She coughed, hacked, then hawked a wad of phlegm onto the ground before examining the letter in her hand and continuing. “The Kez are making a move on Planth.”
Planth wasn’t a large city—maybe ten thousand people or so—but it was the biggest in the Basin and a fairly major trading post on the Tristan River. If you wanted to get to the northwest wilds where all the best hunting and trapping were, you had to go through Planth. It was easily accessible by road and rivers for the average settler or frontiersmen—less so to a fully-equipped army.
Even still, Taniel was less surprised by the news than he was by the timing. “They’ve left Planth alone so far. Why are they moving on it?”
“No idea,” Bertreau said. “Not sure about you, but in my experience orders rarely come with an explanation as to the motives of one’s enemies.”
Taniel felt his cheeks color. He liked Bertreau well enough, and he knew she liked him, but she also enjoyed reminding him how little real combat experience he had outside of hunting Kez through the Basin these last twelve months.
“When?” he asked.
“There’s an army coming up the Basin Highway at this very moment,” Bertreau said, consulting the letter. “They’re a week away from the city. Scouts say a full brigade. Maybe more.”
Five thousand infantry, probably accompanied by horse, three or four Privileged sorcerers, and auxiliaries. Last Taniel heard, Planth had a garrison of five hundred irregulars holed up in the old trader fort at the bend of the river. The fort was meant to fend off raids from hostile Palo, not a modern army with artillery and sorcery. It would be wiped out in a single afternoon.
He let out a low whistle. “Well,” he said, “there goes our source of provisions. I hope they’re evacuating Planth because there won’t be anything left by the end of next week. What are our orders? Pull deeper into the Basin?”
Bertreau snorted. “I wish,” she said, slapping the letter against her palm. “These orders call every able-bodied Fatrastan regiment in the region to the defense of Planth.”
Taniel felt his mouth hanging open. When the war began, the Fatrastan army would be hard-pressed to put together a whole brigade of real soldiers all together, and maybe three or four times that many in irregulars. Unless there were fifty companies just like his hiding out in the Basin, Planth didn’t stand a chance.
It was a damned foolish order.
He felt the elation of the afternoon’s victory disappear, leaving him with a nervous pit in his stomach. Based on the look on Bertreau’s face, she was thinking the same thing.
“What,” Bertreau said quietly, “are we supposed to do against an entire brigade of Kez soldiers?”
Taniel took the orders from Bertreau and looked them over. They were signed by Lady Chancellor Lindet herself, stressing the importance of not allowing the Kez army to reach Planth. “Proceed up the Basin Highway,” Taniel read aloud, “directly to Planth to aid in the city’s defense. Do not delay.”
Ka-poel tapped Taniel on the shoulder.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed to herself, then Taniel and Bertreau, and then held her fist above her head, face twisted, to mime a hangman’s noose.
“Yes,” Taniel agreed, “it sounds like it’s going to get us killed.”
Ka-poel cocked a half-smile at him and shook her head like he didn’t understand. She ran to Taniel’s hammock and came back a moment later with his sketchbook, flipping through the pages until she found the map he’d made of the Tristan Basin. She pointed at Planth, then at their current location, and finally at the Basin Highway.
She drew a line with her finger from their approximate position across to the road. The tapped the road twice, then bent and wrote the Palo word for “Kez” in the dirt.
“What’s she all on about?” Bertreau asked, angling her head to read the map. No one but Taniel ever seemed to catch on to Ka-poel’s silent speech, and even he had a hard time with it.
Taniel did some math in his head, based on where the orders claimed the Kez were currently located, along with the fact that the orders were already four days old. “She’s telling us where we are in relation to this army.”
“So?” Bertreau asked.
Taniel thought he knew what Ka-poel was getting at. She wasn’t afraid of getting killed—she was out for blood. “She’s saying we can avoid getting trapped inside Planth.”
“I’m not running away from an order,” Bertreau said.
