All material contained within copyright © Brian McClellan, 2017.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and scenarios are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Twelve years before the events of Sins of Empire…
A corpse hung from a dead tree on the outskirts of Fernhollow, bloated from the humid summer heat, feet swinging above the dusty road. It was a grim specter haunting an otherwise picturesque country lane, and Major Ben Styke took a few moments to imagine the scene—minus the corpse—as a painting in some posh nobleman’s collection.
Styke stared up at the body, quietly humming a lancer’s hymn to himself. He recognized the corpse, even with its crow-pecked eyes and torn clothes. It belonged to Daven je Kros, the local Kez tax collector. A beating had left Kros’s evening suit shredded to ribbons and the body beneath it a bloody pulp—and probably killed the poor bastard.
Styke’s warhorse, Deshnar, stamped impatiently beneath him, unimpressed by the smell of shit and rotting flesh. Styke patted his flank absently. They were alone here on the outskirts of town, accompanied only by the crows wheeling overhead, and he imagined that word of the tax man’s lynching had probably spread well ahead of his own discovery. None of the locals would use this road today.
So who was responsible? A handful of drunks on their way home from the pub? A posse organized by some of the less savory city elders? The family of someone Kros had recently turned out into the street?
To find a tax collector’s enemies, the old saying went, simply check the latest town census. But here in Fatrasta, a half-tamed frontier full of immigrants from a dozen countries and governed almost exclusively by the Kez, a tax collector’s death presented all sorts of complications. The Kez were an incompetent colonial power at best—a cruel one at worst—and people were getting angrier as taxes went up and public services declined.
Styke had an inkling that things were coming to a head—there were curfews up in Little Starland, heavy fines imposed on the wealthy malcontents in New Adro, and Kez soldiers arrived daily in every port city across the country. The Kez king’s crackdowns were fanning the flames of discontent. But that was big-picture politics. Styke had no place in that world, and he hoped that it would stay as far away from Fernhollow as possible.
“Far away…” he whispered to himself as distant movement caught his eye. Farther down the road, a group of riders had just come into view through the willows. There were four of them, and even at this distance he could make out the green and tan flag fluttering over the standard-bearer, and the matching uniforms.
Kez soldiers. He wondered, briefly, if they’d had anything to do with this, but dismissed the notion. They would be coming from the next town over, passing through Fernhollow to head toward the capital. Besides, they were Kez. They didn’t pay the same taxes as everyone else and therefore would have little interest in a tax collector.
He clicked his tongue. “Deshnar,” he said gently, directing his warhorse over to the body and standing up in the stirrups. He drew his big boz knife and tried to reach the rope looped around Kros’s neck.
No such luck.
Styke tied Deshnar to some nearby scrub and returned to the tree, wondering if its dead branches could hold his weight. As a child he’d loved to climb the big willows on the family estate, but that was before he’d grown to almost seven feet tall and twenty-two stone.
Deshnar snorted at him.
“Yeah,” Styke said. “I’m gonna look like a real asshole if I fall out of that tree and break my neck.” He glanced back toward town, where he could order any of his lancers to come out here and take care of the job for him. But that meant leaving the body hanging there while a squad of Kez soldiers rode by. They’d already seen it by now, of course, but leaving it hanging there was just an invitation to ask questions. Styke removed his cavalry jacket, the sunflower yellow of the colonial army, and began to climb.
“Ride, lancers, ride,” he sang softly to himself as he reached the second branch of the dead tree. “Through the meadows, against the tide. Let your hooves ring, steel ring; break your lances, break their bones, break their spirit against the stones.”
He finished his work and let the body drop with a thud, returning to ground and managing to cover Kros’s corpse with some canvas from his saddlebags as the Kez soldiers came within shouting distance.
