Guns of the Temple (The Polaris Chronicles Book 1) (22 page)

“Yeah? And what the fuck will you do about it?” the duke sneered. “Give me that fucking sword right now, you bitch! That’s an order!”

“It’s too heavy for you.”

“Then give me the gun!”

“I refuse.”

“Then I’ll fucking take it from you.” He reached for the leather holster at her waist.

A closet door burst open nearby and a brown-haired Arben girl of no more than fifteen stepped out. In her hands was a double-barreled shotgun of indigenous manufacture, which she leveled at the Duke. Training kicked in and Lotte raised her flamberge, but it was too late and the girl pulled both triggers at once.

Reloaded buckshot smashed into Lotte’s chest and tore a jagged hole in her plate mail. Because of the padding and silk top she wore underneath, the lead balls did not penetrate her skin. The impact was still enough to knock her back and break a slew of ribs. She collapsed against the opposite wall, her world fuzzy from pain. Her prana was virtually drained from the earlier fight, and she could do naught but slowly sink to the ground.

“Holy shit! God loves me and wants me to be happy,” the duke gasped. He quickly snatched the shotgun away before the girl could fumble another brace of shells into the weapon’s chambers. Plastic hulls clattered against the floor as he took her by the throat and lifted her to her tiptoes. She choked and sputtered, her fingernails digging at his forearms to no avail. Right as she passed out, the Duke released his grip and let her fall onto the tattered mattress. He stood over her and a look of particular menace darkened his features. Before he could go further, she woke up and started to scream and kick. He punched her face in response and she fell back onto the mattress. With a savage grin, he dug his boot-heel into her midsection and she vomited and choked.

“You see that? I cannot be killed! I am blessed by God Himself! You shitty witches, I didn’t even need you assholes in the first place. But I am merciful, you see? Rather than execute your worthless asses right here, I’ll have some fun instead! If that stupid fuck Gillette is alive, I’ll even let him hump the body.”

Stop,
Lotte wanted to say, but found she could only hack up gooey clumps of red from her throat. Her chest was on fire, her breathing labored, and it was getting harder and harder to move or even breathe. Her eyelids grew heavy. She was back at the Teufelsbrücke again, with a templar’s armored boot grinding between her shoulder blades to press her naked torso against the freezing steel floor. The blade of an axe cut the skin on the back of her neck. The castellan was telling her to choose a man to die. No, she could not choose herself. Her fiancé gazed at her with his serene blue eyes.

A sudden twinge of pain was enough to make her blink the vision back. No, this time was different. This time she wasn’t helpless. And if she was to die anyway, she would make sure it was for a reason she could be satisfied to take to the afterlife.
Should have done this long ago,
she thought. Moaning in agony, she reached to her waist and slowly drew her pearl-handled Colt.

In a flash, Karma was upright and he caught the duke in a headlock from behind to tear him away from the bed. But, spent as he was, Karma was quickly on the floor with the duke aiming blow after blow at his face. Blood spattered, bones crunched, and Karma’s resistance diminished. Lotte tried to align the sights on the duke, but found she had not the strength to lift her weapon.

In the end I failed again. Is it really fine this way? Enishi, I’ll see you soon,
Lotte thought as she prepared to succumb to a heady, painful death by suffocation. A movement in the periphery attracted a last bit of attention. The bloodied Arben girl was crawling toward her so as not to be noticed, hand outstretched and gesturing at the gun. With a final effort, Lotte pushed the gun forward and blacked out. It skidded across the rough hardwood and into the girl’s hands.

Karma was both ashen and purple from strangulation when the girl pulled her trigger. The massive, hollowpointed round entered the back of the duke’s shoulder, mushroomed violently against his lung tissue, and erupted out the front of his chest along with chunks of purplish gore. With a cross between a whine and a shriek, Gul rolled to the floor clutching his new, bleeding orifice. The girl smiled and smashed her foot into his testicles, causing his eyes to roll into the back of his head.

