Called to Battle, Volume 1 Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Journeyman Warcaster Lieutenant Caspi Burrick thought the world of you, and you let her high opinion inflate your already bloated self-esteem and impair your judgment. Stumbling around under the weight of that praise-engorged head of yours, you failed her, you failed me, and you failed Cygnar.”

  Strangewayes stood silent. Was that how it had happened? He knew he had a bit of an ego, but had he really been so cocksure that he’d forgotten how to properly secure a camp? Forgotten what a life was worth? Forgotten what he’d always known, that trained, trusted soldiers were by far the most valuable assets on the field?

  Oh, Morrow, he had. He’d told Burrick that, but she hadn’t needed to work very hard to convince him his own training and experience were more valuable than her rare, precious gifts. He’d pulled her lifeless body from her bloodied armor himself, and he realized he’d rather die weeping under the icy-hot blade of a Greylord than ever have to do that again.

  Brisbane continued to glare into his eyes.

  Strangewayes couldn’t read the man, but he was convinced that Major Brisbane could read him.

  Brisbane spoke. “Captain, I’ve seen you in the thick of a fight, pounding hot metal while even hotter metal flies past you. I’ve watched you turn wrecks into war machines using nothing more than a wrench and blasphemy. I’ve seen you shout lesser mechaniks into the wall and back out the other side as masters. I’ve seen the best designs of Cygnar’s engineers roll from the line, take a beating, and come away improved under your hand. Better men than I have quailed at the thought of ordering you to change anything about yourself, but the time has come for me to pound a defect out of your design.

  “Captain Strangewayes, if you have to write this in scar tissue across the inside of your eyelids, I want you to remember one thing: from this day forward, as you work your mechanikal miracles on Cygnar’s materiel assets, don’t do it out of love for those machines. Do it out of a deep and abiding love for what those machines were built to protect.”

  Strangewayes felt a flush rise to his face. A heat grew in his chest, spread to his fingers, and burned at his feet. Not the heat of anger, but something else. He opened his mouth to speak and found the sensation almost overpowering. Words failed him.

  Brisbane’s eyes narrowed.

  Overpowering . . . and undeniable. This, this was what a true mechanik needed to have burning at his core. How could it be expressed?

  Strangewayes chose the only two words he could find, and he knew Brisbane would see in them the answer both he and Cygnar required.

  “Yes, sir.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Howard Tayler writes and illustrates Schlock Mercenary (schlockmercenary.com), co-hosts the Writing Excuses podcast with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Mary Robinette Kowal (writingexcuses.com), and writes fantasy, horror, and science fiction in such free time as remains. He lives with his wife (and business partner, and fellow writer) Sandra and their four children in Orem, Utah.

  He plays Trollbloods, Circle, Minions, Mercenaries, and Cygnar, but not nearly so often as he would like.

  DESTINY OF A BULLET

  BY LARRY CORREIA

  Volgorod, Kos Volozk, Khador, 607 AR

  He had once hidden in a pile of garbage for three days in order to kill a man. That job had been completed during a summer in Imer. It had been miserably hot, and insects had feasted on him continuously. Stinking of filth, badly dehydrated, sunburned, and sick, he had still made the two-hundred-yard shot on demand the instant his target had shown his head. One round. Nice and clean.

  That job had been preferable to this one. For two days and two nights now he had hidden, watching the blank white of a high mountain pass. He was chilled to the bone but couldn’t light a fire for risk of being seen. It must have been because of the unrelenting cold that he found himself thinking wistfully about the desert. The northern woods of Khador had never been intended for man. Fools lived here simply because they were too stupid to leave and too stubborn to die.

  He had come all this way to put a bullet into a particular one of those stubborn fools.

  Some folks called him a mercenary, others a hired gun. Most would argue he was nothing more than an assassin. Regardless of their opinion of how he earned his coin, everyone knew Kell Bailoch was the finest rifleman in western Immoren. Give him a clean shot and the gods themselves couldn’t save you.

