The Crimson Campaign (40 page)

The two goons stepped back, shouting. Both drew pistols. The crowd split apart.

Adamat felt like he was in a dream. He watched himself draw his own pistol and fire it. One of the goons went down. The other took a cudgel to the back of the head from one of Oldrich’s soldiers, and the rest of the soldiers quickly fell in around Vetas, obscuring him from the crowd.

Adamat shouldered his way through the soldiers until he reached Vetas.

Lord Vetas was on his knees in front of Fell, a stiletto still to his throat. She’d relieved him of two very similar-looking daggers and a small pistol, both of which were lying on the ground behind her.

Adamat took great pleasure in the mild look of surprise on Vetas’s face. It died quickly when Vetas saw Adamat.

Vetas smiled. “Adamat! I suspected you might still be alive.”

“Is she still alive?” Adamat pressed the hot barrel of his pistol against Vetas’s face.

“Every pain you do to me,” Vetas said, not flinching at the heat of the pistol barrel, “I will return to you and your wife tenfold. I want you to remember that, Adamat.”

“So she is alive?”

“Quite,” Vetas said. “Though she won’t be in an hour and forty-two minutes if I haven’t returned.” He paused, looking around at the soldiers. “I suspect you know where my headquarters is. You’ve probably been watching me very closely. Bravo. But do you have enough men to get in there?”

“You mean past your Privileged?” Adamat asked. “Yes. Yes, I think I do. Where is my boy?”

Vetas gave a sickeningly self-satisfied smile. “An hour and forty-one minutes. Are you sure you have time for this?”

Adamat looked at the woman in the red dress. Oldrich held her tightly by the arm. She glared at him through narrowed eyes, but he could see that her hands trembled. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Nila,” she said.

“What do you do for him?” He pointed at Vetas.

“Nothing! I… nothing. I don’t work for him. I’m just there to watch Jakob. He’s only a boy!”

“What was Vetas buying in there?”

“Flowers!”

“For who?”

“Lady Windeldwas, or something like that.” Nila brushed the hair out of her face.

“Lady Winceslav?”

“Yes, that was it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” For all her fright, she was remarkably calm beneath the torrent of questions.

Adamat turned back to Vetas. “Why?”

“An hour and forty minutes, Adamat,” he said.

Adamat brought his pistol back and slammed the butt across Vetas’s face. “Secure them,” he said to Fell. To Oldrich, “Sergeant, give her four of your men. We need to get off the street before the police get here.”

Fell dragged Vetas to his feet, still holding the stiletto to his throat. Oldrich sent four of the men with her, along with Nila and the two wounded goons, and the rest of the soldiers followed Adamat.

They met up with the eunuch three blocks down from Vetas’s headquarters.

“My men are in position,” the eunuch said.

“Where’s Bo?” Adamat asked, wheezing from the effort of the run.

He found the Privileged around the corner, standing in the middle of the street. Bo wore black gloves over his Privileged gloves to conceal them. He was muttering to himself, his gloved fingers working silently in the air in front of him, as if he was playing an invisible piano with one hand and plucking a harp with the other. There were three or four people watching him as if he was some kind of madman. He certainly looked the part.

“We have to go in now,” Adamat said. He hunched over his pistol, trying to conceal it from view while he reloaded it.

Bo’s fingers continued to work the air. “I said I’d need time.”

“We don’t have much time,” Adamat said. “His men have orders to kill Faye if he doesn’t return at a prescribed time.”

“Unfortunate,” Bo said with a scowl. “Tell the eunuch to get his men in place.”

The order was given, and five minutes later the eunuch joined Adamat and Bo.

“We’re ready,” the eunuch said.

Bo looked him up and down, eyes lingering on the tailored suit and the bald head. “You make my skin crawl.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Adamat smoothed the front of his jacket. “Sergeant?”

Oldrich’s remaining soldiers had fetched their rifles. They were beginning to get looks from the passersby. “We’re ready,” Oldrich said.

