‘We must hurry. All my effort was lost.’ He swung around, towing the horse after him, taking her with it in a fumble and curse of sudden complaints from her leg muscles as they went back to their canter. She wondered at his words as she fought to keep her seat steady and relax into the horse’s gait against her body’s will and kept up her focus by watching his back as he ran. She would have done anything right then for strength, grace and endurance like that. Anything not to be on this bloody horse, wincing and gritting her teeth as every stride took her away from where she longed to be.
‘What do you mean?’ She fought her way back to balance on the saddle, the stink of hot horse overriding the scent of mud on the road. Talking was essential for a time, if she was not to notice the dropped belongings that had fallen by the wayside, the pattern of feet and wheels gouged into the softer ground, the sudden abeyance of the distant wail; she could not stand the signs of things falling apart.
His voice was made rough by the depth of his breathing and the puffs he made as his feet padded the ground, two pats to the horse’s triple cadence making her feel almost seasick as she watched the white mane of hair shiver and bounce against his shoulders. ‘My gifts did not appease her.’
‘The Empress?’ The politics was beyond her. What could he possibly have to give or want out of Glimshard? And Torada married him so that society would take it as a sign that she meant to treaty for peace with the Karoo. His voice lent no credence to the notion. His body on the other hand she could quite appreciate was worth the gesture, but what he made of it she couldn’t begin to imagine. Her curiosity began slowly to overtake her distress.
‘Yes.’ His reply was late as he slowed down again to accommodate the horse’s need to slow down. She wished he would volunteer something but he seemed to see no point in talk so she would have to draw it from him by demand, except her notion of his rank prevented her. She didn’t think he minded that she had forgotten to call him Consort so far however, nor any other honorific.
‘Why are you the only one?’
For a few moments she watched him, allowing her scientific interest to take over as she waited for his reply. His resemblance to a beast was mostly superficial, physical, she thought. It was hair and colours. His feet were a little different, heels off the ground, and long, the forefoot halfway to a paw, but the rest of him was not more strange than a big man, lean and rugged, heavily muscled – he could have been some lumbering labourer. The beast was in the way he moved, and in his eyes. He moved like a cat. She was glad he looked the other way. She found his gaze disturbing and not only in the erotic way she had dreamed of when she first saw him in a picture. She put her hand to check the holster’s safety cover on the gun.
‘It is not easy to answer,’ he said finally. ‘What is needed is made.’ There was a hesitancy to him that made her suspect there was more to this than he wanted or was able to express. She noted it, attempting to wrap her mind around this investigation so that she didn’t have to think of the city but just at that moment the distant retorts of explosions cut through the squelch of mud, the chink of harness and the horse’s snorting breath.
This time Tzaban did not stop to look back, but Tralane twisted in the saddle, gripping it fore and aft. ‘Stop! I must see this!’
In a few strides they halted. Birds nearby whistled and circled in the fading afternoon light. In the middle distance the glowing stem of the city, which had burned blue and bright for her whole lifetime, was shrinking. She’d known it did that, but seeing it was another thing altogether. Her guts churned suddenly with fear, though if anything the sight was smooth and silent as the operation of a well-oiled hydraulic jack. There was no sign of a fault, though she fancied she saw something tiny, like rocks, falling down in a shower from one side. The final moments were missed as Tzaban pulled on the horse again.
‘No!’ she insisted, hauling on the rein.
‘Yes,’ he said simply in reply, her tug ineffective as he grasped the bridle. ‘Out of your hands now.’ They accelerated to a trot and she was nearly bounced out of the saddle as she struggled to look, to see, as if by seeing she could hold the city and balance it, make it safe and guide it with only her will across the miles. She didn’t understand how such a momentous, awesome thing could be met with such indifference as he showed it, his back flowing again in motion as hers jolted her head so hard she was forced to turn around and look instead at the encroaching darkness as the road passed into loose woodland.
‘You don’t understand. I want to see this. I have to see this! The city has never moved in lifetimes, it might not work, it might never happen again…’ Her begging fell on deaf ears. More explosions in the background, like soft claps rolling across the fields. It would be the sight of a lifetime and she was seeing it only in juddering bursts. Then as they passed into the treeline and down a small slope she wasn’t seeing anything at all.
‘It will or it won’t,’ he said between breaths, so long afterward she felt it was really too late, like he was offering her a kind of apology, though it hurt more not less. ‘Whatever it does, it does it without you.’
She wanted to hit him. The trees enveloped them in a kind of quiet made out of the endless blurred sound of wind in the leaves. She strained her ears. The horse jumped as a tremor ran through the ground, and stumbled on a tree root, but after that there was nothing to hear or see. The sky soon became grey as they kept their trot, canter, trot, walk paces until at last it all became walking and she could barely see until they emerged at the other side of the woodland into a shallow valley, at the other distant end of which the portal had been built at the head of the pass into the mountains beyond.
She was jolted out of her miserable reverie a short while later by the peculiar soft whine of something whizzing past her ear. At almost the same moment Tzaban was suddenly half his height and two metres forwards. The horse cringed and reared but it was tired and the movement didn’t unseat her as she realised they were being shot at.
