Guns of the Temple (The Polaris Chronicles Book 1) (17 page)

Taki felt his own insides twist hard enough to wring out his lungs and let out a soundless scream. It was all wrong. Everything about this was wrong. He had to make it right. It was time to listen to what raged inside. He thrust his arm forward, braced the elbow with his free hand, and opened the gates to call forth raging fire. These traitors would burn. For killing Marko, for discrediting the Hero,
for… for…

A hand clamped around Taki’s wrist before the swirling energy within achieved fiery coalescence and Taki felt the prana charge leave his body as Karma siphoned it away. Taki’s face contorted in anguish: it felt as if his insides had been ripped out through his chest and then replaced with dry cotton. He wheeled on Karma.
What the hell are you doing?
he wanted to scream at the man, but before he could open his mouth, he felt a gauntleted fist smash into his cheek. His wound opened back up and sprayed blood on his eyes. The world went into a maddening spin. Angry shouts and curses in Khazari pinpricked the edges of his perception.

“Stay your hand, maggot,” Lotte snarled, and righted him. She grabbed Taki roughly by the hair and forced him to one knee with her dagger pressed against his throat. He blinked at looked back at her. Her eyes flashed with anger, but to his horror, also smoldered with disappointment. The truth of his actions now hit him with merciless clarity.
Oh God, no. What have I done?
Taki hung his head and tried not to cry. That would be the ultimate dishonor on top of disgrace.

Karma seemed to have defused the tension in the meantime. Slowly the rest of the men dispersed, followed by their commander. Before he stepped away the ensign spat brown-streaked phlegm on Lotte’s boots. Such a slight would have merited a duel under any other circumstance, but she had little to back her position. Disregarding the insult, she instead helped Taki to his feet and perfunctorily pressed a kerchief to his bleeding wound. He opened his mouth to speak. To explain himself, or at least to apologize.

“We’ll talk about this later,” she said.

Taki wanted to claw his wound open till his face peeled from his head. He had always, always, hated those words.

The evening air around the fortress of Sevastopol smelled like fish suffocating in a latrine—like almost any other coastline in the world—but for Aslatiel, it had a homey quality that he missed while on assignment. The cool stone of the parapets soothed his palms, which burned for reasons unknown to him as he stared over the illuminated skyline of the city below. The avenues bustled with the activity of twilight and the smoke of cooking fires bathed the half-lit streets in a dusky haze. Periodically, the cries of the water merchants filtered up to his level. Fresh and clean! No gutrot here! and other familiar sales pitches. Most of the groundwater was either rotten with pestilence or tainted with deuterium, and so became a commodity just like everything else. The fortress had not only its own purification system but also working pumping, which he sorely missed while on assignment.

As Alfa Gruppe commander, Aslatiel was afforded his own expansive private chambers with a balcony view of the city. Even higher ranking officers got the views of the Black Sea, where the pink auroras of beta decay danced above the waters at night. Most importantly, he had space and silence to collect his thoughts. Once, he had been one of the dozens of shaved-headed children cloistered in cells many floors below. Barely human, and incredibly dangerous. If left alone, the children typically went insane under the burden of their own uncontrollable abilities, and after they killed their own parents the entire town was typically next to go. Thankfully, prana manifestation was ordinarily unsubtle, and only by virtue of this fact did the Imperium avoid being overrun by predatory gangs of feral bush mages. Through the wisdom of individuals like Ba’gshnar, they instead became a precious resource to be molded into the fine warriors for the Imperium’s defense. It had been individuals like him who had apparently caused the Gotterdammerung, so this was a just penance, Aslatiel reasoned.

“Luca,” he said as he sensed her approach from behind, though her footfalls were typically muffled out of habit. Their master had always impressed upon them the value of silence in all things.

“Aslatych.”

She sidled up next to him, inhaling deeply as she beheld the cityscape, as if she had missed the smell of the coastline too. Her hair was slick with water from a drawn bath, and she smelled ever so slightly of roses. Thin white terrycloth was wrapped tightly under her arms, and ended just above her thighs. He disliked it when she did this. There was no reason she couldn’t have changed into something else before approaching him. It was hard to tell if she was being deliberately provocative or whether she was simply oblivious. But he was the one who suffered for it. It was hard to avert his gaze, as mortified as his enjoyment of seeing her curves made him.

Lucatiel was truly in the prime of her youth and turned heads wherever she went. He remembered how in the southern desert outskirts, an amir had once demanded to buy her in exchange for a working chaingun and a thousand rounds of explosive ammunition. Only his sister’s gentle humor had prevented Aslatiel from stabbing the corpulent old man in the throat. Such things never happened in the civilized, central parts near the capital. In the Imperium, women were equal to men, and individuals were judged on their merit, not their skin color or the shapes of their noses. He again noticed his gaze tracing the enticing concavity of her lower back and he felt dirty for it, like a lecherous old tribesman in sweaty silks. His eyes focused on a jagged white line on her back which went from under her shoulder to just below the base of her neck. He had a similar mark from a sparring accident as a basang, and he always wondered if she had permitted herself to be struck in the same way so she could mimic him more closely.

“How are you holding up?” he asked, finally forcing himself to look away. Perhaps there was some merit in getting promoted, after all. Then he would at least have the radioactive sea to occupy his vision.

She slammed a fist down on the stone railing. “My body is fine. But I let those damned buffoons surprise us, and I should’ve seen it coming. The novice was nothing more than bait, and I nearly let you be hurt! I still have much to learn, it seems.”

Aslatiel shushed her with a finger to her lips. “But we survived and triumphed all the same. You didn’t endanger me, but rather saved me.”

