by Col Buchanan
A fast wind whipped past Ash. More riders coming in to surround them, armed with small bows. On the ground, Baracha swore in defiance.
‘Come on then, you bastards!’ the big man roared, and then the Alhazii’s tattooed face flinched in surprise and his spine arched suddenly, two arrows sprouting from his back.
Ash ran for him as Baracha lurched up onto his knees. Another arrow streaked into his chest and he fell sideways against the zel he had just knocked unconscious. Blood was spilling from his lips as Ash reached him.
‘Baracha!’ he whispered fiercely, clutching him with claws, but the man only rolled his eyes and gasped for air, too busy dying.
Szhip! An arrow shot into Baracha’s throat. He sagged in Ash’s grip, lay still across the belly of the zel.
A roar gathered then in the old farlander’s throat, and it propelled him over the fallen zel towards the nearest rider, the naked steel of his sword flashing. The rider fell, and then something hit Ash hard in the back, and he twisted around to see the feathers of an arrow sprouting from his body. Another blow struck his back. Another arrow sticking out of him.
He staggered round, his throat uttering a guttural growl.
Foot soldiers were gathering around them now, drawn to the sight of an old farlander surrounded by Acolyte horse archers. Someone was shouting over their heads to stop, one of the masked riders, he thought, telling everyone within earshot that the farlander had murdered General Mokabi, and that he was to be taken alive.
Too spent to run, too spent even to stand any longer, Ash sagged against the flank of the quivering zel on the other side from Baracha, bloody sword in hand.
*
The great horns were blaring out too now from the city’s Stadium of Arms, declaring to the whole of Bar-Khos that a wall was falling and that every fighter was needed on the Shield.
Across the ground behind Singer’s Wall, the rout of defenders withdrew to their fall-back position on Xeno’s Wall, from where the pursuing enemy forces were driven back with heavy barrages of missiles.
The forward lines of the Mannians hunkered down and returned fire, buoyed by the knowledge that behind their backs came tens of thousands more through the breaches to join them, and that Singer’s Wall was now theirs.
Across the open ground, yells and whistles of triumph shot back and forth between the two walls.
When the trap was fully loaded, the Lord Protector himself raised his hand from the parapet of Xeno and gave the order smartly.
Nothing happened for a moment, and then from the lesser seawalls on either side came a ripple of explosions that caused the air to shudder in succession, ringing out across the vast swarming army of men. It was the sound of the freshly installed floodgates along their dug-out foundations blowing open one by one.
Even as the echoes faded away, they were replaced by a rising, thundering roar of sea water suddenly flooding into the open ground.
*
The old farlander gritted his teeth and struggled to push himself to his feet, but his boot slipped in the dirt and he sagged back against the zel with a wince of pain, gripping the bleeding wound in his side, the pair of arrows sticking from his back like quills.
Around his feet lay five dead Acolytes. About him in a great circle, a thousand eager faces stared with fascination in the light of a falling flare, pressing closer with the trepidation of hunters closing on a wounded tiger. Beyond them, hundreds more shouted and jostled closer for a better look at this enemy they had been told lay within their midst, though even in such numbers they were merely a knot of interest in a great sea of the enemy still rushing towards Xeno’s Wall.
‘Hold your fire, I say!’ an Acolyte officer on a zel was shouting at a few fellows flexing their bows. The rider pointed his mount towards Ash and shook his sword at him. ‘Let’s see how you like the fire, old farlander. Let’s see how well you hold up when we roast you slowly, over the coals.’
‘Come and get me then!’ Ash spat back, and the effort of it caused his head to swim sickeningly.
The arrows in his back were not deep. He could hardly feel them in fact. It was the wound in his side that was flaring with pain now, and spilling the life-blood out of him.
He tried to breathe stillness into himself, seeking the calm centre of everything. Awkwardly, he twisted his head around until he could see the still form of Baracha sprawled across the zel, the Alhazii’s glazed eyes reflecting the light of the moons.
So this was how it was going to end then, just as Ash had always expected it would. Death by the sword, alone without friends or family to witness his passing, to soothe the passage from this world to whatever came after, if anything at all.
It was not so bad a fate after all, he realized now, facing it at last. What regrets he still carried seemed old and stale, belonging to a different person.
He gazed out at the sea of faces surrounding him, nursing what time was left to him.
Out there amongst the surrounding crowd a young mercenary was weeping quietly from shock, from the terror of the bloody assault he had been taking part in, from all that he had so far witnessed. Another fellow quenched his thirst from a bulging skin of red wine as the liquid spilled down his chin like a painted moustache, gasping as though breathing it in.
‘Water,’ Ash croaked aloud, his tongue dry and limp in his mouth.
‘Give him nothing,’ retorted the mounted officer. ‘Now get in there someone and take him!’
The more eager souls braved another step closer, nervously eyeing the blade in his grasp, the bodies of the slain Acolytes at his feet, felled when they had gotten too close.
Ash’s head lolled back. He was panting lightly like a dog.
