The Crimson Campaign (44 page)

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.

The Privileged surveyed the gathered crowd and lowered his hands. He turned and disappeared inside the wreckage of the house. Before he did, however, Nila caught sight of something on his gloves: the symbol of the Adran Mountains with the teardrop of the Adsea beneath them.

This wasn’t just any Privileged. This was a member of the Adran royal cabal.

Something told Nila that Dourford hadn’t stood a chance.

Nila picked her way through the wreckage and ducked beneath a beam, entering the house as close as she could get to the servants’ stairs.

The sitting room was completely crushed. She could hear a man calling for help, and another moaning. A body lay in the mangled timber, covered in plaster dust, unmoving. She heard someone speaking from the other room. It sounded like Lord Vetas.

Nila moved slowly into the kitchen. It remained almost completely untouched by the collapse, but it seemed that the servants’ stairs had taken the worst of it. She wouldn’t be climbing up to the second floor that way.

She stepped over to the door to the dining room and listened. Silence, but she could hear someone moving. She looked through a crack in the door. She heard herself gasp at the sight of a woman, body hanging limply from dripping shards of ice, nailed to the back wall of the dining room. She wore Privileged’s gloves. Vetas’s other Privileged?

Someone spoke. A man’s voice. He was saying…

Lord Vetas slammed into the back wall of the dining room hard enough to rattle the remains of the house. Something shifted in the wreckage, and Nila heard someone scream. Lord Vetas, though, didn’t make a sound. The Adran Privileged stepped into view. He spoke quietly, his face angry. He grabbed Lord Vetas by the chin and forced him to look at the dead Privileged.

The Adran Privileged stepped back suddenly. His voice was suddenly calm and collected. Nila heard him say, “I bet you were the type of child who tortured animals for fun. Tell me, did you ever pull the wings off of insects? Answer me!”

Nila had some satisfaction in seeing Vetas pull back in fear. His mouth moved, the word too low to hear.

“That’s what I thought. How does it feel?”

Nila pulled away from the door. Vetas’s scream drowned out the calls of the wounded and dying in the rest of the house. She turned toward the kitchen, looking for another way to get through the wreckage. Panic set in. She had to find Jakob. She had to get away from the house. Even as she began to breathe harder, the adrenaline setting in, a wave of relief swept over her. Vetas was gone. If he wasn’t dead yet, he would be. That bastard had finally found someone stronger and crueler.

She put him from her mind. He wasn’t worth another thought. Jakob, though…

“Nila?”

Nila’s gaze darted around the kitchen. A child’s voice. Where had it come from?

“Nila, quick, hide in here.”

She found Jakob in the bottom of the pantry, tucked behind a sack of flour. She glanced at the door to the dining room. “There’s no room for me in there,” she said, helping him out of the pantry.

“What about Faye?” Jakob asked. “And Uncle Vetas.”

A moan emanated from the dining room. Nila took Jakob by the shoulder and pushed him out through the broken wall the same way she’d come in.

The crowd outside had retreated to what they deemed a safe distance from the house, seemingly content to wait for the police and fire brigades to arrive. Someone grabbed Nila by the arm as she pushed her way through the throng. She shoved them off without a comment, not bothering to look back, and kept her grip on Jakob’s shoulder.

Her mind was already racing. She still had her buried silver outside the city. She had no money, no clothes but the ones on her back. They’d have to walk all the way to the city limits, find the silver, and then tomorrow they could come back into the city and find a place to sell it.

A night or two spent sleeping in the street wouldn’t kill them.

They were four blocks away, when Nila noticed that everyone she passed was staring at her. It was another block before Jakob pointed at her dress and she realized that the blood from her palm was everywhere. It looked like she’d been rolling in it. Two more streets down and they reached a string of shops.

“Do you need help, ma’am?” a passing gentleman asked, pressing a handkerchief to his mouth. He looked queasy at the sight of her.

She showed him her palm. “Just skinned it, is all,” she said, trying to keep her tone level. “Looks worse than it is.”

The gentleman seemed relieved. “There’s a doctor right over there,” he said, pointing two shops down. “She accepts walk-ins.”

“Thank you so much,” Nila said.

She waited for a moment until the gentleman continued on his way. She had no way to pay for a doctor. She’d have to deal with the pain until…

Nila remembered the silver necklace with the large pearl hanging about her neck. A “gift” from Vetas.

The doctor was an older woman in a white dress and sharp eyeglasses perched on her nose. She was seeing a patient, but one look at Nila’s bloody dress and she rushed to see what was the matter.

