Wrath of Empire

Chapter 7

Vlora stood on the dark slopes of the Hadshaw River Valley with a half-empty skin of watered wine dangling from one hand. She hugged herself, Olem’s jacket thrown over her shoulders, and stared into the darkness. The garment, smelling of Olem’s sweat, cologne, and favorite tobacco, had a comforting effect that allowed her to think about the last few weeks without becoming overwhelmed.

Two days had passed since what the soldiers had taken to calling the Battle of Windy River. Two days since the Second Dynize Army had been spotted, and two days since a Fatrastan colonel had served her with a warrant of arrest from Lady Chancellor Lindet.

It was a stupid gesture, of course. Both Vlora and Lindet knew she wasn’t going to accept the warrant and come along quietly. The colonel had given her the papers and returned to his own army, and Vlora suspected that the paper was simple ceremony – something to tell the Fatrastan soldiers that the mercenary defender of Landfall had done something to lose Lindet’s favor.

Vlora sipped her wine. She’d not slept well for almost a month. Her eyes were tired, her body sagging. She refused to take powder until she actually needed it, forcing her body to accept the fatigue rather than give in to addiction. The last thing she wanted was powder blindness.

“Are you all right?” a voice asked through the darkness.

Vlora felt Olem’s hand slip into hers and gave it a little squeeze. He came to stand beside her, wearing the same blood-soaked shirt he’d had on since the battle, an unlit, half-smoked cigarette hanging from his lip. He wore a bandage around his left forearm to protect the stitches of a deep cut he’d received from a Dynize bayonet.

“Not really,” she answered.

Olem stared off into the night for a few moments. “Normally, people just lie and say yes when they’re asked that question.”

Vlora took a half step closer to him and put her head on his shoulder. “They’re burying another forty-three soldiers.” She let her gaze fall to a small gathering of torches about a hundred yards down the side of the valley, where her men threw the last few shovels of dirt on the graves of soldiers who’d given in to their wounds during the course of the day.

“Still bothers you, does it?” Olem asked.

She looked up at him, barely able to see his bearded profile in the darkness. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“I …” He was silent for a few moments. “One of the women they just put in the ground has played cards with me for twelve years. I’m going to miss her. But I’m a soldier, and I can’t stop and think about all the death or I won’t be able to function tomorrow.”

Vlora shivered, though the air still retained much of the damp heat of the day. “I’ve built up plenty of calluses toward death. But some days …” She lifted her eyes past the burial, over the fires of the Riflejack camp, and across the river to a sea of flickering lights that spread out in the distance on the other side of the river. The Fatrastan Second Field Army had arrived yesterday. It was enormous, over fifty thousand men plus auxiliaries and camp support, and as much as Vlora would like to have taken comfort in their presence, she was all too aware of that warrant of arrest sitting on the table in her tent.

Olem searched his pockets, giving up after a few moments. He seemed to sense the direction of her gaze. “I’m not entirely pleased,” he said, “that they decided to camp there.”

“I don’t think we’re meant to be pleased.” For the first time since coming to this damned country, Vlora felt small. Her brigade of mercenaries – just over four thousand left after this last battle, and most of those wounded – was barely a footnote in the eighty thousand or more soldiers assembled within shouting distance here on the banks of the Hadshaw. If she walked up to the ridge, she could see the Dynize camp to the south, watching her and the Fatrastan Army with a caution that their brethren had lacked. She felt as if they were a hammer poised above her, and the Fatrastans were the anvil. “I gave the order releasing the Landfall Garrison and the Blackhat volunteers over to the Fatrastans.”

“I heard. Are you sure that’s wise?”

“If we get sandwiched between these two armies, as I suspect we will, five or six thousand men won’t make a difference. Besides, they’re Fatrastan. Having them tell the tale of the Battle of Landfall might gain us some goodwill.”

“We must have made a good impression, because about a thousand of them have asked to sign on.”

“Even knowing about the arrest warrant?” Vlora asked. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. Soldiers could be loyal to the death, or they could blow away with the next foul breeze. She expected anyone willing to join a mercenary company to be the latter.

“They’re mostly Adran expatriates asking to join. Even here, so far away, Adran patriotism has run high since the Adran-Kez War.”

“I’ll take it, I suppose,” Vlora said reluctantly. “Sign them up and spread them out among the companies. We’ll need to fill out our numbers if we get out of this situation.”

“And if we don’t get out?”

“Then they’ll learn firsthand about the risks of being a soldier of fortune.”

“I see the calluses have grown back already.”

Vlora gave him a tight smile, though he probably couldn’t see it in the dark. “Have our scouts reported anything from either camp?”

