“Enough,” Madigan said sharply. Wilkins and Rains glowered at each other but shut their mouths. He noticed Cleasby was kneeling at the edge of the wreckage, inspecting the rubble. Despite his obvious physical and mental exhaustion, the young scholar seemed intrigued and completely immersed in his surroundings. He had pulled off one of his gauntlets and was poking through the ash with his fingers. At one point he even licked a finger, then grimaced at the taste. “What would you say this place was, Cleasby?”
“Clearly, Lieutenant, this was where that wagon came from. It was an alchemist’s laboratory or something of that nature, something involving volatile mixtures and explosive chemicals,” he answered without hesitation. “Also, they worked in mechanika.”
Wilkins looked at him. “What?”
“Mechanika. A machine imbued with a magical effect through the utilization of rune plates.” Cleasby rattled off the definition.
“I know what mechanika is. I mean, how do you know it was being used here?”
Cleasby held up a partially melted piece of mangled brass. The runes on it were too damaged to read, but its purpose as a detonator was obvious.
“Interesting.” Madigan had recognized the alchemical nature of the place from the smell. His old friend Hutchuck used homemade grenades that had a similar acrid scent. “And how did you arrive at your conclusions?”
“From the size and pattern of the blast. This building didn’t just catch on fire; it burned long enough to spread to the surrounding buildings, then something on the second floor exploded outward. Note that the fire spread as it should have, given proper time to burn, but then it was blown out, more than likely by a concussive blast of pressure outward.”
“That is odd,” Rains said. “Every window in a hundred yards has been shattered as well.”
“Whatever this was burned at a far faster rate than blasting powder,” Acosta said.
“How do you know a stray round from Major Brisbane’s artillery barrage didn’t land on it?” Wilkins asked.
“No.” Cleasby shook his head absently. “There’s no cratering. This explosion was above the surface and blew the walls outward. A shell is hardened enough to keep the two components of blasting powder separate, or else it would detonate in the barrel, so it doesn’t explode until there’s an impact strong enough to mix the two components of the powder. I doubt the thin clay roof shingles the Menites use would have been enough to make that happen.”
Madigan was impressed. “I thought you studied historical literature?”
“A proper education requires a well-rounded outlook, so we were required to take classes in the fundamentals of natural sciences, alchemy, and engineering before picking our specialty . . .” Cleasby muttered, still distracted. “Besides, it doesn’t smell of blasting powder. This was something else. I don’t know what this smell is—it’s sort of oily, but different. Could it be Menoth’s Fury?”
They were all well aware of the Protectorate’s use of the oily and highly flammable substance in a variety of incendiary weapons. The flame spears of the Temple Flameguard held small reservoirs of the substance, primarily to sustain a flame of intense heat at the point, which caused searing wounds. Rains had explained during his briefings on the Protectorate that the heavy liquid slowly seeped up through the sand in the Bloodstone Marches but could also be pumped from below like water from a deep well.
Rains said, “It’s certainly similar. I had an uncle who worked in an armory, and whenever he came to visit, my mother would complain of the smell on his clothes.”
“Does Menoth’s Fury explode like this?” Wilkins asked as he gestured at the blasted remains. “This is impressive.”
“I don’t think so. The oil is sticky and extremely flammable. I’ve heard of tremendous fires caused by accidents transporting it, but not explosions.”
“Perhaps it is some new derivative, designed to act more like blasting powder,” Cleasby said. “And there was significant machinery here related to it, because you can see gears and springs and bits and pieces of the machines spread outward from the blast site.” Cleasby found a badly damaged gear that had been partially buried into a nearby beam. He tried to pry it out with his fingers but gave up. “My guess would be that the wagon was being loaded with whatever device was inside this shop when we arrived in the neighborhood, so they set fire to it and then raced to try to escape before we could control the exit. We might have even heard the explosion; we wouldn’t have been able to differentiate it from the noise of so many others coming from across the city.”