“No, we wouldn’t run away. Look, we’re skirmishers. We’ll do no one any good behind the walls of the fort or holding the line outside the city. But we’re not all that far from the Kez army. Instead of going straight to Planth we head over and harass the Kez. It’ll slow them down and give Planth more time to prepare.”
Bertreau pursed her lips. “Not exactly following orders.”
“We’ll be following the spirit of them. And doing what we do best.”
A slow smile spread on Bertreau’s face. “We’ll strike from the shadows like ghosts.”
Taniel sat in the stern of his canoe, legs crossed, drawing in his sketchbook with a bit of charcoal he kept in his pocket for quiet moments. He drew Ka-poel, her head in profile, back silhouetted by rays of the early morning sun streaming through the mist. He wished he had colored charcoal so he could capture her fiery hair or the way her skin seemed to redden when she faced the sun.
It was early in the morning, just a day and a half after they’d received their orders, and the Ghost Irregulars waited for their scouts to report in.
Every so often Taniel would flip the page and add a few details to his drawing of Bertreau, stealing furtive glances toward her canoe whenever she wasn’t looking. It wasn’t nearly as good as those he did of Ka-poel; the nose was all wrong and the angle of her face was off. But he always had to work quickly on it. Ka-poel liked having her portrait done. Bertreau… not so much.
A figure emerged from the morning mist and approached Bertreau’s canoe—it was Milgi, one of the Palo scouts. He and Bertreau conferred for a moment before she gestured to Taniel.
Taniel put away his sketchbook and paddled up beside Bertreau, planting the paddle firmly in the muck. He removed a snuff box from his jacket and tapped a line of black powder on the back of his hand, snorting it with one nostril. The whole world came alive as sorcery coursed through him, magnifying the sights and sounds of the swamp, making his limbs eager for action. He took a few deep breaths to calm the powder trance, reveling in the clarity of mind it brought him.
“We’re closer to the Kez than we thought,” Bertreau said.
“How far?” Taniel asked.
Milgi glared at Ka-poel for a few moments before answering. “Two miles,” he said in broken Adran. He went back to glaring. Most of the Palo were rude to Ka-poel, if not outright hostile. She was a foreigner, a Dynize from the west, and though she had been raised by the Palo only her abilities as a sorcerer kept her from being banished.
Taniel wasn’t even sure what those abilities were, beyond that it helped her track his enemies. He’d given up trying to understand her relationship with her adopted tribe or her sorcery. He simply found that her presence had become reassuring.
“And how long does their baggage train stretch?” he asked.
Milgi paused to think, his lips moving as he translated the words in his head. “About four miles.”
“They’re moving slowly,” Taniel said to Bertreau. “Vulnerable and stretched out. We can pick at them with hardly a risk.”
Bertreau hummed thoughtfully, her eyes wandering the swamp. She shook her head. “I don’t like it. Five thousand or more men, plus Privileged. I don’t know if I want to risk the Ghost Irregulars for that.”
“I can take care of the Privileged,” Taniel said with more confidence than he felt. Privileged fell to a well-placed bullet just like anyone else and as a powder mage, he could hit them from more than a mile away. The trick was not to miss the first shot and give the Privileged time to respond with e
lemental sorcery. “We’re going to have to face the Kez sometime,” Taniel continued. “It might as well be here, in our territory, and not in formation outside of Planth. Hardly any of our boys have ever seen a proper infantry line, let alone drilled for one. We fight now and we have a better chance of walking away.”
“We can’t kill them all before they reach Planth. There’s five thousand of them.”
“Yeah,” Taniel countered. “But we can soften them up for the defenders.”
Bertreau cleared her throat, looking back at the long line of canoes stretching back into the swamp behind them, irregulars and their Palo allies crouched in each one, waiting for orders.
“Stash the canoes,” Bertreau finally said. “And you, Two-shot, take your savage and scout us out some good targets. Looks like we’ll be nipping at heels for the next few days.”
Taniel waited in the darkness, water lapping at his thighs, the unsteady sound of his own breathing forming a familiar rhythm. He had a new hole in his moccasin—he could tell because the toes of his right foot were clammy and cold, water sloshing between them every time he shifted on his haunches. That was going to get annoying really damn quick.
