When I got back to the Earl I drank a flagon of ale and slept for about a day and a half, waking only to give Adolphus a quick blow-by-blow over a plate of eggs. I kept vague on what exactly had done the Kiren-the less anyone knew, the better for everyone. He was suitably impressed.
For the next week I went about my business with a tight watch, backtracking and setting false trails in case anyone was shadowing me, but best as I could tell, I was on my own. No ethereal spirits, no dark apparitions hovering out the corners of my eye-just the boil on the ass of Rigus that is Low Town, stewing in all its fetid glory.
So for a while I assumed that would be pretty much it. I had some long nights thinking about the monstrosity, but even had I been interested in tracking it down, I had nothing to work from. And, truth be told, I’d had my fill of playing detective-pretending I was an agent had turned out to be even less satisfying than actually being one.
Then the Shattered Dagger Mob went to war with a clique of Islanders from near the docks, and I didn’t have time to think about anything other than the day-to-day survival of my enterprise. Spending my afternoons explaining to stone-faced heretics why I owed them no tax on my operations and my evenings convincing a crew of drug-addled rude boys that I was too crazy to muscle didn’t leave much room for extracurricular activities.
As far as the rest of Rigus was concerned, the important people considered the matter forgotten, and the unimportant people didn’t count. The ice kept a pretty tight lid on the whole thing. There were rumors of black magic and demons hiding in the shadows, and for a while there was a boom in the sale of defensive charms of dubious effectiveness, especially among the Kiren, by nature a superstitious people. But Low Town is a busy place, and as autumn gave way to early winter, the murder of Tara Potgieter sunk into the realm of dim memory.
I thought about heading back to the Aerie to clue the Crane in on what had happened; I figured I owed him that much. But then I figured I owed him a hell of a lot more, and since I’d never be able to repay the full amount, I decided to write off this last debt as well. He’d understand, even if Celia wouldn’t. Scratch a scab long enough and it’ll start to run. That part of my life was over-as far as I was concerned our reunion was an isolated incident.
Despite the best efforts of Adeline, Wren refused to spend a full night within the walls of the Earl. Like a half-trained version of his namesake, he’d flit in to snatch a few crumbs of food, then fly out again without a word. Once I caught him swiping something from a neighborhood stall, and he disappeared for a full week, leaving Adeline sick with worry and furious at me-but then he showed up again one evening, slipping through the back door like nothing had happened.
Though reticient to take to settled life, he was there when I needed him and became an aid if not an asset to my operations. I kept him out of anything serious and never let him hold any weight, but his fresh legs were useful when I needed a message carried, and I found myself acclimatizing to his laconic presence, one of those few individuals unencumbered by the need to fill the air with rhetoric.
Adolphus offered to teach the boy to box, and much as it galled him to admit there might be a skill he’d yet to master, he had the good sense to take the giant up on his offer. He showed a talent for it, and I enjoyed wasting the occasional hour watching the two spar, burning a twist of dreamvine while Adolphus demonstrated basic footwork with his gargantuan frame. It was this idle enterprise I was engaged in late one afternoon when Adeline unknowingly set my feet upon the path of ruin.
“You can take five blows to the chest easier than one to your head,” Adolphus was saying, his fat face thick with sweat as his wife entered the courtyard. “Always keep your hands up,” he continued, Wren aping his actions in miniature beside him.
So soft is Adeline’s voice that on those rare occasions when she magnifies it beyond a whisper it has the effect of a shriek. “Another girl’s gone missing.”
I reminded myself to exhale a chest full of smoke. Adolphus dropped his hands to his sides, his voice low and guttural. “When? Who?”
“Last night. Anne from the bakery told me. They’ve got guardsmen out looking now. I don’t know the girl. Anne said her father is a tailor near the canal.”
Adolphus shot me a grim look, then turned to Wren. “Training is over. Wash up and help Adeline.” I could see the boy was unhappy to be excluded, but Adolphus can be a heavy character, and Wren kept his tongue resting in its cavity.
We waited until they were both inside before continuing. “What do you think?” Adolphus asked.
“Maybe she got lost playing rat-in-a-hole. Maybe she caught the eye of a slaver and is stuffed in a barrel on her way east. Maybe her father beat her to death and hid her body somewhere. It could be a lot of things.”
His one eye flickered across my face, performing double duty as always. “It could be a lot of things, fine. Is it them?”
It’s usually best to assume the worst and work from there.
“Probably.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll keep my nose clean and stay out of it.” Though I doubted I’d have that option. If this was the work of the same crew that got the last girl, there’d be trouble-the Crown would make sure of that. They might not care about the dead child of a Low Town dockworker but they sure as shit would want to know who was summoning otherworldly entities. Only the Crown gets to dabble in the dark arts-it’s a privilege they preserve with great rigor. As of right now I was the only connection to whatever had killed the Kiren, and that alone was enough to merit me a session below Black House.