“Let’s make it a parade, then.” Bo turned on his heel and marched down the middle of the street, heading toward Lord Vetas’s headquarters. His fingers twitched, making music that only he could hear. Adamat exchanged a look with Captain Oldrich. This was not how they’d taken the house in Offendale.

Bo didn’t slow as he rounded the corner and stepped his way toward Vetas’s house. When he reached the middle of the street directly in front of the house, he turned and faced it. He raised his hands above his head. In one of the windows, a lookout shouted a warning.

Even though Adamat couldn’t open his third eye, he could still feel it when a Privileged standing at his elbow reached into the Else. Sorcery flowed into the world, and Bo threw his arms wide, and the entire face of the building collapsed like a piece of cake sliced by a giant knife.

Adamat stared at the dust rising from the rubble. Men inside the house stared back, coughing and waving away plaster dust. The shock was plain on their faces.

Sergeant Oldrich drew his sword. “Charge!” he screamed.

All pit broke loose.

CHAPTER

24

A column of heavy cavalry appeared on the floodplain downriver, west of Tamas. The plumes on their helmets waved gently in the breeze, their mounts stepping with confidence despite the low cover of fog.

Tamas lifted his looking glass and examined the enemy.

The officers were out front with their red epaulets, shouting orders, sabers raised.

Fools.

A rifle cracked from somewhere across the river. A few moments later a Kez officer tumbled from his horse.

They advanced at a leisurely pace, as if it were nothing more than a parade drill. More rifle shots rang out from Tamas’s powder mages, and cuirassiers began to fall. The column continued to advance.

“This weather might foul our powder, sir,” Olem said, looking up at the clouds.

Tamas said, “It won’t rain.”

“It’s awfully damp, sir. Strange, this fog. Never seen it sweep down off the mountains so quickly.”

“That’s because this is an answer to a prayer.”

Tamas heard a trumpet echo through Hune Dora Forest and looked to the south. There was movement among the trees half a mile away across the floodplain where only hours ago Tamas’s infantry had been cutting trees and dragging them to camp.

The dragoons emerged from the forest.

Tamas felt his breath catch in his throat. So many cavalry in one place.

He’d seen a force like this perhaps three times in his life. Each time, he’d been numbered among those cavalry, and the enemy had been swept before them. The horses stepped in line, well trained and fearless. Unlike the cuirassiers, someone among the dragoons had the foresight to remove the officer’s epaulets, so they would be harder to pick out for Tamas’s powder mages.

Behind him, the panic among the Seventh and Ninth Brigades seemed to rise in pitch, and Tamas worried that the act had outgrown itself. He’d witnessed hard infantry of the line break at the sight of a magnificent cavalry formation before.

And the Kez cavalry
were
magnificent. The armored breasts of the cuirassier warhorses seemed to form a wall of moving steel. Their plumes quivered with the movement, and the immaculate uniforms of their riders only added to their majesty.

Tamas searched the line of cuirassiers. In a powder trance, he could see the faces of each man, even at this distance. But picking out one face among so many was nearly impossible. “I wonder where Beon will position himself,” Tamas said. He pointed with his small sword to the southwest. “There, likely, so that he can sweep with his cuirassiers around the barriers we’ve set up and join his dragoons in the slaughter.” Tamas turned to his bodyguard. “Tell me we’re going to win, Olem.”

“‘We’re going to win, Olem,’” Olem said, putting his last cigarette in his mouth.

Tamas stepped onto a rocky outcropping to give himself a better view of the battlefield.

“Men,” he shouted, “take the line!”

Nila was pushed into a doorway by one of the soldiers.

She squeezed her eyes closed, fighting tears she knew so desperately wanted to come. To have escaped soldiers so many times and then fall into Lord Vetas’s clutches, and now this? Who were these people? What did they want?

