by Col Buchanan
Inside the front hallway, Cole was sniffing at the fragrant incense that Marlee liked to burn just as the woman herself appeared before him, still dressed in her nightgown and shawl.
Marlee froze, and her widened eyes narrowed into a frown.
‘I thought Nico was joking.’
Cole stepped forwards and saw her tense as though in loathing of him. ‘Reese. Is she here?’
‘Reese? No. She’s still out at the cottage.’
‘What, even now? I thought imperial forces were to the north of the city?’
‘They are. I’ve tried and I’ve tried but she refuses to come in. She’s in love with that farm of yours, Cole.’
Inwardly he swore with a passion. It was just like Reese to dig in like that in her stubbornness. He’d always been endeared to that quality in her character, yet now it caused a heavy dread to settle upon him.
Just then Nico’s face appeared in a doorway, one cheek filled with a bite from the round of bread and jam he held in his hand. He leaned against the varnished door frame with a worried frown that said he had already heard this news, and was still coming to terms with it.
‘Aunt Marlee,’ he said. ‘Any chance you can put two heads up until we return with my mother? Aléas and Juke need a place to stay.’
‘Of course. Your friends are welcome.’ A brief glance at Cole. ‘You all are.’
Cole didn’t have the patience for this. Reese was supposed to be here. They had a reunion to work through, tears and accusations and all.
‘Why hasn’t that brother of mine gone out to fetch her yet?’ Cole wanted to know.
Marlee glanced to the stairs behind her. Lowered her voice to a hush. ‘Bahn went missing, Cole. Until yesterday we thought we had lost him.’
‘Is he here?’ he demanded, stepping around her. ‘Bahn!’ he shouted up at the stairs.
‘Please, the children are sleeping.’
‘Bahn, where are you, man!’
A soft press upon the front of his tunic. He looked down to see Marlee’s hand pressed firmly against his chest, trying to calm him.
‘Your brother came back to us yesterday with the last of the wounded from the Chilos. He’s been ill with dysentery, lying in an infirmary cot in Juno’s Ferry all this time. Please, go easy on him. I don’t think he’s himself yet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Mannians held him captive for a while. I think they did something to him before he escaped.’
Torture, thought Cole with a shiver of emotions.
He needed to see Bahn. Needed to see that his younger brother was alive and well.
The stairs creaked, and then a pair of legs appeared followed by a stick-thin figure wrapped in a blanket. Cole looked up to see a face sunken into itself, the eye sockets a pair of deep hollows, the skin sallow, darkly shadowed.
‘Bahn?’
‘Brother,’ said the man in a hollow voice, stepping down carefully to meet him in his bare feet.
They both stopped a few feet apart, as though some barrier existed between them. There was a shadow in his brother’s shifting gaze. Emotions so consuming he bore them only by holding onto something else even stronger; hatred perhaps, or bitterness; something black.
Without a doubt the war had changed him. Cole hated to think of what he had been through as a captive of the Mannians.
He and Bahn had been inseparable during their youth, getting into constant trouble while their eldest brother Teech had busied himself with becoming a man. But then wives and children had come along, and the war, and they had grown apart during the long course of the siege, each man falling further and further into himself under the growing pressures.
‘I can hardly believe it’s you,’ Cole said with a tremor of a smile.
For a few moments Bahn seemed his old self again, embarrassed and looking down at his toes.
Cole grabbed hold of him and embraced the man tightly. ‘Good to see you, Bahn. Good to see you.’
But in his arms he felt only the stiffness of his brother’s posture, the resistance of his body against his own.
A chill ran up Cole’s spine, as though he embraced a stranger.
They parted, not looking at each other.
‘Hey,’ said Cole, and he tugged the leather tube of charts from his belt. He had found it right where Ash said he would, under a pile of rocks by a road marker, the charts to the Isles of Sky still safe within it. But he hadn’t wanted to simply pass them on to the first officer he came to, not when they were of such importance. ‘Can I trust you with something, maybe see that it gets to the Ministry of War? I need to go chasing after my wife.’
‘What is it, something important?’
Cole handed him the charts with his eyes dancing.
‘You’ll see.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Homewards
Two cloaked riders cantered along the road leading along the coastline, heads turned to the north where ribbons of smoke were slanting across the morning sky.
‘They’re close,’ a passing Khosian outrider had told them at a crossroads on their way towards the Chilos. ‘They’re coming down the Chilos on rafts!’ And he had pointed northwards, over a road choked with the wagons of refugees and soldiers falling back in ragged columns, where the Imperial Expeditionary Force was marshalling against the city.
Eastwards, crossing the Chilos at last where the steaming waters ran into the sea, and warned at the fort there of slaver parties roaming beyond the river, the two riders had ventured onwards into a land that seemed deserted now, the windswept road ahead empty of life.
Now they cantered along with the shod hooves of their borrowed zels clopping against the rocky road and their rising fears tightening the screws on their silence. Finally one of them could take no more of it, and spoke out aloud.
‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ asked the taller rider, Cole.
