by Col Buchanan
As a Rōshun, and then as a Diplomat, Ché had been trained to spot the important details first. Something drew his attention now, and he squinted between the formations of men at a lone Acolyte moving towards the Matriarch’s position.
It took Ché a moment to become conscious of what was wrong with the image. The man wore leather leggings beneath his robe.
Ché’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword.
Ash was close.
He could see the Matriarch astride her white zel, a golden mask over her face, surrounded by white-robes and mounted bodyguards and her standard hanging above them. His eyes narrowed.
He marched along the edge of a waiting square of men. Deserted camp equipment and trampled pup tents lay scattered across ground that had been churned into a filthy mush. He strode through the remnants of a campfire, scattering ashes and still-glowing embers. His hand closed around the hilt of his sword as he neared the outer ring of Acolytes gathered about the Matriarch.
Behind Sasheen, off to one side of the white-robes, a young Acolyte stood watching Ash.
Ash stopped.
The man drew his blade and stepped out to meet him.
As the Khosians pushed closer towards the Matriarch’s position, the imperial light infantry of the Eighty-First Predasa – less hardened auxiliaries in the main, freshly returned from garrison duty in the northern hinterlands, all of them now sober, tired, and positioned in the thick of the action next to a hardcore of Acolytes – decided that losing over half of their numbers to mortar fire and grenades, including most of their officers, was too much to tolerate for a single night, and decided to beat a retreat to safer ground.
They broke, in fact, when the largest and fiercest of their number, Cunnse of the northern tribes, there for the money and little else, threw aside his shield and sword and shoved his way back through the loosening ranks, shouting that enough was enough, it was time for someone else to meet the slaughter. It took only a moment for the rest to follow his lead.
In no time they were rushing back towards the lines behind them, back towards where the Matriarch was positioned. Others in the fore joined them, retreating from the concussions of mortars raining down from the overlooking ridge.
Ché was shoved from behind by this sudden surge of men as he tried to stride forwards.
He fell, rolling through the muck as he held fast to his sword. When he regained his feet he saw men flooding past Sasheen’s position. Her Acolytes and mounted bodyguards struggled to shove them aside or back into the fray. Swords swung, felling some of them – dead men being better than routing ones.
Ché looked back. He could no longer see the impostor in the sudden milling press of bodies.
What am I doing? he demanded of himself.
He had more urgent matters at hand. The Khosians were fast approaching the Matriarch’s position, who sat shocked on her jittery white zel with its tail dyed a pretty black.
Ché shoved a fleeing soldier out of his way. He took out the pistol loaded with its poison shot.
Waited to see what Sasheen would do next.
Bahn came to a with a gasp, and found that he was being dragged along the ground by a bearded soldier.
A woman was fussing over him.
‘Marlee?’ he croaked.
It was Curl, though, not his wife, and she was bent over him with a vial of smelling salts in her hand. She looked surprised at his recovery, even managed a nervous twitch of her lips.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘You may be concussed.’
He looked up into the bruised and bloodied face of the soldier. The man nodded to him, kept dragging him along.
He had no recollection of how he’d come to be here. One instant, Curl had been treating his wounded arm . . . then blackness. ‘What happened?’ he rasped.
‘You’re all right,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be fine.’
‘Was I hit?’
‘You were caught in a blast. You’re lucky to be in one piece.’
He looked at his body, saw that everything was still there.
Around them the battle was still raging. The entire formation continued to push forwards. ‘Get me to my feet,’ he said, and held his hand out weakly.
Curl frowned, then grasped his hand, and she and the soldier hauled until Bahn stood on his own two feet. He felt faint, nauseous.
‘We’re still here, then,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said the soldier in his roughened voice. ‘Afraid so.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Contact
It was unlike him, to be thinking so fluently in the midst of action. Ash was wholly unable to find his stillness here on this icy field.
The Acolyte who’d been about to challenge him had vanished in the confusion of the rout. As Ash approached Sasheen’s position, cold anger was all that he felt now.
