Blood of Empire

Chapter 20

Vlora’s quick march off the Cape of New Adopest was arrested by the arrival of a messenger from General Sabastenien. The messenger was a young man coated in sweat and dust, looking tired and vaguely shell-shocked. His salute was halfhearted and his horse was limping.

“Message from our cavalry, ma’am,” he said before he’d even come to a stop near Vlora and a small group of officers with whom she’d been conferring.

Vlora blinked at the messenger through a haze and wondered if she looked as tired and strung out as he did. She hadn’t slept in almost thirty-four hours. Olem’s abandonment was still forefront in her mind, despite all she’d done to bury it beneath loads of work. It took all of her energy just to keep her face neutral, her eyes dry, and her mind focused on the duties of commanding a field army. She wondered how she managed to stay upright in her saddle. “Report,” she barked.

“Yes, ma’am. We managed to catch up with the Dynize earlier today. Got in a few good hours of dogging their rearguard and harassing their train. Unfortunately they reached their reinforcements just a couple hours ago and we were forced to pull back when they about-faced on us.”

“Reinforcements?” Vlora echoed.

“Yes, ma’am. Another Dynize field army has joined them. They’ve arrayed themselves to give battle at a bit of hilly ground just as we’re coming off the Cape and onto the mainland. General Sabastenien says they’re trying to use the terrain to neutralize our superior cavalry.”

“It sounds that way.” This was one of the things Vlora had feared about heading onto the Cape in the first place – that the Dynize would try to bottle them up here. Now it had come true, and they were outnumbered two to one. She would have cursed herself for a fool if she didn’t know that the alternative would have been leaving Etepali to run rampant behind her. “Anything else?”

“General Sabastenien has found a defensible position for us to camp tonight and is waiting there – it’s about two miles from the head of the column. That’s all.”

“Good. Get some rest, Private. I’ll send one of my own messengers with a reply.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Vlora turned her attention back to her officers. They whispered among themselves, brows wrinkled, already talking strategy of fighting two field armies at once. She wondered if they blamed her for letting Etepali slip away. She certainly blamed herself.

“My friends,” she said, “you heard the report.”

“Yes, ma’am,” came the echoed reply.

“Any suggestions?”

A colonel whose name had slipped her mind said from the back, “We can just go around them. Call in the fleet to ferry us down the coast.”

“Maybe,” Vlora said, “but that’s risky. It’ll force us to break up our strength.”

“We can swing around to the north and try to hit them one army at a time,” someone else suggested.

“We’d have to be damned fast,” Vlora replied, shaking her head. She’d already decided to acknowledge Etepali as a clever commander, and that meant assuming she was smart enough to counter any of the simpler strategies that Vlora might attempt. The way she saw it, she had two choices: to punch them hard and fast, giving them little time to prepare; or to pull up into a defensible position and draw the enemy to her. The former was risky and would throw them right into the maw of an enemy that outnumbered them. The latter could waste precious weeks and depended on the general of this new field army to be aggressive and daft.

Vlora fell into her own thoughts, half listening while her senior officers discussed possible strategies. The only bright side to all of this was that none of them seemed particularly bothered by the idea of fighting a superior Dynize force. Several minutes passed while she listened and slowly grew alarmed by their cavalier attitude. She finally roused herself.

“Gentlemen and women,” she said loudly, quieting the group. “I’d like to remind you that while we have the edge on the Dynize technologically, they have more Privileged and they have bone-eyes. If any of you doubt the effectiveness of the bone-eyes, I invite you to speak with the officers from my mercenary company. They’ll tell you how the Dynize refused to break at Landfall.”

The group fell into a rocky silence.

“We’ll still beat them,” Vlora added, injecting as much confidence as she could bring to bear. “I would just prefer to do it with fewer casualties. So I remind you to not plan anything stupid in the assumption that we’re going to walk all over a bunch of backward savages. The Dynize are neither of those things.”

“Yes, ma’am,” came the chorus of answers.

She nodded for them to continue their planning, and turned forward in the saddle, ready to sink back into her own malaise. Every strategy she reached for, every plan she began to grasp, seemed to fall apart before she could fully get her head around it. Her mind kept turning to how much easier this would be with Olem at her side – a thought that made her feel angry and guilty all at once. She brought her head up and scanned the horizon for a distraction – any distraction – from her own brain.

