The Silvered (35 page)

Reiter had just swallowed his last mouthful of toasted bread when the screaming started. Unwilling to spend the morning kicking around the garrison, he’d gone back into the city just after dawn looking for an alehouse one of the other officers had mentioned enjoying down in the working class part of town.
“Safe enough,”
he’d said.
“We haven’t changed their lives any. At their pay grade, it’s all pretty much shit. Why should they care which bastards they work for?”

In the older cities of the empire, Reiter would have gone to a coffee house. If such a place existed in Abyek, he wouldn’t be able to afford it, given the prices of the commonplace out by the new border. Fortunately, he had no problem settling for ale and was pleasantly surprised to find he could have a mug of tea so strong it nearly ate the plating off the spoon. In spite of speaking no Pyrahn and the waiter no Imperial, they’d managed to find enough common ground for him to order and negotiate a price in Imperial coin. Commerce always found a way.

The eggs had been just the way he liked, the sausage a little short of actual meat but still tasty, and if he couldn’t get a decent biscuit and gravy, he was reasonably content with the thick slices of toasted bread that replaced that staple in this part of the world. The meal had cost more than he’d normally put down—one way or another that could be tracked back to the war—but his back pay had caught up to him in Abyek and he had nothing else to drop it on. As he cut and chewed and swallowed, he tried not to think of it as a last meal. He wasn’t particularly successful. He didn’t need to be one of Colonel Korshan’s company, smart enough to invent rockets and balloons and whatnot, to know he’d be lucky to survive reporting back without the sixth mage. A smarter man might think about deserting, but he’d given the army his entire adult life; if he couldn’t believe they’d give him back a fair chance to be heard, then he’d thrown that life
away. Besides, the Soothsayers had tossed him into this pile of shit. There was nothing that said they wouldn’t find him if he ran, and that made reporting his failure the smarter thing to do.

Although, he allowed, spreading honey on a fourth slice of toasted bread, that didn’t mean he was in a hurry to get it done.

At the first scream, he put his knife and fork down on his empty plate. At the second, he stood, and threw a handful of coin on the table. As three, four, and five heralded a rush of noise blending terror and rage under what sounded like explosions, he ran for the door. People out on the street stared toward the rising smoke, but they’d just lost a war and had learned better than to run toward a battle.

Reiter had been on the winning side.

Three streets down, a new sound had him glance left, and he spotted half a dozen young soldiers coming out of an alehouse somewhat shabbier than one he’d just left.

“Corporal!”

The corporal jerked around to face him, his expression as much guilty as startled. “Sir!”

“With me!” Reiter didn’t give a crap what the corporal or his friends were guilty of. They were there.

“We’re off duty, sir.”

“Did I ask?”

“No, sir!”

He heard their boots hitting the cobblestones behind him, but he didn’t look back. If he’d needed to look back, the Imperial army had no business winning so much as a darts tournament.

The road spilled him out into a small market square although he had to shove his way through a small huddle of weeping civilians to actually enter it.

A man burned in the center of the square. Reiter had seen more war than he cared to remember, and men were too wet to burn like man-shaped torches—although as this man
was
burning like a man-shaped torch, Reiter found himself grateful for the presence of the unnatural, masking flame.

Behind the burning man, the well shot a pillar of water up into the air.

Barrows and stalls had collapsed. Every piece of board in the market had grown thorns.

What looked like a small cyclone had just reached the square from one of the narrow side streets.

Whatever was happening, it was centered around the well.

He’d nearly reached it, one arm up over his nose to block the stink, when he recognized a familiar spill of gray skirts. Up on her knees, one hand pressed to her side, she crawled toward a body lying near the feet of the burning man.

Young, dark-haired, male—probably the beastman who’d helped her escape. The abomination. Ignoring for the moment that they were in Abyek, because that made no sense at all, Reiter added up the pieces. Seemed a local tough had tried to collect the emperor’s bounty on abominations and had tossed the girl aside as harmless because she had no mage sign in her eyes.

Screaming grew louder all around the market as the cyclone came out from between the buildings and began flinging debris.

Reiter grabbed the girl by the back of the jacket, hauled her up onto her feet, and punched her as hard as he could. Her head snapped back, and he barely caught her before she hit the ground. He’d just had his career, and possibly his life, handed back to him.