Madigan nodded. This neighborhood was under Cygnaran control for now, but the rest of Sul was still getting hammered. The sound of gunfire and thunder was so constant he’d begun to tune it out.
“And how do you know this was where the Exemplars came from?” Wilkins asked, still suspicious.
“Up until the chaos of the evacuation, it appears the Sulese kept a very tidy city.” Cleasby pointed at the ground nearby. “Yet there’s horse dung here.”
It was obvious several animals had spent some time tied here recently. “Thornbury noticed the same thing when he was out scavenging,” Madigan said. “That’s why he alerted me.”
Wilkins slapped himself in the forehead. “It’s a sad day when a nobleman and a college boy notice dung and I don’t!”
“Don’t feel bad,” Rains said. “You’re very good at spotting things that aren’t there.”
Cleasby ignored them and continued with his hypothesis. “So somebody was working on an undetermined explosive alchemical mixture and mechanika of an unknown nature, and they were important enough that the Protectorate sent some of their elite to get them to safety ahead of our invasion. They used a wagon, which means the machine or the mixture itself was of value, and not just the person, or why else use the wagon instead of just putting the alchemist on a horse? They likely brought the Templar ’jack here on the wagon to save coal, then fired it up for protection. The fact that they ran into us suggests that the machine or mixture took longer to load than expected, indicating either volatility or complexity. And whatever it is, they didn’t want us to see it or to leave enough evidence for us to reconstruct it. They’d rather run to protect it, even if they have to sacrifice a ’jack in the process.”
“Very good,” Madigan said. Wilkins did an exaggerated slow clap.
Cleasby turned to Madigan. “You thought you recognized one of them, didn’t you, sir?”
“I did, but I thought I had to be mistaken, as the man I thought I saw is dead.” He hadn’t believed his eyes earlier. He’d blamed it on the smoke and the chaos. But this was too fitting. The possibility was simply too dangerous to ignore. “His name was Groller Culpin. We’ll send a message to Captain Schaffer right away. Both the War Council and the Reconnaissance Service need to be alerted that he may still be alive.” Madigan began walking quickly back toward their post. Cleasby had blinked at the name and now seemed lost in thought.
“What makes this Culpin so special?” Wilkins asked.
“He’s a brilliant arcane mechanik and inventor. Culpin was a Cygnaran loyalist, like me, but he was supposedly killed during the coup. Yet I could have sworn it was him in that wagon.”
Cleasby looked troubled. “I learned about some of his work at the university. But even if he’s still alive, what’s he doing in the Protectorate? Do you think he fled here?”
“Pray I am mistaken, because that man will bring a nightmare down on us like you won’t believe.”
The refugees broke his heart. Especially the children.
Kelvan Cleasby watched as hundreds of Sulese citizens trudged past, broken, tired, wounded, in a line that never seemed to end. Some of them limped along on crutches made of scavenged wood, their wounds bandaged with rags. They carried what they had salvaged of their worldly possessions, and it was odd to see what some people thought of as precious. An old man carried a rocking chair. A young woman held a violin case in one hand and her crying baby in the other. Everyone was filthy.
They appeared hungry, though most were too proud to beg food from their invaders.
Not all, though. A boy, not more than six, ran up to Cleasby and tugged at his gauntlet. “Do you have any food, sir? We haven’t eaten anything in days. Please?”
Cleasby reached into the leather pouch at his belt, searching for a ration tin. He found one: potted meat, rations surely produced by the lowest bidder from some unspecified type of animal. In normal circumstances he would have found it a greasy, disgusting, congealed mass of nearly inedible byproducts. “This is all I’ve got.”
The child took it reverently, tears cutting a path through the soot stains on his cheeks. “Praise Menoth. Thank you. Thank you.”
But then a woman appeared, surely the boy’s mother. “Get away from him!” She swatted the tin from the boy’s hands. “We’ll take no handouts from these heretics!” She spit in Cleasby’s face. “The Creator will provide.”
He stood there stunned as the mother dragged her child away.
