Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There was a tugging at her leg and Emily started suddenly, but it was only her sister. Alice was sobbing, tears coursing down her cheeks, as she tried to bury her face in Emily’s dress.

  Grant was across the clearing, checking on the stolen horses without a glance to spare for the fallen men – or for Mr Northway. After so much fury and gunfire, there seemed to be surprisingly few corpses within the clearing. She saw that Griff’s was not one of them. At least three brigands had made off into the trees.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Emily heard herself saying to Alice, though her head was still ringing from the noise. ‘It’s all over. We can go home now.’ She put a hand protectively on Alice’s head, and then raised the same hand with wonder, seeing it so fouled with grime and oil from the gun.

  She heard a horse snort and stamp, and realized Mr Northway was now mounted again. He looked from her to Alice and back. ‘I had better escort you to Grammaine.’

  ‘Grant knows the way,’ Emily assured him, but Alice sobbed out, ‘Oh please, Mr Northway, please do. I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t come – or what they’d have done to us.’ She raised her tear-streaked face to her sister. ‘I’m so sorry, Emily. I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’

  You didn’t mean to cause this sort of trouble, anyway. ‘Look, Grant’s bringing over the horses. You had better mount up,’ Emily said.

  As Grant helped Alice into the saddle, Emily turned her gaze back onto Mr Northway. ‘I suppose we will be glad of your company on the way back to Grammaine, Mr Northway,’ she said. Then, as soon as Alice was mounted, she turned her horse towards the trees again.

  She did her best to ride aloofly at the head of their little procession, but Mr Northway was like her shadow, his horse keeping steady progress at her shoulder until she felt compelled to look back at him.

  ‘You have some accusations, I think.’ His lipless, sardonic smile had returned.

  She had resolved not to speak of it, but his words broke the fragile dam her discretion had built, and out came the words. ‘It was no chance meeting there between you and the Ghyer!’ she spat out.

  ‘Indeed not.’ His maddening expression did not change.

  ‘He was expecting you. He knew you.’

  ‘The Ghyer knew many people, you included,’ Northway observed.

  ‘But he was expecting you. The very man you came to warn us of– and you have been dealing with him.’

  Utterly deadpan, he replied, ‘But as Mayor-Governor it is my job to deal with brigands.’

  For a moment she was so angry she could not speak. ‘You were going to . . . treat with him. What was it about? Would you turn a blind eye in exchange for a portion of the man’s gains?’

  ‘I was going to make terms, Miss Marshwic, and let him know what targets would arouse official ire and which he could attack in safety.’

  She stared at him. ‘Mr Northway . . .’ But she fell speechless. What could be said to such an admission?

  ‘You see here in my company most of the official fighting strength of Chalcaster, Miss Marshwic. The Ghyer had more than ten, all told, though never all assembled in one place. If he decided to declare war on my town, what do you suppose I could do? My job is to deal with whatever menace presents itself, and so I do by whatever means I possess.’

  Still she was silent.

  ‘I would not have yielded Grammaine to him,’ Northway added.

  ‘Do you imagine,’ she said, ‘that I would be happy at having my safety bought with another’s blood?’

  ‘I don’t imagine you would, but you would never have known.’ Northway sighed. ‘However, the Ghyer was no more reasonable than you, in the end, and between the pair of you, the decent thing appears to have been done. The brigands are put to flight, the man who had unified them is slain, the town is saved.’

  ‘How disappointed you sound,’ she mocked, for his smile was now gone.

  ‘What do you propose I do, Miss Marshwic, when another dozen brigands drift in and start their predations? Do I go to make terms with them? And why should they listen, after I broke my word with the Ghyer?’

  ‘Do you blame me for—’ she started hotly.

  ‘No,’ he cut her off. ‘How can I? But do not cast so much blame my way, Miss Marshwic, for I do what I can. What would you do if all you could accomplish were little evils to ward off worse?’

  ‘You have not scrupled at little evils previously, I think,’ she said, but her tone was not as harsh as before.

  ‘But those were for my own good,’ he told her, and a ghost of his smile returned. ‘Now I am soiling my soul for others, and it does not sit half so well with me.’

