In Thunder Forged

  Khadoran. Section Three.

  So. They knew they had an enemy concealed within Baron Halcourt’s retinue, but—judging by the room their operative had been searching—they didn’t know specifically who.

  Dignity peered out into the hall, double-checking that she was alone, then darted across to her own chamber. When she returned, she carried a heavy clay jar filled with a mix of silvery grit and fine white powder. This, she carefully sprinkled over the Khadoran’s body.

  Only enough left for one more after this. Best not drop too many more bodies.

  Well, publicly . . .

  Careful not to further smear the blood and other bodily excretions, she dragged the powdered corpse to the fireplace and jammed it tightly up the chimney, then meticulously wiped any excess residue from her own hands. Once the alchemical powders soaked into the skin, even the lightest flicker of flame would reduce it to so much ash in moments. A few fragments of bone and teeth might survive, but someone would have to go digging through the charcoal and embers to find them.

  As far as the stains in the carpet, she soaked up what she could with rags that also found their final resting place in the hearth. The remainder would be covered soon enough, when she “accidentally” dropped a brittle decanter of wine on the spot.

  Dignity Underhurst—Cygnaran Reconnaissance Service, field designation: Garland—allowed herself a single heartfelt sigh; pondered the implications of this latest Khadoran ploy; cursed the name Idran di Meryse; and wondered, not for the first time, when the bloody hell her reinforcements might deign to arrive.

  “Ooh . . . Looks to me like she’s got you, Cadmoore.”

  Roland Cadmoore, leader of Benwynne’s trencher unit, glanced up from the game, face strobing in the flickering light-and-shadow pattern from the nearby windows. His opponent, Serena Dalton, long gunners unit, did likewise. Her eyebrows—or, more precisely, eyebrow, though the wise didn’t tease her about it—crinkled in the middle as she glowered.

  “How many times,” she rasped, “do we have to ask you not to comment on our game?”

  Atherton Gaust casually flicked a bit of tangerine rind from under his nails and bit into the exposed fruit. A single stream of juice dribbled across his knuckles. “You’re welcome to ask me as often as you like,” he allowed around a mouthful of pulp.

  Roland and Serena sighed in unison and returned to the game, an army favorite involving both dice and a standard deck of playing cards in combination.

  For a time, the so-called “officers’ quarters”—which were just the rear quarter of the second reserved car, segregated from the rest by a makeshift curtain of blankets—remained blissfully quiet, disturbed only by the click-clack, click-clack of the Lady Ellena trundling over the rails, and the occasional rattle of dice or the slap of a card. Beyond the windows, fields of winter browns, greens, and occasional whites flanked the passing train, oblivious and uncaring.

  “You really want to play the nine of cups over a pair of swords?” Atherton asked a while later. His words were oh so slightly slurred, as he struggled to remove a strand of citrus fiber from between his teeth with his tongue. “You’d need to roll doubles just have a chance of—!”

  “Gaust . . .” Serena warned him.

  Roland, for his part, merely smiled—teeth almost blinding against the darkness of his skin—and then slapped a card from his reserve, cards he was permitted to play at any point in his turn, down beside the others.

  Ten of Swords; Roland had just given himself enough of an advantage to automatically win the next throw of the dice, unless Serena had, and chose to sacrifice, a higher card in her hand.

  “Ouch.” Atherton tucked his chin back, a bit like a turtle retreating into its shell. “I don’t know, Serena, maybe you should—”

  “Triumph is not a spectator sport, Gaust!”

  “That’s why I’m doing more than just spectating.”

  “You—”

  “Oh, let him butt in.” The rear door, leading to the cargo pallet on which the squad’s three warjacks were tightly strapped, slid shut. Wendell Habbershant pulled his goggles down around his neck and scratched at his wind-bitten beard. “I mean, it’s just Gaust. It’s not as though he’s liable to give either of you good advice.”

  “Funny, old man.”

  Wendell waved three fingers at the two corporals sitting over the cards and the dice. “The audience seems to think it was.”

  “Shouldn’t you be off lubricating a shaft or something?”

