Farlander hotw-1

by Col Buchanan

  It was no plan at all, as far as Nico was concerned. He gripped the leather-wrapped hilt of his sword for some vague reassurance, ready to draw it as he was trained to. Nothing any longer seemed real to him.

  One of the figures raised a pistol in his hand. A pistol. 'Halt!' he shouted again.

  Ash: 'How close are they?'

  'Six paces.'

  Nico jumped in shock as something exploded next to his head. In front of them, the pistoleer cried out and tumbled backwards to the ground.

  Serese tossed her own smoking pistol away and drew a long hunting knife without breaking stride. Nico paused, marvelling at the sight of her – and then Ash sprang into action too.

  In one seamless movement the old man drew his blade and ducked, with foreleg bent and hindleg stretched back, and raked his sword across a man's belly; still following through the same motion, he deflected a down-coming blow from another Regulator, turned away the blade, stabbed out.

  Nico missed what happened next. By then he was in the thick of it himself. He swerved from a slash as he had been endlessly drilled to do, felt the cool breath of the blade as it passed his face. This is real, his mind suggested. These men are trying to kill me.

  His body took over. He drew his sword and with his next step thrust it forwards. He felt resistance and then he was through it – a face grimacing inches away from his own. It was a man, a human, impaled on his blade. The man struggled. Nico could feel his desperate movements through the hilt of his sword. He would have let go out of disgust if he hadn't felt a sudden lightness in his grip as the man pulled himself clear of the blade, gasped as though in relief, then sat himself down on the ground.

  Nico backed away from him.

  He felt arms lock around his neck, pulling him backwards and downwards as his sword was knocked from his grasp. He hit the cobbles, a weight pressing on him, a man's stinking breath in his face as someone else held his legs. Cursing and struggling, Serese was thrown to the ground next to him.

  Nico wrenched his head free and lifted it enough to catch sight of Ash.

  The farlander was still on his feet, cutting a dance through the cloaked men gathered round him. Nico watched him in awe as did the Regulators pinning him down. For a moment it looked as though the old man couldn't be stopped, his movements so fast there was no chance to react to them, his own actions seeming to pre-empt all others that occurred around him.

  But there were too many Regulators, and anyway, Ash could barely see. He missed with one strike and suffered a cut across his left arm, a sudden slash that would have taken off the limb entirely had the old man not somehow known to swerve aside in time. He took the wound with a grunt and a defensive sweep of his blade. A blackness dripped in the dim light from the sudden rent in his sleeve.

  'Run!' the old farlander hollered, unaware that both his companions had been brought down. Another sword struck Ash, the flat of the blade crashing into the side of his head. He reeled, bounced off the wall, came off it with a snarl and his blade already lashing out. The Regulators jumped back beyond his range.

  One drew a pistol, took careful aim at Ash's kneecap.

  'Master Ash!' shouted Nico in warning, trying to fight free as the Regulator squinted and pulled the trigger.

  There was the slightest of delays before the blackpowder charge ignited… and then something wholly unexpected happened.

  A giant of a man crashed on to the scene. With a single swipe he took the top of the pistoleer's skull off, so it flapped against his cheek on a vivid hinge of raw scalp. The weapon fired even as the pistoleer toppled to the ground. The shot flew high. The giant charged onwards into those pinning holding down Nico and Serese.

  It was Baracha, and behind him came a wild-eyed Aleas. As though felling wood, Baracha heaved and chopped with his oversized blade. Aleas followed him, covering his back, jabbing and cutting left and right. Ash pressed the attack.

  On his back, still numbed by shock, Nico watched the three Rshun cut down their opponents in a grimly indifferent silence. Within moments, every Regulator was down.

  A roar of applause erupted from inside the opera house. The perfomance drawing to a close.

  Nico kept shaking, and his stomach heaved as he looked across the bodies bleeding out on to the cobbles, unable to stop gagging at the copper stench of it. His man was there somewhere, he knew, the one he had struck down. He could not even tell which one it had been.