  The hard part was the waiting. The sniper let his mind wander.

  He had spotted them coming long before they saw him. Picking his potential employer out from the crowd had been easy. The hooded woman walked between two men in long cloaks. The common folk were deferential and moved quickly out of the woman’s path. The two men were trained killers, and they couldn’t help but act like it, with wary eyes constantly shifting as they scanned the busy market. Their predatory nature made them stand out among the shoppers.

  Kell Bailoch preferred to blend in. It made his job easier. He kept his wide-brimmed hat low over his eyes and covered the lower half of his face with a scarf, masking his Cygnaran features.

  He stepped from the shadows and followed the three discreetly for a time. The gently falling snow barely stifled the merchants’ enthusiasm as they loudly hawked their wares. Fall in northern Khador was like winter in any other kingdom. Once he was certain this wasn’t an elaborate trap and they were isolated from potential eavesdroppers, Bailoch walked up behind the kayazy’s guards and waited to be noticed.

  It didn’t take long. The first bodyguard turned, his hand inside his cloak and surely resting on a long dagger. The second moved immediately in front of the woman. They were quick, but he noted that neither looked toward the rooftops. Sloppy.

  “What do you want?” the first guard demanded.

  “I wish to speak with Mistress Padorin about a job,” Bailoch answered. His Khadoran was unaccented, as bland as his appearance. “I was informed she’s looking for me.”

  The woman turned, giving him a glimpse of pale skin and blue eyes inside the hood. She was rather young for the leader of a ruthless trade organization. “You are the one I was told about?” she asked.

  Bailoch tipped his hat. The survivors of Talon Company could always be counted on for referrals.

  “You’re shorter than I expected.” She appraised him. “Are you as good as they say?”

  “Are you as rich as they say?”

  She nodded.

  “Then I’m good enough.”

  It was just another job, though colder than most. There had been so many jobs over the years they had begun to run together. Half up front, find a way to reach the target, take the shot, collect the remainder. Sometimes that meant investigation, preparation, disguises, infiltration, and cover identities; other times it meant good field craft or an elevated position and some patience. In the end it was all the same: get a line of sight and let Silence work.

  When he had been a sixteen-year-old long gunner recruit, a marksmanship instructor had given him the most important bit of advice of his entire life. The bullet wanted to hit the target. That was its destiny. It was the shooter’s weakness that stood in its way.

  Shifting to keep the circulation flowing to his extremities, he checked the pass again. The target would have to come through it eventually. He was certain that approaching the isolated and fortified cabin of a paranoid master rifleman would have been a stupid move. Staking out this position was the surer, but far more uncomfortable, method to get a shot. In most of western Immoren this would already be considered a harsh winter, but to the rugged Kossites of the Scarsfell, the real snows hadn’t begun falling yet. The target was a hunter who would be looking for game as long as possible in anticipation of the long winter, and when he did, he would pass through here, ready for the hunt.

  Bailoch knew the feeling well.

  Sivasha Padorin stood next to the roaring fireplace, staring into the flames. Bailoch’s earlier assumption had been correct. She was young, twenty at the most, and more than li
kely too inexperienced for this line of work. He’d been informed that her father and older brothers had recently been murdered, casualties in the constant struggle between the factions of the Khadoran underworld. The political nuances were difficult for a foreigner to grasp, but it was a constant source of work. Surely it had been a surprise when the family business had fallen on her.

  Bailoch doubted she would survive long in the cutthroat butchery that passed for kayazy business, but until then her gold would spend as well as any other’s.

  They were alone inside one of the dozens of anonymous properties she owned around the city. Her bodyguards waited outside. That told Bailoch this was something she wished dealt with as discreetly as possible.

  “Your target is a horrible man. He used to work for my father. We were very close once, but I want him dead for what he did to my family. He is a beast, a killer.” She was slight, but he heard steel in her voice. “A year ago he betrayed my family. My father trusted this man, treated him like a brother. Yet he turned on us and gave our most vital secrets to competitors. My brother was murdered because of him. For such treachery there can be no—”

  Bailoch held up one hand. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me.”

