Chapter
3
Taniel stared at the ceiling only a foot above him, counting each time he swung, side to side, in the hemp-rope hammock, listening to the Gurlish pipes that filled the room with a soft, whistling music.
He hated that music. It seemed to echo in his ears, all at once too soft to hear well but loud enough to make him grind his molars together. He lost count of the hammock swings somewhere around ten and exhaled. Warm smoke curled out from between his lips and against the crumbling mortar in the ceiling. He watched the smoke escape the roof of his niche and swirl into the middle of the mala den.
There were a dozen such niches in the room. Two were occupied. In the two weeks he’d been there, Taniel had yet to see the occupants get up to piss or eat or do anything other than suck on the long-stemmed mala pipes and flag the den’s owner over for a refill.
He leaned over, his hand reaching for a refill for his own mala pipe. The table next to his hammock held a plate with a few scraps of dark mala, an empty purse, and a pistol. He couldn’t remember where the pistol came from.
Taniel gathered the bits of mala together into one small, sticky ball and pushed it into the end of his pipe. It lit instantly, and he took a long pull into his lungs.
“Want more?”
The den’s owner sidled up to Taniel’s hammock. He was Gurlish, his skin brown but not as dark as a Deliv’s, with a lighter tone under his eyes and on his palms. He was tall, like most Gurlish, and skinny, his back bent from years of leaning into the niches of his mala den to clean them out or light an addict’s pipe. His name was Kin.
Taniel reached for his purse, wiggled his fingers around inside before remembering that it was empty. “No money,” he said, his own voice ragged in his ears.
How long had he been here? Two weeks, Taniel decided after putting his mind to the question. More importantly, how did he get here?
Not here, the mala den, but here in Adopest. Taniel remembered the fight on top of Kresimir’s palace as Ka-poel destroyed the Kez Cabal, and he remembered pulling the trigger of his rifle and watching a bullet take the god Kresimir in the eye.
It was all darkness after that until he woke up, covered in sweat, Ka-poel straddling him with fresh blood on her hands. He remembered bodies in the hallway of the hotel – his father’s soldiers with an unfamiliar insignia on their jackets. He’d left the hotel and stumbled here, where he’d hoped to forget.
Of course, if he still remembered all that, then the mala wasn’t doing its job.
“Army jacket,” Kin said, fingering his lapel. “Your buttons.”
Taniel looked down at the jacket he wore. It was Adran-army dark blue, with silver trim and buttons. He’d taken it from the hotel. It wasn’t his – too big. There was a powder mage pin – a silver powder keg – pinned to the lapel. Maybe it was his. Had he lost weight?
The jacket had been clean two days ago. He remembered that much. Now it was stained with drool, bits of food, and small burns from mala embers. When the pit had he eaten?
Taniel pulled his belt knife and took one of the buttons in his fingers. He paused. Kin’s daughter walked through the room. She wore a faded white dress, clean despite the squalor of the den. She must have been a few years older than Taniel, but no children clung to her skirts.
“Do you like my daughter?” Kin asked. “She will dance for you. Two buttons!” He held up two fingers for emphasis. “Much prettier than the Fatrastan witch.”
Kin’s wife, sitting in the corner and playing the Gurlish pipes, stopped the music long enough to say something to Kin. They exchanged a few words in Gurlish, then Kin turned back to Taniel. “Two buttons!” he reiterated.
Taniel cut a button loose and put it in Kin’s hand. Dance, eh? Taniel wondered if Kin had a strong enough grasp of Adran for euphemism, or if dance was indeed all she’d do.
“Maybe later,” Taniel said, settling back in the hammock with a fresh ball of mala the size of a child’s fist. “Ka-poel isn’t a witch. She’s…” He paused, trying to figure out a way to describe her to a Gurlish. His thoughts moved slowly, sluggish from the mala. “All right,” he conceded. “She’s a witch.”
Taniel topped off his mala pipe. Kin’s daughter was watching him. He returned her open stare with a half-lidded gaze. She was pretty, by some standards. Too tall by far for Taniel, and much too gaunt – most Gurlish were. She stayed there, laundry balanced on her hip, until her father shooed her out.
How long had it been since he’d had a woman?
A woman? He laughed, smoke curling out his nose. The laugh ended in a cough and received no more than a curious glance from Kin. No, not a woman. The woman. Vlora. How long had it been? Two and a half years now? Three?
He sat back up and fished around in his pocket for a powder charge, wondering where Vlora was now. Probably still with Tamas and the rest of the powder cabal.
Tamas would want Taniel back on the front line.