  ‘You are candid, Mr Northway.’

  ‘I have always spoken the truth with you, Miss Marshwic,’ he said. ‘Possibly because I so enjoy your expressions of outrage.’

  She nodded, and it was not outrage that touched her. Instead she felt numb inside. The roar of the gunfire was still coursing back and forth inside her head, and her clothes – and her hands and everything around her – stank of it.

  She did not mind the noise, she found. It was like thunder, and soon over, but in her mind there was again a room with shuttered windows, filled with the smell of gun-smoke. There was a door she had opened, thirteen years before, while looking for her father.

  By his own hand. He had cheated the Ghyer of a revenge, cheated Northway of any challenge to his ambition, cheated his family of a father, of an explanation.

  She glanced at Northway again, the man whose machinations had put the gun in her father’s hand that fateful night. She searched for the wellspring of hatred that had simmered inside her for so long.

  She could not find it amidst the numbness, only the thought that if Northway’s schemes had forced her father into that room, forced him to take up that pistol, it had still been her father who had decided to pull the trigger.

  The thought shocked her, but it would not go away.

  6

  . . . and I breathe it like the air, now. The smell of the guns is become to me like water to a fish: a thing I take for granted. At first it was simply something that I did not notice any more. Now it is a part of my life I cannot live without. There is power in pulling a trigger: power over the world, in that split moment of sound and fury.

  Alice had recovered from her ordeal within days, and already she was capitalizing on it when she visited Chalcaster. She was the abducted princess, to hear her tell it. She had been wrested from her chamber in dead of night by a band of swarthy Denlanders and hied away with into the forests. They had been plotting to use her noble blood and gentle birth to destroy the monarchy, although Alice was never specific about how this might be accomplished. Before their evil plots could be enacted, however, her rescuer and his gallant few crashed out of the woods and saved her. Only the identity of that rescuer remained unspoken, with the heavy implication that it was some agent of the King desirous of remaining anonymous. Her gushing gratitude to Mr Northway had soured even before she returned to Grammaine, and she had decided that her loathing of the man continued unabated.

  ‘But wasn’t the Ghyer involved?’ asked some of her listeners.

  ‘He was,’ Alice replied, unperturbed. ‘The treacherous villain was in league with the Denlanders.’

  ‘But Denlanders aren’t swarthy,’ Emily once put in, though Alice ignored her entirely. Just as she had ignored Emily’s role in her rescue, for that matter.

  Emily herself had taken longer to recover.

  Back home, she had told Mary all: from their botched attempt at a rescue to Mr Northway’s unexpected intervention, to her ensuing conversation with the man and the thoughts it had awoken in her.

  ‘And this morning, before dawn, I was awake with the sound of gunfire in my ears and the sheets soaked as though I had a fever,’ she finished. ‘I feel as though I should have put it behind me. Am I letting the family down?’

  ‘You were only thirteen when our fa
ther . . . died,’ Mary said unhappily. With their mother dead bringing Rodric into the world, she had been left to bring up her three siblings after the suicide. ‘It was a terrible time to become a parent, although I suppose the experience has been useful.’ She looked down at little Francis, asleep in her arms after some early-morning hysterics. ‘All you knew, at the time, was the loss.’

  ‘And that Mr Northway was responsible,’ Emily put in almost desperately. ‘That he drove Father to it.’

  Mary gave her a level look.

  ‘Mary why else have I been hounding the man all these years? Why else have I been his most determined enemy in Chalcaster? We have all of us placed the blame for it at his door, myself more than anybody, but . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘But he was not the only one to blame.’

  For a long time Mary regarded her silently, but then she managed a short nod. ‘I know. I hated myself for it, but I blamed him too. But do not forget that Northway is guilty, as well.’

