Wrath of Empire

Chapter 24

Vlora met Taniel in the hotel great room for breakfast. He sat in the same place as the night before, in the one quiet corner with his back against the wall, sketchbook on his lap and two plates of eggs and hash in front of them. He pushed one over to Vlora without looking up from his sketch.

She dropped down across from him and craned her neck. Taniel was drawing the hotel manager.

“Do you remember that discussion we had last night about being circumspect in our mission here?” he asked quietly.

Vlora dug into the eggs and hash. “Do you remember when I told you not to be a smug prick?” she replied between bites.

Taniel sucked on his teeth and finally looked up. His face was serious, brows knit in worry.

“Sorry,” Vlora muttered into her meal.

“Everyone’s been talking about your fight with Jezzy’s men,” Taniel said. “In here, out there. It’s the latest fun bit of gossip. Our only saving grace is apparently there are so many fights every day that people will have forgotten about yours by tonight.”

“They tried to recruit me for their club brawl,” Vlora said defensively. “And they weren’t being nice about it. What would you have me do? I didn’t take it far enough to give away who I am.”

“But you did draw attention.” Taniel nodded across the room to an older woman leaning against the hotel bar. She had an easy manner, with a quality pistol and sword at her belt and epaulets on a faux uniform jacket. She was staring at Vlora and Taniel. “That,” Taniel said, “is the Yellow Creek sheriff. The good news is that she’s apparently the only impartial bit of law in this town – and she’s given you a pass because Jezzy’s boys have a habit of coming on too strong. The bad news is she’s now going to watch us closely.”

“Until something else draws her attention.” Vlora sniffed the tin mug in front of Taniel and found watered wine. She lifted it to the sheriff and downed the rest.

“Hopefully soon,” Taniel said.

Vlora fetched beer for the two of them, not trusting the water in a place like this, and returned to her seat. “You’re in a mood today,” she said.

“I spent half the night wandering the town,” Taniel said. “I don’t sleep much these days.”

“Can’t?”

“Don’t need it.”

Vlora felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, and was reminded that as much as she wanted to think Taniel was still the boy she’d befriended two decades ago, he was now something more than human. “And?”

“And I can’t find the damned thing.” Taniel flipped his sketchbook closed in frustration, as if he’d expected to waltz into town and discover the godstone within hours. “I can sense it, and that should be enough. Once Pole knew what we were looking for, she tuned me into the same sorcery as the godstone in Landfall. I should be like a bloodhound to this thing, but instead I’m just walking in circles.”

Vlora sipped her beer. He did expect to find it immediately. “Why do you think that is?”

“No idea. It’s like trying to follow sound in a fog.” He got up and stashed his sketchbook, his eyes focused inward on thoughts he did not share. “I’m going to head back out and –”

Taniel was interrupted by the sound of a crash, and the front door of the hotel suddenly burst open. Vlora turned to look for the commotion and her heart fell. It was that asshole Dorner from the night before and the friend whom she’d dragged down the stairs. Dorner stumbled around the room, clearly drunk, trying to speak with his half tongue. His companion steadied him and pointed at Vlora.

The sheriff perked up. “Boys,” she said warningly.

They ignored her and came straight toward Vlora. Vlora stood up and lay one hand on the pistol in her belt. Neither man had a weapon in hand, but both had swords on them.

Taniel stepped between Vlora and the two, barring them both with his arm. “Can I help you fellas?” he asked.

Dorner stabbed a drunken finger toward Vlora, mumbling something. His companion translated. “My brother here lost his tongue to this bitch. We’re gonna take hers and see if it fits.”

“Everyone needs to calm down!” the sheriff said loudly. She was still ignored.

“I think that’s unnecessary,” Taniel said. “Let me buy the two of you a few rounds and we’ll talk about some way less violent to solve this whole thing. I think that –”

Dorner shoved Taniel hard in the chest, and both men went for their swords. Taniel crashed into Vlora’s table, and before either she or the sheriff could respond, his sword was in his hand.

“Calm down before someone gets –” Taniel began.

Dorner leapt forward, sword flashing, his companion on his heels. Taniel thrust once, pivoted, and pushed before either man could take two steps. The movement was so quick that Vlora could barely follow it. The two men twitched and tumbled, stuck together by Taniel’s sword like chickens on a skewer, dead before they hit the floor.

The room was deathly silent, all eyes on Taniel. “So much for keeping things quiet,” Vlora muttered under her breath.

The sheriff approached, pistol in hand, circling the two bodies and leaning over to put her fingers to their necks one at a time. “Dead,” she proclaimed.