To the pit with that. Let Tamas come to Adopest looking for Taniel. The last place he’d look was a mala den.
There wasn’t a powder charge in Taniel’s pocket. Ka-poel had cleaned him out. He’d not had a smidgen of powder since she brought him out of that goddamned coma. Not even his pistol was loaded. He could go out and get some. Find a barracks, show them his powder-mage pin.
The very idea of getting out of the hammock made his head spin.
Ka-poel came down the steps into the mala den just as Taniel was beginning to drift off. He kept his eyes mostly closed, the smoke curling from his lips. She stopped and examined him.
She was short, her features petite. Her skin was white, with ashen freckles and her red hair was no more than an inch long. He didn’t like it so short, it made her look boyish. No mistaking her for a boy, Taniel thought as she shrugged out of her long black duster. Underneath she wore a white sleeveless shirt, scrounged from who-knew-where, and close-fitting black pants.
Ka-poel touched Taniel’s shoulder. He ignored her. Let her think him asleep, or too deep in a mala haze to notice her. All the better.
She reached out and squeezed his nose shut with one hand, pushing his mouth closed with the other.
He jerked up, taking a breath when she let go. “What the pit, Pole? Trying to kill me?”
She smiled, and it wasn’t the first time under the mala haze that he’d stared into those glass-green eyes with less than proper thoughts. He shook them away. She was his ward. He was her protector. Or was it the other way around? She was the one who’d done the protecting up on South Pike.
Taniel settled back into the hammock. “What do you want?”
She held up a thick pad of paper, bound in leather. A sketchbook. To replace the one lost on South Pike Mountain. He felt a pang at that. Sketches from eight years of his life. People he’d known, many of them long dead. Some friends, some enemies. Losing that sketchbook hurt almost as much as losing his genuine Hrusch rifle.
Almost as much as…
He pushed the stem of his mala pipe between his teeth and sucked in hard. He shivered as the smoke burned his throat and lungs and seeped into his body, deadening the memories.
When he reached out for the sketchbook, he saw that his hand was shaking. He snatched it back quickly.
Ka-poel’s eyes narrowed. She set the sketchbook on his stomach, followed by a pack of charcoal pencils. Finer sketching tools than he’d ever had in Fatrasta. She pointed at them, and mimed him sketching.
Taniel made his right hand into a fist. He didn’t want her to see him shaking. “I… not now, Pole.”
She pointed again, more insistently.
Taniel took another deep breath of mala and closed his eyes. He felt tears roll down his cheeks.
He felt her take the book and pencils off his chest. Heard the table move. He expected a reproach. A punch. Something. When he opened his eyes again, he saw her bare feet disappearing up the stairs of the mala den and she was gone. He took another deep breath of mala and wiped the tears off his face.
The room began to fade into the mala haze along with his memories; all the people he’d killed, all the friends he’d seen die. The god he’d seen with his own eyes, and then put down with an ensorcelled bullet. He didn’t want to remember any of that.
Just another few days in the mala den, then he’d be fine. Back to his old self. He’d report to Tamas and get back to what he was good at: killing Kez.
Tamas found himself a quarter mile under a thousand tons of rock just a few hours after leaving Budwiel’s walls. His torch flickered in the darkness, casting light and shadows across the row after row of recessed graves carved into the walls of the caverns. Skulls hung from the ceilings by the hundred in a grisly tribute to the dead, and he wondered if this was what the pathway to the afterlife looked like.
More fire, he imagined.
He fought off his initial claustrophobia by reminding himself that these catacombs had been used for a thousand years. They weren’t likely to collapse anytime soon.
The size of the passageway surprised him. At times the rooms were wide enough to hold hundreds of men. At their narrowest, even a carriage could pass through them without scraping the sides.
The two artillery men Hilanska had spoken of walked on ahead. They carried their own torches and they talked excitedly, their voices echoing as they passed through the varied chambers. Beside Tamas, his bodyguard Olem kept pace with a hand on his pistol and a suspicious eye on the two soldiers ahead of him. Bringing up the rear were two of Tamas’s best powder mages: Vlora and Andriya.
“These caverns,” Olem said, running his fingers along the stone walls, “were widened with tools. But look at the ceiling.” He pointed upward. “No tool marks.”
“They were carved out by water,” Tamas said. “Probably thousands of years ago.” He let his eyes run over the ceiling and then down to the floor. Their path sloped gently downward, punctuated from time to time by steps cut into the floor and worn by the passing of thousands of pilgrims, families, and priests every year. Despite these signs of use, these catacombs were empty of anything living – the priests had suspended burials during the siege, worried that artillery fire might collapse some of the caves.