“Will the ones that killed the girl come after you?” Adolphus asked.
“I’m done playing lawman.”
“And will your former comrades let you off so easily?”
I said nothing. Adolphus knew the answer.
“I’m sorry that I pushed you to do this.” I found myself very conscious of the gray hairs that speckled his beard, and of the sparse patches in his mane.
“I’m going to head over to the Aerie, see if I can’t get a better handle on the situation.” I left Adolphus in the courtyard and went upstairs to grab my satchel. I considered taking a blade, but thought better of it. If the girl turned up floating in the canal I was sure to get a visit from the law, and if that happened I’d never see anything I was carrying again. Besides, from what I could tell, steel wouldn’t do much against the abomination I had seen. I exited the bar and set out on a brisk walk, my mind drawn back to what I had long assumed would be my first and only encounter with the thing that had killed the Kiren.
The war was almost over-we hovered at the precipice of victory. Everywhere the Dren whore was on her back, her defenses breached, her castles defended by old men with bent pikes and boys too young to shave. Of the seventeen territories that had once made up the United Provinces, only four remained in Dren possession, and once we took Donknacht these remaining holdouts were sure to fold as well. My five long years of service, killing and bleeding and pushing for a hundred yards a day, were almost over. We’d all be spending Midwinter at home, drinking hot toddies by a roaring fire. At that very moment, Wilhelm van Agt, chief Steadholder of the Republic, was considering an armistice as prelude to complete capitulation.
Unfortunately it seemed the news of our conflict’s resolution had not yet reached the Dren themselves, who stood outside their capital city like lions, roaring defiance in the face of Allied might. A half decade of preparation and a mastery of siege tactics had enabled them to create what was likely the most perfect defensive perimeter in mankind’s long history of violence. It seemed they hadn’t heard of the famine and disease afflicting their forces, of the terrible losses they’d suffered at Karsk and Lauvengod, of the generally hopeless nature of their cause-or if they had, it had done nothing to weaken their resolve.
It was this collective intransigence, intransigence which bordered on outright foolishness, that I blamed for forcing me out of bed in the middle of the night to go on a covert mission. It was the stupidity of our own brass, however, that I blamed for the logistical failure that was to leave me and my squad absent appropriate camouflage during the operation.
Inwardly, at least. Outwardly, officers don’t grumble about these little administrative mishaps, even if they’re of the sort likely to get them killed.
Private Carolinus had no such qualms. “Lieutenant, how are we expected to go on a mission at night with no faceblack?” he asked angrily, as if I had an explanation or a vat of the stuff hidden beneath my sleep roll. Carolinus was red haired and ruddy cheeked, a northern Rouender, one of that peculiar breed of men whose ancestors had invaded Vaal three centuries prior and never left. As squat and hard as the coal he had grown up mining, he was nearly as quick to complain as he was to go over the top. He had become, frankly, a constant source of annoyance, but with Adolphus invalided home he was the only man I thought capable of taking over if I caught a stray bolt. “Lieutenant, the Dren have eyes like owls. We’ll be porcupined for sure if we aren’t inked.”
I cinched tight the straps of my leather armor, making sure my weapons were in place and my trench blade hung loose at my side. “They aren’t expecting you to do anything, Private. I, however, am ordering you to shut that flapping cunt mouth of yours and gear up, because you’re going over the wall in a quarter hour whether you’re butt-fucking naked or covered in soot. And don’t worry about the enemy, from what I hear they only fire at men.”
The others laughed and even Carolinus smirked, but their humor was forced and so was mine. It wasn’t just the absence of faceblack-I hadn’t even known we were on until forty minutes earlier, when an aide to the company commander had roughly woken me from the first decent night’s sleep I’d had in a week, telling me to grab a crew of my finest and report to the major.
Truth was, none of it felt right. Donknacht the Unbowed was the capital of the Dren States, and for a millennium and a half it had stood free of foreign yoke. When the rest of the Dren provinces had been swallowed up by their neighbors, Donknacht alone had remained a free city. And when the surge of Dren nationalism seventy years past had unified these disparate states into one mighty confederacy, Donknacht had been the pivot around which the commonwealth had formed.
I couldn’t speak for the remaining provinces, but the soldiers facing us across a half mile of no-man’s-land died on suicide missions cursing our mothers. Their defenses wouldn’t be carried without a full-scale assault preceded by artillery and sorcery, and even then, it was likely to cost us half a division. This assumed the bastards didn’t fall back into the city and fight us for each house and street. Like everyone else, I was hoping the rumors of the armistice were true, and we would stop our long advance here, on the plains outside the capital. Either way, I was hard-pressed to see what five lone grunts were going to do to alter the situation, with or without faceblack.
