Stands a Shadow (5 page)

Ché felt a little flutter of anticipation in his chest. For an instant, he looked at her with the cold eyes of a murderer, hearing the rasping voice of one of his handlers in his mind, telling him what he must do should the Matriarch show weakness or be exposed to the possibility of capture during the campaign.

‘You will miss the Augere then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Sasheen acknowledged, searching for a match as she spoke. ‘All those hours of tedium parading myself to the chattel.’

Smoothly, Ché rose and crossed to the fire, feeling her eyes tracking him. He lit one of the rushes standing in a clay pot on the hearth, brought the burning end of it back to Sasheen, who was indeed watching him with amused interest.

She placed her fingers against his hand to steady the tip of the rush. Her kohl-rimmed eyes flickered up to meet his own, her lips pursed softly around the end of the hazii stick. He felt a pulse in his thighs, his groin.

Stop it you fool. You know she is this way. Using her charms with those she must rely upon
.

He settled himself amongst a cloud of hazii smoke, whilst Sasheen turned back to the door of the side chamber, perhaps drawn by the smell of frying butter. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him. ‘I did not bother to ask you.’

The thought of sharing a meal with her, here in this chamber at the top of the world, filled him with a sudden discomfort. ‘No, thank you. I’ve eaten already.’

Sasheen studied him for a lingering moment. She looked at her bare leg and then back to his face. Her hand on the arm of the settle stopped moving; it slapped once, lightly, against the leather. ‘You heard, I’m sure, that we caught up with Lucian at last. The Élash snatched him from Prince Suneed’s court in Ta’if.’

‘Yes. I heard.’

She rose with a soft rustle of her robe and padded across the rug to another table next to the fire. A large, round glass jar sat alone on the tabletop, filled nearly to the brim with a white liquid. There came a sound of glass scraping against glass as she unscrewed the lid with care. Sasheen rolled her right sleeve up to her elbow; leaned forward and took a sniff of the substance within.

‘Royal Milk,’ she said, without taking her eyes from it. Ché blinked. He’d never seen the Milk before, only knew of its existence, the excretions of a queen Cree from the land of the Great Hush, renowned for its powers of vitality.

The wealth of a small kingdom lay inside that single jar alone.

Even from here, he could smell the liquid over the sweetness of the frying butter and sandshrimps. It was an unpleasant scent, like bile. With care, Sasheen dipped her hand into the white liquid within. She grasped something and began to pull it out; a handful of matted hair.

A scalp
, Ché thought . . . but then the rest of it followed: a forehead, a pair of closed eyes, a nose, a mouth fixed in a grimace, a dripping chin, a roughly hewn neck. She held this apparition over the jar as the white liquid ran from the severed head and her own hand like quicksilver.

It was the severed head of a middle-aged man, Ché could see as the Milk flowed clear from it. Dark hair turned grey at the temples. A wide full mouth, a long nose, sharp cheekbones and brows.

As the last drop dripped clear of it, Sasheen swung the head over the table and settled it by its ragged neck on the dark surface of tiq.

The face flinched in pain or surprise. Ché stiffened where he sat, his wide-eyed stare fixed on the thing before him. The Matriarch backed away from the head as its eyes flickered open, blinking to clear them, bloodshot and tormented. White Milk spilled from the corners of its lips as it saw Sasheen and glared.

‘Hello, Lucian,’ she said to the thing.

The head closed its lips, seemed to swallow a mouthful of air.

‘
Sasheen
,’ the man croaked in a strange, wet voice, almost belching the word.

Ché’s eyes darted to the Matriarch then back to the head. It was Lucian all right. Sasheen’s one-time famous lover and general, one of the first of the Lagosian nobility to join the ranks of Mann when the island had first fallen to the Empire – before he had betrayed her, by leading the Lagos rebellion in fighting once more for independence.

Ché had witnessed the pieces of his hung-and-quartered corpse hanging in Freedom Square, with the soldiers stationed below them chasing away the hungry crows. He’d thought that had been the end of the man. It seemed though that Sasheen had other ideas for her ex-lover.

