The young man turned and ran. Taniel heard screams and saw more people fleeing. He felt his boot hit something as he tried to step back again. The young man had dropped both his kit and his rifle.
Taniel rummaged inside the kit quickly, sure not to take his eyes off the Warden. There was a handful of powder charges. He crushed the end of one between his fingers and drew a line of the black powder on the back of his hand. The Warden was still eating the powder from the powder horn.
All of it.
It didn’t make sense, but somehow the Warden was a twisted reflection of Taniel himself. This Warden was a powder mage.
Taniel snorted the powder.
For a few moments, Taniel thought he might faint. At the edge of his vision the world went dark before suddenly becoming so stark it hurt his eyes. He flexed his hands, then felt his chest. No pain. He gritted his teeth and took the rifle in both hands.
The Warden charged him without warning. Taniel stepped to one side and gripped the barrel with both hands, bringing the stock back over his shoulder and whipping it out and around into the Warden’s face.
The hickory stock shattered and the Warden went down with a satisfying thump. He flopped onto his stomach and pushed himself to his knees, then rammed himself into Taniel’s chest.
Taniel backpedaled, trying to stay on his feet. He wouldn’t be able to wrestle a Warden down on the ground – not if the Warden was in a powder trance. Taniel set one foot behind him to stop his backward movement and wrapped his arms around the Warden’s middle. He jerked the Warden off balance and let go.
The Warden rolled away from Taniel and slowly got to his feet.
The creature’s face was a mess of pulped flesh and slivers of wood. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. He bared his teeth at Taniel. Half of them were missing.
“What the pit are you?” Taniel said.
The Warden cocked his head to one side. He lifted his brown hair, which was tied loosely over his right shoulder in a ponytail, to reveal the raised red welt of a brand. The image of a rifle about the length of a man’s finger had been burned into his skin.
It was the brand that Kez Privileged gave to powder mages before their execution.
The Warden let his hair fall back into place. He watched Taniel for a moment, then looked to his side. Ka-poel was there, her long needle in hand, crouched low. She snarled at the Warden.
“Pole, get back…”
The Warden leapt toward Ka-poel. He moved with incredible speed, crossing the distance in the blink of an eye.
Taniel was faster now that he was in his powder trance. He shot toward the Warden, only to see the Warden twist at the last second. Taniel’s fist soared past the Warden’s face and he felt the Warden’s fingers tighten around his neck once again.
The Warden wouldn’t try to choke him this time. He’d wring Taniel’s neck, snapping it like a child snaps a matchstick.
Taniel jabbed his hand at the Warden’s chest. The Warden barely grunted. Taniel jabbed again and again, lightning fast. He felt the Warden’s fingers lose their strength. Ka-poel threw herself at the Warden. He backhanded her, tossing her to the cobbles.
Taniel saw red in the corner of his vision. His mind’s eye saw Ka-poel’s body in the street, her neck bent at the wrong angle, lifeless eyes staring into the sky.
The Warden suddenly sagged. Taniel made a fist with his hand, pulled it back…
And stopped in horror. His hand was covered in the Warden’s black blood. Between his fingers, the flesh still clinging to it, he held one of the Warden’s thick ribs. He looked down. The Warden, collapsed, stared back up at him. His coat was soaked through with blood.
Taniel saw the vision of Ka-poel’s lifeless body again in his mind and rammed the Warden’s own rib through its eye.
He stood for several moments, gasping in ragged breaths. Something touched him and he nearly screamed, his body was so tense. It was Ka-poel. She wasn’t dead. She put one small hand on his, heedless of the Warden’s blood.
“I’ve never seen a powder mage do that,” Fell said, breathless, as she approached them through the empty street. The front of her secretary’s smock was covered in black Warden’s blood, as well as in some of her own. One cheek was red and swollen, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Where’s the other Warden?” Taniel asked.
“He ran,” Fell said.
“You’re not just an undersecretary,” Taniel said, remembering the long stiletto Fell had fearlessly jammed into a Warden’s throat. “Wardens don’t run.”
“He did when he saw what you did to his friend,” Fell said. “I kept him busy until then.” She sniffed. “You’re not an ordinary powder mage.”
