“At a hundred yards even I recognized him,” Gavril said. “That last one, the one that hit us with a lightning bolt hard enough to knock through the wards on the bastion. That was Brajon the Callous.”
Taniel choked on a mouthful of wine. “The head of the Kez Cabal?”
“The same,” Gavril said.
Taniel felt his knees weaken beneath him. He put a hand on the bastion wall for support. “I would never have stood up if I had known it was him. Brajon was in Fatrasta at the beginning of the war. He almost ended it himself. Wiped out an entire Fatrastan army – singlehandedly. The war would have ended there if he hadn’t been called back to Kez by Ipille himself.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t know,” Gavril said. “They almost had us there. Their Privileged were dressed in infantry colors and hiding their gloves. Blended right in. Bo was too busy tending his shields to notice.”
And Taniel hadn’t had his third eye open until it was too late. He scolded himself. Stupid. He’d almost gotten them all killed. Taniel watched as Gavril took stock of the damage to the bastion. “You know,” Taniel said, “we could have kept firing after they sounded the retreat. Would have wiped out thousands on the mountainside. The Kez did that to us in Fatrasta a few times.”
Gavril snorted angrily. “War has to have some decorum. Otherwise it’s back to the Bleakening for all of us, and Kresimir be damned.”
Gavril left him then. Taniel looked over the edge of the bastion. He thought to open his third eye to track their Privileged, but decided it would just give him a headache.
A thought troubled him. If that was their big push, then where was Julene? He searched the hillside for the entrance to the sapper tunnels. There was some movement there, and he thought he saw a man empty a wheelbarrow of dirt.
Tamas stared up at the ceiling of a small room, his vision blurry. There wasn’t much to see even had his eyes been clear. He could make out the slanted logs of a roof, plain wood with mud in the cracks to seal them against the weather. It was light, barely. His body told him it was dawn. The light was gloomy, indicative of a stormy day ahead. He heard the crow of a rooster, and the sound of hoofbeats, followed by a muffled conversation. The men outside spoke Kez.
He couldn’t feel his right leg. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and combined with his blurry vision Tamas had to fight rising panic. Without a leg or good vision, what hope did he have of escape? He breathed deeply, calming himself, and assessed the rest of his body for wounds.
Both of his hands and arms still seemed to work. They moved when prompted. He could feel the stab of a straw mattress beneath him. His chest hurt when he took too deep a breath, but not enough for a broken rib. His side was tender, perhaps from a cut or a bruise. He touched it gently. A bruise, he decided. He was in short undergarments and nothing else, and years of instinct told him he was not alone in the room.
Tamas struggled to push himself into a sitting position. He’d been provided with neither blanket nor pillow, and lay upon a filthy straw mattress on a wooden frame. There was a window on his left, and stairs going down at the end of the bed. He rubbed his eyes, which improved his vision slightly. A Warden sat in the corner, his muscled, malformed body easy to recognize, though Tamas could not make out much more than the outline of the body.
“Where am I?” Tamas said.
The blurry mountain of flesh seemed to regard him for a moment, then mumbled something unintelligible in Kez.
“Where am I?” Tamas repeated.
The Warden left the room.
“Where am I,” Tamas shouted after the Warden. He pushed himself up farther. “Monster. Beast!” He lay back down, what little strength he had now gone. His head had begun to throb when he moved. He felt along the wrapping gingerly, grimacing. The slightest touch brought a jolt of pain, and he eventually left it alone. He’d been treated. They’d covered his wounds in strips of dirty linen. His leg was wrapped tight, but there was still circulation. He wouldn’t be walking on it any time soon. He heard steps from below, and two pairs of boots upon the stairs. The Warden returned, with him a smaller man.
“Field Marshal,” a voice said in accented Adran. Tamas felt his hackles rise at the sound of the voice.
“Nikslaus,” he spat. “I thought I threw you in the Adsea.”
The duke’s voice was genial. “My Wardens fished me out. How is your leg?”
“It’s fantastic,” Tamas said. “I’m going to dance a jig. Where am I?”
Nikslaus took the Warden’s seat in the corner of the room, while the Warden stood at the foot of the bed. “Deep in the King’s Wood,” he said. “Now, my surgeon said you’d hit your head hard when you fell. Are you having any problems with your vision?”
“No,” Tamas lied.
“Of course you are,” Nikslaus said. “I can tell that your eyes aren’t focusing. I’ll have the surgeon take a look at you before we go.”
Tamas did his best to glare at Nikslaus, but found it hard when he could barely see him. “Why the pit am I still alive? Where are we going?”
“To Kez,” Nikslaus said. “I advised against it, but after that first Warden didn’t kill you, Ipille decided that we should send a message. If everything goes as scheduled, you’ll face the guillotine beneath my king’s gaze on the final day of Saint Adom’s Festival.”
“You’ve planned this for a long time,” Tamas said.
“One of many contingencies. We need to be rid of you, one way or another, if we’re to take Adro. You’re the strongest of the powder mages and a tactical genius – I don’t mind saying it, it’s the truth. The mercenaries will give us some fight, but you’re the backbone of your army. Your soldiers will crumble without you.”
“You underestimate them,” Tamas said.
“Perhaps.” Nikslaus seemed unworried. “The dominoes will fall, Tamas. You’re only the first. Adro is outnumbered. With your head in a basket, we will whittle away at the Mountainwatch and hunt down your powder mages. We have every advantage.”
Tamas gazed at his hands, trying desperately to focus on them. “What happened to my leg?”
“My fault,” Nikslaus said. “The boulder you were hiding behind cracked in a particular way, and then exploded when I applied enough sorcery. A fragment glanced your leg. Shattered it, I’m afraid.
“But I wouldn’t worry much about it,” Nikslaus continued. “Our surgeon says it might heal, in time. He’s quite gifted. Put it back together and stitched the flesh up like no one would know.” Nikslaus stood up and approached the bed. He leaned forward, just out of Tamas’s reach. “You’re a few hundred krana richer, Tamas,” he said in a low voice. He tilted his head toward Tamas’s leg. “There’s a star of gold in there, right up against the bone. You’ve been cured.”
Tamas lurched forward and swung a fist at the blurry image of the duke. His body screamed at him, his leg sending a fiery needle of pain up his body that made his stomach lurch. Nikslaus danced out of the way.
“Cured.” That’s what Nikslaus thought of it. Gold in the bloodstream of a powder mage was anathema. It removed their ability to sense and touch powder, to enter a trance.
Nikslaus gave a chuckle. “You’re cured, Tamas, but it won’t help your cause. Your neck will rest beneath the same guillotine blade that took your wife’s head all those years ago. You won’t go to your death as a powder mage. You’ll go as the son of a poor apothecary.”
Tamas’s blood thumped hard in his ears and his hands shook violently. He wanted to reach out and take Nikslaus by the throat. He longed to have finished what he started on the docks. Yet he could do nothing. He was powerless.
It was not a familiar feeling. For as long as Tamas could remember, his magery had been there. Even when not in a powder trance, he could sense nearby sorcerers and tell where and how much powder there was within hundreds of paces. He could detonate charges or kegs, he could breathe in the acrid smoke and send his body into a berserk rage.