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

the lakefront. Behind them, gunshots and explosions and screams and the great clinking of Troubler chains.

41

With the lakefront in sight to the north, LaShanda Long knelt by her red stallion, Cherokee. He had served her well, and in turn, she had loved him as she might have loved a child. If she could have had children. And now, as Troublers and Crusaders fought and died around them; as more Conspirator sleeper cells roared out of hiding; as they took the haughty and confident Crusaders by surprise and overwhelmed them block by block, LaShanda Long held Cherokee’s head. Bullets riddled his sides. One of his eyes was a gaping red hole. Three or four blocks’ worth of guards had bunched up and unleashed an enormous volley in her direction. Long had dove from the saddle, but Cherokee had nowhere to hide. So much power and grace torn to pieces. She wept as she stroked the horse’s blood-soaked mane.

You did well, boy, she whispered. I love you.

She lowered Cherokee’s head to the ground. He breathed deeply, good eye rolling. Long wiped away her tears. Then she unholstered her gun and shot Cherokee in the head.

When he had stilled, Long wiped his face as clean as she could manage and untangled his mane. A mother preparing her son for state. Then she stood. The rest of her horses, the lord’s and deputies’ entire remuda, had been assigned to their fellow Conspirators. She would make do with the first available mount.

Lord, please lift us all in your sheltering hand.

She walked the corpse-choked streets between shattered, fiery buildings, stepping over the dead, searching for a promising mount. A Crusader galloped toward her on a white gelding. She shot the man out of the saddle. When the horse slowed, she caught its reins. It reared, but Long held on. She threw an arm around its neck, whispered in its ear, stroked its muzzle. Then she saddled up and shot four weaponless Crusaders as they ran past.

Ten of you for every round Cherokee took, and a passel for his life.

She reloaded as bullets cleaved the air around her.

Everywhere, Conspirators and Troublers and Crusaders fired on each other from around corners of buildings. Clusters formed and shot each other and scattered and reformed as bodies littered the streets.

Your mistake, Royster. You brought enough guards to handle chained and broken people, but there ain’t enough of you in the world to stop us now. Our blood’s boilin, and we’re gonna scald you to death.

Long’s forces marched on the lake, backing the enemy toward the water. The Crusaders had no route of egress, no hope of shelter beyond the buildings and houses they could enter but not defend. They could only fight and die. Long rode down the nearest pod of guards, shooting three of them in the back as the other three broke in different directions.

And then, from the east and west and south, an enormous roaring fit to sunder the world from its moorings, the sound of voices raised in a common savage cry such as she had never heard. People surged up the street in a great wave, heading straight for her, whooping and screaming.

At their head rode Gabriel Troy on a paint with white boots, one hand gripping the reins, one pistol raised.

From the west came Jack Hobbes and Lynn Stransky, leading a column of freed prisoners who shot and hacked and ripped Crusader flesh. Mordecai Jones, Tommy Gautreaux, Laura Derosier, and Antoine Baptiste rode just behind Hobbes and Stransky, firing into the bunched Crusaders, trampling the loners under their horses’ hooves. Baptiste and Derosier broke from the main force, a mob of Troublers in their wake, killing from horseback while their foot soldiers engaged the outlander guards with fists and knives. Paired bodies fell struggling to the ground and crashed through house windows and disappeared.

From the south came Tetweiller and his charges, stopping to break any chains Long’s group had missed. Every freed man, woman, and child took up a gun or a knife or the nearest tree limb and attacked anyone in Crusade colors.

In an ever-decreasing semicircle, the outlanders retreated.

None of this will do any good unless we can protect the levees. Plus, there’s all them Crusaders across the river. Maybe they’re already over the bridge and plannin to crush us between them and the lake, just like we’re doin to their friends. I hope Ernie thought to assign lookouts.

Someone—Hobbes? Stransky?—had sent two hundred troops to flank the retreating Crusaders, who found themselves surrounded. The Crusaders fired and slashed, even begged, but before long, they broke like walnuts in a vise.

The battle ended as if it were a candle someone had blown out. And as Troublers and former Crusaders dispatched the wounded guards and tended to friendly casualties, Long, Troy, Hobbes, Stransky, and Tetweiller met on the bloody and viscera-covered street. One by one, they dismounted. They looked at each other and at the scene, a blasted and burning wasteland superimposed on the geometric grids of what they had always called civilization. The air smelled of gunpowder and stool. Already, flies and crows and buzzards attended the dead and the dying. Carnage on a scale unimagined since the Purge, bodies piled like discarded children’s toys. No one spoke for long moments.

Then Troy embraced Long, and the last two months of tension and self-doubt flowed out of her like water from a broken cistern. She smiled and hugged him back. And then they all laughed and cried and shook hands, even Stransky.

How’s the arm? Troy said to Hobbes.

Hobbes grinned, looking demonic, his face covered in blood and soot. Don’t bother me none to speak of. Seen Gordy?

No one had. They lapsed into silence again, awash in the sounds of distant gunfire and the lamentations of the wounded.

I don’t wanna get caught between the water and the enemy, Tetweiller said. We best move on the lake, and all them folks across the river too, before they move on us.

Troy nodded.