The Crimson Campaign

Inside, he could see a pair of children playing next to a large fireplace. A boy and a girl, maybe eight and ten years of age. The window was open to take advantage of the stiff evening winds. Adamat moved to the next window that looked into a kitchen.

A man with a long mustache and burly shoulders stood next to the kitchen table, frowning at Bo. The woman sat at the table, busy with her knitting.

“Just ten minutes of your time,” Bo was saying. He drew a stack of banknotes from his pocket and tossed it on the table.

The woman dropped her knitting needles and held a hand to her mouth. The man sputtered over the amount. Bo drew another stack and added it to the first.

“Whatever you say,” the man said. “Just let me get my coat.”

The door opened, and Adamat was forced to press himself against the wall, hoping the darkness would conceal him from Bo’s eyes.

Bo followed the man out into the alleyway and gestured for him to come down farther. They weren’t ten feet from Adamat when they stopped.

“Now what’s this all about?” the man asked.

Bo lifted his gloved fingers in the air and snapped them.

The man’s head twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees. Bo deftly stepped out of the way as the body staggered and fell. He seemed to regard the dead man for a few moments before he turned and headed back toward the carriage.

Adamat couldn’t help himself. He’d seen gruesome murders in his time, and bad men do terrible things, but the abruptness… He stepped from the darkness. “What the pit is the meaning of this?” he hissed.

“Keep walking.” Bo grabbed him by the arm in a surprisingly firm grip and spun him about, pushing him toward the carriage.

Adamat had no choice but to allow himself to be dragged along. The carriage was soon heading down the street, and Adamat struggled to find a voice to express what he’d just seen. The murder had been quick and cold. A trained assassin couldn’t have done it better.

“Here,” Bo said. He grasped something beneath his shirt and yanked, then tossed it into Adamat’s lap. “Take this. I don’t want the bloody thing anymore.”

Adamat stared down at the ruby-red jewel sitting in his lap. “Is that the demon’s carbuncle?” He wasn’t sure if he wanted to touch it.

“It is,” Bo said.

“I thought you had to kill Tamas,” Adamat said. “How did…?”

Bo looked rather pleased with himself. Not at all like someone who’d just snapped a man’s neck not two dozen paces from his wife and children. “I had to avenge the king. That man there was the headsman who loaded Manhouch into the guillotine.”

Adamat finally drew a handkerchief from his pocket and lifted the jewel to see it better by the light of the streetlamps outside the carriage. It was warm — no, hot — to the touch and seemed to throb with its own inner light. He wondered how much a jeweler would pay for a sorcerous piece of art like this.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Bo said.

“It can’t have been that simple. A god made the precedence for the gaes. You can’t just kill the executioner and have it be all. Can you?”

“Kresimir was just a man,” Bo said. His eyes narrowed as if at something that made him angry. “Just a damned man with a bloody huge amount of power. He may be smarter than most, and have more time to think and plan, but even the so-called gods make mistakes.”

“Is this thing… safe?” Adamat asked.

“Quite.”

Adamat wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. “Why didn’t you just tell Tamas?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Bo said. “I only had the thought recently, and I would have looked a damn fool if his soldiers had killed an innocent man only for the carbuncle not to come off.”

“You weren’t sure? What the bloody pit kind of man —?”

Bo held up his hand and gave Adamat a cold, long stare. “At what point have you ever gotten the impression that there are good people in the royal cabal?”

“You’ve given me that impression,” Adamat said. He swallowed hard. “Yes. You have.”

“Well, get past it.” Bo turned toward the carriage window. “Because I’m not a good man. Not in the slightest. I just pay my debts.”

Adamat watched the Privileged for several minutes. Was that regret in his voice? A frown at the edges of his mouth? It was impossible to tell. Members of the royal cabal were dangerous men, he reminded himself, and were not to be trusted.

He just hoped that Bo really was on his side.

CHAPTER 22

Tamas judged he had two hours before night fell and the Kez dragoons would be close enough to scout his position.

The sound of his soldiers chopping great trees on the edge of the Hune Dora Forest echoed across the floodplains, and teams of men dragged the trees by hand across the dusty grassland to where Tamas had decided to make his stand. Closer, the scrape of a thousand shovels on sandy dirt made Tamas’s skin crawl. He hated that sound. It felt like someone scraping a nail across his molars.