Matabar

Book II. Chapter 6 - "By tonight"

“I’ll be back by tonight,” Ardi whispered, pulling Tess into a gentle hug.

She was holding a length of fabric she’d bought yesterday at a shop near the Lake Port of Delpas. Shaia had promised to sew Tess a light summer dress before Ardan and his fiancée left for Shamtur. It was a blue calico cloth with white spots that resembled tiny clouds.

Tess had volunteered to help with the sewing, so she was now heading toward Ardi’s mother’s workshop, which was located on the first floor on the side opposite the kitchen.

The girl was clenching the fabric so tightly that crumpled folds had stretched several handspans into the cloth, but Tess didn’t betray even a hint of nervousness in her expression.

“Go on, then,” was all she answered, pecking her fiancé on the cheek. “I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll be back soon,” Ardi replied as he had the last time, then put on his short-brimmed hat—a style categorically out of place in the Foothill Province—and stepped outside.

Kelly had left in the morning to escort Erti to his treatment. The doctors were trying new medications to treat his anemia and, apparently, they were helping Erti, but Ardi had a rather different opinion on that. Considering how quickly his younger brother had grown and how much broader his shoulders had become, perhaps it wasn’t the doctors helping in the fight against his anemia after all.

He brushed away thoughts of the coming day.

After setting them aside, Ardan slipped out of the house and just as quietly scurried across the yard, disappearing behind the fence. The street greeted him with its morning... tranquility. Unlike in Evergale, no one was running around, carrying bundles of firewood or sacks of coal, no one was hurrying with their buckets to the wells, and they were especially not hitching their horses to set out under the scorching sun.

No, the only bit of variety among the identical fences—it was hard to tell where one ended and another began—was a sullenly rumbling blue truck with a large white sign reading “Delpas City Administration Post,” and an equally sullen, grumbling postman. Clambering out of the cab, he grabbed several newspapers and deftly flung them over the fences, landing them neatly on the porches.

And of course, nothing here resembled the Markov Canal embankment, where life never quieted, even at night.

To his surprise, Ardi felt a pang of nostalgia for the dark waters of that canal, splashing inside its constricting granite confines. He remembered the bright lights of restaurant and cafe signs, and of course, the renovated “Bruce’s Jazz Bar.” But all of that was back there somewhere—far, far beyond the horizon. It was to the east, where the Swallow Ocean whipped up whitecaps on the breakers.

“Just like in the Alcade,” Ardi whispered to himself. There, in his native mountains, whenever he’d descended into the forests, he’d always gazed longingly at the snow-capped peaks, and once he’d found himself among the rocks and snow again, he’d been unable to tear his eyes away from the forest expanses surrounding the mountain foothills and their many ravines and plateaus.

Turning the corner, Ardan came upon a battered, partially-rusted “Derks.” But next to the rather typical Second Chancery automobile stood not only Nil Kralis, who was dressed in “uniform” this time—black pants, a black shirt with metal buttons, a black jacket, and a black leather belt with a polished metal buckle shaped like the Empire’s coat of arms: a two-headed phoenix.

Beside the Gardener, three other men were peacefully smoking. Two of them were relatively young, and one was much older, around forty-five or fifty. With cheap cigarettes clamped between their teeth, they were discussing something in low voices (low, at least, to human ears):

“Couldn’t the bosses find any other engineers? We can only have one from Shinker’s bureau?” Asked the older one.

“Shinker installed equipment at all the major factories,” Kralis replied with a shrug, flicking ash onto the dusty, hard-packed road. Asphalt hadn’t made it out here. Not yet. “No point dragging anyone else into this.”

“Uh-huh. Which is why the husband and older brother of his acquaintance are coming with us,” one of the Cloaks muttered, shaking his head dejectedly.

“Think there’ll be problems?”

“There won’t.”

All four men whirled around at the sound of Ardi’s voice as he approached his colleagues. For a couple of moments, they sized each other up, then they began to shake hands.

“Darius,” the older man under whose hat sweaty, gray hair was plastered to a low forehead introduced himself.

“Ard.”

“Zbig,” offered one of the younger operatives, extending his hand, and Ardi could feel familiar calluses on his palm—the same kind Alexander had. A shooter, then.

“Ard.”

The third turned out to be the youngest—Ardi deduced as much from his cocky, cheerful eyes and the affected seriousness of a face decorated with only a few scars. Saber and bayonet scars.

