Wrath of Empire

Chapter 20

Styke, Ka-poel, and Celine arrived in a tiny town called Granalia a few days after leaving Tenny Wiles. Granalia was nestled between two forested hills in eastern Fatrasta, and though it was a long way from Landfall, it appeared to be abandoned as they came over the hill and rode down the main street.

“Ka-poel is going to teach me her sign language,” Celine told Styke proudly.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. That way she won’t have to write everything down. I can translate for her.”

“And when did you decide that?”

“This morning, when you were taking a piss.”

Styke rolled his eyes. It would, he admitted, be useful to have a translator. Celine was a quick girl – she already knew Adran, plus a lot of Palo and Kez and a smattering of half a dozen other languages. He had little doubt she would be able to pick up a sign language in no time.

As they drew closer, Styke was surprised to find signs of violence: doors hanging from broken hinges, smashed locks. He dismounted to examine a few of the buildings, only to find the inside of the pub a mess of broken bottles. The general store was cleared of anything useful, as were all the houses and shops. He found a half-eaten meal on more than one table and sniffed at the fly-covered contents. Whatever had happened here was recent.

“They haven’t been gone for more than a couple of days,” Styke said as Celine followed him into one of the houses.

She frowned at the contents of the table. “I don’t like this town. I gives me the creeps.”

“It’s just empty,” Styke told her. “Nothing here is going to hurt you.”

“I didn’t say anything would hurt me,” Celine replied defiantly. “I just said it gives me the creeps.” She rubbed her arms, looking around, and followed closely when Styke went back outside. “How long do we have to stay?”

“Until the Mad Lancers catch up. They should be here today, tomorrow at the latest.”

“What if they already passed?”

“I’d see signs of a thousand cavalry having passed through town.” Styke returned to Amrec and rubbed his nose. He wouldn’t admit it, but the empty town had unsettled him. They were far from Landfall – much closer to Little Starland – and if the Dynize were raiding all the way up here, it meant that Jackal’s spirits were right about the fall of the other big coastal cities.

If things were serious enough, it might spell trouble for the Mad Lancers.

He turned his attention to Ka-poel, who squatted in the dirt road, running her fingers through the ruts from a wagon wheel.

“Any idea what happened here?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“The Dynize obviously took the people who lived here,” Styke said. “But we haven’t seen any evidence of that anywhere else. Why take these people?”

Only silence answered his question. Ka-poel touched her fingers to a spot on the ground and crossed over to Styke, showing him the gooey blackness on her fingertips. Blood, a couple days old. She seemed to feel at the air with those two fingers, then led them around the back of the church to a small, fenced-off graveyard, where someone had neatly stacked half a dozen bodies like firewood.

The smell hit them as soon as they rounded the building, and Styke was surprised he hadn’t caught it earlier. The corpses stank of shit and death, coated in flies as thick as molasses. Piling them unburied in a graveyard seemed like someone’s idea of a twisted joke.

Styke appreciated that kind of humor.

Ka-poel wiped the old blood off her hands on the grass, then cleaned her fingers with a handkerchief and pulled out her chalkboard. They did not resist, she wrote.

That was Styke’s first impression as well. He stepped over the graveyard fence to get a closer look and was surprised when Celine followed him. Maybe the place genuinely did spook her. Bodies, on the other hand, were something she’d grown used to.

He squatted beside the pile, running his eyes over them. If this had been a normal raid, or a looting gone bad, the bodies would have been left where they’d fallen, not stacked here in a bizarrely orderly fashion. These men and women had been executed – some with musket blasts to the back of the head and others bayoneted to death. They hadn’t fought back.

It had to be the Dynize. But this town was much bigger than six people. Why lead off the rest, but not these?

Ka-poel joined him, writing something on her slate. This is a Palo town.

“So?” Styke asked.

She pointed at the corpses, forcing him to look once more. Slowly, it dawned on him. The dead were all Kressians. “So they killed the Kressians but led away the Palo?”

Ka-poel nodded.

“Why?”

She shook her head. A few moments passed, and she headed off on her own, poking around in the grass and walking into one of the nearby houses – no doubt looking for clues as to the fate of the town. Styke remained with the bodies for a moment, studying them thoughtfully, then did a circuit of the church.

He wandered through several more buildings in a half-hearted bid to discover a survivor before finally giving up and returning to the front stoop of the general store with an overlooked bottle of gin and a fresh horngum root from the apothecary’s garden at the end of the street.

He broke off a piece of horngum and chewed it thoughtfully, feeling the numbness spread through his jaw. After a swig of gin the numbness spread to his back, hips, and ass to happily relieve so many weeks of riding tension. He leaned back on the stoop and offered the gin to Celine. She took a sniff of the bottle, shaking her head.

The silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves in the distance. He listened to them approach, waiting for the shout of one of Ibana’s scouts.

But there was no shout, and the hoofbeats grew louder. He frowned, looking over at Celine. The sound was coming from the east. Unless Ibana had found a shorter route, she should be coming from the north. “What kind of horse is that?” he asked Celine.