Terror bloomed inside her with incredible vivid anticipation of her painful death. She clung to the reins and the saddle, turned around by the panicked horse and then carted off the road and into the woods. Small branches and brush whipped at her. By the time the horse had run out of effort and she had gathered the reins back the woods loomed, almost completely dark in every direction. Then she heard the growling shout of Tzaban’s voice calling.
‘Engineer, are you with us?’
She wondered who he meant by us, and turned to go that way, trusting the horse’s instincts to pick a safe path. He was waiting for her in the last light of the sun, two miserable figures with him, muddy and bloodied. One held a snapped bow. The other hung from Tzaban’s grasp, his toes barely on the ground.
‘They’re ours,’ he explained, his tone the most menacing that she had heard. ‘They mistook us in the dark.’
This was clearly a lie.
‘Are they deserters?’ She was too confused to be tactful but they were wearing Imperial livery, with Glimshard badges.
Tzaban’s jaw clenched as he shook the one he held, then dropped him. The man buckled to his knees, whimpering. ‘They have done their bit for now.’ His gaze dared her to say it again and she dared not. Tralane looked again at the two and saw broken creatures, eyes glazed with exhaustion and fear, a starveling desperation in their every movement. She wondered if they were even capable of speech.
Tzaban’s nostrils kept flaring. ‘The war has taken a new turn. They wanted the horse. Let them go.’ At the word both men scrabbled to their feet and began to run, regardless of the dark. She got the impression they couldn’t get away fast enough and she was certainly not the cause.
‘They wanted to kill you, I think,’ she said.
‘They have been attacked by the Karoo. It is plausible.’ He took the horse’s bridle again, and resumed walking as before.
‘Now you sound like Isabeau. She never gives a cat’s backside what anyone thinks either.’ Then she wondered at her choice of word
s and considered that she had perhaps been spending too much time distracting herself by looking at him. He didn’t react to it either way.
‘Who is that?’
‘My daughter.’
She heard him make an interested kind of grunt and then they stopped again and listened. Others were coming up the path, making lots of noise as people do when they flee near blindly, panting, at the limits of their endurance. More soldiers soon passed them, unarmed for the most part and fumbling in the dark, so fixated that their weary faces barely registered Tzaban and the horse until the last second, and even then did not care. They were almost witless, she thought, and her insides grew cold. When the third set had fled by them into the darkness she couldn’t hold it in longer. Whatever he said she needed to hear his voice; anybody’s voice.
‘What’s really going on?’
‘We will find out. For now we should rest a few hours. The horse is tired.’
She cursed him for being like Isabeau in the small-talk department as well. Instead she found herself bantering some witless newspaper-fed nonsense about the war as they turned off the road and took shelter in a copse of thick thorn bushes after he hacked a way into the hollow centre with a machete he had brought with him. The horse was given grain and water. To Tralane, who had come with only her toolkits, he gave half a loaf of bread, taking the rest for himself. Though he had surely tried harder she was starving and ate it all. He reacted no more to her silence than he had to her chatter about politics. The ground was cold and damp and she could hear too much noise that she didn’t understand to be able to rest; trees, wind, creaking, the sounds of people or things stumbling about a way off. Tzaban remained crouched, eating unaccountably slowly. His white hair shone faintly in the little light that the moon gave; a gigantic, claw-fingered monstrosity. The sight made her shudder. In her mind’s eye she saw the view through the telescope of that strange object out near the stars, glinting. She pulled out her oracle and drew up the data from the telescope’s autotrack.
She had recalculated its relative position and velocity by the time that he got up and began to pack the blankets back into the saddlebags. Her aching body and freezing arse told her it was not near dawn, more like the earliest hours of the morning. The horse huffed but seemed better when she remounted. Tzaban gave her water, insisting she drink. She delayed them more then by having to relieve herself. Too afraid to go out of sight entirely she closed her eyes and ignored propriety. A woman might do as she pleased, men should avert their gazes. She didn’t know if he knew that and the thought put a strange frisson through her that she didn’t care for.
They continued, more soldiers coming their way in bursts. One tried to attack Tzaban in a frenzy. The Karoo put him aside with a terrible crunching sound and a wet puff of air leaving with his life. The sudden violence of it, the speed and ferocity, completely silenced her. She swallowed against a lump in her throat. The body lay in the mud and they left it there. She heard Tzaban sneezing.
‘They smell of females.’
This meant nothing to Tralane. She bent over the saddle bow. ‘What?’
His low voice was hoarse, struggling to be quiet. ‘When we are at the other side you must do exactly as I tell you or it is likely we will not live to make mistakes.’
As daylight crawled through the thinning trees they dropped into another long shallow valley and came around a hillock to find a landscape spread beneath them in broad, rolling swathes, the road winding all the way through, riverside, to the distance where the plains rose again to Steppes. Tralane sat up, heartened to find they could see for miles and that the weather was set to be clear. Across the vast acres the smoke of early fires made thin, upright trails into the sky marking camps where soldiers had kept enough of themselves to gather. She could not tell at this distance if they were enemies or allies. The portal encampment, still too young to look anything but ramshackle, lay in an oxbow of the river itself, smokes of greater darkness pluming from it with significant majesty so that she knew they were no cookfires. Thoughts of Minna rose as they must, endlessly, but she pushed them aside, promising herself she would get to that as soon as possible, but now was not possible and therefore she must not let it consume her.