Wilkins approached. “Menoth doesn’t care if you go hungry!” he shouted after her. “He expects you to serve him, not the other way around!”
She gave them a rather offensive hand gesture that probably meant the same thing in Sul as it did back in Caspia.
Wilkins stopped next to Cleasby, picked up the potted meat, and handed it back to him as he wiped his face. “Don’t waste your rations. The priests of Morrow have set up camps for the refugees where they could be warm and eat their fill. They’ll be hungry enough eventually to swallow their pride, or they’ll starve.”
“I thought someone so pious would have more mercy in his heart for refugees.”
“Two straight weeks of watching these fanatics carelessly blowing up their own people in order to strike at us and I’m fresh out of mercy. Morrow forgive me, but I just want to tear this city down and salt the ground.”
There was a chuckle from behind them. “Are you daft, Cleasby?” It was Thornbury. The aristocrat came up and snatched the tin away. “You don’t actually eat issued rations. This garbage is for trading off to units not fortunate enough to have me in their ranks. If you’ve been reduced to eating pork anus and jellied horse hoof, then that says I’ve failed.” Thornbury gave a sharp whistle. The crying child looked back, but thankfully his mother didn’t. The aristocrat tossed the tin. The boy caught it and quickly hid it in his tattered cloak before his mother could notice.
A shout rose from the front of the column. “Incoming deliverers!”
It was a good thing they had been spotted quickly. The deliverers were little more than a ragtag militia. They carried flimsy tubes to fire rockets that seemed as likely to misfire and kill the user as they did their target, but when those rockets worked, they worked extremely well.
The lieutenant was toward the front of the column. “Get out of the open, into those buildings.” Madigan pointed to the south. “Move! Move!”
The squad leaders repeated the order. All the Sixth ran for cover just as the first of the Skyhammer rockets whistled overhead. The refugees began to cry out in fear. “Run, fools!” Wilkins shouted at them. “Your army doesn’t care who they kill!”
Cleasby flipped down his visor—he’d seen what shrapnel could do to eyes—and was thankful he’d done so as one of the rockets landed only fifteen feet away. The detonation swept him from his feet and pelted him with debris.
Wilkins was immediately on one side, large shield raised to protect them. Thornbury was on the other, pulling him up. “Move to cover!” A second rocket struck, but the fragments clanged off the Precursor shield. “Damn them!” Wilkins roared as dirt showered down on top of them. Cleasby found his footing and the three ran after the rest of the platoon.
They reached the building and took cover near the front door. Already Madigan had spotted where the deliverers had launched from and had directed their throwers to engage and electrocute the enemy. Several thunderous booms later, the rockets stopped falling.
They called out names for a head count, and nobody in the Sixth had been seriously injured. When the dust cleared, though, they could see that the refugees hadn’t been as lucky. One of the indiscriminate rockets had deviated right into the mass of fleeing bodies. When the shock wore off, the screaming began.
“Such carnage . . .” Wilkins seemed stunned. He rushed back into the street to help the wounded, heedless of danger. Several other members of the platoon did the same.
Half an hour later, Thornbury approached Cleasby and without a word, handed him back the tin of potted meat. The young nobleman just shook his head sadly and walked away.
Cleasby was glad he’d lowered the visor of his helm, because it wouldn’t do to let the other Storm Knights see his tears.
The Sixth had holed up in a church for the night. Wilkins seemed to take special delight in the idea of Cygnaran Storm Knights sleeping in one of Menoth’s sacred places, but in truth it made tactical sense, as there were many such buildings in Sul, and they were more solidly constructed and defensible than most of the other choices. The Stormblades had shoved aside most of the pews and smashed a few others to make cooking fires.
Their Stormclad wouldn’t fit through the front doors, so MacKay had ordered it to smash a hole in the wall, and now the giant machine squatted in the vestibule. Warjack heads seemed far too small for such large bodies, and the way they were set low in the chests made the machines seem extra hulking to Cleasby. With its boiler barely running, only a little bit of smoke was coming from its stacks. If it had been alive, it would have appeared to be resting, though Cleasby had noticed its head was always slowly moving from side to side, yellow eye slits constantly scanning. He was no expert on ’jacks, but this one seemed extra jumpy.