‘What do you mean?’ his son Nico snapped back at him.
‘I mean, why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?’
Nico was quiet for a long moment, chewing on the long stalk of grass between his teeth. ‘He’s dead, I think.’
‘The old man?’
‘Yes. I think I can hear his crazy laughter in the wind.’
Cole studied his son, painfully aware of how little he knew him any more.
‘You need sleep. We both do.’
We need to find your mother.
The day was dull beneath the clouds sweeping in from the bay. It was a good day for passing showers and watching the tracks of rain approaching from across the white-capped sea, clouds channelled between the snowy mountains along the coast and the far southern continent. Features that he loved about this part of Khos; the drama of its big skies and the constantly changing weather that you could watch sweeping past your position; the drama of the mountains running down into the wild sea.
On a ridge to the north he saw a small herd of untamed zels against the skyline, pulling lazily on the grasses. Cole bent in his saddle, ran his fingers through a stand of swaying lemon grass still wet with dew. He straightened while his son slyly watched him, and lifted the bright scent to his nostrils, letting it spark memories within him.
‘I think I dreamt of you, you know,’ came his son’s voice from behind. ‘One time when I was with Ash in the mountains of Cheem. We took something strong and I saw you in a vision. At least I think it was you.’
‘And what was I doing?’
‘Sleeping beneath a tree. Something big was running in at you, a whole gang of them, and I yelled to wake you but nothing happened. And then the last seed on the tree fell loose and landed on your face, and you awoke.’
Cole stopped his zel to look back at his grown son.
The longhunter said nothing, but a rash of goosebumps had risen across his flesh as though someone had walked over his grave.
Spooked, he spurred his zel onwards.
Together they rode up the rise of the road and over the crest, squinting down
at the small vale below. In the middle of the road sat an empty handcart, its load scattered all around it. They picked up speed, trotting down to it.
‘Father,’ came Nico’s voice.
The boy was staring up into the bare branches of the tree, from where an old ginger cat looked down at him.
‘That’s Solberry, mother’s old cat.’
With sinking dread, Cole stared down at the luggage spilled across the road. The longhunter spotted a chest with clothes strewn out from its open lid, recognizing its carvings instantly.
He tried to speak, and found that he was shaking.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s her clothes chest there. Her mother gave her that before she died.’
There were tracks all over the ground, Cole saw now. Zel prints, leading off north across the vale towards a solitary tree on a hill. Multiple riders weighed down with weapons and armour.
‘You think the Mannians have her?’ Nico asked.
Cole shot him a dark look from beneath his brows. ‘You think they don’t?’
His son was chewing on the stalk in his mouth, cheeks rosy with growing anger, his hooded eyes staring off towards the north where smoke was still rising.
The enemy, coming ever closer.
‘We have to go after her,’ Nico said with sudden conviction, and in that moment he was no longer a boy in Cole’s eyes.
‘Aye, son. We do.’
EPILOGUE
Thirst
Something of hope shone from that early morning sunlight filtering into the sky to the east, yet it was a deception, Ash knew, or at the very least a promise broken even as it was being made.
Naked and gasping like a beached fish, the old farlander lay across two corpses bobbing just beneath the scummy waters, his clothes gone in the forces of the flood, his head turned to the side with bloodshot eyes staring through a collapsed portion of sea-wall to clouds approaching across the bay, dragging dark curtains of rain.
Hurry up, then, Ash told the clouds in his near-delirium. Before I die of this damned thirst.
As he bobbed in the freezing sea water he saw warships out there in the Lesser Bay of Squalls, turning their sails now from the incoming weather. His eyelashes fluttered in the sudden breeze pushed ahead of the rain, though he barely felt its cool touch across his skin. Some time in the previous hours of daylight, his teeth had stopped chattering along with the trembles of his body. His breaths came now in irregular sips and sighs.
Ash knew that he was nearing his death.
Still, bad as things were, at least the rain was falling at long last; a fine drizzle at first, then plump drops crashing all around him. The old Rōshun was able to open his mouth wide and drink it down a trickle at a time, wondrously cool, reviving him a little. The rain thinned the caked blood from his face and naked body, washed the cuts and scratches on his skin. Ash sighed with relief, nothing more to be asked for now.
All was as it should be.
His head lolled to the side, letting him watch the blood from his wounds trailing away in the minor currents of the water. He followed the trail as it curled towards the nearest logjam of bodies, where it merged with a larger cloud of blood darkening the water all around them. It was the same wherever he had been able to glance so far. Bodies everywhere.
It was as well there were few man-eating sharks in this region of the world, though around him a feeding frenzy was taking place anyway, for the city’s thousands of birds perched on the floating dead, pecking eagerly at their soft tissues, with hundreds more wheeling and squabbling overhead.
Two mighty walls of the Shield stood at equal distance to the left and to the right of him, one held by the Khosian defenders and the other having fallen to the Mannians during the night. From both opposing parapets, thousands of grimy faces stared down at the flooded space between the walls, rendered mute by their mutual shock.
