Sins of Empire

Chapter 31

“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.”

Styke could see he had everyone’s undivided attention now. He might be bent and old, but he knew how much soldiers loved a good story. He turned around slowly, pointing his knife at the Riflejacks. “Taniel Two-shot spent three days evening the odds by putting a bullet in the head of every Privileged sorcerer in the Kez ranks. Took out a few officers, too. And a Warden, one of those sorcery-spawned killers. The day of the battle came and our little lot drew up in front of the city. The lancers took the center, the garrison took the wings, and the irregulars came down the river to flank the enemy.” Styke looked at his knife, remembering the close fighting in the Basin, remembering the weight of the armor on his shoulders, the stirrups on his feet, the power of Deshner charging unchallenged across an open field. He felt tears in the corners of his eyes and blinked them away. His next words were quieter, and he could see the strain on the soldiers’ faces as they leaned forward to hear them.

“You’ve never seen anything until you’ve witnessed three hundred lancers, wearing heavy plate you only hear about in legends, ride through enemy grapeshot like it was nothing more than rain. We hit them hard in the center and the garrison came in after us. I broke my lance on a Kez gunner and lost one of my swords fighting a colonel. It was as bloody a melee as I can remember, and we cut our way through to the general’s bodyguard all the way to the rear.

“That’s where I saw Two-shot. He’d brought his men around to flank and opened fire on the enemy rear, sowing confusion. The enemy general broke and ran, and me and a few of my lancers gave chase. What we didn’t know was that we had pursuers of our own, and by the time we caught up with the general, two Wardens had caught up with us.”

There was a chorus of boos. “Yeah,” Styke said. “You know those sorcery-spawned assholes. I bet a few of you have lost friends to them. Well, I lost two of my best to those trash, and I would have gone down myself had Taniel not put a bullet in the head of one of those bastards. He saved my life that day, and for that I’ll always be in his debt.”

Silence lay over the mess hall for several moments before someone shouted, “He saved mine!”

“And mine, too!” someone else shouted.

The whole hall was suddenly filled with the sound of cheers and applause, and Styke felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. It was good to feel that kind of brotherhood again – the respect of soldiers. He turned to climb down from the table, but was stopped by a shout.

“What happened to the other Warden?”

“I once watched a Warden carve through thirty grenadiers before they took him down!” someone else said.

“I saw one get hit by straight shot from an eight-pounder and keep going.”

“Shut up, everyone!” the sergeant shouted. “Yeah, Styke, what happened to him?”

Everything quieted down, the soldiers fixated on Styke. Styke’s attention, though, was drawn toward the door, where a concerned-looking infantryman had rushed over to Lady Flint and was whispering in her ear. Flint stood up, gesturing to Olem, then said across the quiet hall, “There’s a dragonman in the muster yard. He’s looking for you.”

Styke’s hand fell to the handle of the bone knife at his belt, then he drew his own and got down from the table. “Celine,” Styke said. “Stay here.”

Styke joined Flint outside the mess, where the white-knuckled grip on her sword gave away the anger behind a stony, expressionless facade.

The dragonman sat in the dirt just inside the fort gates, ignoring the guards and their lowered bayonets like a cat might ignore squawking birds that he may later kill at his pleasure. He wore a heavy canvas duster, under which Styke could clearly see the rippled, dark green swamp dragon hide. A pair of bone axes lay on the ground beside him, discarded as if unimportant. Styke felt a tingle on his spine at the sight of the legendary gear, and wondered if he’d made an enormous mistake.

“So,” Flint said through a clenched jaw, “you weren’t spinning a yarn, were you? These bastards really are in Landfall.”

Styke resisted the urge to let out an I told you so and instead nodded.

“What’s he doing in my camp?”

Styke looked down at her grip on her sword. Unless he was mistaken, she was more than ready to handle this herself. “I invited him.”

“You what?”

“I’m old. I’m crippled. I’m not chasing this bastard around Landfall. I told him if he wanted to get his knife back he had to come get it.”

“What knife? You’ll forgive me for being annoyed, but the last one of them I saw had just carved up forty of my men. I’m going to put a bullet in his head.”

Styke put a hand gently on Lady Flint’s arm. “This is… personal.”

“You’re damn right it is.” Flint took a step forward.

