by Col Buchanan
Best if he remembered none of it, Ash considered with feeling. Who would wish to recall such a thing, tied to a stake and burned alive for the benefit of thousands of spectators?
He reached over and gripped the boy’s bony shoulder hard. ‘Let me tell you of it another time. If you still wish me to.’
Nico nodded. He looked to his father’s scarred features and a frown crept onto his own. ‘We’d given you up for dead,’ he remarked flatly.
‘No, still working on that.’
Something unspoken passed between their stares.
‘It broke her, you know. You shouldn’t have left us like that, even after what you did. You should have stayed and made it right.’
‘I know, son. I know.’
*
By late afternoon the taverna had filled with soldiers and mercenaries eager to drink away the siege and the winter cold. Showing his usual initiative, Cole purchased a deck of cards from the bar, and while he and the others played casual hands of Rash amongst the scattered remains of the food they had ordered, pretending to ignore the many fighting men and women around them, Ash was content to sit relaxed in the warmth of his companions’ presence, knowing that hiding out in plain sight was their best option for now until the raid commenced some time in the night.
Slouched in his chair, Ash listened to the easy banter passing between Nico and Aléas now, reminding him of a time not so long ago, when they had travelled together on vendetta to imperial Q’os with Baracha growling constantly at the two young men’s exuberance, the pair like old friends already.
Even now it was hard to grasp that Nico was really alive and breathing again. Such a physical shock to the system, each time Ash turned and caught an unexpected glimpse of his apprentice, a dead person sitting there in the flesh; as though his death had been a dream or imagining and nothing more. Every instance of this seemed to cause a split-second revaluation of his memories, resulting in Ash blinking startled from flashbacks of a fiery pyre, seeing his apprentice burning to death upon it.
So much life in the boy’s eyes now, so much animation. It seemed that in almost reaching home he had remembered himself again. What was he thinking right now? What did he make of these strange events he had awakened into? To see him playing cards it was easy to imagine that he was taking it all in his youthful stride. But whenever Nico glanced his way, Ash could glimpse the conflicts quietly surging within the young man.
Yet he lived, and that was the important thing after all. Nico would be fine, given time. Ash was as certain of it as he was of the sun rising on the morrow.
We did it, Kosh, he thought with a silent pat of his own hand beneath the table. We brought him back from the dark.
Ash might have been content just then had so many losses not lain on the path behind him, and if the boy’s presence had not stirred his usual melancholy for the past – for watching Nico smile at Aléas’s humour was like watching the son he hadn’t seen in thirty-something years, springing back to life sharper than any memory, sharp as life.
Ash turned away to look out of the steamy window. The short winter’s day had almost passed by then, and the foremost wall was dull in the deepening twilight. He thought of Nico’s mother Reese, her surprise and joy as he returned with her living breathing son by his side, fully restored.
His heart was warmed by the thought of such a reunion, even if the walls of the Shield and several hundred thousand armed men presently stood in its way.
*
‘It’s a little late to be drinking, don’t you think? The surge is set for tonight.’
‘Never too late. Now get it down you.’
‘If we start now I’ll be blind drunk by the time we muster.’
‘That’s the idea, laddie. When you’re charging those walls you’ll be glad you’re blinded out of your senses, believe me – you’ll be shitting your trousers and you won’t even know it.’
Ash stirred where he had been quietly dozing in his chair, ears pricking to the conversation from the table behind him. A mirror was set into the far wall, and through it he could see a pair of mercenaries dressed in leathers, one bald and one blond, knocking back stiff drinks at their small table.
‘You think this surge will work then?’
‘Certainly. Even if it takes fifty thousand corpses to do it. Trick is not to be one of them.’
‘I hear those Khosians are stubborn bastards.’
‘They fight hard, I’ll give them that. I didn’t sleep for a week after my last assault.’
‘I don’t want to be doing this, Cheeros.’
‘No, few men do.’
‘I don’t even want to be here.’
‘Who would?’
‘Yesterday, when I was passing an infirmary with Hermet, I saw a pile of arms as tall as my waist, just lying there in the mud. Arms! Left arms and right arms all bloody and tangled together, just heaped in a pile.’
‘Calm down, will you? Losing an arm’s nothing. Just pray you don’t lose your legs or your balls.’
Ash smiled grimly, reminded of the dark humour of his rebel companions during the days of revolution. Horrors softened by words.
‘I thought the damned siege would be over by now. Thought I’d arrive here just in time to take part in the sack.’
‘Aye. Didn’t we all, laddie.’
Movement in the mirror caught Ash’s eye. He watched as a hooded man climbed the steps into sight, his shadowed gaze scanning around the upper balcony, looking at each face in turn. Behind him, more hooded men were stepping up into view.
Beneath the table, Ash nudged Aléas with his boot.
Trouble? motioned the young man with a subtle gesture in Rōshun sign.
Maybe, Ash responded with a tilt of his head, and drew the leather tube of charts slowly out of sight, squeezed it through his loose belt, straightened where he sat.
The fellow swept his hood back as he approached, displaying the pallid features of a northerner, while beneath the table Ash gently lay his sword across his lap.