Lucatiel turned her face away from him and unclenched her fist. Where it had landed, the granite bore a new crack. “I am grateful to you, Aslatych, though I do not completely believe you.”

Aslatiel chuckled. “I inquired about who those polaris were. A poorly-manned company, really only half of a squad, that calls themselves ‘Tirefire the Lesser,’ of all things.”

“Why would they insult their own lords so flagrantly?”

“I don’t know, but I am most fascinated with that older woman who appeared to control them. I think she may be a contemporary of our master. They both spoke the same tongue, and she seemed abnormally powerful. Similar to Ba’gshnar. Although in a very different way.”

“Have you asked him more about her?”

“I dare not. You know how secretive he is about his past. We two probably know the most about him out of all citizens.”

“Then you should avoid prying. He has never betrayed us.”

“Of course, Luca. I trust the man with my life and also with yours. Still, I would like to know more about this new threat to our nation. She almost bested us. That must never happen again.”

“You can rely on me, Aslatych. And also on Elsa and Mikhail. We’re all here for you.”

For me, and not the Imperium or even our master.
He knew her too well by this point. Knew that this what she would have actually said had she less restraint. Such passions, however, quickly gave way to treason. It was a possibility he could not permit.

“Remember, you and I serve the padishah,” he cautioned her.

“Only because I like you very much, dear brother,” she replied, rolling the curling edge of her towel between thumb and forefinger like one would handle a round of milligrad.

It was Aslatiel’s turn to avert his reddening face from his sister’s inquisitive gaze. “Are you looking forward to our new mission?” he asked, bringing her back to more mundane matters.

“Of course! We’ve waited for a very, very long time to see Irulan again.”

Aslatiel nodded. “Our efforts will hasten the end of the Dominion.”

Lucatiel rolled her eyes. “I thought you’d be more excited to see your woman again.”

“We haven't been together since our time at the bihara. Surely she’s moved on by now. Perhaps forgotten me.”

“I’ll wager my pistols that she hasn’t.” Lucatiel’s palm came to rest on his knuckles and her fingers curled their way in between his.

For a moment, Aslatiel savored the sensation, but quickly moved his hand away. “What’s important now is the war. Go back to your quarters and get dressed, sister. I must meditate. I must be stronger.”

Days later, they had arrived in Pristina, the Duchy capital, and deep behind enemy lines. Aslatiel finished his mug of mint tea cut with teeth-shattering amounts of sugar, and gazed casually at his surroundings to make sure they were not being eavesdropped on. Around him, Pristina bourgeoisie went about their business of eating, cutting deals, and planning their days. Most of the men and some of the women puffed on clay pipes packed thick with resin-flavored tobacco leaves, permeating the streets and alleyways with sweet-smelling smoke.

Spirits were high in town, at least among the Khazari. Though fall was approaching, the harvest had been decent, and the worst of the seasonal plagues had already moved on. Dyscrasias, fluxes, and distempers claimed a certain number of lives every year and maimed forever many more. The dead were buried and the living endured these trials that they believed were sent from on high to test their faith. When the specter of disease began to wane, it was time for celebration.

Aslatiel, like other spetsnaz, was party to the forgotten knowledge that miasmas and fevers were not in fact the will of the Lord, but rather a result of infestations by creatures too small to be seen by the naked eye. Bathing regularly, washing one’s clothes, and rinsing the hands after defecating were all ways to avoid coming into contact with these creatures. In his troop, hygiene was taken one step further in that they were not allowed to drink water, but only hot or cold tea like Ba’gshnar did. Gutrot was thus unheard of in Alfa Gruppe
,
and the practice had since spread to other units in the padishah’s service.

Aslatiel glanced at his men, or rather, two women and another man. His squad, he thought to himself with a swell of pride. Only in the Imperium would such disparate individuals be brought together so willingly and with such dedication. Elsa, a woman from Gujrat, should have been mortal enemies with Mikhail, a Mohammedan from the Caliphate. And the von Halcons should have been enemies with both. Not under the padishah, however. The king of kings had united the broken peoples of the old world and given them singular purpose under the guidance of The Way. Here, in this blighted, corrupt place, Alfa would make a difference and bring light to the wastes.

After a final check with his enhanced senses to make sure that no one was spying, Aslatiel spoke to his squad in a lowered voice. “It took a while, but the papers we passed on to the resistance have been vetted and we can finally meet their organizer.”

“You mean Irulan, don’t you?” Lucatiel asked.

Aslatiel nodded.

“I hate having to wait to see her,” Lucatiel said. “It’s irksome that we had to go through such a long process with the locals to even meet with her. A paranoid bunch, they are.”

“This region is now considered highly probable for auto-annexation,” Aslatiel replied. “The majority of the population is
Arben and Szerbek
while the Dominion-backed ruling minority is Khazari, and their leader, the Duke Gul, is a notorious enemy of ours. The brutality he practiced in his original lands is magnified tenfold on his current subjects. The majority, if given the chance, will likely want to join the Imperium, which will destabilize the Dominion and likely set off a chain reaction of similar defections.”

“But, dear brother, that still doesn’t answer
what
we’re supposed to accomplish here.”

“I suppose that’s up to Irulan.” He shrugged. “Ah, there’s our contact,” he said, turning his head to someone approaching the table behind him a tawny-faced older Arben clad in a simple linen caftan. Deeply tanned and rutted skin and a lean but powerful figure told them that he was probably a farmer. His eyes told them he likely knew how to handle a weapon as well.

“
Mirëdita,
honored guests,” the farmer said. “I am to take you to Suren’s daughter.”

“Ni hao
,” nodded Aslatiel. “I trust you remember the terms of our agreement?”

The old man nodded.

“Then we place ourselves in your care.”