The Autumn Republic

Chapter 36

When Adamat told his carriage driver to take him to the Flerring Powder Company on the west side of Adopest, he hadn’t expected them to head well outside of the city and into the countryside.

He and SouSmith climbed out of their carriage at about three o’clock in the afternoon the day after their visit to Uskan and paused to examine their surroundings. The chemical company was at the end of a dirt track several miles off the main highway. It appeared to be a collection of over two dozen buildings of various sizes spread out at distant intervals across a wide field. A creek ran through the center of the complex, providing power to a single mill.

Near the river, set apart from the rest of the buildings by some several hundred yards, Adamat noted a black smudge of dirt that looked like it had once been the foundation for yet another building.

The perils of making gunpowder.

Adamat headed toward the largest of the buildings.

He was stopped just outside the building by a woman holding a blunderbuss. She stood half a head taller than Adamat and had the shoulders of a boxer. Long brown hair half covered her eyes, and she leaned against the building door. She pointed the weapon lazily at his feet.

“Can I help you?”

Adamat noticed the cudgel hanging from her belt and wondered if she was the only guard. He didn’t think that likely. Companies like this needed manpower to keep their secrets safe from competitors. “I’m looking for Flerring the Elder,” Adamat said.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I don’t.”

“What do you want?”

“I need to discuss a matter of some urgency.”

“And that is?”

“I should probably speak with Flerring himself.”

The woman tilted her head to one side. “I’ll see if he’s available. Whom can I tell him is here?”

“Inspector Adamat.”

“You here from the state?”

“Yes.”

“Then go away until you’ve made an appointment. Or come back when you’ve got more goons. We’re not rolling over for your idiot regulations.”

Idiot regulations? “You think I’m a government inspector?”

“That’s what you just said.”

Adamat let out a chuckle and smoothed the front of his jacket with one hand. “No, no. I’m not that kind of inspector. I’m investigating a murder attempt.”

“And that knowledge is supposed to get you inside?” The woman looked him over skeptically and raised the barrel of her blunderbuss by half an inch.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Adamat said, putting both hands out in a calming gesture. “I need to speak with Flerring about his blasting oil.”

The blunderbuss was raised until it was pointed at Adamat’s chest. “Well, then you’re definitely not coming in.”

SouSmith stepped forward suddenly, putting himself between Adamat and the gun. “Lower the weapon,” he rumbled.

“I don’t care how big you are, I don’t–”

“Put. It. Down.” SouSmith took a step forward.

“SouSmith, it’s okay, we don’t need to escalate this further.”

The woman suddenly lowered her blunderbuss. “Did you just say SouSmith? As in the boxer?”

“That’s me.” The words came out of SouSmith in a growl. “Problem?”

Her face split into a grin. “Uncle SouSmith! It’s me, Little Flerring. My dad’s Flerring the Fist.”

SouSmith’s fists slowly uncurled. “This is that Flerring?” He snorted. “You’re all grown up, Little.”

She grinned back at him. “Been, what, ten years? People grow up in that time. I haven’t seen any of the old crew since Dad moved us out here to start the powder company.”

“Never took Flerring for a chemist,” SouSmith said.

“Mom does most of the headwork. Dad does the mixing – well, he did anyway. Lost both his hands in an explosion two years ago. He oversees a dozen mixers now and runs the place while Mom is in Fatrasta.”

Adamat stepped up beside SouSmith and leaned on his cane. “Do you think we could see your father?”

“You’re not bringing us trouble, are you, SouSmith?”

SouSmith looked at Adamat, and Adamat drummed his fingers on his cane. Impossible to tell. If Flerring made the blasting oil, he could very well be complicit in the attempt on Ricard’s life. Not that they had to know that. Adamat shook his head. “Just chasing a lead. You probably won’t hear from us after today.”

Flerring gave a nod and opened one of the double doors that led into the building. “Careful what you touch,” she said, “We don’t keep a lot of powder in the main building, but you can never be too careful.”

They entered what looked to have once been an immense stable capable of housing almost a hundred head of horses. The stalls were filled with raw materials, their doors marked in white chalk telling what was stored inside. They passed dozens of them filled with barrels and boxes of sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal, glycerol, nitric acid. Everything was packed in sawdust and straw, which was strewn all about the place.

“This looks incredibly unsafe,” Adamat commented.

“We keep everything separate,” Little Flerring said. “None of the ingredients are particularly dangerous on their own.”

