The Crimson Campaign

Chapter 29

Tamas climbed from his bedroll. He paused once, taking a deep breath.

“Getting old,” he muttered.

Every morning his limbs ached a little more, especially his leg. Every day it took him just another couple of seconds to climb from the bed. Worse now, sleeping on the hard ground. Every night for the last five weeks.

Five weeks. Hard to believe it had only been that long since he’d faced the Kez Grand Army, planning how he’d take them from the side and smash them against the gates of Budwiel. Bloody stupid, now that he looked back on it, thinking he could take the entire Grand Army with two brigades.

His arrogance got him into this. Had he been there, manning the walls beside Hilanska and the rest, they would have fought off those Wardens and sent the Kez army to the pit.

Tamas got to his feet. He pulled on his shirt, long since yellowed and stained with blood – his own blood, and that of others – then on came his uniform pants and boots. Olem had polished the boots during the night, like he did every night. He understood that a field marshal needed to keep up appearances. Finally, Tamas put on his jacket, and he stepped out into the morning air with his bicorne tucked under one arm.

Gavril stared down at him from on horseback. Somehow, he kept that Watchmaster’s vest of his immaculate. His pants were ripped and stained, his arms and shoulders covered with powder burns, nicks, and cuts, but the faded colors of the Watchmaster’s vest showed no wear but that of time and washing.

Gavril had Tamas’s charger saddled and ready, and held the reins out to Tamas.

“I’m not going on some bloody jaunt with you,” Tamas said.

“Then why are you dressed?” Gavril looked around the camp. No one had stirred yet. Tamas let them off easy the last couple of days, sleeping until past eight in the morning. They’d earned their rest, and with the Kez cavalry broken, their remnants sworn to leave Tamas be, and the infantry still a week off, Tamas could afford to give his men some slack.

“The army is marching today,” Tamas said.

“We’ll catch up.”

Stubborn bastard. Why did Gavril need this? Why did he need to drag Tamas along with him? The dead were best left buried, undisturbed. They cared not for the sentiments of the living.

Tamas would rather have tipped his hat to the west and bowed his head in respect for a few minutes. It would have been more practical.

“Get on your damn horse,” Gavril said.

Tamas climbed onto his mount.

They rode west in silence along one of the many rivers that made up the Fingers of Kresimir. Tamas didn’t know if this one had a name. The locals probably called it something – not that there were many locals in this part of Kez.

Northern Kez, with its countless farms and ranches, had once been filled with people. The alternating droughts and floods of the last ten years that had caused Adro so many problems had also affected Kez, and huge portions of the Kez population had gone to the eastern cities in search of work. He imagined those cities even more crowded and dirty than Adopest.

Tamas wondered how Adopest had fared in the war. The canal over the mountains should be finished by this time, alleviating some of the strain off the Mountainwatch for trade. With war with the Kez, food would have to come from Novi and Deliv.

Tamas and Gavril came down out of the highest foothills to where Kresimir’s Fingers began to meet. The Fingers didn’t all converge, not all at once. It was several days’ ride to the place where they did, and their destination was not that far out onto the plains.

The ground turned rocky – great boulders and sudden ravines that made Tamas wonder if the mountains had once come out this far, and if so, what god or force of nature had knocked them down.

The terrain had provided a good place to hide from Ipille’s Wardens, long ago.

They crossed a rocky bluff and then descended into a gully where two of Kresimir’s Fingers met. Tamas rubbed at his shoulders, suddenly cold despite the summer sun beating down upon them.

He saw it then. A cairn, not more than fifty paces from where the two rivers met. It was about four feet high and six feet across, sandstone rocks gathered from the area and stacked.

It had changed little in the last thirteen years. The bloody fingerprints both Tamas and Gavril had left, their hands raw from digging the stony earth, had been washed away. A necklace – a treasured possession of the dead that Tamas had left on the highest stone – was gone, but the rest of the cairn remained undisturbed.

Tamas climbed down from his horse and tied the reins to a stunted tree. He approached the cairn slowly. Thoughtfully. Now that he was here, the dread he’d felt in coming seemed silly.

He turned to Gavril.

The big man, with all his stubbornness in making Tamas accompany him on this pilgrimage, seemed reluctant to get any closer.

