by Col Buchanan
A jangled mood began to spark across the ship. Cole assured them it was an effect of their nearing proximity to the Edge and the strange qualities now abundant in the air. Squabbles grew common. At night, shouts punctuated the stillness from minds trapped in feverish nightmares. Black jokes developed whenever dispirited men wandered off on their own wearing their belts. Paranoia brewed.
The roll of the sun marked the slow passing of the days.
*
One morning, deep into the Hush now, the shouts of the lookouts alerted them to a trail of white smoke curling low over the plains to the west, prompting all to rush to the starboard side of the ship for an eager look, tilting the deck with their shifting weight.
‘A mullaro wagon,’ Cole said next to Ash, who stood with Aléas by the rail.
‘Mullaro,’ he repeated to their dumb expressions. ‘It’s what the highland natives call longhunters, the ones who go after the Milk.’
‘They’re moving fast,’ Aléas observed.
‘Aye, and putting out a lot of smoke to mask their trail. They must have sighted some kree.’
‘Are they alone out here?’
‘No, lad. It’s most likely a supply wagon. Ferrying some supplies down the line.’
‘The line?’
‘You’ve got two ways of getting your hands on Royal Milk and making it back alive. The expeditions do it the complicated way. They set up a base camp where kree activity is still minimal – we passed that range many days ago. Some of them hold down the camp while the expedition pushes deeper towards the Edge, setting up a string of supply drops along the way. A few remain at each one. By the time they reach the rift valley the group is small enough to remain undetected. From there, they launch an expedition down into the Edge for the Milk, bring it out again, and have it shipped back along the line by wagons like that one. They do this as many times as they can over the course of the winter.’
‘And the other way?’
‘You do it like the odd highland native does it. You go in alone with a string of zels loaded with enough supplies to get in and out again.’
‘Sounds insane,’ came the voice of one of the nearby crewmen.
Onwards the Falcon flew, leaving the wagon and its trail of smoke far behind.
*
Ash was dreaming of the dead again, when he awoke with a start and blinked about him in the darkness of his cabin, wondering why the world was being torn asunder by bursts of noise.
But it was only Kosh snoring again in the bunk above his head, his friend who claimed to be having so much trouble sleeping.
Easy, Ash told himself, breathing deeply while the faces slowly faded in his mind and the ship creaked all about him. Strange dreams in this place, the Hush.
Across the tiny cabin the chair creaked. Ash’s heart skipped a beat as he looked over and saw a still form sitting there watching him in the darkness.
‘Who’s there?’ he croaked like the old man that he was.
He could hear breathing, whoever the figure was. A slow relaxed breathing as though the person had been sitting there for hours, watching over him in a state of peace.
Like a son watching over a sick father.
‘Lin?’ he croaked again.
Another creak of the chair, the figure leaning towards him.
Nico?
But then Ash blinked and looked once more, and saw nothing but the empty chair.
A rap sounded through the door of the cabin.
Let it be the ship’s boy standing there when I open it, offering a cup of hot chee.
He was almost right, for it was indeed Berl standing in the passageway leaning on his crutch. No chee in the boy’s hands, though, only an unimpressed Cole standing by his side, the long-hunter glowing with life as though he had been up for hours.
Cole glanced in at the snoring form of Kosh.
‘You old Rōshun sure like to take it easy.’
‘What can I do for you,’ asked Ash, yanking on his shirt, only then realizing that he had slept late.
‘The captain would like you to join him,’ Berl answered politely. ‘In his cabin.’
*
The captain wasn’t alone when they walked into his cabin without knocking. Meer and the ship’s navigator, Olson, were also there, and they both looked up from the desk, where charts were spread open and held in place by paperweights, Meer and the navigator each gripping a pencil in their hands.
‘Good, you’re here,’ grumbled Trench as the others returned their attention to the desk.
Ash stifled a yawn and stared down at the table of charts, wondering if it was too late for breakfast.
The largest map on display was something Trench had purchased back in Lucksore, pieced together from the accounts of longhunters and the few explorers who had penetrated the continent. Most of it was empty past the Aradèrēs mountains until it came to the Edge itself, the great rift valley still far to the south of them. Down the middle of the continent, the black lines of the rift ran all the way to the edge of the map, and no doubt beyond.
Ash stared at the charts as the captain stabbed his finger at their present position, marked on the navigator’s replica, where Olson had been carefully marking their course in pencil marks and filling in what details he could along the way. ‘We’re in kree country now though you mightn’t think it,’ Trench said, and trailed his finger southwards all the way to the upper reaches of the Edge. ‘And this is where we’re heading. Cole, we need to know where you’ll be going in. Assuming you have a particular route you favour.’
Cole pushed the brim of his hat from his eyes, leaned across the table and studied the chart for a few quiet moments. He traced a finger down through the markings of a forest, past the skirts of a tear-shaped lake, all the way to a horizontal line of black, a tributary of the Edge that ran directly eastwards, a thin finger isolated from the main rift for hundreds of laqs.