Tamas used to play in caverns like these when his father, an apothecary, searched the mountains every summer for rare flowers, mushrooms, and fungus. Some cave systems went incredibly deep into the heart of the mountain. Others ended abruptly, just when things seemed to be getting interesting.
The passageway opened up into a wide cavern. The torchlight no longer danced on the ceiling and far walls, but disappeared into the darkness above. They stood on the edge of a pool of still water blacker than a moonless night. Their voices echoed in the great hollow space.
Tamas came to a stop beside the waiting artillery men. He cracked a powder charge in between his fingers and sprinkled it on his tongue. The trance swept through him, bringing dizziness and clarity all at once. The ache of his leg disappeared and the tendrils of light caused by the torches were suddenly more than enough for him to examine the cavern in its entirety.
The walls were lined with stone sarcophagi, stacked almost haphazardly upon one another thirty, maybe forty feet into the air. A dripping sound echoed through the chamber: the source of the underground lake. Tamas could see no exit but the one through which they’d come.
“Sir?” one of the artillerymen said. His name was Ludik, and he held his torch over the pool, trying to gauge the depths.
“We’re thousands of feet beneath the West Pillar,” Tamas said. “And no closer to Kez. I don’t like being led into strange places.”
The cock of Olem’s pistol stirred the silence of the cave. Behind Tamas, Vlora and Andriya stood with their rifles at the ready. Ludik exchanged a nervous glance with his comrade and swallowed hard.
“It looks like the cave system ends,” Ludik said, pointing with his torch across the pond. “But it doesn’t. It keeps going, and goes straight toward Kez.”
“How do you know?” Tamas asked.
Ludik hesitated, expecting reproach. “Because, sir, we followed it through.”
“Show me.”
They passed behind a pair of sarcophagi on the other side of the pond and ducked beneath a ledge that proved deeper than it looked. A moment later, and Tamas was standing on the other side. The cavern opened up again and led down into the dark.
Tamas turned to the bodyguard at his shoulder. “Try not to shoot anyone unless I say so.”
Olem stroked his neatly trimmed beard, eyeing the artillerymen. “Of course, sir.” His hand didn’t leave the butt of his pistol. Olem wasn’t the trusting sort these days.
An hour later, Tamas left the cavern and climbed up through brush and scree into daylight. The sun had passed over the mountains to the east and the valley was in shadow.
“All clear, sir,” Olem said, helping him up to steady footing.
Tamas checked his pistol, then absently thumbed the contents of another powder charge onto his tongue. They stood in a steep valley on the southern slope of the Adran Mountains. By his guess, they were less than two miles from Budwiel. If that was correct, they now flanked the Kez army perfectly.
“An old riverbed, sir,” Vlora said, picking her way among the small boulders. “It points to the west, then cuts south. The base of the valley is obscured by a hillock. We’re not more than a half mile from the Kez right now, but there’s no sign they’ve even bothered scouting this valley.”
“Sir!” a voice called from within the cave.
Tamas whirled. Vlora, Olem, and Andriya all raised their rifles, pointing into the darkness.
An Adran soldier emerged. His shoulder sported a chevron with a powder horn beneath it. The man was a lance corporal, one of Olem’s new company of elite soldiers, the Riflejacks.
“Quiet, fool,” Olem hissed. “You want all of Kez to hear?”
The messenger wiped the sweat from his brow, blinking up at the brightness of day. “Sorry, sir,” he said to Tamas. “I got lost in the mountain. General Hilanska sent me after you not more than a moment after you left.”
“What is it, man?” Tamas demanded. Gasping messengers were never a good sign. They never hurried unless it was of utmost importance.
“The Kez, sir,” the messenger said. “Our spies report they will attack en masse the day after tomorrow. General Hilanska requests you back at the wall immediately.”
Tamas ran his eyes across the steep valley in which they stood. “How many men do you think we could bring through here in two days?”
“Thousands,” Vlora said.
“Ten thousand,” Olem added.
“A hammer of two brigades,” Tamas said. “And Budwiel will be the anvil.”
Vlora seemed doubtful. “That’s a small hammer, sir, compared with that monstrous force out there.”
“Then we’ll have to strike hard and fast.” Tamas examined the valley one more time. “Let’s head back. Have the engineers start widening the tunnel. Get some men up here to shore up this scree so our passage won’t cause a ruckus. When the Kez attack, we’ll smash them against the gates of Budwiel.”