“Saveliy,” he introduced himself.

“Ard.”

They gave no ranks or surnames. Apparently, it had to do with some rule in the protocol for interactions between Cloaks from different units. Ardi didn’t remember the details very well—during his six months of service to the Crown, he’d had other things to do besides thoroughly studying the Black House charter.

The Cloaks exchanged glances again, then turned toward the “Derks” in unison, and each of them let their gaze sweep over Ardi’s figure.

He was gradually gaining back the weight he’d lost after a full half-year of regularly using invigorating brews, but he was still far from his former weight. Which, on the whole, didn’t improve matters.

“At the moment, I’m more worried about whether we’ll all fit,” Darius grumbled, removing his hat and wiping away sweat.

“Ard will sit up front, with me and his staff,” Kralis—the Gardener—said.

The remaining three men shrugged and, after somehow squeezing into the relatively tight cabin, ending up shoulder to shoulder, they got going. Not on the first try, of course. The “Derks” muttered smoky curses in its incomprehensible iron tongue, then shuddered and finally rolled forward.

Ardi prudently unclipped his battered grimoire from his belt and placed it on his lap so it wouldn’t get crumpled. Amazingly, after all his adventures, including an unplanned swim in the Niewa (twice), encounters with demons (three of them), falls from great heights (too many to count), and all the other incidents, it still hadn’t crumbled to dust. And it felt odd to even call it a grimoire. It was an old notebook meant for jotting things down, gifted to him at the age of six by his father...

It had a scarlet leather cover stretched over the thin wooden boards of the binding, stiff, cheap paper that almost resembled outdated parchment, and gray threads stitching the pages together, with frayed bits of glue falling off.

But perhaps that was exactly why Ardan wasn’t in a hurry to swap out his old friend for something more suitable to his way of life. The book on his lap served as a kind of shard of memory from a past dear to him, one he could always keep with him. Like his father’s knife. Or like the oak branch from his childhood home that had become his staff.

Incidentally, Ardi still wasn’t rushing to inscribe any seals on his staff, either. He still saw no point in it—for work, he used only a rather small arsenal of military magic seals which, along with their most important modifications, he could quite easily learn by heart. And for Star Engineering tasks, transferring seals onto a staff wasn’t required at all.

And back to the grimoire: buying a new one would mean parting with no less than seventy exes at Spell Market prices. That would ensure it had at least four hundred pages of quality paper that you wouldn’t have to work hard to avoid tearing. You also wouldn’t have to worry that the ink wouldn’t soak in but would instead blot and bleed out all over the page. And it’d definitely have a cover made of solid boards and good leather with a stiff spine.

A solid, workaday grimoire without any embossing, monograms or other embellishments—he’d seen enough of those in the Grand and in Aversky’s personal collection.

But seventy exes was not a small sum, and Ardi kept putting off that purchase. He would still have to buy a year’s worth of ink, not to mention the necessary literature, sheets for his engineering work, maybe some instruments—to say nothing of his life together with Tess and their upcoming move.

Ardan cast a quick glance toward Kralis. Without taking his eyes off the road, the man was discussing something trivial with his colleagues.

If not for the exorbitant expenses awaiting Ardan, he would have never agreed to this kind of venture. Even with the Colonel requesting it personally. And it wasn’t just about the Shanti’Ra—Ardi was simply tired of risking life and limb nearly every month, sometimes even more often than that.

He absolutely couldn’t stand adventures.

It was only a shame that in the Sleeping Spirits’ dream, the feeling wasn’t mutual…

So the more-than-generous payment for his trip to the loading station was the only—and very self-serving—motive for Ard’s actions.

“What about the army guys?” Zbig asked midway through their conversation.

Kralis turned his left wrist slightly and looked at his watch. He wore it with the face on the inside of his wrist, as all military officers did so they could check the time without letting go of their rifles.

Ardi’s father had worn his watch the same way.

“They’re most likely already in position,” Kralis frowned.

And as if to confirm the officer’s words, at the city limits, which they reached in a scant twenty minutes—Ardi was so used to the Metropolis’ scale that he couldn’t shake the feeling that they should’ve maybe reached the adjacent district by now—two heavy trucks were waiting for them. They were nearly larger than fire engines, but instead of metal panels, they were covered by green canvas tarps stretched over oval frames of bent iron rods.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Given their sheer size, each of them could probably hold around forty soldiers.

