The Price of Valor (11 page)

“Of course, your—Raes,” he said. “I'm at your disposal.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And, come to think of it, I may have a notion of where to begin.”

MARCUS

“H
ello, Colonel!”

“Preacher!” Marcus waved aside his old friend's salute and shook his hand enthusiastically. “Thanks for lending a hand.”

“It's nothing,” the Preacher said. He was a balding, wiry man with blotchy skin pockmarked by old powder burns. “God and the general have endowed me with this troop of half-wits, and I'm glad to be able to put 'em to some use.”

The half-wits in question, standing in a neat line behind the Preacher, bore this abuse without comment. Some of them had regulation army uniforms, but more wore only blue jackets over civilian clothes, like most of the volunteers. They had the soft look of a good upbringing in their faces, and they wore serious expressions. To Marcus' surprise, one of them was a young woman, in a neatly tailored uniform with her hair tied up in a severe bun.

The skies had cleared, and the autumn sun warmed the flagstones of Farus' Triumph. Patriot Guards were everywhere, patrolling by the half dozen or standing watch over the hulking metal shape of the Spike. Patriot-Doctor Sarton's invention had been getting quite a bit of employment of late. Nearly every day, the broadsheets boasted of more traitors discovered and spy rings unraveled. The bleachers had been expanded since the day of the attack on the queen; apparently, the novel executions were a popular entertainment.

The Preacher's troop had already torn apart the wooden platform that had covered the site of the royal box, exposing the shallow bomb crater in the center of a ring of cracked flagstones. At a gesture from their leader, the students offered
Marcus a passable salute and returned to what they'd been doing, which seemed to involve going over the ground with measuring tapes and taking a lot of notes.

“I was surprised to hear you were still in the city,” the Preacher said. “I'd have thought Janus would want you at his right hand when the lead starts flying.”

“I'm a bit surprised to be here, to be honest,” Marcus said. “But he says he needs someone he can trust in the city to keep an eye on things.”

“They need looking after, that's a fact,” the Preacher said, shooting a sour look at the nearest squad of Patriot Guards. “I've never seen such a gang of useless arse-polishers.”

“That's starting to become an unhealthy sentiment to express out loud,” Marcus said. The latest round of victims of the Spike had included several men whose crime was “discouraging confidence and enthusiasm for the government and the war.”

The Preacher spit on the cobbles. “If they don't like me, they're welcome to file a complaint. I answer only to God and General Vhalnich.”

“I'm surprised,” Marcus said, eager to change the subject, “that you're not out in the field yourself.”

It was hard to tell behind his ferocious beard, but it looked as though the Preacher was blushing. “Ah, well. I'm getting old for that sort of thing, you know? Keeping up with the boys in Khandar just about wore the legs off me.” He shook his head. “Besides, for all that they're Sworn Church lackeys, the Leaguers still believe in Karis and His salvation. It never sat right with me, fellow Karisai killing each other over who kneels to who. That's how I ended up in Khandar in the first place, you know. So I could point my guns at proper heathens.”

“So you're still training down at the University?”

“To the extent that such a thing is possible with this bunch of fumble-thumbed lack-brains. With the Lord's help, I may be able to pound a thing or two about laying guns into their skulls before sending 'em off to war.” He turned to the scurrying students and raised his voice. “Johannes! You got an answer for me yet?”

A gangly youth barely out of his teens shot to his feet. “Yes, Captain!”

“Let me see it.”

Johannes approached, glancing nervously at Marcus, and handed his notebook to the Preacher. The artillery captain's eyes flicked over the columns of figures.

“You lost a ten in there someplace,” he said, “but I don't reckon it matters. This is how much powder you think you'd need to make a blast this big, is it?”

“Yes, sir,” Johannes said, standing at such strict attention he was vibrating. “Judging by the radius at which the blast cracked the flagstones, and the distance—”

“Yes, yes. Now, how big a pile would that much powder make?”

Johannes' eyes crossed as he calculated. “If you just dumped it? It'd be roughly a cone. We can reverse the volume formula—”

“You're not getting it. Lord knows I'm not surprised. Colonel, how big was the royal box?”

