Stands a Shadow (38 page)

‘Let’s pray our skuds are still up there somewhere,’ said Sergeant Jay, and they both stood together, scanning the dark skies in silent hope.

Ché drew the zel to a halt in front of the twins’ tent. He leapt off it, leaving Ash across the saddle; ducked quickly inside without waiting to see if anyone spotted him.

Guan and Swan’s packs were lying on the ground next to their cots. Ché rummaged through them until he found the vial of wild-wood juice, then ran back outside with it gripped in his fist. He led the zel to his own tent and went in to grab his pack. He threw his books into it, shoving them in next to the bundle of civilian clothing he had brought with him. He left his Scripture of Lies facedown on the bunk.

‘How’s it going down there?’

A silhouette filled the entrance to the tent. A priest.

Ché rose slowly as he tightened his grip on the straps of his backpack.

The silhouette raised its hand to its mouth, took a bite from something. Ché scented the sweet narcotic scent of the parmadio fruit.

‘Hard to say,’ he told the spymaster Alarum. ‘I’m no expert on war.’

The spymaster stood there with a blanket wrapped across his shoulders. Ché glanced at Alarum’s other hand, saw it hanging limp by his side next to a sheathed dagger in his belt. Ché knew this man was dangerous.

‘For a moment I thought we were being overrun, the way you came charging into camp like that.’ He gestured to the pack in Ché’s hand. ‘Going somewhere?’

Without warning, Ché swung the backpack and threw it at Alarum’s face.

He was a step behind it. He punched the man in the stomach to knock the wind from him, doubling Alarum over with a whoosh of air. Ché locked an arm around his neck, snatched the knife from the man’s scabbard, drew him back away from the entrance with the edge of the blade pressing against his throat.

‘
Wait!
’ Alarum hissed through his teeth.

He struggled, strong for his thin build, gripping Ché’s wrist as he tried to stop him from cutting his throat. One of the bunks toppled over as he kicked it with a foot. ‘
Wait a moment
!’ he hissed in a strangled whisper, white spittle flying from his lips.

The man forced his sleeve back from his arm, held the skin up for Ché to see. Ché stared at it, saw the scaly patch of skin along the spymaster’s arm. His grip loosened a fraction.

‘We may share the same afflicted blood, Ché,’ came his strangled voice. ‘I just might be your father!’

He released the spymaster. Alarum gasped for air with a hand to his throat.

‘My mother slept with many men,’ he said. ‘That proves nothing.’

‘No it doesn’t, not for certain. But still, don’t you wonder?’

Ché tossed the knife quivering into the ground. ‘You left the note for me in the Scripture,’ he said as the realization came to him. ‘That was you.’

‘I see you’re paying it some heed, too. Good. If you stay they’ll kill you. I’ll do what I can for your mother, what little that may be.’

‘You can help her?’

‘Perhaps. If I’m quick enough about it.’

Ché hesitated, caught between sudden emotions. He looked at the man, his gaunt face and dark, intense eyes, wondering if it might be true.

A few priests rushed past the entrance of the tent. Someone was shouting in the distance.

‘Wait!’ shouted Alarum as Ché swirled away, leaving him standing there in the middle of the tent next to the overturned cot.

Ché’s mind raced with uncertainties as he stepped outside.

‘Come on, old man,’ Ché said to the unconscious Ash, climbing back into the saddle with his pack. He nodded to Alarum as the spymaster emerged from the tent. The man seemed to be struggling for words.

With a kick and a whip of the reins Ché galloped out of the encampment, Alarum and the Acolyte guards at the entrance watching him go.

A bodyguard ducked behind his shield as something whistled past close by. For once, Bahn stood cool and unflinching.

‘Our scouts tried it before we attacked.’ Creed was telling Koolas the war chatt
ē
ro. ‘It should hold, so long as we’re careful.’

The surface of the lake had frozen solid. It was strange, to face such a silent, open expanse of ice with the intensity of the battle still raging behind them.

‘With luck, Mandalay’s cavalry have scattered their zels. It should take them time to organize a pursuit.’

Creed and the others stood on a spur of land that projected into the lake for a hundred feet or more. The remnants of the army were filtering onto this projection, heavy and light infantry alike. Already, at the instructions of their officers, men cast aside shields and helms, shrugged out of their heavy armour, before they headed out onto the lake. They spread out so as to distribute their weight more evenly. Stretcher-bearers carried off what casualties they could. The ice, still reasonably thin, creaked beneath their feet, but held.

The army was subliming away.

Past the heavy press of men still heading towards the ice, Bahn could barely see the rearguard that stretched across the mouth of this projection of land. They had formed into a single chartassa, and they fought alone to hold off the imperial attackers; a mixture of Hoo and Red Guards, many badly wounded themselves, each a volunteer for this role.

Bahn found it hard to look at them.

More than anything else now, he wished to get back to Bar-Khos so that he could be in the sanctuary of his own home with Marlee and the children. He could see it in his mind’s eye. It was raining outside the house. The fire was lit. Marlee toasted sweetcakes on the flames while Juno his son played with his model ships and little Ariale gazed at him; Bahn, sitting deep in his armchair in a glow of contented peace.

General Nidemes approached, flanked by Colonel Barklee, one of his Red Guard officers, the man holding a shield aloft to protect them from the missiles that still thudded down. ‘Time to go,’ Nidemes told Creed. General Creed’s eyes glimmered in the dimness. ‘Have you taken all the neck chains from the rearguard?’

‘We have,’ Barklee replied, hoisting a bundled cloak that chinked with the many identity chains within it.

‘We must find some way to repay them for this,’ announced Creed.

Koolas the war chatt
ē
ro listened from behind.

Bahn turned to the rearguard again. They were being pushed back step by step.

