The Crimson Campaign

A great many things were different with Tamas gone.

Not far from the command tent was the mess tent. In most armies the cooking was done by soldiers for their company, or sometimes even their squad. Here at the front, all the cooking was being done by one chef, or so the rumor went.

Mihali.

It wasn’t hard to pick out the tall, fat figure making his way between the cookfires, checking on his small regiment of female assistants. Taniel frowned. Who was this man who claimed he was a god? Taniel had seen a god’s face — Kresimir’s — and put a bullet through his eye. Kresimir had looked like a god. Mihali did not.

Taniel took his jacket and headed down the mountainside toward the command tent.

Soldiers seemed to watch him everywhere he went. Some tipped their hats. Some saluted. Some just stared as he walked by, but Taniel didn’t welcome the attention. Was he some kind of curiosity for them to gawk at? For years he’d always felt at home in the army, but now, with Tamas and the powder mages gone, Taniel felt alone, a foreigner.

He wondered what he looked like to them. He smelled like the alley behind a butcher, and he probably looked like one too. His body was covered in nicks and cuts, his black hair singed from a powder blast yesterday, his face dirty and bruised.

And he wondered what he was. He’d managed to escape serious injury in five hard, bloody fights. He’d been grazed by bullets seven times in the last two days. He’d been inches from being run through on half a dozen occasions. Was he just that fast? Or something else?

That kind of luck didn’t happen. It was uncanny. Had it been like this in Fatrasta? No, he’d never been in an ongoing fight this bloody. He remembered ripping a rib from the Warden in Adopest and wondered if this luck was somehow connected to his newfound strength.

He reached the command tent, ignoring the guard who asked him to stop.

The tent was filled. There were perhaps twenty officers inside — what seemed like all the Wings brigadiers and Adran generals and colonels. Voices were raised, fists being shaken. Taniel slipped along the edge of the tent, trying to make some kind of sense of the argument.

He caught sight of a familiar face and moved up through the crowd.

Colonel Etan was ten years older than Taniel. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and brown hair cut short over a flat, ugly face. Not that anyone would tell him that he was ugly. The grenadiers of the Twelfth Brigade were the biggest, strongest men in the Adran army and one word against their colonel would find you at odds with all two thousand of them.

“What’s going on?” Taniel whispered.

Colonel Etan gave him a quick glance. “Something about…” He paused to look again. “Taniel? Pit, Taniel, I heard you’d joined us at the front, but I didn’t believe it. Where have you been?”

“Later,” Taniel said. “What’s the argument about?”

Etan’s welcoming grin faded. “A messenger from the Kez. Demands that we surrender.”

“So?” Taniel snorted. “There’s nothing to argue about. No surrender.”

“I agree, but some of the higher-ups don’t. Something has them scared.”

“Of course they’re scared. They’ve been retreating from every fight! If they’d hold the line just once, we could break these Kez bastards.”

“It’s not that,” Etan said. “The Kez are claiming they have Kresimir on their side. Not just in spirit, either, but that he’s there in their camp!”

Taniel felt his whole body go cold. “Oh, pit.”

“Are you all right? You don’t look well.”

“Kresimir can’t be there. I killed him myself.”

Etan’s attention was now fully on Taniel. “You… killed him? I heard some wild rumors of a fight on South Pike before it collapsed, but you…”

“Yes,” Taniel said. “I put a bullet in his eye and his heart. Watched him go down in a spray of godly blood.”

“General Ket!” Etan shouted. “General Ket!” He grabbed Taniel’s arm and shoved his way through the assembled officers. They all scrambled to get clear of him — no one stood their ground before a grenadier of his size.

“No, Etan…”

Etan pulled him out into the opening in the middle of the room, where the unfriendly faces of two dozen officers waited in tense expectation. “Tell them what you told me,” Etan said to Taniel.

Taniel was once again terribly conscious of his frayed, bloody clothes and dirty face. The room seemed to spin slightly, the air hot and close.

He cleared his throat. “Kresimir is dead,” Taniel said. “I killed him myself.”

The clamor of voices made his head hurt worse than the sound of a musket volley. He looked around, trying to find an ally. He saw General Ket in the group, but she was no friend of his. Where was General Hilanska?

“Let him speak!” a woman shouted. Brigadier Abrax, of the Wings mercenaries. She was ten years younger than Taniel’s father with a face twice as severe and short hair cropped above her ears. Her uniform was white, with red-and-gold trim.

General Ket took the sudden silence to sneer at Taniel. “You can’t kill a god.”