by Col Buchanan
‘What do we do?’
‘Start looking.’
Casually they sauntered onto the ground as though they both belonged there, Nico headed for one of the tarpaulins while his father headed for another. With a glance towards the nearby tents, Nico stooped down and tugged at the edge of the tarp.
Underneath was a pit in the ground, covered in a tight lattice of wooden poles. Startled faces blinked up at the sudden intrusion of daylight. Nico baulked at the fetid stench rising in the waves of warm air. Flies were buzzing down there. Someone coughed in the gloom.
‘Reese!’ he hissed down, taking in the dull grimy faces of women squinting up at him. ‘Mother!’
No one spoke.
‘A red-headed woman,’ he tried. ‘Please, have any of you seen her?’
Down in the gloom a woman reached up and clutched his hands between the wooden poles, squeezing in desperation.
‘Red hair,’ she gasped, eyes shining in her grimy face. ‘Called Reese?’
‘Yes!’
‘If I tell you, will you get me out of here?’
Nico grimaced and tried gently to free himself from her grip. He looked up to his father, crouched down at one of the other pits. Beyond Cole, at the row of tents, a soldier brushing his teeth with a covestick was watching what they were doing.
‘I can’t!’ Nico said down to the poor woman. ‘They’ll see me. Please, what can you tell me?’
‘I’ll do anything!’ she rasped as she lunged upwards, her face pressing against the poles, her blue eyes screaming.
A hand grabbed at his shoulder, yanking him to his feet.
‘Keep moving,’ said his father by his side, and his voice was even grimmer than before. ‘She’s over there by the tents, lashed to a punishment post.’ And his father nodded to what it was they were headed for, a post of wood taller than a man, propped at the edge of the field.
As hard as he stared Nico couldn’t see her there; as though he couldn’t bring himself to see her there. Yet the closer they came to the post the more he seemed to focus on the details of the woman hanging like a carcass of meat: the naked flesh streaked with blood, the hands bound high over her head, the wild red hair.
‘Holy Mercy of Kush, it’s her.’
‘Hold it together now.’
‘Look at what they’ve done to her!’
‘I know.’
‘I’m going to kill – shit!’
‘What?’
But his father saw him too now: the soldier sauntering over from the tents with the covestick still in his mouth. At once, Cole and Nico both picked up their pace, but the fellow quickened likewise to cut them off.
‘Let me do the talking,’ said Cole.
‘I will not. The only accent you can do is Khosian.’
‘You men need something?’ asked the soldier as he blocked their way, waving his covestick at them as emphasis to the dangerous curiosity in his eyes. ‘Lost, maybe?’
‘That woman there,’ said Nico before his father could speak up, adopting the best Q’osian accent he could manage. And he nodded over the man’s shoulder towards the punishment post, towards what was hanging there in naked shame.
He could see the individual stripes on her back now. The vivid, livid lash strokes across his mother’s skin.
‘You’ve whipped her, I see,’ Nico said, and his voice sounded thick in his ears. His father stirred at the sound of it, still saying nothing.
‘A crying shame too,’ said the soldier. ‘Bitch needs to be broken in though. Went and bit off a fellow’s nose on her first night here. You interested in buying her or something, lad?’
‘Yeah,’ Nico growled and shoved past the man, no longer able to hold himself back.
‘Hey!’ called the soldier from behind.
‘Mother,’ Nico croaked as he came around to face her, cradling her head and her battered face. ‘Mother, it’s me, Nico.’
Reese stirred for a moment, her eyelids fluttering. He saw a gleam of eye in all the bruised swelling around it – his mother grimly holding on.
He wanted to be sick. Trembling uncontrollably, Nico held her cold body against his own, taking her weight. With his knife he cut her free so that she sagged in his arms, and in a rush he wrapped her in his Mannian cloak.
His father appeared by his side and swiftly hefted her over his back. ‘I’ll take her.’
Behind them the soldier was lying face down in the dirt, his covestick drifting along a spreading outflow of blood from his slit throat.
