by Col Buchanan
‘Easy, easy,’ snapped the captain. ‘Get some oil on those gears first.’
Ché could feel the tension in the air, could almost sense the quickened heartbeats of those around him. The city looked empty here, but there were structures not far to the south with lights inside and imperial flags flapping. Soon the crewmen had winched the skud low enough to throw some netting over the port rail.
All at once, the half dozen Rōshun were pouring over the side and down the netting smooth as water, every one of them wearing Owls. Around the rail, the rangers stationed themselves with their rifles aimed and ready.
‘Smells like blood,’ Wild hissed up from the flat rooftop below, crouched down in his black robe. Behind him the other Rōshun were shadows moving within shadows. ‘Smells like a massacre happened here.’
‘There’s some bodies on the street below,’ added the young ranger sniper, squinting through his scope. ‘Looks like they were thrown off the roof, or they jumped.’
The deck was quiet save for the heavy breathing of the men.
‘Could be a trap,’ said Ché, inspired by the tautness of the moment.
Faces looked at him in disgust.
‘Could be a whole company of imperial troops down there, lying in wait for you.’
‘Well, there’s only one way to find out,’ said Coya, and he surprised them all by hitching himself over the rail with stiff, awkward jerks.
‘You’ll need to be quick,’ said the captain from the wheel, glancing to the night sky in the east. ‘One of the moons will be rising soon. When it comes up, we’ll be as visible here as though it was daylight.’
Already Ché could see a soft glow on the eastern horizon. He looked to Curl, climbing over the side with her medico bag slung on her back, helping Coya down the netting.
Time to move.
‘Break your neck,’ said one of the watching rangers as Ché followed the others over the side.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Nico
They looked about ready to drop, these people crowded across the slope of the barricade, panting and steaming as they caught their breaths from the ongoing action at the very top, where others took their turn for a while, fighting off another imperial assault with desperate yells and crashes of steel and shot.
In the rising moonlight the defenders’ ashen features blinked with exhaustion. People were too stunned to look at each other as they gulped down water or anything stronger at hand to settle their nerves, their shaking bodies. Bruised and battered, many of them bled from poorly bandaged injuries; soldiers and civilians thrown together into this improvised last-ditch line of defence.
They had been strangers to Nico when he’d joined them that evening with the enemy shells exploding all around them, though now some of those who had survived the endless night of fighting were familiar to his eyes, and he to them.
Over there he spotted the lanky young woman who’d been bringing them water and stale bread throughout the worst of the action, singing the whole time in old Khosian against deafening blasts that had most of the men cowering under their arms and cloaks while she trod past them. Even now, face blackened with soot, the woman struggled along the rubble offering water from a skin to those who needed it, wiping a strand of hair from her tired yet dogged expression.
There, just beyond her, sat the cock-eyed cartwright still wearing the leather apron of his craft, next to the young hood from Cherry Hill sporting a tattooed head of Caw-Caw motifs. They were both watching the old Michinè fellow bent over his fallen son, the nobleman openly weeping like no Michinè they had ever seen.
Brindle Valores was his name. The man had joined them only a few hours earlier, bringing with him his disgruntled son and a dozen house guards to the fray. Now the tears ran down his white-painted face.
During the most desperate moments in the fighting, the fellow had helped Nico regain his footing while shouting words lost in the battle’s storm, baring his teeth as though a defiant grin was precisely what the situation required. Khosian flares had been going up all along the winding barricades that crossed the city, signalling where reinforcements were needed the most, where the line was buckling against the relentless waves of enemy forces coming at them out of the night. With their own section of barricade close to being overrun, the Michinè nobleman had counter-attacked with his surviving house guards and his son. They had beaten off the attackers, but not before his son had taken a spear through the belly.
Now the enemy was retreating once again up there at the top, replaced by sporadic rifle fire that forced the defenders back down into cover. It sounded as though the shelling and ground attacks were moving further along the line for now, seeking softer sections to exploit.
Upon the slope, Nico thinned his stare against another flare and spotted a familiar silhouette stepping down through the hunkered defenders, boots sliding on the shifting debris. Behind Aléas came another figure, the Contrarè man Sky In His Eyes who had been causing so much havoc with his bow.
Aléas was holding a hand to his side when he sat down next to Nico with a wince. His wound, where a bullet had entered and exited his side, narrowly missing his vitals, was bleeding again through the bandages and his tunic.
His friend was tougher than he looked, Nico was reminded. Though he hid the admiration from his voice with a tone of annoyance.
‘You should go and get those stitches looked at, Aléas. Before you bleed to death.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Aléas, taking a drink from a water skin as the Contrarè man settled down next to them.
Sky In His Eyes looked now to the street behind them where the dead were stacked like stiff boards of wood. Grimly his stare took in the upturned faces, covered in a fine layer of ash cast from the infernos to the north, and the monks chanting and waving burning incense above them.
