The Crimson Campaign

Chapter 38

Midway Keep was a historical monument, a castle of vanity built not for comfort or even defense but to look imposing. Its walls were tall but easily scaled, the indefensible number of entrances brimming with fortifications. The keep towered over the Addown River and menaced the main highway. To the peasants it may have been breathtaking.

To anyone skilled in warfare it was a joke.

It had been built some three hundred years ago by a juvenile king who considered himself an architect. To Taniel, it seemed the perfect place to house a mad god.

Taniel watched the keep from the shadow of a sprawling oak standing solitary in the middle of the Kez army. He could hear the soft sounds of a snoring infantryman nearby. Otherwise, the night was still.

He checked that last thought when he realized he could also hear Field Marshal Goutlit’s unsteady, terrified breaths. The Kez officer crouched beside him, still smelling faintly of piss, and fidgeted with the collar of his jacket. Taniel watched him out of the corner of his eye. A wrong move here, a suspicious noise, and Taniel was a dead man.

Of course, he’d be sure to take Goutlit with him.

“Where’s the servants’ entrance?” Taniel whispered.

“I don’t know.”

Taniel drew his belt knife.

“I, uh, think it’s over there. To the right.”

Taniel pushed the knife back in its sheath. “Is it guarded?”

Goutlit swallowed hard and eyed Taniel, as if afraid to say he didn’t know.

A light caught Taniel’s eye, just in the corner of his vision. He crouched a little farther down and watched the keep for several moments. There. He saw a light moving in a high-arched window.

Goutlit saw it too. He scooted back, pressing himself up against the big oak behind him. Taniel grabbed a handful of Goutlit’s jacket to keep him from moving farther.

“Where’s Kresimir’s room?” Taniel asked.

“There,” Goutlit’s voice came out dry and raspy. He lifted a finger. “That tower there, just above the light.”

A sudden whine cut through the night. It was a low keening that rose sharply into a wail. A low thump accompanied it, and then a human scream that grew louder and louder until Taniel was sure that a banshee was going to come out of the tree above them.

Just as quickly as it began, the sound was over. Distantly, from the keep, he heard a sound like crashing furniture.

“What the pit?”

“Kresimir,” Goutlit said, his voice barely a whisper. “Every night.” Goutlit turned to stare at Taniel. “Every night he’s looking for the eye behind the flintlock.”

Taniel shivered involuntarily.

“Every morning they find bodies,” Goutlit said. “Usually just a few, but sometimes as many as a dozen. Prielight Guards, servants. Kresimir’s concubines. Some of them are strangled while others have been burned through by sorcery.”

“Shut up,” Taniel said. His skin was beginning to crawl. He set his musket against the tree and watched while the light in the keep moved farther and farther away from Kresimir’s tower.

“You can’t kill him,” Goutlit said.

“What?” Taniel snapped.

“That stuff about Kresimir’s bedsheets. Do you think I’m a fool? You’re going to try to finish the job you started on South Pike, aren’t you?”

Taniel remained silent. There was fear in Goutlit’s voice.

Goutlit went on, “He can’t be killed. About twenty have tried so far. Assassins from your own army. From the Church, and even one of Ipille’s – though Kresimir doesn’t know that.”

The Church had tried to have Kresimir killed? Even while their Prielights guarded him? Now, that was interesting. There must be a division within the Kresim Church.

“No one’s gotten close enough, I’d imagine,” Taniel said.

“Oh, they have.” Goutlit swallowed hard. “I saw one assassin with my own eyes. A woman. She tried to open his throat. Her knife bent on his skin.”

Taniel remembered shooting at Julene once, in her cave-lion form. The bullet had simply skimmed off her skin like a smooth stone off of water. And now Taniel was trying to steal from the god who’d managed to nail her to a beam.

“Not enough force.”

“He was hit by a cannonball, walking the front. It shattered on him! Killed half a nearby gun crew and a colonel.”

Goutlit had begun to talk louder. His voice was high-pitched, and he breathed heavily. His whole body began to tremble. Taniel shook him by the front of his jacket. It didn’t seem to help.

Taniel realized he had a problem. He would need to scale the walls of the keep. Easy enough by himself, but impossible for Goutlit.

The simplest thing would be to just kill the man. He was an enemy, after all. A Kez. Their field marshal.

Taniel lay a hand on his knife. Goutlit didn’t seem to notice. A quick stroke, silent as can be. It wouldn’t be the first man Taniel had killed, nor the last.

Then again, this was butchery. Goutlit was his prisoner.

“Take off your clothes,” Taniel said.

Goutlit seemed to snap out of whatever fear had been racing through his mind. “I beg your pardon?”

“Clothes. Off.”

“I refuse.”

“This is me saving your life,” Taniel said. “I can either tie you up, to be found in the morning, or I can kill you. Tell me now, but decide quickly.”

Taniel thought for a moment that Goutlit would cry out. Was this the indignity to break him? Goutlit watched Taniel in silence and then removed his jacket.

“You can keep your underclothes on,” Taniel said, “but make it quick.” When the field marshal had stripped to his underwear, Taniel motioned with his knife at the tree. “Climb.”

Goutlit’s eyes widened. “I can’t possibly…”

Taniel grabbed Goutlit by the back of his neck and shoved him at the trunk of the giant oak. Goutlit scrambled up to the lowest branch awkwardly. Taniel gathered Goutlit’s clothes and followed him up.

“Keep going.”

Goutlit was about thirty feet in the air before he clutched a thick branch and absolutely refused to climb farther. His eyes rolled wildly, and Taniel could hear his teeth chatter.

“I won’t go higher. Kill me now.”