Far above him, the arch of the Great Wheel soared across the starry firmament. Ninshi’s Hood blazed up there amongst the other constellations, named after the goddess who favoured the dispossessed. Fervently, he sought out the ruby star that was Ninshi’s Eye, the star that sometimes blinked to absolve the wrongdoings of whoever witnessed it.
Perhaps there was a meteor shower tonight, for another streaked across the night sky leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. It vanished over the horizon even as the press of the men closed ever tighter around him.
Ash blinked the sweat from his eyes, saw how the shooting star’s trail of smoke lay directly across the Eye of Ninshi. For a moment the star was entirely obscured by it, and then the trail began to slowly fade, so that Ash saw the speck of light trembling there, appearing and vanishing again.
He coughed, his throat raging with thirst.
For the love of mercy, will someone give me some water.
What was that in the distance, like the sudden shudders of rolling thunder?
Loud explosions boomed across the space between the walls. All heads turned to seek them out.
The ground was trembling beneath him. More riders approaching perhaps, a great number of them. With a jerk Ash sat upright, coming back to the situation at hand. The armed men closest to him had stopped to look back in puzzlement. A distant roar filled his ears.
Over the din he heard the shouts of panic rising in the distance, spreading throughout the enemy forces arrayed across the killing ground.
A sudden cool breeze played across his face. Stirred all the loose cloaks around him. Closer came the cries of alarm until the men around him were shouting too. He blinked, marvelling at what he saw. A wall of white water was tumbling towards them a good twenty feet tall, brighter than anything else in sight, picking up specks of debris that were men and zels and wagons alike.
Ash snorted his disbelief. Once more he jerked around towards Baracha. Saw another flood surge roaring towards them from the other side of the Lansway.
‘Hah!’
So the stubborn Khosians weren’t so beaten after all.
A flood, sweeping inwards from the two opposing sea-walls to meet in the middle. Somehow, the Lansway here must be lower than the level of the sea. It seemed the Khosians had laid a trap the size of no o
ther.
In a single instant the mass of fighters around him broke apart in disarray, men stampeding against each other to run for their lives.
The old farlander laughed aloud and dropped the sword from his grasp, too heavy to hold now anyway. He lay back against the flank of the zel still laughing up at the sky, laughing from right down in his clamping belly.
As the ground shook beneath him and his ears pounded with the nearing thunder of the white water, his laughter turned to a roar of defiance, so that Ash was howling with eyes wide open as the flood rushed in to take him, sweeping his body up in its maddening chaos, carrying the old man tumbling away with everything else in its path until there was nothing left but crashing, foaming waves.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Hereafter
High above the Shield, a trio of thunderhawks were at play in the night sky. They had eaten their fill from the grisly scene on the Lansway below, picking the choices parts of the corpses clean, gorging themselves on the bounty of eyes and tongues. Now their spirits soared as their bodies soared, rejoicing in their temporary freedom from hunger.
Far below their dives and circles, the flooded killing ground between the walls lay as a lake of scummy black water covered in floating debris and bodies, their numbers too thick to count, like jams of logwood from one side of the Lansway to the other. A feast for all the birds of the city, and they flocked above it now, crying out in the moonlight in their excitement.
North the three thunderhawks flew, sisters all of them, chasing each other as they veered off towards the city’s coastline, headed for the cliffs overlooking the shanty-town that was the Shoals – where a prickly old thorn-apple tree stood perched on the very edge, holding their permanent nest and food store in its crown.
In the waning darkness before dawn the birds spotted flames on a lawn of one of the many mansions built back from the cliff’s edge. They circled in interest, calling out to each other. Watched the flames burn in a great cross.
A shape emerged from the sky above them, dropping fast towards the fire. A small skyboat, its thrusters burning softly. Gracefully it circled the lawn too before dropping down next to the burning cross, settling onto the grass without a sound.
The thunderhawks called out once more before tilting away for their nest and their day’s refuge, a lone moon shining low over the western sea.
*
The light was brightening as the crew of the skud tied down the vessel, preparing for Kira’s stay in Bar-Khos. The spymaster Alarum had chosen well when he had selected their hideout in the city. The area of mansions belonged to Michinè and independent merchants alike, a place where private skuds were often seen on their grounds. Flanked on one side by a cliff and surrounded on all others by a high barbed wall, their own rented mansion was the perfect place from which to stage their operations without notice.
‘Kira,’ said a voice across the lawn, addressing the old woman stepping down from the landed skud.
‘My dear Alarum,’ she replied in her husky, croaky voice, and the woman’s pale eyes darted to the figures hurrying across the grass towards the fires, watching them coolly as they cast buckets of sand over the burning oil of the cross. Against the mansion’s white pillars, the reflections of flames began to die down. A figure approached her, plump Alarum the spymaster, only just arrived here himself in the previous day. ‘Report,’ she snapped at the man.
Not caring to hide his annoyance, Alarum frowned and said, ‘Come, let’s get you inside first and out of sight.’
Kira, mother of the deceased Matriarch Sasheen, bristled visibly before him. ‘Mokabi’s surge,’ she declared, noticing that the guns on the distant Shield were silent. ‘Has he taken the wall yet?’
Alarum, spymaster and envoy, rubbed the hair on his scalp and looked away, plainly embarrassed.
