Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER ONE

Beneath the Gaze of Ninshi’

Ash awoke with a groan, and found that he was drenched in freezing sweat and shivering beneath a sky full of stars.

He blinked in the darkness, wondering where he was, who he was, experiencing a moment of delicate affinity with the All.

And then he saw a smear of light track high above him. A skyship, its tubes trailing blue fire across the face of Ninshi’s Hood, her one eye glimmering red as she watched the ship and Ash and the rest of the world turning beneath her.

Q’os, Ash remembered with a sudden sensation of sickness in his stomach. I’m in Q’os, on the other side of the ocean, at the spitting end of the Silk Winds, thirty years in exile.

The remnants of his dreams vanished like so much wind-blown dust. He let them go, the fading tastes and echoes of Honshu. It was a loss of something irreplaceable, but it was better that way. Better not to dwell on these things while he was awake.

The light of the skyship faded slowly on its course towards the eastern horizon. It diminished in the hazy air above the city, occasionally blocked from sight by the dark, towering shape of a skysteeple. In the starlight, Ash saw his breath coil from his open mouth.

Damn it, he thought as he pulled his cloak tighter about his neck. I need to piss again.

Twice already he’d awoken in the night; once with a straining bladder, the other time for no apparent reason at all. Perhaps there had been a distant shout in the streets below, or a spasm in his aching back, or a gust of cold wind, or he’d simply coughed. At his age, everything woke him if he wasn’t thoroughly sodden with alcohol before he attempted to sleep.

Grumbling, the old Roshun assassin cast the cloak aside and clambered to his bare feet, his joints popping loud enough to be heard in the still air of the rooftop.

The roof was a flat expanse of gritted pitch, and the grit felt sharp beneath the soles of his feet. It was little better to lie on, even with a spare cloak laid flat for bedding. He turned and looked at the tall prominence of concrete that rose at the centre of the grey, starlit space: a concrete cast of a great hand, its forefinger pointing skywards. Ash rubbed his face and stretched and groaned once more.

He didn’t make use of the gutter that ran around the foot of the roof-edge parapet, or any of the small drainage holes in each corner of the roof, clogged green with algae. He didn’t wish to betray his presence to someone in the streets far below.

Instead, he padded to the southern side of the roof as the city of Q’os lay silent all around him, the curfew still in place since the death of the Holy Matriarch’s only son. He lowered himself onto the adjoining rooftop with a throb of complaint from his bladder. This roof was flat and tarred too, though it was interrupted by the raised triangular skylights that served the luxury apartments beneath them. Each was pitch dark, save for the nearest.

The widow, Ash thought. Up again in the middle of the night.

Ash stood relieving himself in his usual spot, while he peered into the candlelit warmth of the apartment below. Through the sooty glass he could see the lady sitting at the dining table in a cream woollen nightshift, her white hair tied back with a bow. Her delicate, wrinkled hands were poised with knife and fork over a small plate of food as she chewed with deliberate care.

Four days now Ash had been on his rooftop vigil, and each night he had observed this woman eating by herself without any servants in sight; sitting in the chill black hours next to the empty head of the table, staring off into the depths of the candle flame before her as she ate, her knife or fork occasionally striking the plate with a harsh ring that to Ash sounded, for some reason, of loneliness.

He’d created a story for this night owl in his curiosity. A young woman of privilege once, a great beauty, married off to a man of high status. No children, though – or if there were, then long flown from her life. And the husband, the master of the house, carried off by illness perhaps in his prime. Leaving her with only memories, and a bitter lack of appetite save for whenever dreams of the past awoke her.

Or perhaps she’s also wakened easily by her bladder, Ash thought, and grunted, and considered himself an old fool.

A tinkle against the glass alerted him to the fact that he’d swung around too much in his curiosity, and was now splashing over a corner of the skylight. The flow ceased abruptly as the woman glanced up.

Ash held his breath, not moving. He was fairly certain she couldn’t see him in this light; though for a curious instant he almost wished that she could.