“Lots of straw. Seems an immense fire risk.”

“No flames allowed within fifty feet of the building. We do all our work during the light of the day.”

Adamat noticed she had left her blunderbuss outside. It did seem they were quite careful. “What can you tell me about blasting oil?”

“I’ll let Dad do that,” she said, pausing beside one of the stalls. She gestured inside to a makeshift office.

An old man sat at an all-too-small desk in one corner. He was bent over with age, his hair gone gray, but he still had shoulders half a hand wider than SouSmith’s. The outer-stall wall had been given a large window, and the man hunched over a book. Adamat instantly noted the man’s hands – or, that is, the lack thereof. Immense arms now ended in iron caps. One had a dual hook for grasping, and the other a flat piece of steel in the shape of a paddle.

“Dad, you’ve got guests,” Little Flerring shouted. “Dad!” She gave SouSmith and Adamat an apologetic look. “He’s very hard of hearing.”

“Eh?” The big man turned toward them. At the sight of strangers he got to his feet, and Adamat almost took a step back. Flerring the Elder – Flerring the Fist – was immense. He towered over Adamat and made even SouSmith look regular-sized. The left side of his face was burned and scarred, making it look lopsided when he smiled. “Is that SouSmith?” he asked loudly.

“Fist,” SouSmith said, nodding.

“Fist?” Flerring shook his handless arms at SouSmith. “Not so much anymore.” He gave a long, almost mechanical chortle.

The two big men made their greetings and Adamat introduced himself. Flerring the Elder led the whole group around the corner to part of the barn where the stalls had been removed and a comfortable sitting area installed, including several sofas, armchairs, and the entrance to an ice cellar, into which Little Flerring disappeared, only to emerge a moment later with a bottle. She poured them all chilled wine while her father talked.

“Blasting oil,” the big man said, shaking his head. “It was our first big discovery. We’ve done well over the years, creating specialized powder for the Adran army and the Brudania-Gurla Trading Company, but blasting oil was going to make us stupid rich.”

Adamat sat up at the mention of Claremonte’s company. “You do business with the Trading Company?”

“Everyone does,” Flerring said. “And you’re naïve to think they don’t. The company is our biggest source of saltpeter. We have other sources, of course, but they control just about all the import business. Where was I? Oh, yes. Blasting oil.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Eh?”

Adamat repeated his question loudly.

“It’s a liquid mix of…” – Flerring paused – “Well, I’m not gonna give out trade secrets.”

“I understand,” Adamat said sympathetically. “What can you tell me without giving up too much? Does it explode similarly to gunpowder?”

“It’s a high-velocity explosive. Far more destructive than gunpowder. It doesn’t take much, either. A glass ball or tube of the stuff no bigger than my stub here” – Flerring wagged one arm – “is enough to crack stone. We planned on revolutionizing the mining industry with it. Just didn’t work out in the end.”

It didn’t take an inspector to see an awfully significant gap between “going to make us rich” and “didn’t work out.” “What happened?” Adamat asked.

“We had a chemist named Borin on our payroll,” Flerring said. “Nice lad, very smart. I’d thought about trying to marry him to Little here.”

Little Flerring made a face as she handed her father a wineglass. “That wouldn’t have happened, Dad, and you know it.”

“Thought about it, is all I said, hon.” He hooked the wineglass deftly and took a sip. “Anyway, Borin came up with the blasting-oil recipe about two years ago. Spent every waking moment since working to stabilize it. It was too volatile, you see. Killed two of our mixers in an accident early on. It explodes by shock rather than by flame, which makes it damn near impossible to transport.”

Shock. Now that was an interesting tidbit. Adamat thought about his theory that the explosives had been thrown into Ricard’s headquarters. “So you haven’t sold any?”

“Of course not! You think I’m in the business of blowing up my customers? I’ve learned my lesson with explosives.” Flerring gestured to his scarred face with the metal paddle fixed to his left hand. “That’s why we fired Borin, actually. He wanted to see the blasting oil put to practical use, so he sold a couple samples to a mining company.”

“So he did sell it!”

“Yeah. Little found out, and we agreed we couldn’t trust him anymore. We drew up a contract that let us keep a percentage of the profits if he wound up selling the formula to another company and we parted on good terms. That was only about two weeks ago.”

Adamat was on the edge of his seat now. He had something solid. Someplace to take this investigation. If Borin still had his formula and had sold it to Ricard’s attempted murderers, he could track them down. “Can you point me to him? I need to speak with Borin.”