The cyclone vanished, white-painted bricks clattered down onto the cobblestones. A piece of charred meat shaped like a man stood for a moment then collapsed and sizzled. The pillar of water pouring from the well dropped to barely six inches high.

“Sir?”

Straightening, he handed the girl into the arms of a large young private staring wild-eyed at the destruction. “Get her back to the garrison. Tell them they’re to use that stuff the surgeons use to keep her out. Captain Reiter’s orders.” He was a Shield. Anyone who could read insignia had known he was there on the emperor’s command. His orders would be obeyed. “Take him, too!” The beastman wasn’t in pieces. If the stories were true, that meant he was still alive. “Find a barrow that’s not been destroyed, pile them both into it. Get them to the garrison, quickly, and keep them both unconscious.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Corporal!”

“Captain Reiter, sir!” The state of the corporal’s boots declared he’d already lost his breakfast.

Given the smell of burned meat and hair and offal that coated
nose and throat, Reiter didn’t blame him. Not as long as he followed orders. “Until more troops arrive, we’re it.”

“Sir! We don’t have our weapons!”

“We won’t be shooting anyone. You know how to put together a work party?”

Indignation took a shot at replacing horror. “Yes, sir!”

“So put one together. Get people out from under collapsed stalls. Find casualties. Apply field dressings. Can you talk to them?”

“A little, sir!

“Good. They won’t care that we’re Imperials. They need someone to pull order out of chaos.”

“No, sir! I mean, yes, sir!”

As the corporal barked orders, and the beastman and mage rumbled toward the garrison in a salvaged barrow, Reiter moved to take a closer look at the burned body. His fingers were gone. What could have been a wooden knife hilt had been cooked into the palm of his hand. Reiter slid the toe of his boot between the charred wrist and the pavement and lifted.

Six-inch thorns jutted out through the back of his hand and explained why he hadn’t dropped it.

A glint of metal caught Reiter’s eye and he splashed through the water back to where he’d found the girl. Radiating out like a sunburst from the place she’d been kneeling, the cracks in the cobblestones were filled with metal. Metal that appeared to have been molten moments before but had already cooled to the touch.

“Did you have any idea of what you were doing?” he wondered, the question unheard amid the surrounding grief and profanities.

The voice of a heavyset woman rose above the rest as she backed a boy into a corner and started beating him with a belt. “You have fire eyes—don’t tell me you didn’t do it! Don’t lie to me! Don’t lie to me!”

As Reiter ran to save the boy, he realized this neighborhood was going to become brutal for anyone with even the minimal mage marks found outside Aydori.

Nearly three hours later, the moment Reiter stepped onto land claimed by the garrison, before he’d even got through the gate, a private barely old enough to shave separated himself from where he’d been leaning against the fence and stepped into his path.

“Captain Reiter, sir, Major Halyss wants to see you in his office.”

“Tell him I’ll be there immediately after checking my prisoners.”

“No, sir. Sorry, sir, but he said you’re to go right to him.”

It had been worth a shot.

The major was on the second floor at the far end of the garrison building from the transport sergeant’s office. Reiter hadn’t met him, but he knew Major Halyss was Intelligence and had just arrived from Karis. Soldiers’ gossip said that General Reed, the garrison commander, had been giving the major as much leeway as wouldn’t undermine his command. The major’s father was evidently a power at court.

The office was surprisingly bare, the major sitting at a nearly empty desk writing quickly. The boy came to attention, but Reiter fell into parade rest and waited. After filling a third sheet of paper, Halyss tossed his steel-tipped pen back into the inkwell, blew on the last sheet until the ink would take the pressure of his finger, then folded all three and sealed them, pressing his signet into the wax.

“Brendon.”

“Sir!”

“Sergeant Pine. For immediate courier.”

“Sir!”

Halyss watched the boy leave, then turned a dark-eyed gaze on Reiter. Who came to attention.

“Never mind that, Captain. In fact, sit. It’s a borrowed office, I don’t plan on staying long, but we might as well make use of it.”

