Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Silent Valley

Che had risen early that morning, and he huddled in his tent while he lathered some his mother’s chamomile ointment over the rashes on his arms. He hadn’t slept well – too many things on his mind – and with a stiff neck he gazed out through the open tent flap, desiring the meagre daylight of dawn and the view over the snow-blanketed valley.

There was no hurry. In this weather, it would take the army and camp followers an eternity to ready themselves for the march. Outside, the bitter wind tore at the canvas tents of the encampment. Leaves and debris tumbled through the air. The zels were jittery, jostling together in their corrals as they tried to find a place in the warm and sheltered hearts of their small herds. A few people padded through the snow to the latrines, holding hats or hoods over their heads.

Through the open flap, he saw Swan and Guan stamp past. Guan glanced at him without expression, cool now. Swan, though, looked in and offered a brief smile.

Che placed the jar of ointment on his bed and rolled down his sleeves. He sat there pondering for a few moments.

He checked the knife in its scabbard around his ankle then rose and stepped outside. He spotted the twins entering one of the corrals. Their tent wasn’t far from his own. When he reached it, he swept inside.

He looked about the orderly space, then pounced for the backpacks perched against the two cots. In the first pack, he found civilian clothing tightly bound in twine, a copy of the Scripture of Lies heavily annotated, and a journal with drawings and observations of Khos. He drew back when he found the small wooden poisoner’s kit at the bottom of it, a kit identical to his own.

Che glanced back to make sure he was still alone. Quickly, he rifled through the other pack. His hands drew out a canvas bag and within it a small vial. He took it out and held it up to the daylight. A thick, golden liquid was within. He pulled out the stopper, took a tentative sniff.

Che clasped the vial in his fist and hurried outside.

They were still at the corral when he went to confront them, rubbing down the backs of their zels with handfuls of grass. Guan muttered something to his sister when he saw Che approaching. She smirked, then made herself serious again.

‘I know what you are,’ Che snapped, tossing the vial into Guan’s hand. The man glanced down at it, then looked across at his sister.

With a laugh she grabbed a fistful of her zel’s mane and leapt onto its bare back. A moment later, Guan was doing the same.

‘Come for a ride with us,’ she said down to Che, and before he could reply she kicked the animal’s flanks and took off, clearing the fence of the corral in a leap, her brother just behind her.

Che growled deep in his throat. He grabbed the mane of the nearest zel and jumped onto its back, then spurred it forwards so that it jumped the corral fence with a double clip of its hooves. He gave chase as the twins raced out through the palisade and the Acolyte camp around it, clods of snow flying from their mounts’ hooves like birds scattering in their wake.

The land was good for riding beyond the camp, though the wind was strong enough to smear tears across his cheeks. Half blinded and head low, he kicked for greater speed, surging after them as they entered a small wood. His hood fell back to expose his head. He ducked down further as he wove between the gnarled trunks of trees and felt the scratch of leaves and twigs against his face. Ahead, the twins leapt a spring and turned and followed along its bank. Che veered left to cut them off. He forced his zel over the water too and tucked in close behind them, racing at full gallop.

His thighs were burning by the time he came alongside Swan. She lashed at him with a broken branch, laughing again as he fended her off with his hand.

And then from his left came Guan, veering towards him with a branch in his hand ready to strike at his head. Che ducked and felt the breath of it cross the stubble on his scalp.

He pulled hard on the zel’s mane until it reared to a halt. It skittered a few steps and then settled, the steam shooting from its nostrils. There he sat unmoving, while slowly the twins circled back towards his position, moving in separate orbits so as to remain on either side of him.

Che simply looked from one to the other, and waited.

At last they came together and stopped before him. In the uneasy silence, the zels dropped their muzzles to the ground and began to pull at the long grasses that poked through the snow.

‘Wildwood juice,’ he said with a nod to Guan. ‘For subduing the reflexes of a pulsegland.’

His words brought only amusement to their expressions. ‘Come, now,’ replied Swan on behalf of her brother. ‘You thought you were the only Diplomat on this whole campaign?’

‘That’s what I was led to believe,’ he told her sourly. ‘Does the Matriarch know of this?’

‘Of course she knows,’ drawled Guan.

‘And what are your orders?’

Silence; the wind buffeting his ears.

‘We’re here as backup, nothing more,’ offered Guan, and Swan shot her brother a dark look.

Che leaned back on the zel, looking at each of them in turn. He tried to breath calmly, to clear his mind.