A man grabbed her by the arm and shoved her up a narrow flight of stairs. They went up two floors, shouting and cursing the whole way. Nila fought them out of instinct more than anything else. She clawed at a soldier’s face, only for her arm to be bent around behind her and her face shoved up against the wall.

“Pit, this girl is a hellion,” the man said. She tried to twist in his grip. He put pressure on her arm and she gasped from the sudden pain. It felt as if it would snap at any moment.

She was thrown into the corner of a small, windowless room. The plaster was yellow and bare, the only furniture a squat table with a stub of candle.

They hadn’t gone far before finding this building, not more than a couple of blocks. Nila had no idea if this was planned, but there seemed some confusion among the soldiers.

Lord Vetas was pushed to the ground beside her. She stared at him – the only familiar face in this chaos. He was calm, collected. Completely unperturbed. Nila hated that she looked to him for some kind of reassurance. She knew none would come.

“Watch him,” the woman said. She was young, and could not have been more than ten years older than Nila, but her eyes were as cold as Vetas’s. Nila had heard someone call her Fell. The soldiers seemed hesitant to follow her orders, but after Fell gave them a long stare, they turned to watch Vetas.

Fell had drawn a pair of wrist irons from beneath her coat. They weren’t typical irons, even Nila could see that. Instead of a horseshoe-looking metal with a crosspiece, they were thick bands with only a single loop of chain between them. The two soldiers turned Vetas roughly onto his stomach, and the irons were snapped around his wrists. He rolled over, examining Fell.

“Drovian irons,” he said. “Very professional.”

“Turn around,” Fell said to Nila.

“No,” Nila said.

Fell grasped her by the arm and jerked her forward onto her knees. Fell stepped behind her, and Nila felt the cold metal of the wrist irons close on her skin.

There was a shout from downstairs. Fell turned to one of the soldiers. “Do not take your eyes off of him,” she said, and disappeared down the stairs.

Despite Fell’s instructions, the two soldiers retreated to the hallway, where they stood near the door, leaning on their rifles.

“What is happening?” Nila asked Vetas.

Vetas’s face was impassive, unmoving as always. He didn’t so much as glance at her.

He watched the two soldiers for a moment before rocking back on his hips and deftly sliding his shackled wrists beneath his legs and out in front of him, like a contortionist performing a trick. Nila felt her eyes widen a bit. The wrist irons hurt like all pit, and even if they hadn’t been so tight, she couldn’t have done that – and Vetas was a man well over forty.

Nila glanced nervously between Vetas and the soldiers. How could they not see him? Did they just not care?

Vetas pulled something off the bottom of his shoe: a wooden knob. It looked like the handle of an ice pick Nila had seen men use to move blocks of ice in the winter, but it had no pick attached to it.

Another handle came off the bottom of his other shoe, and Vetas searched through his slicked hair with his fingers, drawing out a long wire after only a moment of searching. He wrapped the wire around one handle and then the other.

Nila had been with Lord Vetas long enough to know what it was: a garrote.

Vetas got to his feet in one smooth motion, like a snake rising from the grass. He crossed the room in a few silent steps.

One of the soldiers must have seen him coming out of the corner of his eye. The soldier whirled, raising his rifle. Vetas slammed an elbow into the soldier’s throat. The soldier staggered to one side, gurgling painfully for air. The other soldier had his rifle up in time, but the long bayonet was impossible to use in such close quarters. Vetas grabbed the stock of the rifle and smacked the soldier in the nose with it. When the man reeled back, Vetas slid around him, dropping the garrote into place.

Nila’s mind whirled. She eyed the soldier’s fallen rifle – she could have used it on Vetas if not for the irons locking her hands behind her back. The two soldiers soon lay dead in the hall. Blood trickled across the floorboards, flowing to fill the grooves.

Vetas, his face still and unmoving as stone, searched the soldier for keys.

The creaking of the floorboards was the only warning. Vetas looked up and suddenly fell back into the hallway, out of Nila’s line of sight. Fell soared past, knife at the ready.