by Col Buchanan
Creed spotted the familiar face of Koolas darting around the circle of his guards, the plump war chattēro who had accompanied them to the battle of Chey-Wes, and had since made a legend of Creed from his published accounts of the action. He was holding a battered helm firmly on his sweating head.
‘Get out of here, you bloody fool! Can’t you see we’re busy, man?’
With a crack of wood the top of a ladder slapped against the stonework before them, then began to shudder as men clambered up from below. Still the ladder shook as Halahan shot down at them.
Creed’s sword came out with a breath of steel; Sharric steel, finest in the world, forged in the heart of Khos itself. He planted himself squarely before the ladder. Swung his blade down at the white-masked head of an Acolyte, cleaving it in two as easily as a melon. With Koolas as his witness, the Lord Protector yanked the blade free and leapt up onto the battlement, steadying himself with a slick palm.
‘Make them pay!’ he yelled at his men around him, and his boot lashed out and kicked the next masked Acolyte climbing into view, toppling him from the ladder. Something shot through the sleeve of his bearskin coat. He barely noticed. It felt good to be on his feet again, good to be in the heart of the action with his men once more.
Exultant, Creed spread his legs wide and gripped the sword with both hands, then whipped it down again cleanly through another skull.
‘Make them pay!’
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Reckonings
Dearest Ennio.
My thanks for your heartfelt concerns over my poor health. I am much restored now, you will be gladdened to hear. By the way, I am told your Dreamer’s work was of the highest order.
Ennio Mokabi. When we snap your neck here at Bar-Khos, which shall be soon, I will not claim the credit for it. It will be the people of Khos and the Free Ports who do the felling. They, and some friends of ours.
I expect you will meet them soon enough.
Try to greet your end with honour. Know, at least, that the evil you unleashed here upon Bar-Khos will be long remembered.
Marsalas Creed
General Mokabi set down the letter that had been delivered to him only moments earlier, and looked up from the fortified deck of his warwagon at the fighting raging on the Shield, wondering if his rival Creed was watching it too.
So Bearcoat had read his earlier missive after all. Yet his response was hardly the dejected tone Mokabi had been expecting from a man supposedly leeched of his spirit. Indeed, he sounded quite the opposite. He sounded as though he had somehow freed himself from the Dreamer’s influence.
In a burst of annoyance, Mokabi crumpled the letter in his hand and cast it over the side, then regretted it instantly. He called to one of his men to go down and fetch it from the ground, feeling strangely troubled by what he had just read and wanting to read it again.
‘“I expect you will meet them soon enough.”’
Mokabi glanced about the deck as though looking for assassins, but saw only the familiar faces of his field officers, and his personal bodyguard Nil standing close by with his scratch-gloves sheathed, and the detachment of white-armoured Acolytes posted around the deck’s crenellations.
Is he trying to spook me?
‘Any reply, sir?’
‘What?’
The young aide was still waiting by his side. Next to the steps, the Acolyte courier who had delivered the letter stood wearily in his hooded white armour. The courier had arrived on a steaming zel fresh from the camp, where Creed’s communication had been sent to an imperial farcry.
‘No. That is all.’
He was about to turn away when he noticed something next to the courier’s boot – a small black pool spreading onto the decking.
‘You’re bleeding there,’ he called across to the man. ‘Are you wounded?’
But before the courier could answer, an explosion lit up the night sky over his shoulder to the south, right above the skyline of Camp Liberty, followed by a brilliant flash of light so dazzling that it cast livid shadows from the hand Mokabi threw up before his eyes.
Squinting through his fingers, the general watched as a massive mushroom cloud rose high over the town.
He gasped as the rumble of it swept through him, feeling it shudder through the wood of the warwagon. He saw debris flying hundreds of feet into the air.
They’ve hit a powder store! he thought in alarm, and at last a cold worm of doubt entered into the equations of his mind. Was it a raid? Had they found a way to get behind his lines?