  She looked up from the fire, surprised. “You do not care what evil he has done?”

  “The bullet doesn’t care. Why should I?”

  Sivasha stopped. He had put her off balance. It was apparent she had already thought through what she was going to say to her hired assassin, as if she needed to justify her decision. “Very well. His name is Malko Varnke.”

  “You’ve got local hires. Why do you need me?”

  “You are not the first I have hired for this work; he has killed all I’ve sent before. Varnke is a Kossite, winter-born in the deepest wilds of Vardenska, where the tribes still live by the old ways. He is one with the woods, as alert as the wolves he used to hunt for a living. Since he has wronged my family he has been living in the forest, where no one can catch him unawares. And he is one of the finest shots in the Motherland.”

  “It won’t be a problem.”

  She paused for a long time. “He is Gifted. I do not know the particulars, as they were a guarded secret, but my father said he once served with the Greylords Covenant.”

  An arcanist? Magic had a way of making jobs complicated. “My fee just went up.”

  “Whatever is necessary. I cannot rest until I know Malko Varnke is dead.”

  For some reason he found himself taking pity on the girl, a rare thing indeed. “A word of advice: I’ve been doing this a long time. People die. Sometimes you’re the one to kill them. Sometimes you need somebody else to do it for you. No shame in that. You don’t need to share your reasons. Giving the order is the same as pulling the trigger. It just takes will.”

  “I have the will!” she snapped.

  Perhaps she’d last longer than he’d first thought. “Good. That and ten thousand gold koltinas will put this man in the ground.”

  The thick furs he’d bought kept his body heat trapped. He’d also purchased a compact device from an alchemist in Korsk that produced a small measure of warmth for a few hours each time its capacitor was wound. It kept his extremities from freezing off during the nights. The device had cost quite a bit, but it was worth it: frostbite in his trigger finger could ruin everything.

  He allowed himself sleep in short naps. It was a risk he had to take, as there was no one to share a watch and no way of knowing when the target would try to cross the pass. The wolves and bears of the Scarsfell would more than likely avoid the smell of human waste and gun oil. There were other, far more dangerous and unnatural predators in these woods, but they were rare, and he was a light sleeper.

  In his dreams, Bailoch saw ballistic calculations, wind speed, and trajectories, but never the faces of the hundreds he’d killed.

  The cold grew deepest a few hours before dawn. When he raised his head and the bear skin lifted, icy air shocked him fully awake. Bailoch immediately scanned the snow below, looking for any fresh disturbances in the perfect white expanse. The snow was so reflective that even a bit of moonlight enabled him to see that there was nothing larger than a few animal tracks. It was exactly as he remembered it, and he had memorized every detail of this terrain.

  He shook a fresh inch of snow from atop the furs. The shivering came next. It would pass. Bailoch wasn’t worried about uncontrollable shaking causing him to miss. Only rookies tried to hold perfectly still when shooting. Everyone shook to some degree anyway; breathing, muscle tremors, even a heartbeat could cause the sights to move. Making a difficult shot was all about knowing your body’s rhythms and firing at the correct time. An experienced rifleman didn’t try to hold his breath—that only increased the tremors. The key was to shoot on the respiratory pause. Inhale. Exhale. Squeeze. Bang.

  Only there was no bang with Silence. There was no click of the hammer being cocked, no snap of the firing pin, and certainly no alchemical roar as the blasting powder components met. His rifle was cloaked in magic that rendered it totally silent. The only noise was the buzz of the passing bullet, which anyone who had been shot at could tell you sounded like angry bees, and the impact, which sounded rather like hitting a melon with a club.

  After scanning the pass, Bailoch checked his rifle. Moisture tended to condense on the blued steel during the night, and he carefully wiped it down with an oiled cloth. Dexar Sirac himself had enchanted Silence years ago, and to this day Bailoch had no clue if that enchantment would keep his rifle from rusting. He’d never taken the chance to a find out. A rifleman took good care of his body and even better care of his rifle.

