by Col Buchanan
‘I must speak with my mother,’ Kira muttered under her breath. ‘Mother will understand.’
The priest shivered and wrapped her arms about herself, then started down the grassy slope towards the thronged streets far below.
‘Mistress Kira. Where are you going?’
She stopped with a start, then turned around to see her bodyguard standing there watching her coolly from beneath a tree.
Kira wiped a tear from her eye. Looked back down to the city.
‘My mother,’ she panted, suddenly confused. ‘I must seek her out.’
‘But, Mistress,’ said Quito gently, taking long strides closer. His sharp features loomed above her. ‘Your mother is long in the grave. And she lived in Q’os. Not here.’
‘I know that,’ Kira snapped at him, blinking fast. ‘Don’t you think I know where my own mother lived?’
Quito sighed in that patient way of his.
‘Take a deep breath,’ prompted his knowing voice. ‘As though you really need it. Yes, like that.’
He was good for her, this Diplomat, this trusty bodyguard. Kira dul Dubois breathed deeply until she settled into herself again, remembering where she was and when.
The war.
Boom, boom, boom went the heavy guns of the northern wall. Kira looked on with anger uncoiling now inside her like a creature seeking something to strike. Somehow, just then, her grief and confusion was all their fault, these stubborn Khosian fools who would fight to the bitter end even as the city fell around them. Everyone responsible for her losses was right here in this doomed city: the Rōshun; General Creed and his forces. And still they battled the Empire as though they were going to win this thing, as though they were going to live.
They mock us in their defiance. They mock our destiny. They mock our rightful dominion over this world.
‘You know what Nihilis commanded,’ Kira remarked to the waiting figure of Quito. ‘When the Holy Patriarch conquered the Green Isles after the people there resisted?’
‘He took the men’s eyes, as I recall.’
‘No, that was Masheen. Where he took all their women and children as slaves, and left twenty thousand blind men stumbling about in the rubble.’
‘It’s been a while since I studied my history books, Mistress Kira.’
‘When Nihilis had almost taken the capital of the Green Isles, he demanded that every male in the city older than ten should kill themselves within the hour, if the women and children were to be spared the sword.’
‘I recall it now,’ said Quito. ‘Everyone ended up killing themselves.’
‘Yes. We must be careful here. But we must make them pay for this ten-year stand against the Empire. We must make them weep for generations to come. When the Khosian traitors blow the gates from within, we will storm this city with fire and sword. We will kill them all, we will kill every living thing. The whole world will remember what we did here to mighty Bar-Khos after it fell.’
‘Are you high, Mistress?’
Kira felt a smile creep upon her lips. ‘A little, Quito. Can you tell?’
Her words were those of a playful young woman, yet they came out in the roughened, throaty drawl of an old crone.
Kira tightened her arms about herself, feeling the chill in her bones at last.
The Khosian traitors were primed and ready to go. Some would try to blow open the northern gates when the time was right. Another, the Khosian lieutenant called Bahn Calvone, would attempt to lure the Lord Protector outside with as many defenders as he could, before putting a bullet in his head. Kira could only hope that the man’s conditioning lasted for that long. She had sensed a conflict still surging within him. Some remaining inner core of resistance.
The conditioning would hold, she knew.
The dice had been cast. Now it was only a matter of time before the city fell.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bahn
There was a point he reached, after he had gone so long without proper sleep, after his exhaustion had become a thing to be worn like an iron coat, when Bahn Calvone found the world beginning to still around him, as though it too could take no more without a pause.
Within a sudden cell of silence he sat there unmoving at the kitchen table, staring down at his hands resting on its scratched surface, twitching and shaking next to the pair of objects that were presently gripping his attention: a pile of unrolled paper charts, held flat by the leather tube they had come in, and a loaded pistol fitted with double barrels.
Like a choice to be made, one or the other, though in his numbness he could no longer recall why it was so.