Half the defenders seemed to be either dead or missing now. Nico wondered how they would ever hold back the imperial tide at this rate. And then he saw the same question hanging on many of the haggard faces around him too – on the expressions of those fellow citizens who had gradually knotted around him in the thick of the fighting, inspired in some way by the certainty of Nico’s actions, so that they’d followed him wherever he made a stand and even now remained close by.
‘You were a force to be reckoned with, saving your friend here,’ said Sky In His Eyes. ‘These people around you . . . they gain strength from your own.’
These Contrarè spoke oddly, Nico thought. They were so open with their sentiments, as though there was no guile in what they said.
‘I lost my head, is what I did,’ Nico answered him truthfully, remembering the moment with a grimace. ‘You and that bow-work however . . . We could do with a few more thousand Contrarè like you, that’s for sure.’
But Nico’s words caused the man to flinch in his skin.
‘Yes,’ he said with regret. ‘And I am only here by accident. You should know, not all of my people still argue about supporting your cause or not. Some have engaged the invaders anyway. Even now, they raid the imperial lines of supply to the north. They cause what havoc they can, where they can. And perhaps soon the rest of the tribe will join them. And then they might even come here.’
‘More help than we deserve, I reckon,’ Nico admitted. ‘My father once told me much about our dealings with the Contrarè over the years. You have little reason to favour us Khosians at all.’
Surprise tilted the Contrarè’s head to one side, and he took a moment to gather his words. ‘It always helps to share a common enemy. Where is your father, anyway? He was here a moment ago. Ah, I think I see him.’
Sky In His Eyes raised a hand as the figure of Cole stepped away from a group of soldiers and limped towards them, his longrifle cradled over his arm. He had come upon Nico during the last lull in the fighting, shouting out for anyone with spare ammunition.
Cole nodded to the Contrarè, looked to Aléas, then frowned at his son.
‘We should head back to the inkw
orks while the pressure’s off here,’ he told Nico, wiping his grimy face with an even dirtier hand. ‘Grab something to eat. Let your mother know we’re still alive.’
‘I told you, I’m not leaving this fight.’
‘Nico. She’ll be worried sick by now.’
‘Then you go.’
‘Aaiee . . . You’re as stubborn as she is, you know that, boy?’
It sounded like a compliment, not a criticism, just then. Nico looked to the crest of the barricade again where the odd rifleman was taking a careful, sparing shot with whatever shells he had left. The battle rumbled away further along the line.
‘Hecheney,’ Cole said, catching sight of the Contrarè.
‘Hecheney,’ replied Sky In His Eyes.
‘Must feel a long way from the Windrush.’
‘Like another world away.’
Nico gazed back along the street, drawn to the sight of the Redeemer woman sitting on a lone block of stone. Still alive, even now, after flinging herself repeatedly at the enemy forces. Somehow invulnerable in her madness.
In the pale moonlight, the woman was tearing out handfuls of plaited hair with awful slow tugs that were making a bloody patchwork of her scalp. Her body was trembling, eyes spilling with tears. Working herself up for her own end, her own bloody salvation.
‘Any news from along the line?’ he heard himself ask his father.
Cole took off his hat to wipe his brow, following Nico’s stare to what the Redeemer was doing to herself in the middle of the street. ‘Same gruesome mess as here,’ he grumbled. ‘General Tanserine is anchoring the line from the Mount of Truth. It stretches from there all the way to the south-eastern docks. The enemy need only break through at a single point, and it’s all over.’
‘What about in the north?’
‘Most of the northern wall fell fast once they got inside. Some sections are still holding out, though. Other forces have fallen back into defensive pockets.’
He flinched – they all did – as a mortar round exploded close by. Further along the line, the sound of fighting was growing even louder – yet it was more than that. Nico cocked his ear to a roar of voices rising above the clamour.
Up above, riflemen were flapping their hands to gain their companions’ attention, and people hurried up the slope for a better look.
‘Let’s see what all the fuss is about,’ suggested Nico, scrambling upwards.
*
A man fell back from the crest of the slope, shot through the head by an enemy sniper round. The rest ducked lower, their rifles cracking angrily in reply.
On his belly, Nico peered over the barricade at what had once been a thriving marketplace, and was now only a no-man’s-land of craters and debris surrounded by blackened buildings.
To the west another assault was being thrown against the defences, a thousand imperial fighters glimpsed through the ruins as they stormed a section of the barricade further along. To the east, a column of riders cantered this way along a thoroughfare running parallel to the barricade. Angry cries were rising from the defenders as the riders passed by towing a wagon in their wake, which had two beams of wood crossed vertically upon it, bearing what was obviously a naked corpse.
‘What do you see?’ someone hissed to one of the few riflemen with a scope.
‘They’ve strung up General Creed,’ grunted the man.
‘The Lord Protector,’ others were yelling, seeing what they could all see now. ‘They have the Lord Protector!’
Nico squinted hard through the moonstruck night. He could see the imperial banners flying from the column of riders cantering along the far side of the market square, and the bouncing wagon bearing its gruesome display for everyone to see – General Creed’s naked body lashed to the cross-beams by his arms and legs, a sheen of long black hair flapping in his wake.
‘Must have found his body when they overran the Stadium of Arms,’ growled his father.