He stopped and clasped his hands behind his back in a deception of openness, and looked to each of them in turn.
‘I take it you are mercenaries, here to enlist then?’
The cat growled from where she lay curled on the floor. Warily Ash nodded, and hoped the others had sense enough to act their parts, for he had already noted the shortsword hanging from the fellow’s belt and the bulge of a pistol, not to mention the repeating crossbows in the hands of a few of his companions.
Regulators, Ash thought in alarm. Mannian secret police.
He felt the leather tube pressing hard against his ribs, and it struck him just then the enormity of what was inside it.
All of this time focused on Nico, and here he was in possession of something that could either save the Free Ports or doom them. If the charts were to fall now into the Empire’s hands it would be disastrous for Nico’s people. The Alhazii Caliphate would turn against them for threatening their monopoly with the Isles of Sky, while the Empire would find a way to use the charts for its own advances.
It could change the world, this stiff tube of leather stuffed with parchments.
‘Mind telling me where you’ve been billeted?’ asked the Regulator, hands still behind his back. His companions were spreading out along the balcony, observing the other patrons with suspicion.
‘What’s it to you?’ Cole snapped, throwing down his hand of cards.
‘Maybe nothing. Or maybe you’re the reason I’ve been tramping through the cold streets all afternoon. Tell me. You didn’t happen to rap a sentry over the skull last night, did you?’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Cole.
‘Camp security. Now answer me. Where are you billeted?’
The longhunter barely hesitated. ‘Haven’t gotten around to it yet.’
‘Nonsense. They wouldn’t have allowed you into the camp without assigning you billets for the night.’
The talk had ceased from the tables around them.
No. We’re
too close now for this to happen.
Ash tried to think of the right thing to tell the man, but he was distracted by the cat growling even louder now from the floor. Nico stared down at the table with his shoulders hunched while Aléas casually sat back with a hand beneath his cloak.
Juke watched it all with the fascination of a tourist.
Their silence stretched on, every passing second adding another measure to their guilt.
They had been found out, and all knew it.
There was no warning, just the act itself – Ash lunging up with the edge of the table in his grasp to overturn it with a crash. His blade swept free over his companions’ startled reactions.
‘Run!’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here!’
And then he vaulted over the table, bounding in amongst the Regulators like it was sport.
A pistol pointed at his face and he swept his blade up and knocked it flying. Another man fired his crossbow just as Ash ducked beneath it and impaled his side. He swept around and the rest of them hopped backwards, stunned by his ferocity, tripping over tables and chairs suddenly cleared by the scattering patrons.
Bedlam behind Ash too; all around him, in fact. Soldiers shouting and joining in the fight. Cole swiping at a pair of fellows with his longrifle. Aléas swinging his shortsword. Juke throttling a fellow from behind. Nico throwing a steel mug at someone and then a chair.
‘Get out!’ Ash shouted again, but to little effect.
He glimpsed another pistol rising in someone’s hand, saw that it was aimed right at Nico’s back. Ash hurled his sword into the man’s chest then surged after it, even as the Regulator fell backwards with his pistol flaring.
A slap struck the farlander’s side, harder than he thought for it bowled him over onto the floor. Winded and gasping, Ash lifted his chin from the planking to see the boots scuffing around him as though it was all a grotesque dance.
He gripped his side with shaking hands and felt the hot wet flow dribbling between his fingers, where the bullet had grazed his rib-cage.
I’m shot!
Six feet away Juke was down too, though he was still heaving beneath a mound of soldiers. Above him, Cole’s arms were pinned while the cat snarled and bit at his captors. Only Aléas and Nico were still standing, the pair pressed back to back, his apprentice wielding a chair against the flash of swords, his face grimly desperate.
It was horror that gripped Ash right then. They were going to capture the boy just like back in Q’os. Nico would fall into Mannian hands and the nightmare would become real all over again.
Nausea washed through him like a fever. He reached for his sword, instinctively knowing where it lay. Grasped it up and swept it at two Regulators bending towards him with blades, forcing them back. With an effort he staggered to his feet, barely feeling any pain in his side at all, just a dull throb of presence.
Too many of them, he saw in a single glance of appraisal. Most of the balcony’s occupants had risen up to fight.
Save the boy later.
Save the charts now.
He glanced to the nearest point of escape, a glass window, and saw three soldiers standing in his path to it, all three catching his eye as they drew their weapons.
With a lurch Ash kicked the nearest fellow in the groin then snatched up the pistol flying from his grip. He stepped to the side as he aimed the gun at the man’s head, lining up his two companions behind him, then fired a shot that went straight through all three heads before crashing through the pane of the window.
Even with the glass shattered, Ash was hopping over the trio of dead bodies like useful stepping stones, using the last to spring through the window.
Ash toppled outside, tumbling once before he landed on his back on a sloped side-roof amongst the crash of broken shards.
He slid with the pieces of glass down the tiled slope of the roof, shooting off the edge as he grabbed for the rain gutter and hung there dangling for a moment as he checked below him, before he dropped down into an empty back yard.
Faces at the broken window above. Shouts of anger cast down at him.