  Bailoch moved slowly as he worked the cloth into every metallic nook. Big movements would attract the eye of anyone who was hunting him. He opened Silence’s action, then removed the heavy, paper-cased round from the chamber, took out his cleaning rod, and gave the barrel a quick pass to make sure no moisture had condensed and frozen in the rifling during the night. You always clean from the breach, never the muzzle. Cleaning from the muzzle could scratch the crown, and that could affect accuracy. He’d earned a reputation for being deadly, and he knew that wasn’t just because he was talented; it was because he was methodical. The world held lots of talented snipers, but few lived as long as he had.

  The oil cloth rubbed over the magical runes engraved on the barrel and Bailoch paused. Once, long ago, a name had been carved there. It had belonged to a woman who he had . . . known. But she was gone, scrubbed from his mind just as her name had been scrubbed from the steel. The sniper dismissed the thought and returned to his weapon maintenance. The scope rings were secure. The screws were tight. He rechecked the chamber—clear—and pulled the trigger to dry fire. On a normal rifle he’d be able to listen for the metallic ring of the firing pin, but that was impossible with Silence. Bailoch was so familiar with this rifle that he operated entirely by feel, and everything felt just as it should. When the job was through, he would reward himself with a proper detail strip and deep cleaning of Silence’s action.

  He checked the round of ammunition before reloading. Bailoch used only the best components. The special paper casing was free of blemish or tarnish. The soft lead bullet was jacketed with a thin coat of copper, which kept his rifling from fouling nearly as quickly. Less fouling meant more accurate shooting should he find himself in a protracted engagement.

  Bailoch couldn’t see it, and he was certainly no Golden Crucible alchemist, but he knew that the casing held two sealed bags, each filled with an alchemical solution. When these bags were pierced by the firing pin and the solutions intermingled they would ignite instantly and burn fast. That would create a growing gas pressure. It was the miracle of blasting powder, the wonder of the modern age.

  Seeking the path of least resistance, the expanding gases would shove the bullet down the barrel at great speed and, if he was doing what he was supposed to, right into his target. The still-burning blasting powder entering the atmosphere was the cause o
f muzzle blast, only that wasn’t an issue with Silence’s enchantments. That made getting away, or making another shot without getting killed, much easier for him.

  Bailoch may not have understood the magic behind alchemy, but putting bullets into things was what he’d been born to do.

  There was a limit to how much pressure blasting powder could create inside a firearm and how fast it could hurl a projectile. The day alchemists figured out how to make it push a bullet faster was the day Kell Bailoch became far more dangerous. Gravity was a jealous constant that limited his range. Wind could push his speeding projectiles off course. In a mountain valley like this it could be gusting in two different directions across that distance. When the time came he would have only seconds to judge the distance and the wind, adjust his hold, and take the shot.

  Silence checked, cleaned, and reloaded, Bailoch finally tended to his own physical needs. After relieving himself, taking a swig from his canteen, and gnawing on some ulk jerky, the sniper went back to his frozen vigil as the sun came up.

  In the distance, a lone figure appeared, trudging through the snow.

  It was time.

  Sivasha Padorin poured him a drink and then poured one for herself. “To a successful hunt.”

  Bailoch ignored the glass she set in front of him and reached out for the other one. A clever assassin would poison the glass rather than the drink. He took up the tumbler and eyed the clear liquid suspiciously.

  “You are a paranoid man, Bailoch.” Sivasha smiled, took the glass originally intended for him, and pounded down the drink in one gulp. She grimaced, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Some of my father’s finest vyatka. It is older than I am.”

  He gave her an appreciative nod. “To a successful hunt.” The favored drink of the Khadorans, made from fermented potatoes, could be used to strip the paint from a warjack. It burned going down and then sat like a fiery lump in his stomach, making him sweat. He could see why the people of the frozen north liked the stuff.