Tamas took a shaky breath. He reached out and touched the top stone of the cairn.

“Camenir,” he said, and found it felt good to say it aloud.

A crunch of footsteps sounded on the rocky soil as Gavril finally joined him.

“I doubt anyone but you or me remember the name.” In his head, it had been a musing thought. Aloud, it sounded callous, and Tamas instantly regretted saying it. Gavril was the last of Camenir’s kin. His relatives on the Kez side, dead by Ipille’s orders. The ones on the Adran side not numerous, and those alive having long disowned him.

Tamas tried to picture Camenir in his mind, and found he could not. He looked a lot like Gavril, he thought. Not as big. Quite a bit younger. A sloppy, casual manner and a genuine smile that most found endearing.

“How did you do it?” Gavril stood beside the cairn, head bowed.

“Do what?”

“How did you go on? After what happened?”

Tamas was surprised to hear accusation in Gavril’s voice.

“What choice did I have?”

What did Gavril want him to say? Did Gavril want him to admit he’d slept his way through half the eligible ladies in Adopest, and quite a few ineligible ones? Did Gavril want him to point out that he’d killed more men in duels in the short time following Erika’s death than he had in all his angry youth?

“I saw grief in you,” Gavril said. “I saw it eating through you after Erika’s murder. After Manhouch denied your demands that we go to war. When you came and said you wanted to kill Ipille, I knew it had to be done. But… but after we failed, after Camenir died, you changed. All those signs of grief I’d seen in you were gone. You went back to society. Smiled at all those fools who’d laughed behind their hands at the box containing Erika’s head. You entertained guests and walked the streets laughing.”

“What choice did I have?” Tamas repeated.

Gavril gripped his shoulder and turned him around to look him in the eye. “You never grieved for Camenir. You never cared that my little brother died.” Tears sprang up in Gavril’s eyes, his face red.

“What did you want?” Tamas was suddenly angry. Had Gavril held this against him all these years? Did Gavril think that Camenir meant nothing to him? “Did you want me to turn to the bottle, like you did?”

“I wanted you to show some decorum!” Gavril’s voice rose sharply. “Show some regret. Any sign of emotion for my brother! A man who died for you!”

This close, Gavril towered over him, but Tamas felt no fear. Only rage and regret. “That’s rich, coming from you,” Tamas spat. “Do you think climbing into an ale cask showed decorum?”

Tamas barely saw the fist coming. One moment it loomed, big as a ham, and the next his ears rang as he stared at the ground from his knees. He blinked away a sudden haze. Blood leaked from his mouth and nose, spattering on the dusty ground. Not the first blood he’d left on this spot.

He climbed to his feet, wobbling on his knees. Gavril glared at him, daring him to hit back.

So he did.

The look of surprise on Gavril’s face as Tamas’s fist connected with his stomach gave Tamas a jolt of satisfaction. He followed it up with another punch, doubling Gavril over.

“I lost my wife, you bastard,” he growled.

Gavril wrapped his arms around Tamas and lifted him with a bellow. Tamas felt a thrill of fear as his feet left the ground. To a man with Gavril’s strength, he might as well have been a child.

He brought his elbow down on Gavril’s back, eliciting a yell from the big man.

Gavril lifted him high, then pounded him into the ground. Tamas felt the air leave his lungs, the feeling leave his legs, and his vision blurred. He hacked out a cough and dug one hand into the fat of Gavril’s stomach.

They rolled in the dirt for what felt like hours. Swearing, kicking, punching. It didn’t matter how hard Tamas hit Gavril, nothing seemed to stop him. Even without a powder trance, Tamas still considered himself a pit of a fighter. Gavril broke his holds. Absorbed his punches. And he gave as good – or better – than he got.

Tamas climbed to his feet and kicked Gavril. His brother-in-law shoved him backward, and Tamas felt his back hit the rocks of the cairn.

“Stop!” he said.

Gavril looked up, his face bruised, one eye blackened and his nose bloody. He saw the cairn behind Tamas and lowered his fist.

Tamas limped away from the cairn and lowered himself against an old fallen log.