  He heard retching and turned to see Serese vomiting against a wall. It surprised him to witness that.

  Ash was cleaning his blade on a cloak of one of the fallen. Baracha just stood there, breathing heavily, and looked at his daughter with obvious relief. Around them, on the wet cobbles, the fallen men coughed, wheezed, struggled to move.

  'A fine mess,' the Alhazii growled at Ash. 'It's as well we've been keeping our own watch on the house. I feared this might happen when you finally arrived. You did not take adequate precautions, old man.'

  Ash sheathed his sword with a firm shove. 'It is good to see you too, Baracha.'

  A shrill whistle sounded in the distance.

  'Perhaps we should leave our chit-chat for a later time?' This from Aleas.

  Nico picked up his fallen sword. It took him several attempts to grasp it then he noticed the blood on his hands, and wiped his palms against his tunic. It would not all come off. He tried to sheathe the blade but he could not seem to manage it.

  Ash settled a hand on his arm. 'Just breathe,' said the old man.

  'Yes, master,' Nico said, and slid the blade home.

  'Tomorrow then?' Ash said to Baracha.

  'Aye, tomorrow – and be sure you take proper precautions this time.'

  With quiet words, Ash instructed Nico to lead the way.

  *

  Ash's wound continued to bleed badly on the way back. He and Nico tried to stem the flow, but still the blood ran down to his hand, dripped from his glistening fingers. Ash refused to catch a tram back to the hostalio, considering his wound too conspicuous for that. He clenched a torn-off piece of his tunic against the wound for the entire journey back, making no complaint on the way. They stopped twice at deep puddles at Nico's insistence, where he tried to wash the gore from his own hands as best he could.

  'Can you see again yet?' asked Nico, as he shook his hands dry.

  'Yes, my sight clears.'

  'I don't understand. What's wrong with you exactly?'

  'Nothing is wrong with me. I told you, I suffer from head pains. If they get bad enough they can make it difficult to see.'

  Nico did not press him further, not while his master was still in obvious pain.

  When they at last reached the hostalio almost an hour later, they were bone-weary and beyond. They made it past the dozing night attendant without trouble, clambering up the four flights of stairs with thoughts of nothing but collapsing on their beds.

  They first locked the door of their dark room with a quarter taken from the pile of loose change Ash had left in the washbowl for their purposes. They then fed another quarter into the slot beneath the gaslight, and lit it with a match. Another coin was necessary to unfold Nico's bed.

  Before they could sleep, though, they needed to attend to Ash's wound. Nico used yet another quarter to run the spigot and fill the washbowl with water, the remaining coins still lying at its bottom. Meanwhile Ash took out the medico pack and rummaged through it for sterilized bandages, a vial of pure alcohol, also a needle and thread.

  The old man dripped some alcohol into the wound, hissing through his teeth as he did so. The gash was not overly deep, but gaped open and pink. The flesh around it, for the entire span of his upper arm, was now bruised a dark purple. Some more of the alcohol he poured on to the bandages. He used a match to heat the end of the needle red-hot, then threaded it with precision, though his fingers shook as the blood coursed freely down his arm. Once it was threaded, he held the needle up to Nico, and said, 'Stitch me up, boy.'

  Nico rocked back on his feet. He bli
nked, barely able to keep his eyelids apart. His body trembled with exhaustion, and he was close to falling down. There was no getting out of it though, so he took the needle and sat down beside the old man. He tried to pretend to himself that he knew what he was doing, that he had been listening during the field surgery lessons back at the monastery, that he had not been fooling around with Aleas at all.

  Carefully, he stitched the ugly lips of the wound together, while Ash sat impassively and observed his work. In a way, Nico's exhaustion was a blessing just then; his brain was too far gone to become squeamish at what he saw.

  At last Ash nodded with a sigh: 'That will do.'

  Nico cut the thread with a knife and fixed a bandage, as best he could, around the arm. He then took off the old man's boots and helped lift his feet on to the bed, making sure his head was properly propped on the pillow.

