by Col Buchanan
‘I lost him once before,’ his mother was saying. ‘I couldn’t make it through that pain again.’
‘It’s no problem. I don’t mind having a look.’
‘You must be too young to have any children yourself.’
The girl frowned, burdened by her thoughts for a moment.
‘You’ll understand when you do. I loved this one from the first moment I saw him.’ And Reese looked down at him with sudden tears, and she flashed a startled smile to see Nico looking back at her.
‘Son?’ she asked, leaning close to dab a damp cloth to his forehead. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Mother,’ Nico croaked, his mouth dry. ‘Where are we? What happened?’
A hand patted his own – the young medico, standing without meeting his eye. ‘His skull’s fine,’ she announced, and she brushed the same shaking hand across her grubby forehead. ‘If he is concussed, it’s only minor. But he should stay off his feet for a while.’
‘Thank you,’ said Reese after the woman’s retreating form. ‘Thank you for looking at him.’
Nico coughed to clear his throat.
‘Where are we?’ he asked again, and his mother leaned over to clear the curls from his eyes, studying him with intense interest.
‘We’re in Bar-Khos, down in All Fools. How do you feel?’
‘Like I just got kicked in the head.’
‘I think you did. But you’re fine now. You’re safe.’
‘Where’s father?’
‘Taking a shift at the barricades.’
‘Barricades?’
She paused in indecision.
‘Much of the city has fallen. We’re holding on here in the south, but just barely. They’re trying to get everyone out by ship.’
Ah yes, the war, the siege.
Nico peered through the low flickering lamplight, finally noticing the trickles of dust falling loose from the ceiling every time a nearby explosion rocked the building.
The pain in his head was considerable when he made an effort to sit up. He ignored it though, just as he ignored his mother’s complaints that he should lie still, and not move.
‘I’m not going to just lie here, Mother, while the Mannians are banging at the front door.’
There – it was better now he had his back to the wall. Nico could see around him at last. He waited for his head to stop spinning. They were in some kind of industrial building, high and long, and half ruined at one end by what seemed to be a crashed skyship rising vertically through the roof. People were crowded around the edges of the space, soldiers and citizens alike, most of all here at the back, where small camp fires warmed the air between racks of clay urns.
Silk sheeting soughed in a breeze. On the far wall, the aquamarine of a tattered League flag caught his eye. For a moment Nico peered at the Golden Spiral at its centre. He had been taught how the spiral with its ever-flattening tail was a shape of sacred geometry, describing a divine ratio played out all around them in the natural world: the shells of snails, the curls of waves, the spirals of galaxies in the night sky. A reminder, even here and now, that the world’s infinite complexity arose from an underlying architecture of beautiful simplicity.
As Nico gazed upon the scene, he saw a pair of Red Guards helping each other to their feet. The soldiers looked barely older than he was. They both sported bloody bandages on their heads, and one limped as the other gathered their swords and helped him towards the open doorway at the front of the building, where the dark of night competed with the flashes of falling shells.
‘Have you lost your wits?’ Reese protested as Nico struggled to his feet, and she stood up too, her red hair flaming in a beam of lamplight, scowling at him like he was ten years old again. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What I need to be doing,’ Nico growled back at her.
He felt a little unsteady on his feet for a moment, but the sensation passed. ‘Where’s that sword I had with me?’ he asked her, bending to pick up his winter coat spread upon the floor.
‘Sword? I’ve no idea. You can’t be thinking of going out there in your condition. You might be concussed!’
‘We’ll all be dead if we don’t hold them back.’
He stilled her with a sudden embrace. She held him tightly, her face wet against his neck. ‘It’s good to see you, Mother,’ he said into her ear. ‘Now I have to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise.’
But as he stepped clear he saw that she didn’t believe him. Indeed, his mother looked as though she would never see him again, her face pale and stricken as Nico shambled away, headed for the front doorway and the sounds of battle, wondering only where he could get his hands on a weapon with which to fight.
*
‘Excuse me,’ Nico said as he brushed past someone on his way across the busy floor – a young, short man hurrying the other way, shackled and accompanied by a guard.
But the fellow only replied with an icy stare, as though he was a knife-edge away from gutting Nico where he stood.
Danger! cried his body and mind all at once. Death!
But Nico ignored the warnings, too far gone to feel anything but anger. He straightened where he stood and glared back hotly. He was in a mood to fight anyone just then.
‘Curl!’ called out the man as a figure suddenly caught his eye. It was the very same medico who had been having a look at his head, pretending she hadn’t heard him.
Nico passed a water barrel and drank from it until his thirst was sated. Tempers were running high in the packed space of the building, which was cold and draughty for all the fires that were burning. Tense voices argued back and forth. A pair of Volunteers were shoving at each other over what seemed like morsels of food.
Coming in from the cold, a Red Guard started shouting over everyone’s heads about the Stadium of Arms being captured, and how the barricades were barely holding.
A sword, Nico thought. I need a damned sword.
‘Nico?’
He looked up with water dribbling from his chin towards a figure bounding towards him, barely believing his own eyes.
‘Aléas!’ he shouted to his approaching friend. ‘What are you doing here?’
