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 elemental 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.