Taniel looked down at his hands. He’d punched through the Warden’s skin and ripped out its rib. No one could do that. Not even he could, in the deepest powder trance. Then again, maybe a god killer could. Something had happened to him up on South Pike.
“I guess not.” He looked around at the carnage. The closest people were over a hundred paces away, watching and pointing. He heard Adran police blowing their whistles as they grew close.
“This was a trap,” Taniel said. “A Kez trap. How are they in the city? I thought Tamas rooted out the traitor Charlemund and his Kez accomplice.”
“He did,” Fell said. She seemed troubled.
Taniel fingered a powder charge and closed his eyes. Back in a powder trance. It felt incredible. His senses were alive. He could smell every scent on the air, hear every sound in the street.
His heart still thundered from the fight.
“I’m leaving,” he said, taking Ka-poel by the hand.
“Ricard…” Fell began.
“Can go to the pit,” Taniel said. “I’m going south. If Tamas is truly dead, and the Kez are making Wardens out of powder mages, then the army will need me.”
Tamas rode beside Olem at the head of the Seventh Brigade. The column stretched out behind them, twisting along the Great Northern Highway as it rose and fell through the foothills of the Adran Mountains. His men were already dusty and tired, and the journey to get back into Adro had barely begun.
They marched northwest, unsheltered by Mihali’s sorcerous fog that had allowed them to escape the Kez army four days before. To the east, the Adran Mountain Range cut into the sky with craggy, snow-topped peaks, while the sweltering summer heat beat down on Tamas’s army. To the south and west, the Amber Expanse – the breadbasket of the Nine, and the source of the Kez’s great wealth – spread out as far as the eye could see.
Tamas would have preferred to march on foot beside his men. But his leg still had a twinge to it, and he needed to be able to get up and down the column quickly. His orders had seen many officers’ horses redistributed to the pickets, joining his two hundred cavalry in scouting.
“We’re running out of food,” Olem said from horseback beside Tamas.
It wasn’t the first time Olem had mentioned rations, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“I know,” Tamas said. His men had their basic kit with a week’s worth of road rations. No camp followers, no supply train. They’d marched double-time for four days now, and he had no doubt that some of his men had already finished their reserve against orders. “Give the order for half rations,” Tamas said.
“We already did, sir.” Olem chewed nervously on the butt of a cigarette.
“Halve it again.”
Tamas looked west. It was infuriating. Millions of acres of farmland within sight, seemingly within a stone’s throw. The reality was they couldn’t be any farther away. The closest crops might be eight miles distant, without roads to reach them. No way to traverse the foothills and get down on the plain, forage with over ten thousand soldiers, and get back up to the road without losing a full two days’ worth of marching.
It was their lead on the Kez armies that Tamas could not risk, even for food.
“Put together more foraging parties,” Tamas said. “Twenty men each. Tell them not to range more than a single mile off the Northern Highway.”
“We’ll have to drop our pace,” Olem said. He spit out his cigarette butt and reached in his pocket for another, only to examine it for a moment and slip it back in his jacket. He muttered something under his breath.
“What’s that?” Tamas asked.
“I said I’m going to run out of cigarettes sooner or later.”
Cigarettes were the least of Tamas’s worries. “The men are exhausted.” He turned in his saddle to look back along the column. “I can’t push them double-time another day. The only way they’ve been able to go so fast for so long is thanks to the residuals of Mihali’s food.”
Olem saluted and headed down the column.
Tamas wished that the god had accompanied them on the ill-fated flanking maneuver. He ran his eyes over the faces of the men of the Seventh and Ninth. For the most part, his men met his gaze. These were hard men. His very best. They’d done twenty-five miles a day for four days. Kez infantry averaged twelve.
He caught sight of a rider coming up along the column. The figure looked huge, even on a cavalry charger.
Gavril.
Tamas tipped his hat to his brother-in-law as he came up alongside.
Gavril wiped the sweat from his face with one long sleeve and took a few gulps from his canteen. He’d discarded his grungy Mountainwatcher’s furs on the heat of the high plains and wore only his faded Watchmaster’s vest and a pair of dark-blue pants from an old cavalry uniform.
He grunted a hello. No salute from Gavril. Tamas would have been surprised to get one.
“What news?” Tamas asked.
