by Col Buchanan
‘Perhaps, then, there is something else you can help me with,’ he said with his composure restored.
‘Yes?’
‘It appears the Khosians are constructing something behind Singer’s Wall. Digging up large amounts of earth for some reason. So far, we’ve been unable to find out why. Perhaps, with your link to Creed, you could find something in his head which would explain what they are doing there?’
‘It’s not impossible,’ mused Seech. ‘But I would advise against it. If I go sniffing around Creed now it might give away my leech.’
‘Damn it, man! Can’t you do a single thing for me? What am I paying you a king’s ransom for if you can’t even fetch me some simple intelligence?’
A man of surprises, always, the Dreamer sighed with resignation and nodded curtly. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ Mokabi barked. ‘If that wall doesn’t come down during the surge, you can say goodbye to the rest of your payment. In fact, if you fail me, you should leave as quickly as you can while you still can. You understand?’
‘Threats, Mokabi?’ retorted the man with a dry chuckle. ‘Are you so desperate now you would threaten a Dreamer?’
‘Get out. Get out of my sight and do not return until you are ready.’
‘As you wish.’
In his cloak of ribbons he strode from the room, leaving the doors wide open behind him, letting the warm air flood out into the corridor beyond. A masked Acolyte leaned in and closed it quietly.
Next to the door, his personal bodyguard Nil offered a single shrug: what can you do?
*
Nil seemed alert tonight, as though the bodyguard could sense something out there on the wind, assassins coming for the general through the darkness perhaps. More paranoia, he hoped, though Nil had every right to be suspicious, given that Mokabi’s top officers were still being killed one by one during the late nights, cut through by blade or crossbow bolt. It seemed the Khosians had assassins every bit as skilled as the Empire’s Diplomats.
Snip, snip from his barber, who was humming to himself now, lost in his simple work.
Ah, to be this slave for a day, thought Mokabi wistfully. Free of responsibilities, nothing worth losing but your own life. No reputation, no great wealth, to place on the line like this.
It must be starting to get to him, he realized grimly, if he was longing for the simple contentments of a slave. Mokabi had almost forgotten what the pressures of absolute command were like. Colossal in magnitude. Like standing on a mountaintop yet with everything inverted, so that the mountain was also on top of you, the loneliest of all the peaks in the world. For who could he share it with? Who would not consider the voicing of his burdens as a weakness, as a possible chink in his glamour?
There was a constant tension in his stomach now that never left him – a nugget of dread that was there when he first awoke and still was there when he lay down to sleep.
Mokabi unclenched his fists in his lap and tried to soothe himself by staring through the window, the glass panes reflecting the light of the room’s lanterns so that it appeared darker outside than it really was. Fires were shimmered amongst the distant ramparts of the Shield after another day of attacks.
His grand plan for the final conquest of Khos, his great chance at redeeming his name as the greatest Archgeneral of all, and once more he was running out of time.
It was the height of irony, considering that Kharnost’s Wall had fallen as quickly as he had anticipated it would. But of course it had fallen. It had barely been standing by the time he had arrived here with his forces, worn down by more than two years of attacks by the Imperial Fourth Army. Against that fractured bulwark, Mokabi had successfully thrown the largest assault ever seen in this world, and even that had been but a portion of the resources available to him here, this vast horde he had assembled on the narrow strip of the Lansway around Camp Liberty.
To think of the expense of it so far was to momentarily rob him of breath. His vast fortune would be blown on this enterprise, all the wealth of the southern continent, as much as could be rifled into the coffers of the Archgeneral who had conquered it, gone in the storming of this one damned city, this gateway to the Free Ports.
A single wall taken and three remaining in his way, when ten years ago six had stood at the Shield. With newly built walls the Khosian defenders had dragged out the siege indefinitely, falling back to them when the originals had been taken one by one. Now, with the fall of the ragged battlements of Kharnost, the new front line in the war had become Singer’s Wall, where the defenders had once more dug in their heels, stubbornly refusing to give further ground despite the overwhelming numbers thrown against them.
The daily casualties were as staggering as the costs in gold. Never had he read such casualty reports before. His own forces were taking the vast brunt of the losses in both men and skyships, in those daily slaughters that were their frontal assaults on the Shield. But the vastly outnumbered defenders were feeling the hurt too, and even with Bar-Khos filled to the brim by reinforcements from the rest of the Free Ports, they were dipping deep into their reserves. The majority of the Khosian forces were now committed to holding Singer’s Wall.
Cannon fire flashed amongst the distant ruins of the walls, ruins that were the remains of walls taken by Mokabi himself during the early years of the siege, victories which had meant little while the remaining battlements still held the Empire at bay.
It was a bind that was fast approaching once more. The Khosians refused to be broken, and now Sparus and Romano had united the Expeditionary Force again in the north and were moving across the Chilos, soon to turn south for Bar-Khos. Sparus, the Little Eagle, the very man who had replaced him as Archgeneral after his earlier failure to take the city.
