The Silvered by Tanya Huff

Author:Tanya Huff [Huff, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780756407438
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Reiter had just swallowed his last mouthful of toasted bread when the screaming started. Unwilling to spend the morning kicking around the garrison, he’d gone back into the city just after dawn looking for an alehouse one of the other officers had mentioned enjoying down in the working class part of town. “Safe enough,” he’d said. “We haven’t changed their lives any. At their pay grade, it’s all pretty much shit. Why should they care which bastards they work for?”

In the older cities of the empire, Reiter would have gone to a coffee house. If such a place existed in Abyek, he wouldn’t be able to afford it, given the prices of the commonplace out by the new border. Fortunately, he had no problem settling for ale and was pleasantly surprised to find he could have a mug of tea so strong it nearly ate the plating off the spoon. In spite of speaking no Pyrahn and the waiter no Imperial, they’d managed to find enough common ground for him to order and negotiate a price in Imperial coin. Commerce always found a way.

The eggs had been just the way he liked, the s the mill to keep producing. Theer like ausage a little short of actual meat but still tasty, and if he couldn’t get a decent biscuit and gravy, he was reasonably content with the thick slices of toasted bread that replaced that staple in this part of the world. The meal had cost more than he’d normally put down—one way or another that could be tracked back to the war—but his back pay had caught up to him in Abyek and he had nothing else to drop it on. As he cut and chewed and swallowed, he tried not to think of it as a last meal. He wasn’t particularly successful. He didn’t need to be one of Colonel Korshan’s company, smart enough to invent rockets and balloons and whatnot, to know he’d be lucky to survive reporting back without the sixth mage. A smarter man might think about deserting, but he’d given the army his entire adult life; if he couldn’t believe they’d give him back a fair chance to be heard, then he’d thrown that life away. Besides, the Soothsayers had tossed him into this pile of shit. There was nothing that said they wouldn’t find him if he ran, and that made reporting his failure the smarter thing to do.

Although, he allowed, spreading honey on a fourth slice of toasted bread, that didn’t mean he was in a hurry to get it done.

At the first scream, he put his knife and fork down on his empty plate. At the second, he stood, and threw a handful of coin on the table. As three, four, and five heralded a rush of noise blending terror and rage under what sounded like explosions, he ran for the door. People out on the street stared toward the rising smoke, but they’d just lost a war and had learned better than to run toward a battle.

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