by Col Buchanan
She turned her tired eyes on Ché.
‘So, do you still think I’m beautiful?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Yesterday, when you were drunk, you told me so.’
‘Well, the important word there would be drunk.’
She feigned annoyance, and turned to roll away from him. Felt his hand rest on her shoulder and gently pull her back.
‘Curl, if there were a thousand beautiful women standing naked before me, you’d still be the one to catch my eye first.’
‘Oh?’
‘Oh.’
‘So that’s all that matters to you, pretty looks and a firm body?’
It was Ché’s turn to scowl. His expression softened, though, with the flicker of a smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not with you.’
He seemed to mean it.
A scrape sounded from overhead, and the old farlander’s face appeared in the hole. ‘Ché,’ he said. ‘A word with you.’
Curl watched as the young man climbed to his feet and stepped over to speak with Ash. She sat up and dusted herself off. Thought suddenly of a hot bath and a warm meal in her stomach.
The two men were arguing over something in equally hushed tones. Curl waited, staring at a web that hung in the shadows of the beams, a fat spider sitting in the middle of it, fishing the air for flies.
Ché’s voice rose louder. ‘She might already be dying, you old fool. You’ll get yourself killed, and for what?’
‘Because I must,’ hissed the old man.
They were both quiet for a moment, both angry. Ché glanced down at her, and Curl pretended to look elsewhere.
Ché offered the man an outstretched hand. The farlander hesitated, then took it. They shook, and as Ash withdrew his hand Ché grasped his wrist suddenly. ‘It’s settled, between us?’
The old man studied his face.
‘I think, at least, that we are not enemies,’ he said.
‘Then that shall do,’ Ché replied, releasing his grip.
Ash glanced once at Curl, and then swept out into the twilight.
When she stood next to Ché, she saw the farlander walking lightly over the rooftop with his sword in his hand. A pair of imperial soldiers were drinking from a cistern in the street below. As they continued on their way, Ash began to stalk them.
At the end of the roof he stopped, looked down at a street they could not see. Gently, he lay his sword down, then plucked two tiles free, one in each hand.
He held his hands over the edge of the roof, as far apart as he could, then brought them together by an inch, judging something. He whistled down at the street.
Released the two tiles at the same time.
In an instant he was scrabbling down the slope of the roof.
‘Ash!’ Ché called out to him.
The farlander stopped and looked back. ‘What?’
‘May you find your peace, old man.’
Ash swung himself off the edge of the roof, and then he was gone.
‘Who are you?’ demanded the old priest an inch way from his face.
It was the thousandth time his interrogator had asked Bahn that question. For the thousandth time, Bahn told him who he was.
‘Bahn,’ he panted at the floor. ‘Bahn Calvone.’
It hurt when he talked, the wound in his cheek inflamed and tender.
‘And what is your rank?’
Bahn felt his hair being tugged back so that he faced the old priest. The man’s skin was creased with deep wrinkles, though it was scarred too from acne he must have suffered as a youth. ‘Lieutenant. Of the Khosian Red Guards.’
‘Yes,’ soothed the old priest, stroking his face. His vile breath made Bahn want to gag, to turn away. ‘But who are you?’
It was hot in the confined space of the tent. A brazier smoked near the far wall, and sweat beaded Bahn’s forehead. ‘I don’t understand,’ he sobbed.
The priest smiled and glanced at the Acolytes stationed behind the chair Bahn was strapped to. The Acolyte released his hair so that his head lolled forwards again, and he could see the bare earth of the floor. Through his eyelashes, he watched as the priest turned his back on him, his withered hands reaching out to the small table, across the vials upon it, the folded papers, the blades.
‘Are you a traitor?’ asked the priest without turning from the table.
Bahn felt a burst of fire in his stomach. He was going to be sick, he thought, right here at his feet.
‘Are you a traitor?’ repeated the man.
A fist struck the back of his head.