Birds were fighting over the corpse as it was drawn along at a steady clip. They were big red and black skrakes, and they were tied to the corpse by long leashes of cord. Some hopped into the air flapping and yanking against their leashes to be free. Others, though, hopped onto Creed’s head, pecking at flesh, at the sockets of the eyes.
‘Bastards! You bloody bastards!’
Nico glanced up to see the cartwright standing with his axe raised above his head, screaming out at the passing cavalry. Someone tried to yank the man back but he was beyond reason, and he hopped down onto the other side, screaming out with enough force that he drew a few enemy shots towards him. Even the glinting helms of some of the passing cavalry turned his way.
‘That’s Romano leading those riders there,’ rasped a voice wrung dry of all emotion next to Nico’s side. It was the old Michinè fellow, having left his fallen son below, wheezing heavily as he squinted through an old spyglass propped upon a shattered brick, his powdered face streaked and filthy beneath his grey wig. ‘I’ll swear to it. I’ll swear that’s General Romano leading from the front there,’ he said breathlessly, ignoring a spark of dust from a near-miss – and when he looked to Nico, it was with eyes hollowed out by the totality of his loss. ‘Bastard has come out to mock us in our darkest hour.’
Nico focused upon the lead rider of the column, who was looking back at the cartwright yelling from the defences. The white-armoured man rode like a prince, as cocksure as the prancing white war-zel he sat upon. As though he owned the street, the city, the whole damned world.
Nico gritted his teeth together, a deep rage uncoiling within him.
Another green flare rose to the west of them, hanging for a long moment above the barricade where the fighting was at its heaviest. Horns were sounding out from the enemy forces there. Already, reinforcements could be seen flitting through the ruined streets towards them, hoping to break through.
The column of cavalry was picking up speed too. Leaving the wagon behind with a few riders, they formed a wedge as the young General Romano led them on a charge across the far corner of the market square.
‘There goes a man who believes in his own destiny,’ muttered the Michinè.
Riflemen were yelling out for more black powder as their companions took eager shots at the flashing forms of the cavalry. The enemy riflemen opened up too with renewed vigour, laying down as much covering fire for their general as they could.
A cry sounded out. The cartwright fell back with most of his head missing; a jet of blood describing a perfect Golden Spiral through the air.
Spurred by a sudden impulse, Nico surged to his feet and took off running in the direction of the fighting, hopping over the loose rubble with the grace of a wild animal, never minding the enemy fire as he drew his sword once again.
‘Go on, my boy!’ shouted the old Michinè after him. ‘Give the bastard your steel!’
*
He couldn’t explain what he was doing. Only that he was an arc of motion, another Golden Spiral describing itself upon the world.
Across the next street Nico followed the top of the barricade, scattering surprised defenders out of his way. A quick glimpse back told him that his father was giving chase too, along with Aléas and the Contrarè fellow and some of the citizens who’d been sticking with Nico throughout the night. Others too were rising to join them as they rushed by.
Through clouds of smoke the barricade led him across the second storey of a ruined building, and then Nico was out the other side and he saw the fighting before him, the frenzy of violence fierce as a summer wildfire.
Soldiers and citizens were standing shoulder to shoulder along the brink of the defences, trying to fight back the mass of imperial infantry tearing up the slope at them. But the defenders’ line was a ragged one. Enemy units were breaking through into the streets behind, where Khosian civilians tried to surround them.
Imperial horns called out as though they were beckoning others to the kill.
Raising their own thunder, the Mannian General Romano led his wedge of cav
alry straight at the barricade, surging with spurts of steam and clashes of steel up the outer slope. Explosions lit up the night, and Romano’s furious expression flashed like a man possessed, white foam flecking his snarling lips; a mad wolf needing to be put down.
Nico hefted his sword.
He shoved a defender aside, and another, then launched himself and all caution to the wind by leaping off the top.
For an instant Nico glimpsed the surprise on the young general’s face, and then they collided and went spilling to the ground in a host of gasps and grunts.
Nico was first to rise, more nimble without the weight of armour. He lifted his sword over the fallen general’s head with every intention of severing it from his body – but then a zel charged into him, and Nico went crashing to the ground again, hooves crashing all about him.
He knew he would be dead in the next moment, but he grabbed his fallen sword anyway and rolled onto his back, seeking out the Mannian general. An enemy rider crashed near his feet, an arrow sticking from his throat. Close by, a zel reared in pain at a rifleshot in its flank, dismounting another rider.
From an intuition, Nico rolled aside just in time to avoid a blade slicing down at him.
The enemy general roared in rage before launching another strike, and Nico barely fended it off as he scrambled to his feet, bouncing off the flank of a zel back into the man’s range.
Romano cut this way and that, clearly skilled with the blade, clearly outmatching Nico with ease. He was younger than Nico had been expecting, his striking features contorted by rage. All manner of chaos had broken out around them. Helmed faces leered down with flashing eyes. Zels whinnied and spun about, attacked by defenders with spears and charta rushing down the slope. A grenade shook the ground.