A Perverted Path to Victory

It took a considerable time before the scouts were happy with the treatment of their griffons. Even as the Beastmaster’s attendants crowded around each animal, every one of them an expert healer in their own right, the scouts nervously prodded about, circling like nervous mother hens. Any time a space opened up near the griffon’s head, one of them would fill it in an instant, stroking the animal’s cheek and whispering into its flicking ears. It was only after an hour of treatment that the first team of scouts finally agreed to be pulled away from their animal, though even as they prepared to give their report to General Borek, their eyes kept drifting towards the second, more gravely injured beast.

“If you encountered skywreathe,” the General began, “the enemy must be preparing considerable defenses. What progress have they made?”

The scout saluted smartly, looking tired as all the hells. Tilsa was an older human who seemed to have aged hard, his years in the sky leaving his skin dry and leathery. Despite that, he still held the energetic bounce to his motions which Mui had always associated with griffon riders. They all looked like they thought every moment not spent on the backs of their beasts was time wasted.

“Four griffon paddocks,” he said, beginning with what he knew best. “Though only two flew up to attack us. Not sure if the others were out flying, or if they’re building the paddocks ahead of the arrival of more griffons, but either way, I’m glad they weren’t there. They were good fliers, sir. Nearly got the better of us.”

“Did your opponents survive?”

“Maybe, sir,” Tilsa said hesitantly. “We got ‘em pretty good. They got us pretty good, too. We lived. Don’t see why they couldn’t.”

“Mm,” General Borek grunted noncommittally. “What of the defenses on the ground? The mines?”

“They’re working hard on them, sir,” Tilsa paused to take a sip from his canteen. It seemed his exhaustion was finally catching up with him. “They’ve got wooden palisades, a basic trench, and a good few buildings up. The clearing’s about a mile across, I’d say. Can’t be sure how many of the buildings we saw were barracks, but we saw plenty of soldiers lining the walls. I wager they’ve got eight, maybe ten thousand people in the camp. Don’t know how many of those are soldiers, though.”

“Can you provide details on the condition of the troops you saw?”

“Didn’t get too good a look. We got jumped fast. If I had to bet, though, I’d say most of ‘em know their way around with a spear. Most of the folk we saw had a soldier’s build. I’m betting they’re using the garrison as a labor force, trying to jumpstart the mine’s production.”

General Borek grunted, thinking. He stared away into space for a time, leaving the small circle of officers and advisors in silence, then refocused on the scout.

“These palisades? They were formidable?”

“Solid ring all the way around the camp, sir.”

“Would it have any enchantments?” Sara asked.

Tilsa and General Borek both turned to look at her, surprised. Their shock was a testament to Sara’s efforts to downplay her status as a Chosen. It was certainly expected for an agent of the Divine to join this conversation, but not a mercenary. Even dogmatic General Borek had been taken a touch off guard.

“I would not expect them to be enchanted, no,” General Borek said. “Such efforts would be wasted on wood.”

“Then you can forget about the palisade,” Sara said. “It won’t last two minutes under cannonfire. Plan like it isn’t there.”

“...if you say so,” General Borek said.

Sara chuckled lightly, and even Evie smirked. “Trust me,” Sara said, “the cannons will take care of it. In fact, if they don’t have any combat mages, I’m pretty sure we could beat the entire group into surrender with cannons alone. That wouldn’t get your troops much experience with their guns, though.”

“I anticipate that they will have mages of some description,” General Borek said. “Perhaps not veteran combat mages, but at least mages who are present to aid the construction of the mines. They will doubtlessly try to counter your artillery in whatever manner they are capable of.”

“Yeah, well, they can try. Ten 12-pounders aren’t something anything can stand up to for long. Anyway, go ahead and continue,” Sara said, waving General Borek on. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The General nodded politely, returning to his interrogation of the scouts. What remained to be said was mostly minutia, but as Mui had learned from his military career, the smallest details were often the most crucial.

When the General had received the scout’s full report, in addition to a rough sketch of the enemy encampment, it was nearing the final hours of daylight. He ordered the army to begin preparing to camp, with plans to begin marching for an assault at first light. The General and his advisors, including Sara and Evie, joined the other officers. Mui did not; he’d once intended to volunteer for command of a small squadron in the battles, but he no longer expected to be granted the privilege. He was too important to Tulian and the Empire, now.

As Mui began setting up his tent for the evening, he could not shake a sense of nervousness. It was a strange skirmish that they were preparing for tomorrow, with far too many unknown factors. How many soldiers would the enemy have? How experienced would they be? How comprehensive were their defenses, and how would they fare against the Empire’s first attempts at using firearms? He was confident they would win the day, at the very least. With fifteen thousand troops, they outnumbered even the largest estimate of enemy strength by a third.

Still, there were shifting, uncertain concerns nagging at his mind. It was a common enough thing to feel before battle. This particular night, he felt it more sharply than he did most.

“Mui,” Evie said.

He looked up sharply. Sara’s wife was standing next to his half-erected tent, hands on her hips.

“You were missed at the command staff meeting.”

“I was?” He asked, standing uncertainly. “I am not a sergeant any longer. Even if I was, I wouldn’t be privy to such an important meeting.”

“Then I am offering you a single-day commission as an officer of the Powdered Lead. I want you on the battlefield tomorrow.”

It is amazing how someone so small can look so intimidating, Mui privately remarked. Even after months of knowing the woman personally, even after seeing all she did with her wife, Evie unnerved him in a way no Warrior ever had.

“What are you asking of me?” He asked cautiously. “I have never used firearms in battle. Any of your own veterans would make a better officer than I.”

“You are from the Empire,” she said, turning away from him as she summoned her rapier. She began to work through a series of practice drills as she spoke. “And more importantly, you have been in true battles before. My wife… has not.”

Oh?

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said honestly. “I have heard countless stories of the war between Tulian and Sporatos. She was not just your army’s lone commander, but its most important combatant.”

“Yes.” Evie’s rapier blurred through the air, a silver line that moved too fast for him to track. “But she was the commander of an army which was trained from the ground up for the kind of war she envisioned. She did not…” Evie’s rapier slowed, her lips pursing. Criticizing her wife did not come naturally to her. “She has only an academic appreciation for the brutality that can follow a battle. There will be civilians in the enemy camp, Mui. Do you think the Imperial forces will treat them with respect and honor?”

“No.”

“Sara thinks they will. General Borek has made assurances.”

Mui licked his lips, tongue running over his fur. “Ah. That is…” He could not bring himself to say naive, but he let the unspoken word hang. “What would you have me do?”

“Join the Imperial troops as they enter the camp. Exercise what authority you have, real or imagined, and try to keep the slaughter to a minimum. This is a volatile situation, Mui. Sara’s reaction to pillaging will be violent. Looting she may overlook, but murder? Rape? She will order the Powdered Lead to defend the civilians with their lives.”

“She would order her mercenaries to fight against their own employer?”

“If it is to defend the innocent, she would wade her way into battle without a single soul standing beside her. It is one reason among many that I love her, and it is a tendency I have desperately tried to curb.” Evie’s scowl deepened briefly. “I have failed, of course. It is my hope that you can help avoid this eventuality.”

“I have no official authority,” Mui reminded her, a tinge of desperation entering his voice. This was not something he was prepared for. “My title is very nearly fictional, and it affords me no more rank than my original promotion to sergeant. I do not have the true right to command even a single recruit, as they are not a member of my squadron.”

“You are the Chosen’s liaison,” Evie said, flicking her way through a final rapier drill, one which ended with her disemboweling her imaginary opponent. “If nothing else, an order from you will be backed, however indirectly, by the threat of Divine intervention.”

“General Borek will not allow me to be in danger,” Mui said, trying a different tack. “He believes that Sara’s fondness for me is responsible for a considerable portion of her attitude towards the Empire. We both know she is far more independent in her thoughts than that, but it is what he believes. To him, I am too important to risk.”

“You will go in with the troops once the fighting is finished.” Evie dismissed her rapier, which disappeared with a flash. She looked him squarely in the eyes. “I am not asking you to prevent them from killing in the heat of battle. Only to help cool their blood once they have their enemies at their mercy.”

Mui swallowed. “You are not going to accept another answer, are you?”

“I would,” Evie stated frankly, surprising him. “You are no Warrior, nor Irregular, and certainly no Knight, thank the gods, but you are a clever man. One does not join an army at sixteen and live to become a sergeant without being aware of their limits. If you believe you’re incapable of it, I will take matters into my own hands.” Evie’s lips turned down. “I suspect that I… lack the empathy to match your efforts.”

Mui turned to his left and right, looking to see if there was anyone present. He wondered if Sara was hidden behind an illusory face, or if, for some unfathomable reason, General Borek had put Evie up to this.

He dropped the idea almost as soon as it came to him. This was a straightforward, direct request, despite its inordinate difficulty. The only person who would benefit from it was Sara and the Powdered Lead, and so long as the Empire’s fate was tied to them, it was to the benefit of Mui’s people, too.

