Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Breach

The procession of cloud-men walked along the cobbles with their black robes flapping in the wind and their voices loud as they chanted the solemn words of the death rite. Clatters sounded from the occasional coin dropped into their begging bowls; incense trailed grey and pungent around their shaven heads. In the hands of the oldest monk, following at the very back of their procession, a wooden aeslo clapped together like the jaws of a mouth, beating a slow and steady rhythm that was a jolt to the senses every time that it sounded.

Bahn offered nothing as they passed by. It wasn’t that he wished to refuse them a donation; he simply couldn’t rouse himself enough to perform the simple act of it. He was standing as though buried ten feet within himself, looking out through a bramble of whispered thoughts in a weariness that had become familiar to him now.

All he desired just then was to skip his duties this afternoon, and catch a rickshaw back to their home in the north of the city, and climb into bed, and pull the blankets over his head, and shut out the world until morning.

He had been plagued with this lethargy for a week now. Achieving sleep had always been a nightly struggle for Bahn, his head spinning with reflections and concerns. Yet now, no matter how much sleep he was able to manage, whether three hours of tossing and turning or ten hours of total oblivion, he would still wake feeling lifeless and drained.

It was all he could do to watch indull silence as the monks rustled along the street between the lines of onlookers paying their respects; and after them, the pale mourners who followed, the small jar of ashes cradled in a young man’s arm, his even younger wife next to him, barely able to walk without support.

Bahn needed to resume walking again, if only to invigorate his senses. Not wishing to show his disrespect by rushing past them all, he stepped behind the mourners for a while, trying not to yawn as he watched their grief from behind.

He headed south, through the bustling Quarter of Barbers, that district where Bahn had been born and raised, along with his two brothers. From there the Mount of Truth could be seen rising gently over the rooftops to the west, the hill with a crown of green parkland around its flattened summit, and a building of white that was the Ministry of War, where Bahn reported on most days to his superior, General Creed.

Not today, though. With the lull in the fighting, the general had taken the opportunity to fly to Minos on a personal mission of diplomacy, or so he had deigned to explain it when Bahn had voiced his curiosity. Bahn hoped he would not be long in returning. It had become a daily chore of his to field the endless missives from the Michine council, demanding to know when the Lord Protector would be back, why he’d failed to seek their consent before deserting Bar-Khos and the Shield for so long.

Bahn had begun to respond with the same stock answer every time. He simply copied it from a carefully worded page he kept lying on his desk.

He passed a long line of refugees and locals waiting for their bread rations from one of the council-sponsored bakeries. It made him wonder if he should buy some food for the energy it might give him. Bahn had been eating less lately too, often giving his share of their meagre supplies to Marlee and the children. When he walked through Hawkers’ Plaza, though, the food stalls of the small bazaar were nearly empty, and what little was on display bore prices he could hardly justify squandering with his few coins. Better to grab some plain bread and beans from one of the mess tents when he could.

He stopped as he emerged onto the High King’s Road, the longest thoroughfare of Bar-Khos, running from east to west along the coastline for the entire breadth of the city. The High King’s Road crossed the mouth of the Lansway, the thin isthmus that ran out towards the distant southern continent, and upon which stood the distant ranked walls of the Shield. The road too overlooked All Fools here, the closest district to the Shield and the only civilian area to be found on the isthmus proper, packed now to bursting with refugees. Beyond it lay the canal that intersected the Lansway to connect both harbours, and, beyond that, a line of construction that was a new wall in the making, dwarfed by Tyrill’s Wall, which rose as sheer and massive as a cliff, given scale by the occasional small speck of a Red Guard patrolling its crenellated crown.

Reluctantly, Bahn trod towards it.

The no-man’s land between the walls were churned expanses of planked walkways and sagging field tents, bordered on either side by the sea-walls and ahead and behind by the larger walls of the Shield, so that the space within them contained the acoustics and light of a deep valley trough. The chaos of city life was replaced with orderly discipline and the raw mood of men who fought every day on the top of the ramparts, and below them.

A full army was garrisoned here in these spaces between the foremost two walls of the Shield. Stepping out of a postern gate in the penultimate wall, Bahn found himself in the principal military encampment of the war. Ahead stood Kharnost’s Wall. It was the only thing now standing between himself and the Imperial Fourth Army on the other side.

A full chartassa of heavy infantry drilled in formation under the heat of the noonday sun, their step sergeants screeching out commands for the manoeuvres they were expertly practising. He watched as the phalanx of men halted with a stamp of their feet, and the front ranks lowered the glittering warheads of the spears they called charta, and cried out with a collective shout. Red Guards and League Volunteers strode amongst the tents. Specials lingered next to the open-sided towers that perched over the pitheads of the tunnels that ran beneath Kharnost’s Wall, where the siege engineers laboured in the dark earth, and the Specials fought when they were needed.