Mokabi couldn’t bear it, the thought of being beaten to his victory at the very last moment. He would rather take his own life than live with such shame.
I stalled too long in Sheaf. I shouldn’t have held back so many reserves from the assaults. I should have thrown caution to the wind and hit them with everything right from the beginning.
But that was hindsight, a nearly useless vantage for his present situation. Besides, Mokabi hadn’t become the Empire’s most famous Archgeneral by being reckless. No, he had risen to that exalted position by the relentless, grinding inevitability of his conquests.
It was only now, with his window of opportunity diminishing, that he prepared for one grand throw of the dice heavily loaded in his favour.
If he could take Singer’s Wall decisively, causing as many enemy casualties as possible in a single fateful stroke, he could well defeat the remaining walls in a matter of days. Which was precisely what Mokabi intended, just as soon as the Dreamer finally declared himself ready to shake the wall: an unstoppable all-out surge against the Shield with everything that he had to seize the city for himself.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Vigil
With a start the Dreamer Shard awakened in a cold sweat, the beads cooling upon the surface of her glimmersuit. She grunted in pain as she sat up in her cot and tried to recall where she was.
Of course. They were travelling by road back to Bar-Khos after finding their skud gone from Juno’s Ferry. She recalled that they had stopped for the night in a lonely wayhouse by the roadside, halfway to the city.
In the darkness of her tiny room she gritted her teeth and clamped an arm around her abdomen. The cramps were so bad now that fear washed through her for a moment, for there was no doubting the savagery of these pains. She had been vomiting blood on and off for a day now. In a mirror in her room, her eyes had looked yellow and bloodshot. The worm was slowly killing her. Soon she would have to think about getting it out of her body.
Not long now, she told herself for reassurance. We’re nearly back in the city.
All she needed to do was return quickly enough to confront Seech while her focus remained acute, finish him with powers she knew were approaching their apogee thanks to the sensee ba
rk she’d been given by the strange, blue-eyed Longalla man at the council, and then she could be rid of it. If only she could hold on until then.
Shard thought about getting up and fixing herself something for the pains. But then she realized that her glimmersuit was tingling across her skin, pulsing to a particular rhythm.
One of her vigils was trying to alert her to something.
As easily as she commanded her muscles, Shard called up a column of glyphs in her vision, each pulsing in and out of existence. Quickly she scanned through them until she saw what she was looking for.
Ah!
After all this time of doubting, one of the vigils she had lain around General Creed had finally been tripped.
In excited haste Shard cast the blanket from her naked body and swung her legs to the ground, warmed by the second skin that was her glimmersuit. In her mind she selected the glyph that was pulsing faster than the rest of them and closed her eyes, slipping free of her body and its discomforts.
She found herself floating in the darkened bed chamber of General Creed.
Easy now.
There – a shell of light dancing in the blackness over the sleeping form of the Lord Protector. A disembodied intruder, betraying himself without knowing it in a gentle halo of light, his aura unique to him alone, unmistakable.
Tabor Seech.
Back in the waking world, the scarring of her face itched from the immediacy of the man.
Carefully Shard whispered her tree of offensive glyphs into creation around the left edge of her vision, and then her defensive ones too along the opposite side, running through her head the order in which she would use them. They were symbols she had crafted herself, customized and refined like the glyphs she used within the Black Dream. With practised grace she swept them into different strings, preparing the order of her attack. Willed to life a pair of her fiercest barbed snares and filled them with burgeoning early life, making sure they were primed and ready to go.
Let’s have a peek at what he’s doing first.
Carefully she edged closer, as fully cloaked as she could maintain, close enough to see the glyphs that Seech was spinning out before him. The man had his own unique symbolisms too, impossible for her to read. But she could tell he was trying to crack into the Lord Protector’s sleeping mind.
She itched to launch everything she had at him, but something held her back. On a hunch, Shard raised the focus on her scanning glyph. Traced the faint web of energy sparking out from the light that was Seech, connecting with his glyphs and then wrapping around Creed himself. She increased the focus a little more, spotted a lone ghost glyph fixed to the body of Creed.
A leech, hooked up to the Khosian general!
Suddenly Seech’s spark danced upwards and swept around in a circle until he was close above her.
Shard? Is that you?
It was that damned sixth sense again, that connection between the two of them.
Do it now!
Shard launched her snares right at the dazzle of light, but it was too late.
A whisper of energy washed across her like ripples in water, and then Seech was gone.
She hung back, scanning around her, her suite of remaining glyphs throbbing like her fast-beating heart.
Next time, she promised fiercely.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Landing with a Crash
Rain spattered against the windows of the Vulture, though it was only the dark clouds they were flying through now, threaded with irregular streaks of lightning.
The flashes of light illuminated the faces of Aléas and Nico sitting on the other side of a folding table, both strapped into their seats and dozing lightly, heads rocking from side to side with every lurch of the winged craft. Up front in the green glow of the instruments, Cole sat listening to the Anwi man’s quiet chatter as they rode through the storm.