Her eyes fell on a row occurring about a hundred yards away on the other side of the marching column. It was too far for her to make out the details of what was going on, but it seemed that at least a dozen of her cavalry were attempting to corner someone on horseback. One of her cavalry finally broke away, riding across the column and coming to join her.

“What’s going on, soldier?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the row.

“Sorry, ma’am. Wouldn’t normally bring this to you, but there’s some kind of incident with a local.”

“What kind of incident?”

“It’s a Palo, ma’am. Claims he knows you. Claims he has important intelligence for you.”

Vlora scowled. “And why didn’t you send him to me?”

“Well, he’s a Palo, ma’am.”

“And what difference does that make?”

The cavalryman opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked deeply uncomfortable. “I thought we didn’t have any allies among the natives, ma’am.”

Vlora grit her teeth and reminded herself that these soldiers were freshly arrived from the Nine, where Palo were still considered a backward curiosity. “Bring him here,” she ordered. “Wait, did this Palo give you a name?”

“Calls himself Burt, I think.”

“Brown Bear Burt?” Vlora asked, feeling her mind shed some of her exhaustion. “Never mind, take me to him. Now!”

She followed the cavalryman across the column to find Brown Bear Burt in the center of a knot of cavalry. He had a pistol in one hand, his boz knife in the other, and was gripping the reins with his teeth while he brandished both at the cavalry. He was sweaty, dusty, and worn, with a bloodstain on the left sleeve of his riding jacket. His horse looked worse than he did, favoring one leg and swaying badly.

“Lady Flint!” Vlora’s accompanying cavalryman announced loudly.

Vlora rode into the group. “What the damned pit is the meaning of this?” she demanded. “This man is my friend and a guest, and you will treat him as such! You, summon a medic. You, get him a fresh horse. Jump, god damn it!” The knot of cavalry scattered to the wind, leaving Vlora alone with Burt.

Burt spat his reins out of his mouth and let out a litany of curses in several different languages as he holstered his pistol and knife. “Your boys are seriously protective of you,” he finally said.

“I’m sorry, they –”

Burt waved away the apology. “Disheveled-looking foreigner armed to the teeth and demanding to see your commanding officer? Probably for the best.” He squinted and blinked at her. “You look like you got run over by a herd of cattle. What the pit happened to you?”

“Long story. Why are you here, Burt? I thought you were taking the trunk of the godstone up to the Palo Nation.”

Burt took a deep breath and stripped off his jacket, taking a good look at his arm. “Grazed,” he muttered. “Hurts like the pit.” The wound was recent.

“That’s not from my men, is it?” Vlora asked.

“No, no. Damned Dynize. They get itchy when you refuse to stop for their questions. I was escorting the godstone up north. But a whole lot happened after you left Yellow Creek.”

Vlora felt like a stiff wind might knock her off her horse at this point, and she could see the storm clouds in Burt’s eyes that heralded a whole lot of bad news. She gripped her saddle horn. “There wasn’t much left of Yellow Creek last I saw it.”

“And there’s nothing left now.” Burt spat into the dirt. “A few days after you left, a whole Dynize brigade rolled in. I’d left a few of my boys behind to keep an eye on things and they came and got me when the Dynize arrived.”

“Looking for the godstone?”

“That’s what we thought at first. They put the whole town to the sword. Butchered everyone. Men, women, children. Anyone they couldn’t catch they chased into the mountains. Then they brought in a handful of Privileged and began work on that scree slope below where Little Flerring busted up the godstone.”

Vlora stared at Burt, horrified. “Why?”

“They pulled something else out of the mountainside.” Burt sniffed. “Something hidden way down below the godstone.”

“Hidden?” Vlora echoed.

“Buried,” Burt corrected. “Probably not on purpose.”

“What was it?”

“Big old block of stone. Flat, like a mighty table. It looks just like the godstone, and I suspect that it’s a pedestal of some kind.”