The Holy Matriarch turned her back to the head. She smiled at Ché, sudden mischief in her eyes.

Sasheen raised her right hand to her mouth, licked her fingers one by one. Even as Ché watched her do this, he could see the blood rush to her skin, her eyes begin to dilate even further. She finished with a greedy smack of her lips.

‘Nothing like it in this whole wide world,’ she said breathlessly, and took a step towards Ché, hungry for something.

Once more Ché fought an absurd impulse to laugh. It only worsened as she leaned down towards him, becoming a jostling pain in his chest as she placed her hand against his cheek, pressed her mouth hard against his own. Her tongue darted, parting his lips.

So easy to kill her, he thought, right here and now, if his lips had still been smeared with venom.

The taste of the Royal Milk was like nothing he had ever tasted before. It was neither sweet nor sour, bitter nor salty. His tongue began to sting, and then to go numb, as Sasheen continued to kiss him.

‘
Whore
,’ came the strange belching voice of Lucian from behind her.

And then the rush of it hit Ché, like a breath of fire blossoming through the blood-ways of his body. It jolted him out of his tiredness in a snap so that his blood surged, pounding, and a sense of weightlessness overcame him, filling him with light instead, and air, and the first real glimmers of lust.

Sasheen pulled clear with a moan, and glanced quite obviously down at his crotch. She whirled away with a satisfied smile.

He gasped, close to losing himself entirely, and sprawled back against the settle as though falling.

Two pulses
, he thought distractedly.
I have two pulses in my neck
.

‘Ah, breakfast,’ she declared, as the old priest entered with a tray of food.

Ché tried to move and then thought better of it. He clung to the settle as though he would fly from it at any instant, while the sounds of Sasheen preparing to eat filtered towards him from far behind.

‘What is this?’ snapped her voice. ‘I can hardly see them, they’re so small.’

‘Sandshrips are always small this time of the year, Matriarch. They are still young.’

‘What? And they can’t be fed up a little? And what’s this? Grubby marks everywhere. I suppose the kitchen staff are also too young this time of year to keep the silver clean?’

‘My apologies, Matriarch. I’m still training the new replacements in the proper ways. It will not happen again, I assure you. I can have something else prepared, if you wish?’

‘And wait even longer? No. You may go.’

Ché looked at the grim face of Lucian glowering at him with his maddened eyes. With a loll of his head Ché looked to his right, where the old woman Kira still sat unmoving.

There was a definite glimmer beneath her eyelids now – those bird eyes of hers staring across the space at Ché as though they could see right through him.

Ché closed his own eyes and soared.

CHAPTER THREE

Without Wings

Whoah
, thought Coya, as a gust of wind buffeted the figure that dangled between the two skyships, and set the man swinging like the pendulum of a clock.

‘Hold there!’ shouted the startled deck charge, raising a palm to the crewmen heaving away on the secondary line. At once they stopped hauling, and stood there frozen in their positions, watching the swaying figure with the uncertainty of men who’d never attempted this feat before, and were aware of its possibility only because others were telling them of it.

Out there in the gulf of air between the two vessels, bobbing from the line strung between them both, the figure on the wooden chair opened his mouth to shout: ‘
In your own time, gentlemen!
’

Coya smiled despite his concerns for the man.

‘Bring him in, Seday, quickly now,’ he told the deck charge smartly, and although Coya appeared young for his twenty-seven years – young even with his body stooped over a walking cane – the men snapped to with the respect of earnest sons for a father, and started to haul on the rope once more.

Just then another gust hit, stronger than the previous one, setting the distant figure pirouetting again on his seat. Coya heard the wind pressing against the silken envelope overhead, saw how the two skyships were drifting from their relative positions. Manoeuvring tubes fired along their sides, at the hurried commands of their captains. Still, the skyships drifted slightly apart, the line playing out on the far Khosian deck. The slack was lost, causing the man to bob even more dangerously beneath its tightening length. With an inrush of breath, Coya leaned forward with his weight on his walking cane and his hand clutching the ebony grip tightly.