“I can try,” he said, a storm of anxiety bubbling in his gut the moment the words left his mouth. “Will you provide me a squad? Some symbol of authority to lean upon when I enter the camp?”

Evie did not quite smile, but the thin line her lips had been pressed into loosened just a touch.

“I will place you with a squad of Powdered Lead riflemen. They are a reserve, and will only see battle if the enemy proves remarkably resilient. Should they be called upon to engage, you will not engage with them. Their orders will be simple: once the enemy fortifications are breached and the battle is nearing its close, they should consider themselves under your temporary authority.”

“And they’ll respect my orders?” Mui knew it was rude to ask the question, but he wanted his circumstances to be clear.

“So long as you don’t order them to act against their fellow Tulians, yes.” Evie considered something a moment, then let out one of her rare, indelicate snorts of half-laughter. “Truthfully, you may struggle to corral them as much as you will the Imperials. The sort who volunteered to fight with the Powdered Lead in order to win a foreign people their freedom have proven to be a… zealous group. I wouldn’t recommend giving them the order to load their rifles unless it becomes inevitable. When it comes to enforcing Sara’s ideals, there has been an increasingly common epidemic among the Powdered Lead: that of an ‘itchy trigger finger.’ Seeing their ‘allies’ abusing civilians would exacerbate that condition. It would be best if you don’t allow them to soothe the itch before it is necessary.”

“Wonderful,” he said, breathing the word like a curse.

Evie offered a sympathetic smile. “If the task were easy, I would offload it to someone I trusted less.” After a short beat, Evie seemed to realize what she had said. She sliced a hand through the air, cutting off his reply before it started. “You do not have my confidence, Mui Thom. Make no mistake of that. But you have managed to earn my wife’s trust. I am curious to see what you do with it.”

Before he could say another word, Evie turned on a heel, retreating into the dark. With her goal accomplished, their conversation was over.

Mui settled down next to his tent, piecing together the small shelter far slower than he had been before. He was not Sara. He did not have the Divine guiding him, and his nebulous worries were not akin to prophecy.

He just wished he could convince himself he was wrong.

------------------------------------

A Young Boy Named Pen

------------------------------------

It started with a scream. Not some spectacular, honorable call to battle. Pen’s first battle didn’t have any of those.

No, the scream that started it was small. Awkward. Startled. It had a higher pitch than it usually did, and it cracked when it reached its peak, dissolving into a panicked blubbering shortly thereafter. It was the scream of a sentry up in one of the towers as they spotted an army coming down the road, confirming every worst fear they’d had since the griffons hadn’t come back the day before.

The enemy was coming.

And they had guns.

Pen leapt out of his bunk, one of a hundred scrambling for his gear. They’d only slept a few hours, since they’d been stuck on the night shift for god’s-knew how long. Unfortunately, when the alarm bell was rung, it didn’t matter how tired they were. He slapped his boots on, tugged his breastplate over his head, reached for his greaves, and began tying the leather straps with the fanaticism of a man twice his age and thrice his experience.

Pen didn’t have to be a veteran to know that every moment counted.

He wasn’t the first to dash out of the barracks, nor close to it, but he was far from the last, and that mattered to him. He threw his arm up against the sudden sunlight, a searing early-morning torture which he hadn’t suffered in weeks, then began to stumble forward with the rest, following their shadowed backs as they made their way to the ramparts.

The mining camp was a mess. Cutting down the forest had produced far more logs than they could use in building, and now they were piled in high stacks all across the boot-stomped mud, pits of skywreathe being lit between them. Pen’s wooden barracks were one of several that the garrison soldiers used as long, undivided tenements, while the camp’s workers had been stored in similar, if slightly smaller and more numerous, accommodations nearby. They were primitive things, their windows nothing more than glassless shutters, and one could track the paths of workers by how deep the ruts in the mud had been worn between buildings. The center of the camp, where an open pit was slowly being dug away, was currently an ant’s nest of activity. Civilian workers were scrambling every which way, looking for cover, trying not to get trampled by the lines of soldiers bullrushing towards the palisade walls.

“Wasn’t supposed to happen yet, was it?” Someone asked him. He turned to his right to find Jonay, who’d been in the same garrison as him for the last two years. Their parents had been friends before either of them were born, and they’d stayed close since joining the garrison, even if living in the city had changed how much time they spent together. He couldn’t remember the last time he and Jonay had shared a drink.

“How am I supposed to know?” Pen huffed as the column of running troops slammed to an abrupt halt. He rested his hands on his knees as the column began to wind its way up the palisade steps, funneled onto the narrow catwalk. “There’s no way any of us could know.”

“You got better ears than me,” Jonay said. “And you sleep closer to the sarge. Come on, you bug everyone about everything, and you’re telling me you didn’t hear him talking about what happened to the griffons last night?”

Pen scowled at his friend. “How would hearing about it last night change anythi–”

Jonay disappeared in a spray of blood and wood, his body torn away like a toddler throwing their doll in a fit of temper. He had taken everyone to his left with him, as well as the people to the right, filling the air with smoke and blood.

An entire column of soldiers, maybe a dozen of them, were laid out on the ground before Pen. Some had holes the size of their own heads in their chests, others had entire arms missing, others still had been decapitated from the clavicle upward. Some had been wearing armor, some not, but the wounds didn’t seem to distinguish. He saw two men who had lost their legs below the knees. They were sitting on the ground, staring blankly at the space where there should have been flesh. One turned around and began to pat the ground, looking for his lost limb, asking his companion for help in the most dreadfully calm of tones.

The other man buried his face in his hands and began to sob.

Late, far, far too late, Pen threw himself away with a scream. He landed hard on his rear and began to scramble backward, nails clawing in the mud, feet kicking dirt as he stared, stared, stared at a dozen dead men and women.

“Get up!” A voice roared behind Pen. He felt something hard slam into his spine, hard enough that he cried out, thinking he was dead, only for a hand to grip him by the collar of the armor and drag him up, spinning him around.

“Get to your fucking position!” Sergeant Bek roared, pointing his officer’s sword at the wall. “If you don’t get a bow in your hands in the next ten fucking seconds, that cannonball will be the last thing you ever goddamn saw!”

Cannonball? Pen thought, his mind a scattered mess in ways that his body wasn’t. Even as he reacted to the Sarge’s words, even as his training took control of his limbs to drive him sprinting forward in search of a loose bow and quiver of arrows, he kept thinking. Cannonball? Cannonball? Cannonballs? It’s cannons? They have them?

The traitor armies couldn’t have cannons yet. They couldn’t. Pen had been told about them, when the Visya had sent him and the rest of the garrison to this camp, when the Warriors and Lords had told them all about how powerful the things were and the good they would be doing for the Adjutant, because this camp would be helping build them, and that they should be honored for the chance to serve in such a wonderful way. He’d even been promised that the enemy wouldn’t have them. That the enemy was slow, weak, and stupid, too stupid to make cannons like they would, and that thanks to Pen and the others, the war was already won save for the fighting.

The only one who has cannons, Pen thought as he ripped a shortbow out of a bleeding woman’s unmoving palms, is the Chosen and her armies. But they can’t be here. The Chosen is as Divine as the Adjutant, or maybe even the Emperor himself! She wouldn’t fight us.

It was what the priests had told him. It was what they’d told everyone, and everyone had agreed. There would be no fighting the Chosen, because she was an agent of the Many Gods, just as the Adjutant was the True Will of the Emperor. The gods may use lesser men as tools and pawns, but not the Emperor, who was their Most Honored.

Jonay’s dead.

“Twenty-Second squadron, over here!” Sergeant Bek screamed, waving his sword high over his head before turning around and grabbing a crate of supplies as tall as he was, dragging it out of the shade. He grabbed another one and, with one great smash from his blocky hammer first, broke it open. The old Sergeant roared as he did it, but he did it, and at that moment Pen finally believed the man who’d so often told them he was the strongest person they’d ever met. The sarge ignored his bloodied hand as he tossed one half of the crate on top of the first, shoving the other in front of it. He piled a few extra smaller, random crates next to what he’d already created, then stepped away, waving them onward.

He’d made a staircase up to the palisade wall. The closest stairs had been shot away, Pen realized. When Jonay had been killed.

Jonay’s dead.

Pen dashed for the crates with the rest of his squadron, still trying to toss his quiver over his back as he ran. His left arm wasn’t quite bending like he thought it should, and when he looked down at it, he realized there was a splinter of wood as long as his spread fingers sticking down from his shoulder. Against all odds, it had slipped beneath his pauldron and shirt both, piercing nothing but skin and muscle until it had finally been stopped by bone.

Why can’t I feel that?

“Up, boy, up!” Sergeant Bek shouted, hauling him bodily up the first ‘step’ like he was a ragdoll, before grabbing the next person in line. “Come on, come on, you’re too young to be dying without some traitors notched on your belt! Get up there, go!”

Pen had to leap to get himself up the half-broken crate, then leap again to reach the palisade catwalk, but he managed it. Checking his hands, he realized hadn’t even dropped the bow or its quiver full of arrows. He could even feel his spear still rattling on his back. He’d made it, just like he was supposed to.