Nico felt nothing, looking at the body in that instant. Nothing but a simmering satisfaction.
Whumpf!
The air trembled with a sudden shockwave, making them both turn towards the south, towards the distant wall of the city, where a spout of fire and debris was rising high above one of the gates.
Cries of alarm rose from the surrounding pens of cattle.
‘You there!’ someone called out from the tents.
A man was striding towards them with his sword drawn.
‘Let’s go,’ said Cole, turning with Reese across his back, and together they started running across the field towards the river, headed for the sanctuary of the Khosian forces battling their way through the enemy camp on the other side.
‘Stop there!’
The soldier gave chase, and another two further behind him, burdened by their armour and their drawn blades.
Not looking back, his father kept his head down as he ran, sweating and puffing with the weight of Reese, though he chanced a look to the south again and the city wall, where a pall of black smoke was now rising.
‘I think they’ve blown open the city gates,’ he gasped.
But Nico was more focused on the soldiers in pursuit. He cursed as the ill-fitting helm slipped over his eyes once again. Grabbed it off his head and tossed it behind him, dropping the nearest man with a lucky shot to his kneecap.
A few steps ahead Cole was charging down the river bank towards the slow flow of the water, sunlight dazzling across its surface.
‘Keep going,’ Nico called after him. ‘I’m right behind you!’
And Nico drew his sword in one swift stroke and turned to hold off the enemy, no longer feeling afraid now, only enraged.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bahn
In the thick of the fighting, Bahn Calvone paused with his hand cannon pointed at the Lord Protector’s spine, his finger twitching on the trigger.
‘Sweet Mercy,’ growled General Creed in disbelief, so quietly that only Bahn heard him from a step behind.
The Lord Protector had stopped to look to the south, drawn by the thunder of explosions just like Bahn and everyone else – Creed’s bodyguards and the two thousand sweaty, bloody fighters who had accompanied the general on this sortie through the outskirts of the enemy encampment. Even the nearest Imperials themselves were turning to look, so that everyone stared towards the city wall where twin columns of smoke were rising, and the Khosian horns blared in alarm.
‘They’ve blown the gates!’ wailed a young Volunteer as though they couldn’t see the calamity for themselves, couldn’t hear the victorious roar of the imperial forces storming towards the breaches.
Red-faced and panting, General Creed lowered his blade and stood there in the windy gusts of the plain stunned to silence. Bahn too lowered the gun in his hand. With confusion tearing him in two he stared open-mouthed at the masses of fighters and their war banners gathering before the smoking gates, knowing they would be pouring through into the city beyond.
Bahn fought hard to think of his wife and his children, there in the family home in the north of the city – but when he did a flash of white pain speared through his mind.
Marlee! he thought in defiance, and the sudden shooting pains in his head nearly dropped him to the ground.
He blinked through his tears, seeing the gun in his hand, the snub double barrels he had just been pointing surreptitiously at Creed’s spine, with the intention of shooting the Lord Protec
tor dead. It was only when he focused on the gun in his hand, and what he needed to do with it, that he was able to see and hear clearly again, and his confusions dimmed to a background chatter.
‘How in the sky did they blow the damned gates?’ growled Creed, and Bahn could see the general’s face had drained of blood.
In the distance, the sounds of battle along the walls were reaching a fevered pitch. Closer though, in the camp itself, all seemed strangely silent, save for the snap of flames from the tents they had set ablaze, spreading quickly on the wind.
Bahn blinked, taking in the figures of the nearest enemy troops now running away, scampering off through the encampment in the direction of the nearby river.
‘They’re running!’ rose the shout from various throats. ‘Why are they running?’
And suddenly it was as though all two thousand fighters were standing alone there by themselves, with not a single enemy figure remaining.
Gusts blasted through the enemy encampment, blowing open the flaps of empty tents. Men glanced around nervously. Officers looked to the general, his hair swept from his head and pointing towards the city wall even as he stared after it, consumed by what he saw.
‘I’m dreaming,’ Bahn ventured aloud, clutching at straws.
