by Col Buchanan
‘A little of both,’ he told her, then looked down to study his own two cards; a three-armed black Monk and a white Foreigner.
Ché considered his position. He wasn’t bothered about winning tonight. He was content enough to sit in the familiar environment of the gaming table and forget everything else for a while. On a whim he matched the girl’s bet, then raised her by throwing in two more silvers, wanting to see her reaction.
The girl half closed her eyes again, and settled back in her chair while she waited her turn.
‘Your accent. You’re not from Khos, are you?’ It was the fat man again, sipping wine.
‘I come from all over,’ Ché answered casually.
The man wiped his hand on his woollen tunic and held it out to him. ‘Koolas,’ he said.
‘Ché.’ They shook, and Ché wondered if the man was merely gaining the measure of him.
‘What brings you here, friend?’
‘Some business,’ said Ché. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I dabble in war correspondence, when I’m not writing my own impressions.’
‘Koolas?’ Ché in surprise. ‘The same Koolas who wrote The First and the Last?’
The war chattēro smiled proudly at that. ‘The very same,’ he admitted. ‘You’re well read, friend. They didn’t make that many copies.’
Ché offered a modest tilt of his head.
The dealer spread four cards on the gaming table, face up. Ché spotted a red Foreigner before he glanced at the rest. The other two cards were red too.
Again the girl bet first, this time even more strongly, throwing five silvers clinking into the pot.
Ché sat back and tried to read her. Calm, he thought. She didn’t look as though she was bluffing. There was every chance that she had something, even possibly a flush.
They waited on Koolas, the big man studying his cards and those on the table, his left eye squinting. He glanced at the girl.
‘Nope,’ he said, flicking his cards away.
Ché was enjoying himself. He knew that he was probably beaten here, yet still he reached for his stack of coins, and played with them for a moment, listening to their metallic clinks. She was pretending to ignore him as he stared at her, and he used the moment to glance down at her chest, its curves compressed by leather.
You can’t bluff this girl, he decided at last, and with regret slid his two cards forward. He gestured with his hand to the pot. It’s yours.
She retrieved her winnings without expression. Just once she chanced a look at Ché, and a small smile tugged the corner of her mouth.
A damned bluff, he realized with a start. The little bitch had bluffed them all.
Ché leaned back and barked with laughter. It felt good enough just then that he kept on laughing, the sound of it lost in the din of the crowd, and when he finally stopped he felt better for it, and another hand was already in progress. He caught the eye of one of the barmaids and called for her to bring some water, and good wine.
The wine she brought him was passable, the water tasted as though it had come from the lake.
‘How goes the evacuation?’ enquired Koolas.
‘Shouldn’t you be seeing it for yourself, correspondent?’
‘I’ve seen enough for now, thank you,’ the man replied quietly.
Ché folded his next few hands, too worthless even to bluff with, wanting to see the run of play and the styles employed by the other players before he started working them.
A fight broke out near to the bar. A man was standing on top of it, his prick hanging out, waving it over the jeers of his friends. A table crashed to the floor spilling drinks. The drums of the band picked up a beat, and the music ran without pause into a different song, the singer wailing with urgency and passion now, her words a high ululation of purest old Khosian, almost Alhazii in their intonations. Ché turned around to watch her perform.
The singer was dressed in a black, skin-tight dress of satin. Her hair was bound up by sticks of lacquered wood. Her eyes were lined with kohl. She swung her hips as she sang, moving in a way that caught the eyes of the men in the room, and the women too, so that they all gazed transfixed in desire of her, or desiring to be her. The woman held their stares, her arms cradling her head as she writhed amongst the coils of smoke.
‘Calhalee!’
Ché turned to the table. ‘What?’ he replied to the girl.
‘Calhalee,’ she shouted again over the noise. ‘They say she owns this place.’ He noted how the girl spoke with the thick burr of a Lagosian accent.
‘She’s good,’ he said, glancing back.
The wine was heady stuff; he could feel it already. Ché leaned over the table and extended his hand. ‘Ché.’
‘I heard,’ she replied, and she studied him for a moment, before reaching out to clasp his hand, ‘Curl,’ she told him, and as their skins touched he felt a quickening of his blood and saw her lips part slightly. He squeezed her hand tighter, wanting her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Desires
‘General Creed, some trouble has broken out in the western quarter.’
It was Corporal Bere, holding the reins of his sweat-lathered zel. The officer was freshly returned from relaying a message to Captain Ashtan, who was manning the western shore of the island with units of Red Guards.
‘Trouble with whom?’
‘Some panicked civilians. They’ve decided not to heed our warnings about the Suck and the Chilos. They think they can still make it through on rafts.’
Creed looked at the man in the pearly light of dawn. Bere was filthy, as they all were. His helm was gone, his hair sticking up wild and hard, and his crimson robe hung tattered over his armour. Yet he stood with his back straight and his eyes sharp – a good man, it seemed, when the pressure was on him.
Creed recalled that he was in need of a new chief field aide. But that involved accepting that Bahn was now lying dead at Chey-Wes, and the Bahn that he’d always known was still very much alive in his mind.
