Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Gauntlet

A Greyjacket fell in the darkness as Halahan jogged past him, dead before he even hit the ground. Halahan scrabbled through the debris of a storehouse, and stopped next to Sergeant Jay where he squatted behind an upturned wagon, ducking down next to him. Archers to either side of them were firing wildly over the barricade that stretched across the street. He took a quick glimpse over the wagon, saw bright flashes of gunfire and the streak of shots through the night.

Shapes flitted through the rubble of the gatehouse, bent low as they ran. Beyond them, through the siege-shields on the hastily finished bridge, more figures were massing for a second wave of attack.

‘Where is he! Did you send another runner?’ he shouted into Jay’s ear. The staff sergeant nodded, then looked through a gap in the wood, staring grimly at swarms of Imperials crossing the bridge.

An explosion made the sergeant duck next to him; grenades tossed ahead of the assault.

Halahan looked up at the surrounding buildings. Riflemen and archers were firing down with everything they had now. In the night air over the lake, cannons roared at each other as skyships engaged.

Somehow, the fire-positions in the shattered buildings along either side of the gatehouse had fallen. Now, reports were coming in of enemy units trying to flank the second line of defence. Hala-han suspected Commandos, using stealth to swim in from positions on the bridge or from the shore itself. They seemed to be attacking all along the southern edge of the island, if the crackles of gunfire were anything to go by.

Halahan scowled as he saw Red Guards and Specials falling back into the road from a side street they’d been defending. Next to Hala-han, an archer stood and shot at an Imperial clambering up the opposite side of the wagon. More were bounding up it, howling like wild dogs, with the wagon shaking under their weights. Red Guards on both sides of him pushed forwards, their chartas licking out, back again; a man’s insane face glared at him before toppling backwards beyond sight.

He swung to look back along the street with a curse on his lips, but then he saw the great dark bulk of Creed striding towards his position, the general’s bodyguards jostling around him. Halahan ran to meet him. The general’s face was red with passion as he shouted over the noise. ‘They’re attacking all along the south with rafts and swimmers. How long can you hold here?’

‘Hold? Does it look as though we can hold?’

‘We have two thousand men still in the city, Colonel. You must give us time to get them all out.’

‘I’m aware of our problems, General. But I’m telling you, we can’t hold here any longer.’

Creed looked up, as they all did, at an explosion rippling through the sky to the east. A skyship was disintegrating in brilliant tumbles of fire.

‘Fine, then,’ Creed shouted. ‘Pull back in good order, but slow them as much as you can. I’ll have a boat waiting for you all.’

‘Is that a promise, General?’

They stared hard at each other for a moment, both angry, both wanting to shout in other’s faces for no other reason than the need to vent their frustrations. But then Creed’s expression softened, and Halahan saw that he held out his hand. Halahan clasped it and shook hard.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he told him.

It was obvious that Principari Vanichios knew what he was going to say before he even spoke the words.

Creed said it anyway: ‘It’s now or never, old friend. We have to go.’

The Michine laid his hands against the parapet and stared south across the city. From their vantage on the citadel’s highest tower, they could see the entirety of Tume spread out around them. Gunfire crackled along the streets to the south. A few buildings burned, trailing banners of fire in the breeze that blew in from the east. Soldiers were streaming back in disorder, heading for the Central Canal where the last ferries were preparing to leave.

‘Will you get all your men out in time?’ Vanichios asked him.

‘No,’ Creed admitted heavily. ‘Some pockets are trapped in the south-west. We can’t break them out in time.’

‘And the rest. You have room for them?’

‘We’re improvising. There’s still a place for you and your men if you want it.’

The man’s stare slid away from him. Flames bobbed in his eyes. He had nothing more to say on the matter.

For a moment, Creed thought of pinning his great arms around Vanichios and dragging him from his ancestral home by force. But there would be no dignity in that, not for this man. He was Michine. Without dignity he was nothing.

In the east the sky battle was still raging. He could see coughs of fire lighting up the hulls of the skyships, broadsides hammering each other.

‘I did not think I would be this afraid,’ came Vanichios’s quiet voice.

Creed flinched. He felt like a villain, deserting him like this.

‘Farewell,’ he said at last, and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.

Vanichios did not look at him as he left.

Ash shivered beneath the blankets, his eyes swimming with phantoms of colour. He had long ago drawn the curtains over the window of the bedroom, yet still the moonlight leaking in around the edges was too much for his closed eyes, so that he kept his head covered while he coughed and sputtered in his fever, and felt as though the whole bed was spinning.

In his mind, the distant gunshots were only the sounds of maize husks popping on a fire. He was half dreaming of the drinking house of his home village of Asa, the room hot with the fire burning in the hearth, the black pot above it tended by Teeki as the warming maize clattered within it and filled the smoky room with its aroma.

He was sitting alone in a corner, eyeing his step-uncle across the room with a growing sense of hatred.

