by Col Buchanan
A monstrous roar turned her head towards a wave rushing in from starboard. She just had time to brace herself before it broke across the length of the boat, tilting it sharply as she was thrown to one side. Only the vessel’s trailing storm anchors stopped it from capsizing altogether, but freezing water rose up to her thighs as she grabbed for the wheel, boiling about her like broth. She spat the briny taste of it from her mouth and shook her eyes clear, seeing the little swamp rat Pip squirming through the water for higher ground. He hung there on the wheel, dripping wet, as the water level quickly receded.
Ocean looked ahead over the dropping crest of a wave and saw something out there in the darkness – what looked like a column of fire standing in the distance like a vision.
She lost sight of it as they dipped down into another trough, spotting it again as they came up the other side. With her Patched eyes she focused on the glimmering light like a hawk, seeing that it was a ship on fire. Beyond it, strangely, more fires were flashing up in the cloudy sky.
Another glance to the transponder showed that it was shining even whiter than before. Relief washed through her. Ocean grasped the throttle and pushed it to the limits again, aiming for the distant beacon that was the burning ship.
*
She was amazed, frankly, to find anyone out here on the open sea in this kind of weather, considering the fragile wooden vessels she knew they still sailed here on this world.
Yet it was a ship all right, and it was on fire as it wallowed on the high seas. And what was that behind it now, as she drew ever closer?
Ocean strained her vision as far as she could. Beneath flashes of light in the sky, she saw a shadow of land stretching across her course. The water seemed to be calmer than before. Indeed, as she looked north and then south, she saw how the boat had entered an ever-narrowing bay that was still many lems wide, and peering straight ahead over the rise of a swell, she glimpsed a glittering city perched on the dark coastline, above which the flashes of light were most concentrated.
A butterfly tickled around in her stomach; a creeping sense that she knew now where she was bound.
The city of war!
But how? What was her contact on the planet, Juke, doing here in the besieged city of Bar-Khos, of all places, when he was supposed to have made his way to a safe Free Port from which to guide her in?
In glum silence Ocean powered onwards with the chop diminishing the further into the bay she went. She was in the lee of the land now, for even the winds lessened to occasional gusts. Her heart beat faster as the transponder signal grew stronger, bringing her right towards the burning vessel. It was a large wooden merchant ship, its masts still standing amongst a conflagration of flames in which there was no sign of survivors.
In the distance, other ships were headed this way from the direction of the city. Even as she spotted them a shape soared right overhead, turning to head them off – a skyship, she realized with a shock of awe at seeing such a thing. The vessel was larger than images had suggested, huge in fact, considering it was held aloft by a vulnerable envelope of gas. Onwards it swept with a booming thunder suddenly roaring from its side, its blazing guns puncturing the sea before the ships with spouts of rising water.
And then a second skyship rushed over her head with its guns firing at the foremost one, tearing chunks from its wooden backside and prompting an inner explosion from its depths. Ocean gasped as flames took out the silk loft of gas. Her mouth hung open as she watched the rest of the vessel plummeting to the sea wreathed in fire and smoke.
In its spreading wake the waves swelled outwards, bobbing the boat up and down. When Ocean glanced to the transponder its light was bright white, and the device was vibrating loudly. She swallowed a sudden taste of bile. Cutting out the power to the squid-jets, Ocean snatched the transponder from its sticky-tape mount then clambered out of the cockpit with it, staggering against the gusts onto the narrow prow, the inflated deck sagging beneath her feet.
She stopped, riding the surging water with her legs spread wide, staring hard at the device vibrating in her hand.
She was right on top of the signal, for sure.
With a trembling hand she lowered the device so that it pointed straight down between her feet, right through the heaving hull of the boat.
The device buzzed loudly in her grasp.
Oh Juke, she thought with a sigh of regret, thinking of the young Anwi man she barely even knew, who had travelled here from the Isles of Sky to help her. A young man she had only ever communicated with over a farcry. What happened to you?
But it seemed obvious what had happened to him. Bound on a ship for a safer Free Port than this one, only to be bombed from the sky and drowned.
Such bad luck, and before her real work had even begun.
Pissed and hissing through her teeth, Ocean tugged the hood from her head so that her great mass of hair popped open like a small tree catching the wind. Then she clambered back into the cockpit with her face set straight to the city, and got the boat going again, knowing that she had no other choice now, that she had to get out of these elements or she would die.
Bar-Khos, she thought with a bitter shake of her head.
Of all the ports in all the world, it had to be Bar-Khos!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nico
Down on the moonlit plain it looked as though the end of the world had come to the besieged city of Bar-Khos, or at least some early manifestation of the end.
From the enemy positions beams of white brilliance were striking the city’s northern wall, swinging back and forth along a glittering confetti of gunfire and explosions. Wherever the great beams spilled over the top they threw shadows into a night sky filled with battling skyships, and what appeared to be a grotesque shape rearing against the clouds – like the face of some fearsome god of old looming over the city.