“Nothing of particular note. The Dynize are probing both sides of the river with quite a lot of caution. So far they haven’t made any move to set up on our flanks. Seems that the Mad Lancer desecrated a few hundred of those Dynize cuirassiers and left the bodies where they’d be found. I have no idea what the Dynize are used to, but that probably turned a few stomachs.”

“Including mine. One of these days I’m going to have to rein Styke in, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Neither am I.” Olem turned his head toward her. “Is that my jacket?”

“Yes.”

He reached into the breast pocket. A match flared to life a moment later, lighting his cigarette and illuminating a pleased smile. “There’s some communication between us and the Fatrastans, but mostly trade. Our boys are making good use of their camp followers while they have them.”

“And spending all the money Lindet paid us to defend Landfall. Soldiers have no sense of planning for the future, do they?”

“If they did, they wouldn’t be soldiers. I say let them enjoy themselves while they can. We might be fighting those Fatrastans soon.”

Vlora’s stomach clenched, and she instinctively glanced south toward the Dynize camp. Hammer and anvil. The arrival of the Fatrastans had only delayed the inevitable. How much more time did she have to plan until the enemy decided to strike? How long could this standoff last? Hours? Days? Weeks? And when it finally happened, which army would turn on her first? “We could turn them against each other,” she murmured.

“Eh?”

“The Dynize and Fatrastans. If they didn’t both want my head, they’d focus entirely on each other. They’d barely even notice us.”

“We could fake your death,” Olem suggested.

“I’ve never been good at such crass deception,” Vlora said with a grimace. “Besides, it’s too obvious. We need something more subtle.”

“Distract them and slip away?”

Vlora caught sight of a figure walking up the slope toward them, and she thought she recognized the shadowy form. “Perhaps,” she said slowly. The figure stopped some twenty yards away.

“General? Colonel?” a voice called.

“Up here,” Vlora responded.

Olem squinted into the night. “Is that Gustar? I haven’t seen him since the battle.”

Vlora waited to answer until Gustar had reached them, snapping off a shadowy salute. “Ma’am, sir. Major Gustar reporting in.”

“Gustar,” Vlora explained to Olem, “was one of just a handful of officers who wasn’t wounded the other day.”

“Pure luck, ma’am,” Gustar interjected.

She continued. “Right after the battle, I sent him and a squad of dragoons as far north as they could go in twenty-four hours. I’m glad you made it back in one piece, Major. What can you tell us of the road to the north?”

Gustar removed his hat, dragging a sleeve across his brow. “The short version, or the long version?”

“The short, for now.”

“Very good. I can tell you that the Second Field Army came down the Hadshaw from the Ironhook Mountains via keelboats. They stripped everything on their way – supplies, conscripts, local militias. From what we could discover, every town for a hundred miles in that direction pooled everything they had into the Second Army.”

“Leaving them defenseless,” Olem said flatly.

“Yes, sir.”

“If only I were the pillaging type,” Vlora murmured. “Go on.”

“Supposedly there are two more armies on their way down from Thorn Point and Brannon Bay, but with the seas compromised, they could take weeks to arrive. No one knows anything about the armies recalled from the frontier to the northwest.”

“They’ll come down the Tristan River,” Vlora said. “I’m not worried about them. Just what’s north of us.”

“That’s it,” Gustar said. “If we head northeast, we’re not going to run into anything. There’s no word of the Dynize landing this far north, and everything Lindet has between us and New Adopest is contained in that army across the river.”

“Excellent,” Vlora said. “You and your men help yourself to a double ration and hit your bunks. You deserve to sleep in tomorrow.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Another salute, and the major headed back down the hill.

Vlora waited until he was out of earshot, and said, “Gustar fought in two battles and didn’t blink an eye when I ordered him to ride for forty-eight hours straight. The man deserves a promotion.”

“Agreed,” Olem said. The tip of his cigarette flared. “Were you going to tell me about this scouting mission?”

“I …” Vlora wasn’t entirely sure why she hadn’t told Olem. “It didn’t seem important at the time, and we’ve been more than a little busy the last two days. I sent Gustar on a whim. I didn’t expect the path from here to New Adopest to actually be clear.”

“So we are going to try and slip away, then beeline it to the coast and head for home?”

“It’s not elegant,” Vlora admitted. “But yes, that’s my backup plan. It may be our best bet of getting out of Fatrasta alive.”

“If we can give two major armies the slip.”

“Exactly.” Vlora scowled at the sea of campfires across the river. “Did you ever tell me who’s in command over there?”

“A woman named Zine Holm.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She’s a Starlish noblewoman. Fought in the Fatrastan War for Independence as a soldier of fortune, and has been commanding armies against the Palo since.”