“This will do.” Taniel fastened Goutlit to the tree branch tightly, using Goutlit’s own belt and pants as restraints. “It’s not comfortable, but you’ll live.”

Taniel stuffed one of Goutlit’s socks into the field marshal’s mouth.

He ignored Goutlit’s squeals of protest and began to descend. By the time he reached the ground, he couldn’t even hear the man, and once he’d taken a few dozen steps, Goutlit was all but forgotten.

Taniel timed the Prielight patrols around the base of the keep and slipped up to the wall after the last patrol had passed. The keep had once had a moat, but that had long ago filled in, leaving only a swampy lowland and a few ponds behind.

The walls of the keep were easily sixty feet high, and the one leading up to the tower that was Taniel’s target couldn’t have been less than a hundred. No small climb.

He left the musket in some weeds and secured his pistols and dagger before beginning the climb. Immense blocks of granite, half Taniel’s height, were stacked at a slight incline, each one with a lip that gave his fingers a couple inches of room to hold on to. Taniel tested his grip with both hands, then hauled himself up.

He was halfway up the wall when a Prielight patrol passed under where he’d been. He hung off the wall, breathing quietly and praying they’d not stumble across his musket. A raised voice, even a suspicious glance upward, and he’d be finished. He silently cursed himself for taking the dead guard’s uniform. The Kez military tan stood out against the dark granite of the keep like a beacon.

The patrol kept moving, and Taniel resumed his climb.

He reached the top of the wall, just under the parapets. He could hear the steady tread of a patrolling guard just above him, and then another sound. It seemed quiet and distant at first, and then grew louder.

Taniel pressed himself against the stone, his fingers and arms aching from the climb. What was that sound? He looked down. Far below, another Prielight patrol. Was someone sounding an alarm?

He let go of the wall with one hand and carefully dipped into his pocket, taking a powder charge between his fingers. He’d make noise if he snorted it, so he crushed the end of the charge and sprinkled it in his mouth.

That infernal sound would not go away.

His powder trance intensified and he clung to the wall for a moment of dizziness.

Taniel almost began to laugh.

The guard above him was whistling.

A scream shattered the quiet of the night, nearly making Taniel lose his grip in surprise. It came from one of the windows below him.

His heart hammering in his ears, Taniel heard the guard on the parapet curse softly to himself, and then the sound of running footsteps as the man went to see what was wrong.

There was no time to waste. Taniel couldn’t be sure if the scream had been Kresimir, or one of the god’s victims, or even someone raising the alarm on Taniel. He pulled himself up to the parapet and peeked over. No one.

On the parapet, Taniel padded quietly toward Kresimir’s tower. He could make out other guards on the opposite walls of the keep, all of them looking down toward the source of the scream. None of them seemed to have noticed him.

He reached the tower and swore. No door on this level. He looked up. Another fifty feet of climbing, in full view of the guards on the parapet. Wait. A window, not fifteen feet above him.

Taniel threw himself up the stone wall, climbing as quickly as he dared, and in only a few moments he was through the window.

He found himself in the spiral staircase of the tower. He glanced back the way he’d come and had to stop to blink away a dizzy spell.

It was a long way to fall.

Taniel climbed the tower stairs until the stairs ended in a thick iron-bound door. He paused there and wondered what kind of a ward a god would put on his bedroom. He looked down and was grateful that his hands were not shaking. No sound of footsteps below him. No breathing from inside the room. Kresimir must be out.

Taniel pressed gently on the door. It opened with a single long creak that made him cringe.

He paused at the sight of the room.

Taniel had expected something like he’d seen in Kresimir’s palace on South Pike: a fine bed with expensive silk and lush carpeting and wall hangings, preserved against nature and time. But this… this was not the opulent quarters of a god.

The rug was nothing more than a soiled sheet. The curtains – perhaps once fine – were now torn and bedraggled. There was a full body mirror, shattered. A four-poster bed lay slanted against one wall, two of the posts destroyed.

Was this really Kresimir’s room? It showed signs of habitation. There was a table by one window, set with a meal. Taniel crossed to that and glanced out. He was just above the Addown. On the table was a tankard, half full of beer. A mouse, unafraid of Taniel, nibbled on the bread.

This had to be a mistake. Taniel had seen Kresimir’s palace. He’d seen Kresimir’s city. The god who created those things would not live in a tower like this.

What could he do? Goutlit must have lied to him. Taniel gritted his teeth. He’d climb back down and go skin that worm. Half the night, wasted, just because…

His eyes fell on the bed. The sheets were covered in blood; spattered rust-colored stains.

Taniel opened his third eye.

He dropped to his knees, staggered by the kaleidoscope of colors within the Else. Thousands of pastels swirled and moved, as if sorcery itself was born in this room. Taniel had to breathe deeply, suppressing the urge to vomit. The whole mountainside of South Pike hadn’t looked like this after months of Kez Privileged slinging their strongest sorcery at Shouldercrown Fortress.

Taniel forced his third eye to close and slowly got back to his feet. He drew his dagger and staggered to the bed.

He grabbed the sheet and tore it off the bed. One or two long strips would do it. He could wrap them around his waist, beneath his jacket, and be out the window in less than a minute.

Taniel stopped. He’d heard something. Just the wind, or…

Footsteps on the stairs.

He finished his cuts and grabbed a handful of bloody linens. He made a dash for the window.

The door opened.

A Prielight Guard stood in the door, a platter with fresh bread and cheese and a bottle of wine. He stopped, mouth open in surprise, at the sight of Taniel.

The silence was broken as the guard threw the platter to the floor and drew his sword, running forward with a shout.