Once more, Bahn stood on the sidelines, watching from afar the bravery of men as they lay down their lives for the sake of others. For some reason, since regaining his feet, Bahn had found that he no longer felt any fear at all, as though he’d shed a heavy cloak he had forgotten he was even wearing. More than ever before, he understood why he was here, and why the men of the rearguard were here, giving up their lives for the sake of their people.

‘I’m staying,’ he told Creed as the general turned to leave.

Creed cast him a look of surprise. ‘What’s that?’

‘I’m staying,’ he said as he took the chain from his neck. ‘With the rest of those men.’ And he tossed the chain across to Barklee.

Creed frowned and quizzed him with his eyes. ‘You’re in shock, Bahn,’ he decided. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. We’ve won here, damn it! Even if it doesn’t seem so just now, we’ve scored a victory here!’

‘Hold Bar-Khos, no matter what, General,’ Bahn told him. ‘That’s the only way you can repay these men now.’

Before Creed could answer, Bahn turned and walked away.

‘Bahn!’ Creed shouted after him. ‘Bahn!’ he commanded.

But within half a dozen footsteps, Bahn was lost amongst the confusion of men.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Tume

It was quiet in these hills to the south of the Silent Valley, and the pale morning daylight brightened only slowly beneath a layer of clouds. Snow still lingered in clumps within the shadows of yellowing grasses, which swayed and sighed in the breezes coursing through the small side valley where they had camped.

So this is Khos
, Ché thought to himself, as though only now, in his relative solitude away from the demands and company of Mann, he could truly appreciate the landscape of this island.

Ché sat on the wet ground with his back resting against a saddlebag. He had removed the piercing in his eyebrow, and he was dressed comfortably in plain woollen trousers and a thick cotton shirt that had cowry shells sewn along its sleeves. Over it all, his cloak was keeping out the worst of the wind. During the remains of the night he’d left his ammunition belt strapped around his waist, where the pistol hung in its holster, and his knife too. He’d watched and listened for signs of pursuit, not sleeping at all.

Now, in the early light, Ché was watching a hawk as it balanced with delicate twitches of its wingtips above the opposite slope of the little valley, silently hovering as it watched for prey. Before his outstretched legs, a small campfire of twigs smoked and crackled in a circle of stones. The meagre flames offered little warmth save for the mind.

The hawk suddenly dived with wings folded tight. It vanished behind a line of grasses, appeared once more with talons empty. It must be young, thought Ché. Still learning to kill.

Try again
.

The fire spat, and he stared at it, watching the two fresh branches he’d recently laid across the embers. Their bellies glowed red, the occasional flame struggling upwards, flickering, dying again. Ché’s eyes narrowed, heavy with tiredness.

The old R
ō
shun snored on the other side of the fire. The farlan-der was suffering from a bad chest, his breathing laboured and shallow. Indeed, he coughed just then, and stirred beneath the cloak Ché had placed over him for a blanket.

Ash’s head came up, and the man opened his bleary grey eyes.

He took a long look at the young man before him. Blinked in recognition.

‘Ché,’ he rasped.

‘Easy,’ replied Ché, as the old man clutched his head and struggled to rise. ‘I think you’re concussed. I’ve been trying to keep you awake all night.’

Ash sat up with some care. His fingers inspected the lump on his skull and the fresh stitching there.

‘That would explain why I feel like death,’ croaked the farlander, as he gently placed a palm against his skull.

Ché tossed the flask of water across to him. The old R
ō
shun drank from it long and deep. He gasped, and his neck craned as he took in the sky and twisted as he looked at the valley slopes beneath their campsite. He took another sip of water. Smacked his lips and stared at the flask between his legs for some moments.

At last he lifted his head with some clarity in his eyes.

‘The battle,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

Ché offered a weak shrug. ‘The Expeditionary Force rallied. The last I saw of the Khosians they were fleeing across a frozen lake.’

‘Sasheen. Is she dead?”

‘I hope so. She was shot through the neck. I’m curious, though, why you were there trying to kill her?’

Ash was fumbling for something in his tunic. He drew out a leather pouch, dug his fingers into it to find that nothing was there. In disgust he tossed the empty pouch into the fire. He coughed long and hard, his eyes screwed in pain. At last he coughed a gob of phlegm into the flames, where it sizzled for a moment while he hung his head between his knees.

‘The boy was yours, wasn’t he? The apprentice she burned to death in Q’os?’

‘Aye, he was mine,’ came his voice, husky.

‘But he wasn’t wearing a seal.’

‘No.’

So the old farlander was human after all, Ché mused.

He studied the man in the pale daylight. Ash had aged since Ché had last seen him all those years ago in Cheem. He was thinner than he recalled. The bones of his face were sharp and pronounced beneath his dark skin, which was creased with wrinkles, and papery thin. His wedge of grey beard had overgrown. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and faintly yellow.

He looked like a man nearer death than not.

‘What am I doing here?’ Ash asked him. ‘This makes no sense to me.’

‘I’ve been sitting wondering the same thing myself.’

The farlander lifted his head and studied Ché for a long moment. His eyes settled on the stubs of the young man’s little fingers. He winced. ‘What are you doing here, Ché?’ he said. ‘Are you one of them?’

Ché turned away.

‘Ché?’

As the moments dragged on, he could sense the old man’s suspicions growing.

‘You left Sato without telling us,’ ventured Ash.

Ché looked to the bird once more, saw it hovering again. Part of him wished to confess it all to the old man just then, to tell him what part he had played in the destruction of the R
ō
shun order. But he found himself unable to say it.

Still, realization gradually dawned on the old farlander. ‘You were with them all along. With the Empire. But how? The Seer would have seen it in you.’ Ash sat up straighter, though it brought him pain. ‘Ché – what are you? What have you done?’