‘He failed to take the wall?’ she asked, incredulous.
‘Oh, he took the wall all right. And then his forces walked straight into a trap.’ Alarum had been up all night, she could see. His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaws set to the clenching of a perpetual yawn. ‘Looks like the Khosians dug out the ground of the Lansway between the walls so all of it was below sea level. And then they rigged floodgates in the sea-walls. Blasted them open when Mokabi’s surge took Singer and poured in with all their numbers. There’s a seawater lake there by all accounts now, stretching between the walls and with no way across it. Effectively the Khosians have cut the Lansway in two, making Khos a true island. The whole southern campaign is stalled in its tracks.’
The old woman hissed through clenched teeth.
‘How many did he lose?’
A shrug in the darkness. ‘Hard to know right now. I just received a Khosian report suggesting a hundred thousand men or more. An exaggeration, I hope. There’s word too that Mokabi might be dead.’
‘He took his own life?’
That vain old bastard had better have taken his own life, after such a calamity as this one. Mokabi was finished after tonight. Alive or dead his reputation lay in tatters, an embarrassment to the Empire.
Silently she cursed the general and all his easy promises to take the city. Her last hopes of stopping Romano from taking Bar-Khos and becoming Holy Patriarch were gone now, gone with the hope of Mokabi achieving the same feat first.
In that practised way of hers Kira calculated the adjustments to her own position, and decided there was nothing else for it. They still had a city to take here. Anything could happen to the young pretender before then, especially if Kira had her way.
‘Tell me some good news,’ she said. ‘Have the Khosian traitors reported in yet for their briefings?’
She referred to the Khosian prisoners that had been captured after the battle of Chey-Wes, their minds warped by drugs and suggestions until the order had feigned their escape.
‘Some. Others remain missing. Indeed, we have a visitor right now.’ And the spymaster looked towards the mansion, where a figure was leaning against a wall with an outstretched arm.
The fellow was shivering, whoever he was. Kira watched him slowly wipe his mouth with the back of a hand, as though he had just vomited.
‘He turned up at the drop point tonight. Claims to have been laid up suffering dysentery for all this time. I’ve given him a trigger phrase and confirmed that we captured him at Chey-Wes. He’s one of ours.’
The order had grown skilled over the years in conditioning the minds of others. Those Khosians they had captured after Chey-Wes had been primed to report to their new Mannian handlers once they had escaped and returned to the city of Bar-Khos.
Yet the procedure still remained something of a hit or miss affair. There was no telling how a person would react when those dormant suggestions were first activated.
‘He appears to be taking it hard,’ she noted. ‘How long before his conditioning fully asserts itself, do you think?’
‘Only time can tell.’
‘Yet time is what we are lacking, spymaster. The Little Eagle and Romano push south down the Chilos even as we speak. We must ensure the traitors are ready to let them into the city once they arrive.’
‘We have others who are ready for that task. This one is special, though.’
‘Special?’
Alarum called over to the slouching figure.
‘Step forwards, soldier of Khos!’
Across the lawn and into the light the figure approached them cautiously. He did indeed look like a man who had been suffering dysentery, his appearance gaunt in the extreme.
‘Introduce yourself, soldier,’ commanded Alarum.
‘What?’
‘Your name, man!’
The Khosian peered with confusion in his raw eyes.
‘Bahn. Bahn Calvone.’
When Alarum looked to Kira his own gaze was shining excitedly.
‘The fellow is a lieutenant in the Red Guards. An aide to General Creed himself.’
‘Really?’ she said, and Kira leaned closer with sudden, acute interest,
lifting a bony hand to his shoulder.
‘Then you may be of great use to us indeed,’ she told the shivering man in her grip. ‘Hm?’
The Khosian lowered his head and sniffed loudly, then offered a reluctant nod.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Once Were Brothers
Cole was thinking of the cat as he approached the house behind the others, for he had lost her during their capture back in the imperial camp, and hadn’t seen her again.
She’s fine, he told himself now for the tenth time. She knows how to look after herself.
Neither was he the only one to be worried over a lost companion. Aléas and his son both remained wrapped in their thoughts since the failure of Ash and the Alhazii man Baracha to return through the tunnel before its collapse – a tunnel which Cole had been glad to get clear from himself. Safe in the city at last, they had refused to leave the tunnel exit until Cole had pulled them clear.
Now he breathed in the early-morning air of the city and looked at the house they were walking up to, seeing movement in one of its upper windows.
His stomach churned.
So strange to be back in Bar-Khos where the war rumbled on even more fiercely than before, everything the same and yet different. There were too many desperate people in the streets now, too few faces that he recognized. A mood of perpetual threat hung above it all.
Cole felt the familiar tensions rising in him again, wanting to be gone from here.
Ahead he heard the door open and a woman’s voice shout out in surprise as she laid eyes on Nico, a young man believed to be dead. It was Marlee, his brother’s wife.
Cole had never heard her so excitable before.
They disappeared indoors, and Cole sighed and stilled his racing heart as he stepped up to the house, knowing that his wife Reese might be inside even now.
*