Ash hated himself just then, but still he gripped his sword and the wound in his side and staggered off into the twilight, deserting the boy to his fate once again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Fighting Spirit
Shard and Coya walked through corridors blackened and still reeking with smoke damage from last night’s sky raid, no doubt why the many windows of the Ministry of War were propped open a little, so that the halls were chill and they walked through their own spurts of eager breaths.
Their boots rapping on the smooth marble of the floors, together they marched for the private chambers of the Lord Protector Creed as fast as Coya could manage, which was to say in a stiff amble.
Shard pretended not to mind, but really her body hummed with impatience.
They had just come from the dusky streets below, where the dead were passing in carts led by shaven-headed monks ringing bells in sonorous percussions, and waving burning incense to mask the stench. Nearest to the Shield, a thin pall of smoke had blanketed the southern quarters of the city, diffusing the fading daylight so that the living stood like murky spirits lining the streets. They watched the corpses go by in the backs of the wagons, casualties from the walls wrapped in cloaks, blankets or nothing at all, jostling and bouncing as the wheels clattered over the cobbles, crudely animated in ways that could never be mistaken for life.
The people had been hit hard by last night’s sky raids in those southern quarters closest to the Lansway. Marsh had stared darkly in the worst-hit districts, where figures still stumbled around in shock, filthy faces made clean where tears had cut their stripes. Terror had clearly fallen from the sky. Rows of buildings still smouldered where stooped figures clawed through the smoking ruins, searching for survivors or simply what was left of them.
On one corner, Coya had stopped abruptly with a tut and a pull of his face. He was looking across the street at a man holding a woman, both of them visibly distraught and with something clutched tightly in her arms. A young child. The mother was soothing the still form and sobbing and shaking like the man who held her. Two small bare legs poked out from their embrace. Burned flesh dangled from them like socks of skin.
Shard had looked away quickly.
Onwards they had continued, eager to reach the Mount of Truth and General Creed. But even in their haste the news had caught up with them, panicked citizens and street-criers shouting it aloud: Juno’s Ferry had fallen. Even now, elements of the Imperial Expeditionary Force were pushing south towards the city.
Bar-Khos would soon be surrounded on all sides.
*
General Creed sat where he always sat these days, on his wheeled chair on the balcony of the Ministry of War overlooking the Lansway, pale and slumped in the twilight. Alone.
There had been a lull in the fighting on the Shield today, though the pounding of cannon fire continued unabated, smoke and fire rising up from the defences where the specks of men hunkered down along the battlements of the walls. Creed watched with darting eyes.
‘Coya,’ he breathed with the scent of wine on his breath. ‘Come to see the show, then?’
‘Show?’
‘Mokabi marshals his forces for a major offensive. We expect an attack tonight.’
‘We just heard the news about Juno’s Ferry. Why haven’t the Al-Khos forces to the north launched an offensive in support of them?’
‘Because Al-Khos is commanded by mutinous Michinè fools who think they know better. Believe me, there will be a reckoning when I am back on my feet again.’
‘Good. But by then the Expeditionary Force will be ensconced outside the northern walls.’
Creed’s expression stiffened. The Lord Protector of all of Khos, helpless while the city was slowly surrounded.
‘Tell me, then,’ he said quietly, and glanced up at Shard at last, catching her eye, ‘of your jaunt in the forest.’
Coya bris
tled and shot her a dark look.
‘Best if we speak on that later. For now we have something more pressing at hand. Shard, if you please.’
In her cloak and black leathers, Shard squatted down next to the wheeled chair and lay a hand on the back of Creed’s. The general’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘It’s all right, Marsalas. She’s here to help you.’
‘Miracles, is it?’ said the general into her face. ‘It’s a miracle you’ve brought me, then?’
She called up her tree of profiling glyphs and called one to life. Carefully, she scanned around the body of Creed and the pulsing aura of his presence, simmering like the banked coals of a fire. She sought out the hidden glyph which Seech had left there, the leech that was sucking Creed of his spirit.
Despite its layers of protection, it was an easy thing to remove now that she was this close to its victim, touching him in fact.
‘You have a leech fixed to you,’ she told the general quietly, the tip of her tongue poking from the corner of her mouth. ‘There. It’s gone.’
She released her touch and stood back from the chair, studying Creed closely.
‘Explain yourselves!’ demanded the man with sudden colour in his cheeks.
‘The change is fast,’ Coya remarked, clearly impressed. ‘You see how the glaze in his eyes is fading already?’
‘Yes, it happens quickly.’
Creed growled.
‘One moment, man,’ Coya admonished him, then opened a vial of rush oil from his pocket and tilted the end over his forefinger. Restraining a smile, he bent down and smeared the liquid over the general’s lips as though the man were a child.
Creed slapped the hand away and struggled unsteadily out of the chair to glare at them with his nostrils flaring. He opened his mouth to shout his anger then looked down at himself, swaying there unsupported.
‘What did you do?’ he asked her.
‘You had a leech fixed to you by Tabor Seech. It was draining away your life.’
In his long nightrobe Creed straightened with surprise. Stiff muscles carried him across the small space of the balcony before he swept around to face their stares.