The swamp was quiet—at least, as quiet as a swamp would normally get. Bullfrogs croaked in the distance behind him while he listened to the quiet chatting of a pair of Kez soldiers discussing their lovers back in the homeland. To anyone else, the words were just a low buzz at almost thirty yards, but Taniel’s trance-enhanced ears could hear every lurid detail and he felt his cheeks warm slightly.
Ka-poel shifted beside him, touching him gently to keep her balance. Taniel exchanged a glance with her but she was, as usual, placid and unreadable. He wondered if she ever felt any real fear, or if all of this was some kind of a game to her. He wondered if he’d ever actually know.
To his right Taniel could make out the hunched forms of over a dozen of the Ghost Irregulars waiting for his signal.
Taniel wished he’d brought his canteen—his throat was as dry as the pit—but by necessity he didn’t have anything on him but his belt knife and a powder horn. He held the knife in one hand, gripping it tightly, feeling naked without his rifle.
He remembered his father telling stories to him as a boy about sneaking into Gurlish fortresses to spike their cannons in order to break a siege. Taniel had played with his friends, pretending to be an Adran soldier doing the same, getting away by the skin of his teeth or dying in a blaze of glory.
It felt strange to remember such fantasies when he was here, now, preparing to do essentially the same thing.
His mind was brought back to the present by the movement of a torch bobbing through the swamp toward his hiding place. He lowered himself an extra couple of inches, watching the shadowy outline of his companions do the same. Only Ka-poel didn’t flinch, remaining as still as a stone.
The torch continued along, not wavering in its path parallel to the Basin Highway where the Kez had made their camp, and Taniel looked pointedly away from the source of the flame, focusing instead on the face beneath it. It belonged to an older soldier, his musket over his shoulder, peering into the night with a look of consternation. His gaze swept across Taniel and the Ghost Irregulars without stopping before he continued on.
Never, Taniel thought to himself, hold the torch in front of you. It ruins your vision.
The night wore on, Kez fires growing dim as the moon rose high into the sky, casting patches of light across the waters of the swamp. It wasn’t long before the distant sounds of conversation and soldiers going about their nightly routines disappeared. The new silence was punctuated from time to time by Kez camp guards stomping through the underbrush.
After one of the patrols had passed, Taniel finally rose to his feet, shaking out his limbs one at a time to get the blood moving and loosen aching joints. He snorted a pinch of powder, feeling the sorcery sharpen his night vision.
“It’s time,” he said softly.
The words were passed down the line, and the rest of the Ghost Irregulars rose up, clutching their knives, limbering up for their task. Taniel felt a thrill go through him. They’d stalked, captured, and killed hundreds of Kez but they had never faced a true force of soldiers like this before.
Taniel motioned with his knife hand and crept through the water, watching as the Ghost Irregulars split off into groups of three or four. He almost called them back, feeling a pang of last-minute trepidation, but he bit his tongue.
This is what they did best.
He and Ka-poel emerged from the swamp water onto the firm-packed soil of the highway and waited until the count of sixty before heading forward.
The highway itself was little more than a stretch of naturally hard soil, shored up over the centuries by locals, that stretched the length of the Tristan Basin. In some places the hard-pack was a mile across, in others scarcely a few feet, but it provided a reliable passage for traders and settlers through the Basin.
Taniel and his men had scouted well, finding a place where the highway was only about half a dozen yards across. A disturbance here would effectively divide the long, snaking camp in two.
But Taniel had more in mind than just a disturbance.
“Remember,” he whispered to Ka-poel, handing her flint and tinder, “don’t light their powder.”
It was only a few paces to the nearest wagons, yet in the tense final moments before an attack, the distance seemed like miles. He crept along, listening to the snores of the teamsters sleeping nearby, and reached out with his senses. The wagon was packed with several barrels of black powder—a prime target for any saboteur, let alone a powder mage. But that wasn’t what he needed right now. He moved on to the next wagon, then the next, until he found a feed wagon with bales of hay and alfalfa for the horses.