“Outta the way!” A voice cried behind him. He was blocking the path. He scurried forward, prodded faster by every shouted curse, until suddenly he found himself slamming up against a blank space of wood at the edge of the palisade, where the carpenters had carved the logs into intimidating spikes.

He was breathing impossibly hard, harder than he had in all his life. It felt like his lungs had burst through his ribs and were thumping against his breastplate, like the metal chestpiece was the only thing keeping his body from falling apart in a spray of gore.

Jonay is dead.

Pen looked down the palisade wall. He knew it well; he’d help build it. They’d done it in a matter of days, they had, built the entire sprawling, twisting thing out of nothing but the trees they’d chopped down to give themselves the space for it. It rose with the hills here, dipped with the valleys there, and twisted back and forth all the way across its length. It was a good, solid construction, and it had turned this mine into a fort. When the workers finally started cutting out proper stones, he’d been told, they’d use them to make a proper wall right in front of it, maybe building the start of a new city. He’d been proud of that, proud enough that he’d not even hated getting the duty of digging out the rises to fill in the ditches, which everyone else despised.

Now all that work was crowded by soldiers. Men and women of the garrison force, most of whom Pen knew by face, if not name, were crouched against the top of its walls just like he was. They all had equipment like him, a bow, quiver, and a spear, but none of them were standing up. None of them even had an arrow knocked to the string.

“Hey,” Pen said, reaching out to tap the fellow next to him. “Hey!” He shouted, when the man didn’t respond further, not beyond turning to stare at him, confused and irritated. “Hey,” Pen repeated, “Aren’t you Little Bek?”

“Fuck off,” the man hissed.

“You are!” Pen laughed, a mad sound that drew him several glances. He couldn’t blame them; it surprised even him. He’d just been taken off guard by finding himself crouched next to Little Bek, the man everyone said looked like a baby version of the Twenty-Second Squadron’s Sergeant. He’d transferred squadrons to avoid the nickname, which had sealed his fate surer than a headstone. “Bek,” Pen said, sobering himself, grabbing his shoulder more insistently, “why aren’t we shooting? Shouldn’t we be shooting? Why is everyone hiding?”

“Look for yer damn self!” Little Bek hissed, shaking Pen’s hand off him.

Still wrapped in the comforting coat of surrealist disbelief, Pen did just that. He poked his head up in the valleys between two logs, looking for the enemy.

The first time the great cannons had fired, Pen hadn’t heard it. Or maybe he had, but it wasn’t something he’d been able to pay attention to. It was too loud a sound, too unnatural, for his mind to accept as something that had actually happened. Maybe they’d even fired many times; he had no way of knowing. After he’d seen Jonay die, his head had been stuffed with cotton, leaving just enough room for the gears and cogs to send his legs the right orders for moving.

This time? When he poked his head up above the ramparts and found the field impossibly, cruelly empty? He heard the cannons fire.

His eyes snapped up to a cloud of white. Not where he’d expected it to be, where longbows and siege weapons would sit. Not at the edge of the jungle wall, the furthest point from the fort where an enemy army could have encamped within the clearing.

No, he found them way, way down the road, at the very first turn, which, he knew, was almost a full mile away.

The puffy smoke which had drawn his eyes was broken open an instant later by streaks of black, round spheres of iron spinning forward through the air, and another instant later by the thunderclap BOOM that reached the walls just before the deadly projectiles.

Two balls struck low, digging trenches fifty feet long in the mud before bouncing up and away, filling the air with a peculiar warbling noise. They recoiled into a useless arc that sent them tumbling far, far over the fort. A few other balls went high, zipping past with the sound of a whip cracking an inch from his ear, no doubt annihilating some unfortunate trees behind the fort.

The others struck their targets.

Fifty yards to his right, Pen watched an entire section of the wall snap. It was as if a giant had tied a chain around the base of the wall and given it a firm yank, tearing the logs out of the ground in one fell swoop. Screams and shrapnel filled the air as garrison soldiers fell, buried beneath the walls which had been built to protect them.

Jonay’s dead.

“What in the foulest of hells is going on here?!” Sergeant Bek screamed. Pen turned around just in time to get a faceful of the man’s forearm as he grabbed Pen by the throat, pulling him to eye level. “Did I order you to be a coward?!”

Pen shook his head viciously, suddenly more terrified by the red-faced, spitting fury of the grizzled old veteran than he was any cannonball.

“Then get on your godsdamn feet! And stay that way!”

Pen was dropped as haphazardly as he’d been grabbed, the world spinning as he took a gasp of air. He couldn’t feel the pain in his throat, just like he couldn't feel the pain in his shoulder, but he knew there’d be an awful bruise there soon.

The sarge went up and down the rows, screaming abuse at anyone and everyone he passed, physically hauling up those who refused to respond. Protests constantly followed in his wake, which he ignored at first, expecting them to follow orders. This lasted all the way until another crash of cannonballs hit a nearby portion of the wall, sending everyone ducking back into cover. Only then did Sergeant Bek whirl on those who’d hidden once more, his chest swelling as he took the deepest breath Pen had ever seen any man ever take.

“STAND UP!” He bellowed, spewing bloody spit across a dozen heads. “Stand up, you broke-dick, short-tusked, bastard sons of bastard daughters! You think those cannons give a single fuck how much wood you put between yourselves and them?! No!” He turned on a cowering woman and began to emphasize each worth every word with a swift-footed kick to her ribs. “Get! The! Fuck! Up!”

Slowly, reluctantly, driven by a combination of hard-drilled training and terror for the abuse they might suffer if they dare refused, the Twenty-Second Squadron began to stand. Pen went up with them, straightening his back, grabbing his bow tighter, only to realize that he couldn’t even remember if he’d been one of the ones who’d hidden the second time.

“They can’t take this fort from over there!” Sergeant Bek roared. He gathered himself, his shouts shifting from rage to something subtly different. Furious, but proud. “They’ll have to come and fight us! Even if they knock every wall down around our ears, they’ll have to come in and put their hands on us, and that’s what you’re trained for! That’s what I trained you for! And you’ll win! We’ll win! But only if when they march our way, you’re STANDING! How else are you going to use your bows, your spears, your own two fucking eyes?! Stand up and stay up, Twenty-Second!”

“Sir!” Pen shouted, his voice added to a chorus of others amongst the rattling clap of fists against chests, their salute ringing loud. It was far from the best they’d ever given, a performance that would have shamed them on the parade grounds, but in the face of those cannons roaring down on them, it was at least something.

The sarge began walking up and down the lines, head held high, his fists clasped behind his back like the spitting image of a noble Warrior. The minutes passed by to the tune of manmade thunderclaps, the blue sky filled with the sounds of a raging storm. Other sections of wall began to fall, but to Pen’s disbelieving relief, they fell less and less frequently. The cannons’ shots were being blocked by their own fog, and with the low wind and narrow road they were shooting from, they soon ended up as good as blind. The western road away from the fort now ended in a solid wall of white, from within which occasionally spewed balls of iron that missed more often than they struck.

Then, just like the sarge had said, the cannonfire stopped. From within the fog emerged the shining armor of the enemy, and they were already on the march.

“Here they come!” Sergeant Bek yelled, stuffed to the brim with enthusiasm. “Ready your bows!”

It wasn’t just the Twenty-Second Squadron that responded to the sarge’s cry. All across what remained of the wall, knuckles were tightening on wooden limbs. Pen checked his stolen bow’s string, tugging it back a few times to gauge its strength. It was a good bow, he decided. He felt bad for the woman he’d taken it from. He wondered if she’d live to be mad about it, or if she’d already died, or if she’d been dead when he’d taken it. He… hadn’t checked.

Jonay’s dead.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. They were supposed to join the garrison, get good pay, and stay out of trouble. Their parents had hated the idea, of course, but Pen and Jonay hadn’t seen the problem. The only way they’d be in danger, they’d argued, was if the city had come under attack. And if the city came under attack, well, they’d all be in danger anyway. Sieges weren’t a good thing for anyone. Pen had argued that if the war had come home, they’d be safer in the garrison than with their families, because they’d at least have been given some training with a spear and the right to carry it.

Now he was in the middle of the jungle, bow in hand, staring down an army. Jonay was dead. It had all gone to shit.

The enemy army reached the edge of the clearing, then began to break into pieces. The first group of soldiers turned right, hugging the jungle wall, then the next group broke left, spreading out as well. They were planning to encircle the entire fort, he realized. That hadn’t been a part of the plans. If the enemy tried that, Sergeant Bek had once told him, they were going to run out of the fort and smash the enemy to pieces, breaking each of their little piecemeal squads.

Can’t do that now, Pen thought, looking behind him. The cannons hadn’t destroyed the fort entirely, but they’d broken it. Every gate on the west side had been knocked down, turning any avenue of exit into a jumbled mess of shattered wood. Even if they’d had the numbers to charge out into the open, they wouldn’t have been able to coordinate it, not in time to catch the enemy by surprise.

