Sins of Empire

Chapter 22

Celine led Styke and their small group out of the Depths and up to Loel’s Fort, where the night was silent and all but a few Riflejack guards were in their beds. Styke followed Lady Flint into the temporary headquarters she’d set up in the old staff building and stood in the doorway, not entirely sure what to do as Flint pulled out a notepad and scratched something on it, handing it to Olem.

“Send a messenger to Vallencian. Tell him I was attacked and my escort killed.”

Olem took the note and slipped by Styke, and Styke put a hand on Celine’s shoulder, turning her toward the door. “Lady Flint,” he said with a nod. “Glad you got out of there. I best be going.”

“You,” Flint said, giving him pause. “Stay.” She snatched a bottle of wine from underneath the table in the center of the room and popped the cork with her knife. “You’ve earned a drink, I think.”

Styke hesitated. For once, he was feeling less than confident about his position. His task was to keep Flint alive, at least until Tampo gave the order, and now he wasn’t entirely sure he could kill her. She’d been ambushed by more than a dozen men and walked away without a scratch. What hope would he have in his condition, even if he caught her unawares?

He’d have to cross that bridge when he reached it, he decided sourly. For now it was his job to get – and remain – close. He dragged a chair over to the table and sat down, pulling Celine up onto his lap.

Flint poured three glasses of wine. They drank in silence until Olem returned, nodding, and brought his own chair up to the table. He took his glass and raised it to Flint, then to Styke.

“My nerves are shot to shit,” she said, the words clearly directed at Olem.

“The ambush?” Olem asked gently.

Flint drained her first glass and poured another, reaching under the table to get a second bottle of wine. “The ambush, the powder trance – I took a whole charge at once – and then the fight. I haven’t had a call that close since the Kez Civil War.” Her eyes were cast down, her voice quiet, and she seemed suddenly vulnerable. The moment passed quickly, and she looked at Styke with steel in her eyes.

“You looked like you were handling things fine,” Styke said. He couldn’t get those bodies out of his head. He was used to his own path of destruction. Even back during the war he rarely saw one that compared. But pit, he found himself impressed by Flint’s. He thought about Taniel Two-shot, fighting out in the swamps, picking off Kez Privileged like they were bottles on a fence. “Powder mages,” he said softly, a curse under his breath.

Flint leaned over, topping off Styke’s glass. “Powder mages aren’t invincible,” she said, frowning. Styke noticed that her hand was still trembling, and remembered that she was barely thirty years old. He considered soldiers her age practically kids, even back when he was one. “We can be outflanked, overwhelmed, or taken by surprise. If you and Olem hadn’t arrived they might have done all three and finished me off.”

“We got lucky,” Olem said. “We heard your pistol go off. We were only the next street over.”

“Though I would have expected you to turn and run against so many men,” Styke added.

Flint frowned. “They’d killed him. My escort. He was a good man – funny, clever, interesting. When something like that happens, instinct kicks in. I barely have control of myself. It feels like I blink, and then there are bodies.” She met his eyes. “They call you Mad Ben Styke. Was it ever like that for you? The anger?”

Styke looked down at his glass. Pit, soldier talk. He was going to need more wine than this. He gave the glass to Celine. “Just a sip,” he said, then drained the rest and pushed it over to the bottle. Olem refilled it.

Styke cleared his throat. “They say that some people are overtaken by a berserker rage in a battle. Their eyes mist and time seems to slow and they just kill everything that they see. I’ve heard people speculate that Field Marshal Tamas had that” – he nodded at Flint – “and that only his training kept him from being a true berserker.” He twirled his lancer’s ring with his thumb, listening to his chair creak under him as he shifted. “They called me Mad Colonel Styke because they thought a madness took me into battle. Because I made foolish charges against outrageous odds. But I’ve never had red mist. Sure, I lose my head sometimes, but when I kill, it’s deliberate. I never –” He paused. “I rarely pick a fight I don’t think I can win.”

“Those charges,” Olem said. “The two charges at the Battle of Landfall. You knew you were going to win those?”

Styke felt the memory flood him. He could almost taste the sweat and stench of the battle, the heat of burning buildings and racket of an artillery bombardment. He savored it. “Sounds arrogant when I say it out loud. But yeah, I knew I’d win. Nothing stood before me and my lancers. We wore enchanted armor, stuff that saw its heyday four hundred years ago, and it shrugged off bullets and sorcery like a parasol does rain.”

“What happened to that armor?” Olem asked.

Styke could still hear his voice echo in the helmet and feel the reassuring weight of medieval plate on his shoulders. When he flexed his fingers he could almost imagine the lance back in his hand once more, the feel of his ring pressing against its wooden handle. “Lindet confiscated it after the war. Don’t know what happened after that.”

“Pity,” Olem said.

Flint leaned back in her chair, glass dangling from her hands. Styke had heard it took a lot to make a powder mage drunk, and her eyes were barely foggy after a whole bottle of wine. “I want to know something,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Taniel Two-shot. Was he really a hero around here?” Before Styke could answer, she continued. “I mean, I’ve heard some of the stories, and I’ve heard his name spoken in conjunction with the war. But back then, when the whole thing happened, was he really as big of a war hero as they say?”

Styke tried to remember everything he could about Taniel Two-shot. It had been a long time. “People liked him. It was romantic. A young powder mage, out there avenging his mother’s death against the Kez cabal almost two decades after the fact. That and fighting for Fatrastan independence to boot. The newspapers loved to write about him.”

“Did the Palo take to him? I’ve heard rumors that they did, but I’ve never actually asked anyone.”