“Maybe ten by ten,” Marcus said.

“And how much space under it?”

“Not much. Less than a foot.”

The Preacher looked at Johannes. “Could you fit that much black powder in there?”

The boy blinked. “Er . . . no, sir. Not even close. But I'm sure my calculations weren't
that
far off—”

“What it means,” the Preacher said, “is that we're not dealing with ordinary black powder. Which you ought to have known from the start, because without a complicated fuse you can't get a whole pile of powder to go off at once. It'd get sprayed around, you see?” At Johannes' expression, he sighed. “You don't see. God help us all.”

“So what happened?” Marcus said. He was starting to feel sorry for Johannes. “
Something
exploded.”

“You ever hear of flash powder?” the Preacher said, turning away from his hapless student. “Stage magicians use little bits of it sometimes. It's basically your standard powder but ground up much finer so it burns faster and hotter. Not much good for guns or muskets, 'cause you'll bust the barrel wide-open. It works for blasting, though, if you can afford to waste it.”

“I'm not sure I follow,” Marcus said.

“Flash powder's expensive. It's dangerous to make—the finer you grind powder, the better the chance that something'll accidentally touch off the lot, you know? And like I said, it's not good for much. You can usually get the job done with black powder just fine.” The Preacher looked back at the crater. “Unless you need to stick a big bomb in a small space.”

“So that's what they used here?”

“Has to be. Quite a bit of it, too.” The Preacher shook his head. “I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere near it. It's God's grace that Her Majesty wasn't there.”

“I can agree with that,” Marcus muttered. “Okay. Flash powder. Do you have any idea where that might come from?”

“Somewhere close by is the best I can tell you. It doesn't travel well. Even a little damp will ruin it.”

“That's something.” In truth, it was much better than Marcus had expected. He'd hoped the Preacher could tell him something about the bomb, but he hadn't expected much. All Marcus knew about powder was that it came in little paper cartridges. “Maybe we can track down the source.”

The Preacher nodded. “Good luck. My boys and I are at your disposal if you need anything.”

Marcus looked at the scurrying students. They
were
boys—and one girl—young, unseasoned, and enthusiastic. After a few more weeks of the Preacher's instruction, they'd be handed off to Janus, who would throw them into the fire. After that . . .

“Luck to you, too,” he said quietly as he turned away.

Marcus walked back to Twin Turrets, by way of the Saint Dromin Street Bridge. Vordan City was changing around him, and one of the most visible signs of the times was the near disappearance of carriages from the streets. The army had an insatiable demand for horses, both to mount the outmatched Vordanai cavalry and to serve as beasts of burden alongside oxen and mules. The Ministry of War had scoured the streets for animals, and those that remained commanded ten times the price they had previously.

There were still two in the stables at Twin Turrets, along with a small coach, but any vehicle was an object of curiosity now, and Marcus preferred to avoid the attention. Those carriages he did see were pulled by laboring teams of unfit animals, and carried men wearing the blue-and-black-striped sashes of the Patriot Guard. These rattled back and forth between the Cathedral, where the Deputies-General sat, and the Hotel Ancerre where the Directory had its headquarters.

Other effects of the war were more subtle. The price of a four-pound loaf, the staple of the working poor, had dropped after the revolution, but it had never reached the one eagle that Danton had promised, and since the start of the war it had begun a steady upward march. Armed guards once again stood outside bakeries, protecting the proprietors from hungry customers. Prices of other goods fluctuated wildly, but always with ruinous effect: coffee had virtually disappeared from the shops, while warehouses bulged with stacks of cheeses and bolts of cloth unsalable at any price.

It all went back to the blockade; Marcus was no expert, but he knew that much. Trade overland to the north and east, with Murnsk and the League, was obviously impossible. At the declaration of war, the mighty Borelgai fleet had weighed anchor and put Vordanai ports from Nordart to Essyle under their interdict. Any Vordanai trader who wanted to take his goods to a foreign market risked being blown out of the water by a ship-of-the-line, and the only cargoes coming in did so in black-sailed ships, by the dead of night. Fortunes were being made, rumor said, by cruel men who risked capture or death for the chance to sell their wares for a hundred times what they'd cost.

