A canvas-jacketed soldier fumbled with his rifle behind a low stone wall near the library campus of Hilomnos.

  He and his partner had rushed to the sound of gunfire when first they’d heard it, on a routine patrol earlier. That partner then lay slumped over dead, his lifeless body sprawling out of cover, still bleeding from a hole through the back of his neck.

  The soldier had tried his best to return fire when the shots first came toward him, but he hadn’t truly seen their attacks, and the choked gurgling of his comrade severely discouraged him surveilling the situation more accurately. Instead he’d fired the whole of his magazine half-blind, surely missing wide with every shot, racking the bolt back and forth and pulling the trigger as fast as he could.

  He struggled then to reload, as the corpse by his side did much to impede concentration. The gunfire slowed before long, and quieted in his immediate vicinity. But the shouts filled with strange, unknown syllables ever increased, making it clear the firefight’s diminishing intensity did not, actually, bode well.

  His heart in his mouth, he traded the gun from hand to hand in frustration. Working against the tremors of his hands and fingers, at least he found purchase on the smooth wood and metal enough to keep it steady. He pressed the first bullets into its open breach, one after another, slower than he had been trained, before realizing his shift in posture had protruded the barrel of his rifle up above the low height of his cover.

  He slunk down further into concealment, praying he’d done so before the unseen enemy singled him out as a target. The gunfire had ceased almost entirely by the time he finished pressing the ammunition into the magazine.

  But before he could even chamber a fresh round, he heard what sounded like the slow beating of large feathered wings, and the hissing of sparks and cinders on cold stone, and a smell of burning.

  * * *

  Roskvir made the death quick, with a single downward thrust of his sjaelsvaben through the soldier’s chest. He stood two feet firm above him on the stone wall he’d used as cover, looking down into the dead man’s eyes as they glazed over. He stilled, and the rifle and spare bullets fell from his hands, clattering to the ground.

  He took no pleasure in the victory, just as he hadn’t hundreds of times before.

  Back in the library’s forecourt, he saw his company already assessing their own wounded from the firefight. It was truly over, then, with the soldier he’d flown down upon being the very last to mop up. Though sounds of battle continued raging on in the city beneath the cliff, they’d carved out an area of comparative respite.

  He unfolded his wings, feathers of red and orange heat scattering sparks over the ground once more, and beat back to his company. Landing, he willed his wings gone, while keeping his halo and glaive, and at once the intense, burning pain between his shoulder blades began to fade.

  “Report,” he ordered the nearest officer. The enemy’s resistance had been brief but intense, a distinct departure from the fighting they’d experienced throughout most of their storming of the beach and city, and Roskvir could already himself count many wounded and dead from his marines.

  The leutnant surveyed the company himself, tallying and calculating. Squad leaders were directing their subordinates to occupy positions in a small perimeter around the forecourt, reloading, or tending to the wounded.

  “There were about forty of those ones with the purple-accent uniforms, the real deal. They didn’t give any ground, not like the brown-jackets have.” He ran a hand through his hair. “By my counts, they cost us sixty, maybe just as many severely wounded… that’s what it costs to storm a position like this in ten minutes, without anything to soften it up before.”

  “Very well, sergeant. And the vizeadmiral?”

  “She made it inside the fortress within the first minute. We’ve yet to hear from her, but… well, you know her.”

  “The library.”

  The sergeant paused, before realizing Roskvir was correcting him.

  “Yes, sir. Either way, we’re waiting on her return. Should I muster a squad to go after her, now that we’ve regrouped?”

  “No, that would just complicate things… she works best alone,” Roskvir said – though of course, that was only half the truth. “We will await her outside. Our primary concern is defending this position from potential counterattack until her return.”

  The leutnant nodded, then gestured for his squad to the forecourt perimeter.

  Roskvir could sense Thjali again. Her presence had dipped out of the range for a few minutes during the firefight, but no longer.

  He hated the way it felt, as he always had.

  Ten minutes ago, he’d sensed the presences of at least three dozen other sjaelsvaben, too, none of them terrible or disgusting and all unique and unfamiliar.

  Over the course of ten minutes, those presences had disappeared. Sometimes one-by-one, sometimes in groups. Often, to the sound of gunfire, but some of those enemy soldiers defending the forecourt had sjalesvaben that enabled them to resist weapons of gunpowder.

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  Most of those he’d felt extinguish more personally. Their wielders dead at the end of his own red-fire blade.

  He breathed deep, surveying the bodies strewn all around him. They would have killed him, he knew, had they the chance. More than sixty of his men lay dead as a testament to that.

  He did his best to retreat into meditative stoicism as he’d been trained.

  It was difficult.

  But in time, he managed, as he always had.

  Thjali’s presence was almost upon them, loud as it was both in a literal and psychic sense. All-too familiar music again grew nearer, music that sounded weird and wrong every time he’d heard it.

  Then the grand doors to the fortress-library’s main entrance opened, and she was there, black fire in her hand and above her head, unnerving music in the air and in his ears, as if violating them.