Within it, memories were surfacing like corpses, bloated and awful.
He recalled Nico, standing behind the bars of the Bar-Khos jail where they’d first been introduced, the boy scared and red-eyed from crying with his mother, Reese, a woman determined to save her son that day. He had made a pledge to her, a promise to protect the boy, even if it meant giving his own life first.
He saw Nico on the burning pyre again in the Q’os arena, his apprentice breathing his last breath, dropping his head as fiery tendrils took hold of his body.
Ash’s anger was complete. He pushed his way through the routing troops, shoving them aside as he strode forwards. Without pausing he slipped through the ring of Acolytes that surrounded the Matriarch’s and her mounted bodyguards.
The guards’ war-zels stood firm against the flow, redirecting it around the animals’ steaming flanks. Ash stopped as a guard turned his zel to block his way.
He thrust his blade into the man’s side, piercing through his chainmail, not taking his eyes from Sasheen three strides distant. Ash jerked the blade free even as the bodyguard raised his own sword high. A flare was peaking in the sky above the man, illuminating a passing cloud.
Half blinded, he ducked as the man swung his blade downwards, bending from his saddle to reach him.
Ash blinked with the light still cloying in his eyes. Stabbed out with his blade again, felt its point cleave through into the man’s heart.
He stepped around the zel as the guard tumbled to the ground. In the midst of them Sasheen was trying to turn her zel around, to get clear of the position.
A space opened in their rear and Ash sprang forward, sword ringing from its sheath.
The Khosians were chanting as they pushed forwards. Arrows had begun to pepper down around the Matriarch’s standard. Archgen-eral Sparus, not far from her, was exhorting his officers to maintain the line, trying to restore solidarity to an army tottering on the dangerous edge of individualism and full rout.
Ché looked towards the Matriarch’s position, where she was desperately close to the advancing Khosians and the explosions of mortars that seemed to be walking towards her. She was attempting to withdraw, despite Sparus calling out to stand firm.
So it had come to this, then.
Some part of Ché was suddenly awed by the possibility now facing him. The pistol hung loose in his hand. To kill a Holy Matriarch; to topple her from her empire with a single shot to the head . . . His mouth went dry at the thought of it. His features set into a hardened mask.
It’s hardly different from all the people you’ve murdered at her whim, he tried to tell himself.
Ché licked his lips and glanced around in search of Swan and Guan, but he was unable to see the two Diplomats anywhere. He was fairly certain they had orders to kill him once this campaign had reached its end. The note left in the Scripture had been right. He knew too much.
Don’t stay, then. Leave now and hope they consider you to be amongst the dead. What is there for you here but more pain and anguish?
Only his mother, he knew. But she’d already been lost to him, and he from her, all those years ago when he’d first be
en sent to Cheem to be turned as a Rōshun. Nothing had been left to him by the order of Mann, nothing but this hollow complexity of a life that he’d never wished for, had never chosen.
Ché chose now to raise the pistol firmly in his hand.
He steadied it with his other hand, tried to draw an aim on the Matriarch as he waited for an opening in the ring of mounted guards surrounding her. A flare went up. Men illuminated in shaking light jostled past him, interrupting his aim.
Ché fought to hold steady. He caught a brief glimpse of Sasheen as she tugged her zel around, and then she was blocked again by the tightening shields of her bodyguards. She would be away within moments.
Damn it, he swore silently.
He couldn’t get a clear shot.
Suddenly, one of the bodyguards swung around with his zel. The man’s sword rose high in the air then drove down onto someone on foot. As he carried through with the swing, the bodyguard bent low in his saddle.
Sasheen’s head came into view.
Ché’s pistol flared and fired.
Ash saw Sasheen lurch backwards in her saddle as he closed with her. The Matriarch’s white zel cried out as it reared up on its hind legs, backing a few steps towards him. Riders jostled and hollered all around them.