North of the Triumph, at the base of the bridge, a pamphleteer had set up shop. His table was covered in stacks of flimsy paper, each weighed down with a stone against the wind. The pamphlets had changed, too. Instead of the familiar caricatures that had served as bylines—the Hanged Man, the Drunkard—each sheet bore spots of colored ink in its top-left corner for easy identification. Two black dots meant the author was aligned with the Conservatives, who dominated the Directory, while a bewildering array of colors indicated allegiance to the hundred different factions that made up the Radicals. Other combinations meant other splinter groups Marcus had never heard of, some of which might have merged or disappeared by the time their manifestos came back from the printers.

Cartoons were popular, as usual. Marcus stopped to examine one marked with blue and green dots. Directory President Maurisk, caricatured as a near skeleton, was strapping a fat man in a headsman's black hood to the table of the Spike. “I'm sorry,” he was saying, “but you're now surplus to requirements.” He was surrounded by hundreds of double-circle grave markers, piles of them reaching into the sky like jagged mountain peaks. The caption read
HAVING SPIKED THE REST O
F VORDAN, THE PRESIDE
NT ELIMINATES THE EX
ECUTIONER
.

Farther down, where the rainbow of color turned to solid black-on-black, another cartoon showed a heroically proportioned Maurisk with a sword in either hand, facing down slavering caricatures of a Borel, a Hamveltai, and the Emperor of Murnsk, along with another figure Marcus didn't recognize. Behind him was a girl, her dress half torn off—nothing like a woodcut nipple to boost sales—labeled
VORDAN
. The caption read
YOU
'LL HAVE NO MORE OF
HER, YOU BLAGGARDS
! The girl was weeping in her hands, but Marcus thought she was intended to look a little bit like Raesinia.

The pamphleteer, a fat man with wispy eyebrows and a bald, spotted pate, caught Marcus' frown and raised his hands defensively.

“I just sells 'em, sir,” he said. “I ain't responsible for the contents.”

“Who's this?” Marcus said, tapping the fourth figure. It was a big man with a hatchet nose, almost birdlike in appearance.

The pamphleteer looked around conspiratorially, then shrugged. “Supposed to be Durenne, the Minister of War. Not much of a likeness, if you ask me.”

“No,” Marcus said. He frowned. “What's he done to get the Conservatives so mad?”

“He's the closest thing the Radicals have to a leader, and he's on the Directory. Some people says he's a spy for the Borels, or the Sworn Church, or somebody.” The man shrugged again. “Like I said, I just sell 'em. You want that one?”

Marcus gave the pamphleteer a couple of pennies, but left the cartoon under its stone paperweight. There had been plenty of politics when he was at the War College, of course, but after his exile to Khandar his life had been blessedly free of it. The Colonials never attracted anyone with any ambition, and there had been a brutal simplicity to their relationship with the Khandarai, at least until the rise of the Redeemers.

Now, though, politics in Vordan City had risen to a new and deadly level, and Janus had plunged him into the middle of it, right where he felt least prepared to be. Marcus sighed and turned his steps over the bridge.
The Preacher's right. I ought to be out in the field.
Here he felt trapped, useless.
Surely Janus must have someone better for this than me?

Maybe,
he thought morosely,
he just wants to keep me out of the way.

*   *   *

Marcus' black mood had not lifted by the time he returned to Twin Turrets. He acknowledged the salutes of the Mierantai guards with a grunt and stalked into the grand dining room, where Janus' imported servants laid simple but vast meals for the garrison. It was a bit late for lunch, but there was always something left over.

Ordinarily, the hall would be empty by this hour—the Mierantai servants were very punctual—but today Marcus found one end of the big table occupied by the Queen of Vordan, dressed boyishly in a linen vest and trousers, wolfing down a plate of eggs and sausage while leafing through a stack of broadsheets and pamphlets.

“Marcus!” she said, swallowing hastily. “I've been looking for you.”

Marcus swore silently. “I'm sorry, Your—Raes.” She scolded him every time he used her title. “I should have left word where I was going.”