She tilted her head to listen. “It’s light,” she said. “Maybe an Angland racer?”

“It’s not an Angland.” Styke got to his feet. The road from the east was on the other side of the church. The problem that unsettled him was that he did not recognize that hoofbeat, not entirely. It sounded like …

He rounded the church to spot a small group coming toward him on Dynizian mounts. There were six of them – four men and two women – wearing regular Fatrastan traveling clothes and not outwardly armed. They had the red hair and freckles, but their horses precluded them from being Palo. Styke felt the hair on the back of his head stand on end as they came to a stop on the other side of the graveyard, barely sparing a glance for the pile of corpses.

“Who are they?” Celine asked.

“Go back to the horses,” Styke said. “Find Ka-poel. Both of you go to the edge of town and wait for me.”

“What do you …?”

“Now!”

Celine set off at a run. One of the horsemen broke off from the others and began to trot after her. Styke put himself in the man’s path. That seemed to be enough, as the rider simply switched his attention from Celine to Styke. All of the riders were staring at him.

“Are you Ben Styke?” one of them asked in heavily accented Adran. The woman speaking had a scar across her left eye. Whatever had caused it had barely missed leaving her half-blind.

“Who wants to know?” Styke slowly reached for his knife.

The man whose horse Styke had blocked pointed at Styke’s chest. He spoke in Dynize, but it was close enough to Palo that Styke could understand most of it. “Look at his size. He’s a crippled giant with gunshot wounds. Has to be him.”

“Ji-Orz, go keep watch,” the woman with the scar said. One of the men broke off and headed back the way they’d come, remaining on horseback on a nearby hillock. “You are the man they call Ben Styke, correct?” she asked.

Styke’s feeling about these Dynize grew worse and worse. He took a half step back. The group was far too at ease to be soldiers. Styke could see the bulge of knives beneath their coats, but none of them carried a firearm. He tried to remember the Dynize title “Ji,” but he didn’t think he’d ever heard it before. “I am.”

The nearest one leaned over in his saddle, peering at Styke. “You think it was just a story? I can’t imagine an old cripple like him killing Ji-Kushel.”

Styke’s blood ran cold as he remembered the name. Kushel. The dragonman he’d killed in Lady Flint’s muster yard. “Ji” was the title for dragonmen. He felt a small bead of sweat break out on the back of his neck and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his knife. Six dragonmen. Styke nearly died fighting one.

“We were sent by Ka-Sedial,” the woman said, “to kill the man who murdered one of our brothers in single combat. You killed Ji-Kushel?”

Styke had the sinking feeling that he was about to die. He fought the feeling, flinging it from his mind with a growing annoyance. Six dragonmen. Whoever this Ka-Sedial was, he had no intention of underestimating Styke. “Yeah,” he said. “I killed him. I popped his head like a zit.”

One of the other dragonmen snorted in derision. They glanced from one to the other, barely suppressing smirks. They didn’t seem all that worried that Styke had murdered one of their comrades.

“Ji-Matle,” the woman said, “go secure that girl.”

Ji-Matle flipped his reins, urging his mount forward into a casual trot that belied any kind of urgency. He came abreast of Styke and looked down at him, shaking his head. “I still don’t believe it.”

Styke stepped sidelong in front of the horse, jerking his head back from Ji-Matle’s quickly drawn blade, and rammed his boz knife through the neck and up into the brain of the horse. It spasmed, and blood fountained from the wound to cover Styke’s arms. He shoved, pushing the dying creature over as Ji-Matle leapt free with startling dexterity.

The dragonman landed in a crouch, looking at his horse in dismay. “You’re strong,” he noted, looking over his shoulder at his companions.

“Finish him quickly,” the woman said, “and we can be back in Dynize by the end of the month.”

“You really think they’re going to let us go home with a war on?” Ji-Matle asked.

“We have Ka-Sedial’s word. Would you question that?”

“Of course not.”

Despite Styke’s display of strength, none of the dragonmen seemed at all concerned about the danger. While they spoke, Styke circled around to the horse and knelt by it, sawing at the neck with his blade as if making sure the creature was dead. The warmth of its blood felt slick between his fingers, and he whispered an apology.

“Come now, Ben Styke, you have already killed my horse,” Ji-Matle said, gesturing with a bone knife.

“I’ve got a knife like that,” Styke said, still kneeling by the horse. “It belonged to your friend Kushel.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Ji-Matle looked to her once again, as if for guidance. “Where is that knife?” she asked.

“Left it with a friend on the other side of the country,” Styke lied. “I just want you to know that I used it to cut out Kushel’s tongue and eyes before he died, then I took a shit in his mouth.”

The woman spat. “These Kressians are all damned savages. Kill him, Ji-Matle, and we will be gone.”

Ji-Matle frowned, appraising Styke for several seconds before darting forward and drawing a second knife. Styke caught sight of the dragonskin armor beneath his duster just as Ji-Matle leapt over the dead horse, swinging his knife downward.