Absently, Ash stroked the cat sitting by his feet, and stared down once more at the charts spread out before him on the trembling table. Meer must have drawn them up with help from the ship’s navigator, Olson, for they were precise in their graphical descriptions, dissected with lines of latitude and longitude, marked with scales of distance in laqs. Each unrolled sheet described a certain region they had passed through, leading to the final one, the most important one, a complete chart ranging from the Midèrēs all the way to the equator and the Isles of Sky.
Ash kept seeing flashes in his mind as he stared at the white spaces of parchment. Images of the Falcon crashing into the sea. The white froth spilling away from it in every direction. The remains of the skyship slowly sinking into the water.
Hard to equate these paper charts with the lives of all who had been lost.
If there had been survivors amongst the crew, they were on their own now. Ash and the others had been chased away by the pair of Anwi attack craft, fleeing north in their own Vulture until Juke had managed to lose them. Stunned silence had been their companion for the rest of the flight.
North-west they had sped with the thrusters blasting and the wings vibrating through the air, plotting a course which they hoped was aimed directly at the Free Ports, Juke occasionally changing the charge coils when needed. Over clouds and highlands they had flown, and then the great range of the Aradèrēs itself, a crossing made easy this time by the great height at which they flew. Somewhere not far from Lucksore they had entered southern Pathia at last, with Juke nursing the craft now at minimum speed, trying to save what power was left in the last few cells.
Ash gazed down at the charts blindly. He blinked for focus, and tried to imagine the importance of these parchments to the people of the Free Ports, the leverage it would offer them in their dealings with the Caliphate, even with the Empire of Mann; if the walls of Bar-Khos were still standing.
He glanced across to Nico, dozing away in all his ignorance. What was Ash bringing his apprentice back to, besides war and a grieving mother?
A face flashed in his mind: Meer falling away from him into the night. The horror of it bore down on Ash.
The cat was purring at his feet.
‘Thank you,’ said a quiet voice.
It was Nico, watching him from half-closed eyes.
‘What for?’
The boy blinked with those big eyes of his, so much like Ash remembered. A shiver ran up his spine; sitting here talking to a ghost.
‘For not letting me go.’
Something in the way he said it made Ash wonder if he meant more than hanging on to him on the dangling rope bridge. But then the boy closed his eyes fully, and there and then seemed to drift into sleep again, exhausted and still weak.
*
‘What’s happening?’ Cole hollered.
Ash opened his eyes to find the craft diving sickeningly towards a canopy of forest and the others gripping their seats with their wide stares fixed ahead, looking past Juke at the controls.
‘Port thruster,’ grunted the Anwi man from the cockpit, one hand wrestling the control stick and the other flicking switches over his head. ‘It just died on us. Hold on!’
The forest was rushing fast towards them, but at the last moment the craft’s nose swung up so that they crashed belly-first through the canopy – bare tree limbs clattering past the windows – then dropped to the ground, hitting it with a shock that threw Ash forwards in his seat, the straps biting into his flesh as water swept over the front canopy.
At last they came to a rocking stop. Juke was flicking switches as fast as he could, shutting everything down.
In moments they were sitting in silence save for the dying whines of the craft.
‘That’s it,’ said Juke thickly. ‘End of the ride.’
*
‘Where are we?’ Aléas asked with the rain drumming against the metal hull over their heads, and Nico glanced through the windows as though wondering the same thing. It was getting cold in the cabin of the craft, their breaths rendered visible in the air.
‘Near Sheaf, I think,’ rumbled the longhun
ter, peering outside at the tall reeds surrounding them, for they seemed to have come down in some sort of forested marsh. ‘I recognized the harbours of the city on the way down on the coast of the Sargassi. We must be in the marshlands to the south of it.’
‘Northern Pathia,’ scowled Aléas. ‘We almost made it back to Khos!’
‘So what now?’ Juke asked, turning from the cockpit to look at Ash standing there peering out – as though Ash had all the answers in the world.
He shrugged, tightening his lips.
‘I guess we walk.’
A curse from the longhunter uttered beneath his breath. ‘We just walk to the Lansway and knock on the Shield to be let into the city?’
Ash sat down heavily, needing to lighten his burdens. He reached for the leather tube containing the charts and gripped it hard in his hands, aware of Nico watching him and his father from his seat on the opposite side of the cabin, the boy’s hands kneading themselves on his lap.
Give him time, Ash decided. Let him settle into himself.
‘Tell me if I’m wrong,’ said Juke from the front. ‘But they have farcrys in the Free Ports, do they not?’
‘What of it?’
Juke raised a kidney-shaped device that dangled around his neck, and grinned.
‘Then maybe we can use this one to contact someone, and arrange for help?’
*
Far, far to the north of their position, beyond the bridge of land known as the Lansway connecting Pathia with the Free Port of Bar-Khos, Shard the Dreamer sat with closed eyes communing silently within the Black Dream, seemingly oblivious to the freezing wind blasting her in the face.