Bahn tried to focus. The sweat was pouring down his face now, mixing with the blood in his mouth. ‘No,’ he rasped. ‘I’m no traitor.’
‘Oh? So you would never be a traitor to your people?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t!’
The priest turned around. In one hand he held a slip of folded paper, and in the other a delicate curved blade. ‘Yet all men are traitors.’
He leaned towards Bahn’s face, and his thumb opened the folded slip of paper. Bahn drew back, his breath caught in his chest. He watched as the priest pressed his lips together and blew once across the paper. A fine white dust engulfed Bahn’s face. In his panic he sucked in a breath and the powder with it, and his mouth instantly went numb.
Colours, dancing on the edges of his vision. White light flickering in the midst of a gathering darkness.
Bahn lolled his head back, his body going slack. Hands steadied him from behind.
‘Now,’ came the distant voice of the priest. ‘Tell me again. Who are you?’
Ché looked up at the hole in the roof. It was twilight outside, and the sky was a deepening shade of violet. Thick banks of smoke were rising into it as more of the city burned around them. The air seemed to be growing thicker with the smell of it. It was starting to sting his eyes.
They were out there somewhere, the Diplomats, circling around the area. He could feel their presence as a faint tickling sensation in his pulsegland, a kind of itch that could not be scratched away. It had been that way since the sun had first begun to set, though it had grown no stronger since then.
What are they waiting for? Ché found himself wondering.
‘Those fires are getting closer,’ he announced, and Curl nodded, looking at his hand but not at his eyes. He was playing with her fingers as she sat before him, and she with his.
He watched her with affection. There was something vulnerable about this girl, behind her wit and her determined manner.
‘We should be going.’ he said, and tugged her hand.
She looked at him at last, and he could see her steeling herself for the task ahead, the streets that needed to be negotiated if they were to make it to safety. Ché helped her to her feet as she held a hand to her mouth and coughed. The smoke was thickening.
They both stood there looking out, mouths hanging open in wonder.
To the north a few streets away, an entire row of buildings was alight; a line of fire that crackled and sparked and rose higher as it gained purchase on walls and furnishings, spreading through the buildings towards them. To the left it was the same, a street burning; to the right too. He and Curl seemed to be standing at the centre of a gathering inferno.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Curl, twisting her head from side to side.
Ché clambered out of the hole and scrambled on all fours up the slope of the roof. He coughed and covered his mouth as he looked south, his eyes reflecting flames.
‘Water,’ he called down to Curl. ‘We have to reach the nearest water!’
It wasn’t far, he saw. He could see it through the smoke as they rounded the corner.
‘This way,’ Ché said from behind the cloth that wrapped his face, and took off towards the walls of the spa, his eyes scanning to left and right. He knew without looking that she was following behind.
They ran through a plaza of long tables and benches, with a lattice of wooden poles over their heads from which hung paper lanterns, each one slig
htly aglow from the burning structures behind them. Their boots pounded loud against the planking. Ahead, the structure of the public spa stood low against its fiery backdrop, its walls round, steam pouring from its open top as though it too was on fire. Ché spotted movement in the street beyond it, between the sheets of flames that were dying buildings.
‘Hey!’ Curl swore as he grabbed her and forced her down behind one of the tables.
He released her so he could look over the table. Nothing now. No sign of the figure he had just seen. Ché glanced around and took in the plumes of smoke and flying sparks getting closer, and tried not to let them spook him.
‘Come on,’ he said, and he was up and jogging again, pistol in his hand now.
From their left came a blast of noise. One of the lanterns disappeared before his eyes.
Ché swore and ran onwards while trying to spot the source of it. Another blast sounded, and a table flew into the air just as they were passing. He veered to the right and cleared the plaza, bursting through a sheet of cloth hanging in his way. The rear of the spa loomed right in front of them; before it, squat huts belching steam.
