LITMIR.BIZ

      ZEBRA BOOKS

      KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For Zack:

       my warrior,

       my hero

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Thank you to Kevan Lyon, Megan Records, and the late, great Kate Duffy. The road to the Blades of the Rose has been an amazing adventure because of these daring women.

      Thanks to Kent Madin of Boojum Expeditions for his insight on Mongolia, and thank you to Yu-Huei Layton for help with key Chinese words.

      And to everyone else who has provided encouragement and support for this eccentric, wonderful series—thank you.

      Contents

      Chapter 1: Trouble at the Docks

      Chapter 2: A Mysterious Message Delivered

      Chapter 3: Followed

      Chapter 4: Captain Huntley’s Mysterious Disappearance

      Chapter 5: The True Hammer of Thor

      Chapter 6: Karakorum

      Chapter 7: The Tortoise Speaks

      Chapter 8: A Curious Means of Seeing

      Chapter 9: The Lion and Lamb

      Chapter 10: Another Form of Magic

      Chapter 11: Nadaam

      Chapter 12: Surprising Outcomes

      Chapter 13: An Expanding Knowledge

      Chapter 14: Within the Clouds

      Chapter 15: Allies or Enemies?

      Chapter 16: Oasis

      Chapter 17: A Good Place to Stand and Fight

      Chapter 18: The Siege Begins

      Chapter 19: The Walls Are Breached

      Epilogue: Winter’s Benefit

      Chapter 1

      Trouble at the Docks

      Southampton, England. 1874.

      Gabriel Huntley hated an unfair fight. He had hated it as a boy in school, he had hated it during his service in Her Majesty’s army, and he hated it now.

      Huntley ducked as a fist sailed toward his head, then landed his own punches on his attacker in quick succession. As his would-be assailant crumpled, unconscious, to the ground, Huntley swung around to face another assault. Three men coming toward him, and quick, cold murder in their eyes. Their numbers were thinning, but not by much. Huntley couldn’t keep a smile from curving in the corners of his mouth. Less than an hour in England, and already brawling. Maybe coming home wouldn’t be so bad.

      “Who the hell is this bloke?” someone yelped.

      “Dunno,” came the learned reply.

      “Captain Gabriel Huntley,” he growled, blocking another punch. He rammed his elbow into someone’s gut. “Of the Thirty-third Regiment of Foot.”

      His ship had docked that night in Southampton, bringing him back to British shores after fifteen years away. As he had stood at the bottom of the gangplank, his gear and guns strapped to his back, he’d found himself strangely and uncharacteristically reticent. He couldn’t seem to get his feet to move forward. After years of moving from one end of the British Empire to the other, following orders sent down through the chain of command, he was finally able to decide on his fortune for himself. It was a prospect that he had been looking forward to for a long while. After resigning from his captaincy, he had booked passage on the next ship to England.

      However, that idea had already begun to pale on the voyage back, with days and weeks of shipbound idleness leaving his mind to pick and gnaw at whatever fancy struck him. Yes, he’d been born in England and lived there for his first seventeen years—in a dismal Yorkshire coal mining village, more specifically. But nearly the other half of his life had been spent on distant shores: the Crimea, Turkey, India, Abyssinia. England had become no more than a far away ideal of a place recreated again and again in company barracks and officers’ clubs. He had barely any family and few friends in England besides Sergeant Alan Inwood. The two men had fought side-by-side for years, and when a bullet had taken Inwood’s leg, the trusty sergeant returned to England. But he’d written Huntley steadily over the years.

      In Huntley’s pocket was Inwood’s latest missive. He’d memorized it, having read the letter over and over again on the voyage to England. It promised a job working with Inwood as a textile agent in Leeds. An ordinary, steady life. The prospect of marriage. Leeds, Inwood claimed, had an abundance of nice, respectable girls, daughters of mill owners, looking for husbands. Huntley could have a job and a wife in a trice—if he wanted.

      Huntley knew how to fight in the worst conditions nature and man could create. Monsoons, blizzards, scorching heat. Bayonets, sabers, revolvers, and rifles. He’d eaten hardtack crawling with maggots. He’d swallowed the most fetid and foul water when there had been nothing else to drink. None of it had broken him. He had nothing left to fear. Yet the idea of truly settling down, finding, good Lord, a wife, it turned a soldier’s blood to sleet.

      After the ship had docked, Huntley had lingered at the foot of the gangplank, jostled on all sides by the shoving and cursing mass of the crowded dock. He had tried to make himself take the first step toward his new life, an ordinary life, and found that he couldn’t.

      Not yet, at any rate. Instead of rushing toward the inn where mail coaches waited to take passengers to English towns and cities near and far, Huntley had begun to walk in the opposite direction. Though he’d been at sea for months, he needed more time. Time to think.

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