His tent was on the side of one of the mountain ridges that frames Surkov's Alley. It meant he had to sleep at an incline, but he also had a vantage over most of the valley, and right now he watched the Wings of Adom camp. The Wings' camp sat closer to the front than the Adran, and they held the east side of the valley with their flank against the river.
Reports were that the Wings were holding their front every day, but were forced to withdraw when the Adrans retreated so that the Kez couldn't flank them.
Tamas would have been furious had he been here to see it, that the mercenaries were putting forth a better defensive than the Adran army.
A pair of Wings brigadiers were making their way from their own camp toward the big, white-and-blue command tent at the rear of the Adran army. A few other officers seemed to be heading in the same direction. A meeting, it seemed. If Tamas were here, Taniel would be at that meeting.
A great many things were different with Tamas gone.
Not far from the command tent was the mess tent. In most armies the cooking was done by soldiers for their company, or sometimes even their squad. Here at the front, all the cooking was being done by one chef, or so the rumor went.
Mihali.
It wasn't hard to pick out the tall, fat figure making his way between the cookfires, checking on his small regiment of female assistants. Taniel frowned. Who was this man who claimed he was a god? Taniel had seen a god's face – Kresimir's – and put a bullet through his eye. Kresimir had looked like a god. Mihali did not.
Taniel took his jacket and headed down the mountainside toward the command tent.
Soldiers seemed to watch him everywhere he went. Some tipped their hats. Some saluted. Some just stared as he walked by, but Taniel didn't welcome the attention. Was he some kind of curiosity for them to gawk at? For years he'd always felt at home in the army, but now, with Tamas and the powder mages gone, Taniel felt alone, a foreigner.
He wondered what he looked like to them. He smelled like the alley behind a butcher, and he probably looked like one too. His body was covered in nicks and cuts, his black hair singed from a powder blast yesterday, his face dirty and bruised.
And he wondered what he was. He'd managed to escape serious injury in five hard, bloody fights. He'd been grazed by bullets seven times in the last two days. He'd been inches from being run through on half a dozen occasions. Was he just that fast? Or something else?
That kind of luck didn't happen. It was uncanny. Had it been like this in Fatrasta? No, he'd never been in an ongoing fight this bloody. He remembered ripping a rib from the Warden in Adopest and wondered if this luck was somehow connected to his newfound strength.
He reached the command tent, ignoring the guard who asked him to stop.
The tent was filled. There were perhaps twenty officers inside – what seemed like all the Wings brigadiers and Adran generals and colonels. Voices were raised, fists being shaken. Taniel slipped along the edge of the tent, trying to make some kind of sense of the argument.
He caught sight of a familiar face and moved up through the crowd.
Colonel Etan was ten years older than Taniel. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and brown hair cut short over a flat, ugly face. Not that anyone would tell him that he was ugly. The grenadiers of the Twelfth Brigade were the biggest, strongest men in the Adran army and one word against their colonel would find you at odds with all two thousand of them.
"What's going on?" Taniel whispered.
Colonel Etan gave him a quick glance. "Something about … " He paused to look again. "Taniel? Pit, Taniel, I heard you'd joined us at the front, but I didn't believe it. Where have you been?"
"Later," Taniel said. "What's the argument about?"
Etan's welcoming grin faded. "A messenger from the Kez. Demands that we surrender."
"So?" Taniel snorted. "There's nothing to argue about. No surrender."
"I agree, but some of the higher-ups don't. Something has them scared."
"Of course they're scared. They've been retreating from every fight! If they'd hold the line just once, we could break these Kez bastards."
"It's not that," Etan said. "The Kez are claiming they have Kresimir on their side. Not just in spirit, either, but that he's there in their camp!"
Taniel felt his whole body go cold. "Oh, pit."
"Are you all right? You don't look well."
"Kresimir can't be there. I killed him myself."
Etan's attention was now fully on Taniel. "You … killed him? I heard some wild rumors of a fight on South Pike before it collapsed, but you … "
"Yes," Taniel said. "I put a bullet in his eye and his heart. Watched him go down in a spray of godly blood."