  Three human-shaped forms flanked her. With unnatural, jerking lunges, keeping pace with her arrogant stride. The men of his company cringed at the sight of those forms, though they tried not to show it.

  And Roskvir, too, was afraid. He was never not afraid, when he felt her presence.

  But his concentration shifted to something else that came from the darkness of the library alongside Thjali.

  That the vizeadmiral pushed along, in front of her: a child.

  She was small enough to be six, perhaps seven years old. She wore a wreath woven, green-leaved branches, while the fine white embroidery of her dress was bloodstained around the skirt’s bottom hem.

  Thjali pushed her forward with gruff disinterest. As the two of them came into the light, the child quailed at the sight of the dead soldiers piled around the forecourt, evident horror and fear deepening.

  Thjali stopped in front of Roskvir, and he nodded to her deference, masking all forms of displeasure. He made a point to ignore Thjali’s thralls as they shambled to a stop around him, while the music of Thjali’s sjalesvaben continued humming.

  “Kapit?nleutnant.”

  “Vizeadmiral,” Roskvir replied. With anyone else of her rank, he would’ve saluted, but he knew Thjali wouldn’t make anything of it. “I assume everything went smoothly?”

  The girl looked back at him, with eyes both hardened and afraid. At once Roskvir felt as if he’d met the eyes of someone who must’ve been much older.

  “Obviously,” said Thajli. She made no effort to reciprocate interest in his prong of the operation, despite the hundred or more dead soldiers across the plaza.

  “I suppose I don’t know what I was expecting,” he said.

  He wondered what could be so important about one child to have merited an action of such scope and urgency, although he didn’t doubt she was indeed important.

  “His excellency the shogun will be pleased. That is all that concerns us.”

  “Of course, vizeadmiral. What are our directions now? My briefing didn’t extend beyond the seizure of the position.”

  “You and the marines are to escort me back to the forward operations center on the beachhead, immediately.”

  Roskvir blinked.

  “We’ve sixty wounded soldiers here, vizeadmiral, some gravely so,” he said. “We need to entrench, conduct triage, at least for the most serious injuries—“

  He stopped, seeing Thjali’s emotionless regard.

  Her terrible muted music stretched over the brief void between words, as well as the continued off-rhythm of semi-distant gunfire.

  “If you truly desire, leave a token force with the wounded. The rest, along with you, are withdrawing, with me immediately.”

  “We’re far past the front line. However weak the enemy, any we leave behind here will be at serious risk of envelopment, and destruction.”

  “I’m afraid that’s within tolerances, according to my mission briefing. In fact, the loss of my entire command was within tolerances, as long as I returned with this thing in one piece,” Thjali replied, giving the child a small shove. The girl stumbled slightly before catching her balance.

  Her demeanor had changed since first emerging from the library, Roskvir noticed. As she regained her footing, she looked as if she were attempting to appear calm, as best she could. Just as he’d been trying himself, moments ago.

  He turned back to Thjali.

  The death of her entire command was tolerable. They both well understood that he was a part of Thjali’s command, as she so referred.

  Her style was never anything less than straightforward.

  He hated her, as did she him, even if a vague respect for each other’s martial prowess kept tensions sometimes cooled. But it was at times such as those that his hatred was clarified.

  He’d no way of knowing if an immediate withdrawal regardless of field conditions was actually outlined in Thjali’s mission briefing. But questioning orders from the shogun would be dangerous, whether they were real or fabricated, and they both knew she had him cornered.

  “If we’re on the same page, then, muster the uninjured,” said Thjali, gloating silently. “We’ll skirt the fighting, as per his excellency’s instructions.”

  Then she continued past him, her thralls lurching back into motion after her.

  He spit on the ground, as soon as she was out of earshot,

  His hatred flared hotter, outmaneuvering that cultivated stoicism. At the lethal consequences to her selfishness, that she almost seemed to relish. And at the disgusting, unnatural power of her sjaelsvaben, which as well she took pleasure in flaunting.

  But one other, new reason fed his hate, then, he realized, as it simmered back down to a low broil.

  He couldn’t help but watch her departure with a glare of brazen disgust, as Thjali pressed her hostage forward with such unnecessary roughness. When the child was offering no form of resistance, and was all the while still so clearly frightened. The gesture was almost an insignificant matter, in context of all Thjali’s other crimes. But it struck him that way all the same.

  Certainly, he wanted nothing more than to escape from Thjali’s command at the first opportunity. But she would never promote him away, he knew.

  Most likely, instead, he thought — as he had, many times before — the sooner the better that she died in battle, sacrificed strategically by a superior, as cosmic irony would have most appropriate. All the world would be better for it, if the day ever came. Both ally and enemy.

  Such a thought was worthy of court-martial, perhaps even execution. But of all he’d considered that blood-soaked morning, for that treasonous belief he had the fewest reservations.

  "In order to further their own faction within the Imperial Japanese inter-service rivalry, relatively junior officers resorted to the assassinations of members of the rival faction and their supporters in government. With both factions being opposed to the peace faction, this period has become known as the era of "government by assassination".

  Wikipedia