“Competent?”

“As far as I know, though I think this is the biggest army she’s ever commanded.”

Vlora considered this for several quiet minutes, working through the various plans in her head and trying to create something coherent enough to actually work. “Get me a meeting with her. Also with the Dynize general, whoever the pit that is.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. No, wait. Tonight. As soon as possible. Tell them it’s urgent, and we’ll meet at a neutral location.”

She could practically hear Olem grimace. “I’ll try, but …”

“Make it happen.” She tugged on the shoulders of his jacket, feeling a real chill for the first time tonight. “I’m going to try to sleep for a couple hours. Wake me up as soon as you’ve set up those meetings.”

Three hours later, Vlora rode north along the Hadshaw River Highway with Olem and a dozen handpicked bodyguards. She half listened to a corporal droning on about supplies and yesterday’s casualties, sniffing a few granules of powder at a time just to stay awake. Across the river, most of the Fatrastan fires were out and the night was all but silent. Occasionally her sorcery-enhanced senses spotted sentries along either ridge of the river valley – Fatrastan on the west side, and hers on the east.

They reached a crossroads and small keelboat landing, where a party of equal size awaited them on the dusty shore. Torches flickered in the light breeze, casting shadows on sunflower-yellow uniforms.

“Did you hear back from the Dynize?” Vlora asked quietly as they dismounted. She kept her eyes on a forty-something-year-old woman in the center of the waiting group, uniform decked out with medals and the black epaulets of a Fatrastan general.

“I did,” Olem responded. “The Dynize general refuses to see you. He’s convinced it’s a trap, and that you hope to get him alone for an assassination.”

“He’s smarter than his colleague we met a couple days ago,” Vlora said. “Which is unfortunate. I need to size him up. For now I’ll have to satisfy myself with Holm.” She handed her reins to one of her bodyguards and crossed the distance between her and the Fatrastans without preamble.

“General Holm.” Vlora held out her hand. “Thank you for meeting me on such short notice.”

“General Flint.” Holm took the offered hand, shaking it firmly. She was a stocky woman, broad at the chest with hands as big as a grenadier’s. She had smile lines at the corners of her mouth and friendly eyes that Vlora was more likely to see in a tavern owner. “I’m a big admirer. This is an odd time to meet, but I’m a night owl anyway and I figured you had something important to say.”

Vlora tried to gauge the Fatrastan general, but found herself lacking. Holm didn’t seem like the hard-bitten type forged on the frontier, nor the soldier of fortune Olem described. “To be honest, I thought we should meet as soon as possible, and this is the first time I’ve been able to pull myself away from my duties.”

“I see.” Holm clicked her tongue as if mildly annoyed. “Well, we’re here now. I’d like to congratulate you on your victory the other day. My scouts arrived just at the tail end, but I’m told it was rather something – holding the line against a superior force until your cavalry could hit them from behind. Exactly what I’d expect from Lady Flint.”

“I’m flattered, General. But I either win or die. I prefer to do the former.”

Holm chuckled. “And that’s exactly what I expect an Adran general to say. Imminently practical.” She clapped her hands together. “Excuse my delight, Lady Flint, but this is just too much. I’ve always wanted to meet you. I wish I could show you the hospitality of my camp.”

“You’ll forgive my refusal, considering the arrest warrant I was served by your colonel the other day. A Fatrastan Army camp seems less than welcoming right now.”

Holm’s eyes tightened. “Ah, yes. That. I’m … unaware of the circumstances of the warrant, and will freely say I disagree with arresting a foreign war hero who’s fighting Fatrastan battles on our behalf.”

“Does this mean you’re going to ignore it?” Vlora asked hopefully. “You outnumber the Dynize, but I understand your army was hastily assembled, and I think you could use our experience when you go to retake Landfall. You are going to retake Landfall, aren’t you?”

“That is my ultimate mission,” Holm said. “Unfortunately, I have every intention of arresting you. I’m a great admirer, but Lady Chancellor Lindet has won my loyalty too many times for me to disobey a direct order.”

Vlora wondered if Holm knew about Lindet’s abandonment of Landfall, but bit her tongue. Throwing mud over Lindet’s name was not going to win Holm’s friendship. “You’re aware that my men have no intention of allowing me to be arrested.”

“I’d hoped that you’d come along quietly.” Holm paused thoughtfully, then continued. “I am convinced this is a misunderstanding. If you’re willing to accept my hospitality, you will be treated as a guest in my camp until we are able to meet with Lindet in person. Your wounded will be cared for, your men given safe passage back to Adro – or allowed to fight with the Fatrastan Foreign Legion if they’d like. You’d have my word that no harm would come to you under my care, and I would be an advocate in whatever dispute you have with the Lady Chancellor.”

