Stands a Shadow

YOU KNOW TOO MUCH, MY FRIEND.

The handwriting was unknown to him. No signature adorned it.

Che crumpled the note and stood and looked outside. He returned to his bunk and sat down with the piece of paper in his fist, pondering.

At last he stuffed the note into his mouth, and began to chew.

That morning, the First Expeditionary Force set forth for war.

Behind it, a contingent of soldiers, merchants and slave porters remained on the filthy sands of the beachhead, tasked with bringing in the rest of the supplies and transporting them forward to the army. The fleet would leave after that, bound for the safety of Lagos. It was too exposed here without adequate squadrons of men-of-war, and the closer harbourages of the southern mainland remained too much of a risk while the Mercian convoys ranged back and forth to Zanzahar for their vital trade. At least the army had some air support at last, for three imperial birds-of-war had finally limped in to rejoin them. The rest were still missing.

For the majority of the Expeditionary Force it was a slow start, and it required most of the morning for everyone, including the camp followers, to begin their march. Draught animals had to be fixed to carts and coaxed into pulling over terrain that seemed to include no roads; herds of livestock and zels needed shepherding up the wide valley floor.

Ahead of the vanguard, light cavalry roved the countryside, searching for enemy contingents and civilian targets to fire and plunder. It was easy work, though, for the highlands of eastern Khos were lightly populated and defended, and those who did live here had mostly hidden themselves in the rocky fastnesses of the region. Further inland, the elite purdah scouts ranged with their great wolfhounds at their sides, employing their usual methods of stealth to remain undetected. They were scouting the path that the army would need to take through the highlands in order to reach the Tumbledowns and the Cinnamon River, which it would then follow downwards into the Reach.

From the main body of the Expeditionary Force, skirmishers fanned outwards to form mobile flanks of protection for the slower troops moving in columns. The light infantry, the predasa, were at the van of the main procession, multinationals from all corners of the Empire, clad in bright cloaks and leather armour, their shields and helms slung from their backs, tramping a rough path through the grasses and heather as they marched. Behind them came the predore, the heavy infantry, the core of the army, most with the lighter complexions of Q’os and the Lanstrada, accompanied by carts bearing bundles of pikes wrapped in oiled canvas. Behind those came the Acolytes, chanting quietly as they went, the few thousand voices adding a curious harmony to the stamp of so many feet; working to a rhythm that matched the sway of the palanquin that bore the Matriarch in their midst.

In the churned mud at the very back of the column, the carts and civilians of the baggage train stretched noisy and chaotic: blacksmiths with portable forges, wild-haired hunters from the hinterlands, animal herders and their herds, pistoleered rancheros on their fast zel ponies, meat merchants and butchers, slave traders and slave porters, stitchers, carpenters, merchant venturers, private military companies, healers, surgeons, professional scavengers, poets, prostitutes, astrologers, historians… everything one would expect to find in the wake of an imperial army bent on conquest.

And so the ponderous inertia of such a huge force was set into motion, and stubbornly maintained for the next three days as it snaked upwards into the rugged hill country of eastern Khos, following whatever tracks the purdahs had marked out for it.

The army camped in the places its scouts chose for it at the start of the day. The soldiers erected their pup tents and made fires from whatever scarce wood they could forage; the Acolytes put up the larger tents of the Matriarch’s encampment before surrounding it with the stakes of the palisade, which they bore with them on heavy wagons. The camp followers made do with what they had or what they could find.

It was bitterly cold here at night in the high country, and often as not Ash huddled beneath his cloak without the luxury of a fire, for what little fallen wood there was amongst the scraggly forests of yellowpine was usually scavenged early for the needs of the army. For food, he used the coins Mistress Cheer had paid him – a more than generous amount for all the work he’d done for her – and purchased what he needed from the many small food merchants that accompanied the army. The rates were extortionate, of course. Soon, he had to dip into the hidden purse slung beneath his leather leggings.

He would have grumbled more if he hadn’t seen how the soldiers of the army itself were exploited in much the same way. Like Ash, they had to buy food using their own pay, and did so either in bulk from the merchant venturers of the baggage train, or from the countless food vendors who swarmed around them every mealtime like scavenging flies.

Ash marvelled at an army that did not feed its own men. He wondered how it could possibly work, until he overheard an exchange between a soldier and a bored prostitute, in which the man was trying to pay her in rotten apples. His wages were too low to sustain him on the march, he explained, and so he was already in debt to his superior officer. Once they sacked a town or won a battle he would be on his feet again, for plunder and slaves were divided amongst the men after the officers received their cut.

It was profit, Ash came to appreciate, that drove many of these men onwards, much like the camp followers themselves, for those few followers he exchanged words with told of similar tales: bad debts to landowners and moneylenders; an inability to find anything but seasonal work in regions clogged with slaves. They were desperate, and in their desperation had sold what they had left and had paid to come here in droves.

Ash mainly walked alone during the long marches through the hill country. He went by his original cover story of a bodyguard whose employer had drowned during the storm. He seldom needed to use it, though. Mostly, he came and went throughout the baggage train as he liked, always making certain to keep his distance from Mistress Cheer and the girls, but it wasn’t difficult in such a multitude, and he saw them only once during the first days of the march. Mistress Cheer had hired a new man, a rangy youth in a brown woollen cloak who used his sword to chop wood.

Ash kept to himself, speaking to few but listening to many. All the while, his eyes hungered for a glimpse of Sasheen.