‘This tributary here is my usual route. It’s our best bet now. Far enough from the main rift that the kree presence is less concentrated. We’ll still need to leave the ship a good distance away before we approach it though. Unless we want to stir them up like a nest of wasps.’
‘Any idea how many people you’ll need?’ Trench asked.
‘We have four already. For the amount of Milk we need to carry out, we’ll need another four, maybe five able hands with us.’
Olson the navigator tutted with his tongue. ‘That’s a lot of volunteers, considering what you’re asking.’ And he spoke with the easiness of a man who had no intention of being one of them.
‘Well, I ain’t the one who’ll be doing the asking,’ Cole answered, and the longhunter glanced to Ash.
‘How do you get down into the Edge without being detected?’ Meer asked from the other side of the table, tapping his pencil lightly.
Cole relaxed in his stance, crossing one boot behind the other, and levelled his hard gaze on the hedgemonk. ‘Well for that trick, we need to get our hands on a live kree.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘You’re welcome to watch if you like.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Signs of Kree
It came out with a squeak, the stopper of the bottle. Cole sniffed the dead sour scent of the amber liquid inside and backed away slowly, glaring from under his brows at the shimmering sea of grasslands around the stand of boli trees.
Crunch, crunch, crunch, as he trod back across the layer of ashes and burned leaves to the edge of the clearing, where he stopped in the shade of one of the strange trees, its bare and blackened limbs reaching to the sky. Cole took off his hat, mopped his forehead with the back of his hand, then flopped the hat back on again.
The plains shimmied and the morning sun crawled a degree westwards on its long course through the day. The longhunter hung a hand from the crook of a low branch, squinting behind his goggles against the day’s glare.
‘See anything?’ he said to the figure perched in the tree above him.
‘A he
rd of zels. Three pineys. A flight of geese.’
The old farlander looked gaunt with tiredness today. He’d probably been poking the woman Shin again, Cole thought. At his age, the old dog.
‘You certain? A man your age can miss all kinds of things in that blur he calls his vision.’
A grunt. A rub of cloth against bark. The farlander was twisting around to look at something through the eyeglass. The end of the piece was trembling slightly in his shaking hands.
‘Hold on.’
Cole scratched his crotch and belched long and loudly, getting the worst of it out of him. The copse of boli trees stood as usual on a small hillock of land. He scanned the trees around the clearing, checking faces in the branches: Aléas and Meer and the navigator Olson, with his face pinched by fear.
‘That scent works fast,’ Ash said and lowered the eyeglass. ‘Directly west. Heading straight for us.’
‘You sure?’
The eyeglass dropped into his hand.
Cole propped it against the low branch and took a look for himself.
That was fast. Through the lens he spotted the dark form of the kree easily, bouncing and veering erratically in the sway of his aim, speeding on its six legs across the dusty ground with the spines of its carapace riding high. Big though, he thought, as he narrowed his eyes, and then his heartbeat quickened as he took it in fully.
It was no nimble scout but a full-grown warrior.
What’s it doing out here on its own?
Quickly he scanned along the horizon for signs of a warband, but he saw nothing save for a herd of zels, running now as they scented the approaching kree. A stray warrior then. Here to make a hazard of their lives for however long it remained alive.
‘It’s a full-grown warrior, so stay in the trees,’ he called out around the clearing. ‘And don’t be trying any heroics either. Remember, we want the juices from it before it’s dead. Scoop as much into the jars as you can and be quick about it. Once that thing’s dead every kree within laqs will know of it. We’ll need to be leaving here fast.’
Cole glanced to his rifle then picked up the fuse trigger that was lying against the base of the trunk, the fuse itself trailing off beneath the dead leaves. He stood there waiting with it in his hand as the creature rushed up the slope towards them.
Once more he checked the faces around the trees. Hoped they would keep their heads together if anything went wrong.
The kree was amongst the trunks now, whipping through the undergrowth into the clearing like a charging bull. With a whip of lashes the warrior threw its head forward and charged across the clearing towards the open bottle, the quills on its back thrashing like reeds in a storm, its jaws clacking.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ the longhunter muttered, and right as the kree rushed across the middle of the clearing he pressed the trigger, igniting the charges that would take off some of its legs.
Except that nothing happened, and he pressed the trigger again, kept on pressing it while the creature reared above the bottle and spilled it over, then swung towards Cole as though it had scented him.
Cole cast the trigger aside and swept his knife from its sheath. With the kree charging him, he swung the blade against the trunk and chopped the rope running up it in two.
Into the air went the kree in an explosion of burned leaves and ashes, kicking and thrashing against the netting.
‘Shoot it, you idiots!’ Cole shouted, grabbing for his own gun.
They opened fire, but a warrior was more heavily armoured than a scout, and ensnared in the netting it was a tricky shot to make the hood that hung just below its carapace; easier in fact for Cole down on the ground.
Cole hefted up the rifle and took his best crack at it, but the kree was thrashing so violently that he missed. A front leg tore through the netting and suddenly the rest of the kree burst through, the warrior landing amongst another eruption of leaves and ashes. Cole stepped backwards despite himself, breaking open his rifle to reload it. Glimpsed the kree rearing before him, the scent of it making his senses reel.