‘I think someone’s shooting at us!’ Curl exclaimed as he guided her through he door of one of the huts, into its clammy darkness. He slammed the flimsy door shut behind them, and a fist-sized hole appeared in the wall at the level of their heads.
Ché was on the ground in an instant. ‘Get your head down!’ he hollered, pulling Curl to the floor. In the next moment the hut erupted with the violence of a storm. Chips of wood spat across the darkened space as portions of the walls imploded.
‘Do something!’ she screamed at him from her foetal position on the floor.
‘I’m doing it!’ he yelled back from beneath the cover of his own arms.
He felt shards of flying wood stabbing into his flesh. His body had taken over, trying to preserve itself at the expense of its arms and legs.
The violence diminished for a moment. Voices shouted outside.
Ché slithered across to one of the holes in the wall and peered outside. A dozen figures were approaching the hut. They were clad in heavy fire-suits, their heads fully covered and their eyes shielded by glass, bending awkwardly to reload heavy weapons that by the size of them could only be hand cannons.
Ché wiped his face clear of sweat. He sniffed the steamy air, foul with sulphur, scented a trace of something else within it, something familiar. He glanced behind him. In the gloom of the hut he could see a basket of laundry at the back of it. His eyes searched the floor in between.
They started to fire again, whoever they were. Curl screamed as Ché slid across to a handle on the floor and heaved open a trapdoor, revealing a square hole in the lakeweed below, a wooden board slanting into it, ribbed for scrubbing clothes. He felt a sting of pain in his ear, another in his back. She shrieked louder.
‘Curl!’ he shouted.
‘What?’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘What?’
‘We’re leaving!’
She stared down into the black bubbling water of the lake and cast him a round-eyed glare. ‘Are you crazy?’
Ché was already struggling out of his backpack. He slid into the water, warm like a bath.
‘Just hold onto me and kick as hard as you can. I think there’s a canal to the south of us. It can’t be far.’
She was terrified, he saw. It struck him that he should be frightened too.
She plunged into the water and came up sputtering. ‘South?’ she shouted. ‘How can you tell which way is south?’
‘I’m guessing,’ he told her. ‘Are you ready? Deep breath now. Go!’
The old priest and caretaker Heelas removed the cloth mask from his mouth and nose and inhaled a deep breath of the Tume night air.
Such a stench, he thought sourly. It reminded him of Q’os in the deep summer, when the reeking Baal’s mist would sometimes cover the city, except this was much worse than that.
Still, at least he was away from the inner chamber and Sasheen’s sickly scent of death, and out of the depths of the citadel. Heelas had always loathed being in the vicinity of illness as much as he feared the enclosure of spaces. His worst fear had always been the cool tunnels of the Hypermorum, where they laid the dead to rest. His worst nightmare was of being dead himself, and of being interred there for an eternity.
She’s dying, he thought once more as he crossed the drawbridge of the citadel and stepped onto the central plaza. Sasheen is dying.
He had left the Matriarch in her chamber, alone save for the gruesome presence of Lucian next to the bed. What a couple they made, he had thought as he’d closed the door behind him in relief. It was hard to picture them both as they once had been: two lovers struck by each other’s dazzle. For a time they had been inseparable, she and her dashing general from Lagos. Sasheen had even spoken of having children with him, of building a family retreat in Brulé.
His head down, Heelas walked with his hands in his sleeves, ignoring the bows of passing priests, all of them men and women without status.
Heelas stopped by the canal and looked down at the loose rafts of lakeweed and the debris of wood still floating there. He saw a splash, though failed to see the fish that made it, only the soft ghost light in its wake.
The lesser priests would not be bowing their heads to him after she died, he reflected morosely. He would be lucky if Romano merely had him chitted, his nose removed, and cast him out on. Always it went that way when one ruler was supplanted by another. The old inner circle was cleansed to make room for the new. His whole life, everything he had worked towards – gone.