Vlora ran her hands through her hair. The capstone was now with her fleet, and everyone who knew anything about it – Prime Lektor and Julene, specifically – were there protecting the damned thing. The root of the godstone had gone with Burt. So what was this new piece that the Dynize had found? If it was truly a pedestal, it might be integral to the godstone as a whole. She looked around for a messenger. “I need to talk to Prime,” she muttered.

“That Privileged from Yellow Creek?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a damned mind to hold his feet to the fire to find out if there’s something we – all of us – missed.” Burt seemed to push away his exhaustion, his face hardening. “Whatever it was, the Dynize killed a lot of my friends to hide it.”

Vlora searched her saddlebags and produced a canteen of rum, handing it to Burt. He took a swig, sputtered, and spat. “Kresimir on a cracker, I thought that was water.” Once he’d recovered, he took a more measured sip and handed the canteen back, wiping his face with his jacket. “Thanks, I needed that.”

“So what happened to the stone they pulled out of the mountain-side?” Vlora asked.

“They headed south,” Burt replied. “I was halfway across the Ironhooks when I got the message. Sent the rest of the godstone on to my people and grabbed what men I could and headed back. They were gone by the time we reached Yellow Creek – they dragged their prize to the Hadshaw and loaded it onto a keelboat. Made it about a hundred and fifty miles before we caught up to them.”

“You chased a Dynize brigade with a handful of irregulars?”

Burt eyeballed her. “You think I’m gonna let them get away with killing my friends? Of course we did. Managed to butcher a handful of them at a joint in the river, killed three of their Privileged, but lost a lot of my own boys.”

“Three Privileged,” Vlora said flatly.

“Yeah, three of the bastards. I subscribe to the Ben Styke theory of killing sorcerers: Hit them hard and hit them fast. Kill them before they can put their gloves on. Palo Nation irregulars are the best guerrilla fighters in the world, Flint.” He made a few motions as if drawing a map in the air. “We managed to get ahead of them and sink the keelboat hauling that pedestal, but like I said, we took a bad hit. What irregulars I have left are back there right now, harassing the shit out of the Dynize to keep them from recovering their prize. I’ve sent for backup, but when I found out you had an entire army over here, I thought you might be closer.”

“Shit,” Vlora said quietly, her mind racing. She pictured a map of the region in her head. “If you sank their keelboat about a hundred and fifty miles south of Yellow Creek, that means they’re… almost dead west of us right now.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve got two Dynize field armies between me and them.”

Burt grimaced, touching his arm. “I did notice that.”

One of Vlora’s soldiers returned with a medic. Vlora and Burt both dismounted, letting the medic clean and stitch Burt’s wound while another soldier brought him a new horse and went about switching saddles and bags between the two animals. “Don’t let that limp fool ya,” Burt told the soldier, “she’s still good to go. I want her back, so don’t go shooting her for the afternoon stew. Ow.” The medic pulled on the stitches and tied off a knot. Vlora dismissed her, leaving the two of them alone again.

“I’m not sure what I can do,” Vlora said hesitantly.

“I’m not, either,” Burt replied. “If I didn’t need the help, I wouldn’t ask for it. Whatever it is the Dynize got their hands on, they wanted it pretty bad, and that means I want to take it away.”

“I don’t disagree.” Vlora felt the beginning of a plan forming in the back of her head. “When did you sink that keelboat?”

“About eight days ago.”

“And how much longer do you think you can keep them occupied?”

“Maybe another week or two, if we’re lucky. They’re damned persistent and they’ve got readier access to their friends. I won’t be surprised if they already have a couple more brigades heading up river to help them.”

“No,” Vlora said thoughtfully. “Me neither.” Her mind was working overtime now, spinning through a hundred different possibilities. This was an opportunity to get ahead of the Dynize, to take away another vital piece of their sorcerous puzzle. She waved down one of her messengers. “Send word to the general staff,” she ordered. “Tell them that we’re going to bring the column up right against the Dynize camp.”

The messenger blinked in surprise. “Tonight, ma’am?”

“Yes, tonight. I want us camped on their front door, so close we can throw rocks at each other. Have my powder mages find the enemy Privileged immediately, and tell Bo and Nila I’ll have separate orders for them.” She paused, chewing over her half-formed plan. “Oh, and send someone to fetch Colonel Silvia. I want to know how many flares our artillery have.”