The young Rōshun threw him his lopsided grin, then broke through Nico’s surprise with a firm embrace.
‘Same as everyone else. Just trying to survive the end of the world.’
He looked well for all that his cloak was travel-stained and his clothing ragged. Only his long blond hair was its usual combed neatness. Less than a fortnight had passed since they had last seen each other, yet it felt like months to Nico just then, a whole lifetime ago, since he had set off in search of his mother.
‘Come on,’ said Aléas. ‘Some of the other Rōshun are here too. They’ll be gladdened to see you.’
Nico wasn’t so certain of that. It was hardly as if he had made many friends in the brief time he had known the Rōshun.
‘Later, when I get back. I want to check on my father first.’ And his glance outside at the flashing darkness told Aléas all he needed to know. ‘Why don’t you come with me? You can fill me in on everything I’ve missed on the way.’
‘Can’t, I’m afraid. Big meeting soon, about some important mission we’re meant to be going on. I’ve been asked not to wander far.’
Nico glanced over his friend’s shoulder but saw only dark forms in the firestruck shadows. ‘The big Anwi man,’ he asked, recalling the fellow who had accompanied them from the Isles of Sky. ‘He’s still with you?’
‘Juke?’ Aléas scowled. ‘The man took off not long after you did. Said he had somewhere important to be. I haven’t seen him since.’
‘And Ash. Baracha. Did they ever make it back?’
A blink; his only show of emotion.
‘No. They never did.’
The booms of explosions rattled the building, sending more dust trickling into the air. A man cried out in his restless sleep.
‘This really is a sorry state of affairs to find ourselves in, h
uh?’
‘It truly is.’
‘I’m headed for the barricades. Just come with me for a little while. It’ll be like old times again.’
Aléas looked towards the open doors.
‘Well maybe I can skip out for half an hour. Make sure you don’t get yourself killed again.’
‘Good man! And listen, I’ve lost my sword somehow. Can you get me a blade?’
The young Rōshun stiffened with mock sincerity. ‘You’re really asking if I have a spare blade?’ With a smile he opened up his cloak wide like a pair of wings, to reveal the glitters of blades hanging there from his belt, his side, his outer thigh, his ankle.
‘Take your pick.’
Nico reached for the biggest blade he could see.
‘Just not that one. No, not that one either.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Nico
Through the dark and crowded streets of All Fools, Nico and Aléas hurried towards the sounds of war.
Ahead lay the rest of the city like a heap of coals smouldering in the night. Brilliant explosions dazzled their eyes, flames soaring high. But they were nothing compared to the lightshow in the starry sky, seemingly beamed from the enemy positions in the north – sheets of lightning flickering more rapidly than any thunderstorm imaginable, flashing so fast that they created the strangest of visual effects here on the ground. Every time he glanced at Aléas running through the shadows, his friend was flickering in and out of existence while moving in the jerkiest of motions.
‘Damned lights are giving me a headache,’ said Nico through gritted teeth.
His head throbbed as the cobbles shook with another tremor.
To their left rose the Mount of Truth, its crest festooned with signal flashes and cannons firing down on the enemy-held streets to the north. Skyships circled around it laying down even more fire.
A cart hammered along the busy street with its driver whipping at a pair of zels, loaded down with wounded figures. Children were screaming in fright from a nearby house.
The fiery buildings in the distance burned like so many bonfires.
‘You frightened?’ Nico asked his friend.
‘More tense than anything. You?’
‘Feels like a snake’s in my belly.’
‘Yeah, I hate this part before the action. Before your blood is up.’
It was funny to hear Aléas speak like a grizzled veteran, for he was the same age as Nico, eighteen years old. He recalled that the young man was originally from imperial Q’os.
‘You all right with this, taking on your own people?’
But Aléas only scoffed at his question.
Mortar shells were falling across their line of sight, concussions felt through the soles of their boots. Flames bloomed from the rooftops.
No wonder people were crowded in so tightly here. All Fools was the southernmost district of the city and furthest from the enemy, stretching across the throat of the Lansway between both harbours. Its streets and alleyways were filled with people who had fled from the falling north of the city; desperate figures hunkered down together for warmth under what blankets or cloaks they possessed, praying for a way out, or standing watching the falling shells, or shouting, or walking about in a daze. Soldiers stumbled past drooping with exhaustion. People gabbled noisily from the rooftops over their heads.
‘Almost reminds me of festa,’ Nico said, for that was exactly what he was thinking of just then, those famous week-long carnivals of Bar-Khos, his favourite times in the city; the streets and rooftops hosting a thousand, never-ending parties in defiance of the siege.
Was it all gone now? Would any of that ever happen again, when citizens were fleeing by ship from the harbour even now, and those waiting out the night here were likewise awaiting their turns to flee?
‘Reminds me of my first Rōshun vendetta as Baracha’s apprentice,’ said Aléas. ‘In the city of Calretti with the Mannians at the walls. We stole inside disguised as Calretti defenders, going after one of their Rice Tyrants in his Forbidden Palace. I was sick with fear the entire time. I mean physically sick from it. Baracha couldn’t stop laughing.’