Perfect.
Taniel emptied a few lines of black powder from his horn beside one of the bales. He lit the powder with a thought and watched it fizz, hissing to life. He gently blew the embers into the hay. Within seconds a great tower of smoke rose from the cart. He waited a few moments until he heard shouting from somewhere down the baggage train where the rest of the Ghost Irregulars were setting their own fires, and then shouted in Kez,
“Fire, fire!”
Teamsters sprang from their wagons, stumbling out of their bedrolls, panicked cries going up among them. Taniel, undetected, ran to the edge of the swamp. He paused for a moment, checking to be sure Ka-poel had escaped, only to spot a pair of skinny legs sticking out from beneath a nearby wagon. Taniel swore to himself and sprinted back toward her. “Let’s go, Pole,” he growled, grabbing her by the ankles.
Ka-poel’s head appeared, and she bared her teeth at him, slapping away his hands, and then ducked back beneath the wagon. Taniel could hear the sound of her flint striking and realized she’d yet to get her own fire going.
“No time for that now!” Taniel said, grabbing her by one foot.
She kicked him away, there was the sound of the flint several more times, and then she suddenly scrambled out from beneath the wagon, followed closely by a thin trial of smoke. Taniel helped her to her feet.
“You there!” a voice shouted, and Taniel turned in time to see a teamster grabbing at Ka-poel’s shoulder. Taniel threw a wild punch across the man’s jaw and Ka-poel kicked him between the legs. They left him an angry, swearing mess as they sprinted for the cover of the swamp.
The cypresses were lit by an orange glow as the blaze consumed the camp. Taniel could hear the frenzied dash of the other Ghost Irregulars making their escape, and the shouts of Kez teamsters and soldiers as they sought to douse the flames that enveloped at least ten of their wagons.
After about two hundred yards, Taniel stopped running and began to frantically search the bases of the cypress, looking for a knife mark on the roots of one of the bigger trees. A panic struck him as he failed to find the mark, and he feared that he’d gotten turned around in the darkness. Sweat broke out on his brow. All of this waiting and work was for nothing if
he couldn’t find the mark. He swore to himself quietly. “Pole. Pole! Where’s the damn tree?”
There was no answer—not that he expected one—but when he looked around, Ka-poel was no longer at his heels.
“Captain,” a low voice said, “is everything okay?”
Taniel found Sergeant Mapel nearby, gasping from his run, leaning against a cypress root.
“It’s fine,” Taniel spat. “I’m just looking for that damned tree.”
Mapel sucked on his teeth, glancing around at the myriad of cypress that surrounded them. He didn’t have the sorcery that allowed him to see in the dark, not like Taniel, and would be no help at all. “You know the drill, captain,” Mapel said. “If you can’t find it, we get out of here. No sense taking needless risks.”
“Go on,” Taniel said. “I’ll be close behind.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“No,” Taniel said. “Get to the rendezvous. That’s an order. Make sure all our boys made it out.”
Mapel nodded reluctantly and headed deeper into the swamp. Taniel swore to himself, watching the sergeant go. Mapel was right, of course. No needless risks.
A sharp whistle caught Taniel’s attention. He looked up and, after a moment of searching, found Ka-poel sitting in the high branches of one of the cypress trees not a stone’s throw away. Taniel felt a wave of relief wash over him. He sprinted over and climbed the tree, checking the knife mark on the way up. This was it, all right.
A cautious climber could make it to the top of one of the big cypress in just a few minutes. Taniel threw that caution to the wind, scrambling up the thick, winding branches until he was at the very top. He found Ka-poel waiting for him, holding out the kit and rifle he’d stashed here earlier.
Ka-poel mimed that the rifle was already loaded.
“Two bullets?” Taniel asked.
She nodded.
Taniel swung around, wrapping his legs around a branch and giving himself a comfortable seat from which to aim. He brought the stock to his shoulder and sighted down the length of the rifle.