“No,” Styke said, pulling her back by the shoulder.

“If you lay a hand on –”

“If you try to keep me from doing my job,” Styke growled, “you’ll have to go through me and then the dragonman. You gave me a task. Let me finish it.” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and limped toward the dragonman, stopping in the middle of the muster yard. He rubbed his leg, hoping the horngum would keep him limber enough for a fight.

The dragonman watched him for a few moments, lounging on his elbow like he was having a country picnic. He finally got to his feet, shrugged out of his duster, and collected his bone axes. The swamp dragon armor comprised a breastplate, leaving toned arms bare, and a skirt of leather strips that went down to his knees. His legs and arms were crisscrossed with black tattoos, giving an outfit that might have looked silly on another man a particularly sinister effect.

Styke took the bone knife from his belt and held it up. “Kushel, was it?”

Kushel’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know my name?”

“You have two ways to get your knife back,” Styke said. “You can either tell me what these godstone things are that you’re looking for, and what designs you Dynize pricks have for Landfall, or you can fight me for it.”

Kushel openly scoffed. “You know a lot more than when we last spoke, Ben Styke. What makes you think I plan on letting anyone in this compound leave here alive?”

“Your friend up in the Basin only took out forty of Flint’s men. Impressive for one man, I’ll grant you, but you think you’re going to handle their pissed-off friends?” Behind him, Styke could hear the soldiers pouring out of the mess hall and lining up to watch the confrontation. “Tell me what I want to hear and you’ll walk out of here without a scuff on that pretty armor.” Styke thought back on those Palo kids at Mama Sender’s, about how they were too stupid to back down in the face of a man clearly unafraid of being outnumbered. He wondered if he was making the same mistake.

Probably.

Kushel’s eyes made a slow, mechanical circuit of the yard, noting guards in their towers and up on the wall, and lingering on Lady Flint before finally coming to rest on Styke. Styke recognized the gears turning in Kushel’s head. He’d made the same calculations on a thousand different occasions. Can I walk out of this alive? The slight upturn at the corners of his mouth said that he’d decided he could.

What an arrogant prick.

“Fight?” Styke asked. “You can pry this out of my old, crippled hand.” He gripped the bone knife with his mangled hand and his boz knife with his good, and put his weight back on his right leg. He’d barely fallen into a stance when the dragonman suddenly leapt forward.

Styke had fought a lot of quick men in his time, from duelists to bona fide assassins. But he’d never seen someone cover twenty feet in the blink of an eye like that. Kushel’s axes rose and fell, the left swinging down from overhead, the right swooping in for Styke’s belly.

Styke surprised both of them by catching each blow on a knife blade, then blocking a second and the third. Kushel recovered quickly each time, pulling back to strike with the speed of an adder, each new attack coming with independent precision that would have marveled Styke had he the time to be impressed. All his focus went into reacting, catching, and redirecting, and for almost twenty seconds he fell back beneath a flurry of blows, unable to even manage a riposte. Kushel scored cuts across Styke’s arms and chest, and Styke barely managed to keep them from biting deep.

Styke knew he was old and out of practice, but wondered if even in his prime he would have been able to match Kushel’s speed. Only the weight of the weapons – Kushel’s heavier, more cumbersome axes against Styke’s knives – allowed him to keep up at all. The attacks came on relentlessly, each hit seemingly more powerful than the last, and Styke’s crippled hand began to numb from the effort of blocking them.

That all changed when a twinge in his wrist fouled a block, and Kushel’s ax bit into the bone of one of Styke’s fingers. He released his grip on the bone knife with a yell of dismay, watching it fly into the dust ahead of an arc of blood.

The next strike came for his unarmed left. Styke snatched the ax by the haft and turned his fighting knife to pass beneath the blade of Kushel’s other ax, allowing the blade to draw a long, crimson line down his arm. Kushel tried to stretch the advantage, pushing his ax into Styke’s chest, but Styke did two things at once:

First, he slammed his forehead into Kushel’s nose. Second, he twisted his knife and drew back. The blade slid along the polished bone haft of Kushel’s ax and, with a final jerk, severed Kushel’s thumb and four fingers.