Moments later a second explosion lit up the skyline of the camp, another arsenal going up in a blossoming pillar of flame and smoke. Someone shouted out a curse.
The general slapped his palm against the parapet and gritted his teeth in silent fury. All of that black powder, one of the most expensive substances in all the world, going up in great clouds of smoke.
In a rage he turned to bellow a command just as something dropped around his neck, tightening with a cinch. Mokabi froze, aware of the cold press of a gun barrel against the side of his throat.
His eye flickered to the side. He saw that the bleeding courier had somehow managed to position himself by his side, and that the pistol was tied to a loop of cord fitting snug around the general’s neck.
‘Easy there,’ came the courier’s muffled voice through the holes in his white mask to Nil, the bodyguard. ‘One press of this trigger and pfff, no more.’
Nil paused in mid-step, flexing the small poisoned blades of his scratch-gloves keenly, his shaven head reflecting the distant flames from Camp Liberty. No one else had even noticed yet, too busy taking in the flames rising from the camp.
‘Are you mad?’ Mokabi rasped. ‘You’ll never get away with it, man.’
Gripped by shock and the tightening cord, Mokabi watched the courier tear the mask from his face to reveal the black-skinned face of an old farlander, and a pair of dark eyes promising his death.
No, not now, not like this!
Mokabi steeled himself as the farlander leaned closer to speak softly into his ear. ‘Your people are holding some friends of mine back in the camp. I need them released and delivered here now.’
‘What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Four people, captured in Camp Liberty by your Regulators earlier today. Have them brought here now!’
Sudden action around them now, his officers noticing his plight at last, the slow-witted fools, calling out to the Acolytes around the perimeter. Mokabi held up a hand to stay them. There wasn’t a chance that any could dispatch this assassin without his finger pulling the trigger in the process.
Still, he wasn’t dead yet. For an assassin the old farlander seemed more concerned about the fate of his friends. Mokabi could use that to buy himself time.
‘Do it, pass out the order!’ snapped the farlander.
Mokabi tried to take a deep breath, then spoke out with the firmest steel that he could muster, passing on the instructions to his nearest aide.
‘Do as he says. Bring the prisoners here, and try nothing in the meantime!’
Quickly the aide hurried below decks.
‘Good,’ panted the farlander by his side, swaying as though he might collapse at any moment, the blood continuing to pool around his boot.
*
The night burst alive with fountains of fire jetting high into the sky. Even in the midst of the fighting on the wall, eyes turned to the startling sight of them, where they rose above the distant glimmers of Camp Liberty, heart of the enemy. A moment later their concussions shook the wall and the bones in their bodies; crump, crump, crump.
Few knew that the Specials were raiding the imperial camp, but it was a victory for the Khosians anyway, and cheers and shouts of triumph sounded from the battlements of Singer’s Wall as the defenders hurled themselves at the enemy with restored vivacity.
‘They’ve bloody done it!’ Halahan exclaimed to Creed as he cracked an Acolyte’s head with the
butt of his rifle. ‘They’ve hit the bloody arsenals!’
Eyes reflecting the distant fireballs, General Creed gritted his teeth in a primal grin.
*
How much time had passed he could not say precisely – standing there rooted to the spot while he held his finger to the trigger, his other hand clutching the bandaged wound in his side. Time enough for Ash to mull over his situation, at least, and to wonder how much longer he could remain on his feet without fainting from loss of blood.
After his flight from the taverna, Ash had eventually lost his pursuers by hiding out in a crowded stable of zels. In the moonlight pouring from the doorway, perched trembling on a water trough next to his sword, the old farlander had washed out the wound in his side so he could have a better look at it, long inured to the pain of such injuries. It seemed he had been lucky, for the bullet had grazed off a rib, gouging out a bloody furrow of flesh along his side. Gamely he’d swept the blood from it with his hand, seeing the whiteness of his rib bone shining through for a moment.
