Page 1 of Baron Bolt

PROLOGUE

June, 1815. Somewhere south of Brussels

Thunder came rumbling through the stone before it came through the air. It hit his spine first, a shudder in the rock under his shoulder blades. Then the sound broke over the house above him like a broadside. Somewhere close, metal sang against metal, a high, sweet wire-note that had no business in any storm Captain Damian Archer had ever slept through.

He did not open his eyes.

Training. A man who woke in an unknown place kept his eyes shut and his breathing slow and let his ears do the work. The first thing an enemy watched for was the flutter of waking. He lay still, his breath shallow as he tried to pull himself together.

Cold. On his back on something hard and level, harder than ground, colder than ground. Stone?

Weight on him. A great deal of it, across his legs and his chest and one arm, pinning him as a fallen horse pins a man, except a horse was warm and this was not.

The air smelled of tallow and vinegar and wet earth. Under all of it, thick as a coat, the smell he knew better than any other smell in the world. Three days after a battle, downwind of the field. That smell.

Where am I?

Nothing answered. He went looking for the last thing he knew. That road ended at …

The guns. He had been watching the guns. French pieces on the rise to their front, close enough that he could see the crews serving them, the sponge and the worm and the rammer, men working neatly and fast at the business of killing his company. Smoke in banks. His throat raw with powder and shouting. A boy beside him. An ensign, seventeen if he was a day, holding his ground in the manner of the very young, too frightened to know he ought to be frightened. The boy had wandered two steps forward of where any of them should have been standing, craning at the battery as though it were a review.

Damian had seen the gunner step to the breech. He had seen the portfire come down. No time to shout, so he had not shouted. He had taken the ensign by the crossbelt and slung him bodily back and behind. In doing it he had turned himself, chest and left shoulder, square to the guns.

The world became noise. Not sound. This noise was different. It struck him and went through him. He remembered the ground coming up sideways, and the sky lying flat and white above the smoke, and no pain at all, which was how he had known. He had seen enough men on their backs looking surprised at a white sky. He had thought it as calmly as any order he had ever given.

I am dying.

He had wanted to tell the boy something. The boy’s name was …

The name was gone. He reached for it and found a blankness where it should have been, clean-edged, like a shot hole in a coat.

Then nothing.

Then this.

Somewhere beyond the weight on him, a man was talking.

Not to Damian. Not to anyone, by the sound of it. A low, rapid muttering, words tumbling over each other. The language was wrong. German, he thought, or mostly German. He had heard enough of it around the campfires of the Legion to know the sound of it without knowing the meaning. Lebe, the man said, over and over, coaxing, crooning. Lebe. Lebe doch. Warum, and then a run of it too fast to follow, and then, abruptly, Latin. That he could half do. Schoolboy Latin, beaten into him at Harrow, came creaking out of storage and made what it could. Mortuos. The dead. Resurgere. To rise. Dixerunt mortuos non posse resurgere. They said the dead could not. They said the dead cannot be⁠—

The man laughed. It was the worst laugh Damian had ever heard, and he had heard men laugh drunkenly while surgeons took their legs.

Thunder again. The house above shook itself like a wet dog. Dust and grit sifted down onto Damian’s face. That wire-song of humming metal again, closer now that he was listening for it, a taut singing that ran along the ceiling and down somewhere to his left and died away in a smell like a struck flint. Just like the guns. His stomach rolled over slowly at that smell.

He opened his eyes.

The dark did not dissipate with them. For a moment he thought he was blind. Then the moment passed and he understood. The room was black at its edges and lit at its middle. A fringe of shifting yellow low and to his left, candlelight leaking through gaps in whatever lay over him. Far up and to the right, two thin blue-white seams that flared with the lightning and went dark. He blinked. The seams doubled, slid apart, hung in the wrong places.

His eyes were not agreeing with one another. The right saw where things were. The left saw where they had lately been, a half-beat behind and smeared at the edges. Where the two reports met, the world shivered. He shut the left. The room held still. He noted this as he would have filed a report of a bridge down along his line of march, and went on.

The weight on him. He turned his head one inch along the stone.

There was a hand in front of his face.

A man’s hand, half-curled, gray as candle-fat. It belonged to the arm that lay across Damian’s chest. The arm belonged to the shape whose shoulder pressed his shoulder. Beyond that shape, a foot, sole outward, at a height and angle no living man could have held for a minute. Beyond the foot, in the leaking yellow light, more. A cheek. A back. The dark line of an open mouth. It came to him slowly, like water coming through a boot, cold and rising and not to be argued with.

He was lying under dead men.

Not beside them. Under them. They were stacked on him and around him the way the pioneers stacked the dead when the ground was too hard for graves. He was inside the stack. He had been … sleeping … there.