Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Fine. But if you think I’m gonna tell these folks they gotta put their chains back on and die like good little sheep, you’re dead wrong. And I mean dead, mister.

Dwyer sneered. Cowardice dressed in pretty sentiment.

In about three minutes, you’ll find out exactly how scared I am.

Troy turned and rode back, expecting to hear Dwyer’s hoofbeats or the shotgun blast that would kill him. But he reached his host without incident. Dwyer had ridden back to his own column. Troy grinned, ignoring the protests in his stiff knee.

How’d it go? Tetweiller asked.

I don’t think he’ll bring me a pie anytime soon, Troy said.

Tetweiller checked his pistols. You ready for this?

Troy looked over his shoulder and raised his hand again. On my mark, he shouted.

The Conspirators roared again. Dwyer’s group answered them. Like two tribes from the world’s birthing, enemies’ flesh caught in their teeth.

On the bridge, Dwyer shouted to his troops.

Should have made your speech earlier.

Troy dropped his hand and spurred the horse, a guttural cry rising in his throat. His followers thundered after him.

The Crusaders rushed to meet them. The bridge shook and swayed as their voices echoed throughout the city.

Leading the vanguards on that red and smoking edifice of stone and metal, Troy and Dwyer collided. Their horses crashed and tumbled, throwing them. Troy and the herald flew past each other and skittered along the bridge, bowling down enemies as if they had been launched from cannons for precisely that purpose. Something ripped in Troy’s left shoulder, the pain blinding. His sore knee jerked and twitched. Around him, horse smashed into horse and body into body, every individual sound swallowed in that thundering. Troy groaned and came up firing with his right hand, putting bullets through the heads of the six nearest Crusaders, others dropping as Troublers and Conspirators shot them and tackled them and slit their throats. At Troy’s elbow, a withered and stinking Troubler woman leaped upon a Crusader’s back and clawed the man’s eyes out. He fell to his knees screaming, and she ripped his throat out with her yellowed teeth. Jones fired into the crowd and reloaded and used his horse as a battering ram. Derosier had been unhorsed and was firing with both guns, pistol-whipping Crusaders, screaming like a madperson. Gautreaux’s riderless horse galloped by, blood painting its haunches. Antoine Baptiste fired with one hand and used the other to hack at a guard with a sword, the origin of which Troy could not guess. Tetweiller stood in his stirrups fifteen yards away, aiming and shooting, his face composed and serene, a single tear on his cheek. His horse straddled a corpulent body with a long gray beard bearing evidence of three or four meals in its tangles. The chambray shirt no more than rags, holsters empty where once hung two pearl-handled revolvers. The body bled from a dozen gunshot wounds and a deep gash near the heart.

Aw, Tommy. May the Lord carry you to glory.

A Crusader armed with a machete decapitated a half dozen skinny, filthy wretches until Baptiste shot him in the chest. Sofronio Blanco, a water bearer who lived on Troy’s street, took a bullet between the eyes not ten yards away. Two Troublers were crushing a guard’s skull with rifle butts when Jevan Dwyer rose behind them and smashed their heads together. They fell, brains leaking from their ears. Someone had slashed Dwyer across the chest, the wound long and red like the tail of a comet, but if it bothered him, he gave no sign. One of Tetweiller’s fighters, a lamplighter named Marcelline Caron, ran at him with a hatchet. Dwyer pulled his double-barreled shotgun from the scabbard on his back and pulled both triggers. Caron flew back the way she had come, her chest and neck and face a mélange of bone and gristle.

Dwyer saw Troy and smiled.

A swarm of hornets had burrowed under the skin of Troy’s shoulder, and his knee kept buckling. But he reloaded and shot a Crusader fighting next to the herald. Then he winked at Dwyer.

The herald roared, his torso running crimson, his shotgun smoking. He raised it and slammed its butt against a female Troubler’s skull. She fell and lay still. Watching Troy, Dwyer stomped the back of the woman’s neck. Troy did not hear her spine break, but her limbs spasmed. She might have been the same woman he had seen only a moment ago, felling Crusaders with her bare hands. Anger rose in Troy’s gullet like vomit, burning his throat. A red haze descended, obscuring everything except the desire to strangle the life from Dwyer. And the herald must have sensed it, for he dropped the shotgun and motioned Troy forward.

Troy spat at Dwyer and took aim.

But before he could pull the trigger, a Crusader tackled him from the side, driving through Troy’s injured arm. The pistol skittered into the crowd, through pools of blood and innards. It disappeared near the bodies of two felled and flopping horses, the animals’ eyes rolling as they screamed. Troy twisted and landed on top of the Crusader. Then he jammed his thumb in the man’s eye and ripped it from its socket. The Crusader shrieked, his eyeball dangling on his cheek like a wilted flower. Troy punched him in the throat, and his screams turned to hoarse cackles. The former lord of order pulled his other pistol and shot the Crusader in the face.

Something struck Troy in the jaw hard enough to make the world swim. He fell off the dead Crusader and dropped his pistol.

Jevan Dwyer stood above him, grinning without joy or mirth or compassion. And then he kicked Gabriel Troy in the face.

Troy’s head cracked on the pavement. Dwyer sat on him, driving a fist into his jaw over and over, smashing his nose, his eye. Troy went for Dwyer’s eyes, but the herald pummeled his hurt shoulder. Troy grunted and clenched his jaw against the next blow, but by then, Dwyer was off him and