Slowly, Taniel pulled his sword out of the two and faced the sheriff. Vlora could see the fight in his stance, the tension in his legs like a snake coiled to strike. She had no doubt that he could wipe out the whole room before anyone made it to the door, and the thought frightened her.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to disarm yourself,” the sheriff said.

“It was self-defense, ma’am,” Taniel said.

“I saw that,” she replied, “but we’re gonna have to put it in front of a judge. You need to disarm and come with me.” The sheriff’s voice wavered. She could see that same tension in his legs that Vlora could, and she was scared.

Vlora waited for him to move. Whatever he did, she would have no choice but to back him up. Things had panned out about as badly as was possible and she couldn’t think of a way to turn it around.

“Tan,” she said quietly.

“I know.” Taniel took a deep breath and bent to wipe his sword on Dorner’s body before handing it and his pistol to Vlora. “Get my rifle and pack out of my room,” he said to her. He showed his empty hands and belt to the sheriff and looked down at the bodies, dismayed. “I guess I am a smug prick. And you’re on your own until we can get this sorted out.”

The sheriff slowly put up her pistol. “You two are just a load of trouble, aren’t you?”

“Just trying to live our lives, ma’am,” Vlora said.

“We’ll get this sorted out before a judge,” the sheriff repeated, “and then I’ll ask you kindly to live those lives somewhere else. Understand?”

Vlora swore to herself, meeting Taniel’s gaze. This was going to be a problem, and both of them knew it. “How long will this take?” Taniel asked.

“Couple weeks.” The sheriff sniffed. “We’ve got just one judge and a damned lot of violence.”

Vlora could see in Taniel’s eyes that he was reconsidering his offer to go quietly. But the options were slim: Either he could sit in a cell for two weeks while Vlora searched on her own, or they could cut their way out through a lot of innocent people and end up being run out of town. She looked meaningfully at the sheriff and nodded.

“So be it,” Taniel said coldly.

The sheriff escorted Taniel out of the building, leaving Vlora alone with two corpses and a whole bunch of eyes staring at her. She left the rest of her wine and took Taniel’s weapons upstairs, then fetched his pack and stowed it in her own room.

She slipped out the back of the building, hoping to avoid any more unwanted attention. Halfway down the street she stopped and swore to herself, realizing that without that damned magical compass in Taniel’s head, she didn’t have a chance of finding anything. She muttered and swore to herself and continued on, trying to formulate a plan.

She found a secluded street in the Gurlish quarter and sat down in an alley to try and focus. She closed her eyes, and took a deep sniff of powder to enhance her senses and focus her mind. Once she was in a deep trance, she opened her third eye.

The world became a hazy, colorless place. Buildings and people seemed almost translucent, and she swept her gaze all around her looking for color. There was a little of it – small flames, like candles burning in windows, that she knew belonged to Knacked throughout the city. There were a few dozen of them, which was unsurprising considering the amount of money involved in such a town. Knacked, after all, were useful people.

There was nothing else, though. No bright flames of a Privileged, and none of the customary pastel smudges that indicated leftover sorcery. She tried to remember what the godstone in Landfall looked like in the Else, and realized that she’d never bothered to check. In the chaos of the battle and subsequent retreat, it had never even crossed her mind.

She cursed herself for her foolishness, and closed her third eye.

“I can’t do this on my own,” she said quietly to herself.

She returned to the main street and walked along, eyes on the signs above the storefronts. It wasn’t long until she found one that said EXPRESS MESSENGERS: YOUR LETTERS, CONFIDENTIAL AND GUARANTEED.

It was a company that she’d seen in Landfall, and she had made use of their services before. She went inside, where a single clerk waited behind a dusty desk, half-asleep with his chin resting on his fist. He roused himself as Vlora entered.

“Paper,” Vlora demanded.

She sat in the corner and penned a letter in Adran military code. She sprinkled the wet ink with black powder and then sealed it in wax with a signet ring she kept in her pocket. It was marked with the old symbol of the Riflejacks – a chevron over a powder horn. She gave the letter to the clerk.

“Where to?” he asked.

“That,” Vlora said, placing several coins on his desk, “might be difficult.”

She gave the clerk her hotel and room number in case of an answer and stepped out into the midmorning air, breathing in the stench. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bottle until Olem arrived with the army, but that didn’t seem like a very good use of her time. She needed a plan – any plan – that would keep her moving and looking.

Without Taniel’s sorcerous compass, she was going to have to depend on footwork. Luckily, she’d already done some thinking on the matter. She would walk each valley and examine each mine, combing the landscape under the pretense of looking for an employer who wasn’t the two big-boss fools here in town. It would be slow going, and there was a very real risk of attracting attention, but it was the best plan she had.

