“Taniel!”
Taniel stopped on the landing and glanced back up the stairs, trying to decide whether to wait or not. He knew that voice. He didn’t want to hear anything it had to say. He nudged a body with his toe. One of the Hielmen he’d gutted with his bayonet. The man’s eyes fluttered. Still alive. He glared up at Taniel. He gritted his teeth, not making a sound, but he must have been in immense pain. Taniel debated whether to call a surgeon or to kill him. The wound was mortal. Taniel squatted next to him.
“You’ll not live out the week,” Taniel said.
“Traitor,” the Hielman whispered.
“Do you want to live another day or two, kept alive so that you can answer to Tamas’s questioners?” Taniel asked. “Or end it now?”
The man’s eyes betrayed his suffering. He remained silent.
Taniel undid his belt and folded it over, offering the end to the man. “Bite on this.”
The Hielman bit down.
It was over in a handful of heartbeats. Taniel wiped his knife on the Hielman’s trousers and jerked out his belt from between the man’s teeth. He stood up, buckling the belt back on. Why did he do this? He should be off at the university, chasing girls. He tried to think back to the last time he’d chased a girl. His first night in Fatrasta, before the war began, he’d met a girl at a dockside bar. They’d flirted all night. A little drunker and he might have slept with her, but he’d kept his head about him and remembered Vlora. He wondered if that girl was still there. He had a sketch of her in his book.
The Hielman lay at his feet, at peace despite the scrambled gash in his stomach and the fresh crimson line dripping from his throat. Ka-poel stood a few feet away, silent as always. She watched the dead Hielman as if fascinated.
“We should go,” Taniel said to Ka-poel.
“Taniel, wait.”
Vlora hurried down the stairs. She stumbled, caught herself on the railing, and sank down to sit on the steps halfway down. She held one hand over the wound on her thigh.
They stared at each other for a moment. Vlora was the first to look away, down at the body at Taniel’s feet.
“How are you?”
“Alive,” Taniel said.
Several more moments of silence followed. Taniel could hear his father upstairs, yelling orders. Tamas hadn’t even been fazed by the sudden attack. A warrior through and through.
A few soldiers passed them, two going up, one going down. There was a commotion in the main hall downstairs as Tamas’s soldiers rounded up wounded prisoners.
“Forgive me,” Vlora said.
Tears streaked down her face. Taniel fought the impulse to rush to her side, to see to her wound and comfort her. He could sense her pain, emotional and physical, but it could not touch him in his powder trance. He refused to let it touch him. He hooked his thumb through his belt and squared his jaw.
“Let’s go,” he said to Ka-poel.
Adamat ground his teeth in frustration. Seven days since the coup. Seven days since he’d visited Uskan and gotten only more questions for his time. Who’d been burning pages from books on religious and sorcerous history? Who’d taken the other books? And what the pit was Kresimir’s Promise?
Adamat stopped his hackney cab in Bakerstown long enough to grab a meat pie, then continued on past Hrusch Avenue, where the dusty smell of oil, wood, furnaces, and gunpowder whirled between the gunsmith shops and foundries. Here the noise was louder than usual, the crowds thicker. A boy sat on the step of every shop with a bundle of papers, taking orders and reporting numbers as well-dressed gentlemen rubbed shoulders with the lowliest infantryman. A hawker stood on the street corner and yelled that the new Hrusch rifle would protect a man’s home. The gunsmiths were selling the rifles as fast as they could make them.
Adamat flipped through the day’s paper. It said that Taniel Two-Shot was in the city, returned a hero from the Fatrastan War for Independence. Now he was chasing after a rogue Privileged. Some said the Privileged was a surviving member of the royal cabal. Others said it was a Kez spy, keeping an eye on Tamas’s powder cabal. Either way, an entire block had been leveled already, and dozens had been killed or wounded. Adamat hoped the Privileged would either be caught or would leave the city altogether before more blood could be shed. There was going to be enough of that in the coming face-off between Westeven and Tamas.
The royalists had barricaded off Centestershire, nearly the whole middle of Adopest. They’d launched a preemptive attack against Tamas’s forces, only to be driven back. Now it seemed the population was holding its breath. General Westeven, nearly eighty years old, had rallied the entire royalist population of the city, gathered them in one spot, and made enough barricades to stop a damned army. All in one night, or so it seemed. Field Marshal Tamas had responded by bringing in two whole legions of the Wings of Adom mercenary company and surrounding Centestershire with field guns and artillery. Not a shot had been fired yet. Both men were experienced enough not to want to turn the middle of Adopest into a battlefield.
It was a damned nightmare, Adamat decided. Two of the Nine’s most celebrated commanders facing off in a city of a million people. No one could come out a winner from that.
Yet life went on. People still needed to work, to eat. Those not involved directly in this new conflict stayed well away from it. Tamas had done an admirable job at keeping the peace in the rest of the city.
To complicate matters, the Public Archives, where Adamat was most likely to find copies of the damaged books at the university, were behind the royalist barricades. It was not a place he was prepared to go alone.
The carriage came to a stop in front of a three-story building off a side street at the far end of High Talian, the slums of Adopest. There was but a single entrance on this street, with a faded olive-green double door. Half of it was closed, blocked from inside, the paint peeling and the masonry crumbling around the doorpost. The other half was open, and a man of small stature leaned against the opposite post.
Adamat fetched his hat and cane from the carriage and held them in one hand, the other seeking a handkerchief from his pocket, which he used to cover his mouth as he stepped out. He paid the driver and approached the doorway, listening absently to the clatter of hoofbeats behind him as the carriage pulled away.
“Where in Kresimir’s name did you find an apple this time of year, Jeram?” Adamat wiped his nose and stuffed the handkerchief in a pocket.
The doorman gave him a slant-toothed smile. “G’evening, sir. Haven’t seen you for a month or two.” He took a crunching bite of his apple. “My cousin in the south of Bakerstown gets fresh fruit all year-round.”
“They say we might go to war with the Kez if negotiations don’t go well,” Adamat said. “You’ll have to wait until next fall for another apple.”
Jeram made a sour face. “Just my luck.”
“How go the fights today?”
Jeram pulled a worn piece of paper from the brim of a threadbare hat and studied it to make out the most recent markings. “SouSmith’s done three in a row, Formichael has won twice today. The two of them look ready to drop, but it’s the foreman has a death bug in his britches, says the two of them are gonna fight it out this hour.”
“Five fights between the two of them already?” Adamat snorted. “It’ll be piss poor, they’ll barely be able to stand.”
“Aye, that’s what the tables are saying, and there’s not much wagers yet. Everybody that’s betting has put it on Formichael.”
“SouSmith hits hard.”
Jeram gave him a sly glance. “If he can land a punch. Formichael’s better rested, younger, and half SouSmith’s weight.”
“Bah,” Adamat said, “you young ones always think the old have nothing left in them.”