He stared at the uppermost map that was unrolled before him – one of the charts that his brother Cole had given into his safekeeping before setting off to find his wife. Bahn gazed at the dark pencil marks, taking in the Aradèrēs mountains stretching across the very top, and the eastern coastline of the Great Hush coursing down the right-hand side, snaking all the way to the Isles of Sky – which did not appear to be islands at all, but rather another range of mountain peaks slightly inland from the coast. A deceptive name indeed.
It was the closest-guarded secret in the world, the location of the Isles, just sitting there on his kitchen table. Deep down, Bahn knew his people could change the course of the war with these charts. The Alhazii Caliphate would pay anything, do anything, to ensure they remained undisclosed to anyone else. Even, perhaps, if that meant taking the side of the Free Ports in this war.
So why did he sit here staring dumbly, doing nothing, when he should be rushing to the Lord Protector with them?
Whose side are you on? he demanded to know, but Bahn no longer knew the answer to that, or even fully understood the question. He felt like a ghost inhabiting a living body no longer his own. A body that fed him his strange thoughts and memories.
At least, he thought, he hadn’t handed over the charts to the Mannian witch.
Not yet, anyway.
Once again Bahn looked to the loaded pistol next to his hand. He began to tremble even harder.
*
He was so lost in himself that he failed to notice his son bounding into the kitchen from the yard outside; not until the boy was shouting something before the table and Bahn looked up at last, surprised, to take in the sight of young Juno’s frightened expression. It was as though his son stood just beyond a wall of heavy glass, for Bahn could hear nothing of what he said, could only see his mouth flapping away in ranting silence as his wide eyes fixated on the heavy pistol lying on the table.
Yet Bahn could hear other things now, if he cared to listen. Like the water clock tinkling on the far wall, a marriage present from Marlee’s father from before the war. Or the screams overhead of his infant daughter Ariale, named after the flying horse of legend. Or the shout of a man running past in the street outside.
Bahn felt clammy all of a sudden, the air in the room grown hot. He could barely seem to catch his next breath.
‘Can’t you hear them?’ came the ten-year-old’s voice in a sudden flood of noise, and Bahn blinked at his son then cocked his ears to the wailing horns outside the house.
‘Can’t you hear them, Father?’
Yes, he could hear them now. Sirens calling defenders to the northern wall over the steady rumbles of cannon fire.
With a start, Bahn sat upright in his chair, and in doing so realized that he was sitting there in the full combat armour of a Red Guard, and that he was due to report in at the wall. He looked up as his wife Marlee appeared in the doorway, holding the screaming red-faced form of their daughter in her arms, trying to soothe her. Ariale’s wail joined the horns calling the city to arms. Her eyes and nose gushed while her mother rocked her up and down, a hand held across the top of her tiny head, both of them exhausted.
His infant daughter always seemed to be falling sick these days. If it wasn’t a bad cough it was the stomach flux, or this fever.
It’s this war, he thought to himself darkly. It weakens her. She can hear the guns and sm
ell the fear on everyone around her. She smells it off me.
‘Did you fetch the healer like I told you to?’ Marlee asked of the boy.
‘Yes, Mother, she’s on her way.’
He was a good boy, this one. Not like his brother’s lad Nico, contentious and always giving off at the mouth. Bahn had a sudden urge to tell him how proud he was to have him as his son. But it was as though a glass wall still stood between them, a barrier he didn’t have the will to pierce. Instead he looked down at the surface of the table again. At the two choices left in his life.
A thud sounded in the distance. Then another.
Suddenly the windows rattled.
‘Oh no,’ panted his wife, and in her arms Ariale ceased screaming.
‘What is it?’ asked his son.
‘Bahn, it’s starting! Bahn!’
Even as he sat there unmoving, Marlee was pushing their son beneath the table and crouching down next to him with a now-silent Ariale. The concussions were getting closer. The house shook, and then an explosion went off nearby and it rattled their home even harder, glass and pottery shattering everywhere.
‘Bahn, my husband, why are you sitting there like stone?’ cried his wife at his feet.