Kralis pulled up beside the soldiers’ commander. He wore a dark green tunic—indicating that he was part of the infantry—with a captain’s shoulder epaulettes, a weather-beaten face, and sharp, piercing eyes beneath bushy eyebrows that were starting to gray.

“Denis,” Kralis greeted curtly, rolling down the window in the brisk, no-nonsense manner of all servicemen.

“Nil,” the captain replied in kind, and peering into the cabin, added just as curtly, “Gentlemen.”

“Captain,” the Cloaks boomed out almost in unison, while Ardi merely gave him a brief nod.

Unlike the red-tunic-wearing city guards, the Black House had no bad blood with the army—quite the opposite, in fact. The Second Chancery and the military often had to work together. The “hot peace” along the Empire’s thousands of kilometers of northern border had forced these two organizations to join forces.

“The shaman of the Shanti’Ra demanded that we come without mages,” the captain, of course, pulled out a filter-less cigarette. “That tusked creature refused to even speak to our man unless we promised to meet that condition.”

Ardi wasn’t the least bit stung by such wording. Moreover, if he’d had his way—and if his upbringing had allowed it—he’d have used a far cruder term for one of the leaders of an orc warband/tribe.

“And yet you have a mage with you,” the army man finished pointedly.

“There’s no need to worry about that,” Kralis replied laconically, then pointed at the trucks. “Where are the mechanics?”

“The Ley-engineers?” The captain tugged at the hem of his tunic. “They should’ve been here already. Looks like they’re running late. Eternal Angels, Nil, why is it that every time we deal with civilians, punctuality ends up forgotten?”

“A philosophical question.”

It was obvious that the captain and the Gardener knew each other well and had worked together more than once.

“We have a complication, Captain Gamid.”

“That goes without saying,” replied the captain. His last name was commonly used in the Ral foothills. He removed his peaked cap and wiped his hair with a kerchief. The steppe sun spared no one. “Out with it.”

“Our colleague here”—Kralis gave a brief nod toward Ardi—“has close ties with the mechanics.”

The captain shifted his gaze to Ardi and swore.

“Shit.”

“Quite so.”

Gamid put his cap back on, thoughtfully placing the same kerchief inside it.

“We’ll figure something out. What worries me more right now is that the Shanti’Ra apparently agreed to talks only so as not to sour relations with us. You know that for almost a year now, we’ve been chasing nothing but poachers and bandits across the steppe, which works to our advantage and-”

“Denis,” Kralis interrupted the captain. “Remember the briefing, alright? Control your thoughts and speech.” The Gardener turned to Ardi. “And you, my dear colleague… Don’t make me file a report noting your boundless curiosity.”

Ardan offered no reaction to what he’d just heard, but he did rein in his Witch’s Gaze.

Even so, what he’d overheard was enough to make him think. The Shanti’Ra had left the settlers and those trying to develop the Alcade plain alone? That sounded unbelievable, which meant that there had to be a very, very weighty reason for such a change of heart.

“The Blacksmiths?” Kralis changed the subject.

Ardi knew from Boris who these “Blacksmiths” were. That was what the army called their artillery units amongst themselves. Apparently, if Ardan recalled correctly, it was because they were always tinkering with iron, fire and explosions.

“They’ve been hauling the long barrels into position all night,” the captain said, casting another displeased look at his watch. “At the signal, they’ll blanket everything that’s there. But in close quarters, we might end up within shrapnel range, so... it’s rough, Nil. If you lot can’t come to terms with the orcs, then we’ll secure the site in a wide ring, after which the Blacksmiths will flood them with lead. All of them. Both the Northerners and the Shanti’Ra.”

“Understood.”

“So you’d better reach an agreement… Oh, and here come the civilians now.”

Ardi glanced in the rearview mirror. Coming over the hill was a small truck much like the mail van, only gray and bearing a big advertisement: “Shinker Design Bureau. Ley energy in every home!”

At the wheel sat Anna’s elder brother, and beside him was a slightly anxious, somewhat pale Percy. They pulled up behind the Cloaks’ “Derks,” which kept them from seeing Ardi.