Over by the mess tents, a group of Greyjackets and Volunteers had stripped to their trousers and were playing a game of cross. Colonel Halahan was there, smoking his pipe as he stood in his plain grey uniform, offering the occasional bellow to the men of his brigade, all of them internationals from abroad; Nathalese, Pathian, Tilanian and beyond. Across from him, Halahan’s counterpart in the Free Volunteers appeared to be offering encouragement to his own men by way of laughing at their mistakes.

The Volunteers were fighters from Minos and the other islands of the democras. They held nothing back as they gestured and swore at their mocking officer in a manner that always surprised Bahn whenever he came across it; such informality would never have been tolerated within the rigid hierarchy of the Khosian army. Just like the Greyjackets they were competing against, these men had no superiors save for those they most respected; they could even dismiss and replace their officers by a show of hands whenever that respect was lost.

Halahan raised a hand now at the sight of Bahn, and Bahn nodded in response to the old Nathalese veteran. ‘Colonel Halahan,’ he called out in greeting. ‘You look well.’

‘You’re a bloody bad liar, Bahn,’ the old veteran shouted back, just as one of his men was knocked sprawling to the ground before him, and he was in snarling amongst them all, breaking up a fight.

Bahn was in the shadow of Kharnost’s Wall long before he reached it. The guns along the top of the battlements sat silently, but sharp-shooters were taking the odd shot up there.

It was the breach of Kharnost’s Wall that Bahn had come to inspect this afternoon, that section which had collapsed in the previous month after it had been undermined by the Imperials, and which had been hard fought over for a week until the defenders had been able to plug it with debris.

It drew Bahn to it now, a pale jumbled wedge filling a broken portion of the great rampart. A makeshift job, he could see even before he reached it. Men and zels laboured to lift blocks of cut stone into place as they built a thin sheath wall to cover the loose filler. Still, they said the rampart would be permanently weakened here.

It had been a while, Bahn realized, since he’d actually mounted Kharnost’s Wall and looked to the other side. Not often were the guns so subdued, the air so clear of flying projectiles. Bahn decided to take a look.

He could feel sweat on his forehead by the time he had hiked the long steps to the very top. It was the armour: he’d never learned the knack of carrying its weight properly. On the upper parapet he placed a hand on a crenellation and tilted his helm back to wipe at his brow. A pair of Red Guards cast him a glance then returned to their game of rash; their lieutenant paid him no notice at all, the man was occupied with eyeing the isthmus beyond.

Bahn peered over the battlements himself. He saw dark lines of earthworks, and siege guns still wrapped in their night protections of straw and oiled canvas. Here and there were movements of white, and the odd desultory puff of smoke from one of their snipers.

Behind their lines spread the vast encampment of the Imperial Fourth Army, like a smoky, sleepy city.

We should ask them if they fancy a game of cross, he thought. We could settle the entire war here and now and get on with our lives.

Below, on the Khosian side, the game of cross was just finishing. He could see Halahan limping towards the wall as though he intended to climb its steps. Bahn had little wish to talk to the man, or anyone else just then.

He moved on, unconsciously keeping low as he stepped along the parapet towards the site of the breach, feeling exposed at each wind-blown open space between the teeth of the crenellations, and the occasional gaping emptiness where a section of the battlements had fallen away entirely. No one else was walking bent over, though, nor showing the least sign of concern about the odd incoming shot. Bahn forced himself to straighten his back and to walk in a way more befitting an officer.

He stopped as the battlements dropped away altogether, the stonework ragged where the undermined wall had collapsed. Bahn gaped down at the filled-in breach.

The rubble and earth that plugged the gap was a good half-throw across in size. It had been tamped down and floored with loose planking, and a crude barricade of stone blocks had been set across it for cover, although no one was out there just now. The breach itself was no longer visible from the Mannian side of the Shield. It was faced with the same great slope of earth that fronted the rest of the wall, the only defence they had found that could withstand the constant bombardments of cannon.

Still, it was certainly visible from where he stood, and Bahn could not tear his gaze from it. He stared at the broken section of wall as though staring into the depths of himself, feeling some kind of affinity with this weakened mass of stone.

He thought of the note that had arrived from Minos intelligence the week before, suggesting the possibility of an imminent invasion of Khos. He had been bound by his duty to keep the news to himself; it was, after all, only a supposition of the enemy’s plans. Even Marlee he had kept in the dark, not wanting to cause her unnecessary worries; she had known that something was wrong with him anyway, had noticed the despondent way he carried himself these days. And then the guns on the Mannian side had fallen silent, supposedly as part of the Empire’s period of mourning. To Bahn, it had seemed more as if they were catching their breath for the onslaught to come.

