Stands a Shadow

by Buchanan, Col

  ‘Well enough,’ she told him. ‘I know some medicines too, home folk stuff. Herbs and ointments.’

  ‘Give your details to Hooch over there. Our medicos might make some use of you. I’m Major Bolt, by the way.’

  She smiled, opened her mouth to thank him.

  ‘No, don’t thank me, girl,’ he said, holding up one of his large hands. ‘You can curse me in your own time – but just don’t bloody thank me.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Eyes

  People seldom remembered what the old fort on the hill had originally been called. They simply knew it now as the ‘Eyes’, a name that referred to the dirty faces that could always be seen pressing against its thickly barred windows, their desperate glares staring out from their confinement at a world that was passing them by.

  The Eyes had long since ceased to be a fort. It stood on a hill in the Fallow District of the city, a brooding presence that overlooked the eastern wall and the houses and workshops of the area. These days it was used solely to hold veterans of the war, those soldiers who were siege-shocked badly enough to have become a danger to themselves or even to others; the Specials in particular, those at least who fought in the tunnels beneath the walls.

  At times, often when the mood in the city itself was tense, the inmates would call out to the Red Guards stationed atop the eastern wall with jokes or obscenities, or they would shout at the citizens of the district surrounding it, ordinary folk going about their business, too polite to look up at the lunatics on the hill.

  That evening, Bahn couldn’t tell if anyone was calling out from the windows of the place, for a crowd of Red Guards was causing a din at the wrought-iron front gates of the institution, so that he could hear nothing else but their shouting. He pressed through to the front of the crowd and found that the gates were closed. On the other side of them stood an opposing group of jailers, clad in thick leather aprons and armed with cudgels. They were shouting back through the gates just as vehemently.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Bahn hollered to the lieutenant of the squad he now stood amongst.

  ‘They’ve been ordered by the governor to stop us from entering,’ the officer shouted back with a hand cupped over Bahn’s ear.

  ‘They know why you’re here?’

  ‘Of course. That’s why the governor’s trying to stop us.’

  ‘All right,’ Bahn said. ‘Tell your men to give it a rest.’

  He turned to face the jailers as the noise began to settle down.

  ‘I am an aide to General Creed, and his order has been clearly given. Now open the gates and stand aside.’

  He saw a movement amongst the men, and two of the jailers parted as a grey-haired fellow pushed through to confront him. ‘I am Governor Plais,’ the man informed him, ‘and by the council’s authority I am responsible for this institution. I repeat what I have already said to your fellow officer. There are no men fighting fit within these walls. They would not be here otherwise.’

  ‘Governor,’ said Bahn, stepping up to the gates. ‘Right now, an army of forty thousand Mannians stands on the shore of Pearl Bay. As you can hear, even now the Fourth Army pounds the Shield in preparation for a full-scale assault. We need every man who can fight, whatever his crimes, whatever his state of mind.’

  ‘But these men are disturbed! Dangerous even!’

  ‘Still, the order has been given. Now open the gates.’

  For a moment no one moved.

  ‘Open them!’ Bahn snapped without patience. He looked at the jailers behind the gate until one of them took a step forwards, and then the rest of them followed, and the gates squealed open, and Bahn and the Red Guards stepped through into the courtyard with the governor protesting in his face.

  ‘The council will hear of this,’ he shouted, but Bahn stepped around him and headed for the building entrance.

  ‘I have no doubt that they will,’ he cast back over his shoulder.

  The cell was approached through a long passageway sealed by a series of iron gates cast brown by rust, which shed the odd flake whenever a gate slammed shut and was locked behind them. The walls were damp down here in this silent basement level, where the only light came from the oil lantern carried by one of the jailers.

  ‘But the man is a maniac,’ the governor was insisting in his grating voice.

  ‘I know who he is. I fought by his side in the first years of the siege.’

  ‘But he’s a convicted murderer, a torturer – he’s more likely to kill you than the enemy! Have you lost your mind?’