To lose this man now could very well equate to losing the entire war.

‘Quickly now!’ he urged, without taking his gaze from their charge.

The figure was well past the halfway mark and nearing the ship at last. He looked calmer out there than Coya did merely watching from the deck. With his feet dangling over an abyss of several thousand feet all the way to the choppy sea below, he was turning his head to take in the rugged coastline of Minos, and the bay in which the city of Al-Minos lay like a gleaming pearl. Drawing closer, Coya saw his long black hair whip around his wind-reddened face; his hands with their many plain rings; his heavy bear-skin coat covering his great bulk.

Suddenly, Coya felt his pulse grow faster from the sheer anticipation of the Lord Protector’s presence.

‘Easy, lads,’ General Creed boomed as they pulled him roughly onto the decking; and suddenly there he was, towering over them all, feigning an easy nonchalance when in truth Coya saw only exhilaration in his eyes.

The crewmen released the general from his safety harness while Creed clapped a few shoulders for good show. He stepped forward to shake Coya’s offered hand.

Coya scented hair oil, and that awful spiced goat’s cheese so beloved of these Khosians.

‘I’d hoped you were joking when you suggested an underway transfer,’ remarked the old general. ‘We couldn’t have met on the ground, eh?’

Before responding, Coya caught the eye of Marsh, his own bodyguard. Marsh scowled at the gang of crewmen still pressing for a better look at this living legend from Bar-Khos, and shoved them without ceremony towards the rest of the crew gathered on the opposite side of the deck.

‘Too dangerous,’ Coya admitted when they were at last beyond earshot, while Marsh stationed himself close by, watching everyone on deck through his dark-tinted refractors. His eyes could be seen blinking through the lenses on the back of his head.

‘Someone else was hit?’

‘Last night in Al-Minos. The visiting League delegate from Salina had the misfortune of being strangled in her sleep. That’s eight assassinations in the last two weeks. Which would suggest a coterie of Diplomats is now at large within the city.’

The Lord Protector nodded without expression, keeping his thoughts to himself.

Together they watched as the transfer line was reeled back aboard the Khosian skyship that had borne him all this way from Bar-Khos. The vessel fired its tubes to assume a patrol around the Minosian vessel they now stood upon. In the silence, Coya studied the man’s profile in an attempt to judge his present condition. Creed had visibly aged since they’d last met over of a year and half before. The greying at his temples had spread into streaks of silver; the lines deeper now around his eyes. All of it from grief, Coya knew from the reports he’d been hearing.

‘How are you, anyway?’ he asked the Lord Protector. ‘I hope your journey was a smooth one?’

‘Smooth enough. I only regret that our meeting must be so brief.’

‘Yes,’ said Coya. ‘The Khosian council must fret whenever you are gone from the Shield for so long.’ At that they both smiled, knowing it to be true. As their eyes met, unspoken between them lay the question of why Creed was here at all. ‘Still, it’s good that we can meet for this little while at least. A meal is being prepared for us in the captain’s cabin. If you wish, we can retire to some comfort and be out of this wind for a while.’

Creed responded with a look that said he was seldom accustomed to thinking of his personal comforts. He glanced towards Marsh and the many crewmen still watching them, the captain of the ship included. ‘I’m too old to be skulking around in fear of a few assassins, if that’s your concern,’ he said. ‘Let’s enjoy the fresh air while we talk, and then we can eat.’ He paused as he looked at Coya, who was stooped and wrapped heavily against the cold. ‘Unless of course it would be better for you . . . to be inside.’

‘I’m fine here, if you are, thank you,’ Coya replied crisply, and bowed his head politely.

The motion caused him pain, as all movements did. Even at his relatively young age, Coya had the arthritic bones of an ancient man. ‘Please, at least allow me to indulge you in some chee while we talk.’