Styke whipped his left hand out of the horse’s neck, flinging warm blood into Ji-Matle’s eyes and then rolling out of the way of the swipe. He came out of his roll and reversed directions as Ji-Matle barely managed to stick his landing and stumble toward the graves. He dropped one of his knives, pawing at his eyes. Styke ran at him on the balls of his feet, boz knife forward. Ji-Matle swiped blindly, slashing through the left arm of Styke’s jacket, the blade biting into his skin. Styke did not slow, ramming his own knife into Ji-Matle’s groin and plowing him over.

Ji-Matle continued to struggle despite the life flowing out of him, reversing the grip on his knife and swinging for Styke’s side. Styke caught him by the wrist and slammed Ji-Matle’s elbow against a marble gravestone, bone erupting from the skin. Ji-Matle refused to scream, still attempting to fight until Styke grabbed him by the face and smashed his head against the same stone.

The fight was over in seconds. Styke dropped the crumpled figure at his feet, fingers covered with blood, brain, and bits of skull. It seemed like his whole body was slick with warm blood – from the horse and from Ji-Matle – and he turned to face the dragonmen.

They stared at him as if in disbelief, looking at him and at the corpse of their dead companion. The woman spoke. “Ka-Sedial was right not to underestimate you, Ben Styke,” she said quietly. “Kill him.”

The word had barely left her mouth when a blast went off nearby and the top of her head exploded. Her mouth remained open, her face fixed in an expression of mild annoyance, before she toppled off her mount and to the ground.

Both Styke and the remaining dragonmen looked for the source of the blast, only to see Celine sitting astride Amrec less than twenty yards away, partially hidden by a nearby house. She held Styke’s carbine in both of her hands. She trembled visibly, and immediately began to reload the carbine.

Several things happened at once. First, the dragonmen began to move – one toward Celine and two toward Styke. Celine dropped the carbine, and Styke began to run toward her, shouting over his shoulder, “Ka-poel, if you’re done hiding, I could use some of that blood magic!”

The nearest dragonman froze. “What did he say? What name did you speak?”

The dragonman keeping watch from nearby shouted, taking the attention of all three of his remaining companions. They suddenly turned their horses and beat a fast retreat toward the east, leaving Styke standing in bloody clothes to try and figure out what had scared them off.

He didn’t have to wait long. The sound of approaching riders came swiftly, and soon behind them the Mad Lancers rode out of the forest to the north with Ibana and Jackal at their front. Ibana joined Styke quickly, staring at his clothes and the bodies of the dragonmen. “What happened? Do you want us to run them down?”

“Not a great idea,” Styke said. The lancers might have a better chance against dragonmen with carbines at a distance, but he did not want them to get tied up in a forest against those bastards. “Keep everyone tight, and triple the scout patrols.”

“Who the pit were they?” Ibana asked. “And what happened to you?”

Styke hurried toward Celine, calling over his shoulder, “They’re dragonmen, and they’ve been following us since Landfall. Apparently they’ve been sent to kill me.” He reached Amrec and picked up his carbine, returning it to the saddle. Celine looked distant and frightened.

He pulled her down, taking her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he told her.

“I killed her.”

“You did. It was a very good thing.”

Celine blinked at the sky. “I didn’t like it.”

Styke squeezed her gently and set her on her feet, only then realizing she was now also covered in blood. He lifted her chin with one finger, laying his other hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You never have to kill anyone when I’m around. Never again.”

“But she would have killed you.” Her face hardened. “I didn’t like it, but I won’t let anyone kill you, Ben.”

“I know,” Styke said gently.

She looked down at his arm. “You’re bleeding.”

“That’s just horse blood. And human. But it’s his.”

She poked him, sending a jolt of pain up that arm. “It’s also yours.”

“Right. I’ll get cleaned up in the river. Go find Sunintiel. Tell her you killed a dragonman. She’ll be very proud.” He pushed her away and headed back to the bodies, only to find Ka-poel had beaten him there. She frowned down at the dragonmen’s corpses. He said, “If they had rushed me, could you have done anything?”

She shook her head.

“That’s not very reassuring.” He paced from one end of the graveyard to the other, walking off the adrenaline rush. Part of him knew that he very easily could have died. Another part rejoiced at fighting another real warrior like that. The fight with Kushel had been drawn out. This had been short, brutal, and satisfying. “Did you find out anything about the town?” he asked Ka-poel.

She shook her head.

Frustrated, Styke paced the graveyard again. Maybe he should have sent the lancers after those dragonmen. Losing even a hundred men would be worth not having four dragonmen prowling the countryside. He thought about the woman Celine had shot and turned to Ka-poel.

“ ‘Ka’ is the title for the bone-eyes, right?”

Of the royal family, she wrote on her slate.

The implication was not lost on him. “So what are you, some kind of princess?”

Another head shake.

“Then what?”

I don’t know, she wrote.

Styke stared at her for several long seconds, hoping she’d give at least some sort of elaboration. When none was forthcoming, he finally turned away to examine the passing column of lancers. None of them looked worse for wear, which meant they hadn’t run into any trouble the last week. But that, he was certain, was about to change.