The dragonman reeled back, stunned, but even with a destroyed hand managed to dodge Styke’s next thrust. They each had one good hand and one weapon now, and Kushel jammed the stubs of his fingers against his side to try to stanch the blood, doing it all without comment or cry, which in itself was more than a little unnerving. He came on hard, ax crashing against Styke’s knife, working inside Styke’s guard with both blade and haft, leaving Styke’s chin and chest bloody and bruised.

Styke’s own crippled hand was slick with blood, and each time he tried to catch Kushel’s ax it slipped out of his grip until he finally managed to hook it with his knife and pull back.

Kushel had learned that trick, and this time let the ax go instead of losing his fingers. He suddenly dropped low, kicking at Styke’s knee. Styke grunted, unable to keep himself from toppling into the dust, trapping his knife hand beneath him as Kushel leapt on top of him. Kushel’s bloody finger stumps were suddenly thrust in his face, the blood stinging his eyes, and Styke grasped blindly for something – anything – until he wrapped his fingers around the lip of Kushel’s blood-slick armor.

He used the grip to roll Kushel beneath him, freeing his arm, and pressed the point of his knife firmly against Kushel’s armor before using every bit of his strength to shove through the tough leather.

Kushel gave a choking sound as Styke pushed the knife to the hilt against his armor, yet still the dragonman fought on, weakening blows pounding against Styke’s stomach and face. Styke let go of his knife and grit his teeth, grasping Kushel by the head and pulling him close. “Stop. Fighting.” Kushel spat a mouthful of blood. Styke wiped it from his face and got to one knee, holding Kushel down with his crippled hand and drawing back the fist of his other.

“Wait!” Flint suddenly shouted. “We need him alive!”

Styke looked down at the knife in Kushel’s bowels and the bloody, dusty ground around them. With the right attention Kushel might live a day, maybe two, in horrible agony. “You fought well,” he said, “but a warrior doesn’t threaten a little girl.” He brought his fist down with all his might, caving in the top of Kushel’s skull like an eggshell.

Styke knelt in the gore for several moments, his chest rising and falling, as he tried to gather himself. Blood and brains dripped from his fingers, a crimson smile in the empty eyes of the skull on his lancer’s ring. Ten years since the last time he truly feared for his life in a fight. Ten years since anyone had matched him in strength. He was suddenly aware of the absence of sound, and lifted his head to see a thousand sets of eyes glued to him. Soldiers crowded the muster yard, watching him from the walls, and the roof of the staff office. A cigarette hung, unlit, from the corner of Olem’s open mouth and Lady Flint regarded Styke with an appraising look, her mouth pressed into a hard line.

Slowly, feeling all the aches and twinges he’d ignored during the fight and several dozen cuts and bruises he’d received during it, Styke got to his feet. He collected one of the bone axes and walked over to Flint, holding it out. “For your men that died fighting this asshole’s friend.”

“Thanks.” Flint took the ax, flipping it from side to side to examine the blade before lowering it. “He was our link to the Dynize in Landfall.”

“There will be more,” Styke said.

“Says who?”

“The spirits told me.”

Flint didn’t seem to be able to tell whether that was supposed to be a joke. Styke wasn’t sure himself. “Tell me,” Flint said, “what did you do to the second Warden? The one Two-shot didn’t kill?”

“I punched his teeth in,” Styke said, remembering the hot breath of the sorcery-twisted creature and the thick muscles that moved like snakes in his grip. “Then I broke his spine.”

Styke limped toward the mess hall. He needed to get cleaned up, then find Celine. Part of him hoped she hadn’t just seen that. The adrenaline began to subside and he felt sick from the absence of it and the overwhelming stench of death. But deep down, his heart sang.

He was still Mad Ben Styke, and he would not be trifled with.

Styke was halfway to the mess hall when a voice suddenly called out from the gate. “I’m looking for Ben Styke! Where is Ben Styke?”

“What the pit is it now?” Styke asked, turning around slowly. He came up short at the sight of a boy wearing a smith’s smock with the words “Fles and Fles Blades” emblazoned in the corner.

“Are you Ben Styke?” the boy asked.

“Who wants to know?”

The boy licked his lips, his face white. “Jackal said I could find you here. It’s Old Man Fles, sir. The Blackhats, they…”

Styke was already running past the boy, ignoring the hundred pains in his body, before the boy could finish the sentence. “Olem,” he shouted over his shoulder, “keep Celine safe!”