Ash had been sitting there all evening, getting quietly drunk like the old regulars at the bar, mulling over the rice wine that was their nightly respite from the world. His own burdens had refused to lighten, though. Even now, he did not wish to return home to his young wife and child, and all the responsibilities that they represented.

They had lost another of their breeding dogs to the shaking disease that morning. Ash had no idea how they were going to find the money to replace it, nor even how they were going to repay the debts they already owed.

The more he drank, the more he thought of running away and leaving it all behind him. This was hardly the life he’d imagined for himself, not when he’d been growing up as a youth on his family farm, watching his mother and father work themselves into the ground trying to meet their own rising debts and taxation. Ash had dreamed of striking out on his own when was old enough, of earning his way as a soldier, a sailor, anything but this.

And then he’d fallen in love, of all things, and had married, and settled down… so that in the blink of an eye, it seemed, here he was, trying to drink away his burdens like his father before him.

Ash stared at his step-uncle across the room, brooding. Lokai was headsman for a dozen villages within the outer ranges of the Shale Mountains, a tax-collector in regal clothing, appointed by an official of the overlord Kengi-Nan. He doubled as the local moneylender too, lending back to the villagers his own skim of their taxes at extortionate rates.

A useful man to have in the family, Ash would have thought. Yet his step-uncle was obsessed with increasing his wealth, and with the power over others that it gave him. When it came to money, he seemed little impressed by ties of blood.

Lokai was enjoying himself tonight. In the midst of the banter with his henchmen, he deigned to acknowledge Ash’s piercing glare. The man stared back, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back just enough to look down his nose. Even from here, through the smoky atmosphere of the room, his eyes seemed to be laughing at him.

Ash had no idea why he suddenly snapped just then. A drunken intuition perhaps. A sense that in those mocking eyes lay knowledge that warranted such a reaction from him, even if he was ignorant of what it might be.

Ash saw the man’s eyes widen as Ash lurched to his feet, stumbled drunkenly across the room towards Lokai.

He slurred words he did not fully understand himself, while his step-uncle struggled to rise and his henchmen around him did the same.

A table scattered. Lokai rolled to the floor with it, the drinks spilling everywhere, a flash of blood on the man’s face.

Ash’s knuckles stung as he roared over his sprawling form.

Men grabbed him from behind. He surged against them until he was spent of breath and grew still in their arms. He stood there heaving for air as he glared down at the man.

‘You think yourself something special?’ his step-uncle demanded from the floor, holding a hand to his bloody nose. ‘You think because you have my pretty niece as your wife, because you married your way into a better family than your own, it makes you someone?’ And he slapped off the helping hands of his henchman as he staggered unsteadily to his feet. ‘You’re nothing but a fool,’ he snapped. ‘And your own wife makes you the greatest fool of all!’

Silence in the room. The words so incongruous to Ash that it took several moments for them to sink in.

‘What are saying?’ came his thick voice.

The man was in full flow by then. ‘What do you think I’m saying? When you needed money, the year you were wed, to buy your damned dogs. You think I loaned you those coins freely? I had my way with her by way of a down payment.’ He paused then, to look about at the other men standing there gaping. ‘Aye, I did that, and there isn’t a damned thing any of you dare say about it.’

He drew a breath to say more.

Ash realized that the tin mug he had been drinking from was still clutched in his left hand, the contents gone from it. He lunged forwards without warning, breaking free of the men’s grasps as he swung the mug with all his might, a black rage upon him.

When they dragged Ash to his feet, his step-uncle was lying on the floor with his face caved in like a bowl. Blood was bubbling from a hole at the very bottom of it. The man’s left foot kicked a beat against the planks of the floor, and then he gasped and died as they all stood there watching.

He’s murdered the headsman, someone muttered.

Ash fled into the darkness of the night.

He looked up, found himself staring at a harsh square of moonlight.

It was the bedroom window, with the thin curtains hanging over it.

A figure sat silhouetted in the chair, picking at the wood of one of its arms.

‘Che?’

The figure leaned forward in the chair. Ash heard the wood creak.

‘It must have been hard, hearing that news about your son.’

Nico.

A strange thrill filled Ash’s stomach, like the fear of falling. He found that he couldn’t speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nico. ‘I don’t mean to pry.’

Ash rested his back against the headrest, feeling how the pillow was wet where his face had been lying.

The memory faded slowly in his mind, though he could still smell the popping maize in his nostrils.

‘Not as hard as losing him,’ he rasped, and blood pumped in his throat.

‘You miss him.’

‘I think of Lin every day. As I think of you.’

‘What do you think about?’

‘You, or my son?’

‘Your son.’

‘ Ach,’ Ash said in frustration.

He felt the urge for a drink, recalled he had already finished the wine he’d found in the kitchen.

‘I think of his eyes, like his mother’s. I think of how he gave his spare tackbread to his friends in the leanest days on the trail. I think of him chasing the girls before he even knew what he was chasing them for. I think-’ and he stopped himself there, on the brink of something reckless.

‘I think of his death,’ he said in a whisper.