But even as the plaster dust rained down on him, Bahn’s attention remained fixed on the two objects on the table, the charts and the gun, locked in the uncertainty of the moment.
‘Bahn!’
Her voice broke through at last. Time to move. Bahn scrabbled for the charts and rolled them back into their leather case, then shoved the tube firmly into his belt. He staggered to his feet, pulling the pistol towards him, its double barrels scraping across grit.
Bahn swayed there for a moment, feeling sick.
‘Stay there,’ he said. And then he stalked from the room without saying another word, without even looking back at his family huddled beneath the table staring after him.
*
Crowds filled the streets of the city. A human river of noise and motion flooding down from the northernmost limits of Bar-Khos, where the sudden onset of shelling seemed heaviest, and where the smoke of many fires was rising now into the leaden winter sky.
A good downpour would help damp any flames, but it had stopped raining at long last, after days of dreary dampness. Wrapped in his Red Guard cloak against the chill, Bahn could taste the smoke in his mouth and feel the sting of it in his already reddened eyes. It was unsettling to be marching northwards towards the sound of the horns, which continued to blare in their calls to arms, creating a kind of disharmonious music when heard against the din of the concussions. For ten years Bahn had grown used to the siege-front being in the south of the city, where the mammoth walls of the Shield had held back the imperial ambitions for all that time. Yet now, with the Empire’s invasion force massing against the northern wall, all had reversed itself.
Ahead, the northern wall loomed above the city’s rooftops, blocking out much of the grey sky beyond. Bahn did not have far to walk from his house, which was located in one of the northern districts, a place he’d previously considered safe for its distance from the front. Now the shells were falling all along the districts behind the wall, distant crumples or nearer blasts of fire. The streets grew more deserted as he neared the defences, until most of the people he could see were soldiers in a hurry, natives of Bar-Khos like himself in Red Guard cloaks and armour, or Volunteers from the rest of the Mercian Free Ports, men and women dressed in brown leathers. They hurried along grimly silent for the most part, though some were shouting to companions up on the parapets above.
By the time Bahn reached the wall the horns were beginning to fall silent, though the Khosian cannon were deafening as they fired from the many turrets in reply to the enemy shelling. Bahn joined the press rushing up the nearest set of steps, and made the long climb to the very top, his boots scuffing on the wet stone, the weight of his armour and weapons like carrying a man on his back.
By the time he made it to the high parapet above, Bahn was sheeting sweat and rasping for air, and he doubled over to catch his breath, thinking he would be sick. He was still weak after his recent bout of illness. Too damned long spent lying on a cot in Juno’s Ferry recovering from dysentery.
No time for such complaints now though.
The wind was strong and fiercely cold up here, blowing clear the smoke from the braziers and the many burning buildings behind. Bahn squinted at the lines of defenders standing along the battlements. Men and women wrapped in cloaks and the steam of their rapid breathing, every face turned to the plain beyond the wall.
Sweet Mercy, thought Bahn with a shudder, gripping the chill stone of a crenellation for balance as he took in the imperial army arranged against the city. In the space of a day, the advance forces of the Imperial Expeditionary Force had grown to cover the entire plain.
Tents were going up by their thousands, surrounded by spiked perimeters of ditches and earthworks. Across the plain swept a horde of light cavalry in a showy display of white banners bearing the red hand of Mann. Beyond them, heavy infantry marshalled into formation to the steady, distant throb of war drums.
Fifty thousand enemy fighters were the numbers Bahn had been hearing. After suffering bitter losses at Chey-Wes, the Imperial Expeditionary Force had been reinforced by troop ships from the island of Cheem, before the League navy had finally cut off their sea route, sinking even more enemy transports loaded with men.
‘We should be taking the fight to them right now,’ growled a young Red Guard to some others. ‘While they’re still digging in like this.’
Snorts rose from his companions.
‘We’re outnumbered five to one. What’s left of our forces are still recovering from Mokabi’s assaults in the south. And you want us to go out and meet the bastards on open ground.’
‘Well it worked up in Chey-Wes. Our chartassa made mince of them.’
