The Price of Valor (35 page)

“Go!” Marcus said. “Get it open!”

The two Mierantai attacked the door with vigor, wrenching the boards away with a series of
cracks
and
crunches
that would have been as audible as musket shots if not for the roar of the burning riverboat. Once they had the old door clear, Marcus grabbed one of the bars and, glancing at Raesinia, worked it under the doorframe right beside the latch.

“Polite thieves?” she said.

“Right.” He grinned and threw his weight against the bar. The latch gave way with a splintery crunch, and the door swung open.

They slipped inside and into darkness. Marcus kept his lantern shuttered until they'd closed the door behind them, then opened it enough to allow two of the soldiers to light glass-enclosed hurricane lamps. As the flames caught, shadows danced and wavered throughout the warehouse, and tiny points of fire gleamed on polished metal. Raesinia's breath caught in her throat.

“That,” Andy said, “is a lot of cannon.”

They were lined up, hub to hub, rank after rank of them, at least three dozen in various sizes. Beside them stood stacks of chests that Raesinia assumed contained the ammunition. An equal number of caissons, small carts that would be dragged behind the cannon into battle, stood in neat rows. Beyond that was a shadowy mountain of small kegs; Raesinia made a quick estimate of her size and did some rapid calculations in her head.

“That's got to be most of what's missing from the powder mill's output,” she said. “I don't think I realized how much that actually was. It looks like enough powder for an—”

“For an army,” Marcus said grimly. He gestured past the gunpowder, where Raesinia could see more stacked crates the size and shape of coffins. “Those are muskets. There's got to be enough here for ten regiments.”

“I thought Maurisk was making bombs,” Andy said. “What's he going to do with all this?”

“It has to be for the Patriot Guard,” Marcus said. “Halberds are all well and good for standing in front of buildings, but with this . . .”

“He must have friends in the armament factories as well as the powder mills.” Raesinia raised her lantern. “Come on, spread out.”

“What are we looking for?” Hayver said.

“Paperwork.” Raesinia looked at the neat rows of weapons. “Nobody puts something like this together without paperwork.”

*   *   *

They found a clerk's desk near the center of the warehouse, overflowing with stray paper. Raesinia hurried over, and Marcus and Andy stood beside her while Hayver and the three Mierantai kept looking, picking their way carefully closer to the front door of the warehouse.

“Well?” Marcus said as Raesinia rummaged through the sheets. “We could just take it all.”

“I don't know if there's anything useful here,” Raesinia said. “A lot of this is in code.”

She set aside a stack of gibberish pages, then caught a scrap of readable text
out of the corner of her eye and pounced. They were messages, written on flimsy foolscap with the message
ENCODE AND DESTROY
printed at the top.

“Keeping your plaintext around after encoding?” Raesinia murmured, flipping through. “Naughty, naughty. Sothe would show you a thing or two.”

Most of the messages, whose dates went back at least two weeks, were concerned with the movement of hidden shipments through the city, and all were unsigned. She put these aside, with mounting frustration.
There has to be something here to tie Maurisk to all this.
He'd been a canny conspirator when they worked together, but not always a cautious one.
He has to slip up somewhere.

There.
A long document, with the heading
DIRECTORY FOR T
HE NATIONAL DEFENSE
. A list of names—her eyes flicked down it, and then back to the top.

“In the interests of state security and given the present emergency, the following persons are to be arrested with all dispatch . . .”

“The present emergency . . . ,” Raesinia whispered under her breath, scanning the list. The first name on it was Giles Durenne. “Marcus, I've got it.”

“Got what?” said Marcus, who'd been poring through another stack of papers.

“Here.” She thrust the list under his nose.

He read for a moment, frowning. “Half these people are deputies. And Durenne?”

“It's a coup,” Raesinia said. “That's almost the entire Radical caucus, and a lot of their allies.”

“Nice to see that I rate a mention,” Marcus muttered.

Raesinia looked back to the paper. The name “Colonel Marcus d'Ivoire” was in the midst of a mixed bag of officers of all ranks.

