Stands a Shadow (37 page)

Ché shoved a fleeing soldier out of his way. He took out the pistol loaded with its poison shot.

Waited to see what Sasheen would do next.

Bahn came to a with a gasp, and found that he was being dragged along the ground by a bearded soldier.

A woman was fussing over him.

‘Marlee?’ he croaked.

It was Curl, though, not his wife, and she was bent over him with a vial of smelling salts in her hand. She looked surprised at his recovery, even managed a nervous twitch of her lips.

‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘You may be concussed.’

He looked up into the bruised and bloodied face of the soldier. The man nodded to him, kept dragging him along.

He had no recollection of how he’d come to be here. One instant, Curl had been treating his wounded arm . . . then blackness. ‘What happened?’ he rasped.

‘You’re all right,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

‘Was I hit?’

‘You were caught in a blast. You’re lucky to be in one piece.’

He looked at his body, saw that everything was still there.

Around them the battle was still raging. The entire formation continued to push forwards. ‘Get me to my feet,’ he said, and held his hand out weakly.

Curl frowned, then grasped his hand, and she and the soldier hauled until Bahn stood on his own two feet. He felt faint, nauseous.

‘We’re still here, then,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ said the soldier in his roughened voice. ‘Afraid so.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Contact

It was unlike him, to be thinking so fluently in the midst of action. Ash was wholly unable to find his stillness here on this icy field.

The Acolyte who’d been about to challenge him had vanished in the confusion of the rout. As Ash approached Sasheen’s position, cold anger was all that he felt now.

Within it, memories were surfacing like corpses, bloated and awful.

He recalled Nico, standing behind the bars of the Bar-Khos jail where they’d first been introduced, the boy scared and red-eyed from crying with his mother, Reese, a woman determined to save her son that day. He had made a pledge to her, a promise to protect the boy, even if it meant giving his own life first.

He saw Nico on the burning pyre again in the Q’os arena, his apprentice breathing his last breath, dropping his head as fiery tendrils took hold of his body.

Ash’s anger was complete. He pushed his way through the routing troops, shoving them aside as he strode forwards. Without pausing he slipped through the ring of Acolytes that surrounded the Matriarch’s and her mounted bodyguards.

The guards’ war-zels stood firm against the flow, redirecting it around the animals’ steaming flanks. Ash stopped as a guard turned his zel to block his way.

He thrust his blade into the man’s side, piercing through his chainmail, not taking his eyes from Sasheen three strides distant. Ash jerked the blade free even as the bodyguard raised his own sword high. A flare was peaking in the sky above the man, illuminating a passing cloud.

Half blinded, he ducked as the man swung his blade downwards, bending from his saddle to reach him.

Ash blinked with the light still cloying in his eyes. Stabbed out with his blade again, felt its point cleave through into the man’s heart.

He stepped around the zel as the guard tumbled to the ground. In the midst of them Sasheen was trying to turn her zel around, to get clear of the position.

A space opened in their rear and Ash sprang forward, sword ringing from its sheath.

The Khosians were chanting as they pushed forwards. Arrows had begun to pepper down around the Matriarch’s standard. Archgen-eral Sparus, not far from her, was exhorting his officers to maintain the line, trying to restore solidarity to an army tottering on the dangerous edge of individualism and full rout.

Ché looked towards the Matriarch’s position, where she was desperately close to the advancing Khosians and the explosions of mortars that seemed to be walking towards her. She was attempting to withdraw, despite Sparus calling out to stand firm.

So it had come to this, then.

Some part of Ché was suddenly awed by the possibility now facing him. The pistol hung loose in his hand. To kill a Holy Matriarch; to topple her from her empire with a single shot to the head . . . His mouth went dry at the thought of it. His features set into a hardened mask.

It’s hardly different from all the people you’ve murdered at her whim
, he tried to tell himself.

Ché licked his lips and glanced around in search of Swan and Guan, but he was unable to see the two Diplomats anywhere. He was fairly certain they had orders to kill him once this campaign had reached its end. The note left in the Scripture had been right. He knew too much.

Don’t stay, then. Leave now and hope they consider you to be amongst the dead. What is there for you here but more pain and anguish
?

Only his mother, he knew. But she’d already been lost to him, and he from her, all those years ago when he’d first been sent to Cheem to be turned as a R
ō
shun. Nothing had been left to him by the order of Mann, nothing but this hollow complexity of a life that he’d never wished for, had never chosen.

Ché chose now to raise the pistol firmly in his hand.

He steadied it with his other hand, tried to draw an aim on the Matriarch as he waited for an opening in the ring of mounted guards surrounding her. A flare went up. Men illuminated in shaking light jostled past him, interrupting his aim.

Ché fought to hold steady. He caught a brief glimpse of Sasheen as she tugged her zel around, and then she was blocked again by the tightening shields of her bodyguards. She would be away within moments.

Damn it
, he swore silently.

He couldn’t get a clear shot.

Suddenly, one of the bodyguards swung around with his zel. The man’s sword rose high in the air then drove down onto someone on foot. As he carried through with the swing, the bodyguard bent low in his saddle.

Sasheen’s head came into view.

Ché’s pistol flared and fired.

Ash saw Sasheen lurch backwards in her saddle as he closed with her. The Matriarch’s white zel cried out as it reared up on its hind legs, backing a few steps towards him. Riders jostled and hollered all around them.

He saw an armoured rider lying next to its white zel.

It was Sasheen, sprawled in the muck with her life-blood pumping from her neck. Her bodyguards were gathering where she lay, holding their shields aloft to protect her, their movements as jerky as frightened boys’.