  ‘He’s the only man here I haven’t yet spoken to. I’ll have a word with him, at least.’

  Darkness pressed upon them from all sides. It seemed to follow their little haven of light as they walked in a collective hush along the passageway, the only sounds the dripping of water and the scrapes of their feet against the stone floor. There were four jailers with them, clad in leather aprons and gloves that came up to their armpits, stout clubs dangling from their grips. They were silent, their eyes fixed ahead. They seemed to be steeling themselves for confrontation.

  Bahn followed them, not liking the close confines of this place. He couldn’t imagine being locked up as a prisoner down here. An hour would have him tearing at the walls to get out.

  The door to the cell was made from a solid, fire-hardened slab of tiq wood banded by iron. One of the jailers stepped up and opened the small viewing hatch.

  Bahn leaned forward to peer inside.

  He saw a candle, burning a halo of warmth in the centre of a small vaulted cell. In its light sat a large naked man, chained by the neck to the wall he leaned his back against, one leg stretched before him, the other bent up and its knee supporting a limp hand; his face was smoky shadow, with two eyes that glowered at those in the hatch with open hostility.

  Bull, Bahn thought. How did I know you would always end up like this?

  He stepped back as the door was unlocked and pulled open by two straining jailers, the hinges protesting loudly.

  ‘Stay behind the chain,’ the jailer with the lantern advised Bahn. ‘He blinded one of our men a few months back. With his thumbs.’

  The man ducked inside, with his club at the ready. Bahn stepped into the cell and stopped by his side, his ankles touching a chain that hung slack across the tiny space. He held his helm beneath his arm, and tried to stand tall in his armour and his red cloak.

  The prisoner placed his hands upon the collar around his neck, and lifted himself to his feet in all his naked glory, displaying a patchwork of scars across a tensed, muscular frontage. He looped some of the chain over his arm to support the weight of it, a curious gesture, as though he was adjusting some fine robe of office.

  You’ve aged, Bahn thought, as he took in the heavy abuses of the man’s face, and the receding hairline at his temples, where a pair of horns were tattooed.

  Bahn had indeed fought alongside this man in those first few desperate years of the war, before Bull had been chosen for the heavy infantry of the chartassa. Bull had been crazy even back then; a dangerous and volatile man who enjoyed a fight more than any other Bahn had ever known. It hadn’t surprised him when Bull had finally lost his temper once too often and with entirely the wrong person – his superior officer, a fellow whom Bull nearly killed with a single clout, and for the careless mistake of calling him by his real name.

  Two years in a stockade had come of it, and a full discharge from the army. After that, Bahn had vaguely followed his rising celebrity as a champion pit-fighter. One of the best in Khos, it was said.

  And then the day came when Bahn, along with the rest of the city, heard the news of Adrianos’s murder. Adrianos, hero of the Nomarl raid, the last commander to have personally led a successful offensive against the Imperial Fourth Army. The city’s hero had been found in several different pieces in his fine apartment just off the Grand Bazaar. He had been gagged and bound and tortured. Parts of him had been flayed.

  Next to his carcass, Bull ha
d sat, wearing nothing but blood.

  ‘Hello, brother,’ Bahn said to him in a hush.

  Bull took a step towards him. ‘Bahn?’ he asked, incredulous.

  ‘Yes.’

  Bull stepped closer, the chain unravelling from his arm as it stretched tight behind him. The jailer at Bahn’s side shifted uneasily, weighing the club in his hand. Bull refused to acknowledge him. He remained focused on Bahn, his massive arm held against his stomach, the knuckles of his hand disfigured by swelling, the skin recently torn and bloody. ‘What brings you here then, eh? Are you lost?’

  His voice rasped as though he hadn’t used it for a very long time. ‘Speak up,’ growled Bull. ‘I’m doubting this is a social call. What is it?’

  All at once, as Bahn listened to the lilt in the man’s voice, and stared into the dark eyes above his sharp cheekbones, he was taken back to the days of the early war, hunkering down behind a parapet as Bull grinned in his face, slapping his back to stop him coughing and enjoying every moment of it, the crazy barkbeating bastard.