‘Ash was no better. At the worst of times he’d find something that was funny.’
Nothing else to say to that; their lingering silence a kind of respect for the two men most likely dead now, lying out there somewhere beyond the looming black walls of the Shield to the south.
‘You ever think about it? What comes after this?’
‘A hot bath, I hope.’
‘I mean death, Aléas. What happens when we die? I mean, when they brought me back to life, I could hardly remember a thing about who I was. But I could remember, just for a while, impressions from when I’d been dead. Death wasn’t just a nothingness. I still existed in some way.’
‘Or you had some crazy dreams before they woke you up.’
Nico shook his head. He knew it had been more than that. Dreams, he reflected. Maybe he had been dreaming in death just as he dreamed in life.
‘You think the Great Dreamer is twisted enough to kill me twice in as many seasons?’
‘Why not?’ answered Aléas, straight-faced. ‘The cosmos seems to like its surprises, the more dramatic the better.’
‘True, but now that we’ve said it, doesn’t that kind of cancel it out?’
‘Cancel what out, that you might die here? You really think it works like that?’
‘I think, Aléas, I have a strange feeling right now, and it’s only growing stronger the closer we get to those fires. Like I could be going to my death all over again.’
‘Relax, you’re just spooked. Anyone would feel that way after everything you’ve been through. Just keep your head down when we reach the barricades, you’ll be fine.’
The scenes grew worse as they neared the roar of battle. Buildings were ablaze in solid lines here, and crowds had gathered with sloshing pails to fight the fires, though their efforts were hampered by the shells that were still falling. In the middle of the street a pair of snot-nosed children cried out for their parents with arms outstretched. Not far from them stood an old woman in her woollen nightgown, biting the knuckles of one hand as she stared at the chaos all around her, her wits blown to pieces. Monks hurried back and forth, humping water or helping carry the wounded clear, tending to those already dying.
With every footfall Nico’s heart-rate grew faster.
‘There it is,’ said Aléas, but Nico had already seen it ahead – a barricade sealing the end of the street, with more barricades extending across streets on either side of it, in a line of defence that ran right across the southern districts.
It was larger than he’d been expecting as they came nearer. A rampart of rubble and beams that rose a full twelve feet in height, flickering in and out of sight with the rapid flashes of lightning in the night sky. Defenders scrambled along the slope with their heads down, occasionally backlit with yellow eruptions of fire, moving in the same jerky motions as everyone else through the constantly flashing light: Red Guards, Volunteers and a good number of civilians.
Above their heads a skyship blew up like a midnight sun, momentarily washing everything with its brilliance.
‘Stay cool,’ Aléas shouted, taking the short bow from his back and notching an arrow. ‘Don’t lose your head!’
At a jog they approached the barricade with the defenders’ shouts and gunshots assailing their ears. A shell landed across the street, blowing off the roof of a building in a rain of debris – shocking in its proximity. Hunching low, Nico looked for a sign of his father amongst the figures ranged along the top of the defences, but he couldn’t see him. He supposed Cole could be anywhere along the front line here.
A block of masonry provided cover as they both hunkered down behind it. The slope of the barricade looked like a dangerous place to be right now. Most of the defenders at the top were lying with their arms over their heads as bullets struck around them. Only a few riflemen were brave or reckless enough to fire b
ack.
So what now? Nico thought to himself.
Aléas read his expression, and slapped his arm with a grin.
‘You having fun yet?’
*
Really, he’d been expecting to do more than simply hunker down like this, jumping at every explosion, just waiting for something to happen – waiting, indeed, to be useful. Nico had been ready to take on the enemy hand-to-hand if needed, yet there was no fighting to be done, not here and now anyway.
Maybe they should head further along the defensive line, where the Imperials could be heard assaulting the barricades in a clash of shields and swords. But with all these mortar shells coming down it was hard to get the body moving again; it seemed like madness to leave the shelter of their cover.
He was just turning to Aléas when a sudden white heat blinded him, and Nico threw his hand over his face before an even greater blast knocked him clear off his feet.
Screams sounded through the falling dust. Coughing and spitting grit, Nico looked up to see the large bite of rubble now missing from the middle of the rampart.
Aléas was squirming on the ground trying to recover his short-bow. Someone’s severed legs were lying not far from him, bloodied and bent out of shape. Across the street another blinding explosion went off inside a half-ruined building, warming Nico’s face with its heat while the cobbles shook. Even as he looked on, the building’s brick shell sloughed away like a discarded coat, leaving the bare bones of its structure engulfed in an inferno. Soldiers tumbled out through windows and doorways, frantically tearing off their burning cloaks.
Nico gripped the bucking ground, gagging at the scents of roasting meat carrying across the street, terrified out of his wits.
‘Aléas!’
Overhead a lone, sputtering flare sailed into the air, casting its green light across the battlefront. Nico pulled himself into cover again while the flare hung for a moment in a sky stitched with angry tracer fire. Everything around him seemed angry now – the rippling shocks of air blasting back his hair, the cracks of gunfire, the yells and curses, the flames, the popping grenades, the ground itself rumbling as though enraged at being awakened.