“Hold steady, and be ready for their advance!” Sergeant Bek called, pacing behind the line of troops. “I’ve read the reports! Their hand-held cannons hit hard, but they can’t loose as fast as a bow! If you stick to your training, if you stand strong and don’t back down, we’ll win the day!”

Pen slipped an arrow from his quiver, resting it on the string. The enemy army continued to pour out of the road, splitting to either side like water spilled over a rock. They refused to get close enough to engage. Pen guessed they wanted to attack from every direction at once, but they could only do that if they had the numbers for it, and he couldn’t tell if they did. The river of steel pouring from the road seemed like the grandest thing he’d ever seen, but there had to be an end to it. The fort was large. Maybe they’d end up spreading themselves too thin? He could only hope.

As the enemy continued to emerge, Pen began to hear the snap of longbows. Craning his neck around, he spotted the garrison’s precious few Archer-Warriors lining the wall, their massive longbows drawn tight. Their arrows, thick as Pen’s wrist and as long as his arm, floated ponderously through the air, easy to track in flight. As they landed, each one speared straight through a traitorous soldiers’ breastplate.

Those shots could do next to nothing to the teeming horde of soldiers as a whole, but the effect they had was obvious. The soldiers began to crouch, trying to make themselves a smaller target, ignoring their marching orders to dodge left or right when they saw a shot incoming, and he even thought he saw many of the enemy’s commanders halting to take shelter behind a raised shield, assuming that they were the targets of the Warrior longbows. Pen didn’t know if the Archer-Warriors were truly skilled enough to pick their targets at such a range, but he was glad the enemy seemed to think so.

“They’re starting to run out of troops,” Sergeant Bek called, raising his sword. “Which means they’ll have to be charging up into range soon. They want to use their fancy toys, but they don’t damn well know they’re fighting the Twenty Second! Remember, find your aim point! Loose well, loose fast, and-”

Four men collapsed, Sergeant Bek among them. Pen grabbed the wall with both hands in a panic as, for a brief moment, Pen thought the floor was giving out beneath them all, some unseen damage completing its work with a series of rattling pops, but then he registered the hiss of something in the air around him. The sounds he was hearing weren’t the wall giving out, but instead the whisper-screech of something whipping by his head, each one accompanied by a thumping crack. More distantly, though growing louder every second, was the thump-thump-thump of gunshots.

“Down!” Someone cried. “They’re shooting at us!”

Pen dropped with the others, hiding behind the palisade. He pressed his cheek to the cool wood, trying to feel some illusion of safety from it, only to recoil in shock. He could feel the shots thumping into it, each one powerful enough to rattle a chunk of the wall. Dozens were striking every second. They were being fired from the furthest part of the clearing, almost a thousand feet away.

He turned to look at Sergeant Bek, wondering what the man would say to see them cowering.

The sarge’s face was opened up, a streak of blood that began as a thumbprint beneath his left brow, widening into a cavernous hole that had been torn from the back of his head. He was staring straight up, his glassy eyes reflecting nothing but the sky.

“We need to shoot!” Someone else shouted. Pen turned towards the voice just in time to watch Saveno jump up, string drawn to her cheek, only for the arrow to tumble from her fingers. She dropped the string a moment later and, without the arrow to absorb its energy, her bow snapped violently, cutting up one of her arms.

Saveno ignored this, reaching down to touch her breastplate. There was a hole in it, right over her sternum, and she put two fingers inside. When she lifted them away, they were wet with blood.

Saveno dropped, tumbling off the back of the palisade walkway. She didn’t make a noise as she struck the ground below.

There was a long silence among the Twenty-Second squadron. Pen traded glances with the others, whose faces were white with fear. Not everyone had the same story as him, of wanting a soldier’s paycheck without the danger, but most did. Their faces were white with fear, their eyes rolling like startled animals.

“Hey,” Pen said, trying to hide the tremble in his words.

One woman broke. She dropped her bow and scrambled for the makeshift stairs by dragging herself on her stomach, keeping herself as far below the parapet as possible while she fled.

“Hey!”

Another soldier followed after her. And then another, and another.

“Hey! No, no no-!”

Pen was knocked aside as Little Bek broke away, one sharp palm driving him to the ground. He cursed as he tried to get back to his feet, only to abandon the effort in favor of curling into a ball, trying to protect himself from being stampeded. He felt feet pummeling him on all sides, thoughtless hands grabbing him for leverage as the soldiers at the wall stumbled over one another, desperate to flee as quickly as possible. His ribs were stomped on, his head kicked, his arms battered and bruised, and he could do nothing to stop it, certain that his pleading screams couldn’t be heard over the panic and cracks of gunshots.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it ended. Pen lifted his head, looking for the rest of the army.

Smoke had begun to rise over the fort, and not just from skywreathe. Fires were beginning to spread among the camp, and in far too many places for it to be the result of a single mistake. Some of the garrison squads were trying to fight the flames, running over with barrels of caught rainwater and working in teams to toss them on the largest of the blazes, but even Pen could see several buildings were already total losses. If any of those fires spread to the wall, there’d be nothing to stop the enemy guns from ripping them all apart. Even the fallen portions were, in their own lumpy way, providing some sort of cover. He didn’t want to know what the garrison would look like when they were hiding behind piles of ash.

Pen rose unsteadily to his feet, only to think better of it when he heard a bullet whip past his head. He ducked back down, behind the safety of the wall, then began to scurry forward on all fours.

His squadron wasn’t the only one that had abandoned the walls. Some had broken at the cannonfire, others at the gunshots, and a few had remained all the way until their comrade’s abandonment had rendered any further bravery pointless. He supposed Sergeant Bek could at least take some pride that the Twenty-Second hadn’t been the first to break.

Just as that thought passed his mind, Pen passed the man. Sergeant Bek was lying on the walkway all askew, limbs positioned exactly where they’d fallen. Flies were already buzzing around the wound in his head, nibbling at the pink flesh which had begun to ooze from it. Distantly, Pen felt a macabre sense of gratitude that he’d spent so long working around sulfur. It had robbed him of his sense of smell.

Reaching over, Pen knelt, shooing the flies away from Sergeant Bek’s face. Gently, reverently, and in full view of the rest of the camp, he shut the man’s eyes. He closed his own eyes as he did so, bending low to murmur a prayer.

And to hide his other hand sliding up the man’s hip, slipping his officer’s sword from its sheath.

Pen opened his eyes as he finished the prayer. He put his hands behind his back as he bowed respectfully. The same motion also served to tuck the sword into the back of his belt, securing it as best as he could.

That done, he crawl-ran over to the crates, then heaved himself over the edge, trying to keep his back to the camp. He didn’t know how many people were looking at him, but with half of a ten-thousand-strong camp running around in a panic, the other half standing in wide-eyed confusion, the odds were good that someone was glancing his way. He didn’t want them to know that he’d stolen the sergeant’s weapon, because he…

What? Pen asked himself, suddenly disgusted. You’re going to sell it? Which hell would you need to throw yourself into to find a buyer? You don’t know shit about selling swords. This is the first time you’ve even held one.

Pen landed on the ground with a grunt, reaching around to adjust the weapon, which had jostled loose. He cinched his belt in an extra notch, hoping it would help keep the sword from slicing up the back of his calves the next time he had to kneel, then looked around, wondering what the hell he was going to do next.

Run for the trees? No, they’ll gun you down. Hide in the mines? For how long? They’re here because they want the sulfur, and we haven’t dug shit. They’ll find you before morning.

With a start, Pen was torn from his thoughts by the realization he’d become nothing more than another one of the gawking onlookers. How many of the milling crowd were thinking similar thoughts to him, wondering how they were going to escape this battle with their lives?

Jonay’s dead. The thought rang in his head for the thousandth time. He tried to force it away, but for the first time since his friend’s death, there was nothing to turn his attention to.

Come on, you bug everyone about everything, Jonay’s voice echoed. You’re telling me you didn’t hear?

He hadn’t been lying when he told Pen that he hadn’t heard anything about this army approaching. But he had heard things. Interesting, exciting things, the sort of story he struggled to keep quiet. He chose the bunk near the sergeant to overhear things just like it, and a few days ago, he’d not been left disappointed.

Pen reached behind his back, wrapping his fist around his stolen sword. Sergeant Bek had been a good sarge. A good man. Ten years past the age when he could have retired and become a fat, happy pensioner, he’d chosen to stick with the garrison. Pen had heard Bek when he was drunk. The thought of sending kids like Pen off to war, of slapping a spear in their hand and waving them on their way, it had disgusted him. He’d stayed with the garrison so he could train up the troops as best he could, giving them the best chance they could ask for when the war showed up on their doorstep. The Twenty-Second had been the only squad in the garrison to drill more than was required of them, and they’d been proud of that.

Pen turned to the walls, peering through the many gaps to the army beyond. Without targets on the wall, the gunfire had slowed to a trickle. He could see a new group of uniforms filtering through the rest. Shining breastplates, open-faced helms, and a gauntlet only on one hand. Their muskets were different from the rest of the army’s, and they marched without concern for their fellow soldier’s formations.