I turned to Saavedra, our point man since a stray artillery shell had taken off the top of poor Donnely’s skull. His dark eyes and the stern set of his face betrayed his Asher ancestry, though why he had signed up as a member of our mixed unit instead of with the regiments of his own people none of us could say. Saavedra refused to discuss it, or much else for that matter, and the men of the First Capital Infantry were not the sort to look closely at a man’s papers, as long as he took his turn over the top. Despite his exile among us heathens, Saavedra hewed close to the standards of his race, taciturn and unreadable, the best card player in the regiment and a terror with a short sword besides. He’d have enough faceblack stashed somewhere to darken his own features, but sure as the single god of his people was a grim one, he wouldn’t have enough for two.
“Get the rest of them ready. I’m to see the major.” Saavedra nodded, silent as usual. I headed back toward the center of camp.
Our major, Cirellus Grenwald, was a fool and a coward but not an outright lunatic, and that alone placed him distinctly in the top half of the officer corps. If his primary talent consisted of being born at the top of a ladder, it was something at least that he’d yet to fall from it. He was talking to a man in a leather coat with silver trim, whom I took for a civilian at first glance.
The major offered me an ingenuous smile that, more than any actual competence, had hastened his ascent through the ranks. “Lieutenant, I was just telling Third Sorcerer Adelweid here about you. Head of the fiercest platoon in the division. He’ll provide an impregnable defense for your… undertaking.”
Sorcerer Adelweid was pale faced, thin but with a wormy film of excess flesh. He had found the time to slip his raven black, shoulder-length hair into a jeweled clasp, an adornment which, along with his gilded belt buckle and silver cuff links, seemed singularly inappropriate to the situation at hand. I didn’t like him, and I liked less the discovery that my mission involved his protection. The Crane aside, I hated sorcerers-everyone in the force did and not just because they were showy and whiny and got their requisitions for arcane items filled in a hot minute while we scavenged for boot leather and millet. No, every grunt in the force hated sorcerers because, to a man and with vituperate language, each could tell of losing comrades when some spell-slinger got careless directing battle hexes and annihilated half a unit in a spray of blood and bone. The brass thought them great fun, of course, certain that each new scheme they proposed would be the secret weapon that would win us the war.
But it wouldn’t do to let this animus play across my face. I saluted the man crisply, an obeisance he returned apathetically and without comment. Major Grenwald continued, “Welcome to Operation Ingress, Lieutenant. Your orders are as follows. You and your men are to take Sorcerer Adelweid four hundred yards into no-man’s-land, halting at a place of his choosing, at which point the sorcerer will perform a working. You are to detail one man to protect him, then you and the remainder are to travel another two hundred yards toward Dren lines, where you will place this talisman”-he handed me a small black jewel-“on an overlook within sight of the enemy defenses. You are to hold that position until Sorcerer Adelweid has completed his part of the mission.”
Adding up the distances I came to the unfortunate sum of six hundred yards, closer to the Dren’s territory than to ours and well within the range of even short-distance patrols. Nor did it escape my notice that Grenwald had offered no estimate as to how long Adelweid would need to complete his task. Was it ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? For that matter, why did we all assume this slippery piece of black glass would even work? From what I had seen of the Art, it was just as likely to blow up in my hands.
I didn’t imagine I’d get answers, even if I was foolish enough to ask the questions. Instead, I snapped a hand at Grenwald, praying it wouldn’t be the last time I’d salute the vainglorious motherfucker, then turned to Adelweid. “Sir, our unit is grouped at the front trench. If you’ll follow me.”
He nodded vaguely toward the major, then fell in line behind me without comment. I took the opportunity to make one. “Sir, now might be a good time to remove any reflective gear you have. That hair clasp in particular will give away our position to any Dren sniper we run into.”
“Thank you for the suggestion, Lieutenant, but my garments will remain as they are.” His voice was every drop as oily as I expected, and he rubbed at the gleaming bangle possessively. “Our mission would be quite impossible to complete without it. Besides, I have no wish to return to camp victorious, only to discover that someone has made off with the cuff links given to me by the head of the Order of the Twisted Oak.”
Better than not coming back at all, I thought, and better than sacrificing me and my men to your bloated sense of vanity. Although he was right: someone would have stolen them.
By the time we reached the outskirts of camp, the men were in position, weapons at the ready, armor pulled tight. The six of us stood in a circle and I repeated our orders. It was clear they weren’t happy, not with the job and not with Adelweid, but they were professionals and kept quiet. When I was finished, I ordered a last equipment check and then we were up the ladders and alone in the wasteland between our camp and the Dren.
“From here on out, full light and noise restrictions are in effect.” I nodded to Saavedra, his face predictably soot colored. He shifted into a practiced stalk and fifteen seconds later I could barely make him out. Carolinus fell in behind him, and I followed with Adelweid a few steps ahead of me.