‘My pardon,’ said a voice as someone bumped against him.
Heelas turned in anger and instantly felt something sharp press through his robe and against his stomach. He was much too long in the tooth to wonder if it was anything but a knife.
An Acolyte’s masked face hovered close to his own.
‘Where is she?’ came a deep voice from behind it.
‘Who?’ he asked, playing for time.
‘Sasheen. Where is she?’
Heelas held up his hands. ‘How would I know? I’m only a courier.’
‘Put your hands down!’ hissed the man. ‘I see how you strut, priest. Now stop lying to me and answer my question, or I will kill you now, here, where you stand.’
Heelas straightened. So it comes to this, he thought. A knife in the belly and my nose filled with the smell of rotting eggs.
‘You think you can frighten me?’ he said. ‘I can see your eyes, far-lander. You intend to kill me anyway. Do it, then,’ and he struck his chest loudly. ‘I’m ready.’
A hand lashed out to grip the front of his robe, pinning him there on the spot. The knife popped through the robe and into the skin of his stomach. It stayed there, a finger’s width inside him, as he felt warm blood trickle down into his pubic hair, his thighs.
Heelas blanched. The pain was nothing, and then it was everything.
Caretaker Heelas had been through his share of personal Purg-ings over the years. He knew how to handle pain by now, and so he did, summoning his will and forcing himself to relax into its waves.
‘If I shout, I can have a dozen men here within a moment.’
‘Then shout.’
Heelas looked about him. Priests and Acolytes came and went across the lantern-lit space. Over by a far wall a firing squad was dispatching some of Tume’s Home Guard survivors. More soldiers milled around one of the nearby warehouses, where they were offloading a munitions cart, carrying away boxes of grenades and other explosives. He could call for them, certainly, but he would only be dead all the sooner.
What does it matter. She’s dying anyway.
‘You can’t reach her,’ he said, coolly. ‘She’s in the Sunken Palace. In the heart of the rock.’
‘Describe it to me.’
He did so, all the while thinking how strange it was, what the mind and body will do to hold onto its life for even a single
precious moment longer.
The flesh is strong, he reflected.
Just as he finished, the man struck him three times in and out, as fast as a snake striking. He walked away even as Heelas folded onto his knees, his hands clutching his torn and bloody stomach.
‘Help me,’ Heelas gasped, but no one heard him.
It was too late for help; he toppled sideways to the ground.
With his head resting against the boardwalk, he gasped and looked at the specks of grit scattered across it like rocks in a desert.
An ant was working its way through that landscape. He watched it twitch its antenna towards him for a moment as he lay there dying, and then it continued on its way.
Ché thought she was dead when he dragged her body out of the canal and lay her down against the lakeweed. Curl sputtered, though, when he pressed hard against her stomach, then rolled onto her side and coughed.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.
She wiped her mouth, taking a moment to find her voice. ‘I think so.’
Across the canal the street was a roaring inferno. Curl sat shivering as they watched it, and he held her in his arms until she began to settle.
The itch in his neck was more a constant throb now. He looked about him, at the buildings on this side reflecting the light of the fires, the narrow street choked with the debris of looting.
They’re close.
‘You need to go now,’ he said as he helped Curl shakily to her feet, the water running clear of their clothing.
‘What about you?’
‘There’s something I must finish before I can join you.’
Her forehead furrowed, and she glanced along the empty street.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘Just be careful.’ Even as he spoke he felt a sudden twist of guilt at letting her go like this.
‘Here,’ he said as he shoved the pistol into her hand.
‘I’ve never used a gun in my life.’
‘And you won’t have to now. It’s waterlogged. Needs taking apart and oiling again. If you get into any trouble, just point it and use it as a threat. Here, take this too.’ He took the belt of ammunition from his waist, and buckled it around her as she watched him. ‘You’ll look more the part wearing this. Remember, just use it as a threat. Don’t try firing it, understand?’