Gamid exchanged a few words with the engineers, clarifying the reason for their delay and confirming their readiness to take part in the trip. After acquiring the necessary answers and paperwork, the captain nodded to Kralis, who was watching the proceedings through the side mirror. Then Gamid twirled his hand in the air and the army trucks shuddered, spouting thick, dark clouds of diesel fumes. Their engines roared like a herd of horses—ones with a bad cough—and Gamid dashed to the cab of the nearest truck and clambered inside.

Their convoy, clattering loudly enough to be heard for kilometers, began rolling down the slope, from which the low trees of the southern forest were already visible.

Delpas, like Evergale, sat on a kind of border with the steppe. Thanks to Blue Lake, there was enough moisture in the soil and plenty of rain to give life to a sparse woodland. But at the same time, the city was still surrounded by steppe from the north, west and east.

“Open the glove box,” Kralis told Ardan, not taking his eyes off the winding, dusty road that lacked any semblance of pavement.

Ardi popped the latch and reached inside, pulling out a plain bandana.

“It’s not exactly a capital-issue mask, but it’ll do,” Kralis explained. “Put it over your face when we arrive. That way, we won’t have to answer stupid questions.”

“Kralis.”

“What, Ard?”

“Do you think, considering the fact that I grew up with Percy and Mr. Fedor Polskih is the brother of a close friend of mine… Is there even any point to a mask? Or maybe you have some way to make me look shorter and hide my staff as well?”

The Cloaks in the back cursed, and Kralis looked like he’d bitten into something very sour.

“Wear it for form’s sake,” he insisted. “Civilians can assume whatever they like.”

Ardi sighed and shrugged. For form’s sake, then.

“They did sign the non-disclosure papers, right?” Ardan asked.

“They did,” Kralis confirmed. “But experience has shown us that no matter how tightly papers can seal someone’s mouth, an ill-timed and equally ill-fated key sometimes finds its way to that lock in the form of strong, cheap liquor—often at the worst possible moment. And… I understand that you don’t want certain people in your household finding out about your rather… specific line of work, Ard. Believe me, we’re just as keen to avoid unnecessary rumors spreading around town.”

Ardan sighed again and, folding the bandana into a triangle, tied a tight knot behind his neck, then flipped the wide part over his chest. That way, he could pull it up over his face at any moment.

Kralis, who’d been watching this out of the corner of his eye, snorted wryly, “Cowboy.”

They traveled in silence the rest of the way.

***

Their odd convoy halted by a small section of the woods bordering a relatively narrow river that flowed into Blue Lake. It was here, at a bend in the river, that a loading station had been set up. Trains laden with ore, lumber, meat, and other goods came here. Their cargo would be offloaded and transferred onto barges, which would go down the river, which had been artificially deepened and widened, toward Blue Lake. There they’d shift the cargo onto heavier, larger barges that could cross the lake and enter the mouth of the Blue River, which flowed out of the lake and reached all the way to the bay. There, the river barges would offload the goods again, which in turn would be loaded onto enormous ships that, skirting the Tai Peninsula, would then sail along the Southern Sea Trade Route.

This was why Delpas, Blue Lake, and this loading station were very important nodes for the Empire’s trade and industry. Especially when it came to Ertalain ore. Only the largest and purest crystals were transported by train; the bulk of it went only by water.

In fact, there was still about a kilometer and a half to go through the forest to reach the station itself. Clearly, no one planned to drive right up to it for an entirely understandable reason that Captain Gamid had mentioned in advance.

The soldiers disembarked first. There turned out to be even more of them than Ardan had initially thought. They were young guys around his age—about a hundred of them—with bayonets fixed to their rifles, in dark green uniforms. They split into groups and, together with their commanders, headed into the woods, where they soon began blending into the foliage—which explained the color of their uniforms.

Ardi pulled the bandana up over his face and, along with the other Cloaks, got out of the car. Percy, loaded down with two boxes of tools, wearing his work boots and the same inexpensive clothes as before, came over to them, as did Fedor Polskih, who looked the same as always—a square jaw, a strong-willed chin, with a solid build and intelligent eyes. Eyes that only needed to skim over Ardan’s figure briefly in order for boundless surprise to flash in them, and a moment later, equally deep doubt.

Fedor simply could not believe that his guess might be right and that the person now standing next to him was indeed Ard Egobar, whom he’d known for over five years and still remembered as a “kid.”