He sounded
hail fellow well met
. His eyes said
trust no one
. Reiter sat, but he didn’t relax. Expecting another Lieutenant Lord Geurin, he was pleased to see that while the major had all the innate airs and confidence of the aristocracy, he appeared to lack an obvious sense of petulant entitlement. Of course, appearances could be deceiving.

“So, your prisoners.” The major leaned back in his chair and smiled. The smile made Reiter think of Aydori. “I hear they were wheeled out of what a very incoherent young private seemed to think was a riot or a sacrifice or flame knows what and into the custody of the Imperial army. They’re boxed and drugged. So I was wondering, just out of curiosity, you understand, why you would ask they be drugged with a substance even the surgeons admit is experimental. Useful, definitely,” he added, “but experimental.”

“It’s important they don’t wake up, sir.”

“I did gather that, yes.”

Rather than attempt an explanation, Reiter pulled his orders from inside his tunic, and passed them across the desk. The major’s gaze rested a moment on the Imperial seal, then he read the single page quickly and passed it back.

“Clear enough. Creep into Aydori, capture six mages, take them to Karis. While I’m well aware ours is not to question why…” Reiter suspected Halyss would question the emperor himself given the opportunity. “…I don’t suppose you were given a reason for your covert mission?”

“Yes, sir. But I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Not even to me?”

“No, sir.”

“Something that inexplicable, my guess is Soothsayers.” Halyss said
my guess is
like he meant
and I know flaming well
. “Crazy bastards.” He made the insult sound personal. “So this girl in the cells…?”

“She’s the sixth mage. Lieutenant Geurin is on the way to Karis with the other five. I had her. I lost her.” Reiter met the major’s gaze. “Now, I have her again.”

“Good for you. Given the chaos you pulled her from, I suspected as much—not that she was your mage, of course, but that she was a mage, and so I checked her eyes. As I said, I was curious. Thing is…” Halyss leaned forward. “…mages have been a bit of a hobby of mine. Why is it mage-craft is dying out in the empire but still strong in the old mountain countries?”

“Science?” Reiter offered when it became clear Halyss actually wanted an answer.

“That’s a theory, but I’ve found no reason science and mage-craft can’t coexist. It must be something else, mustn’t it? At any event, this hobby of mine has to do with why I’ve been sent to the front. I’m more useful here.” The major’s affectations slipped just for a heartbeat. If Reiter hadn’t been watching him so closely for his own protection, he’d have missed it. It seemed Halyss wasn’t happy about his orders. “Those five women you were to capture, pardon me, six, are not the only mages in Aydori. Their artillery has more Fire-mages than cannon by all reports. Oh, yes…” He sat back and raised a
hand, as though Reiter, sitting silently, had commented. “…her eyes. No mage marks. They’re not dependent on consciousness, by the way. No mage marks, not a mage.”

“So I’ve always believed, sir. But this confirmed it.” Reiter pulled the tangle from his pocket and set it on the desk. Halyss’ eyes widened, surprise evoking an honest response.

“This is from the Archive,” he said, confirming the rumors of his previous post. Only someone who’d spent significant time at court would know about the Archive, let alone recognize an artifact taken from it. He reached out, paused, and only continued when Reiter nodded. “You realize, don’t you, that this little golden net is probably worth more than everything you and I will ever own in our entire lives?”

“Because of the gold…”

“Because it can’t be duplicated.” Fingers through the weave, Halyss held the tangle up to the light.

“There were six of them, sir.”

Halyss stared at him for a long moment. “Not what I meant, Captain.” The fine gold chain glittered as he turned it. “We have lost the knowledge and the ability to create more and an attempt to regain even some small part of that knowledge is…” He stopped and stared at the tangle, mouth partially open. When Reiter followed his line of sight, the only thought in his head was suddenly,
probably worth more than everything you and I will ever own in our entire lives
.

“Do you know what this looks like, Captain?”

“It was like that when it came off the mage, sir.”

“Not what I asked.”

“It looks…melted?”

“No, it doesn’t.” Major Halyss tapped the blackened ends of the two broken sections. “Enough heat to melt this would have been enough heat to melt at least another inch or two of the gold. And these links, while elongated, aren’t melted. Emperor Leopald has been experimenting with electricity…”