He had needed stitches, or the kiss of a red-hot poker to seal the flesh. Lacking either, the farlander had torn up his undershirt to use as a pressure bandage, and had fixed it in place with its twisted sleeves wrapped around his torso, tying them as tightly as he could. And then he’d wondered how he was going to save Nico and the others.
Hours later, with two Mannian Acolytes left dead in the settlement of Camp Liberty behind him – one of them missing his white cloak and armour – Ash had followed their directions to the warwagon of Mokabi, and from there he had watched it from afar until spotting the hooded courier riding towards it along the paved road from the camp.
With no time for anything else he’d simply acted on the spur of the moment, propelled by the simplicity of his sudden, audacious plan.
And somehow he had made it work.
‘These friends of yours must mean a great deal to you,’ came the voice of Mokabi, breaking the long silence between them. The Mannian general sounded calm, almost disdainful, as though it was nothing to have the end of a loaded gun tied to his neck with a grizzled farlander holding the trigger.
‘A great deal more than your life, certainly.’
‘Come now. We both know you need me alive here.’
‘Do not mistake what I need with what I am willing to do.’
‘You’re bleeding out, old fellow. I doubt you’ll be in a position to threaten me for much longer.’
‘Better hope my companions arrive soon then. If I drop first, I take you with me.’
Bursts of light in the night. Skyships fighting up there in the sky above the Shield. Mokabi watched them with narrowed eyes, though Ash returned his gaze to the Mannians on the deck around him, the bodyguard hovering nearby with his deadly claws, refusing to retreat any further, the others waiting for a chance to jump him, a few edging closer whenever they thought he wasn’t looking.
Steady, Ash told himself as he swayed on his feet, applying more pressure to the bandage under his clothing. His legs felt weak. His arm was growing tired simply holding the pistol in the same position for so long. It helped that the end of it was tied to the loop of cord around Mokabi’s neck. Give it long enough, and Ash would be hanging from it for support.
‘Know this,’ he growled at the figures around him loudly. ‘The next man who moves will be the reason I put a bullet through your general’s throat.’
‘Stay back!’ Mokabi spat at them, and they obeyed.
Ash’s nostrils flared, scenting something new in the air. Over the side of the wagon a white mist seemed to be rising. A cry rang out.
Along the western crenellations an Acolyte suddenly toppled backwards to the decking, something black sticking out of his eye.
Two more Acolytes fell back from the edge before anyone could react. Shouts were rising from below now, from Mokabi’s cavalry detachment stationed on the ground around the wagon, from where sudden clouds of white smoke were rising to obscure everything.
Suspecting some kind of rescue attempt by the Imperials, Ash gripped Mokabi and pressed the gun harder into his neck. But then he saw that three, four Acolytes had fallen now, along with the pair of drivers too, and he knew that this was something else entirely. Grim-faced, the huge bodyguard Nil took up position over the fallen drivers, his back turned as though Mokabi was no hostage at all. Beyond the bodyguard’s armoured shoulder, Ash glimpsed hooded figures bounding over the backs of the massive mammoots, the foremost of them leaping for the cupola that was now clear.
Ash barely believed what he saw next. It was Bones, the young Rōshun who had once been an apprentice of Kosh, his crazy eyes flashing.
The bodyguard Nil snapped into a fighting stance and swayed aside from a slash of the young Rōshun’s blade, then thrust out with both scratch-gloves. Twisting desperately, Bones lost his footing and pitched over the side, but his place was instantly filled by another leaping figure, and this time Ash knew how it would turn out – for it was Wild, one of their deadliest, coming in through the rising smoke like a thrown spear. Nil lashed out but Wild spun past him like a dancer to pierce his back, then ducked beneath a reply of steel, twisting the blade that was still deep in the bodyguard’s body.
Boots clattered on the decking as more robed figures leapt in around the falling bodyguard to attack the other defenders, Wild amongst them. Smoke blew thickly across the scene. Through the clouds Ash saw a massive form stepping over the fallen bodyguard, a large axe in his grasp. It strode towards Mokabi, lifting his axe to strike.