  Ash closed his eyes. His breathing grew shallower.

  Nico thought of this old man dancing through the armed Regulators while near-blind, wielding his blade as though it was weight less, all the glamour and myth surrounding him suddenly bearing truth.

  'I think I killed a man tonight,' Nico said quietly over his master's still form.

  Ash inclined his head by the smallest degree to look up at him. 'And how do you feel, now it is done?'

  'Like a criminal. As though I took something I had no right to take. As though I have become someone else, someone tainted.'

  'Good, may it always be that way. Only worry if after the act is done and your blood cooled, you feel nothing at all.'

  But that was what Nico wished for most of all, just to feel nothing. How could he ever return home to his mother and meet her eye, knowing what he had done?

  'He might have had children,' Nico said. 'A son, like me.'

  Ash shut his eyes, let his head straighten back on the pillow.

  'You did well, Nico,' the farlander croaked.

  The words barely registered on Nico. He kept his own boots on as he made the hardest climb of his life up on to the top bunk. He had barely sprawled on the thin mattress before his body gave up on him. He fell into a deep unconsciousness.

  Both of them lay dead to the world, each covered in a sheen of sweat and dried blood, oblivious to the pounding of a fight in the room overhead, the coins falling and clattering endlessly behind other walls.

  *

  It was quiet in the dark streets surrounding the opera house. The great building itself lay in silence, the perfomance finished for the night. Its patrons had long departed for home or gone on to further late-night engagements.

  The cart rocked on its wheels as another corpse was thrown on to it. The clean-up squad worked in silence, save for the occasional grunt of exertion from behind the kerchiefs wrapped around their faces or the odd curse in response to the reeking evacuations of the bodies they trod amongst. Two figures stood apart from the scene, a man and a woman. He puffed on a hazii stick; she leaned against a wall, wrapped tightly in her cloak.

  'He comes at last,' the man declared.

  Another zel-drawn cart creaked into the side street, a stout wooden box on wheels. Its driver clucked the zel on as quietly as he could, and pulled in the reins as he drew parallel with the two figures.

  'You took your time,' the woman reproached him, pushing herself off the wall.

  The driver shrugged. 'How long?' he asked, before dismounting.

  'An hour – no more.'

  The driver clucked his tongue, strode to the back of the cart. He tugged open the doors and a pair of bloodhounds stared out at him from a wire cage, their tails wagging furiously.

  'Come my darlings,' he said to them. 'Time to earn your supper.'

  After opening the cage he fastened thick leashes to their collars, then allowed them to jump down.

  The hounds pulled hard against his bodyweight, keen to begin the hunt. They remained quiet save for their open-mouthed panting, as they had been trained. 'The trail of blood leads that way,' the woman pointed out helpfully.

  But dogs were already on to it, and they scurried after the scent with their handler barely able to restrain them. 'We move fast,' he warned over his shoulder, not waiting to see if anyone came after him.

  The two Regulators exchanged a glance, then followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Fishing With Pebbles In any other city port on the Mideres, alarms might have rung out at the unexpected arrival of a war galleon flying no colours save for a neutral black, and carrying a force of men clearly fitted out for war.

  But this was Cheem, and sights like that were as common as fish. As the vessel moored by the wharf side and the men disembarked with military discipline, a few of the local beggars – ex-sailors mostly, crippled or burned out – turned to see if it might be worth their while asking for spare change, and quickly decided against it. Only one of these beggars allowed his gaze to linger for any length of time: a man in his forties, his left arm ending abruptly in a leather-bound stump. Once, he had been a soldier in the Imperial Legion, and he was not so far gone with age and drugs to miss noticing the imperial military tattoos on the bare wrists and arms of the men disembarking, nor the camouflage attire they wore under their plain cloaks, nor their obvious self-regard.

  Commandos, the old addict decided, and slid further back into the shadow of the doorway. He watched carefully as one of their officers approached a city guard. Arrangements were made. More guards were summoned upon and mules soon brought forth. Sailors from the same ship offloaded caskets heavy enough to be holding gold, and strapped them on to the mules. That done, the officer, a few of his men and an escort of guards set off into the city along with their loads.