“This is dated two days ago,” Marcus said.

“He's getting ready.” Raesinia looked around the warehouse. “It can't be much longer—”

There was a groan of metal, and the front door of the warehouse opened a fraction, letting in the lurid glow from the ship burning outside. Marcus slammed the bull's-eye lantern closed and dropped to his knees, and Raesinia followed suit. Andy flattened herself behind the nearest caisson. Closer to the door, Raesinia saw the other lantern vanish as Hayver snuffed it and took cover.

“Damn,” Marcus whispered. “I thought we'd have longer.”

Something stabbed into Raesinia's skull, a sudden pain behind her eyes that throbbed with every heartbeat. She blinked, breathing hard, and it faded slightly, leaving a coppery taste in her mouth.

Raesinia swallowed hard. “What now?”

“Hope they go away.”

“If they don't?”

He shrugged. “Then we'll see if they're willing to risk firing near this much powder.”

The door opened wider. The fire on the ship was still crackling, but over the top of it Raesinia heard another sound, a high-pitched
ting
that repeated every few seconds. She held her breath for a moment, then peeked around the edge of the desk as strange shadows twisted through the vast space.

Four men in Patriot Guard sashes were struggling to haul the main door open on its sliding track. Two more, muskets in hand, stood peering into the darkness, but it was the figure beside them that drew Raesinia's attention. It was a woman, old and gray-haired, walking with the aid of a long, knob-handled stick. The point of the stick must have been sheathed in metal, because it made a
ting
and threw a tiny spark every time it struck the flagstones.

She had one hand outstretched, and hovering above it was something like a miniature sun. It was a ball of flame, about the size of a man's head, colors shifting and twisting under a perfectly smooth surface as though a roaring blaze was contained in a glass bowl. When the woman moved her hand, the flame followed, as though it were tethered to her finger by a string.

Raesinia had become very adept at leaping to certain kinds of conclusions. Nothing of this world could let someone hold a ball of fire in her hands, and that left only a few possibilities.

“It's one of
them
,” she hissed. “The Penitents. We have to get out of here
now
.”

Marcus risked a glance of his own. “Balls of the
fucking
Beast,” he said. “You're not serious.”

Raesinia waved to Andy, gesturing toward the back door. The girl nodded and slunk off, keeping to the shadows between the caissons. Marcus ducked back behind the desk, and Raesinia gave his shoulder a tug. She led him on hands and knees, threading their way among the piled implements of war.

“You are here,” the old woman said. Her voice was raspy and nearly unintelligible under a thick Murnskai accent. “I feel you. Do not hide.”

She raised her hand, and a portion of the ball of flame split off and rose toward the ceiling. It brightened as it did so, from the light of a bonfire to the light of the sun itself, throwing the whole warehouse into sudden, stark illumination. The shadows vanished.

“There!” one of the Patriot Guard shouted. Musket barrels swung around.

At the same time, the long shapes of Mierantai rifles came up over the boxes
of muskets. The blasts were nearly simultaneous, muzzle flashes washed out in the brilliant light. Balls
pinged
and
thoked
among the stacked boxes, and one of the Guards fell backward with a cry and a spray of blood.

“So much for staying quiet,” Raesinia said.

“Back!” Marcus shouted, rising to a crouch and drawing his pistol. “Everybody back!”

Hayver and the Mierantai fell back from among the muskets, the riflemen running bent over to present smaller targets while Hayver stood up in full view of the Patriot Guards. The four who'd been wrestling with the door now raised their own muskets, but a shot from Andy sent them scattering for cover before they could fire. The old woman glanced at them scornfully.

“Shoot
her
!” Raesinia hissed. She drew one of her own pistols, aimed, and fired as soon as it looked as though the guards were lining up another shot. It was too far for someone of her low skill to hope to score a hit, however, and besides sending the enemy ducking for cover again, there was no obvious effect. She tossed the empty weapon away and drew the other. “Marcus! Get them to shoot the woman.”