‘Aye, lad, but our chartassa didn’t face all that artillery back in Chey-Wes. And that plain is no ground to be fighting on right now, it’s like a damned quagmire after all the rain. Our phalanxes would get cut to pieces just trying to manoeuvre across it.’
Bahn tried to exhale the sense of dread in his belly. He reminded himself that he had faced this army before and survived – after they had invaded the island’s wild eastern coast, and the Lord Protector Creed had indeed led a Khosian force against them into the Reach, despite the enemy’s superior numbers. A stinging draw had been the result of that clash, though the leader of the Imperial Expeditionary Force, the Holy Matriarch of the Empire herself, had been one of the casualties. Afterwards, having fought a desperate rearguard action while his people made their retreat across a frozen lake, Bahn had been captured.
His captivity amongst the Mannians remained a horror even now. Recalling it made his flesh crawl and the dread settle even heavier in his belly. And here they were once again, against all expectations, in the midst of a Khosian winter: the Empire’s forces come to take the city and all that meant anything to him.
‘Where’s your helm, Lieutenant?’ It was one of the older Red Guards who had been talking, a fellow officer.
Bahn stirred, realizing what the man had just asked him. Wonderful, he thought. In his fractured condition he’d forgotten to bring his helm to the battlefront, even as the Empire’s shells fell all around him.
From the corner of his eye he took in the middle-aged captain with a tartan blanket wrapped about his armour instead of a cloak. The fellow hardly seemed troubled by what was facing them. A fool then, a fool who believed this wall would be enough to hold back the monsters facing them.
‘Cole’s brother, aren’t you?’ he asked Bahn.
‘My brother?’
‘Aye, Cole Calvone! We met a few times at the All Fools Respite.’
Yes, he remembered now. But that was years ago, a different lifetime away, back before his older brother had deserted everyone who needed him, not least of all Bahn.
Just then, Bahn found himself looking to
wards the east, towards the foothills running all the way to the snowy peaks of the High Tell. His brother had rode off days ago with his son that way, hoping to bring back their mother from the family farm.
They had yet to return, though. And now imperial forces swarmed everywhere he looked. If they hadn’t been captured, they must surely be . . .
‘I have no brother,’ he heard himself say aloud.
‘But—’
‘I have no brother!’ Bahn snapped, and he stepped past the bewildered man before he could say anything in response.
He realized he was still gripping the loaded pistol in his hand. Half blind with sweat and tears, Bahn looked for General Creed along the parapet, and spotted his standard flapping in the breeze further along the line – a raging bear.
His body moved of its own accord. The face of the old witch Kira leered as a projection of his own warped mind.
Not yet! You must remember the plan, my child. The plan!
No, I must do it now or not at all. I cannot stand this waiting.
The plan, you fool! You must follow your orders as instructed!
He snarled his dissent and gripped the pistol even tighter, hurrying through the press towards the Lord Protector’s position, watched curiously by the captain from behind.
*
Bahn found General Creed exactly where he’d expected to find him, right at the focal point of the defences. In his great bearskin coat the Lord Protector of Khos was standing over the main northern gates themselves, his long black hair flying wild in the wind and his eyes thinned to slashes, surveying the Imperial Expeditionary Force on the plain with a spiteful calm.
It was the first time he’d seen the general since Chey-Wes, even though Bahn had been back for days now, having been instructed by his Mannian handler not to report for active duty until this morning.
Marsalas looked tired, but better than expected for a man who had suffered a recent heart attack. Around him were gathered a handful of his generals and Michinè noblemen, including the First Minister, Chonas, and around them his cordon of veteran bodyguards. Yet the Lord Protector towered above them all, taller even than Bahn remembered him to be. Perhaps it was only the sheer immobility of Creed’s posture just then. How he faced down the winds, the falling shells, the massing forces of an empire like one of the stony sentinels adorning the wall itself, so that Bahn was drawn to him as he always was at such times as this, the frightened to the fearless, the boy to the father.