by Col Buchanan
The waitress smiled. She seemed happy to see him here once more. Shawnee was looking older these days, her pretty features grown lean and tough over the long years of the siege. He had known her for all the time he had been coming here to The Commons on his occasional visits to Bar-Khos, this fine establishment of Minosian cuisine on the edge of the city’s western harbour. Run by Shawnee’s always-bickering Minosian parents, it was a welcome reminder of home and his own wife’s cooking.
‘Marsh isn’t dining with you this evening?’ Shawnee asked him in a wistful tone.
Coya cleared his throat, feeling the awkward silence of the others around the table. By his side, where his bodyguard would normally have been sitting, stood an empty chair instead.
‘No, Shawnee. Not tonight.’
She was sweet on the man, Coya recalled. Indeed, only a few nights ago, sitting at this very table, Marsh had talked of sleeping with Shawnee in the same way that Marsh spoke of all his other sexual conquests, in an unrelenting patter that would not be stopped until he was finished.
‘Oh,’ she said, slowly raising a hand to her throat in realization.
‘And some wine,’ mumbled a voice from his other side.
It was the Lord Protector’s field aide, Bahn Calvone, sitting with a cigarillo burning from his fingertips, looking at no one. ‘Some black wine.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ The woman hesitated for a moment, and then she hurried away with her head down.
Perhaps Coya should have suggested a different establishment for their meal tonight. Yet with the loss of Marsh, he had needed to be somewhere homely and familiar.
They were seated on the flat rooftop of The Commons since the main dining room below was packed beyond capacity, and both Coya and Creed had refused all offers of special treatment; indeed, the general appeared desperate just to be treated like everyone else tonight, for all that the guns could be heard pounding away at the opposite end of the city, firing at the Mannian forces still preparing for their first assaults. It wasn’t as cold up here as it should be either. Heat rose from the heating tubes running throughout the clay roof, fed by warmed air from the building’s hearth fires below. Around the edges, a waist-high parapet and rows of potted vinebrush helped to baffle the winds coming from the north. With the lines of smoking oilstones strung overhead, emitting a soft golden light as they burned from within, it was cosy enough.
Tonight marked the first night of Kamasat, the four-day-long festa leading up to the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. A night when it was custom to have a meal with old friends. All across the southern districts of the city, the streets and rooftops were alive with people braving the elements; lights and chatter and fires lit for warmth. The Bar-Khosians were not a people to let a ten-year-long siege dampen their festas, never mind a bitter winter.
‘You all right?’
It was Shard, leaning closer in her chair.
In the packed space of the rooftop, the Dreamer cut a striking figure tonight, dressed in a one-piece leather suit with black and white pica feathers sprouting from the high collar of her open coat. A silver mask covered one side of her dark, Contrarè features.
His old friend Shard looked weary to the bone this evening. Since arriving with him in the besieged city she had been carrying some kind of sandworm in her guts. Some creature from the Alhazii deep desert, famed for its mind-altering bile, which Shard had hoped would temporarily heighten her powers in her duel against her arch rival – and ex-lover – Tabor Seech, a Dreamer working for the Empire. But the sandworm’s secretions had nearly poisoned her to death, and following the defeat of the enemy Dreamer, Shard had been quick to drink down a concoction of her own devising, some smoking demon’s brew – or so Coya liked to imagine it – which not only killed off the worm in her guts, but had almost finished her too.
Now she was a shadow of her former self, walking like Coya with the aid of a stick and with a long period of recovery most likely still before her. A Dreamer unable to perform any of her miracles when they needed them the most; when he needed this damned crossbow bolt out of his head.
‘I’m fine,’ Coya told her.
‘Any word on a new bodyguard?’ Creed asked with a glance to the stairs, where the temporary guards he’d assigned to Coya were waiting below.
‘I’m told they’re sending a Volunteer from the local garrison for now. They say she’s one of their best.’
‘Hmpf. You should have chosen a Khosian if you wanted the best.’