  ‘The Mannians have landed in force in Pearl Bay.’

  Bull narrowed his eyes, pushed his head forward to scrutinize him more closely.

  ‘I’m here for the veterans. To see if any of you are fit to stand with us.’

  ‘Another judge, then,’ Bull spat, half turning away.

  ‘What? You think you’ve been judged unfairly?’

  The chain snapped tight as Bull towered over him. Bahn fought the urge to step back a pace.

  ‘Easy, now,’ soothed the jailer as he poked his club into Bull’s bare chest.

  Still Bull ignored him, stared instead at Bahn. ‘No, I suppose I don’t. But then neither was Adrianos. You understand? When I judged him.’

  ‘They call you the slayer, did you know that? A monster only fit for chaining up in a hole.’

  Bull’s expression remained the same; curious, wrathful.

  ‘Will you stand with us, and fight for your people?’

  ‘My people?’ he asked, incredulous.

  ‘Aye. For the people of Bar-Khos, like your father. And for your mother’s people in the Windrush.’

  Suddenly, a wide smile creased his face like the gash of a knife. Two of his front teeth were missing, Bahn saw. The rest looked to be rotting. ‘I owe no loyalty to anyone, least of all the people of Bar-Khos.’

  ‘Will you fight for us?’

  ‘Is it a pardon. Is that what you’re offering?’

  ‘Yes. If that’s what it will take.’

  ‘And all I have to do is kill some Mannians in the name of my people, is that it? You’ll take the slayer into your ranks even if he’s a cold-blooded murdering bastard of a barkbeater, is that how it’s to be, Bahn?’

  For a long moment Bahn swayed in his armour, feeling tired and out of place here.

  ‘Believe me, Bull,’ he told his old comrade plainly. ‘Where we are going, we’ll have great need of men like you.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Free Enterprise

  Mistress Cheer was clearly a woman who knew how to land on her feet. In the space of a single day, amidst the confusion and high emotions of the beachhead, she obtained for herself a wagon and a mule, a cartload of supplies, and enough home comforts to create a small camp for her and her women on the seaward edge of the dunes.

  By evening, awnings had been erected over two sides of the wagon and the sand underneath covered in mats of woven grasses. There were stools to sit on, and a fire smoked beneath a hanging kettle and pot, with water and stew warming in them. Mistress Cheer had even procured three tents for them all, which she instructed Ash to pitch not far from the wagon, though far enough for some privacy.

  The women relaxed at last, preening themselves in clear view of the men surrounding the camp, squabbling amongst themselves whenever their mistress was beyond earshot. A few casually flirted with Ash, sporting with him over the colour of his skin, the firmness of his old body. He chuckled in pleasure, giving as good as he got.

  Ash had overheard that the place itself was called Whittle Bay, a broad cove within the larger sweep of Pearl Bay, which was located on the eastern coastline of Khos. It was a pretty enough location, with its hills to the west and the high peaks of mountains both north and south, and the rocky, gull-covered island out in the greater bay. In many ways the scene reminded Ash of northern Honshu, though it was spoiled somewhat by the stink of the army deployed across the beachhead, and by the closer press of thousands of camp followers, who had accompanied the invasion force all this way to Khos, like Mistress Cheer, in hope of making a profit.

  The fleet lay at anchor out in the clear deep waters just beyond the coastal shelf of the cove. Its ships bobbed in tight formation, looking weather-beaten even from here, with spars and masts missing or hanging broken amongst wrappings of sails, some of the hulls listing too far to one side. The work was hardly slackening with the falling twilight. It seemed that a great deal still required unloading before the army could set forth in the morning.

  Ash rested as best he could. His cough was worse today. Every now and again his limbs would shake as if from some inner chill, though his clothes were blessedly dry for once, and he kept the oiled cloak wrapped tight about him, and refused to stray long from the warmth of the fire.