“I think so,” Styke said. “Like I said, I only actually met him once. We fought through the Battle of Planth together, and he saved my life by putting two bullets through a Warden’s skull.” He paused, trying to recall newspaper articles he’d read after his imprisonment. “Yes,” he said more confidently, “the Palo did take to him. One became his guide and he took her back to Adro with him, and…” Styke trailed off, remembering who, exactly, he was talking to. He cleared his throat. “They say the two of them got married just before their death at the end of the Adran-Kez War.”

Flint was entirely unreadable. “They never got married,” she said.

“Ah.” Styke wasn’t going to push that subject.

“She wasn’t a Palo, either,” Flint said, looking away. “She was Dynize. Her name was Ka-poel, and she was a bone-eye sorcerer with enough power to… well. She was incredibly powerful.”

Styke remembered her. He remembered her better than he remembered Two-shot, if he was being honest. He could smell the blood sorcery on her, and see the playful confidence that seemed so strange in the eyes of a Palo youth. “A Dynize,” he echoed. “Didn’t know there were any in the swamps.”

“She was a refugee of some sort,” Flint said. “Was adopted by a Palo tribe as a child. Taniel talked about her in his letters, and then I met her later, after he brought her back and – after things were over between the two of us. I hated her at first. Thought she had taken Taniel away from me. But then I realized that he was still mine when he got back, and that it was only after I did what I did that she claimed him for herself.”

Styke glanced over at Olem, who remained silent through the whole thing. The two were obviously longtime lovers, and it couldn’t be easy to live in the shadow of someone like Taniel Two-shot. But Olem just gave Styke a small, knowing smile, and rolled himself a cigarette. “You’re getting drunk,” Olem said softly to Flint.

“Yup,” Flint answered. “Doesn’t happen often. Feels kind of good to talk about it.” Her eyes focused on Styke, and she said, “I like you. I have no idea why, but I do.”

“Because we’re both killers,” Styke said before he could stop himself. He held his breath, but Flint just gave him a rueful smile.

“To killers,” she said, raising her glass.

Styke clinked his against hers. He sensed it was time for him to leave the two of them alone, and stood up, finding that Celine was already fast asleep in his arms. He put her over his shoulder. “I saw a dragonman tonight,” he said.

Some of the haze across Flint’s face seemed to lift. “Really?”

“He’s not a Palo. He’s a Dynize.”

Flint seemed to sober slightly. “What the pit is a Dynize dragonman doing in Landfall?” she mused, more to herself than to him.

“He knew of the other one. The one you killed. Said his name was Sebbith or something like that. If they knew each other, I’m guessing they were both Dynize. But I don’t know why they’re here.”

“Find out,” Flint said.

Styke sighed. He found himself liking – even respecting – Lady Flint more and more. If he did have to kill her it was going to be a challenge in more ways than one. But for now, they were on the same side. “I’ll draw him out,” he promised.

Vlora watched Styke carry Celine through the door. From the window she saw him cross the muster yard, and she was struck once again by the contrast of the man gently carrying a child that was not his own, and the killer she’d witnessed down in the Depths.

“Did you see him fight tonight?” she asked Olem.

“I didn’t,” Olem said. “I was too busy aiming at the assholes coming after you.”

There might have been a note of reproach in his voice, though Vlora didn’t know if she deserved it. She stood by her choice to attend the gala alone. “He came up behind one of the Palo silent as a ghost. He put that knife through the guy’s sternum, then tossed him like a toy.”

“The stories all said Ben Styke was the strongest man in Fatrasta.”

“I wasn’t confident it was Ben Styke until now,” Vlora said. “But damn.” She took another drink. The wine was loosening her lips, maybe a bit too much, but her heart rate had finally returned to normal. She looked at Olem, feeling a stab of regret. He was a soldier, and he was used to friends dying in battle, but she knew that he worried for her all the same. She suddenly felt all the things that she’d been unfair about over the years.

It was unfair to head off alone on a mission of unknown danger. It was unfair to pull rank. It was unfair to turn down his proposals for marriage when she had no intention of ever leaving him. It was unfair to put off having children, when they both wanted them.

It was unfair of her to lie.

“Olem,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Do you remember after the end of the war? In the blood and the chaos when all those bodies were lost at Skyline Palace?”

“Quite well, yes.” Olem’s voice was flat, controlled, his lips clamped firmly around his cigarette. Vlora knew the pain the memory caused him, and was reluctant to add to it. No one had been closer to Field Marshal Tamas than Olem those last few months.

Her mouth tasted sour. She licked her lips, considering the secret she had kept for ten years. It had always felt like it wasn’t hers to give, and yet now she knew it was foolish not to share it. “I’ve been telling myself and everyone else for ten years that Taniel and Ka-poel died during that fight. But they didn’t. They survived the explosion and slipped away in the chaos.”

Olem sucked on his cigarette, staring at her through the smoke. “I figured,” he said.

“How?”

“You never grieved.”

Vlora cleared her throat. Faithful, trustworthy Olem. The bastard knew all along. By Adom, he was the best present a commanding officer could ever get. “I love you,” she said.

“I figured that, too.” He handed her his cigarette, then said, “Why do you bring it up now?”

“Because they told me they were heading to Fatrasta. This was ten years ago, but I’m worried they’re still here. I’m worried they’re involved in all of this shit. I would have sensed his sorcery if they were in the city, but still… I’m worried. If they do get involved, I can’t imagine it’ll be on Lindet’s side, and Olem? I can’t fight Taniel or Ka-poel. Neither of them was quite human when they left, and they’re out of my league.” And I don’t want to fight them.

“Well,” Olem said, lighting a new cigarette, “we better hope they aren’t still around then.”