Mercenaries.

Pen wondered where this army would go next. He wondered where those cannons would be pointed after today, who those guns would strike down. He wondered if they would choose the simple path. If they’d march down on the home of his father and mother, of Jonay’s family. He couldn’t see why they wouldn’t. It was the closest city, after all.

Almost without realizing it, Pen’s hand dragged the sword from his belt, twirling it in a spin he’d so many officers do before. They did it to get a feel for the balance, he thought, but it wasn’t like he knew what an unbalanced sword felt like. It just felt right to do. He began stalking across the muddy fort, shoving people out of his way, and openly laughed at himself as he went. Nobody gave a rat’s ass that he was holding an officer’s sword. Why would they have?

“Twenty-Second!” He called, stomping up to his squad. “Twenty-Second!” He yelled again, his voice cracking something fierce, which he didn’t concern himself with. He’d lied to get in the garrison, and everyone knew it. He and Jonay hadn’t wanted to wait until they were sixteen.

A few of his squadmates looked his way. Of the original twenty, there were twelve left. The others had either been shot on the walls or fled, probably bashing open locks in the barracks to grab as much as they could before the fort was overrun. He couldn’t blame them. Bribing the enemy with a cache of hidden goods was one of the many ways to avoid getting brutalized after a battle.

“The fuck?” Kiv asked, eyes narrowing. “You steal Bek’s sword, you shit?”

He used the sword to point towards the mine. “I did. There’s guns in there.”

He had everyone’s attention now. The remnants of the Twenty-Second turned to him, eyes wide.

“I heard it two nights ago,” Pen said. “Colonel Maboran was telling the sarge about it. They shipped in some powder and guns. Not many, but a few. We were going to start training on them once they had enough. It was supposed to be easier to train us, since we’re right at the sulfur. They were gonna mix the powder here, too.”

“How many’s not many?” Jahn demanded. “A hundred? Ten?”

“Don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s more than we have now.”

“The hell it doesn’t matter,” Kiv spat. “Five guns won’t do shit.”

“They’ll kill five traitors. That’s more than we’ve managed so far.”

In the midst of the chaos, twelve soldiers shifted their weight from foot to foot, looking uncertain.

“How many notches have you got on your belt?” Pen asked. “I don’t have any, but I want some. The sarge died calling us cowards for standing up. I don’t know how long it’ll take for his soul to pass, but if I know the sarge, he’s fighting it every step of the way. Probably watching us right now, screaming his head off.”

He could see the squad wavering. They were thinking of Sergeant Bek, who they’d all hated in the strange, loving way only soldiers with a hardass officer knew. Even with his corpse rotting on the wall, it still felt like the man would leap up and start berating them any minute now.

“I’m going to go see how many guns we have,” Pen declared, gesturing toward the mine. “If you want to piss off the sarge’s ghost by showing him we never needed all those drills, come with me.”

Pen started walking towards the mine, his heart thundering. He resisted the urge to turn around and look to see how many had followed after him. He’d already decided he was dead, so it shouldn’t matter. All that mattered was putting a piece of lead in someone’s head.

Pen’s boots dug tracks in the mud as he started down the slope to the mine, hopping down the switchback path like each turn was one big step. Colonel Maboran had told the sarge that the guns were being stored beneath the foreman’s office, because he’d been the only civilian in the camp with guards. It was safe, but not somewhere a soldier would look.

When he reached the log cabin and put a hand on the door, Pen finally allowed himself to glance back, as if he was looking to see who he should hold the door open.

Twelve soldiers had followed him. To his surprise, he realized that Little Bek was among their number. Kiv had left, only to be replaced by the only man who’d abandoned the squad since Pen had joined up. He must have overheard the speech. Gods knew why he’d decided to come with them, minutes after he’d literally trampled Pen, but he was glad to have him.

He threw open the door and stomped inside, listening with half an ear to the startled shouts of the foreman. It was as nice of an office as he’d heard, with glass windows, a finely engraved desk, and plush furniture in each corner. The tools of a miner were scattered strategically around the room as decorations, their disuse revealed by a thin coating of dust. The foreman himself was still behind his desk, shoving papers into a sack.

“Good gods-!” The foreman cried, leaping up. “What are you doing here?! My personal guard was already confiscated, and now you have the gall to waste your time here? You should be defending the walls, not-”

Pen grabbed a miner’s lantern off the man’s desk, twisted it until a click lit the flame within.

With all his strength, he hurled it against the wall.

A woosh filled the room as oil sprayed across the expensive wooden paneling, engulfing it in flames. Drops of liquid fire splattered across the room, lighting the ceiling and furniture alight.

“My god!” The foreman gasped, shoving himself away from his desk. “What have you done? You- you’re traitors! You must have led the enemy here!”

The foreman tried to dash out of the room, but he was an old man. Pen snagged his arm easily, dragging him to a stop.

“I’ve heard,” Pen said, attempting his best rendition of a threatening growl, “that black powder doesn’t play well with fire. Not at all.” He squeezed the man’s arm. “I’m not leaving until we have those guns. Neither are you.”

The foreman’s eyes glanced up and over Pen’s shoulder, flames dancing in the iris of his eye.

“You’ll kill us all,” he whispered.

“Better than getting beaten to death as a slave.”

“The next room!” The foreman cried, raising one withered arm to point at the door behind his desk. “There’s a trap door under the rug. The powder is in there too, I swear it!”

“Who brought them? Who knows how to use them?”

“No one!” The foreman twisted his arm, failing to escape Pen’s grasp. “The caravan didn’t even know what they were carrying! I t-think they were delivered with instructions, but I don’t know! I haven’t looked since Colonel Maboran stuffed it all in there!”

Pen looked back at the squad who had followed him in, swallowing his indecision. Had to look confident.

“Do any of you know how to read?”

After a few muttered negatives, Jahn spoke up tentatively.

“I know my letters well enough. I can sound it out.”

Profoundly relieved he wouldn’t have to force the foreman to read them the papers at knifepoint, Pen dropped his arm. The old man bolted as quick as he was able, pausing only to snatch up the bag full of whatever he’d decided was important enough to salvage.

Pen coughed as the man left, pulling a cloud of oily smoke through the door with him. He crouched to get under the inky smog, hurrying over to the door the foreman had pointed at and flinging it open.

It was a bedroom. One that, at least to Pen’s peasant eye, looked like a nobleman’s room. A tall bed was draped in silken bug netting, sitting underneath a tinted window with a fancy metal hinge that let it swing open to allow a fresh breeze in. There were no other exits, he noted, and the fire was growing hotter behind them.

Pen tore the room’s central rug out of the way, spitefully tossing it to the fire, then jerked open the trap door its removal revealed.

“Why’d you light the damn place on fire?” Jahn asked, kneeling next to him.

Pen lay on his belly and reached into the pit to grab one of the long linen sacks that had been revealed, dropping it with a thump nearby.

“I’ve got no fucking idea what I’m doing,” he admitted matter-of-factly, reaching for another bag.

Rather than panic his squadmates, to his Pen’s utter shock, the admission made them… laugh? They moved to help, each taking on a different task. Little Bek turned around and slammed the door shut on the fire, while Jahn started searching the bags Pen was hauling up for the fabled instructions.

“Gods, these are heavy,” Little Bek said, dragging one of the bags over to the window. He adjusted the couter on his elbow, careful to make sure it was covering his skin, then smashed the window open. He hefted a bag up on his shoulder, then unceremoniously tossed it onto the muddy street outside, hurrying back to grab another.

“How many are in each bag?” Pen asked as he grabbed another.

“Looks like six or seven,” Jahn said, handing off a bag to Little Bek. “I haven’t found the instructions yet.”

“Well I found thirty silver pieces,” Sagna said. Pen glanced up to see the man rummaging through the contents of the foreman’s nightstand drawer, which he’d upended on the man’s bed.

“Not what we’re looking for,” Jahn said.

“Fuck off,” Sagna snapped, pocketing the coins. “If I’m going to die, I’m at least going to die rich.”

“How many gods do you think you can pay off with thirty silver?” Jahn asked.

“Focus,” Pen ordered sharply. He’d finished dragging up the last of the long linen bags, and was now dropping his entire body into the cubby in order to get a better grip on the barrels of powder that were in there. “Anyone found those instructions?”

“Is that them?” Little Bek asked, pointing to a sheet laying next to Pen’s foot.

“Dunno,” he said, snatching it up and handing it to Jahn. “I can’t read. Is that it?”

Jahn held the sheet to the light of the broken window, clearing his throat as he squinted at the tiny letters.

“M-muh… ska- I mean, sket… Musket D-Deliv-ry. Yeer of our Emperor, ah, Twelve-”

“Don’t read out the fucking date,” Sagna snapped, smacking Jahn on the back of the head. “Skip to the middle of the page or somethin’ before you waste all our time.”