  ‘Without a doubt, guilty as any man ever was,’ Emily agreed. ‘All the heroes have gone to war, after all. What can we be left with save villains? He should be the toast of Chalcaster, of course.’ But behind the bitterness there was a mixture of feelings. When she had ridden to town soon after the rescue she had expected to see bunting and cheering, and toasts drunk to the health of Mr Northway, but the Mayor-Governor was closeted in his office still, and would not see mere well-wishers. Any advantage he could have made of the situation was leaching away whilst he dealt with each new problem the war effort handed him. Most did not even guess that he had anything to do with the Ghyer’s defeat.

  Can it be possible that the war will actually make an honest man of him? The idea was almost enough to make her laugh.

  After that, perhaps she should have made a visit to Chalcaster, if only to assess her old enemy and see where his new weak points were, and whether his razor-edged wit had dulled after their adventure. But the ball was coming on apace by then, and Mrs Shevarler had the dresses brought to them for their final fitting, and suddenly there was more to do than Emily had time to cope with.

  And anyway, she had been expecting him to darken her door in his mourner’s black. Surely he would come to exploit his newfound leverage, to barter the rescue of her sister into some usable currency. She was ready for the clash and had marshalled her arguments against him, ready to resist any blandishment he should employ. And yet he stayed away. Perhaps his work as mayor kept him busy. Or perhaps he himself was not sure how to approach this new stage of their rivalry.

  And all too soon Emily and Alice were embarking for Deerlings, leaving Chalcaster and its problems behind them.

  *

  The approach to Deerlings had been planned two generations back to waste no opportunity of showing off the house or the splendour of its grounds. Now their buggy wound its way through ever-ascending slopes of lawns and fountains and exquisite topiary: even with winter just a day away, and the chills of the year’s end creeping in with the gathering dark, there were flowers still in bloom, each bed carefully seeded so that as one harvest of colour faded, another was awakening.

  Emily had visited here once before when she was no more than eight, for her father to receive some honour from Lord Deerling. Her impressions were of massive high-ceilinged rooms finished in gilt, of mirrors and polished floors that showed her reflection equally well, of a host of soft-footed servants who were always there to keep an eye on the curious child. Alice had come more recently as the guest of one of her well-born friends at a party four years ago. In that gentler age on the eve of the war her eyes had been drawn not to the furnishings but to the people. During their two-day buggy ride Emily had already heard from her sister a list of the great and the good who had attended, with especial attention to the eligible young men in their new coats of red.

  ‘Really you must marry soon, Emily, while I am still in the flush of youth,’ the girl fretted.

  ‘And whom do you suggest I marry?’

  ‘Oh, what do I care? After all, Mary married a tradesman, and you could hardly do worse than that.’

  ‘I apologize for spoiling your chances, sister, but I’ve no mind to marry any time soon,’ Emily said.

  ‘I know what it is,’ Alice said slyly. ‘It’s because the Ghyer called you a man. You needn’t worry. In a good gown like that you’re practically presentable. And even if you don’t possess my gifts, your birth should stand you in good stead.’

  ‘Why thank you, sister, for your educated opinions,’ Emily replied somewhat tartly. ‘Do note that our parentage is not going to open many doors for us here at Deerlings. We will be counted amongst the lowly.’

  Alice sniffed disdainfully as though to indicate that her personal charm and beauty would make up for any deficit in pedigree.

  Their little two-horse buggy was a shabby affair compared to most of the opulent carriages already drawn up outside the stables of Deerlings. Alice was too busy to make that comparison, though, intent on ticking off coats of arms and looking for the intertwined herons that were the King’s. Grant helped Emily step down, and she paused and took a good look at Deerlings House.

  She had expected the giant edifice of her memory to be diminished now, no longer seen through the eyes of a child, but Deerlings remained the grandest building she had ever seen: a vast winged front of regimented windows flanking a colonnade, which framed great front doors that alone seemed as grand as all of Grammaine. A pair of statues faced each other across the doorway: a near-naked spearman with arched eagle’s wings menacing a coiled and barbed serpent in whose mouth glowed real fire.

  ‘Will you be all right, Grant?’

  ‘I’ll find my way, ma’am. I’ll put the horses to rest first, and then I’m sure the kitchen will have a bite for me.’ He chuckled roughly. ‘I shouldn’t say it to you, ma’am, but I’ll wager the kitchen girls’ll have time for a word even for an old’un like me.’