‘Not yet!’ Ash shouted to the robed form and held up his hand. ‘I need him alive!’
And in that moment he saw the tattooed face of the big man before him, saw that it was Baracha himself.
The big Alhazii lowered his axe and leaned closer for a better look.
‘Ash?’
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Tremors
Shard stepped onto the parapet as the fighting raged along the battlements, at once shocked and awed by the desperate battle before her, all of it taking place against the backdrop of giant plumes of fire and smoke hanging over the distant Camp Liberty.
So this was war at the front then, what it was like for the defenders of the Shield; what it had been like for ten long years.
In the bloody dazzle of it all Shard hesitated, as any sane person would have just then. She’d been drawn here with Tabor Seech in mind, sensing her ex-lover at work tonight on the Lansway, seeking him out for their reckoning; but now it was the battle which filled her senses to overloading, sweeping her up in them.
Lit by torches and braziers, groups of defenders were clashing hand to hand with figures struggling up between the crenellations. Even as soldiers heaved and cast the ladders sideways from the parapet, grappling hooks sailed up and over trailing knotted chains, accompanied by grenades and firebombs blossoming wherever they landed. Some distance away, out there in the killing ground, a siege tower was burning brightly like a torch, its huge form dwarfed by the even greater bulk of Singer’s Wall. Other wheeled towers continued closer in jerks and lurches, pulled along by lines of armoured mammoots. Flashes could be seen at the tops of them, the enemy shooting up at the parapet of the wall with rifles.
Further along the thronged run of the wall stood General Creed, surrounded by his bodyguards, unmistakable with his bearskin coat and naked head, his sheer black hair flying as he swung his sword at a white-cloaked Acolyte scrambling over the wall.
Dark smoke rolled over her head. She couldn’t seem to move for a moment, frozen there in the midst of the action. With explosions rippling along the wall, Shard fired more of her will into her hastily improvised body shield, an invisible barrier encasing her body, hungrily seeking further protection from its presence, awfully aware that it would stop only small masses, nothing larger.
Still, it was something. The Dreamer straightened in her cloak and took a few purposeful steps in General Creed’s direction, but then she stopped, feeling the stones beneath her fee
t begin to tremble. She swayed for balance, seeing everyone else sway too, the whole wall seeming to shudder and shake beneath them so that men were staggering now, falling even, from the shifting force of it.
An earthquake, here of all places.
‘Seech,’ she hissed aloud.
*
Speckled in other men’s blood and panting fiercely, General Creed backed away from the crenellations and shook his blade dry, seeing whole gutters of the stuff flowing blackly down the flagging and over the rear edge of the wall. He swayed unsteadily on his feet.
Catch your breath, man, before you drop.
The space he left was quickly occupied by Red Guards taking their turn at the front. The enemy had largely been beaten back along this section of the wall, though they rallied below at the base of the slope in preparation of another charge. Elsewhere, Mokabi’s forces clashed in whatever toeholds they had gained on the parapet, fighting for time and space so that more of their companions could join them from below, the waves of enemy fighters still surging up the slope and the upper face of the wall. Defenders were surrounding them, though, in overwhelming numbers.
His own hands shaking, Creed took out the vial of rush oil and sipped a mouthful, letting it burn his gums for a few moments before squirting the foul stuff out again onto the flagging. Strength shot through his weary muscles.
Where was General Tanserine? It seemed like ages since he’d sent out a runner for the man.
Glimmers over the eastern coastal wall, high above the Bay of Squalls, where the thin clouds were afire with the blasts of skyships circling and fighting like dogs over a prey that was the two moons.
Along with the initial assault had come the first wave of Mannian birds-of-war, sweeping in at the wall from across the bay where Mercian squadrons had jumped them swiftly. The sky battle had grown larger and more intense as ever more squadrons joined in from both sides, until it was clear the Mannians had launched everything they had in one big pulse across the bay. There was no telling who was winning and losing up there.