He saw an armoured rider lying next to its white zel.
It was Sasheen, sprawled in the muck with her life-blood pumping from her neck. Her bodyguards were gathering where she lay, holding their shields aloft to protect her, their movements as jerky as frightened boys’.
He cried out as though robbed of a prize rightly his, struggling to his feet with his sword hanging like a thing forgotten.
She was dead or dying. That was all that mattered, he consoled himself.
Ash barely noticed the mounted bodyguard circling around him. From the corner of his eye, he spotted the guard raising his sword.His gaze remained fixed on the motionless bundle that was the Holy Matriarch of Mann.
Ash was stillness.
The sword came down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A Fighting Retreat
Ché stuffed the pistol into his belt and fought his way through the jostling infantry towards Sasheen. He caught a glimpse of her body lying unmoving in the mud. Someone had removed her mask. A wound in her neck pumped profusely.
Not far from the scene, a lone Acolyte lay sprawled on the ground. His cloak was splayed open to reveal a pair of leather leggings. Ché tore the mask from the man’s face. He gasped and stood back in surprise.
Ash! he thought as he took in the black skin of the old farlander. One of the Rōshun, here, of all places.
Ché reeled with his thoughts asunder. Blood was coursing from a swollen lump in the man’s head. He was still alive, then.
Ché looked about him for a moment, at the masks and the stark faces of strangers.
He knelt and slapped the farlander’s face. Ash’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. He seemed to weigh nothing but skin and bones as Ché lifted him and threw him over his shoulder. He grabbed the reins of a loose zel, threw the old man over the saddle. The animal tried to skitter away as he bent to reach for the fallen sword. He pulled it back towards him, then mounted behind Ash.
He kicked the animal into a trot.
For a moment the battle hung in the balance.
Perhaps if the imperial army had learned nothing from the previous fifty years of land war – or if Sparus’s own five hundred Acolytes hadn’t positioned themselves in the direct path of the Khosian advance and stood firm – or if one more man in the ordinary ranks had yelled in fear for his life – then the First Expeditionary Force might have broken.
But it didn’t. Instead it rallied gamely and began to fight back. And in the way of these things, the collective shame of its near-defeat lent an impetus to the army’s efforts, and they fell upon the Khosian flanks like a flood.
The Khosians reeled.
‘She fell, sir, I saw it with my own eyes.’
The Red Guard captain stood with a slight stoop as he spoke. He held a bloody hand across his stomach.
‘Very well,’ said General Creed. ‘Now go and find yourself a medico.’
The officer gritted his teeth – perhaps it was an attempt at a smile – and hoisted his charta before returning to the lines of the right flank. They were disintegrating now, much like the rest of the formation.
Bahn paid little attention to the news of the Matriarch’s possible death, or even to the destruction of the army taking place all about him. He was in something of a daze as he stood fighting down his nausea, the blood leaking from an ear he could no longer hear from.
‘That’s four sightings, Bahn!’ barked General Creed by his side, pulling him from his scattered thoughts.
Bahn blinked dumbly in reply.
The general stood with hands behind his back, taking in the imperial onslaught on all sides. ‘They rallied well, don’t you think?’
‘Like Khosians, sir,’ Bahn finally replied, feeling giddy.
Creed examined his lieutenant. The flesh around the general’s eyes was swollen from exhaustion.‘We’ve accomplished all we can here. I think it’s time that we left, don’t you?’
‘General?’
‘You’d rather we stay here a while longer?’
He tried to shake his head, but it only caused more sickness to wash through him.
‘Not – for a single moment,’ he said.
Creed turned to one of his bodyguards. ‘Have a runner sent to fetch General Reveres.’
‘Reveres is dead, sir,’ replied the bodyguard.
‘What? When?’
‘I’m not certain, sir.’
‘Nidemes, then!’
It was some minutes before General Nidemes limped towards them through the darkness. His helm was missing and his greying hair was matted to his head in the semblance of a bird’s nest.