As if reading her mind the Karoo turned, his orange eyes a sudden shock in the pale blues of the dawn. ‘To each moment now give all your attention. Give me your scarf.’
Tralane hesitated, wondering, but had no reason to dispute him although his manner made her flare hot with anger. The situation overrode her outrage. She gave him the large cotton sheet of her headscarf, watching its short white tassels play with sudden jollity in a tiny breeze. It unfolded in his hands to its full extent – enough to act as half a bedsheet if it must, so fine that it could wrap a neck or shade a face or be worn as a shirt any number of ways. He refolded it with a peculiar care into a square like a large pocket handkerchief and then to her utter astonishment, undid the front of the soft cloth that lay between his leathered thigh armours, and peed into it with stern deliberation, scrunching it to be sure that it was well soaked. The smell was powerful, even in the cool morning, like a tomcat in full reek that had been fed on burnt apples. Her nose automatically wrinkled in disgust but her curiosity got the better of her and she found herself applying a studiously scientific eye to him as she asked, ‘What did you do that for?’
He had a heavy, very human looking penis, she thought as he covered himself up again, though if he had balls that matched she could not see. She thought it was lightly furred at the base, rather than hairy, with that same stripe, but much paler, being part of his ventral side, with skin that strange lilac blue, dark and going darker towards the tip which gleamed. Then at the last moment she saw it drawn inward of its own accord. Like an animal, she thought, and wondered about it as he wrung out her scarf and left only a few dark drips to fall to the ground. The white and grey check was now a grey and pale green check. He didn’t give it to her but rolled it and stuffed it down the central channel of the saddle where there was a gap for the horse’s spine.
‘Maybe won’t be water later,’ he said. ‘Would be harder then.’
‘No, I mean why at all?’
‘It will mark you as mine. Then we can travel together, through Karoo. Hnn, maybe.’ He glanced at her and she saw a quirky smile on his face, uncertainty in it and apology for that.
‘Maybe?’
He sighed. ‘Empress’ touch lingers. Maybe I just die. Maybe you too.’ He shrugged and she saw resignation.
‘Die how?’
Instead of answering he started to walk and the horse automatically went after him. Tralane thought maybe it didn’t matter as she didn’t plan to die. She checked the gun in the pack and took it out, keyed the power, set it to the holster on her leg. Once the road had moved them clear of the last trees they left it and began to cut across country in a direct line towards the portal. When they were not jogging along in clear ground she struggled to see the truth of what they were going into but it became clear soon enough as did something more important.
‘Tzaban,’ she said, leaning forward as she saw his head rise in a sign she had his attention. ‘The portal. It’s not working.’
The wooden buildings of the site were half torn apart and their pieces made into bonfires. Around these a large gathering of men and some women were milling about. Most wore Imperial livery. Some were seated in rows, heads down – prisoners. As she strained to see she saw a corpse heaved into the flames of one of the fires and then realised the regular pattern of shapes beside the main structure was made of bodies laid out.
Tzaban stopped and she nearly fell off the horse as it stopped with him. They had been seen. A group of four riders had come out on to the track and were moving steadily in their direction. They had Glimshard colours, but came with drawn swords held in their free hands.
‘Why?’ he said quietly in a grunt aimed at her as one of the approaching officers raised his arm and shouted across – Tzaban was unmistakable so there was no p
oint in not signalling back. He raised his arm and bellowed some military-sounding call in return. ‘Gau Tam,’ he said to her after, her ears still ringing, as they moved off again. Tralane was tuned enough to their peculiar conversations by now to know he meant why the portal had failed.
‘I don’t know until I see it,’ she said. ‘The stanchions are still there in the ground.’
Where the portal had been was easy to see. A churned path of mud, broad as three streets, led up to a straight line between two tall metal posts and ended there, pristine heavy grass beyond. She was busy thinking about how it might work, what power sources it must use, when they were surrounded by the oncoming riders. Before Tzaban she vaguely recognised the face of the man he had hailed – Gau Tam, the general’s second or aide or whatever it was. She could never recall the rank names but his familiarity was reassuring. The others, two men and a woman, looked like officers to her too, but all different in some way. Their knuckles, she noticed, were yellow-white, hands pale. Every uniform was covered in blood and filth, rent. One had a bandaged head. The horses were scruffy – not officer horses but regular cavalry mounts, and worn out.
‘Sir,’ Tzaban said, looking up at Gau Tam. She’d never seen him so still and apparently relaxed. His voice was quiet. ‘I am commanded to bring this engineer to the site.’
‘I know you are.’ His white cravat lay loosely around his neck in a heavy, stained ring. Two of the others had drawn kerchiefs over their lower faces. Tralane smelled a whiff of naphtha coming off them, and turpentine. She saw their eyes were red and watering above the cloth.
Glorious Angels Page 36