“We’ve spotted the Kez,” Gavril said. No “sir” either.
Tamas felt his heart leap into his throat. He knew the Kez were on his trail. It would be stupid not to realize that. But for four days they’d not seen any sign of the Kez armies.
“And?” Tamas lifted his own canteen to his lips.
“At least two brigades of Kez cavalry,” Gavril said.
Tamas spit water all down the front of him. “Did you say
brigades
?”
“Brigades.”
Tamas let out a shaky breath. “How far?”
“I’d guess fifty-five miles.”
“Did you get close enough for an accurate count?”
“No.”
“How hard are they pushing?”
“Can’t be sure. Kez cavalry will make forty miles a day on the open plain if they push hard. An army of that size, and in the foothills – twenty-five, maybe thirty miles a day.”
Which meant that if Tamas allowed his men rest and forage, the Kez would catch them in seven days. If Tamas was lucky.
“In six days,” Gavril said, “you’ll hit the edge of the Hune Dora Forest. The terrain will be too steep for cavalry to surround us. They’ll be able to dog our heels, but nothing more. Not till we reach the Fingers of Kresimir.”
Tamas closed his eyes, trying to remember the geography of northern Kez. This was Gavril’s old haunt, back when he was Jakola of Pensbrook, the most famous womanizer in all of Kez.
“The Fingers of Kresimir,” Tamas said. He knew the location, but it sounded familiar for more than just its mark on a map…
“Camenir,” Gavril said quietly.
Tamas felt a sliver of ice creep down his spine despite the heat. A flash of memory, and once again he was standing beside a shallow grave, dug with bare hands in the cold of night beside the torrent of a raging river. The end of a daring – but ultimately failed – plan, and the most harrowing escape of Tamas’s long career.
Gavril tugged at the front of his sweat-soaked vest. “We’ll be going right by. I’m going to stop and pay my respects.”
“I don’t think I could find him,” Tamas said, though he knew it was a lie. The location of the grave was burned into his memory.
“I can,” Gavril said.
“It’s quite a ways off the road. If I remember right.”
“You’ll stop too.”
Tamas looked back at his column of soldiers again. They marched on, the dust rising above them carried into the sky by a light breeze.
“I have men on the march, Jakola,” he said. “I’m not stopping for anything.”
Gavril sniffed. “It’s ‘Gavril’ now, and yes, you will be stopping.” He went on, not giving Tamas the chance to object. “You can lose the Kez entirely at the Fingers. We just have to reach the first bridge before them.”
The Fingers of Kresimir were a series of deep, powerful snow-fed rivers off the Adran Mountains. They were impossible to ford, even on horseback. The Great Northern Road traversed them by a series of bridges built almost a hundred years ago.
“
If
we can reach the bridge before them,” Tamas said, thankful to leave the topic of that lonely grave behind. “Even if we do, the cavalry can go west and around and be waiting for us when we come down onto the plains.”
“You’ll think of something.”
Tamas ground his teeth together. He had eleven thousand infantry and two hundred cavalry, and just a four-day lead on a group of Kez cavalry that could very well equal his numbers. Dragoons and cuirassiers had more than just an edge on infantry in open battle.
“We need food,” Tamas said.
Gavril looked toward the west and the tantalizing wheat fields of the Amber Expanse. “If we slow down too much to forage, the cavalry will reach us before Hune Dora Forest. Once we reach the forest, there are few farms. Foragers might bag deer and rabbits, but not enough to go around.”
“And the city itself?”
Tamas remembered there was a settlement just south of Hune Dora Forest. Whether the forest took its name from the settlement, or the other way around, Tamas did not know.
“It’s generous calling it a ‘city.’ It has walls, sure, but there can’t be more than a few hundred people. We might be able to buy or steal enough food for a day or two.” Gavril paused. “I hope you’re not planning on stripping the countryside of everything. The people here have it hard enough. Ipille treats his serfs worse than Manhouch ever did.”
“An army needs food, Jak… Gavril.”
Tamas stared toward the mountains, barely noticing the white peaks. He had to balance this army perfectly. They needed food and safety. If they reached Hune Dora Forest without food, his men would begin to starve and desert. If they took too long to forage, the cavalry would reach them before the forest and have their way with the entire column.