“This is for my brother,” she said, before pulling the trigger once more. The round entered Gul’s mouth and exited out the back of his skull. Bloody brain and bone fragments painted a pink halo around his head, and he did not move again. She spat on his corpse and gave it a final kick in the ribs. Cracks of distant gunfire punctuated the acrid stillness of the air, though she remained silent. After a pause, she approached the unconscious pair of Temple witches, gun in hand. Idly, she raised it and pointed at the armored woman’s head, finger tensing on the trigger. She clenched her teeth, lowered the gun, and squatted, hugging her knees for a while.

Lotte snapped back into the painful clarity of consciousness when she felt the sensation of something warm and comforting on her chest. She stared at the girl, who was crouched next to her with a hand placed on the shotgun wound. The shattered chest armor lay on the ground a short way away. Her gaze strayed briefly to Gul, and then came back to the girl. She really was a small thing, Lotte decided. A small thing with aged eyes, like so many children raised with war as their mother.

“Hold still, Big Sis.”

“You… know how to use the healing sutra?” Lotte asked, finally able to cough and free the last of the clotted phlegm from her lungs. Fresh air burned painfully in her air passages, for which she was grateful. The girl nodded. “Then you are…”

“I’m what you would call a ‘forsworn’, right? Because I never went to the mountain like I was supposed to? I never made a promise to do that. I just wanted to stay with my family.”

“I’m a polaris. An officer,” Lotte said. “Surely you know we are bound to hunt your kind down. Had we met elsewhere, I’d have executed you without a second thought.”

“Why do you tell me this?”

“Because you also have the right to kill me. It’s only fair that you know.”

“Can I tell you something honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I thought about it. I pointed the gun at you afterwards. I was ready to shoot. But you seemed very sad.” She shook her head, struggling with her words. “No, not that. Not sad, but, more like I thought we were feeling the same things? Like missing people? Is that strange?”

Lotte shook her head and smiled.

“No, not at all. When you were fighting, I was thinking of someone I still miss very much.”

“So I was right!”

“What will you do now?”

“I need to tell Irulan what happened. Now, my people will join with the Osterbrand, and we will have a good future. And
I
will go to Sevastopol, if they will still have me. Irulan says I could become a special warrior like her, and bring hope to girls all over the world.”

Lotte’s chest felt heavy.

“Didn’t you want to stay with your family?”

“They got killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? It was all his doing,” the girl said, looking at the duke’s body. “I need to go now. Your friends are coming.” She carefully set the Colt down. “Thank you for letting me use it.”

“Wait. Please, take it.” Lotte handed the gun back to the girl. “You’ll have to find your own ammo, but consider this a gift. From your Big Sis.”

The girl smiled, finally showing a row of white teeth. Without preamble, she darted away carrying the precious artifact. A few moments later, Taki burst in with Hadassah and Draco in tow.

“Mother of God,” Taki swore as he raced over to Lotte.

“Little help over here?” Karma groaned, feebly waving his hand.

Hadassah crouched next to him, gently channeling prana into his swollen face. “This is the second time in one day. Next time I’ll just finish you off.”

“Did you see a girl leave the room?” Lotte asked. The others shook their heads quizzically. “Never mind, it must have been my imagination,” she said with relief. It was a violation of the Code to suffer a Forsworn to live. Just one more sin she would bear, though lightly.

Draco looked over to the duke’s body and sucked his teeth. They had all seen enough heads blown apart that they knew they were irrevocably, completely fucked.

“Good riddance to that sack of shit, even if we failed. The triada’s going to flog our bare asses for years but right now I don’t give a damn,” he said.

“We’d better make ourselves scarce. The duke’s men aren’t going to believe we didn’t kill him,” Taki said. He chewed his thumbnail. “That is, if we in fact didn’t.”

“As soon as everyone’s healed enough to walk unsupported, we’ll leave,” Lotte said. “And no, I didn’t kill him. Neither did Gillette. The Hero had it a long time coming, though.” She shook her head slowly. “Are those Imperials still in the area?”

“For some reason, they retreated,” Draco said. “Cheeky bastards. I can’t believe so many cute girls tried to gut me in so many ways. Who the hell were they?”