Olem leaned forward, whispering, “That’s a better offer than the Dynize gave you.”

“Much,” Vlora murmured. She considered her run-in with Lindet back in Landfall. “Unfortunately, I don’t think you can promise my safety, General Holm.”

Holm’s eyebrows rose. “Why is that?”

“I tried to arrest Lindet for crimes against her own country right before the Dynize arrived. We put our differences aside just long enough to defend Landfall.” And then, Vlora added silently, that bitch fled without lifting a finger to help hold the city.

“Well,” Holm scoffed. “You certainly have a pair of balls worthy of your reputation.” She held up a hand as if she needed a moment to digest this new information. “I’m aware that Lindet is far from perfect, but crimes against her own country?”

Vlora considered telling her about the godstones and Lindet’s ambitions, but decided against it. The story was too far-fetched, and even if Holm believed it, she might very well think Lindet deserved to get her hands on them. Instead, Vlora offered a small shrug. “I believe that Lindet will have me executed the moment she gets a chance. And so I must refuse your offer.”

Holm’s brow furrowed, and Vlora was surprised to hear a note of genuine sadness in her voice. “I’m sorry to hear that, Lady Flint. Am I to understand that I should consider your army that of an enemy?”

The implications of that were immediately clear. Vlora’s men would be shot on sight, and Holm would probably begin the morning by crossing the river in a flanking action to encircle Vlora’s army – at which point she could either force a fight, or simply wait for Vlora’s men to run out of rations and surrender.

The question of the Dynize Army made the entire situation much murkier.

“Tell me,” Vlora said, “did you bring Privileged?”

Holm’s reply was frosty. “That is not information I will tell you if we are enemies.”

“Our scouts say they have three Privileged,” Olem cut in.

Holm opened her mouth, a scowl on her face, but Vlora simply held up her hand. “I’m not threatening you – and I have no intention of murdering your Privileged unless we engage in combat. I just wanted to warn you that the Dynize do not have either bone-eyes or Privileged with them. But they are bloody disciplined, and breaking them will take more than overwhelming force.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because whatever happens to me, you’re going to fight those Dynize sometime in the next few days. And I’d rather you win than them. Frankly, I think the battle will be more in their favor than you expect.”

Holm chewed on this information, a worried frown on her face, eyeing Vlora. “I’ll take this information under advisement.”

“I –” Vlora was cut off by the sound of hooves galloping toward them from the direction of her camp. “Excuse me,” she told Holm, striding back toward her bodyguard. She found one of her messengers waiting with them, his chest heaving from a hard ride. “Is it the Dynize?” Vlora demanded. “A night attack?”

“No, ma’am,” the messenger said in a hushed tone. “You told me to let you know the moment Taniel and Ka-poel arrived.” He gestured into the darkness behind him, and Vlora was able to make out two figures on horseback hanging back in the darkness. She could suddenly sense Taniel’s powder magic, as if it had appeared from nothing – as if he were letting her know about his presence.

Vlora looked at Olem. “They’re here.”

“Should we return to camp?” Olem asked.

“No,” she said, jerking her head toward the road. “They’re here.”

“Oh.”

Vlora returned to Holm. “General, I’m afraid I have to cut this meeting short. Will you allow me to reconsider your offer?”

“Has something changed?” Holm asked, peering over Vlora’s shoulder toward the messenger.

“Maybe.”

“I can give you until tomorrow afternoon. Then I will consider the Riflejacks an enemy army.”

“Thank you.” Vlora turned to leave, then paused. “Am I to be assured the Landfall refugees have your protection?”

“We’ve already begun to pass out what supplies we can spare. I will take care of them the best I can – and I will not let the Dynize have them.”

“Again, thank you,” Vlora said. “I will answer you tomorrow.” She left the general at the keelboat landing and headed back to her bodyguard to fetch her horse. She and Olem rode ahead, toward the two figures waiting in the darkness.

She could see that both Taniel and Ka-poel were tired. Their horses were haggard, their clothes covered with the dust of the road. They both wore greatcoats over frontier buckskins, with rifles, swords, and pistols strapped to their saddles. They looked like a pair of bounty hunters chasing an outlaw.

“Good evening,” Olem said, tipping his hat.

“Morning, more like it,” Taniel responded. “Good to see you again, Olem. Glad you’ve healed up since Landfall.” Ka-poel waved. “We would have been here yesterday,” Taniel explained, “but the Dynize have the roads south of their army buttoned up pretty tight.”

“What news?” Vlora asked.

Taniel shared a look with Ka-poel, then gave Vlora a tight, tired smile. “We found them. We know where the other two godstones are.”