‘And what would you suggest, Corporal?’
Bere looked surprised to be asked his opinion. ‘I don’t know, General. Perhaps more men to contain them.’
Creed considered his words.
‘They’re still a free people,’ he decided. ‘If they want to chance it, let them chance it.’
The corporal nodded and climbed back onto his zel. Creed’s bodyguards cleared the way as he kicked the animal into a gallop, scattering the soldiers that clogged the city boardwalks.
Creed was standing in the middle of the bridge that spanned the wide Central Canal. He placed his big hands on the rail with a slap, and looked out over the scene of chaos without expression. A skyship was lifting off from the roof of a nearby warehouse, overloaded with wounded men and civilians.
The mood of the remaining citizens was becoming desperate as a new day rose around them and they found themselves still here. They wanted out by any means now. But the Chilos and Suck had effectively been sealed off by the Imperials, so that anyone passing into the mouth of either river ran a gauntlet of missile fire from both banks. An hour previously, Captain Trench, of the skyship Falcon, had reported that the Chilos was running red with corpses.
They have no faith in us to protect them, Creed reflected as he watched the pandemonium around the canal.
He could hardly blame them for that. The army had staggered into Tume shattered and harried by the enemy. They hadn’t looked as though they could hold a single bridge, let alone a city, and without heavy cannon it was doubtful they could.
A cold breeze ran fingers through Creed’s long hair. He tilted his head back, smelled the dank rot of the lakeweed amongst the other scents of the city. He had always liked it here in Tume, those times long ago when he’d visited with his old comrade Vanichios to wench and gamble and drink like the bachelor officers they were, and with all the luxuries afforded to the son of the Principari.
Beyond the Central Canal stood the citadel, an ancient fortress on th
e crown of the rocky island. A moat circled the base of the small island in the form of a canal. It was empty of boats now that Vanichios had sent away his family and civilian staff the previous night.
His friend refused to be dissuaded from his decision to stay and fight. Even now, his remaining Home Guards pulled wagons of supplies inside the citadel for the forthcoming siege, while on the parapets the canvas covers were being removed from the ballistae and bolt-throwers. Despite Vanichios’s own belief, the Principari’s Home Guard had been deserting in droves throughout the night, so that less than half of them now remained for its defence. Vani-chios had cursed and called them cowards and dogs in their absence. With his eyes gleaming, he’d exhorted Creed not to evacuate the army from Tume, but to stand and defend the city by his side.
For a moment Creed had been swayed by his old friend’s passion. It was galling to run once more from the Imperials. Yet cold, common sense had returned before he could speak.
Tume was a grave waiting to be filled. To defend the city now would cost the lives of his surviving men, for the Al-Khos reserves were still three days away with their heavy cannon, too far to make a difference now. Meanwhile, word had just arrived from the gatehouse that the Imperials were starting work on rebuilding the half-destroyed bridge, even though the defenders were keeping them under fire. By their reckoning, the enemy could have it finished within a day if they pushed hard and recklessly enough. Creed had no doubt that they would.
It would be street-to-street fighting once they were across, with no telling how long the defenders could hold on as a cohesive force before it became every man for himself, his army disintegrating around him.
No. He wasn’t going to let that happen.
The general gazed down upon the Central Canal and the ferries moored there, those that had made it back from their last runs.
The tall boats were covered with gangs of work crews hammering and sawing wood as they fixed sections of roughshod armour into place, protection for the rails and boathouse on each hull. Colonel Barklee of the Red Guards strode amongst them, jumping on and off the boats to inspect the firing holes they were cutting into the wood, the only experienced marine officer that they had.
The boats would need all the protection they could get. Once the remaining civilians and wounded were lifted out, there was still the matter of evacuating the rest of the army. Some could be taken out by the skuds and skyships. The rest would have to cram onto the ferries and run the gauntlet of the Chilos river mouth, hoping to break through so they could drift south with the current to Juno’s Ferry, where Creed had decided to rally and draw a defensive line.
They were fortunate, in one respect, for they still controlled the skies, the imperial birds-of-war having withdrawn after a few initial engagements. How long that would continue, though, no one could know.
Creed was intent on getting everyone out by tomorrow morning, before the Imperials finished repairing the bridge.
Anyone still here after that would be on their own.
Curl liked this one. There was something lonely about him, and rootless, and wounded, though he carried himself well, with a kind of last-stand defiance in his eyes, and his honest laugher was infectious.
Who are you? she wondered as she watched Ché play. He didn’t have the look of a Khosian. She noted the blond stubble on his scalp, shorn close like a military man. The eyes that were dark and quick beneath thin brows. The square handsome face. His fine hands.
For once, Curl felt the need for some male companionship. Or at least she had done, during the night when she’d wakened on the cold floor of the warehouse they had been quartered in with the wounded, chased from sleep by the ghosts of nightmares, the faces of young men crying out at her to save them. While some volunteers and monks from the city tended to the needs of the wounded, Kris had lain soundly asleep, the woman snoring, and Andolson too, with his jitar, whom they’d spotted when they entered Tume. He had informed them that Milos and young Coop were dead, and the rest of the medicos they had known likely scattered throughout the army.