She would look for anything suspicious in this world and in the Else.

“Ma’am?”

Vlora was pulled out of her thoughts by a voice at her elbow. She turned and immediately stiffened, her hand falling to her sword arm. There was a Palo woman by her side, wearing a duster and tricorn, and the tight pants and loose shirt of a duelist. She was accompanied by seven men and women, most of them Palo, all wearing similar outfits and also armed with small swords.

Vlora ordered them in her mind, body prepared to work through the motions as she cut her way free of imminent violence. The process took her mere seconds, but it was interrupted by a friendly clearing of the woman’s throat.

She looked at Vlora’s sword hand. “No need for that, ma’am,” she said. “We’re here to talk.”

“About what?”

“Our boss wants to meet you.”

“And who is your boss?” She thought she had a pretty good idea.

“His name is Burt.”

Brown Bear Burt. Jezzy’s competition. Vlora considered her options. Eight against one were steep odds in a fair fight. She still had a buzz from her earlier sniff of powder, so she could probably take them without too much risk. But if even one was a skilled swordsman, she could be in trouble.

Her eyes narrowed as she realized that not one of them was carrying an ounce of powder. Odd, that. A coincidence? Or something else?

She thought of Taniel sitting in a cell in the Yellow Creek sheriff’s office, and decided that the mission had already taken a big enough hit. “When?” she asked.

“Right now, if that’s convenient.”

Vlora took her hand off her sword. “Then let’s get this over with.”

The Yellow Creek Picks, as they called themselves, were headquartered at a brothel not more than a few blocks from Vlora’s own hotel. It was on the edge of the Gurlish quarter, a sprawling, three-story wooden building with an enormous barroom and numerous hallways leading into the bowels of the establishment. Men and women of every nationality in various states of undress circled the room, chatting up the few miners who hadn’t yet left to tend to their claims.

Whores of both sexes eyed Vlora as she walked in, but she was spared the sales pitches and escorted straight upstairs to a spacious room that looked down onto the main floor of the brothel. The center of the room was taken up by a wide desk on top of the biggest bearskin Vlora had ever seen.

The man behind it, despite his name, looked nothing like a bear. Burt was only an inch or so taller than Vlora. He had flaming-red hair and muttonchops and a wiry build. He wore the kind of expensive suit Vlora only saw in the best parts of Landfall, with a gold chain hanging from the breast pocket and a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose. He had papers in one hand, reading them while toying with a big boz knife, the tip of which was buried in his gouged desk.

He set the paper down and looked up as Vlora came up the stairs. She waited for her escorts to take her weapons and frisk her, but instead the Palo guards retreated back down to the bar.

Burt leaned forward, grinning at her, and opened a box on his desk. “Cigar?”

“I would, thanks.” Vlora took one, figuring that she might as well enjoy a few minutes before the bastard tried to have her killed, and allowed him to light the end.

“Your name is …”

“Verundish,” Vlora said, using the name of an old military colleague. “I’m guessing you’re Brown Bear Burt.”

“That’s me,” Burt said cheerfully.

“You’re not very bearlike.”

“Just Burt will do,” he said. “Kill one big Ironhook grizzly with a lucky shot and suddenly people make it a nickname.” He spoke Adran without an accent – suspiciously so. A lot of Palo spoke Adran, but he sounded like he’d been born there.

Vlora puffed on the cigar. The tobacco was good – very good. She held it out, looking along the length for a tobacconist’s mark. It was a small spear with a circle around it. Nothing she recognized. She waved away a face full of smoke. “That’s a good cigar.”

“Little place off the coast I invested in a while back. Things go well, they’ll be selling them as far away as Strenland in a couple years.”

Vlora took another puff, then set the cigar carefully on the ashtray on Burt’s desk. She couldn’t let herself relax, not here. She’d already been introduced to the way people do business here by Jezzy’s Shovels, and even someone as skilled as she could wind up facedown in a ditch if she wasn’t careful. “Is there something I can help you with, Burt?”

“Hmm. Verundish, you said?”

“That’s right.”

Burt got to his feet, still puffing on his cigar, and walked over to the balcony to look down to the bar below. He returned to his desk, pouring a glass of whiskey and offering it to her. She declined, and Burt shrugged and took a sip. “Why are you here, Verundish?”

“Came looking for work.”

“That’s what you say. Yet you’ve already turned down my competitor, Jezzy.”

“I’m not looking for that kind of work,” Vlora said. “This town is going to explode one of these days – anyone can feel it – and I have no interest in being in the middle. I’d like something a little quieter.”

Burt took a seat, throwing his feet up on his desk. “Your companion, too? He’s looking for something quiet?”

“That’s the plan.”

