“Tomas?”
He growled, and took off running toward the northeast, angling away from the road.
“Tomas!”
Even running as fast as she could, she lost sight of him fairly quickly, but he was following his nose, so she followed the breeze.
The sun had nearly reached the horizon when she started to smell smoke.
Sweet, greasy, almost familiar smoke…
A moment later she could see multiple strands of dark gray rising over the trees, writhing against the sky.
Breathing through her mouth, she came out of a hollow, pushed through the masking trees, and stared down a long slope at a burned-out compound tucked against the side of a small valley. A fairly large cottage, a well, a garden, a low shed half open for wood and half closed in for livestock…all destroyed. Recently destroyed. The blackened shells of the buildings and a small dark pile in the center of the garden still smoldered. She couldn’t make out the details of the pile no matter how she squinted or how hard she rubbed her eyes.
She couldn’t see Tomas, although this had to have been what he’d caught scent of.
Heart pounding, she slowly walked forward until she wasn’t only looking at the destruction, she was in the midst of it.
Only two walls of the cottage stood, less of the shed, and it looked like they’d burned it down with the chickens inside. Even the wellhead had been destroyed, stones smashed away and tossed aside, the destruction more evidence of viciousness than even the fires.
Boots had pounded the garden hard, bootprints crossing and recrossing crushed seedlings and stained earth.
They’d killed the chickens in the shed. Why had they dragged the rest of the livestock here?
Even staring directly at the blackened pile, Mirian couldn’t figure out what the bodies had been although through the unmistakable smell of lamp oil, she thought she smelled pork. She thought, at first, it was her eyes, then she saw the foreleg slightly off to one side, far enough away from the heart of the fire its shape had survived in spite of how small it was.
After that, it wasn’t hard to pick out skulls, shoulders, bones cracked and black.
There were Pack in the empire. Small family groups. Children.
Fur stank when it burned.
She couldn’t smell fur.
Killed. Skinned. Dismembered. Burned.
She only hoped it had been in that order.
“They can’t have gone far.” Black against the burned wood, she hadn’t been able to see Tomas until he rose to his feet. She could hear a whine and a snarl both in his voice. “I wanted to track them, but I knew you were following and…” He dropped again to four feet, threw back his head and howled.
Mirian felt something break inside. She backed up, nearly tripped as her heels sank into a patch of softer earth, didn’t stop until she reached Tomas’ side. With his howl sounding inside her, replacing the horror with rage, she pointed at the pile of smoldering bodies and then pulled her clasped hands apart.
If water could be parted, so could earth.
When the last body had tumbled out sight into the cleft, she brought her hands together again.
Knelt and laid her palms flat against the ground.
The bare earth turned green and wildflowers bloomed, covering the grave in a thick carpet of color, covering the ruins in a tangle of vines.
Mirian glanced toward the sunset as she stood. “Don’t get so far ahead I can’t find you.”
Snarling, Tomas took off to the south.
He was out of sight almost immediately, but somehow she never lost his trail.
She caught up to him just after full dark on the outskirts of a village. Together, they watched six men strutting down the road. They carried pelts, and they were laughing. Talking. Bragging. Two of them planned to head straight home. The other four were going to the pub to celebrate.
It turned out it didn’t matter if they still had silver shot remaining. They had no chance to use their guns.
The breezes stole their screams away.
And Mirian buried the bodies too deep to ever be found.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when a sleepy page led Reiter to a room off another nondescript corridor, set the lamp he carried on the small shelf just inside the door, yawned, and said, “This is yours now, sir.”
Left alone, Reiter discovered everything he owned had already been brought over from the garrison and stored neatly—uniforms hung in the large wardrobe, small clothes folded in the drawers underneath, and his shaving kit set out on the washstand under the mirror. No musket. No pistol. No knife. Only the soldiers on guard carried weapons in the palace. He hoped his were still in the garrison armory.
After a day standing silent in a fluctuating cluster of distant relatives, sycophants, and courtiers—Tavert, the emperor’s mobile secretary had been the other person with him the entire day—Reiter was almost certain he’d rather have been court-martialed. Not to the point of execution, but a few years of hard labor had started to look good. If he’d been given Major Halyss’ old job, he was clearly missing something. But then, Major Halyss was Intelligence and he was Infantry, so that didn’t surprise him.
The room was about twice the size of his room back in the garrison’s officer quarters but shabbier, the furniture both worn and mismatched, probably salvaged when the rooms of those with higher rank were renovated. Besides the bed and wardrobe, there was a desk with a filled inkwell, three iron-nibbed pens and a pad of paper, and a fairly comfortable chair. The heavy brocade drapes covered a tiny window, the thick glass beaded with rain. Given the hour and the weather, he couldn’t tell what the window overlooked although he doubted he’d been given a room with a view. Too small to fit through, he supposed he should be thankful that if he couldn’t climb out, no one wandering the roof could climb in. On the wall across from the bed, a scuffed door led to a water closet so narrow his shoulders brushed the walls on either side.
Giving thanks the room was painted, not papered—in one day he’d seen enough appalling wallpaper to last the rest of his life—he wondered if this had been Major Halyss’ room. Probably not. Halyss’ birth no doubt rated him a repeating pattern of bright green fishermen.
The door didn’t lock, but Reiter had spent his entire adult life in the army and had long since lost any need for privacy. More importantly, the bed was comfortable and he was exhausted from keeping his mouth shut. He’d never suspected running an empire could be so inane—although given Lieutenant Lord Geurin, he supposed he should’ve had a clue. His last conscious thought involved the whorehouse he’d planned on visiting had he survived this morning’s debriefing…
“Captain Reiter.”
His eyes snapped opened, and by the time he’d focused on the private standing just inside the door, his hand had closed around empty air where his pistol should have been. “Who…?”
“Linnit, sir. I’ve been assigned to you.” He crossed the room, threw open the drapes, then returned to the door and picked up a pitcher. “I’ll deal with your boots while you shave, sir.” Distant bells sounded six. “Breakfast in the guard mess in half an hour. I’ll be back.”
Reiter missed waking under artillery fire. At least then he knew what the flaming fuck was going on. Hopefully, the emperor wouldn’t take long to tire of him and he could go back to the safer prospect of being shot at. He sighed and got up.
His window looked due east, directly into the rising sun. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have seen that as a blessing. As it was, he blinked away the sunspots, noted a maze of roofs and chimneys, and in the distance, rising above the edge of the building, an arc of gold almost glowing in the sunshine. At first he thought it was the roof of some kind of garden pavilion, then he recognized it as a balloon although it was larger than what they used for reconnaissance in the field and more oval than round. Had General Loreau demanded the Shields have their own balloon corps just because the other two divisions did?