  Emily found herself smiling, where only a season before she would have been shocked beyond all reckoning – or at least feigned it – to hear the old man talk like that. Nor, she guessed, would he have risked the words back then. Their escapade against the brigands had brought them closer through mutual peril. Now he was less formal with her, and she fonder of him.

  ‘I wish you well of them,’ she replied. ‘Come, Alice, we must go and present ourselves.’

  *

  ‘Miss Emily Marshwic and Miss Alice Marshwic.’ It was announced in a piercing voice by a woman in footman’s garb, but neither of them really noticed. After a year and a half of war, deprivation and worry, this was like coming home.

  The great ballroom of Deerlings had a gleaming floor that scattered light and colour in mother-of-pearl reflections from wall to wall. The walls themselves began with gilded skirting wrought into the form of waves, and rose up through spiralled pillars to merge into the ceiling’s spreading golden vistas of marine life. The first Lord Deerling had been a coastal man, and subsequent generations had elaborated on his original theme, so that here could be seen fishing ships hauling in their nets, while there a kraken, many-armed and twisting, broke the water to do battle with trident-wielding sailors. There were mermaids with their lyres, and schooling fish of silver and red and blue, and here the ancient sea king in his armour of shells, and each vignette was separated by coiling gilded plaster moulded into the shape of sea wrack.

  Beneath, and multiplied back and forth by the mirrors hanging on two walls, were the great and the good, the young and the beautiful, the wealthy and the powerful of all Lascanne. Two score ladies of quality, from the stately Lady Deerling herself in pearls and white lace and satin, to pretty aristocratic girls a year younger even than Alice, each the centre of her own world. Their gowns were a kaleidoscope of hues and patterns, for the scarcity of society gatherings prevented any consensus on the season’s fashions. Each had chosen her very best and, seeing them, Emily knew that her own gown, made at such expense, was coarse and provincial. Some of these ladies proba
bly dressed their servants in better. She did not care: she was here, and here at least was somewhere bright and lively. Here was somewhere her worries could not follow her.

  If only Mary had come, she would have loved to see this. There had been no persuading her.

  ‘To think, I had almost forgotten what a man looked like,’ Alice declared, for amongst the throng of beautiful plumage there were men, perhaps one for every three of the ladies. They were all of a piece in their colours, of course. Who, with an invitation to Deerlings, would not have his dress uniform ready, resplendent in gold and red? Emily recognized but a few of them: there was Mr Markworthy, now a captain by the look of him. His head was cocked back, laughing, and he had three ladies half his age hanging on his arms. She spotted one of the Brossade brothers – the younger she thought – with a monstrously broad and moneyed widow entreating him to something. The woman tugged at his cuff, and Emily saw that the hand of his that she took was of polished brass, marvellously jointed.

  She found Lord Deerling without effort; he was back from the Couchant front for this night only, or so rumour said. He was a tall man, not short of Poldry’s age, his thin face dominated by a silver moustache. A younger officer was recounting something to him, but his attention was mostly on his lady wife, clasping her arm in his own. Behind him in mute attendance stood two hulking men in feather cloaks: savages from some distant land.

  ‘But they’re all so old,’ complained Alice, having assessed each face in the room in only seconds. ‘Not one of them is under thirty, I’m sure.’

  She was right, of course. These were the senior officers, the lords: those whose influence had wrested them away from the war for this.

  ‘Oh, look who it is!’ Alice exclaimed, pointing across the room and causing a few heads to turn. Emily followed her finger and saw a dark and shabby figure lurking by a statue. If she had not recognized the face, or the clothes, she would have taken him for a bailiff.

  ‘Mr Northway,’ she said softly. He looked resentful and ill at ease, and the people around him were doing their best to ignore his presence completely. Hateful little man’ she told herself, like a black cloud of misery set to spoil the night for us. But, in spite of herself, she found some sympathy for him. He was a public servant, a man of papers and underhand action, and here he was adrift in a sea of gentry and gallantry.