Only occasionally would someone on a wall point a hand and holler down to the crews in the row boats working through the scene for survivors, calling out to them of some sign of movement. The Khosian and imperial crews passed each other without challenge, even without banter. A truce held between both sides, it seemed, at least so long as it took to recover their comrades.
The boy Nico had made it home safely. He felt it in the fibre of his being; life where once there had been death.
And even though his son Lin remained there in that inner place of loss, the pain of it seemed more muted now, less jagged; as though in making up for one tragedy he had redeemed himself – irrationally, in some small measure – in relation to the other.
He had done all that he could for the young man and his mother. More than had ever been expected of him.
Tiny waves lapped against the farlander’s neck, growing into the bow wave of a nearing boat. Ash heard the chatter of Khosian voices drifting closer. He had no strength left in him, none at all to raise a hand and signal help.
Instead he closed his stinging eyes, fearing nothing, hovering on the very brink of the world.
He had travelled the surface of the planet in his years. He had seen it in all its glory and its madness.
Clear as day, Ash watched his old comrade and mentor Oshō leading the charge across the Sea of Wind and Grasses, the dust rising in a plume as thousands of Shining Way followed him into the maws of the enemy ranks and the bitter climax to the revolution.
Lightning flashed. A storm was raging at sea. He saw young Baso lashed to the mast of a ship, shouting his challenges to the gale and the heaving waves.
A sweep of sunshine, dazzling, through the gauzy air. Now he was watching his old friend Kosh as he sat in peace sketching the Rōshun monastery of Sato on a sunny day, becoming looser, better, the more that he worked through the warming skin of wine by his feet. Aurora, faming in passion across the night sky.
Ash recalled nights when the winds came as storm and vied to have his tent away with them, shoving him as he held down canvas with tired muscles and idiot grins.
He remembered sharing his thoughts with his son on a wintry night on the outside porch, while the frost had crept towards their feet.
A funeral march in Perfume City where he’d watched the people’s grief from behind.
A robin sheltering under a thorn bush in the forest, watching him getting drenched in the rain.
No one there but the trunks swaying in the deep woods.
His wife. Ash thought of his sweet, kind wife. He thought of their first bed, much too small for them, and how they had made do; her pitched stare as they made love. Soft mornings in the glade where she had scattered the crows from her stride, a pretty woman he loved even now.
‘You took your time,’ said a voice of milk and honey.
Ash blinked his eyes open, crusty with blood. Took in the sight of his young wife standing before him, standing there in the green dress she had worn at their joining as husband and wife.
Her dark hair stirred in a breath of wind. Startled, he saw that his own hair hung across his shoulders, long and fine as all northern highlanders of Honshu. Ash was young again. He had his hair again!
‘Butai,’ he breathed in surprise.
‘All that time,’ said his wife brightly, radiant in the sunshine, ‘and you never took another, never started a new family. What a waste! What a foolish waste of a life!’
‘I still lived it,’ he croaked back at her. And for all his longing for the remembered past, Ash recalled why he had always been so restless in his early life, why in the deep calculation of things he had found his rightful place as Rōshun. His great desire to see the world. To live with new horizons daily.
‘Yet here you are,’ she said. ‘Home again.’
‘Yes!’
A breeze rustled through the long summer grasses, drawing his gaze to their simple cottage perched on a mound of ground before the stony face of the hill. Butai was walking towards it now, glancing over one delicate shoulder.
A roar filled his ears.
‘Your eyes,’ Ash called a
fter her. ‘They’re as beautiful as I always remembered them to be.’
In reply his young wife trailed her open hand.
‘Are you coming or going, my love?’
Her love inflamed his own. A boyish smile twitched his lips.
Ash inhaled the sweet winds of the mountains as they flowed through the grasses, through his hair, marvelling that he was home.
Praise for the Farlander novels
‘Something special . . . Buchanan writes vividly and well, and the story grips from the astonishing opening sequence to the unexpected conclusion’
The Times
‘Two pages into Farlander I was hooked . . . Nice one Mr Buchanan’
Neal Asher
‘With steampunk, magical and historical influences, this is one of the most refreshing new fantasies out there’
SFX
‘If you’re a fan of blood-drenched epic fantasy then this is a series that you should keep an eye on’
Fantasy Book Review
‘The battle scenes are intense and brilliantly written . . . If you like your fantasy grand in scope but intimate in detail and character-driven, then the series is perfect for you’
Civilian Reader
‘I’m a sucker for political intrigue in my fantasy books, and Stands a Shadow delivers this in bucketloads . . . A brilliant read’
Mithril Wisdom
‘A searing new fantasy series that sets the blood pumping . . . this is a series to be reckoned with. Everyone take note’
The Truth about Books
The Black Dream
Col Buchanan is an Irish writer who was born in Lisburn in 1973, and now lives on the west coast of Connemara. In recent years he has mostly settled down, and loves nothing more than late-night gatherings around a fire with good friends. The Black Dream is the third of the Farlander novels.
By Col Buchanan
The Farlander Novels
FARLANDER
STANDS A SHADOW
THE BLACK DREAM