Before Jahn could continue, there was a sudden roar from outside. It was a sound that Pen only knew from the parade grounds, on the rare occasions when the city’s Visya had given the garrison permission to drill formations outside the walls. It was a battle cry, thousands of lungs spewing as guttural a yell as they could summon up, tearing their throats raw as they screamed their anger.

“Let’s go!” Pen ordered, yelling over the sudden racket. “Out the window, everyone! We’ve got enough!”

“You sure?”

“Go!”

Pen started shoving people towards the window, encouraging them to throw themselves out into the muddy street. The door to the foreman’s office was starting to leak smoke, wisps of it curling at the edges of the wooden planks. Even if the battle hadn’t just changed outside, they were out of time.

Pen landed roughly on the mud, bruising his arms on the lumpy bags full of guns. He quickly hopped to his feet, turning to help pull the rest of his squad out.

The last member of his squad, Sother, fell out of the window just as the fire spread to the outside wall, sweeping along the logs to engulf the window.

“Shit,” Sothear gasped, gripping his knees as he bent over to catch his breath. “Too close. Way too close.”

“Get that barrel away from the fire,” Jahn said, looking up from the paper. “The fire could set it off, and then we’ll all die.”

Pen rushed over, tipping the foot-tall barrel onto its side to hurriedly roll it away from the flames. “Is it really that sensitive?” He asked. “Shouldn’t it only go off if it’s in a gun?”

“Half these instructions are stories of the ways alchemists have gotten themselves killed making this shit,” Jahn said, slapping the paper. “I haven’t even found how you’re supposed to use it. Only all the ways you can do it wrong.”

“Then keep reading. Everyone else, grab a bag or something.”

“Where we going?” Little Bek asked. He glanced nervously up at the edge of the mine, a deep sense of trepidation obvious on his face. The sounds of battle were drawing closer.

“Up to that little hole over there,” Pen said, gesturing with a bag of guns. “We’ll load the guns, wait ‘till some traitors come by, then see how many shots we can get off before they run us down.”

“Ambushing them ain’t gonna win us the battle,” Sagna muttered.

“We already lost. Now we’re just trying to make the fight easier for the next army these bastards come up against.”

As they picked their way across the muddy pit of a half-finished mine, the chaos of battle was steadily drawing closer. Pen had never been in a battle before, and didn’t know what they ‘should’ sound like, but he could at least get the impression that the rest of the garrison wasn’t just surrendering outright. The sound of gunshots were getting closer and closer, growing loud enough that he had to shout to be heard, and they were slowly being joined by the clash of wood and metal. If he had to guess, the enemy had breached the walls, finally giving the garrison the opportunity to test their spears.

Pen ducked into the shadow of the small cubby in the mine’s walls, waving in everyone after him. He didn’t know much about mining, and didn’t know why the long, thin slot had been dug out of the ground, but he was glad for it. They retreated into the darkness and set their goods down, tearing them open.

“What do we do now?” Pen asked, holding up one of the guns. It didn’t look like the ones the enemy had been using, but that was to be expected. If the traitors already had so many guns, they must have rushed them into service. These weapons were probably far better made.

“Um,” Jahn said, huddling near the entrance of the slot so he had enough light to read by. “Okay. There should be some, uh, packages of powder. Not the barrel of powder, but in the bags with the muskets. It’s got one of the bull-its wrapped in paper, sitting on top of a bit of black powder.”

The squad began rummaging through the supplies, eventually pulling out the little paper packets. A lead ball as wide as Pen’s thumb was half-wrapped in paper, sitting atop a mushy pile of grainy sand. The packaging was thicker than writing paper, and it had been folded over the bottom, though it looked easy enough to tear open.

“So what you do is, you put the rip open the bottom of the package and dump the powder down the barrel. After that you put the ball on top and grab the rod there…”

Pen found himself once more taken by the surreality of his life as he carefully followed Jahn’s instructions. The man was barely able to read, pausing every now and then to spend long, painful seconds sounding out unfamiliar words, and yet he was the sole person they were trusting their lives to. Pen could hear the battle raging outside, the combat growing to a fever pitch that lasted a few short minutes, only to slowly start fading away as, presumably, more and more of the garrison either surrendered or were killed. Outside their narrow cubby, Pen could see the civilian workers beginning to pour down the mine’s slopes, running to the bottom of the pit to try and hide among the heaps of dirt and half-organized piles of supplies.

“I think I’m good,” Pen announced as he pulled the ‘hammer’ of the gun back. He put the gun to his shoulder, carefully aligning the three bits of metal that were supposed to help him aim. His finger rested on the trigger, careful not to pull it too early. If these guns were half as loud as the traitor’s, they’d only get one volley off before the entire army knew where they were.

“I’m ready, too,” Little Bek announced, holding up his musket just like Pen. “I don’t know if I can hit anything with it, though.”

“We’ll wait until they’re close enough that we can't miss.”

“And how long’s that going to be?”

“Gods know,” Pen grumbled, lowering his gun. “Jahn, get back in here and load one for yourself. Actually,” Pen added, an idea occurring to him, “Everyone put your gun down and start loading another one. If we have them all loaded, we can shoot one, drop it, and grab another.”

There was a rustle as the squad began to follow his orders, talking amongst themselves. As Pen grabbed another musket and began to load, Jahn came and sat down next to him, fixing him with a curious look.

“What in the hells happened to you?” The man asked. “Was the Sarge’s sword cursed or something? He take over your soul when you grabbed it?”

Pen touched the weapon, surprised. He’d somehow almost forgotten he’d grabbed it.

“No,” Pen said. “I just realized I was going to die. So I stopped caring if I screw up.”

“Have you?” Jahn grabbed a musket, beginning the long process of loading. “I mean, have you stopped caring? I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Is this what we should be doing? Following some kid into battle?”

“You know we’re going to die, right?” Pen bit open a package of blackpowder, dumping it down a musket’s barrel. “I’m going to get us all killed.”

“Yeah, but is it worth it?”

“I don’t want to end up a slave.” Pen grunted as he pulled the hammer back on the musket, making it ready to fire, then grabbed another one. “But mostly, I want to kill some of them before they get to Ta-Pet. I don’t know if those cannons can knock down a real wall, but I’m worried about it. My parents live near the edge of the city, y’know? They won’t last long.” Pen coughed as he bit open another package of black powder, inadvertently inhaling a puff of the awful stuff. “And,” he said, dropping his voice a touch lower, “Jonay’s parents live there, too. We never told anyone, but if the city ever came under attack, we were gonna desert. Run off to go protect our parents, instead of helping at the walls. And now Jonay’s dead, and I’m not going to be in the city when it comes under attack…” Pen jammed the ball down the barrel as far as he could with his thumb, then reached for the loading rod. This particular musket made an awful screeching noise as he forced the lead down the barrel, making him grimace. “I guess, when it really comes down to it, all I’m trying to get you to help me with is killing traitors. For all I know, the people we shoot might have ended up being the ones that put my parent’s house to the torch. That’s what I’m praying for, anyway.”

As Pen spoke, the conversation in the cubby had slowly died away. By the end of it, the Twenty-Second was dead silent, listening to a fifteen year old boy talking about how he’d accepted his own death, with the only hope left to him being a dream of taking someone with him to the grave.

Pen stopped talking. He felt lightheaded, his thoughts scattered and disconnected. His hands seemed to be moving of their own accord, sliding through the motions of loading musket after musket. Up above, the sounds of battle were finally dying away. The clash of steel and crack of bullets were replaced by angry shouts and the popping of growing fires. He could hear orders being barked almost constantly, the traitors shouting at garrison and civilians alike to lay down their arms or else be shot where they stood.

Pen kept peering out into the light, waiting for some sign of the enemy. He knew they’d show up eventually. The battle was lost, and so many of the miners had fled to the bottom of the pit in a desperate bid to avoid the flying bullets. It was only a matter of time.

“We really just waiting here?” Kai asked. “How are we going to do any good? What if they come down the other side of the mine and start killing folk, and we can’t do a thing about it?”

I don’t know, Pen admitted, if only to himself. Outwardly, he struggled to project perfect confidence.

“They’ll get close eventually,” he said. “If they start on the other side of the mine, people will run this way. All we have to do is wait.”

“You’re the boss,” Kai said, scratching her chin. She chuckled. “For some fuckin’ reason, yeah. You’re the boss.”

Pen ignored her. He kept his focus on the brightly lit mine, nervously running his hands up and down his musket. Minutes ticked by at a glacial pace, the quiet muttering of the squad all he had to convince him that time itself hadn’t frozen. Up at the rim of the mining pit, Pen watched the occasional group of traitorous soldiers march past, every one of them leaning a musket against their shoulder. They all looked like they were in a hurry, but he couldn’t tell why. They marched this way and that without any pattern, often with an officer screaming their heads off at them, but they were too far for him to catch what was being said.

“Shit,” Jahn breathed, leaning forward. “Here they come.”

Pen followed his eyes to the leftmost set of switchbacking trails. A squad of soldiers were staring down from the edge of the mining pit, looking down on the hundreds of huddled civilians below. The enemy squad wasn’t large, maybe fifteen or so soldiers, but at a barked command and gesture from a catfolk holding an officer’s sword, they began to gingerly make their way down the muddy pathway.