"General Ket!" Etan shouted. "General Ket!" He grabbed Taniel's arm and shoved his way through the assembled officers. They all scrambled to get clear of him – no one stood their ground before a grenadier of his size.
"No, Etan … "
Etan pulled him out into the opening in the middle of the room, where the unfriendly faces of two dozen officers waited in tense expectation. "Tell them what you told me," Etan said to Taniel.
Taniel was once again terribly conscious of his frayed, bloody clothes and dirty face. The room seemed to spin slightly, the air hot and close.
He cleared his throat. "Kresimir is dead," Taniel said. "I killed him myself."
The clamor of voices made his head hurt worse than the sound of a musket volley. He looked around, trying to find an ally. He saw General Ket in the group, but she was no friend of his. Where was General Hilanska?
"Let him speak!" a woman shouted. Brigadier Abrax, of the Wings mercenaries. She was ten years younger than Taniel's father with a face twice as severe and short hair cropped above her ears. Her uniform was white, with red-and-gold trim.
General Ket took the sudden silence to sneer at Taniel. "You can't kill a god."
"I did," Taniel said. "I watched him die. I fired two ensorcelled bullets. I saw them hit. Saw him crumple. I was on that mountain when it began to collapse."
"Oh?" Ket demanded. "Then how'd you get down?"
Taniel opened his mouth, only to shut it again. How did he get down? The last thing he remembered was cradling Ka-poel's unconscious body as the building they were in began to buckle and fall.
"That's what I thought," Ket said. "The powder has gone to your head."
"He's a hero, sir!" Colonel Etan said.
"Even heroes can go mad! Provosts! Get him out of here! This meeting is no place for a captain."
Taniel was shoved to the side by someone, and he heard another voice say, "Kresimir isn't here! What kind of poppycock is that?"
"I've seen him."
Everything went still. Taniel recognized that voice. General Hilanska.
Hilanska was still seated while everyone else stood. He wore his dress uniform, decked out in dozens of medals, the collar freshly starched, his empty left sleeve pinned to his chest. The general looked tired, his immense weight sagging over the edge of the chair, his face pulled down from weariness.
Hilanska went on, his voice deep and level. "You've all seen him! At the parley this morning. He was there, you bloody fools, and you ignored him. The man at the back, who didn't speak. He wore a gold mask with only one eyehole. If any of you had bothered to listen, the Wings Privileged said he reeked of sorcery, more powerful than any they'd ever witnessed."
"That was only a Privileged," Ket said. "Not a god."
Hilanska struggled to his feet. "Call me mad, Ket. I dare you. Tamas believed Kresimir had returned. He believed Two-Shot here had shot him. But the bullets weren't fatal. Kresimir is, after all, a god."
Ket regarded Hilanska warily. "And yet Tamas still led the Seventh and Ninth behind the Kez lines to their deaths."
"He's not dead," Taniel said, feeling his blood rise.
Ket turned on him. "Says our dead field marshal's whelp."
"Whelp?" Taniel's vision went blurry. "I've killed hundreds of men. I've nearly held that damned line out there by myself the last two days. I feel like I'm the only one who wants to win this war, and you call me a whelp?"
Ket spat at his feet. "You'll take all the credit yourself? What an ego! Just because you sprang from Tamas's loins doesn't mean you have his skill, boy."
Taniel could barely think. He'd been on the front line every day fighting for this? Rage took control of him. "I'll kill you, you stupid bitch!"
Taniel felt his muscles tense to leap at General Ket, when something struck him in the side of the head. He staggered and tried to run at Ket. Hands grabbed him, arms pulled him away. He was hit again in the head. Thrashing and yelling, he was forced out of the command tent.
"Taniel," he heard Colonel Etan say in his ear, "calm down, Taniel, please!"
It took the sight of a half-dozen sharpened pikes leveled at his face to bring Taniel back from the brink of rage. The provosts – Adran military police – behind those pikes wore expressions that said they'd poke him full of holes in an instant.
"That's enough of that," Etan said, pushing away a pike. He was able to get the provosts to back off a few steps.
Now that the rage had passed, Taniel felt cold, weak. His whole body began to shake. Had he really just called Ket a bitch in front of the entire General Staff? What had come over him?