Two of them rode ahead of the others, approaching him until they were just a few feet away from Deshnar. They wore steel breastplates polished to blinding shine in the morning sun, their backs stiff and formal with heavy cavalry swords and carbines hanging from their saddles. In Styke’s experience, cuirassiers preferred the glory of a single charge against isolated skirmishers. They didn’t like to do the real work of war.
He dusted off his palms and eyed their lapels. The man, narrow-faced and young, no more than nineteen or twenty with muttonchops grown out to make him appear older, bore the stars of a captain. The woman, a sergeant, was in her midtwenties and had dirty blonde hair cut severely at the shoulders. She looked down on him with the kind of irritated disregard that most people reserved for pigs lying in the street.
“By Kresimir, you’re a huge son of a bitch,” the sergeant said, looking from Styke’s boots to the top of his head. Styke stared back, unimpressed. She had some heft to her, but she had too small of a frame to be a proper cuirassier. Heavy cavalry needed strength to swing those swords and weight to back it up. And that polished cuirass had never seen combat. She went on, “I’ve seen ’em big, Captain, but I’ve never seen anyone that size.” She looked truly puzzled, as if she’d just seen a swamp dragon for the first time and couldn’t quite comprehend what creation had put in front of her.
“Can I help you?” Styke asked.
The sergeant started, as if surprised that he could speak. She covered it with a scowl and barked, “You can help me by saluting, soldier. You’re in the presence of a captain of his majesty’s finest.” She glanced over her shoulder at her captain, who’d remained back several feet. “By Kresimir, sir, I can’t imagine the commanding officer of this outfit allowing discipline to falter so. I tell you, if I had the command, things would be different around here. Damned colonials are all the same.”
Styke couldn’t help but snort a laugh.
“What’s that, soldier? Something you want to share with me? You will salute and you will salute now, or Kresimir help me, I will take you to whoever is in charge of this place and I will see you whipped five stripes every morning for a week.”
Styke opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the captain flipped his reins and directed his horse up beside that of his sergeant. “Sergeant Gracely,” he said, “stand down.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I won’t see a common colonial mock his majesty’s finest.”
“Sergeant, that colonial is seven feet tall.”
“My apologies, sir, but I don’t care how big he is, he—”
“Sergeant!”
“Sir?”
“Do you see his jacket hanging from that saddle? Do you see his lapels? He’s a lancer.”
“What does that matter, sir?”
“Can you think of a colonial lancer that size? Perhaps one that’s well known for having broken a company of elite Starlish grenadiers during the Battle of Fort Kurlin, by himself?”
The sergeant’s mouth hung open for a few moments, and Styke could see from her face that she was doing a desperate bit of mental math. She closed her mouth, scowled, and then seemed to reevaluate Styke.
Styke fetched
his jacket from Deshnar’s saddle horn and swung it over his shoulders, taking care to adjust the lapel where a single silver lance designated him as a major. Technically, he outranked the both of them. But Kez of any rank were always more important than a colonial.
Gracely bit her lip, then blurted out, “You’re Ben Styke?”
“Major Ben Styke,” the captain corrected gently. “He may be a colonial, sergeant, but this man has killed more enemy combatants than you can count. He’s broken grenadiers, infantry lines, and even Privileged sorcerers. Fort Kurlin, and much of the northeast of Fatrasta, belongs to the crown because of his heroics.”
Gracely paled, then snapped a salute. “Major Styke, sir. My apologies.”
Styke rolled his eyes and bent over, wrapping the canvas around the body at his feet and then hefting the package, single-handed, and tossing it over Deshnar’s hindquarters. He began tying the body in place, pausing occasionally to wave the flies away. “No apologies needed, Sergeant,” he said. “You can’t help being an asshole. You’ve the double curse of being both a sergeant and a Kez.” He gave her a toothy grin.
The captain responded with a disapproving, if wry, smile. “Major Styke, my name is Cardin. I’m a great admirer of yours.” He bent from his horse and offered his hand.