“Mercenaries,” Pen breathed, his eyes going beady as he stared at the encroaching soldiers. He recognized their armor from earlier, but now he could get a better look at them. From their helmets to their boots, not a single piece of their gear even vaguely resembled the style of Imperial armors. Their breastplates were slab-faced steel, their helmets unpainted and undecorated. Their missing gauntlets, he realized, were only missing on each soldier’s dominant hand, allowing them to fit their fingers around a musket’s trigger guard. Unlike Imperial soldiers, who wore a hodgepodge of assorted clothing and gambesons under their armor, every single one of the mercenaries wore a vibrantly green short-sleeve tunic, one that matched the color of the jungle canopy. Every piece of equipment they carried, though sized to fit each soldier, was perfectly identical. If he hadn’t been able to see their faces, they could have all been twins.

Their muskets were strange, too. Not like the other traitor’s guns, nor anything like the weapon Pen had clutched in his own hands. They were longer, nearly as tall as the soldiers carrying them, and they had a strange-looking piece of metal mounted in the place where the notched sights were on his own musket. All of them had a long knife attached to the end of their guns, and they kept both hands on the weapon, ready to drop into a spearman’s stance at any moment.

The only exception to this pattern were the two figures at the head of the small column. One was the catfolk man Pen had first spotted. He had a musket identical to the others, but he was wearing a more traditional set of Imperial armor. He carried an officer’s sword, which he occasionally used as a pointer to accentuate his orders, and generally held himself in a manner Pen was very familiar with. A low-ranked soldier, a sergeant, but one who had been given an important task which was causing him no end of stress. He’d seen the look on Sergeant Bek’s face many times, when nobility happened to single him out for some assignment or another.

Beside him walked a short, very strange woman. Pen could only guess that she had a single catfolk grandparent or something similar, because she appeared purely human save for a set of sleek ears and a long tail. She wore no armor beyond a simple, lightweight steel breastplate, and her belt was festooned with leather pouches carrying what looked like a strange variety of short-barreled guns. A more normal musket was slung over her back, but it was tied tightly down, as if she had no intention of using it. Her nose was turned up as she surveyed the civilians below, narrowed eyes appraising the crowd like livestock. Between her imperious bearing and lack of armor, he assumed she was some official of the traitorous empire, likely here to appraise the mine that had just been captured.

“Get ready,” Pen whispered, waving the squad forward. “Everybody grab a musket and line up. Put the extra loaded ones at your feet.”

“We can’t all fit side-to-side,” Jahn whispered back. “Not enough room.”

“Then…” Pen reached for something to say. They’d let him be in charge, and people in charge were supposed to give orders. “Whoever can’t fit up front, grab the muskets and get ready to hand them to the person in front of you. When you give them the last one, you can grab your spear and get ready to charge.”

“Gods,” Sagna whispered as she took a place beside Pen, musket in hand. “Shit. We’re really going to die, aren’t we?”

“If we shoot them all down,” Little Bek whispered back, “do you think we can make a break for it? The miners will probably bolt, and we might be able to escape in the panic. They can’t shoot all of them.”

“If we’re running,” Pen warned, “we’re only running when we’re out of loaded shots. Fire everything you have, and if we’re still alive, sure, run. But I’m here to kill traitors.”

“You get knocked upside the head, kid?” Little Bek asked. “When’d you start wanting to kill people so bad?”

“I did get hit in the head,” Pen said, sliding his eyes over to Little Bek. “Remember? When you stomped all over me while running away?”

Little Bek looked down and away, falling silent.

Pen watched the small enemy squadron work their way down the mining pit, urging them to come closer. It was nearly noon outside, and the shadow of clouds only occasionally passed over the fort. The enemy wouldn’t be able to see them in their little nook, not until it was too late. He just had to hope they got close enough.

“Oh, gods,” someone muttered. The enemy squad had just taken a slight detour, choosing a slightly less steep route to the bottom of the mine.

One that would take them no more than fifty feet from the small cubby they were hidden in.

“Get ready,” Pen ordered, shouldering his musket. He did his best to line up the notch at the end of the barrel with the two little divots that had been etched out close to his face, pressing the wooden weapon deeply into his shoulder. The instructions they’d found were decent enough, but he’d still never fired one of the things. He had no idea what to expect.

“Don’t aim for the mercenaries,” he whispered. “Aim for that officer. Once he’s down, we can start shooting at the others.”

A chorus of quiet ‘yessirs’ filtered back to Pen. A tight little ball twisted itself in his gut at the response, twin knots of pride and anxiety wrapping around one another. He was in charge of something important. Of important people.

This will be the first time an Imperial soldier fired a gun at the enemy, Pen thought. The Adjutant himself said these guns will win the war, right? And here I am, firing the first shot. How’s that for listening in, Jonay?

The enemy continued to advance. As they’d approached the civilians below, they’d unshouldered their muskets, holding them in a loose, easy two-handed grip. Ready to thrust with the knife at the end of the barrel. Pen tracked the officer through the iron dot at the end of his gun, holding his breath. Everyone was waiting for the moment that the man would reach the closest bend of the path, saving their shot until they had the best chance of hitting him with their strange weapons.

Something’s wrong.

The thought came to him suddenly. Unbidden. Without any cause, Pen felt a deep, overwhelming panic begin to seep through his body. It began in his chest, deep in the center of his heart, slithering outward to fill his blood with something truly, profoundly awful.

He tried to gasp.

His lips wouldn’t respond.

He tried to squeeze the trigger.

His finger wouldn’t move.

Nothing was moving.

The world had come to a standstill.

Do not fire.

The words tore through Pen. His body could not twitch, but he felt a deeper self, something far more real than his flesh and bones, begin to quake. The voice was everything, everywhere, a million interwoven voices striking him at once. It was deep and grating, as if the bubbling cesspit of a flooded grave was spitting the words at him.

Pull the trigger, child.

He tried to scream. The second voice was a single, absolute pressure, a titanic force crushing his soul from every direction. It was a woman who held on her tongue the absolute perfection of unyielding authority, her very existence a demand beyond any living creature’s ability to refuse.

The world will change.

He began to thrash, his mind tearing itself at the seams. Every new voice split and pressed him back together again, playing with his soul like a dog does the broken body of a songbird. Every instant, every syllable, each one unmade and remade him, incomprehensible forces plucking his mind from the world and dousing it in the flames of perdition.

You shall not spill the blood of Fate.

What was left of him focused on one spot. On the sensation of cool iron against one finger, hooked around one trigger. He stared at the figure silhouetted in his sights, imagining them outside the home he had grown up in, bloody sword in hand.

What has begun can still be stopped, child.

Pen felt as if his entire arm was unraveling. He threw every ounce of himself into a single desire, wrapping his very soul around the fear he felt for his family, the guilt he felt for his friend’s death.

Your teeth rest against the neck of a dying world. Will you have mercy?

Pen ignored the divinities in his mind. Ignored the gods which sought to take his choice from him, those which grasped and clawed at his immortal self like starving children warring over the last shred of meat.

Rage, little Pen. Become fury. It is what you are. Take solace. I will shelter your soul.

Time began to move. Pen felt his finger tugging, the trigger digging a deeper indentation against his skin.

Those who spite Fate are mine to claim.

He embodies our Domain most of all.

All mortals die. This one sooner than most.

The Concord holds. The choice will be his to make.

Pen cast aside the gods. A dozen voices in his head or a thousand, they didn’t matter. His mother did. His father did. His friends did. He pulled and pulled, every muscle straining against the frozen flow of time, one child throwing his will against a timeless glacier of divine authority.

There was a click.

A spark.

And a little boy named Pen changed Fate.

Time shot into motion with the crack of his musket, white smoke filling the air like morning fog. Six other shots leapt out a moment later, all heading for one target.

Humanity’s first gunfight began.

It would not be its last.

Through the haze, Pen watched the catfolk man spin to the ground, blood spraying the air in a spiral behind him.

“Gun! Another gun!” He yelped, holding his twitching hand out. A musket landed in his palm. He jerked it violently away from the person behind him, throwing it to his shoulder as fast as he could. The catfolk man was dragging himself through the mud with one arm, the other limp and bloody at his side.

To Pen’s shock, the mercenaries the man had commanded did not react in a panic. He’d hoped they might cry out for the shooting to stop, thinking they were a victim of friendly fire, but they proved maddeningly professional. They dropped to their stomachs, crawling rapidly forward to press themselves against the closest switchback rise. The height he had over them left them partially exposed, but they had more cover than they would have otherwise. He could see their hands fly to the pouches at their waist, loading their muskets with the familiarity and ease of endless practice.

Pen barely took the time to aim before he fired off his second shot, filling the cubby with more smoke. A ripple of shots went off just before and after his. All of the sudden, he couldn’t see a single thing through the smoke.

“Move forward!” He yelled, his voice cracking yet again. “Out of the smoke!”