Flames rose high across the northernmost districts. Horns wailed faintly in alarm, the sounds of them undulating over the plain where imperial camp fires ranged numerous as the stars – tens of thousands of fighters committed to the downfall of the city. Booms of concussion rattled the windy night air.
Yet for all appearances, Bar-Khos and its ancient walls had withstood countless assaults over the centuries, and it had never fallen. There was a permanence to the stones of that city standing so squarely on the mouth of the Lansway, a permanence that had always ultimately frustrated those who would try to conquer it, not least of all the Empire of Mann during these last ten years of siege.
It could only be hoped that this time would be no different.
‘How far?’ huffed Nico’s father, stepping back from where he’d been pissing across their tracks in the snow.
Nico was still standing there relieving himself. He swung away from the sight of the siege to peer back along their trail, gazing through the darkness with his eagle-sharp eyes.
In the distance a single lantern moved across the brow of a hill; a dim speck of light flitting between the unseen trunks of trees.
‘Close,’ Nico said. ‘A quarter-hour behind us, maybe less.’
Cole furrowed his forehead beneath the wide rim of his hat. He pushed it clear of his eyes to once more inspect the clouds to the north, no doubt gauging the chances of more bad weather arriving to cover their escape. His father knew these hills of the Breaks well, and he could read the weather of southern Khos like a seer. He did not look hopeful at what he saw.
‘Quick as you can,’ Cole said to the twenty bedraggled women, all squatted down on the trail with their skirts hitched up amidst rising clouds of steam, trying to pee on command.
‘It’s the fact he’s enjoying this,’ one of them grumbled, and Nico saw that it was Shandras, the short-haired woman he’d been seated opposite on the wagon.
‘All you can manage now, ladies,’ said Cole as he slapped Nico’s back on the way past in mid-flow. ‘As much as you can get on the trail, if you please.’
The women were quiet mostly, making what they
could of this brief respite from their harried trek despite the strange request made of them. They were cold in the ragged dresses and aprons they had been captured in, even with the thin blankets they wore like shawls. Nico watched them from the corner of his eye, glimpsing the bare skin of their legs gleaming in the night. The pretty one, Kes, caught him taking a peek and lifted her skirt for a brief flash of her thighs, grinning where she squatted.
Quickly he buttoned himself up with a clearing of his throat, and turned away.
Even now we make space for living, he reflected soberly.
Nico was trying hard not to dwell on what could happen here if they were captured again; though even harder he was trying not to dwell on the recent deaths that lay behind him – the startled faces of men in the dark woods as he ran them through with his blade.
Killing had a way of sticking to you like a bad aura, he knew by now. Even if you never thought about your actions at all, they were still there with you, part of you, like something that needed to be washed off but never could be.
Even his father was acting differently towards him. He stared more directly at Nico now, with a kind of subdued disbelief mixed with curiosity, as though seeing his son for the first time as more than a boy. His tone had changed to something less dismissive than before.
If only the price for his father’s new-found respect had not been so high.
Nico looked back along their trail again, seeing the flicker of lantern light moving down through the far trees. All that killing had allowed them to escape, yet it wasn’t over yet, not with these pursuers hot on their trail. More bloodshed was still to come.
Sometimes, Nico reflected, it was as though life gave you good fortune only so it could rip it away again with the bad.
*
After killing the slavers in their camp and freeing the captives, they barely had time enough to gather what food and supplies they could before Nico had heard riders fast approaching along the road.
The escaped guards must have made it to the small garrison in the last burnt-out village they had passed, for in a moment Nico had spotted imperial soldiers headed their way, even as he shouted out a warning to the others.
In a rush, Cole had led the panicking group west across the road into the trees and the hills, but it hadn’t taken long for the imperial soldiers to find their trail in the snow. Soon they were following the group, using a lantern to light up the tracks they were leaving through the drifts. All night long, their pursuers had slowly been closing the distance between them.
Now the ragged group had paused by the banks of a noisy river, the same Bitter River that eventually ran through the city of Bar-Khos – for Cole had claimed to have a sudden idea.
‘We need to rest soon,’ said the woman Shandras, straightening her skirts as she rose.
‘You’re resting now, aren’t you?’ Cole snapped back at her. He was staring ahead to the western skyline, where something kept drawing his attention on a nearby hill.
‘We don’t rest soon, we’re going to start dropping, I tell you.’
Cole rounded on her with his teeth bared, hissing under his breath. ‘If we stop now we get caught by our pursuers. Is that what you want, woman?’
It was in that moment when Nico realized the pressure his father was under. Cole had taken on the responsibility of these Khosian women as his own, even though he would have clearly left them behind given the chance, would have chosen the safety of his own family over anything else first.
‘At least tell us why we’re doing this, for Kush sake?’
‘I did,’ he answered, stepping clear of her. ‘We’re marking our trail.’
The women were standing now and huddling together for warmth, or gathering the reins of the few zels they had managed to retrieve from the slaver camp. They glanced uneasily at the speck of light following them behind.
‘Wash your boots off in what snow you can find,’ Cole instructed. ‘Then rub some of those winterberries onto your boots, mask any scents still on you.’ Cole nodded to a nearby bush covered in shrivelled red berries.