He felt along his ribs. One of them might have gotten cracked. His face felt like a rug after the housekeeper had beat it for an hour. The back of his jacket had ripped – he could tell just by moving his shoulders. One of his boots was on the other side of the cairn, and Tamas didn’t even remember it coming off.

“You want to know what happened to me?” Tamas said.

Gavril grunted. He lay on the ground across from Tamas, legs splayed.

“That night we buried Camenir is the night I decided to kill Manhouch.” Tamas gathered up a wad of spit and hawked it into the dirt. It was red. “I decided to start a war. Not for the people’s rights or because Manhouch was evil or any of the other drivel I tell my supporters. I started a war to avenge my wife and my brother.”

Tamas took a deep breath and stared at his stockinged foot. His sock had ripped a week ago and his big toe stuck through it. “I couldn’t do it in a world of grief. I had to feel out my friends. Charm my enemies. That was the first step: to convince them I was still Adro’s favored son. Manhouch’s protector. The next step was putting Manhouch’s head in a basket.

“Then, of course, the war. Which” – Tamas held up one finger – “I almost didn’t go through with. The earthquake and the royalists nearly knocked me off my course. My heart bled when I saw the shambles in which Adopest had been left. But Ipille sent Nikslaus and put me back on my path to vengeance.”

Tamas let his finger drop. “The path will end when I cut out Ipille’s heart for taking my family.”

The air was still. The only sound that of the water where the two rivers met.

“That was a nice speech,” Gavril said.

“I thought so.”

“Had that memorized long?”

“Most of it for years,” Tamas said. “Had to do a little improvising. Never thought I’d be giving it to you.”

“Who, then?”

Tamas shrugged. “My grandchildren? My executioner? Taniel’s the only one who knew the real reasons I planned the things I did.”

The sound of a horse whinnying brought Tamas’s head around. Up on the bluff, perhaps a hundred feet away, were two riders. He squinted into the afternoon sun as his fingers looked for his pistol. It had come out of his belt and lay a dozen paces to his left.

The riders began to head down the bluff toward him. The glare of the sun lessened, and he recognized two familiar faces: Olem and Beon je Ipille.

“Company,” Tamas said.

Gavril craned his neck and looked toward the bluff. “Is that Beon and Olem?”

“Yes.”

“I could break Beon’s neck. Bury him next to Camenir. Would be poetic justice in that.”

“My – our – quarrel isn’t with Beon. It’s with his father.”

“I’ve heard Beon is Ipille’s favorite.”

“Ipille’s ‘favorite’ son changes every six months or so. Beon just lost a major battle with me. I think if we killed him now, Ipille would say he deserved it.”

“Not a loving father.”

“No.”

Olem and Beon came to a halt some dozen paces off. Olem looked down at Tamas’s dislodged boot, then around the gully. “Seems there was a fight,” he said.

“Ambushed. We dumped the bodies in the river,” Tamas said.

“Of course,” Olem said. He didn’t sound convinced.

“I thought that you were given orders to stay in the camp?” Tamas said to Olem.

“Sorry, sir,” Olem said. “The general here asked me to accompany him as his chaperone so that he did not break his word of honor in leaving the camp.”

“And why did you feel the need to follow me?” Tamas turned to Beon.

Beon frowned toward the cairn. “I have heard a story,” he said. “Regarding a powder mage, and two huge brothers with great strength.” His eyes flicked to Gavril. “An old story, passed around in my father’s court. One that my father has taken great pains to stamp out.”

“So?” Gavril said, his tone petulant.

Beon seemed unperturbed. “The story caught my childhood imagination. It comes to an end when an entire company of my father’s Elite disappeared in the Fingers of Kresimir. Some of their bodies were found. Some weren’t. I always wondered if that was really the end of the story.”

Tamas and Gavril looked at each other.

Tamas asked, “And you thought you might find the end of the story by following us out here?”

Beon was looking at the cairn again. “I thought, perhaps. I see a powder mage, a widower by my father’s orders, and one very large man with great strength. I predict that the story I heard has a sadder ending than my childhood imagination would have hoped.” He bowed his head toward them and turned his horse around. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

“It did,” Gavril called out.

Beon stopped and looked back. “Did what?”

“The story. It had a sad ending.”

“No,” Beon said. “The story is not over yet. But the ending will be very sad regardless.”