Bahn removed his helmet, set it down on a surviving crenellation next to him with a scrape of metal. A cistern was built into the battlements here, filled with rainwater, and he drank a few sips from a cup fixed to it by a chain. Sated, he leaned against the stonework and gazed out over the Lansway, lost in the tumult of his thoughts.

A far thunderstorm was trailing curtains of rain across the far end of the isthmus and the crust of hills that stretched away on either side of it: the very tip of the southern continent, and the land of Pathia, now ten years fallen to Mann. His hair blew about in the breeze as birds wheeled high and aimless in the sky above.

He ducked as a shot whined off the stonework near to him. Bahn turned to look at where it had struck, and saw Halahan standing there with the foot of his bad leg propped up on the rubble of the broken battlement, a hand on his raised knee, his other holding the clay pipe in the corner of his mouth, coolly studying a breath of dust drifting from the stonework next to his boot.

The Nathalese veteran leaned and spat on the chalky bullet-strike as though putting out a flame, then spoke to Bahn without turning to him. ‘Thinking of some poke?’

Bahn blinked, not understanding his meaning.

‘You seemed lost, a moment ago. I wondered if you were thinking of some lass.’

Bahn rose from his crouch and brushed his fingers through his hair and fixed his helm back on his head. He was careful all the while to remain behind the protection of the battlements. ‘You walk quieter than a mountain lion,’ he replied to the Nathalese man, before he realized what he was saying.

Halahan was gracious enough not to glance down at the hinged metal support that wrapped a good portion of his leg, but instead simply met his gaze. A dark humour played in the backs of his eyes, which shone with the dazzling dark blue of setting skies. Bahn had always liked the Nathalese commander of the Greyjacket brigade, had always respected his no-nonsense manner, without guile or self-importance – unlike so many of the other officers he knew within the army.

The colonel had been a priest once, or so he’d heard, though it was hard to see anything of the religious man about him now. Instead there was something windburned about his character, and something lawless.

‘I was thinking of that fleet in Q’os,’ Bahn confessed. ‘I was wondering if it would be setting forth soon, and if so, for where.’

‘You were wondering if it would be coming here.’

‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

Halahan seemed to laugh without showing it anywhere but in his eyes.

‘Is the old man back yet?’ he asked him.

Ah, thought Bahn.

‘No. And the council are flapping my ears off about it.’

‘I can imagine. It looks bad on them when the Lord Protector goes off by himself asking for League reinforcements.’

‘You think that’s what he’s doing there?’

‘Certainly. Amongst other things. What else can he do? The council would rather bury their heads in the sand. By the sounds of it they’re just hoping the Mannians invade Minos rather than here.’

Bahn offered a shrug, but the motion was lost beneath the shoulder-guard of his armour. ‘Maybe they’re right, then. Minos could be as much a target. They’re being hard hit as we speak.’

‘Aye, I’ve been following the reports. Imperial Diplomats running amok in Al-Minos. The Second Fleet engaged in a battle with sizeable enemy formations.’ Halahan sounded as though he didn’t believe any of it. ‘And the Third Fleet dispatched from our waters to help, it’s so bad. Handy that. If you wanted to slip an invasion fleet down here from Lagos unmolested.’

Halahan puffed on his pipe as the wind jostled his long grey hair about his face. It did not seem as though he was discussing the matter of their possible extinction here. Bahn had often wondered about these men who lived through war as though it were an ordinary life to them. How they were able to switch off their imaginations from the worst of fates that could befall them. How they glided through their lives whether in peace or in battle.

He was envious of anyone who exhibited such traits. Bahn never seemed to stop being frightened of the future and the war. And he certainly didn’t glide through his life; he trod furtively with his attention darting left and right, always concerned at making a false step or saying the wrong thing. Perhaps he should develop a taste for drinking more, like so many of his fellow officers. Or for the hazii weed, like Halahan always seemed to be smoking. Even now he could smell it in the odd twist of the wind.

A flight of skyships was circling over the city, far above the merchant balloons tethered to their towers, higher even than the wheeling birds. Bahn had dreamed the other night that he and his family had been aboard one of those magnificent flying vessels, heading towards the rising sun in search of sanctuary.

‘You know, don’t you, that every one of them has a private ship moored in the western harbour. Fast sloops with their crews on standby, in case the Shield ever falls.’

Bahn nodded absently. He listened to the cuff of the wind against his ears.

‘Still,’ he spoke at last, and his voice sounded fragile, ready to break. ‘The feint could be here, don’t you think? Minos could be their real target.’

Halahan studied him for a time, the humour gone from his eyes.

The man placed a hand on Bahn’s shoulder.

‘Better get your head straight, son,’ Halahan told him softly. ‘They’re coming for us all right.’