  Occasionally Mistress Cheer would cast him one of her pointed stares. He would groan to himself and climb to his feet, before wandering around the camp with his sheathed sword in his hand for show, scowling at the soldiers and non-enlisted men camped all around their small oasis of perfume and stockings and girlish laughter.

  As the sun finally set, Mistress Cheer put the women to work with sharp claps of her hands and practised words of encouragement. They were hardly the only prostitutes on the beach – far from it – but still, soon enough, a long line of soldiers stretched from their little camp as they waited their turn, drunk and boisterous on this foreign beach far from home. Ash maintained order within the camp itself as the girls took turns leading the clientele into the tents, their business brief.

  His mind was barely on the job. To the south, where the ground rose up towards the ruins of the burned village, he could see the palisade and tents of the Matriarch’s camp, with her standard flying high. It seemed to call to him each time he turned his attention elsewhere.

  There was little trouble with the men that evening. It was late when the women’s calls for respite grew loud enough for Mistress Cheer to acknowledge them, and to declare an end to business for the night. A number of drunken soldiers still awaited their turn, but their complaints died quickly at Mistress Cheer’s glare and the hard, silent farlander by her side.

  Rather than preparing for sleep, the girls set about having a small party instead.

  Ash was weary after the long day. He excused himself, and with reluctance left the warmth of the fire, and found a spot on top of a nearby dune and huddled down in his cloak where he could keep an eye on them, but remain alone. With his sword lying by his side, he studied the lights of the distant camp of the Matriarch, the lie of the moonlit land around it. He looked for movement amongst the many fires that were merely glimmers from here. He wished he had his eyeglass with him; even a pair of eyes younger than his own.

  Ash coughed once more, spat phlegm, wiped his mouth dry. Clouds were drifting in from the north, ponderous and heavy. More rain on its way, maybe. They would obscure the waxing moons and make a darkness of the land beneath them.

  A good night for it, he thought to himself.

  ‘See something of interest up there?’

  He smelled her musky perfume even before she sat down on the sand, and fixed her dress over her legs as the coarse seagrass flattened beneath them. Ash looked at Mistress Cheer as she settled a flask of rhulika in his hands.

  He nodded a grateful thanks to her, taking a long drink to warm himself.

  ‘Easy. It’s the last of it.’

  He returned the flask with a brief smile. ‘Thank you. It has been some time since I
last had a proper drink.’

  Behind them, the squeals and laughter of the women rang out from their small, firelit hollow in the dunes. A breeze played through the fringes of Mistress Cheer’s hair. She fixed her shawl tighter about her head.

  ‘Tell me again what it was your previous employer did?’

  Ash tapped the flask in her hand with a fingernail.

  ‘Alcohol?’

  ‘He shipped a small fortune of it here. Would hardly let me touch the stuff, though.’

  It was a poor lie, Ash thought. He couldn’t tell if she believed him. Cheer looked away, her eyes dancing with the lights of the campfires. Singing and laughter drifted with the breeze; people elsewhere in the dunes celebrating in high spirits.

  Over it all they could hear the rhythmic wash of the sea.

  ‘We’re a long way from home,’ she said to him sombrely.

  Ash gave a slow nod of his head.

  She turned to look at him again. ‘Some more than others, I suppose. Do you ever miss it – Honshu, I mean?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said in what sounded like self-admonishment. ‘Of course you do.’

  He saw that the cloud mass was nearing the moons now. It would be getting dark soon, dark enough to prowl.

  ‘You know, you have the saddest eyes I think I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen my fair share of them, in my time.’

  Ash’s forehead wrinkled in a frown. He felt an urge to rise and walk away from the woman and her prying talk. But then she shifted over to press against his side for warmth. He found that he liked the feel of it enough to stay where he was.

  She studied his expression, waiting for him to say something. He had no words for her, though.

  ‘Well, I feel my bed calling. Time the girls got some rest too.’ She rose and brushed the sand from her dress. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ she asked, and he heard the heat in her words, the unspoken offer.

  His eyes lingered on the curves of her body beneath her dress. He wished very much that he could accept it.