It wasn’t a salute, but Styke rarely managed to wring a salute out of Kez officers. A handshake, he decided, would have to do.
“Good to meet you, Cardin.” He wiped some body fluid from the rotting corpse off on his pants and shook Cardin’s hand, then swung up into the saddle, urging Deshnar back up to the road. Cardin and Gracely followed him, rejoining their companions, and the five made their way toward Fernhollow at a walk.
Styke gave Cardin a sidelong glance as the Kez captain fell in beside him. “Major Styke,” Cardin said in the slow, thoughtful manner of a man with something on his mind, “you’re the commander of the Fernhollow Garrison, are you not?”
“I am,” Styke said.
“Could I trust you to tell me, soldier to soldier, whether there is any trouble in Fernhollow?”
Styke let his next sidelong glance linger. Cardin’s own eyes were on the wrapped corpse draped over Deshnar’s hindquarters, and he looked uneasy. Styke didn’t have to ask him what he meant. Trouble was word of the year across the whole of Fatrasta. There were riots over taxes and grain, bubbling conflict along the frontier, and a general undercurrent of discontent from the humblest salons to the biggest city newspapers.
He wondered after the reasoning for Cardin’s line of questioning. Was he here to raise taxes? Inspect the town? Institute some kind of conscription? Styke tried to think of a positive reason that a Kez officer would be asking after such an out-of-the-way town and couldn’t come up with one.
“Fernhollow’s not a big town,” Styke said, rubbing his chin. “Just a thousand people, if you include the Palo. I know most of ’em by name, and there aren’t more than a handful of troublemakers in the lot. Most of them just want to keep their heads down.”
Cardin nodded thoughtfully. “I’m glad to hear that. Major, I’m with the Eighth Cuirassiers. My squadron has spent the last year out on assignment in the Ironstead Territory and is on our way back to Landfall. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like a place to billet the men for the night. They need real food and beds, and they haven’t had much chance at either for quite some time.”
“I see,” Styke said. He almost felt relief at the idea. Putting up a few hundred Kez cuirassiers would be a pain in the ass—Kez soldiers rarely paid their bills, and they tended to drink too much—but as long as it wasn’t taxes or a new conscription, this sounded like something Styke could deal with. “Fernhollow is a bit out of the way for coming back from the Ironstead Territory, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Cardin agreed. He glanced over his shoulder at his companions, then said in a low voice, “My commanding officer has a mistress in Beggar’s Wood.”
Beggar’s Wood was about fifty miles south of Fernhollow. A long way out of the way. Styke snorted. “How long do you plan on staying here?”
“Just tonight. We’ll have the men moving again early tomorrow morning.”
Styke gave it a moment’s consideration. “Right. I’ll send word around. We have two inns and seven pubs. Between them and a couple dozen of the families in town, none of your men should have to sleep on the ground.” Styke didn’t like Kez soldiers, but he wasn’t an asshole. A year on the frontier, with all the rumors of violence that must have reached them, was hard on any group of soldiers—even if, by the look of their cuirasses, they hadn’t actually seen combat.
Cardin seemed relieved. “Thank you, Major Styke. I am in your debt.” He snapped his fingers, and Gracely brought her horse up next to his. “Sergeant, report back to the squadron and let them know we’ll be staying in Fernhollow tonight. Everyone is to be on their best behavior. Tell Major Prost that I’ll reserve the best room in the city for him tonight. That should please him.”
Gracely snapped a salute and peeled off from the group, riding back the way they came, and Cardin gave Styke a grateful smile. “With all the trouble going around, I was worried about bringing the men so far out of the way on our return from assignment. But,” he sighed, “Major Prost insisted. At least he’s given me leave to choose our camps with care. The last thing I need to do is get the men involved in any of the violence.”
Styke nodded along, but his mind was already far away. He was thinking about the corpse tied to his saddle, and wondering who was going to hang for the tax collector’s death. He was thinking about the logistics of a few hundred extra soldiers in town.