Creed cut a striking figure too in the tabled space of the rooftop, even with his great bulk dressed down in casual wools and his long hair tied back in a knot. From their meals the other patrons kept glancing around in fascination, watching the table from the corner of their eyes and this extraordinary gathering of glamour.
Mostly though, people were watching the sky over their heads; the very same ceiling of clouds that Coya and his companions were so earnestly trying to ignore. But another series of booms sounded overhead and they all craned to look – just like everyone else on the roof – at the lightshow in the air.
Creed had said it was an innovation of the Mannians, a tactic of demoralization only recently tested against the people of Lagos before their destruction. Some kind of moving imagery, projected from the brightest lights imaginable – War Wicks, the general said they were called – and cast against whatever haze was in the air. An illusion then, though it looked real enough up there, resembling nothing less than a giant ghostly form hanging in the smoky pall above the city; a shape that seemed to coalesce now and then so that it could be seen more clearly for what it was – a winged demon soaring high over the huddled rooftops.
One of the city’s skyships was still trying to circle the beast, firing guns whenever it flew close enough. Spooked like everyone else who laid eyes on it, they seemed to be ignoring the signal-lights from the Ministry of War that flashed at them to cease fire.
‘It’s an effective show, I’ll give them that,’ remarked Coya, provoked from his glum silence.
Creed grunted. ‘It’s an annoyance, nothing more. They’re trying to soften us up before they start their ground assaults against the wall. They think this kind of nonsense will have us quaking in our boots like children.’
‘You see that?’ said Shard. ‘They’re using triangulation. You can just about make out the three beams of light converging.’
Sure enough, through the hazy night air Coya could see a trio of beams spearing up from three differing locations in the north. Where they met was where the beast took form.
‘They call the whole thing a Sky Scribus,’ said Creed, and he looked to Shard again with obvious fascination. The more time he spent with this young Contrarè friend of Coya’s, the more he seemed attracted to her. ‘You’re certain you can’t do anything to stop it?’
‘Marsalas, I can barely pull my clothes on right now without help.’
The general pursed his lips as though to hold back his next words.
Beside him, his field aide blew out a cloud of smoke and lifted his head skywards at last. Lieutenant Bahn appeared even more exhausted than Shard in appearance. In fact he looked as though he hadn’t slept in a month, his eyes raw wounds in the slack facade of his expression.
Coya had been told about this lieutenant, so favoured by the Lord Protector, who had turned up unexpectedly after being missing in action. How Bahn had been captured after the battle of Chey-Wes and imprisoned for some time by the enemy, until somehow he and others had managed to escape.
The man had been debriefed by Khosian Intelligence and cleared to return to his role as the general’s aide, at Creed’s own insistence – a most sensitive position if ever there was one. Yet there was something strange in the way he refused to hold anyone’s gaze tonight. The way he seemed lost in some inner turmoil. If Marsh had been here right now, Coya would have exchanged a meaningful, possibly paranoid glance with his bodyguard concerning the lieutenant’s condition.
Just then Bah
n saw that he was being watched and sputtered out a lungful of smoke, coughing. He wiped his mouth then tossed the remains of the cigarillo into an ashpot on the table. His hand was shaking.
There were rumours, Coya knew, of what the Mannian priests could do to a person’s mind, given enough torture and drugs.
I should have this fellow looked into myself. Just for peace of mind.
‘Bahn,’ declared the general. ‘Since when did you smoke, man?’
‘I don’t,’ answered the lieutenant, even as he took another cigarillo from a box and poked it between his lips. ‘Just need a little something to keep me alert right now.’
‘Still not sleeping right?’
The man shrugged, downplaying his weariness. His hands were still trembling when he tried to spark a match. He looked chilled in the thin clothes he was wearing, as though he had dressed without giving any mind to the season at all – save for a single notion on his way out the door, a scarf wrapped around his neck. Observing his struggle to light the match, Shard leaned across the table with her thumb extended, and suddenly a flame appeared from the end of it, tiny and trembling.