A musket
cracked
, and one of the Mierantai stumbled and crashed into a stack of boxes. His two companions dove for cover, and Andy popped up and fired again, raising sparks where the ball glanced off a stone outside. Raesinia caught sight of Hayver, taking cover behind a box and frantically ramming a new round into his musket. The old woman continued her unhurried advance, staff
tinking
on the floor, while behind her the Patriot Guard fired from the sides of the doorway and ducked out of sight. One of them took too long in aiming, and a Mierantai rifle
cracked
, sending him sprawling to the floor.

Hayver rose from cover, musket swinging about, aiming square at the old woman from less than twenty yards. She had time to turn her head before his weapon bloomed with fire and smoke. Something fast and bright happened, just in front of her, the sphere of flame swooping with trip-hammer speed to place itself between them. Something spattered across the old woman's clothes, spraying droplets that smoked wherever they landed.

She melted the ball—

“Hayver!” Marcus shouted. “Back!”

Hayver backpedaled, dropping his musket and scrabbling for his pistol. He backed into a stack of musket crates and stumbled, sending the topmost crashing to the floor. Weapons packed neatly in straw spilled across the floor.

The old woman raised her hand, her face gleeful. The fiery orb subdivided
again, and a smaller mote zipped across the space between them to impact on Hayver's chest. It spread across him in an instant, as though he'd been dipped in lamp oil, outlining him in a nimbus of fire that brightened until it was white-hot. The pistol in his hand exploded as the charge cooked off, spraying blood across the floor, but Hayver was already screaming. His flyaway hair seemed to glow as each strand burst into brief, brilliant flame.

“Hayver!” Andy put her musket to her shoulder, sighting on the woman, and pulled the trigger. Sparks flashed in the pan, but she must have been hasty loading, because the shot didn't fire. Another shot, from one of the Mierantai, did. The ball of flame skipped across to interpose itself, again spattering her with molten lead, which she ignored as though it were drops of rain. Another bolt of fire slashed out, and the rifleman began to burn.

“Run!” Marcus shouted.

Raesinia watched Hayver collapse, no more than a darker shape inside his personal ball of hellfire. The woman glanced at him and extended her hand, and the flames around him shot back toward her, rejoining the orb hovering before her. What was left behind was a steaming, blackened ruin barely recognizable as human.

Marcus was halfway to the door already, with Andy close behind him. The third Mierantai had thrown himself behind the barrels of gunpowder, loading his rifle, his face the grim mask of someone staring death in the face. The old woman regathered her flame from his burning companion, calling them back to her hand like a medieval falconer and his hunting bird.

We're not going to make it.
Raesinia threaded her way back through the piles, ignoring the Patriot Guard musket balls that still snapped and whined around her. The Mierantai got to his feet and fired, producing no more than another spatter of lead, and more fire snapped out. As he burned, the charges in his belt pouch exploded, nearly tearing him in half. The old woman gave a harsh, cackling laugh.

Marcus and Andy had reached the last row of cannon, but there was an open space between them and the back door.
If they run, she'll burn them.
They'd apparently reached this conclusion, and Marcus had hold of Andy's arm, holding her in the protective shadow of the guns. Raesinia found herself among the chests and caissons, huddling as the woman, the Penitent Damned, stalked closer.

Raesinia's eyes fell on the closest chest. It wasn't locked, just latched. She pried it open an inch with one finger, and found it full of linen bags. Her knowledge of artillery was limited, but she guessed that these were premeasured
portions of powder, used for speed in the heat of battle. Each one was about the size of her hand.
They can't be very heavy . . .

Carefully, she extracted one of the pouches and let the chest close. She hefted it, testing the weight, and then gauged the old woman's unhurried progress.
A few more steps. Marcus, just stay put a little longer . . .

“Andy, go!” she heard Marcus shout. The girl ran, and he stood up, pistol in hand. The old woman smiled.

Goddamn all chivalrous bastards!

Raesinia sprang to her feet as the report of his pistol echoed through the warehouse. She took a step forward, winding up, and hurled the sack of powder toward the old woman with all the strength she could muster.