‘Nidemes, we’re leaving as of now. We’ll perform a heel turn and proceed to the lake as fast as we can.’
With obvious relief the general hurried away off to pass on the order.
‘The lake?’ asked Bahn.
General Creed’s breath formed a rising cloud in the air. ‘I’m sure that by the time that we get there, you’ll have worked it out, Bahn.’
‘They’re heading for the lake,’ observed Sergeant Jay.
Halahan saw it. What was left of the army had turned about and tightened its flanks, and now was forging a path through to the lake on the northern side of the battlefield.
‘About bloody time,’ breathed the colonel to himself.
He turned to face the remnants of his own small force. The imperial mortars had been abandoned – three of the pieces had seized up finally, too hot to fire any longer; a fourth had blown up, though only the charge had exploded, miraculously, not the explosive shot itself. Their crews were gulping from small flasks of spirits, looking as though they’d just survived a deadly game of blind-man’s duel.
The riflemen defending the perimeter had run out of ammunition too. They were exhausted to the man, and they were nervously watching as the Imperials regrouped again along the waist of the ridge and around the base of its slopes. All knew that the next assault would finish them.
Colonel Halahan drew in a breath and bellowed: ‘Someone send up a signal flare – we’re leaving!’
The men roused themselves, brief burns of energy returning to their spent frames. ‘And let’s destroy the rest of these mortars, shall we?’
Halahan scanned the bloody carnage of the ridge. The dead would have to be left where they’d fallen. He struck a match to relight his pipe. Exhaling smoke, he gathered all the precious pistols he’d tossed aside so far. As he stood next to the sergeant the signal flare shot upwards into the air, burning yellow as it stalled and fell back to earth.
Beyond it, skyships were blasting each other with spurts of cannon fire.
‘Let’s pray our skuds are still up there somewhere,’ said Sergeant Jay, and they both stood tog
ether, scanning the dark skies in silent hope.
Ché drew the zel to a halt in front of the twins’ tent. He leapt off it, leaving Ash across the saddle; ducked quickly inside without waiting to see if anyone spotted him.
Guan and Swan’s packs were lying on the ground next to their cots. Ché rummaged through them until he found the vial of wild-wood juice, then ran back outside with it gripped in his fist. He led the zel to his own tent and went in to grab his pack. He threw his books into it, shoving them in next to the bundle of civilian clothing he had brought with him. He left his Scripture of Lies facedown on the bunk.
‘How’s it going down there?’
A silhouette filled the entrance to the tent. A priest.
Ché rose slowly as he tightened his grip on the straps of his backpack.
The silhouette raised its hand to its mouth, took a bite from something. Ché scented the sweet narcotic scent of the parmadio fruit.
‘Hard to say,’ he told the spymaster Alarum. ‘I’m no expert on war.’
The spymaster stood there with a blanket wrapped across his shoulders. Ché glanced at Alarum’s other hand, saw it hanging limp by his side next to a sheathed dagger in his belt. Ché knew this man was dangerous.
‘For a moment I thought we were being overrun, the way you came charging into camp like that.’ He gestured to the pack in Ché’s hand. ‘Going somewhere?’
Without warning, Ché swung the backpack and threw it at Alarum’s face.
He was a step behind it. He punched the man in the stomach to knock the wind from him, doubling Alarum over with a whoosh of air. Ché locked an arm around his neck, snatched the knife from the man’s scabbard, drew him back away from the entrance with the edge of the blade pressing against his throat.
‘Wait!’ Alarum hissed through his teeth.
He struggled, strong for his thin build, gripping Ché’s wrist as he tried to stop him from cutting his throat. One of the bunks toppled over as he kicked it with a foot. ‘Wait a moment!’ he hissed in a strangled whisper, white spittle flying from his lips.
The man forced his sleeve back from his arm, held the skin up for Ché to see. Ché stared at it, saw the scaly patch of skin along the spymaster’s arm. His grip loosened a fraction.