Bronze hair flashed in moonlight cast by a sudden break in the clouds. Nico watched his father glance towards the captive they had mistaken for his mother, before he turned southwards to stare across the noisy river, all the way to the orange glow lighting up the sky above the enemy encampment.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Cole grumbled to his son, his familiar profile shadowed by the brim of his hat. ‘We’ll be hard-pressed to catch up with your mother now. If she’s reached the front, we’ll have a time getting her out of their camp.’
‘I know. But we could hardly just leave them like that.’
No? said his father’s glance.
Nico was tired of saying sorry for what he’d done, for what he had been certain was the right thing to do. In truth, part of him felt a small measure of disappointment at his father’s callousness. The father he had known before the war would never have suggested leaving these women to their fates. He certainly wouldn’t have criticized his son for wishing to do so. No, this was the scarred, hardened man he remembered during the worsening days of the siege, become almost a stranger to Nico even before he had fled.
Squabbling wouldn’t help the matter though. And he supposed he was hardly being fair on his father either. Cole had saved that child back there after all, even when it meant risking his chances of rescuing his own son. Beneath the scarred and adamantine shell, the father of his youth was still in there somewhere, an easygoing man of generous heart and good humour, glimpsed in those moments when he forgot himself most of all, forgot about the burdens he still carried that were warping him with their pressures.
‘You talked about these hills when I was a boy,’ Nico remembered, scanning about their position. He could see a herd of water buffalo huddled under a few trees by the water’s edge.
‘Used to come to the Breaks with my brother Bahn a lot, when we were younger. Back when I still lived in the city.’
It was always a surprise to hear of his father’s upbringing in Bar-Khos, before Nico had even been born. He always imagined Cole as a rugged homesteader and outdoorsman, someone born beneath the open sky.
‘We hunted and fished. Camped under the stars. Took mushrooms.’ He cast the tightest of smiles. ‘Good times.’
Hard to imagine such a thing. His father and Bahn as young lads, high on mushrooms under the stars.
‘Whatever you’re planning here, I hope it works.’
‘It’ll work.’
Nico looked up just then, and saw that the clouds had momentarily cleared overhead. The stars were shining full of life up there, and he sensed the whole world spinning beneath the soles of his feet; this planet, smaller than once it had seemed in his mind, yet infinitely larger too.
He inclined his head, thinking he heard a horn calling out through the night air, not from the city but closer. His father was watching the speck of lantern light back along their trail, slowly moving along the Bitter River. Their pursuers were getting close. Nico could see the individual shapes of their zels stepping through the gloom.
Suddenly he heard it again, unmistakable this time – a hunting horn sounding out as though their pursuers had caught sight of them. Shouts carried their way on the breeze.
With a grim calmness Cole fixed his stare towards the west again, where the river bulged and curved around a hill. Nico followed his gaze with interest.
‘What is it?’ Nico enquired, seeing the pinpricks of golden light bobbing about at the top of the slope. For an awful moment he thought they were more imperial soldiers blocking their way. ‘Torches?’
‘No. That’s where we’re headed.’
Like some Alhazii prophet of the deep desert, his father raised his rifle into the starry sky and pointed it towards the west, towards the slope topped with glimmers of light, and shouted, ‘This way!’ to the straggling group of women.
Cole crunched forward into the virgin snow and Nico followed after him, just li
ke in the old days, son and father out hunting for winter quail in the foothills of the High Tell. And just like back then, Nico could tell from the determined hunch of his shoulders and the long steady lope of intent that his father was on to something.
‘Come on!’ yelled Cole from further up the gully with a throw of his arm ahead, as though that way lay a salvation known only to him.
*
In his surging, long-legged stride Cole led them upwards through the trees, hissing at the women behind them to be quiet now.
Firemoths, Nico realized, seeing what they were headed for at the top of the hill, those strange lights flickering between the trees. Firemoths swarming in their hundreds in one of their deep winter displays. He had no idea why his father was so earnestly headed for them, but at least the group was gaining height now. With the hunting horn calling out ever louder from their trail below, it seemed the best course left to them.
Behind him followed the chuff of hooves through the deep snow. Some of the freed captives rode on their few zels, including Chira, the raw-eyed woman who’d been given the child, asleep now against her bosom. After them came the rest of the bedraggled women, hanging on to each other and the tails of the zels as they struggled upwards in a steamy line, young Kes amongst them.
Now they were free, these hardy homesteaders who had been seized from along the Chilos had no intention of being recaptured. None complained how tired they were, only gritted their teeth harder and kept struggling upwards, spurred on by the horn calling after them from along the river valley below. But with every glance cast backwards by his father Nico knew what he was thinking. It wasn’t enough. Soon they would be overtaken.
Up on the brow of the hill moonbirds were calling out into the night, cooing like doves at the twin moons and each other. The moons lit up the ground, one white and one a pale blue shining through breaks in the trees, adding a cool tinge to the already frozen appearance of the white hills about them.
