it all the way to a right angle, his muscles screaming in protest at the force required.

He then snuck back up to the camp. He found a burlap sack and gathered all of the air canisters, then stripped the men of their rations and kits – he gathered a knife, a sword, and enough food to feed himself and Ka-poel for over a month.

He left them all sleeping soundly in their bedrolls. They’d wake in the morning – or when their sentries regained consciousness – to find themselves robbed.

And in the center of their camp, just beside the fire, a neat pile of eleven air rifles, each of them bent into an L-shape.

Nila waited northwest of the Adran camp, her dress damp from the grass beneath her. The stars above were hidden by a veil of clouds, and despite the thousands of cook fires in the camp to the southeast and Bo’s warm body by her side, she felt utterly alone in the wilderness.

During the day she knew she would have seen the plains of southern Adopest stretching all the way to the mighty Black Tar Forest that skirted the Charwood Pile Mountain Range to their west. To the east was the Adsea, and the Adran Mountains to the south that separated Adro and Kez.

She had once been told that they were called the Adran Mountains by Adro and the Kresim Mountains by Kez. She rubbed her hands together to get them warm and wondered how these mountains were labeled in the maps of those outside of Adro or Kez. The autumn chill was here and the leaves would fall from their trees any week now. All her clothes were in the luggage on top of their carriage where they’d left it in the Adran camp.

And inside that was the corpse of an assassin with a melted face.

“Are you still going to help Adamat find his son?” she asked. It occurred to her, just after she’d spoken, that if Bo was willing to lie to Adamat, he wouldn’t hesitate to hide the truth from her.

Bo shifted beside her. They had slipped out of the camp with little trouble, some trick of Bo’s sorcery, stepping around soldiers and sentries as if they were invisible. He hadn’t said much since then.

“I keep my word,” Bo said. The slight hesitation. The regret in his voice. He didn’t want to .

“You’re thinking you shouldn’t have brought Adamat and Oldrich along in the first place,” Nila said quietly.

Bo snorted but said nothing.

“Well?”

“Of course I am. It proved nothing but a complication. Certainly it got us a meeting with Hilanska, but I only endangered their lives and made it harder for us to get anything done. On my own I could have slipped into the camp, tortured a few key people for information, and gotten out again.”

It was odd the way Bo expressed regret over endangering the lives of those men in one breath and spoke of torturing innocent soldiers in the next. In Nila’s mind those two items were mutually exclusive, and yet she still thought of Bo as a good man. Was she wrong, or was it more complicated than that?

Bo waved a hand dismissively, as if in response to something she didn’t say. “He’s out of harm’s way by now.”

“Can you be sure?”

“The missing prisoners have certainly been discovered,” Bo said. “If Hilanska wanted to make much ado about it, there would be search parties combing these fields already. Perhaps riders going after Colonel Etan. No. Hilanska will sweep it under the rug. Perhaps he doesn’t have the time or manpower to organize a search.” Bo’s head tilted toward Nila and she thought she could make out the shadow of a smile on his face. “Perhaps the assassin with a melted head has discouraged pursuit.”

Nila cleared her throat. She didn’t want to talk about that. Pit, she didn’t want to remember that. The feel of the man’s skull giving way beneath her burning hand would give her nightmares for months. She shuddered. “What are we watching for out here?”