  “Why, are you looking for pointers?”

  And so it went for several minutes, Serena and Roland now splitting their focus equally between the game and the verbal sniping. Neither had ever entirely figured out, from the moment Wendell joined the squad, how much was friendly banter and how much genuine hostility.

  It was, unusually, the younger gunmage rather than the elder mechanik who brought this particular match to an end. “Listen, Habbershant . . .” He gave the curtain a cursory inspection, as though ensuring that none of the others were eavesdropping. “What have you heard?”

  “About what?” he asked, even though all four of them knew damn well.

  “Come on, Master Sergeant.” Atherton squeezed into the seat beside Roland, ignoring the trencher’s grunt of protest, and watched the scenery go by. A copse of trees briefly broke the monotony, casting a shadow play of thrashing limbs and flapping wings across the faces of soldiers and cards both, before the terrain turned flat and largely featureless once more.

  Wendell, too, sat at the table, dropping down beside Serena. Idly, he picked up one of the dice sitting alongside the deck—a cheap, uneven thing carved of old bone—and began flipping it between two fingers. With a sigh that seemed almost an industrial sound, more appropriate to the train than his own chest, he began, “I don’t know anything, mind you. All I’ve got is the grapevine. But . . .”

  ***

  “Your corporals are worried about you, Sergeant.”

  He’d found her precisely where he’d expected, on the tiny platform outside the rearmost car, watching the fields and the seemingly endless track pass into the unseen distance. Though speaking around the ivory pipe clenched in his teeth, he made himself both loud and clear enough to be heard over the clatter of the wheels and the whistling of the wind. Not so loud, however, as to render their conversation anything but private.

  “Is that so?” Benwynne asked, her tone so empty they might well have used it to store ammunition. “And why would they be worried?”

  “They all saw the courier hand you that letter before departure, and you’ve been avoiding everyone on the trip so far, except to pass along a few orders. Your people aren’t stupid, Sergeant.”

  “No. No, they’re really not.”

  Wendell joined her, leaning on the railing. The pair of them swayed in unison with the rocking of the train; otherwise they remained immobile, until the mechanik idly began tossing bits of orange rind out into the Lady Ellena’s wake.

  “And you told them what, Master Sergeant?”

  “Nothing of consequence.” Tear. Toss. Tear. Toss. “Just repeated a lot of what’s already circulating. Rumor and guesswork. I think the prevailing theory at the moment is that your husband—whom you’ve kept secret from the squad—has recently disappeared with your only child—whom you’ve also kept secret from the squad—and that you’re worried you’ll never see him again.”

  Benwynne finally tore her gaze from the passing terrain. “Where the hell do they get these notions?”

  “Morrow only knows. I certainly have no idea.”

  “Funny thing is, Master Sergeant, they’re not entirely off-base, if you want to get metaphorical about it.”

  Again, the clattering wheels and the whistling wind were the only speakers for a time.

  “Sergeant,” Wendell began; cleared his throat. Tear. Toss. Tear. Toss. “I respect your privacy, and I’ve no standing to press.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But . . .” Again he cou
ghed, then shrugged helplessly.

  “But you’re worried,” she finished for him, “about whether I’m in shape to command.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like—”

  “I’m fine, Master Sergeant.”

  As that certainly sounded final enough, Wendell turned to depart. Only the rustle of paper, scarcely audible beneath the ambient roar, stopped him.

  Benwynne, still leaning over the railing, reached back to offer him the letter. With equal care and even greater hesitation, he accepted.

  He needed only seconds to absorb the salient details.

  “Twenty-five years?!”

  Benwynne nodded. “Hard labor. It’s a slow death sentence.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ben.” Wendell felt his fists clenching, forced himself to relax. The document wasn’t his to destroy. “Your niece?”

  “Still no idea. I’m in no position to take her in; I’m in the field twelve-and-a-half months out of the year. But we haven’t any other family to speak of . . .” She shrugged, a casual gesture more appropriate to a discussion of the Triumph match still ongoing a few cars away.

  “And Callum? Do you need any leave time to deal with—?”