“Kralis,” Gamid pulled a map from a tube and spread it out on the car’s hood. “Pay attention. The Shanti’Ra are here.” The captain jabbed a finger at a red circle about seven hundred meters from the loading station. “They’re unlikely to come close to the site because they surely already know that the Blacksmiths are in position.”

“So if anything happens, they’ll cover two sectors at once,” the Gardener nodded. Ardi couldn’t help marveling at the fact that someone only a couple of years older than himself possessed enough knowledge and competence to command such an operation. “Alright, Gamid. Understood. How much time will we have if we need to send a signal?”

“Remember the shrapnel radius?”

“Twenty-five to forty meters,” Kralis nodded again. “How big are the guns?”

“One hundred and fifty millimeters. About forty barrels. So…”

“…So in just a minute, they’ll reduce that entire quadrant to scorched earth,” Kralis muttered. “Nasty stuff, Denis.”

“Is it ever any different, Nil?”

“Never,” Kralis agreed, then turned to Percy and Fedor. “Alright, gentlemen engineers. Your duties are the simplest. You stay quiet. Pretend you don’t exist in this world. If everything goes well and we make it to the loading station, then you-”

“Must make sure that-” Percy began, but Fedor stepped on his toe.

“First of all—you stay quiet,” Kralis repeated without much enthusiasm. “At the station, you must make sure that the northern orcs, the Shangra’Ar, didn’t mess anything up with the machinery and generators. That’s it. You don’t stick your necks out beyond that. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” Fedor answered for both of them in his deep, booming bass. It sounded like throwing a stone into a well.

“Excellent,” Kralis slapped the map and turned to the captain. “I need to talk with my colleagues, then we’re moving out.”

“Checkpoint time?”

“Half an hour.”

“Alright.”

The captain stepped away to join his officers, taking the engineers with him. Fedor kept furtively glancing back toward Ardan, while Percy paid no attention to what was going on and only grew more and more pale by the second.

He probably wasn’t a coward, it was just that… he’d led an ordinary life, free from demons, chimeras, murderers, psychopaths, conspirators, and magic-wielding Firstborn.

And who, when you took that into account, was more envious of whom?

“My dear colleague,” Kralis addressed Ardan. “The shaman will only speak with you. We need to pull out the governor’s son and, if possible, the crystals. If you see it’s not working out—use them as a bargaining chip.”

Ardan raised an eyebrow in surprise. Obviously, the governor’s son was still the governor’s son, and an aristocrat to boot, but Ertalain crystals… The Empire would never agree to negotiate with someone who had encroached on its primary resource, if only to avoid establishing such a precedent.

“As a bargaining chip, huh?” Ardi repeated, and looked at the backs of the departing engineers.

They had far too many tools with them to just “check the equipment,” and the equipment could be checked once the station was secured. And calling up so many artillery pieces for a few hundred orcs sounded downright strange.

Not to mention the fact that several Cloaks had come along with him, rather than the Gardener alone. And all three were operatives.

A fifty-year-old operative being sent out on a field mission? That would only make sense if Darius possessed a very specific set of skills. And judging by the telltale burn scars that could sometimes be glimpsed beneath the short sleeves of his summer jacket, one could guess that Darius belonged to that rare group of people who had devoted their lives to flammable and explosive substances. And he must have been pretty good at it, too, since he’d not only lived to such a ripe old age, but had even kept all his limbs intact, fingers included.

“There’s something else at the station, isn’t there?”

Kralis scowled.

“Yes,” the Gardener didn’t deny the obvious. “Just don’t ask what. But if things go south, keep away from warehouse number four.”

Wonderful… At the loading station linking the main mines of the Alcade Mountains with the rest of the Empire, there was something. Something so valuable that the Crown was willing to give up a great deal for it—and, if necessary, bury it under a mountain of corpses. Judging by the presence of the engineers, that something was probably some sort of Ley mechanism…

If one disregarded the previous series of events in the Metropolis, one could write it off as a mere coincidence, but if you thought about it, then…

“Why couldn’t you say that from the start?” Ardan sighed.

“Would you have agreed to come with us if I had?” Kralis snorted. “Even with the promise of your reward?”

“No,” Ardi answered honestly.

“Well, there’s your answer. Now let’s go have a chat with the orcs.”

Ardi placed his grimoire back onto the chains at his belt and slotted the accumulators into their rings. Last time, he’d been unprepared for an encounter with the Shanti’Ra, but he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.