“Spettsgruppe Alfa,” Karma said, rising painfully to one knee by pulling Hadassah’s arm. “The silly cherry blossom gives it away. I heard a rumor they’d been sent to Kosovo but I always thought it was just tavern bullshit. Guess I was wrong.”

“
Alfa?
But that unit’s a myth,” Draco said.

“No, they’re quite real. The batshit blue-eyed one is Lucatiel von Halcon.”

Taki seemed to go pale and shudder to himself.

“The Prince of Maladies,” Lotte said. She sucked her teeth in realization, and the old wound on her scalp started to throb again.

“Shouldn’t that be ‘Princess of Maladies?’” Taki asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No, it’s definitely ‘Prince,’” Draco said. “The Ursalans don’t believe women have souls, so anyone who kills a lot of their men must obviously have a cock.”

“So if I waste a ton of them, will I get a cool nickname, too?” Hadassah asked.

“Probably. They love that mythic warrior shit.”

“Then I wanna be called ‘the Reaper of Souls!’”

“They’ll probably call you ‘the Gleaner’ or ‘the Picker’ instead.”

“Shut up. You’re not in charge of that. I’m gonna be the Reaper.”

“You ignoramuses don’t realize how close we all came to death,” Karma said with a sigh. “How we managed to survive a fight with them is actually a total mystery to me. This is the unit that singlehandedly took Krak des Chevaliers during the succession war in the Levant. Next to them we’re fishbait.”

“Show some respect, numbnuts!” Hadassah said, elbowing Karma in the ribs. “It doesn’t matter if those dickbags can come lightning and shit fire. We all survived because of
Lotte
, er, the captain.”

“Damn straight it was her doing. We trusted her and we lived. Don’t ever forget it, Gillette,” Draco said. Taki nodded, clasping a fist to his chest.

Lotte swallowed back a lump forming in her throat as she wiped at burning in her eyes. She had failed in her mission, and the province would fall into turmoil. If the little girl’s words held truth, then Kosovo would be in Imperial hands by a fortnight. Jibriil would show no mercy unless she begged him on her knees. But at least they were all alive. For a brief moment, she was tempted to think that perhaps there was some inherent fairness in the order of things. Then she dismissed the thought as foolish.

Several blocks away on a corpse-strewn rooftop, Lucatiel rested her finger on the trigger of an ancient steel deathbringer as long as she was tall, and lined Taki’s head up in her crosshairs. Only a little more pressure and she’d send a .50-caliber jacketed slug to turn his brain into mist before the report even reached his ears. Her body ached from the prana burst he’d hit her with, but more wounded was her pride. The Imperial Ace was not to be bested by some random, pimply-faced virgin. Lucatiel knew her priority was to kill the officer, but having a semiautomatic anti-materiel rifle allowed her to deviate from protocol.

“Aslatych, I have them,” she muttered.

“And Gul Hekmatyar?” Aslatiel asked.

“He’s dead. May I shoot now?”

“No. Our mission is complete. We will withdraw for now and let rebellion take its course.”

Lucatiel bristled, and made no effort to hide it. “Our enemies still
live!
”

Aslatiel slid a hand over the end of Lucatiel’s scope, causing her to look up in consternation. He leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek, to which she flushed.

“
Nyet!
We will be able to kill them in the future. For now, I want to see what happens with the boy. Out of all of them, he is the most vulnerable, and yet at the same time, has the strongest potential for change. So we will wait and see what he does.”

“You sound like you want to make love to him,” Lucatiel sneered.

“He’s pretty cute,” Aslatiel said, and winked at her.

“Asshole!” she snarled, and smacked him.

Karma’s knowledge of Pristina’s winding corridors allowed the squad to silently slip away from the burning city center before the Khazari or rebels managed to swarm Gul’s body. Unlike their ignominious retreat from the Vergina armory, their ignominious retreat from Kosovo was made bearable by a mass efflux of merchant caravans. Unwilling to have their wares subjected to a sacking, experienced traders fled with practiced swiftness, and Tirefire the Lesser was able to hitch a ride by promising to serve as bodyguards.