Nila did her best to make small talk as the doctor cleaned and then wrapped her wound. She had fallen, Nila told the doctor. A nasty fall, but nothing was sprained. Payment? “Oh, my. I seem to have left my pocketbook at home. Can you keep this necklace until I return to pay you?”

The arrangement was struck, and Nila even borrowed a fifty-krana note against the necklace. She pulled Jakob out the door, relieved that he’d stayed quiet through the entire exchange.

Nila had only gone another half a block before a thought struck her.

The Privileged. The one who’d come out victorious and then torn Vetas’s arms off – he was a member of the Adran royal cabal.

“Jakob,” Nila said, directing him over to a street side café, “can you wait here for a few minutes?”

Jakob’s eyes grew wide. “Don’t leave me alone.”

“Just for a few minutes. Here, let me buy you glass of milk. Sit right here, inside, and wait for me to come back.” She paused, thinking. “If I don’t come back, I want you to ask directions to the nearest barracks. Tell the commanding officer that you’re looking for Captain Olem. He’ll be away, fighting on the front, but the officer will help you find someplace to stay.”

“You’re not coming back for me?”

“I am,” Nila said, “but just in case I don’t, that’s what you’re to do.”

The boy seemed to take stock of her confidence and straightened his back. “Yes, Nila.”

She bought him a glass of milk and put him on a chair just inside the café, asking the waiter to keep an eye on him for half an hour. Ten krana bought her an old apron from the café, and she wrapped it around her middle. It concealed the blood on her dress nicely.

Then Nila backtracked her way to Lord Vetas’s manor.

The police had arrived, and the fire brigades were crawling all over the manor. A white sheet had been laid over the remains of Dourford, and the fire brigades pulled a twisted body from the wreckage. All of Lord Vetas’s men had disappeared, along with whomever they were fighting. The number of police kept her from wanting to get any closer to the building.

She began to make a circuit of the area, checking each of the nearby streets. Surely there were lookouts, or… or… someone!

Nila found nothing. Lord Vetas’s men, the Adran soldiers, the cabal Privileged; they’d scattered to the wind.

She widened her search.

It wasn’t until five streets over that she caught sight of a man with ruddy muttonchops and a pressed suit of clothes walking along the thoroughfare with a wide rug, rolled thick enough that it might have a body inside, over his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing any Privileged’s gloves, but Nila knew it was the same man – the cabal Privileged.

She ran to catch up with him. He walked slowly under the weight of the rug and he was whistling loudly to himself. Surely this couldn’t be the same man?

He turned a corner.

Slowly, Nila crept up to the edge of the building. Maybe it wasn’t him. Privileged didn’t carry things themselves. They had servants for that.

She rounded the corner and nearly screamed.

About ten feet down the alley, the man was sitting on his rolled rug. He had his feet up on an old wine barrel as if he’d been there all day.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Nila glanced into the street. Surely he wouldn’t harm her. Not on a busy street in broad daylight.

“Sir,” she said. How to talk to a Privileged? She’d spent some time with Rozalia when she was with the royalists months ago, but that had made her just as uncomfortable. Privileged were not to be trusted. “My lord?”

His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t correct her. This was the same man, all right. And he didn’t like someone noticing that he was a Privileged. She braced herself, ready to run.

“Yes?” he asked, his voice amiable.

“You’re a Privileged,” she said. “From the Adran Cabal.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”

“I saw you splatter Lord Dourford across the cobbles about an hour ago.”

“That was his name?” the Privileged said. “I thought he looked familiar. That pompous prick was a member of the Kez Cabal. Bah, I’m surprised they let him in. Less talent than a Knacked.” He looked her up and down. “Now what can I do for you? Make it good, because I’ll have to kill you after.”

Kill her? Nila had no doubt he would, given the need. Members of the royal cabals were notoriously cruel. She cleared her throat and straightened her back. “Due to your duty as a member of the royal cabal, I will give into your protection Jakob Eldaminse, next in line for the crown of Adro.” She let out a sharp breath, only now realizing that she’d been holding it.

The Privileged’s eyebrow remained cocked. Slowly, as if realizing that she was serious, the eyebrow lowered. He threw his head back and laughed.

Nila felt a nervous smile dance upon her lips. Had she said something funny? “You’ll do it, then?”

“What? Oh, pit no. You think I want some noble brat hanging on my hip? That kid is, what, four?”

“Six.”

“Six. Right.” The Privileged stood up. “The Adran nobility is dead. They’re not coming back.” He paused and looked around. “Where is the boy, anyway?”

“Hiding.”

“Smart.”

“Sir,” Nila said. “My lord, you have to. He has no one else to protect him.”