Flerring exchanged a glance with his daughter. “He’s over there,” he said, waving his hook vaguely to his right. “And over there. And there.”

Little Flerring chuckled in an exasperated manner. “That’s unkind, Dad.”

“Look, I tell all my mixers and chemists that if they blow themselves up, it’s their own damn fault.”

“Don’t make sport out of the dead, Dad.”

Adamat felt his heart fall. “Borin’s dead?”

“Very. About as dead as a man can be this side of angering a Privileged. Best as we can guess, he was packing up his samples of blasting oil and dropped one at his foot. You might have seen that grease spot over by the river on your way in?”

“Yes.”

“That used to be a very sturdy stone building. It’s where our chemists worked. That building was built to survive any size explosion. It could have lasted through an artillery bombardment. Took out Borin and all of our ongoing experiments. There weren’t even pieces of Borin left after that, and we’re still finding bits of stone everywhere we walk.”

Adamat leaned back in his seat and let out a sigh. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Flerring shrugged. “It set us back, but our people keep good notes. It destroyed every bit of the blasting oil we had left, which I think is a damned blessing.”

“Dad…”

“Don’t you ‘Dad’ me.” Flerring shook his head at his daughter and turned to Adamat. “I’ve put a stop to all research on the blasting oil. Burned all but one copy of the notes, and only I know where the last copy is. Infernal stuff isn’t going to get us all killed while I’m still alive. Once I’m dead, my girl here is welcome to blow herself up as quick as she wants. But not before that.”

A dead end. Dead as Borin. There was no way to know if Flerring was telling the truth about any of this without the chemist to corroborate. Maybe Flerring killed Borin to cover his tracks. Adamat could bring in a dozen officers and tear the place apart, but that was the last thing he had time for. And SouSmith might not forgive him.

“Do you happen to know who Borin sold the stuff to?”

Flerring scratched his head with his hook. “A mining company. Do you know, hon?”

“There’s a receipt somewhere,” Little Flerring said. “I’ll see if I can find it.”

She disappeared for a few minutes, during which time Flerring and SouSmith talked about their boxing days. Adamat couldn’t help but be amazed at how vigorous the boxer-turned-powder-maker was, despite his injuries.

His daughter returned holding a scrap of paper and handed it to Adamat. “The Underhill Mining Coalition,” she said.

Adamat paused as he reached for the paper and let his hand fall. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll remember it, thank you.”

Little Flerring shrugged and put the paper in her pocket.

“This mining company. You didn’t happen to meet their representative, did you?” Adamat felt his heart begin to race.

“No. Borin did business with them behind our back. We wouldn’t have agreed to the sale otherwise.”

“Did Borin happen to tell you why they needed it?”

“They were looking for high-powered explosives,” Little Flerring said as if it were obvious.

This wasn’t helping at all. “But did they come to him or did he go to them?”

“Oh. They came to him.”

“That’s all we need to know. Thank you,” Adamat said, getting to his feet. “I think it’s time we go. I appreciate your help a great deal.”

“Didn’t think we were much help,” Little Flerring said. “If you track down the samples Borin sold, let me know. I’d prefer they were destroyed.”

“You were a great deal of help. And don’t worry, I’ll tell you.” Adamat shook hands with Little Flerring, then tentatively grasped the Fist’s offered hook. A few minutes later and he and SouSmith were back in their carriage headed toward Adopest.

“Good to see him,” SouSmith rumbled.

Adamat barely heard him, deep in thought. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Been a long time. Girl’s grown up.”

“Oh? You thinking of settling down, SouSmith?”

SouSmith chuckled. “Too young for me.” He paused. Then, “Why such a hurry?”

Adamat drummed his fingers on the head of his cane excitedly. “Because the Underhill Mining Coalition isn’t a mining company,” he said.

“Don’t follow.”

“They’re a club. A group of thieves and smugglers who call themselves businessmen. They meet to drink and play cards at an exclusive – and hidden – location in Adopest. Most people know them as the Underhill Society and I happen to be friends with one of their members.”

“Who’s that?”

“Ricard Tumblar.”

Nila and Olem hunted the Kez cavalry through the gorges and hills of Brude’s Hideaway for three days. On the first day a low cloud cover descended over the area, obscuring the peaks of the Charwood Pile to the west, and on the second day a heavy fog rolled in. Nila wondered if the fog had some kind of sorcery behind it, but neither she nor Olem could sense anything amiss in the Else.