  “What’s to deal with?” She finally faced him, and Wendell would have felt a lot more comfortable with open mourning than the implacable façade she wore. “The evidence was so overwhelming, the tribunal didn’t even retire to chambers for deliberation. My brother killed almost his whole family. What would be served by taking time away from my duties now?”

  Wendell couldn’t decide how to answer that. To determine for yourself that he’s guilty? To find out why?

  To convince yourself it wasn’t your fault?

  He damn well wasn’t about to say any of it. He knew Benwynne had been close with her brother growing up, that she’d practically been a parent to him in their late adolescence. And he knew, however she may have felt, that she’d hardly thank him for the implication.

  What he finally settled on, then, was, “What do you need from us?”

  “From you, discretion. From everyone? Do your jobs, and trust that I know how to do mine.”

  “Absolutely, Sergeant. I’m . . .” Honored you’d trust me with this. But no, Bracewell wouldn’t appreciate that, either. “Absolutely.”

  She spoke one last time, just as the mechanik stepped from the platform back into the rear car. “Wendell? Thank you.”

  A crisp salute, far more formal than was his wont, and then Wendell slid the panel closed, locking out the loudest of the Lady Ellena’s exertions, leaving his commander to dance alone with her regrets.

  ***

  “Ladies, gentlemen, honored guests, your attention, please! Lady Ellena will be arriving in Bainsmarket in approximately twenty minutes. Please gather your belongings and be prepared to disembark when your car number is called.”

  “Master Sergeant?”

  Wendell looked up as Benwynne’s holler blasted through the sounds of soldiers assembling their gear—and, in the case of Corporals Cadmoore and Dalton, sweeping the Triumph cards and dice back into a burlap sack. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “I want you out on the pallet. Give the ’jacks a last once-over, make sure nothing’s been jarred loose and that their furnaces are stoked and running the minute we disembark.”

  “On it, Sergeant.” One final puff, then Wendell tapped out the exhausted bowl of his pipe—drawing an irate mumble from Atherton as the ash sifted over the gunmage’s boots—and headed rearward.

  Clambering over the warjacks, hunting mechanical defects while the train continued to lumber on toward its destination, wasn’t entirely unlike assembling a printing press, during an earthquake, while standing atop a rain barrel—but Wendell, no stranger to such things, scrambled over the steel hillocks with neither hesitation nor misstep.

  A cursory examination, conducted with quick hops and scurries, revealed no obvious damage. Wendell hadn’t expected otherwise—machines built for combat weren’t likely to shake themselves apart over a cross-country railroad—and he didn’t anticipate learning otherwise on closer inspection, either. His job was to be certain, though, not to “expect” or “anticipate.” The Master Sergeant checked the sun, determining how long he had for his assessment, watched the twin columns of smoke hauling themselves skyward, linking earth and cloud like slow, blurry lightning . . .

  Wendell blinked. Two columns of smoke?

  A lunge, a leap from Bulldog’s strapped and secured chest, and Wendell’s fingers clasped the roof of the next car over. A bit of awkward scrambling of his boots against the wall—I’m so glad the others weren’t here to see that!—before he finally hauled himself over the edge.

  Leaning into the wind, feet spread to counter the sway, he raised a hand for shade. The first snake of haze belched from the smokestack of the Lady Ellena, just as it should have. The second, much farther ahead . . .

  “Oh, hell . . .”

  ***

  “M’lady, my duty is the safety of this train and her passengers!” The engineer, whose overall lankiness and bushy beard resembled a scarecrow wearing a bird’s nest, had raised his voice so that Benwynne might hear him over the banshee scream of the engine’s brakes. “No bloody way am I taking us one yard nearer Bainsmarket than I have to!”

  “We don’t know for sure what the problem is!” Benwynne insisted. “It might just be a random fire, but if it’s not . . . Look, I’m not asking you to drive into the heart of the damn city. Just get us near enough to see what’s happening, so my people can—”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but no chance!”

  “Evacuate the civilians first,” she suggested as the lumbering behemoth of iron finally shrieked to a halt. “You’ve got five minutes. Then take us in.”