They don’t ask me my own orders.

‘You know what I have been tasked to do,’ he realized aloud.

Guan opened his mouth to speak, but Swan kicked her zel forwards so that it butted her brother’s to one side.

‘You sound troubled by your work, Che,’ Swan said. ‘Does it keep you up at night, tossing and fretting?’

He studied the woman, saw how her usually pretty features were gone now in this windy place, replaced by a bitter scowl of contempt.

‘We follow our orders,’ she pressed. ‘It would be to your advantage if you did the same.’

‘What? You doubt I’ll go through with it if it’s required of me, is that it?’

‘You hardly sound certain of yourself. What do you think, Guan?’

The brother, chewing on something, said, ‘Perhaps it’s his devotion that is lacking. Perhaps his heart is no longer in it.’

‘I’ve proved my loyalty,’ Che responded hotly, regretting the words even as he spoke them.

‘Oh, please,’ said Swan. ‘As though the Section ever relied upon loyalty. You should know as well as anyone what happens when a Diplomat strays from their mission. Your mother is a Sentiate, is she not? Well, a whore is the easiest person of all to make disappear.’

Che blinked, the only outward sign of a sudden rage clamouring to be released from him. The heat of his anger revived him, focused him.

He leaned towards her, his eyes thinned to slits.

‘If you come for me,’ he said plainly, ‘I will mark you out first for the carving.’

And he turned his zel away and kicked it into a trot, eager to be away from them.

That morning, the dawn sun rose over a plain of bleached emptiness, across which others were emerging from beneath their snow-mounded shelters, like an army of the dead rising from the frozen ground.

Ash could see his own breath in the air before it was whipped away in the wind. He huddled against the cold bite of the gusts and thought, damned early for snow.

The head pains had subsided to a dull throb at last, but he still carried a lingering hangover from the night before. He wandered slowly back to the camp to discover cries of sorrow mingling with the ordinary business of the day. There had been deaths in the night – mostly older camp followers or those already ill. People struggled to cut graves in the hardened earth.

Ash bought himself a breakfast of liver paste and tackbread, and a mug of hot chee from a canteen run by a husband and wife team, their supplies heaped on the back of a wagon supporting an awning under which they cooked. The river had partly frozen over during the night, and people around him were muttered about the sudden change in the weather. They worried that it was more than just a cold spell; that perhaps winter was approaching early.

It took even longer than usual for the army to set forth on the march.

First to leave were the skirmishers and light cavalry, who headed off while the rest of the army pulled itself together. One by one the steaming companies of infantry took to the road that ran along the Cinnamon valley, its passage marked by snow tramped down to mush. The Holy Matriarch and her Acolytes followed after them, protected by more screens of light cavalry. By the time the baggage train finally began to move out, the column was stretched thin and long beneath clouds dark enough to threaten more snow. The price of clothing tripled in the space of an hour.

Following the road, they came down at last into the Silent Valley, which turned them west towards Tume and the floodland of the Reach. The valley was five laqs across at its widest points, and the hills and mountains to the south of it were barely visible beyond the flat plain of tilled fields and deserted homesteads, with the Cinnamon widening and meandering down its middle. It was as quiet as its name suggested, save for the rush of air that ran through it, giving the place a lonely feeling, something oversized about it.

By late afternoon, the procession began to bunch up as those behind came up against those ahead. The van of the army had stopped for some reason. Soon, rumours were filtering back down the line that the Khosian army had been sighted ahead.

The First Expeditionary Force prepared itself for battle.

A group of rancheros were given permission to break off from their herd. They galloped forwards to see what was happening at the front, their hands clamped to their wide-brimmed hats as they whooped for effect and slapped their zels for speed. The rest of the baggage train drew up in a vast circle with the wagons dotted around the perimeter. People armed themselves as best they could. Within half an hour the price of weaponry had risen by a factor of five. The mood grew tense.

The rancheros returned after a short time and came to a stop in the press of bodies seeking news. It was an army, all right, but hardly of a size to concern them.

The gabble of the camp followers rose with excitement.

‘When will the army engage?’ someone wanted to know.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ one of the rancheros replied. They would rest and ready themselves tonight, then attack at first light.

‘What if they attack us first?’ came Ash’s cool voice from the back of the crowd.

They laughed at that, for they thought it was a joke.

The mood lightened after this appraisal of their position. Profit, most people were talking of. A battlefield after the fighting was done could be a place for rich pickings. With hungry eyes, they settled down around their fires to wait.