Bahn squinted, as though not quite sure if it was really there or not, then leaned in so that his clammy features were lit from below by the flame and the flickering table candle in its glass jar.
‘Neat trick,’ he muttered around a mouthful of smoke.
‘I thought you could hardly pull your clothes on without help?’ barked Creed, his eyes twinkling, the old dog.
‘This?’ said Shard, blowing out her thumb. ‘This is just showing off. I can do this in my sleep.’
More booms rumbled over their heads, close enough now that glasses rattled on the tables. A squadron of skyships were sweeping after the giant figure as it soared above the city beating its wings hard. It grew fainter the further south it came towards them, the trio of light-beams tracking its course all the while, until it turned and circled back towards the north.
It was impossible to fully enjoy a meal when your cutlery was clinking to the sounds of such nearby action. Yet here they were, waiting to dine like the patrons already doing so around them, citizens long inured to living life under fire. Once more the talk resumed around the tables. Shawnee reappeared at the steps with a platter of wine bottles and brought them over. She smiled at Coya again, but he could see that she had been crying.
Look after that wife of yours.
The words rang in Coya’s head like a never-ending echo. The last words Marsh had spoken before sacrificing his life for him – thinking of Coya’s wife, of all people.
How many times had Marsh joked about Rechelle being the only woman he would ever love, the wife of the very man he had sworn to protect from harm? Coya had always wondered how much truth lay behind his companion’s humour. How much of it had to do with the man’s inability to ever settle down with a woman, interested only in brief and meaningless liaisons.
‘Wine?’ asked Creed, enjoying the opportunity to serve others for once.
‘Thank you, Marsalas,’ answered Coya, and his friend’s easy manner was enough to startle him, to stir some emotion into his dry blinking eyes.
Creed was the most relaxed of them all tonight. A Lord Protector buoyed by their recent victories of Chey-Wes and now against the Mannian General Mokabi and his forces in the south. Confident too that they could hold off the newly arrived Imperial Expeditionary Force as long as they stood firm. He was a welcome bastion in what seemed to Coya, for all the general’s own assurances, like a gathering storm.
‘To the fallen,’ Creed toasted, then downed his glass in one swallow and instantly refilled it; perhaps he was not so unshaken after all.
It was all business and war tonight, hardly a celebration with friends. Not that Coya would have expected anything else under the circumstances. Earlier that day they had attended the daily service held for the dead at the Temple of the Lonely Lights, in which Marsh and those others killed in the blast had been added to the latest list of the fallen, their names sung out in remembrance.
In the burnt wreckage of the Council Hall, nothing had been found of Marsh that was recognizable as his own, nothing left to bury or cremate. His lifelong guard and companion had been vaporized on the spot.
Just gone. Vanished without a trace like he’d never existed at all.
‘Tell me,’ asked Coya, swallowing to clear his throat. ‘Have they found any more survivors?’
‘Too few,’ grumbled Creed. ‘We were lucky your man put him in the water when he did. I doubt any of us would have made it out alive if he hadn’t.’
In his mind Coya glimpsed it again, the Council Hall and the Pool of Enlightenment . . . Marsh and the envoy engulfed in water and flames while a carpet of fire spilled out across the floor towards their legs; heat roaring at him like a living thing.
‘It was hardly luck, Marsalas,’ he croaked.
‘No. Your man was fast as lightning. He will be honoured for his sacrifice, I assure you. If not for him, most of the Council would have been killed.’
‘We should have seen it coming,’ said Shard, possibly trying to steer the conversation away. ‘Liquid incendiaries carried in the belly, ignited by an accelerant on his nails. The kind of thing we should be expecting by now.’
Her words only rumpled Creed’s expression.
‘There’s no way to protect against everything,’ he said with a dark eye to the winged demon in the sky. ‘Not when they keep inventing new ways to kill and torment us.’
‘That’s why we need to attack.’