  “I said no. I’m responsible for the train, not just—”

  “Master Sergeant Habbershant!”

  “Yes, sergeant?” This from the back of the engineer’s compartment.

  Benwynne gestured at the array of levers and knobs. “Can you drive this thing?”

  A moment’s study, then, “Well enough to get us the intervening couple of miles.”

  “Excellent.” Once more speaking to the conductor, she continued, “You’re excused with the rest of the civilians.”

  The man’s lip stiffened under his moustache. “I’m not about to—”

  “I am hereby requisitioning this vehicle for the Second Cygnaran Army, under military emergency authority. You can drive, you can disembark, or I can shoot you.”

  His protest transformed itself to a faint croak in mid-syllable as he realized the sergeant was dead serious. The engineer all but bolted from the train.

  “Habbershant, have your men uncouple everything behind the cargo pallet.” Which, unfortunately, wasn’t much, but it should lighten the load a little. “Get all the civilians off the train or into those rear cars, put our people up front, and get us moving!”

  Moments later, the foreshortened Lady Ellena flew along the rails, wheels sparking, engine howling in dismay. The men and women of squad five gathered on the various platforms and in the open doorways, watching the ground stream past in a liquid blur, their faces growing chapped beneath the slow mastication of winter’s teeth. They stood ready to leap from the train—preferably once it had stopped, but if necessary, even before—and confront whatever threatened Bainsmarket. Behind them, on the open cargo car, Wendell’s mechaniks stood or crouched, kept from tumbling off the platform by various makeshift harnesses. Frenziedly they stoked coal-burners and cranked generators, returning full power to the semi-dormant ’jacks.

  The city was still a smudge of high walls and abstract shapes in the distance, only partly distinguishable from the larger blur of the vast Thornwood Forest beyond, when Benwynne and Wendell first got some idea of what was happening. Additional plumes of smoke, smaller and thinner than the one they’d already spotted, trailed like ducklings behind the first. Dull booms and brilliant flashes suggested detonations w
ithin Bainsmarket itself—only a few, thankfully scattered, but more than enough to disrupt the lives of every citizen.

  “It’s not ordnance,” the mechanik muttered, confirming what Benwynne had already figured. “Doesn’t sound right, and I’m not seeing any weapons fire or gathered forces outside the walls.”

  “Saboteurs, then,” she said.

  “That’d be my guess, yeah.” He paused, swore, wrestled with a stubborn lever. “Khador?”

  “Can’t imagine who else. Too far from the coast for a Cryxian incursion, and the Protectorate would strike further east.”

  “How?” Atherton stood listening, not in the engine itself, but on the tiny platform linking it to the first car. “I’m not the greatest admirer of CRS, but I can’t imagine they’re incompetent enough to miss an entire Khadoran infiltration of—”

  Benwynne and Habbershant shared not only a glance but a memory: the beach near Clocker’s Cove. They never had proven whether that raid had been funded with Khadoran gold koitina—but here, they’d no doubt at all between them.

  “Mercenaries,” they said together.

  “But . . .” Atherton actually seemed at a loss for words, an event that, under other circumstances, might have inspired the others to drop to their knees in paeans of thanks. “Nobody foresaw this possibility?!”

  Again the two senior officers shared thought and expression, the latter a deep scowl. As the northernmost stop on the Cygnaran Market Line—and thus, a staging area for many supplies shipped to the front—Bainsmarket was an obvious target for sabotage. And both of them knew that His Majesty’s War Council did not consist largely of idiots. There must have been safeguards in place. Which meant . . .

  “Whoever staged this,” Benwynne said darkly, “is good. Too damn good. I—”

  Wendell, gone suddenly white as Commander Nemo’s hair, lunged, hurling all his weight onto a brass lever. Again the brakes screamed, spitting sparks to shame a dragon. The train lurched, sending soldiers staggering, buckling as the iron grapples between cars flexed in the fierce deceleration. The Lady Ellena shimmied, vibrating along her entire length, and every man and woman aboard tensed at the fearsome grinding from the leftmost track, and the abrupt, ship-like listing to one side.