The Autumn Republic

He was just about to step away when the door suddenly pushed open, nearly hitting him in the face. He leapt back, and a fifth guard stared at him in surprise.

Tamas slammed his knife into the man’s throat and drove him backward into the room, shoving him across the main table. The other four guards jumped to their feet, shouting and scrambling for weapons. Tamas was faster. He pulled his knife hand back and dragged it across a second guard’s throat before leaving it in the heart of a third. He leapt the table in a single bound, the powder trance singing in his veins. His foot came down on the bench opposite and he barely had time to swear as it gave way beneath him.

He stumbled upon landing and threw himself into a roll, tumbling across the room. He came up beside the fourth guard just as the man turned on him with a pistol. Tamas reached out with his senses and fizzled the ignition of the powder as the hammer came down. He wrenched the pistol out of the man’s hand and slammed the butt into the guard’s face hard enough to hear his skull crack.

The fifth guard ran for the door. Tamas drew his boot knife and threw, flat-handed. The knife hit her just beneath the shoulder blade. She let out a yell, stumbled, and reached back for the hilt. Tamas crossed the room and broke her neck.

He scrambled for both of his knives and took up a position beside the door. The silence was deafening. Where were the reinforcements? Where were the sleeping guards?

A single pair of boots sounded on the stone stairwell. Tamas hazarded a glance, only to see Andriya appear. The man was covered in blood, but by the looks of him none of it was his own. “You’re making too much noise,” Andriya said.

Tamas let out a soft sigh of relief, cleaned his knives, and led Andriya back upstairs. They passed the bunk room, where Tamas could hear a soft death rattle.

“Take care of that,” he said.

On the roof, two sentries lay in pools of their own blood, and Tamas shielded his eyes from the flickering torches and surveyed Surkov’s Alley to his south. To his surprise, he saw nothing-no fires, no camping companies of Kez reserves. In the distance, he could see the torches of Midway Keep, and far beyond that the glittering lights of Budwiel.

The entire Kez army was now to his north.

He snatched one of the torches and waved it twice. Within moments the ground to the north of the inspection station was writhing with the dark figures of Adran soldiers as they flooded forward. He was joined a moment later by Andriya.

“Didn’t we do this once before?” Andriya asked. “Going behind the enemy’s lines? I seem to remember it didn’t end so well.”

Tamas glanced toward Andriya. Somehow, he had gotten even more blood on him. Olem, he reflected, might not be as good a killer as Andriya, but he was far better company. “You should change your uniform.”

“I don’t have a spare.”

“That was shortsighted.”

Andriya licked a bit of blood off the tip of one finger, a not entirely human smile playing upon his lips. “We climb the walls of Budwiel tomorrow. I want the bloody Kez to know what’s coming for them when they see me.”

“If you insist.” There was no “sir” when Andriya had his blood up like this. Killing Kez was his favorite thing in this world. “Just stand upwind from me.”

Tamas turned to watch more of his army emerge from the darkness. The vanguard had surrounded the inspection station now, and on the road he could see the long, dark snake of his army marching forward through the dark. On the river to his right, several cargo barges moved into view, cutting quietly through the water, loaded down with heavy artillery.

“The Kez army be damned,” Tamas said. “Nothing will stop me now.”

Nila’s first instinct after regaining consciousness was to scream.

She nearly bit her tongue in half to keep herself from doing so. Her hands were bound behind her back and her eyes opened on nothing but darkness. Fear threatened to swallow her whole, adrenaline tearing through her veins and overwhelming the stiffness of her limbs and the saddle soreness at her very core.

She slipped into the place between the real world and the Else almost instinctually-in fact, it was several minutes before she realized what she had done. Her breathing was calm, her heart no longer fluttering. The world floated before her in a translucent haze. Bo had described this as a good place to be calm and to think, but had warned her that her brain would not receive the information that it needed to analyze the world around it. Sounds were muted, and even the feel of the ground beneath her legs seemed distant.

Cautiously, she let herself leave that place, sinking back into the real world. With it came all of the pain and aches of being alive and she couldn’t help but let out a slight whimper.