She looked down at the table again, returned her attentions to her meagre meal. Ash shook himself dry, wiped his hands on his tunic. He nodded a silent goodnight to the woman and turned to make his way back.

Just then, a flicker of the candlelight caught his eye. A large fire-moth, alight with its own inner glow, bobbed around the candle flame as though in courtship. The flame fluttered against the briefest of touches. Ash and the widow both stared transfixed as the creature became ensnared in the flame. A wing stuck fast to the melting wax of the wick. The wing curled and crisped and ignited; the other beat a frantic rhythm as the moth’s body caught fire, and the other wing too, until the creature was a struggling form burning alive in a miniature, crackling pyre.

Ash looked away, a bitter taste in his mouth now. He couldn’t bring himself to look back a second time. Instead, he scrambled up the brickwork of the wall as fast as he could, as though to escape the sudden images flickering unwanted at the edges of his vision.

They came anyway. As he rolled over the parapet, for an instant he saw nothing but a young man struggling on a different pyre. His apprentice, young Nico.

Ash sucked in a breath of air as one might do from a sudden, sharp knock. His gaze rose to the Temple of Whispers, the towering shadow wrapped by ribbons of windows lit from within. She was in there somewhere, the Matriarch, mourning her own loss; most likely in the Storm Chamber at its very peak, itself brilliantly illuminated. It had been lit like that for the last four nights Ash had been watching.

He blew into his hands and rubbed them together for warmth. Always he felt the cold more these days. He noticed that his left hand was trembling, though not his right one. Ash clenched it into a fist as though to hide the shaking from himself.

After a moment he sat down on his bedding and made himself comfortable before the eyeglass perched there on its tripod, aimed resolutely at the Storm Chamber. He lifted the skin of Cheem Fire and pulled the cork and took a short pull from it. For the cold, he told himself. To help me sleep. He tossed the skin next to his sword, which rested upright against the concrete hand, and the small crossbow with its double strings removed to keep them safe from the weather. He squinted into the eyeglass. Caught a vague passing of a silhouette in the wide windows of the Storm Chamber.

Ash wondered how much longer he would have to wait like this, perched above the city of two million strangers at the very heart of the Empire of Mann. He was anything but an impatient man; Ash had spent the greater portion of his life sitting and waiting for something to happen, for an opportunity to present itself. It was a Roshun’s main occupation when not risking his life in the final violent stages of vendetta.

Somehow, this waiting felt different to him. It was no Roshun vendetta after all. He was isolated here, without support, without even a home to return to if he saw this personal act of revenge through to its end. And his condition was clearly deteriorating.

He had been surprised when the loneliness had first settled in amongst his grief, his guilt. It had come on that first evening he’d found himself alone in the city of Q’os, after Baracha and Aleas and Serese had left to return to the Roshun monastery in Cheem, the vendetta completed against the Matriarch’s son, his own apprentice dead by her orders. It had been a long night that, huddled in his cloak upon the safest vantage he had been able to find of the Temple, this playhouse rooftop, with a bleak desolation falling upon him.

Ash lay back and pulled the cloak across his stiff body. He rested his head on a boot and locked his fingers across his stomach beneath the coarse cloth of the cloak. It was the first clear night so far in his vigil. Already the twin moons had set in the west, while overhead the Great Wheel turned as it always turned, as slow and fluid as a tide. To the right, low in the sky, hung the constellation of the Great Fool, with the sage’s feet hovering close over the earth. Above and further to the right of it, Ninshi’s Hood continued to watch over it all.

He found himself gazing at the stars that formed the face within the hood. Most of all he stared at the single eye shining hard with its ruby light, the Eye of Ninshi. It was like no other, that star. At times, it vanished entirely from sight while its companions continued to burn, only to return several hours later, slowly brightening as before.

To see the wink of Ninshi’s gaze, the old Honshu seers maintained, was to be absolved of your very worst wrongdoings.

Ash gazed at the Eye unblinking. He stared long and hard enough for his own eyes to begin to sting and glimmer in their sockets, though still he stared, willing the star to disappear.

He failed to notice his hand reach up for the clay vial of ashes that hung about his neck, and grasp it tightly.