Ash saw it then, as though he was there in the Sea of Wind and Grasses. He saw the dust of the tindergrass engulfing the clash of battle. The Heavy Wing of General Shin emerging from behind the lines of the Shining Way, betraying them all for a fortune in diamonds. A rider bearing down on his son, felling the boy with a single stroke. Hooves trampling over his body as though he was nothing but a discarded sack of clothing.

‘What is it?’ said Nico in the silence.

Ash clutched the sheet he lay upon in his fists, needing something to cling to.

‘You wish to hide things from me, even now?’

No, Ash thought. I wish to hide them only from myself.

He looked at the shadowy form of his apprentice across the room.

‘I did not love him,’ came his cracking voice. ‘For a time, at least, I thought I did not love him as my son.’

‘You thought he was not yours.’

Ash gripped harder. It came to him then that it hardly mattered whether he suppressed the memories of how he’d behaved towards the boy. He’d still be here, still living with the shame of it.

‘After I heard what my wife’s uncle had to say, I treated Lin unkindly.’

Unkindly, he reflected, as he listened to himself in disgust.

No, he’d been a bastard to the boy, plain and simple. For the few years they had spent together in the cause before he had died, Ash had treated his son with a cold and satisfying indifference.

‘I’m sorry, Nico,’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘If I was ever unkind to you also. If it seemed I did not care for you. I am not good with… these thing at times.’

The figure watched him in silence.

‘Please, now, I’m tired,’ he told it.

And he lay down again, and slowly pulled the blanket over his head, and waited until he knew that Nico was gone.

The ferries approached the mouth of the Chilos in single file, borne by the quickening current of the lake and the banks of oars that splashed through the dark waters. Drums sounded from within them, beating slow and steady beats for the benefit of the oarsmen labouring to increase their speed.

Halahan stood in the fortified wheelhouse at the stern of the boat next to General Creed, who peered through the gap at the top of the wooden screen that sheathed the gloomy space. Behind, other officers swayed to the gentle rocking of the boat, reeking of sweat, saying little. Koolas the war chattero was wedged in a corner at the back somewhere. The boat’s captain, a middle-aged woman with a pipe in her mouth like Halahan, manned the wheel herself, squinting too through the gap before her, a pair of borrowed Owls wrapped around her eyes. The mood was a sombre one. None of them knew if they were going to make it through.

The captain spun the wheel hard. The boat turned sluggishly, heavy in the water with so many men cramming its weatherdeck and the deck below.

‘Here we go,’ she murmured as they swung into the river mouth, and she rapped her boot-heel against the floor three times. Someone shouted a command beneath their feet. The rhythm of the drummer picked up pace. The oars splashed even faster. Halahan listened to the first smattering of shots hitting the wood all round them.

A flare went up, illuminating the scene like a noon sun.

More shots rained in. Arrows arced through the air towards the boat. Some were aflame. Riflemen on the deck opened up in reply, his own Greyjackets and regulars mixed in with archers.

Halahan turned to the screen fixed across the left side of the wheelhouse, and craned his neck to look behind them. He saw the other ferries bobbing over the wash of their wake, the churned waters of the Chilos aglow with blue fire. Each of the boats towed lines of improvised rafts, with men hunkered down behind what feeble protection they could find. They were falling already, picked off by the snipers along both banks.

‘ Fear is the Great Destroyer,’ someone was chanting over the riotous clatter of shots. It was Koolas, Halahan saw in the bright wash of flare light that speared through the slits in the screens. He was chanting the prayer of Fate’s Mercy.

They would need it, Halahan though, as he glimpsed the dark shapes of cannon on the eastern bank, and men struggling to aim them.

‘ Be without regrets, like straw in the gale.’

He realized he was holding his breath, and glanced to Creed to see how he was faring. The general’s attention was fixed on the river ahead of them. His face was still a grimace; he looked as though he wanted to tear something apart. His left hand was clenching in a fist.

They were passing the mouths of the cannon now.

‘ Be as the empty pail in the rain.’

Halahan waited for them to fire. He tried not to think of all the men crammed below deck; what would happen to them if the ferry’s hull was holed and the boat went down.

The riflemen on the weatherdeck were firing fast, replying to the gunfire from the shore. The shooting rose in pitch until it was all one deafening sound.

‘ Be as the stream that courses always to its source.’

They were past the cannon now. Halahan released his breath and swayed back on his aching feet. He looked behind again.

The second ferry was less fortunate. A spume of white water rose from its left side, falling as a shower of hissing droplets. The boat listed to its side, taking on water. Shouts rose from its decks.

Men were rolling clear of the rafts, and holding on as best they could as tried to stay low in the water.

The firing on the weatherdeck was dying down. Halahan saw that they were through the gauntlet, even as he heard the cannons fire again behind.

It was clear on either bank here, dark until another flare went screeching into the sky.

In the wake of their boat, corpses of men were floating after them.

‘I’ll make them pay for this,’ Creed muttered to no one. ‘Kincheko and the rest. They’ll pay for this.’ And the general gripped his left arm as though in sudden pain, and ground his teeth in silent fury.