He accepted another musket even as he followed his own orders, plowing through the fog. The instant he could see the enemy again, he threw the musket to his shoulder. The catfolk man was out of sight, so he started searching for the noblewoman instead, vainly hoping she was important enough that her death would hurt the traitor’s cause. She was nowhere in sight. She’d likely fled in the confusion.

Pen turned his aim to the vague area of the mercenaries instead, squeezing off another shot. Mud sprayed in a wide arc a few feet to the left of where he’d aimed, showering one of the enemy soldiers in soil.

“Quick, quick!” He yelled, holding out a hand for another musket. It landed in his palm a moment later. He put it to his cheek, spent a half second aiming, then pulled the trigger.

Instead of white smoke, the world went black. Pain roared through his hands, his arm, and his chest. The pains he could not feel before emerged with a vengeance, every agony shoved to the forefront of his swirling mind. He felt something cool against his head and, after the sensation sluggishly worked its way through his thoughts, realized he was laying on the ground.

Pen peeled open his eyes. Or at least tried to. His right eye was caked in too much blood to open. He lifted his head and looked down at himself.

His right arm was a mess. Shrapnel of iron and wood were embedded in the flesh, with the largest chunks aligned with his bicep. His breastplate had a line of scratches across it, though there were no holes. Blood was dripping down the front of the steel, dribbling out of his neck in small spurts.

He tried to sit up. His abdomen did not answer his commands. All he achieved was flopping ingloriously to one side, a pained groan pulled from his lips.

Someone dropped in front of him, clutching their stomach. Blood welled between their fingers, and through the ringing in his ears, he heard them gasp wetly. It seemed the mercenaries had begun to fire back.

Pen looked up to the entrance of the nook, trying to see down the hill. He couldn’t see a thing from where he lay. Only the haze-filled sky, the unique grey of skywreathe intertwining with black ash of the burning fort.

Then, without warning, a figure darkened the entrance.

The noblewoman had arrived. She held a rapier in one hand, a short musket in the other. She wore an expression unlike any Pen had ever seen. It was a furious grin, an unholy matrimony of wrath and joy.

He tried to warn his squad, but all that came out of his throat was a meaningless gurgle.

The woman ducked just as a shot rang out, the bullet sailing over her head. Pen could not track her movements as she slid forward, her body a blur, her rapier invisible. She struck someone to his right, driving her blade through their throat, then fired her hand-musket, evaporating the head of another. His squad, far too late, began to turn towards her, raising their weapons.

It was over in seconds.

Pen did not know what happened. She wove amongst them as if she were born a wraith, untouchable and malevolent. Her sword sang as it flicked left to right, flinging blood in wide arcs. No one cried out, no one begged for mercy. The walls were painted with long slashes of crimson before any had a chance to so much as a gasp. Twelve soldiers died in the space between breaths.

Pen watched as she squinted into the dark of the cubby, ensuring she was truly alone. Satisfied, a silk cloth flashed into existence in her offhand, which she swiped down her blade in one quick, clean motion.

He rolled away from her, searching for a fallen musket. He willed his left arm to drag itself from underneath his body, reaching for the weapon.

Silver embedded itself in his forearm. Fire shot up the limb as the woman twisted her blade, pinning him to the ground like an insect.

“Were you the architect of this ambush?” She asked. Her accent was thick, but she spoke respectable Kemari.

Pen thrashed with what strength he had left, trying to dislodge the rapier in his arm. All his efforts earned him was another flash of agony, one which pulled a wet, bubbling scream from his throat. Blood drooled from his lips, pooling on the floor beside his head.

“You have an officer’s sword,” the woman noted, crouching to slip Sergeant Bek’s sword from his belt. “But no sheath for it. A field promotion, then?” His one good eye followed her as she glanced over the rest of his squad. “No one else with an officer’s equipment. Judging by the quality of your training, you were not army regulars, yes? Mere members of the garrison.”

Pen dearly wished he had strength enough to spit at her.

“Your ambush was well-prepared,” she said approvingly, as if discussing a training skirmish. “You killed two of our mercenaries. My wife will be irate.” She turned her attention back to him.

Pen flinched away from her glare. He could not help it. There was something deeply, profoundly wrong about her. He thought of the gods who had been screaming in his mind, and wondered why they had allowed a thing like her to exist.

“Are you a loyalist?” She asked, her head tilting as she inspected him. “If you are not, I would like to extend you an offer of employment within the Powdered Lead Mercenaries. To improvise an attack like yours without any understanding of firearms is commendable. You nearly killed someone very, very important.”

He summoned the last of his strength. He dug deep within himself, dragging up every ounce of energy his body had left to offer.

And spat a wad of clotting blood onto her boot.

Pen never saw the swing that killed him.

------------------------------------

Evie

------------------------------------

She wiped her blade clean once more, looking down on the unfortunate azarketi boy. It was a waste. She could tell he’d had honest talent. Attacking a superior force in such a manner had shown a strong will, clever mind, and the bravery necessary to leverage those advantages.

Unfortunately, Sara intended to convince General Borek to ransom as many of the captured enemy as was possible, and with how miniscule a price a random member of the garrison would fetch, that would certainly have included the boy. Evie was not interested in seeing what a talented foe like him could become if given time to develop.

She grabbed one of the muskets off the ground, making a mental note to have someone come collect as many of the misfired musket’s remains as was possible. Hurlish would doubtlessly want to inspect the weapon for the cause of its failure.

Evie was personally more interested in the workings of the surviving musket. She lifted the powder pan, making sure it was not loaded, then spun the weapon around, starting her inspection at the end of the barrel.

It was not rifled. That was promising. Hurlish had not taught the Empire how to rifle their weapons, nor of the principles by which a spinning bullet gained accuracy, and this musket proved it a wise decision. Further, the fact that the rebellion had clearly mimicked what it knew of the Imperial weapons indicated that, even with Sara absent from Tulian, their spies had not yet gained a strong foothold in the city. They were basing their weapons on what they could steal from the Imperials, rather than Tulian proper.

She began walking back down the hill, prying at the musket’s seams with her belt knife. For whatever reason, they had decided to add a cover over the flintlock, hiding the mechanism behind a thin sheet of metal. She popped it off, tossing it aside, and turned the unveiled workings towards the light.

To her surprise, the weapon was, somehow, far more complicated than the Imperial muskets. Instead of the simple piece of folded iron which served as the frizzen spring in every flintlock Evie had seen, the rebellion had developed an inordinately complex series of bent plates, seven of them stacked atop one another and bound with tiny wraps of iron. A ‘leaf spring,’ if she was recalling the correct term. It was one of the products that Tulian smiths had begun to churn out with an eye for export, their far larger versions intended to provide smoother suspension for horse-drawn carriages. The musket used one of these leaf springs rendered in miniature, which seemed like an incredible waste of time and resources. They could have achieved the same result by folding a single iron bar in half.

Did the Empire possess leaf springs prior to this? Evie wondered, running her thumb over the metal. If they did not, that could indicate they have spies among Tulian’s industry already. That, or we have failed to vet our export partners well enough. The rebellion could be surreptitiously purchasing our products via intermediaries.

She paused to rest her musket against her shoulder, pulling one of her notebooks out and flipping to an empty page. She jotted out a quick reminder to have Vesta investigate their trading partners more closely, then slipped the book away, glancing up to check on Mui’s squadron.

They were still kneeling next to the switchback, their rifles loaded and held in a loose, anticipatory grip. Though there were no other dark nooks in the mine capable of hiding an ambush group, they doggedly determined to not be caught unaware again. Those closest to her kept scanning the lip of the mining pit, carefully monitoring for suspicious activity from the shifting crowds, while the others were staring down to the center of the mine with their rifles resting on their knees, waiting for any of the civilians to produce weapons of their own.

For once, Evie was not as concerned about the possibility of attack as her troops. The first ambush, though cleverly executed, had obviously been a hastily-assembled effort, undertaken by rebels entirely unfamiliar with their weapons. If the enemy had any actual ability to use the muskets en masse, they would have done so long ago. Instinct told her that the danger had passed.

Her attention slid from the mercenaries to the man they were protecting. Mui sat in the center of the soldiers, an empty potion bottle still held in one hand. To her surprise, there were already two unfamiliar figures at his side, one pressing their glowing hands to his shoulder, the other standing with their hands clasped behind their back, facing away from her. She had only called for a healer a few short minutes ago, and she hadn’t made it a priority order. She’d thought it would be an hour or more until Mui would have access to a healer.

Evie’s steps hitched as she started inspecting the second figure. It was a human man of middling height, wearing dented, heavily worn armor. His hair was thin and wispy, having gone grey years upon years ago, and his skin was wrinkled by years spent under the sun.

And at his hip was a blacksteel blade, secured by nothing more than a single loop of leather. Two thirds of the way down the length of the blade was a single, impossible chip that had been broken from the enchanted steel.

Evie dropped the musket. She stood stock still, staring at the man’s back.

“Did you really think,” Graf Urs said, turning around with a kind smile on his face, “that I would miss my dear Evie’s first command?”

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!