It was just bad luck.

Nila couldn’t see the ends of their cuirassier lines as they swept the ridges and bends of the highlands. The sun was obscured and the whole world seemed gray.

She stood in her stirrups the third day, wondering how any man or woman could possibly stay in the saddle for hours at a time, let alone several days. Everything below her waist hurt, and most of the things above it. Her knuckles were sore from gripping the reins and her spine ached from the jolt of her horse’s stride. Her head spun from hour after hour of trying to maintain her vision of the Else, attempting to spot anything in the fog. Olem told her to drink more water.

Olem sat beside her at the top of a small hill looking to the south – or maybe the north, she couldn’t really be sure, with no point of reference. There was a white chasm at their feet where the earth dipped beneath the fog, and she couldn’t tell if this was merely a divot in the landscape or a valley a mile long.

“The good news,” Olem said, puffing on a cigarette, “is that the fog screws with them as much as it does with us. They’re left reading the ground and listening for echoes in the murk, same as us.”

Nila sniffed. He’d become progressively more optimistic as the hours rolled past. He seemed to hold the opinion that every minute they spent circling the Gurlish Wolf in the fog was another minute he wasn’t abusing the flanks of Tamas’s army. Which, she supposed, was true, if the Gurlish Wolf hadn’t slipped past them and was back on the plain already, attacking the Adran army.

“They have an advantage over us,” Nila said.

“Oh?”

“They can smell your cigarette smoke from farther away than we can see them.”

Olem took the cigarette from his mouth and stared at it sourly before putting it out on his ash-stained saddle horn and tossing it into the damp grass. “Damn it.”

They sat in silence for several minutes before Nila said, “How do they communicate in this?”

“Pit if I know. I haven’t heard a trumpet since the fog descended, so it’s not that.”

“Maybe they have a Knacked?”

“Maybe,” Olem mused. “Someone with very precise hearing. A few years back I heard a story about a pair of Knacked twins that could communicate over a hundred miles just using their minds. That kind of thing is rarer than a Privileged healer, I’d imagine.” He drew his tobacco and rolling papers from his breast pocket, stared at them for a moment, then put them back with a sigh. “No, I imagine they’ve done the smart thing and hunkered down in one of these valleys to wait out the fog.”

Nila studied the ground beneath their feet, looking at the horseshoe prints in the mud – horseshoes marked by a Kez blacksmith. The tracks led into the gully below them. The Kez had split up after being run from their camp three days before. Their tracks seemed to lead everywhere, crisscrossing and doubling back without any clear path to follow.

And like a hound looking for a scent, Olem had patiently been following every one of those trails. He kept his formations tight, his scouts plentiful, and never stumbled blindly into one of the fog-concealed valleys.

It all seemed very professional to Nila, but she wouldn’t have had any idea as to any of this if Olem hadn’t been explaining it to her along the way.

“You’re picking this stuff up quickly,” Olem said.

“What stuff?”

“All this.” He tapped the pocket where he kept his tobacco. “Cigarette smoke. Something I didn’t think of, but a Kez cavalryman would. Good call.”

Nila ducked her head. “Thank you.”

“A fighting Privileged,” Olem said. “Six months ago, if I had to guess what extraordinary thing you’d become, I would not have guessed that.”

Nila knew it was meant to be a compliment, but it niggled at her all the same. “You don’t think I’m capable?”

“You’ve shown yourself to be capable.”

“But you wouldn’t have thought that.”

“That’s not quite what I meant.”

“And what did you mean, Colonel Olem?”

Olem removed the rolling paper from his pocket and was about to sprinkle tobacco on the center before he made a face and put it back. “Privileged are born to it. You were a laundress. No offense, but it didn’t seem like something on your horizon.”

Nila opened her mouth, ready to take the argument further, then decided against it. What was she doing, arguing like this? Olem was right, of course. A Privileged? Her? It was laughably unlikely.

“If you don’t mind me saying,” Olem said, “you’ve been on edge. More than just a chafed ass.”

Nila let out what she had wanted to be a dismissive laugh, but it came out as just this side of hysterical. “You could say that.”

“The field marshal has a habit of using the hottest fire to temper soft metal,” Olem said. “I’m not sure if he should have sent you.”