‘We all are,’ growled Creed. ‘We’re dreaming this whole stinking war and this is the latest nightmare.’
But Bahn meant it – he felt like he was wading through a delirium. Numb in body, and now increasingly so in his mind, he peeked out from far inside his head at the bleak and lonely world all around him.
‘We need to retreat,’ called out an officer in black leathers, and it was Major Bolt of the Specials, veteran of Chey-Wes. ‘We need to get back to the city, right now, General!’
Creed stirred, leaning over to spit out his distaste at what he was seeing. If the Lord Protector was frightened, only the paleness of his features showed any sign of it. He glanced to the last enemy figures disappearing from sight through the camp, then back along the trail of writhing bodies left in the wake of his own forces; hundreds of fallen enemy soldiers with an arm or leg shorn from their bodies, maimed and bleeding out onto the earth right next to their severed limbs – a whole road of them leading all the way back to the smoking north-eastern gate, which was now swarming with imperial forces.
‘Your orders, General?’ shouted a Red Guard colonel, pushing through the gasping fighters with his helm missing from a bleeding scalp.
‘Quickly now,’ shouted Creed over the heads of his fighters, and thrust his sword aloft. ‘With me, damn it!’
At a run they set off south through the deserted outskirts of the camp, Creed and their fluttering banners leading the way through the rolling smoke. Bahn stayed close to the general, his gun shaking in his hand. Off to the right, their three skyships were engaging a pair of imperial Birds-of-War. One of the enemy ships was trailing flames. He could see burning figures leaping from it.
A man stumbled to the ground in front of him, a young Red Guard carrying Creed’s standard, and then Bahn tripped too on something and went down almost on top of the fellow. Reaching back for his fallen gun, he glimpsed what he had caught his foot on – a thick wire mostly buried by loose earth.
Bahn grabbed the thing and gave it a tug, and gasped as it popped from the ground in a line that ran towards the nearby Bitter River.
What was this?
Buried mines?
At once the world erupted in a blast of dirt and hot air that rocked the earth beneath him. Everything inside Bahn was squeezed hard. Coughing grit, he looked out from the cover of his arms as another explosion shook through the ground, sending a fountain of black earth rising skywards, bodies flying like limp dolls in every direction.
Bahn could only huddle down further, flinching from every shock of air jolting through him, the earth bucking like a living thing beneath him. He snatched a glimpse of fighters hurling themselves to the ground with their own arms over their heads; others running back the way they had come; yet more spinning through the air, through the morning sky right over his head. And then a cloud of smoke and grit rolled over him like a burial shroud and turned day to night, the whole world coming asunder like his own heart.
Where was Creed in all this mayhem? Could he have been blown to pieces like the rest of them – Bahn released from his awful task by this Mannian trap instead?
But it seemed not, for a hand was suddenly pulling at his cloak, and Bahn recognized that indomitable strength hauling him to his feet.
Marsalas Creed was snarling something as he dragged Bahn through the choppy haze. His hair flew wild around eyes squinting fiercely in all the gritty hail coming down, and the Lord Protector surged through the maelstrom like a man defying a tide; like an old pit fighter coming back from a knockout with all he had left.
In a wedge of bodyguards Creed led them away from the erupting earth, charging between the blazing tents of the encampment towards the only ground that wasn’t exploding around them – eastwards towards the river, and the distant flashes of imperial troops still fleeing from the vicinity. Deafened by the concussions, they rushed past tents blazing in the rising winds, leaving the dead and wounded where they fell. Bodies lay scattered everywhere. No one could hear Creed shouting for everyone to follow, yet fighters formed around him and his young standard-bearer anyway, the raised shields of his bodyguards clattering with debris.
‘Mines, General!’ someone was hollering into Creed’s ear. ‘They’ve laid the camp with mines. It’s a trap!’
‘I can see, can’t I?’
Before them glittered the Bitter River, flowing across the plain towards the city wall, the early sunlight striking across it in glassy scales of brilliance that played in Bahn’s eyes, captivating him.