  The remaining men, perhaps seventy in all, were told to stand down. They relaxed nearby in the early morning sun, grumbling whenever they were picked out for duties. Small groups filtered out into the streets occasionally, given heavy purses and instructions to procure riding zels, mules, supplies.

  From his doorway, the old addict, his cravings forgotten for a grateful moment, watched with a frown and a curious pang of nostalgia, and wondered which poor fools had provoked the Empire's wrath now.

  *

  A bitter wind blew through the open window of the tower, carrying with it the scent of rain. Osh, looking out at the darkening sky, drew the heavy blanket tighter about himself, and shuddered.

  A storm comes, he thought, as he gazed across the mountains to the black clouds that crowded the far distance. So soon after the last one too. Winter comes early this year.

  It was not a pleasing thought. Osh did not look forward to the winters here in the high mountains. The constant damp chill in the air made his bones ache, so that every movement cost him strength. The simple act of rising from his warm bed each morning was a battle of will that seemed to require ever more effort as the years went by. The winters made him feel his age, and in a way he resented them for it.

  I grow weak in my old age, Osh thought. Once, I would not have been plagued with so many doubts as I am now.

  Below him, Baso hurried across the courtyard with his thin robe flapping in the wind. Osh followed him with his gaze, thinking to call out to his old friend. But then he frowned.

  It could not be Baso. Baso was dead.

  He looked harder and saw, instead, that it was Kosh, red-eared and hunched against the chill wind. He disappeared into the kitchen, no doubt seeking an early breakfast for his ever-needy stomach.

  It had been hard news, hearing of Baso's passing. It had stunned Osh to the core as he stood there in the courtyard, with the rest of the assembled Rshun, while the Seer told them of the loss of their men in Q'os. Osh's body had frozen with the shock of it, his chest tightening so that he could barely breathe. For a moment he'd thought he might be experiencing a heart attack, even though the bad turn had not lasted long. For the first time in his life, surrounded by men under his command, Osh had been unable to take the lead.

  Only Ash had saved him face, and then Baracha. They had taken on
the demands of reaffirming vendetta, allowing Osh to return to his room and close the door firmly behind him, there to grieve in his own private way.

  Standing before the window now, an image came to Osh's mind of Baso laughing as a fork of lightning split the sky above his head. Osh smiled at the recollection. He had not thought of it in many years.

  It was a memory from the second day of their flight from the old country, following the final defeat of the People's Army at the battle of Hung. Osh had been the only general to escape from that fateful trap. In a fighting retreat, he and the tattered remnants of his command had made it to the surviving ships of the fleet, harboured thirty laqs up the coast. Without adequate provisions, in disarray, they had set sail towards the silk winds, knowing that their homeland was now lost to them, and exile their only remaining hope; and a slim hope, at that, as the overlords' navy heaved into sight under full sail.

  Unable to outrun them, the ships of his fleet found themselves trapped between the rocky coastline to the west and a storm front approaching from the deep ocean to the south, a sinker of ships if ever there was one; and, right behind, the closing ships of the enemy, outnumbering them at least three to one.

  In a last throw of the dice, the fugitives in the fleet turned towards the approaching storm like the desperate men they were.

  Baso had been merely a boy then, no more than sixteen, still clad proudly in his battered, oversized armour when most of the other survivors of the defeated People's Army had removed theirs for fear of drowning. All had seemed lost in those dark hours at sea. Prayers to ancestors tumbled from quivering lips. Amid the screaming gales, rigging and masts broke loose, waves swamped decks and carried men away, capsized vessels entirely. No one expected to make it through alive. Even Osh thought they were dead men, if not by the hands of their pursuers then by the ferocity of the storm; though he had kept his fears to himself as he ordered the fleet to push onwards, making a show of bravado for the sake of his men, though in reality, within his heart, he felt as broken as the rest of them.