Elsewhere in the cold space of the warehouse, she had heard a young man calling out from his own nightmares of the battle.
Curl had risen quietly, and had ventured out alone in search of some distraction. From a busy street vendor she had purchased a wrap of dross folded in graf leaf, and had taken it all before wandering towards the sound of drifting music.
Finding herself in the Calhalee’s Respite, she’d sat down at the game of rash with the grey dust blowing through her blood, and had played with half her mind on the game and the other half on the men around her, the young and pretty ones, and the spirited veterans.
She’d placed Ché in the former category when first he had sat at the table opposite her and flashed his winning smile, and there and then she had thought, This one. The man played good cards, won more money than he lost, though in a loose uncaring way. And gradually she’d got into the game too. Played with him and the others with their cards and their coins, losing herself in the same way that she might have done with a man in bed, getting more drunk with every mouthful of the bitter Keratch she bought from the bar.
By morning the rash game had settled into an endurance event, the basement taverna calmer now that the soldiers’ needs had turned to food and sleep. Hot meals were doled up by the few remaining members of staff, with Calhalee the owner amongst them, the woman refusing all payment now. Lanterns were refilled around the room, though the natural light brightened from the glass floor so that it reflected in blue flickers along the ceiling and walls.
Men left the table and were replaced by others, but a core remained, the fat war correspondent Koolas amongst them, and the man Ché, who appeared to be on a similar mission of drunkenness and distraction to her own, for he drank heavily.
Her thoughts spun slow and languid like the passing hours, her mind blown. She talked with Ché and the other players at the table, making jokes and laughing in return; but all the while, some frightened stunned part of her was still standing on the night field of Chey-Wes, while around her men stabbed and hacked each other to death.
‘Tell me,’ she said to Koolas. ‘What can those of Mann lack that makes them wish to conquer the whole world?’
The man was scribbling something in his notebook while he played. He looked up with a start. ‘Hair?’ he suggested simply, before returning to his notes.
‘We have a story in Lagos,’ she went on. ‘The story of the Canosos. Of the end of the age. It tells of how a time will come when lies are seen as truth and truth is openly despised. A time when a host of dead souls rule the world in their own image. When only a few men and women remain to resist them.’
Koolas nodded absently. ‘I believe I’ve heard of it. Lagos ends up drowning in its own tears, am I right?’
Curl recalled that part of the tale too. Her face flushed, even as Koolas looked up quickly, and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’ His words trailed away, the man suddenly awkward.
‘There’s a similar story told in the High Pash,’ Ché interrupted in his slurred, drunken voice. He was still cradling her skin of Keratch, which she’d allowed him to try. ‘About a Great Hunger that turns man against the world itself. Erēs swallows them up in the end. All but those who resisted.’
‘I hope it’s true,’ she said, and she could hear the shaking hatred in her own voice, surprising her with its venom. ‘I hope that every last one of them is wiped from the face of this world.’
The man Ché was watching her oddly, one eye partly closed.
‘I might have known I’d find you here.’
Curl looked up to see Kris standing there, the woman holding a cup of something in her hand.
‘Kris. Come and join us.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Not my thing. I’m just doing the rounds to see where everyone is.’
Curl reached over and retrieved the skin of Keratch from Ché’s grasp. ‘Any word on when we’re pulling out yet?’
‘Kris, it’s either this or scream at the top of my lungs for an hour.’
‘Still, watch yourself. Don’t go wandering around on your own.’
‘I won’t,’ Curl replied, as though she meant it.
Kris glanced to the man Ché then back at her.
‘Catch you later.’
‘Hoon – get your bloody head down, man!’
Halahan hollered the words even as another cannon shot crashed into the crenellations in an explosion of dust and masonry. Hoon was unharmed, miraculously, as he rolled choking from the dust with a fellow Greyjacket, Halahan patting them down as though they were on fire.
Another shot smashed against the thick facade of the gatehouse, even as their own cannons replied in kind, tossing balls over the partly destroyed bridge to land before the enemy artillery on the far bank. The imperial snipers were firing rapidly now. It was hard to breathe with all the rock dust scattering and falling over the balcony. Halahan’s ears rang so loudly they hurt.
The fire-position looked like a scene from the Shield in the earlier days of the war. The men hunkered down as low as they could on the debris that covered the flagging, cleaning out their barrels or struggling to reload. A medico was applying pressure to a Grey-jacket’s bloody side; three others lay dead at the back of the space, their eyes still open. Halahan stayed low as he crossed over to Staff Sergeant Jay, who was crouched against the parapet, watching the bridge and the far bank through Halahan’s eyeglass.
The sergeant seemed to sense Halahan’s approach. He turned just as Halahan bent beside him, and shouted into his ear without preamble, ‘We’re getting the thick of it now!’
Halahan accepted the eyeglass and adjusted its focus until he saw the heavy cannon belching smoke some way back on the opposite shore. The Imperials had three batteries positioned against them now, heavy guns with longer ranges than their own smaller field cannon.