“I’m soft metal, am I? No. It’s not that. Well. It is that. But so many more things. I’ve never ridden before and my body hurts so badly I want to cry every moment. I’m untested, barely trained. This infernal fog!” Her voice rose a little too high and a nearby cuirassier glanced at her.

Olem sat unmoved, listening for several moments before he said, “At least you know your failings.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“Really. I mean it. I’ve met dozens of officers who think their immaculate mustache can move the world. Not knowing one’s weaknesses gets people killed.”

Nila shook her head and gave a short laugh, relieved to hear this one sounding a little less desperate. “Little do they know that an immaculate beard is what it takes.”

Olem grinned at her. “Right you are.” His hand was halfway toward his rolling papers again before he swore under his breath.

“Are you with anyone?” Nila asked, the question leaving her lips before she could stop herself.

Olem glanced up in surprise. “Huh? Well…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Kind of. It’s a tenuous thing.”

Nila was surprised to find herself hurt by his answer. She had turned him down, after all, and that was months ago. Maybe she had hoped he would pine for her a little longer. “Another soldier?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s she like?”

“Long legs. Black hair. Very good at what she does.”

“Oh? And what does she do?” She felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth when Olem’s cheeks turned red.

“She’s a powder mage.”

Nila gave a low whistle. “You don’t settle, do you?”

“Never have,” Olem said, giving her a lingering glance. She opened her mouth, but forgot her response immediately when Olem held up a hand. “Do you hear that?” he whispered.

Up and down the line, cuirassiers grew alert. Nila strained her ears to listen, but couldn’t hear anything. “What is it?”

Olem put one hand on the stock of his carbine. “I thought I heard a horse down there.”

They remained in silence for several minutes, during which Nila barely allowed herself to breathe. The fear and anxiety all returned in those precious minutes of waiting, and she could feel her heart hammering against her chest like a bird trying to escape its cage.

A shadow appeared in the fog down in the gully. Nila thought her heart would burst at any moment, until she saw Olem relax, his finger edging away from the trigger of his carbine.

“It’s one of ours,” a cuirassier said. “Looks like Ganley.”

A horse came out of the fog carrying a blue-uniformed rider. Olem called out a greeting, and Nila sat back in her saddle, trying to find a comfortable spot on which to sit. There wasn’t one. She closed her eyes, trying to reach the meditative state that Bo had taught her – a place between this world and the Else, where she could let her worries fade.

She had yet to reach it.

When her eyes opened again, she found that she’d slipped past her target and gone into the Else – here at least, she sighed to herself, the fog couldn’t penetrate. The hills rolled on in the distance, and she could see that the gully before them was indeed a deep one, extending thirty feet down and on into thick brush in the distance. Hundreds of small flames danced before her eyes like fireflies.

Several things happened at once. First, she screamed. Second, the returning scout, Ganley, fell from his horse, his bloody throat grinning up at them all from the ground, and third, those hundreds of fireflies suddenly shot forward and the rumble of hooves brought Nila out of the Else and into the real world, where horses seemed to erupt from the mist, ridden by Kez cavalry in their green-on-tan uniforms.

Olem’s carbine went off, causing a ringing in Nila’s ears. A dozen other shots were fired before the Kez cavalry were suddenly upon them.

Nila felt a Kez mount ram her own, sending the creature reeling to the side. She sawed at the reins and nearly fell out of her saddle, when a sword flashed in front of her eyes. The cuff of a blue uniform sprang into her vision as Olem countered a stroke meant for her neck. She heard him grunt, swear, then he was gone.

A Kez dragoon leaned into Nila from the side, and she’d barely got her hands up before the guard of his saber cracked into the side of her head. Vision swimming, she latched onto the man’s arm, pulling him closer, and put her fingers around his throat.

She willed the fire from the Else, pouring her anger and energy in behind it, and waited for the man’s head to wither like a burned mushroom.

Nothing happened.

Panic seized her. She pushed herself closer to the dragoon, feeling his breath upon her neck, grasping for the Else. It was still there, she could still sense it at her fingertips, but nothing was happening.

The guard of his saber hit her again. She reeled, unable to grasp her sorcery, yet knowing if she let go, she would die with a split head. She dug her fingernails into his throat and tore. The man suddenly disengaged, cursing angrily in Kez and holding his bloody throat.

Nila remembered the pistol Olem had given her. She grasped for the butt, her hands shaking, and leveled it at the dragoon.

A grin flashed across his face, and the last thing she felt was a tug on the back of her head and the whole world going upside down.