‘Where are you, my love? Where have you gone?’ Marlee had asked Bahn as she had seen him off.
He should have said something to his dear wife, something meaningful, while he still had the chance. But instead offering only forgettable platitudes of farewell.
Bahn blinked in the sunlight bouncing from the river, seeing a line of gunsmoke suddenly rippling along the opposite bank.
‘Get down!’ someone was yelling as they ducked or fell from the incoming volleys of shots. Though Bahn only stood there gaping, hearing the rip of bullets going past him, tearing through tents and flesh alike. Others were braving the fire too: a short-haired woman in the skins of a Volunteer ranger, bearing a longrifle. He saw her crouching down at the river bank, a captain by her insignia, waving her companions onwards, shouting with spirit at the riflemen crashing to the earth around her feet and returning fire.
A familiar face startled him, and then Bahn glimpsed it again. It was the young street girl turned army medico known as Curl, her achingly beautiful features so out of place here in all this ugly violence, the crest of her hair bobbing high while she tended to a wounded man.
Maybe the girl was a portent of some kind, seeing her here in the midst of the fighting again, just like he had at the battle of Chey-Wes. A reminder of the man he had once been, before this living death that had become his existence since that battle, when he’d been captured by the Mannians and slowly replaced by a shadow formed only to do one remaining thing with his life, to destroy all that the real Bahn had ever loved.
Shoot me now! he shouted in his mind as he stood there opening his arms wide, waiting for an enemy bullet to strike him dead.
But it seemed he was invincible just then, bullets narrowly missing him while other people were shot through. And then once again Creed’s hand grabbed a hold of Bahn and yanked him into a crouch, where the Lord Protector was hunkered behind the shields of his bodyguards. Creed paid him no mind, too busy waving battle signs to some officers lying in a crater behind them with their men. Through the smoke, the remains of their forces were flooding towards the river over the churned earth, channelled by what were obviously mines going off on every other side of them. Mines that most of all were blocking their means o
f escape to the south, their route back to the city.
Faces all around him glanced this way and that, framed by frantic motions. Everyone looked grim, sick, just getting through the next moment and the one after that. Even Creed had lost his usual shine. He looked flattened, like the day he had been told his wife was dead.
Oh Holy Mercy what have I done?
A bodyguard fell back against Bahn’s boots, his skull pierced by a bullet. Bahn stared down at the dead man.
‘Signal our air support,’ Creed was hollering to a few soldiers hunkering down next to him, clamping their helms to their heads. They held the chunky wooden box of a Sun Writer between them, and Creed slapped the nearest signaller on his shoulder to gain his startled attention. ‘Tell the ships to start laying down covering smoke along the river, in both directions.’
‘Shouldn’t we call for a pick-up?’ Major Bolt yelled at him. ‘We’re pinned down here. And anywhere we move is likely to be mined.’
‘Three ships will hardly carry us all, Major.’
‘At least we can get you out. At least we can deny them that!’
Bahn saw the general frown in an uncommon display of annoyance.
‘The smoke, dammit!’ he shouted to the stunned signallers. ‘Signal for the smoke!’
Quickly the message was flashed to the nearby trio of skyships, which were turning back now from a burning enemy ship.
In a line they flew towards them, the foremost diving fast with its skul sails sweeping wide, a huge thing when seen above the rows of tents. A Sun Writer flashed from its prow, and then it was so close that Bahn could make out the crewmen on its decks, its marines firing down with rifles and crossbows. But then a series of rockets shot up into the air from the opposite side of the river, trailing white ribbons of smoke. They all missed but for two of them, which pierced the gas canopy and blew it away in a flash of fire.
Down the ship came, spilling crew over its tilting sides. With a mighty crash it splashed into the river and then exploded from within. Bahn turned from the wash of heat. When he looked back he saw something dropping from the sky, and then something else. He wiped his eyes of tears and saw the smoke barrels raining down from the remaining two skyships, barrels that landed along the banks of the river belching a thick yellow mist stretching out in the breeze.