They all turned to Bahn in surprise that he had spoken so firmly. His gaze lowered, the ragged lieutenant took another draw from his cigarillo.
‘You said it yourself, they’re just waiting for the ground to firm up out there before they attack. Well it hasn’t rained in days. The plain’s draining out at last. We should open the northern gates and attack them instead with everything we can, finish them once and for all. Otherwise we’re just waiting for our fates to be decided for us.’
General Creed rocked back in surprise. ‘You’re the last one I thought would suggest taking the fight to them. Normally you wail on me to use caution in these matters.’
‘Wail on you, General?’ Bahn asked without a trace of humour, inclining his head as though insulted by the remark.
Creed’s expression stiffened. Seeing it, Bahn blinked as though coming back to himself. ‘It strikes me as the very thing we need to do now. Attack them with all our fury.’
‘Clear your head, man,’ snapped General Creed. ‘You sound like the Michinè on the hill, all wrapped up in appearances. Like the appearance that we hold the lesser hand here. Yet we are the ones hunkered down in a walled city with all the shelter and supplies we need to see us through winter, and enough fighters to hold off the enemy. For once, all we need to do is wait and we will prevail.’
‘Still. What if they have more tricks up their sleeves just waiting to throw in our midst?’
‘Tricks?’
‘General, they would hardly be outside the wall if they did not have confidence they could take the city. That implies factors that we are unaware of. If we attack now, we take the initiative from them.’
His words were enough to silence them all. Coya watched on with interest. Creed was an aggressive general by nature. He had proven as much at Chey-Wes, when he had driven the Khosian wedge through the imperial forces even though they were vastly outnumbered. Now his lieutenant was presenting him with a reason to attack once again.
‘Fine wine,’ Coya remarked with a smack of his lips, hoping to change the subject, and indeed it was enough to draw Creed back to him. ‘I wanted to ask you about something else, Marsalas, before our food arrives.’
Creed refilled their glasses once more, buying some time to gather his thoughts.
‘Go on.’
‘I understand your intelligence people have a Diplomat in captivity?’
‘Yes?’
‘I would like to take him of
f your hands, if at all possible.’
‘I’m told he’s already been interrogated thoroughly, Coya.’
‘Still. I want him.’
Creed shrugged, barely interested in the matter. ‘Then I’ll see what I can do.’
A gust blew in to play with the candles on all the tabletops. Diners held hats to their heads or steadied flapping napkins. A bell was ringing down in the harbour, another ship heaving off into the night and the wind-lashed sea, and from their table at the very edge of the rooftop they all stared down at the hectic scene.
Coya took in the forest of ships’ masts within the shelter of the harbour’s walls, and the two forts at each end where bursts of anti-skyship shells were arching out over the black water, trailing reflections below. It was amazing that ships were heading out even now, risking attacks from the imperial Birds-of-War swooping down on them further out to sea, where indeed in the inky blackness a hulk was burning like a candle.
Siege or not, trade with the other Mercian islands needed to be maintained if Khos was to survive. Down at the dock a series of ships were unloading in a frenzy of work crews and carts. A trio of low-prowed longships caught Coya’s eye, sleek vessels of the old fashion bearing flags from the nearby island of Coraxa. While the crews shipped their oars, armed figures clambered up gangplanks onto the dockside to form themselves into a ragged formation of fighters bristling with weapons. Red Guards ran towards them in alarm.
‘Look,’ rasped Creed, rising from his chair, and a number of patrons turned to watch him striding to the parapet. ‘Redeemers!’
‘Ah,’ nodded Coya. ‘I was wondering when they might make an appearance in the city.’
Shard was craning around him for a better look. ‘Who?’ she asked, for she was the only one here not native to the Free Ports.
‘Redeemers,’ Coya answered. ‘From Coraxa. They wander the hills there, having renounced everything for the chance at redeeming themselves. Helping out villages from bandits. Patrolling the roads for highwaymen. Many of them are old Volunteers with rusty blades and guilty consciences.’
