He paused when Bertthur cleared his throat. “Was that Taniel? Tamas’s brat?”
Keep walking, Taniel told himself.
“Two-Shot,” Bertthur said. “Come back here this instant. Colonel Etan!”
Taniel froze. Etan was here?
“Colonel, isn’t this the man who got you crippled?”
“He’s the man who saved my life,” Etan’s voice returned.
“He saved my life, too!” someone shouted.
“And mine!”
“Bah. I remember you now, Two-Shot,” Bertthur said. “It must have been five, six years ago. A whiny little bastard. A piss-poor soldier. You’d rather run off with that dark-haired whore of yours, neglecting your training. I never saw anything in you. Huh. Looks like she didn’t either.”
A whore? Vlora? He might have wanted to call her that and worse when he’d caught her with that fop at the university, but Taniel would be damned if he’d let some fool officer go on about his love life. He balled his hands into fists and slowly took a breath to calm himself. He didn’t have to listen to this. He could just walk away.
“Bertthur, I think you’ve had enough,” Etan’s voice said. “Perhaps it’s time to retire for the evening.”
“Go to the pit, Etan,” Bertthur went on. “Taniel, I can see that things haven’t changed. No respect for authority. No military decorum. You’ve just traded one whore for another.”
“Bertthur!” Etan’s voice held some warning.
“But now it’s a savage whore! What will he think of next? I bet your father is rolling over in his grave every time you bed that bitch.”
Taniel’s whole body shook. The fury threatened to overwhelm him. He forced himself to remain calm. Slowly, he turned around.
“Bertthur,” Taniel said. “I don’t remember a Colonel Bertthur. I remember a Captain Bertthur. An ass of a man who held his rank only because he was the bastard son of a duke. Field Marshal Tamas swore that man would never hold a higher rank as long as he was left alive.”
Bertthur turned red. “That’s a week in the stocks for you, Two-Shot.”
“You’re a braggart and a fool, Bertthur. You’re a disgrace to the uniform.”
“Two weeks!”
Taniel charged toward Bertthur and the officer shrank back, as if expecting to be punched. Taniel gripped the colonel’s bars on his collar and ripped them off, tossing them to the side.
“A month!” Bertthur roared.
Something soared through the air and struck Bertthur in the side of the face. It looked like mashed potatoes.
“Who did that?” Doravir demanded.
A dinner roll hit Bertthur on the nose. He reeled back, suddenly under assault from every manner of dinner food. Someone flung a whole dish of sauce on him, staining his uniform.
“You’re not a free man anymore, Two-Shot!” Bertthur fumed. “Your father is dead. You’ll see two months in the stocks, and I’ll hand your little savage whore over to my men!”
Taniel took a step forward and plowed his fist into Bertthur’s chin, sending the older man to the ground. He could hear the crack of the bastard’s jaw breaking.
“Provosts!” Doravir shouted.
Damn this. Damn them all. Taniel righted Berrthur’s chair with his foot and leapt up on it.
“Friends,” he shouted, raising his arms for quiet. The officers’ mess suddenly calmed, and to Taniel’s surprise, he had silence within moments. “The General Staff has deceived us all,” Taniel said. “Field Marshal Tamas is not dead. He hasn’t even been captured. He’s leading the Seventh and Ninth through Kez as we speak.”
“A lie!” Doravir shouted.
Tamas raised his voice to drown her out. “Haven’t you wondered where the Kez cavalry are? They’re chasing Tamas!”
Taniel was shoved off the chair by a provost. The man had no sooner laid his hands on Taniel than a major tackled him to the floor. Taniel got to his feet. “We only have to hold these Kez bastards for a few more months! Fall will be here soon and then winter, and Field Marshal Tamas with it!”
A musket butt slammed Taniel in the stomach. He doubled over in pain, but forced himself up. “No retreat! No surrender!”
The officers’ mess erupted in a roar of cheering. Food was flying everywhere. Taniel was forced to the floor by the back of his neck, his face ground into the carpet.
“You’re finished, Two-Shot,” Doravir hissed. “You’re a dead man!”
Taniel didn’t care. The officers would all tell their men, and their men would hold the line. They’d do it for Taniel. They’d do it for Tamas.
Nila felt a sense of dread grow in the pit of her stomach as she neared Vetas’s manor. Black smoke billowed above the street, and men’s screams carried on the wind. The sound of fighting grew more distinct as she drew closer, and above it all a sound that she’d only heard once or twice in her life but was unmistakable – the thump of sorcery.
It had to be Privileged Dourford. She could see the tall Privileged in her mind’s eye, laughing gleefully as he slung sorcery at unknown attackers, burning men to a crisp with the flick of his fingers.
The sorcery seemed to have an echo. There’d be a thump, and then another one just as loud if not louder almost immediately after. The combat was still going on as she rounded the corner of the next street over and approached the manor from the rear. Smoke poured from the windows on all three stories of the manor. Flames licked the smoke, curling like fingers around the window frames. A crash, and then another.
No, this wasn’t any echo.
Sorcery fought sorcery inside the building.
Nila ran toward the manor, her dress gathered in both hands. She remembered hearing the kitchen staff say that Lord Vetas had called a second Privileged from somewhere down south. She was supposed to have arrived this morning. Was that woman fighting Dourford?
There was a great whump and Nila felt her ears pop. She staggered to one side of the street, trying to keep her feet. The flames had disappeared from the manor. Another whump, and the smoke burst from the windows as if propelled by a giant bellows, and no more followed it out.
Nila froze in her tracks, more frightened by the sudden silence than she had been by the sorcery. Who had won? Who had even been fighting? Was Vetas in there? Was he still alive? Could Jakob have survived all of that?
She didn’t know if she could make herself go inside. She took several deep breaths, gathering her courage.
A crack split the air, throwing Nila off her feet. She landed on the street hard enough to scrape the skin off her palm.
One side of the house collapsed, crashing in on itself. She stared, openmouthed, as the walls crumpled and part of the roof slid off one side, clay shingles falling into the alley with a sound like a thousand wind chimes in a hurricane.
Nila climbed to her feet and was running toward the house before she could think. Her palm throbbed, her dress bloody, but she didn’t care about that. Jakob was still inside, up on the second floor. His nursery faced the other street, and even at this angle she could tell that if he was inside, he’d been crushed. But maybe he was lucky. Maybe he’d been under the bed, or protected by the door frame, or…
The back wall of the manor suddenly blew outward, sending plaster, furniture, and bits of what looked to have once been a human out into the street.
A man stood in the wreckage. He was of medium height, with ruddy muttonchops on an otherwise clean-shaven face and loose pants and matching jacket that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a street in the bankers’ quarter. He wasn’t particularly handsome, nor was he ugly, but Nila felt a jolt when she first saw him.
He held his hands high, fingers poised in white Privileged’s gloves as he looked down on the mess he’d just made all over the thoroughfare. The gathering crowd pulled back in fear. A woman fainted when she realized what the juicy red meat scattered in the street was. A man vomited.