He cried out as though robbed of a prize rightly his, struggling to his feet with his sword hanging like a thing forgotten.

She was dead or dying. That was all that mattered, he consoled himself.

Ash barely noticed the mounted bodyguard circling around him. From the corner of his eye, he spotted the guard raising his sword.His gaze remained fixed on the motionless bundle that was the Holy Matriarch of Mann.

Ash was stillness.

The sword came down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A Fighting Retreat

Ché stuffed the pistol into his belt and fought his way through the jostling infantry towards Sasheen. He caught a glimpse of her body lying unmoving in the mud. Someone had removed her mask. A wound in her neck pumped profusely.

Not far from the scene, a lone Acolyte lay sprawled on the ground. His cloak was splayed open to reveal a pair of leather leggings. Ché tore the mask from the man’s face. He gasped and stood back in surprise.

Ash!
he thought as he took in the black skin of the old farlander. One of the R
ō
shun, here, of all places.

Ché reeled with his thoughts asunder. Blood was coursing from a swollen lump in the man’s head. He was still alive, then.

Ché looked about him for a moment, at the masks and the stark faces of strangers.

He knelt and slapped the farlander’s face. Ash’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. He seemed to weigh nothing but skin and bones as Ché lifted him and threw him over his shoulder. He grabbed the reins of a loose zel, threw the old man over the saddle. The animal tried to skitter away as he bent to reach for the fallen sword. He pulled it back towards him, then mounted behind Ash.

He kicked the animal into a trot.

For a moment the battle hung in the balance.

Perhaps if the imperial army had learned nothing from the previous fifty years of land war – or if Sparus’s own five hundred Acolytes hadn’t positioned themselves in the direct path of the Khosian advance and stood firm – or if one more man in the ordinary ranks had yelled in fear for his life – then the First Expeditionary Force might have broken.

But it didn’t. Instead it rallied gamely and began to fight back. And in the way of these things, the collective shame of its near-defeat lent an impetus to the army’s efforts, and they fell upon the Khosian flanks like a flood.

The Khosians reeled.

‘She fell, sir, I saw it with my own eyes.’

The Red Guard captain stood with a slight stoop as he spoke. He held a bloody hand across his stomach.

‘Very well,’ said General Creed. ‘Now go and find yourself a medico.’

The officer gritted his teeth – perhaps it was an attempt at a smile – and hoisted his charta before returning to the lines of the right flank. They were disintegrating now, much like the rest of the formation.

Bahn paid little attention to the news of the Matriarch’s possible death, or even to the destruction of the army taking place all about him. He was in something of a daze as he stood fighting down his nausea, the blood leaking from an ear he could no longer hear from.

‘That’s four sightings, Bahn!’ barked General Creed by his side, pulling him from his scattered thoughts.

Bahn blinked dumbly in reply.

The general stood with hands behind his back, taking in the imperial onslaught on all sides. ‘They rallied well, don’t you think?’

‘Like Khosians, sir,’ Bahn finally replied, feeling giddy.

Creed examined his lieutenant. The flesh around the general’s eyes was swollen from exhaustion.‘We’ve accomplished all we can here. I think it’s time that we left, don’t you?’

‘General?’

‘You’d rather we stay here a while longer?’

He tried to shake his head, but it only caused more sickness to wash through him.

‘Not – for a single moment,’ he said.

Creed turned to one of his bodyguards. ‘Have a runner sent to fetch General Reveres.’

‘Reveres is dead, sir,’ replied the bodyguard.

‘What? When?’

‘I’m not certain, sir.’

‘Nidemes, then!’

It was some minutes before General Nidemes limped towards them through the darkness. His helm was missing and his greying hair was matted to his head in the semblance of a bird’s nest.

‘Nidemes, we’re leaving as of now. We’ll perform a heel turn and proceed to the lake as fast as we can.’

With obvious relief the general hurried away off to pass on the order.

‘The lake?’ asked Bahn.

General Creed’s breath formed a rising cloud in the air. ‘I’m sure that by the time that we get there, you’ll have worked it out, Bahn.’

‘They’re heading for the lake,’ observed Sergeant Jay.

Halahan saw it. What was left of the army had turned about and tightened its flanks, and now was forging a path through to the lake on the northern side of the battlefield.

‘About bloody time,’ breathed the colonel to himself.

He turned to face the remnants of his own small force. The imperial mortars had been abandoned – three of the pieces had seized up finally, too hot to fire any longer; a fourth had blown up, though only the charge had exploded, miraculously, not the explosive shot itself. Their crews were gulping from small flasks of spirits, looking as though they’d just survived a deadly game of blind-man’s duel.

The riflemen defending the perimeter had run out of ammunition too. They were exhausted to the man, and they were nervously watching as the Imperials regrouped again along the waist of the ridge and around the base of its slopes. All knew that the next assault would finish them.

Colonel Halahan drew in a breath and bellowed: ‘Someone send up a signal flare – we’re leaving!’

The men roused themselves, brief burns of energy returning to their spent frames. ‘And let’s destroy the rest of these mortars, shall we?’

Halahan scanned the bloody carnage of the ridge. The dead would have to be left where they’d fallen. He struck a match to relight his pipe. Exhaling smoke, he gathered all the precious pistols he’d tossed aside so far. As he stood next to the sergeant the signal flare shot upwards into the air, burning yellow as it stalled and fell back to earth.

Beyond it, skyships were blasting each other with spurts of cannon fire.