“What if they already passed?”
“I’d see signs of a thousand cavalry having passed through town.” Styke returned to Amrec and rubbed his nose. He wouldn’t admit it, but the empty town had unsettled him. They were far from Landfall—much closer to Little Starland—and if the Dynize were raiding all the way up here, it meant that Jackal’s spirits were right about the fall of the other big coastal cities.
If things were serious enough, it might spell trouble for the Mad Lancers.
He turned his attention to Ka-poel, who squatted in the dirt road, running her fingers through the ruts from a wagon wheel.
“Any idea what happened here?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“The Dynize obviously took the people who lived here,” Styke said. “But we haven’t seen any evidence of that anywhere else. Why take these people?”
Only silence answered his question. Ka-poel touched her fingers to a spot on the ground and crossed over to Styke, showing him the gooey blackness on her fingertips. Blood, a couple days old. She seemed to feel at the air with those two fingers, then led them around the back of the church to a small, fenced-off graveyard, where someone had neatly stacked half a dozen bodies like firewood.
The smell hit them as soon as they rounded the building, and Styke was surprised he hadn’t caught it earlier. The corpses stank of shit and death, coated in flies as thick as molasses. Piling them unburied in a graveyard seemed like someone’s idea of a twisted joke.
Styke appreciated that kind of humor.
Ka-poel wiped the old blood off her hands on the grass, then cleaned her fingers with a handkerchief and pulled out her chalkboard. They did not resist, she wrote.
That was Styke’s first impression as well. He stepped over the graveyard fence to get a closer look and was surprised when Celine followed him. Maybe the place genuinely did spook her. Bodies, on the other hand, were something she’d grown used to.
He squatted beside the pile, running his eyes over them. If this had been a normal raid, or a looting gone bad, the bodies would have been left where they’d fallen, not stacked here in a bizarrely orderly fashion. These men and women had been executed—some with musket blasts to the back of the head and others bayoneted to death. They hadn’t fought back.
It had to be the Dynize. But this town was much bigger than six people. Why lead off the rest, but not these?
Ka-poel joined him, writing something on her slate. This is a Palo town.
“So?” Styke asked.
She pointed at the corpses, forcing him to look once more. Slowly, it dawned on him. The dead were all Kressians. “So they killed the Kressians but led away the Palo?”
Ka-poel nodded.
“Why?”
She shook her head. A few moments passed, and she headed off on her own, poking around in the grass and walking into one of the nearby houses—no doubt looking for clues as to the fate of the town. Styke remained with the bodies for a moment, studying them thoughtfully, then did a circuit of the church.
He wandered through several more buildings in a half-hearted bid to discover a survivor before finally giving up and returning to the front stoop of the general store with an overlooked bottle of gin and a fresh horngum root from the apothecary’s garden at the end of the street.
He broke off a piece of horngum and chewed it thoughtfully, feeling the numbness spread through his jaw. After a swig of gin the numbness spread to his back, hips, and ass to happily relieve so many weeks of riding tension. He leaned back on the stoop and offered the gin to Celine. She took a sniff of the bottle, shaking her head.
The silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves in the distance. He listened to them approach, waiting for the shout of one of Ibana’s scouts.
But there was no shout, and the hoofbeats grew louder. He frowned, looking over at Celine. The sound was coming from the east. Unless Ibana had found a shorter route, she should be coming from the north. “What kind of horse is that?” he asked Celine.
She tilted her head to listen. “It’s light,” she said. “Maybe an Angland racer?”
“It’s not an Angland.” Styke got to his feet. The road from the east was on the other side of the church. The problem that unsettled him was that he did not recognize that hoofbeat, not entirely. It sounded like …
He rounded the church to spot a small group coming toward him on Dynizian mounts. There were six of them—four men and two women—wearing regular Fatrastan traveling clothes and not outwardly armed. They had the red hair and freckles, but their horses precluded them from being Palo. Styke felt the hair on the back of his head stand on end as they came to a stop on the other side of the graveyard, barely sparing a glance for the pile of corpses.
“Who are they?” Celine asked.
“Go back to the horses,” Styke said. “Find Ka-poel. Both of you go to the edge of town and wait for me.”
“What do you …?”
“Now!”
Celine set off at a run. One of the horsemen broke off from the others and began to trot after her. Styke put himself in the man’s path. That seemed to be enough, as the rider simply switched his attention from Celine to Styke. All of the riders were staring at him.
“Are you Ben Styke?” one of them asked in heavily accented Adran. The woman speaking had a scar across her left eye. Whatever had caused it had barely missed leaving her half-blind.
“Who wants to know?” Styke slowly reached for his knife.
The man whose horse Styke had blocked pointed at Styke’s chest. He spoke in Dynize, but it was close enough to Palo that Styke could understand most of it. “Look at his size. He’s a crippled giant with gunshot wounds. Has to be him.”
“Ji-Orz, go keep watch,” the woman with the scar said. One of the men broke off and headed back the way they’d come, remaining on horseback on a nearby hillock. “You are the man they call Ben Styke, correct?” she asked.
Styke’s feeling about these Dynize grew worse and worse. He took a half step back. The group was far too at ease to be soldiers. Styke could see the bulge of knives beneath their coats, but none of them carried a firearm. He tried to remember the Dynize title “Ji,” but he didn’t think he’d ever heard it before. “I am.”
The nearest one leaned over in his saddle, peering at Styke. “You think it was just a story? I can’t imagine an old cripple like him killing Ji-Kushel.”
Styke’s blood ran cold as he remembered the name. Kushel. The dragonman he’d killed in Lady Flint’s muster yard. “Ji” was the title for dragonmen. He felt a small bead of sweat break out on the back of his neck and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his knife. Six dragonmen. Styke nearly died fighting one.
“We were sent by Ka-Sedial,” the woman said, “to kill the man who murdered one of our brothers in single combat. You killed Ji-Kushel?”
Styke had the sinking feeling that he was about to die. He fought the feeling, flinging it from his mind with a growing annoyance. Six dragonmen. Whoever this Ka-Sedial was, he had no intention of underestimating Styke. “Yeah,” he said. “I killed him. I popped his head like a zit.”
One of the other dragonmen snorted in derision. They glanced from one to the other, barely suppressing smirks. They didn’t seem all that worried that Styke had murdered one of their comrades.
“Ji-Matle,” the woman said, “go secure that girl.”
Ji-Matle flipped his reins, urging his mount forward into a casual trot that belied any kind of urgency. He came abreast of Styke and looked down at him, shaking his head. “I still don’t believe it.”
Styke stepped sidelong in front of the horse, jerking his head back from Ji-Matle’s quickly drawn blade, and rammed his boz knife through the neck and up into the brain of the horse. It spasmed, and blood fountained from the wound to cover Styke’s arms. He shoved, pushing the dying creature over as Ji-Matle leapt free with startling dexterity.