Burt shifted in his seat. “See, now, that’s what’s so strange to me. Your kind doesn’t really attract quiet, do they? You’re too valuable for quiet work.”

“My kind?” Vlora was genuinely puzzled. Did he mean Adrans?

“Powder mages.”

Vlora stiffened, forcing herself not to reach for her pistol and blow Burt’s head off right here and now. She, Vlora Flint, was a celebrity and a renowned general. But there were still a lot of people in the world who had it out for powder mages without a name. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

Burt rolled his eyes. “Don’t play coy, Verundish. I’ve got a Knacked on my payroll that can sense powder mages. Not a very useful Knack, but he’s a smart man, so I keep him around. He earned his pay when you walked into town.”

Vlora’s fingers crept toward her pistol. Behind the desk, with his line of sight, he wouldn’t be able to tell.

Burt continued before she could respond. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not threatening you or your companion. I’m not an idiot. Nor do I actually want to know what two powder mages are doing out here on the frontier looking for quiet work. If you’re keeping your heads down, I’m not the type of fool to bring that to anyone’s attention.”

“So what do you want?” Vlora asked coldly.

“Same as Jezzy wants. I just happen to know what you’re worth.” Burt took his feet down and leaned forward. “Come work for me – the two of you – and I’ll pay you five thousand krana up front and fifty thousand the first day of next spring. Each.”

Vlora couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows. He actually did know what a powder mage was worth, though he wasn’t sure who Vlora really was. That was an immense amount of money for a hired gun for six months of work. She wasn’t interested, of course, but at least she didn’t have to kill him. Yet.

She shook her head.

Burt frowned. “Eighty thousand.”

“Pardon?”

“Same offer. Eighty thousand krana.”

Vlora swore inwardly. If she was really a hired gun, she would jump on the offer in an instant. “It’s not about the money, I’m afraid.”

“What’s it about?”

She tried to come up with a better excuse, but found herself grasping at straws. Nobody turned down that kind of money. “I don’t want to get involved,” she said emphatically. “I want quiet work. Easy work. I’m not here to show off.”

“Ah.” Burt puffed on his cigar, examining her through half-closed eyes. “You’re hiding from something.” He raised his hands in a peaceful gesture. “Again, I’m making no threats. Just an observation.”

Vlora knew the risk of such an excuse. If Burt wanted, he could try to blackmail her. But if he was as smart as he seemed, threatening a powder mage was probably low on his to-do list. “It’s not personal. If it makes you feel any better, your competitor isn’t going to get a rise out of either me or my companion, no matter how much she offers to pay. There are things worth more than money.”

“We agree on that, at least. A little quiet is priceless,” Burt said thoughtfully. He stood up again, clearly frustrated, and paced behind his desk. “If you’re not getting involved, you should probably get out of town.”

“I’m not going anywhere until a judge clears my companion.”

“I’d suggest you reconsider,” Burt said.

“Is that a threat?” Vlora asked, keeping her tone neutral.

“Not at all. It’s a friendly warning. You’re right when you say this town is hot. Fighting will break out eventually, and when it does, anyone with a weapon will be a target. What’s more, Jezzy doesn’t take no for an answer. You’re going to be a liability for her and, frankly, for me. I’ve got your assurances that you won’t get involved, but I don’t know you. You could be lying. Or things could just change.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

Burt showed her his empty hands. “Cross my heart. Just friendly advice.”

“I don’t know you, either.”

“Touché.” Burt chuckled. “I think we each know where the other stands now, so I’m not going to waste any more of your time. One last offer: Come work for me.” Vlora tensed, looking over her shoulder. The sentence was too ominous not to be the precursor to some sort of retaliation if she said no. But the two of them were alone. Burt continued. “How about this: You sleep on it tonight. Talk to your friend at the town jail, and chew on this bit of information: Jezzy already has herself a powder mage. I’ll pay you two whatever you want to kill the bastard.”

Vlora rocked back. So that’s why Burt was so anxious to hire her and Taniel. Two powder mages to counter one. It was surprising information, and more helpful than Burt knew. A powder mage could sense another, so if Jezzy didn’t know what she and Taniel were yet, she would soon. And that complicated the pit out of their mission.

Things just kept getting worse and worse.

Vlora stood up, straightening her jacket. “I’ll take that under advisement. Thank you for being … polite.”

“Of course,” Burt said, raising his cigar. “But lest you think I’m too polite: I have people I trust who know what you are. If a bullet happens to find my brain, they’ll make sure that whatever you’re running from is able to find you. Understand?”

Vlora smiled at him tightly. This man was not an idiot. Unfortunately. “Good afternoon,” she told him.