It didn’t help that Pangborn had started decorating it with the severed heads of its mechanized foes. It now had two enemy ’jack heads hanging from a chain over its shoulder plate. One was the burned head of the Templar from their first battle, and the other was the smaller head of a light Repenter warjack the Menites had set against them during their fourth week of campaigning.
Despite the late hour, MacKay and Pangborn were still up as well, working on a project for the lieutenant. Pangborn caught Cleasby nervously eyeing the Stormclad. “He’s a bit of a collector is all.”
Cleasby had been trying to write, keeping a careful record of the platoon’s activities as he’d been ordered by Captain Schafer, but under the circumstances he found it hard to stay focused. He put the clipboard away. “I thought you said its cortex had been wiped.”
“Supposedly it was, or maybe this one just has a glitch straight from the Fraternal Order of Wizardry.” MacKay came over, stroking his mustache. “When he beats a ’jack, he cuts its head off and shows it to me like when a cat gives its owner a bird it caught. Pangborn welded them to the chain just ’cause the big fellow was carrying them in his hand everywhere.”
“This doesn’t strike you as odd?”
“Odd thing was the other day when those Sulese nutters set that old laborjack against us. Poor rusty old thing had been loading crates for thirty years. Our Stormclad beat it to pieces in the blink of an eye, but he didn’t bother to take its head. Oh, no. It was like an old laborjack wasn’t worth taking a trophy.”
“Well, sure,” Pangborn said. “When you bag a big deer or an ulk, you put the antlers on the wall to show off to the other hunters. But that laborjack wasn’t a fight—it was more like putting an old plow horse out of its misery.”
“So our homicidal warjack collects the heads of his defeated foes. Lovely.” That probably should go on the list, but he wasn’t even sure what to call the offense. Encouraging negative warjack behavior? He knew the regulations better than most, but he certainly hadn’t seen that one. On the bright side, the head of the Templar that had almost crushed him wasn’t nearly as intimidating burnt and hanging from a chain. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Madigan, who didn’t seem to sleep much, joined them in the vestibule. “How goes it, M
acKay?”
“Campaigning’s a hell of a thing. You hate every minute of it while you’re about it, but when you’re home you sure do begin to miss it at times—the excitement and the purpose, you know? Nothing I did there matters near as much as what I do out here. I’d say all is well, sir.”
The idea was an odd one to Cleasby. He couldn’t imagine ever coming to like this sort of thing, but MacKay’s entire life had been spent as a soldier. It changed a man’s perspective.
“I’ve missed it myself, old friend. How goes your investigation?”
Their two mechanikally inclined Storm Knights had set out a tarp, and arrayed across it were all the bits and pieces of destroyed machinery they’d found at the site of the mysterious alchemical explosion on their first day in Sul. “Fair, I think. I surely can’t rebuild it, but we’re pretty sure we reasoned out what it was used for.”
Cleasby, ever curious, got up so he could see. There hadn’t been much left to work with, and most of the remains had been partially melted and spread across half a marketplace. “I’m impressed, MacKay. That was quite the puzzle.”
“Wasn’t me, lad.” MacKay reached up and thumped Pangborn on the shoulder. “’Twas Nestor here. Personally, I was stumped.”
“Imagine that.” Madigan didn’t seem surprised. “I thought you said all you were good for is fighting?”
The giant shrugged. “Wasn’t nothing.” He seemed rather bashful.
“He’s as good at fixing things as he is breaking them,” MacKay said proudly. “That’s rare. A man’s skills usually tend one way or the other.”
“Headhunter likes me all right, too,” Pangborn said. “At least he hasn’t tried to electrocute me yet, so I think that means he likes me.”
Cleasby was almost afraid to ask. “Headhunter?”
“That’s what I call him.” Pangborn grinned.