A flash across the tail of his vision. In an instant, the creature had turned away and was chasing after someone across the clearing.
It was Aléas, sprinting across the ground towards a distant tree.
Shaking his head, Cole grabbed his rifle and scrambled up into the branches next to Ash.
‘Your boy,’ he told him as Aléas sprang up into a tree just as the kree thrashed its barbed lashes after him. ‘He’s good.’
‘Aye. One of our best.’
A few surviving leaves tumbled to the ground as the kree charged the tree in which Aléas had taken refuge. The young man clung on to one of the swaying branches, riding it out.
‘Aléas!’
‘What!’
‘Lead it back across the clearing. Give me a clear shot at it.’
Cole was expecting a complaint in reply, but no, the young man was working his way around the trunk, and he dropped down on the opposite side to the kree then sped around the creature at a run.
The creature gave chase. In a sprint Aléas led it out across the clearing straight towards his position.
‘Left, left!’ Cole shouted, squinting now down the sights of his rifle. ‘No, your left!’
The young man darted sideways.
Cole exhaled and squeezed the trigger, hitting one of the buried mines just as the kree scuttled over them again. Even behind his goggles the flash of the blast forced his eyes closed.
When he looked down into the clearing again, the kree was on its back with its two remaining limbs scrabbling weakly at the air.
Thank you, my cousin, Cole recited to the dying creature for the life that it gave up for him; and then he spotted Aléas a few feet in front of it, the young Rōshun lying sprawled on the ground with his hands over his head.
‘All right, my lad. You can get up now!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Little Eagle
Responsibility was the killer of sleep, or so his father had always told him; his father, the lowly commander of a border garrison, a quietly self-contained man content to remain in the same station for the rest of his life, even when it meant eschewing the Mannian creed of self-advancement.
So much different from his son Sparus, who had always yearned to climb higher, as high as he could go. What was life, after all, without advancement and the rewards that flowed as a consequence?
Over the years Sparus the Little Eagle, Archgeneral of the Holy Empire of Mann, had grown to know what it was to carry the weight of responsibility into his bed at night, and had long prided himself on his ability to switch off at the end of a long and troublesome day, to simply lie down and sleep, satisfied to prove his long-dead and small-minded father wrong once again.
Yet now, in his soft bed in his warm chambers in the citadel of Tume, with the spiced scents of sleeping incense drifting in the air and slowly relaxing his body, Archgeneral Sparus was caught in the trap of insomnia again, staring at the blackness of his closed eyelids, his head aflame with the day that had just passed and the next still to come.
It was going badly out there, this squabble with General Romano. Though if he was to be honest, it had been going badly ever since they had first landed their forces on the eastern coast of Khos.
After a forced march towards the Reach and a surprise attack by General Creed’s forces, which had resulted in the mortal wounding of Holy Matriarch Sasheen, the Expeditionary Force had lost its narrow window of opportunity, just as he’d always worried they would. Winter had fallen upon them early, before they had even reached the northern walls of Bar-Khos, before they had even made it through the Reach, bringing with it conditions that could cripple an army on the march.
Right from the beginning, Sparus had shown little enthusiasm for this grand plan to invade Khos from the sea while assaults against the Shield were intensified. He hadn’t trusted it because he hadn’t trusted the plan’s creator, Mokabi himself, the ex-Archgeneral, who had
promised to come out of retirement to see it through. Too many factors remained unknown, with too little time allowed for the Expeditionary Force to complete its mission. No doubt all of it on purpose, so that Mokabi himself could take Bar-Khos from the south and steal the thunder.
He would have refused outright had Sasheen not ordered him to lead the invasion. And now she was gone and the Expeditionary Force fractured; Sparus holed up in the deserted Khosian city of Tume with those still loyal to him, along with most of the heavy guns, while Romano’s forces hunkered down along the southern shore of the lake, both sides vying for outright control.
The floating city of Tume might offer Sparus and his army greater protection against attack, not to mention the bitterest elements of winter, but with their forces now landlocked and supplies cut down to irregular deliveries by air, his opponent, young General Romano, in his own camp along the shore, was reaping the spoils of the Reach – slaves for gold and food for the feeding of his men. Framed by the Windrush to the west of them, where the Contrarè were killing anyone who entered, and to the east by the sparsely populated highlands that ran all the way to the sea, Sparus had been forced into raiding for supplies to the north of the lake, ranging around the lines of the Al-Khosian army now dug in there; constant running skirmishes over towns heavily fortified and willing to fight, and which usually managed to burn their supplies before they could be taken.
In this contest of attrition it was costing more men and more black powder to supply his army than it was for Romano, and often for frustratingly low returns.
Desertions were rising, people going over to the side of Romano, whose star appeared to be on the rise. Disease ran rampant through the ranks. Malnutrition was being reported amongst the civilians who had followed them here as part of the baggage train; cannibalism even. And still, his and Romano’s forces remained locked in their stalemate, neither one able to break it.
In his more honest moments of the day, those moments like now, when he was finding himself increasingly unable to sleep, Arch-general Sparus knew that he was losing this battle with the young pretender Romano.