And he was thinking about the name Major Prost. It sounded vaguely familiar, a tickle at the back of his memory, and he didn’t like it.
He showed Cardin to The Rumbling Sow, the bigger of the two inns in town, then pointed him toward the mayor’s house before dropping the tax collector’s body off at the undertaker’s. The name Prost bothered him the whole way to the small stone fort on the edge of town, and the much larger barracks and stable that housed his garrison of colonial lancers.
He left Deshnar with one of the stable boys and found his second-in-command, Captain Blye, smoking his pipe down in the reeds by the river. Blye was stout and heavyset, with square shoulders and a pencil-thin, carefully-groomed beard that he claimed was all the style in Gurla right now. It made him look like an idiot, and Styke liked to remind him about that at any opportunity.
“Blye,” Styke said by way of greeting.
“Major. Where have you been all morning? Rezi was looking all over the place for you. Said you left without eating breakfast and it had her worried.”
Mention of Rezi brought a half smile to Styke’s face, but he forced it away. “Somebody killed Kros,” Styke replied.
Blye took his pipe out of his mouth and stood up. “Shit,” he said. “You’re joking.”
“Nope. Brend Hillness found the body when he went to check on his cows this morning. Kros was strung up on the old ironwood west of town. He was kicked to death and left for the crows.”
Blye made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “Poor bastard. Any idea who did it?”
“I’m gonna spend the rest of the week trying to find out.”
“Need any help?”
“No, I’ve got more important shit for you to deal with. There’s a company of Kez cuirassiers on their way into town and looking for a place to sleep tonight. I told ’em we’d put ’em up.”
“Of course you did,” Blye grumbled. “I take it you want me to make arrangements.”
“I do.” Styke waved his finger under Blye’s nose. “I also want you to make sure our boys are on alert tonight—but don’t let them look like they’re on alert. I want those Kez to head out of town and forget about us by tomorrow night. No incidents. Understand?”
Blye put away his pipe and snapped a salute. “Right, sir.” He began heading up toward the fort. Styke stared at the river, wishing he could spend the rest
of the day down here. Just him and Rezi, a sheepskin, and a couple bottles of wine.
Maybe next week.
“Blye!” he called
“Sir?”
“Does the name Prost mean anything to you?”
Blye tapped his chin with one finger a couple times before pointing it at the sky. “Major Nons je Prost?”
“That’s right.”
“Major Prost is the governor’s bastard brother. Right son of a bitch, rumor has it.”
Styke felt his stomach clench. That’s where he’d heard the name. Prost was a pariah, even among Kez officers—a sadist and a coward who preferred burning Palo villages to actual combat. Supposedly his company was made up of thieves, cutthroats, and a few unfortunate souls who’d managed to piss off the wrong officer.
And Styke had just invited them to spend the night in Fernhollow.
The last thing Styke needed was a run-in with someone like Prost. Styke knew his own temper well enough to keep his distance, and he stayed busy on the outskirts of town while a handful of trusted men kept a close eye on the Kez. He checked in with his men three times that evening, and then twice again in the middle of the night, waking every few hours from a restless sleep to walk the rounds and speak with members of the town watch.
Kez soldiers could be heard singing inside The Rumbling Sow well into the early hours of the morning, but the town watch reported the streets quiet and everything peaceful. The visit was, Styke decided as he crawled back in bed for the final time that night, a success.
He woke with the sunrise, rolling out of bed and leaning on the thick timbers of Rezi’s four-poster as he pissed into a chamber pot. He heard Rezi stir behind him, and turned to find her sitting halfway up in bed, naked beneath the thin sheet, head cocked, her short, black hair framing a raised eyebrow. She had the hazelnut skin of a half Deliv, with strong, well-defined arms and long legs on a six-and-a-half foot tall frame. She, he decided, could have been a cuirassier, and no one would have argued.