Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  For a second I clung, insect like and unmoving, to the ladder, terrified that the flash had given my position away, but the laughter and chatter began again immediately, and I risked a few more feet of descent. It took me a moment to realize that the people closest to me were speaking not in Feldish, but in Grappoli.

  One was the ambassador himself, and the other wore a bicorne hat and the air of a naval commander. The ambassador had turned his back on the Heritage party contingent, and seemed to be speaking in earnest, rapid terms, so that his partner became visibly agitated, looking around him. It seemed to go on for several minutes, this eager back and forth, while the parliamentary contingent looked on with an air of mild indignation.

  Good, I thought. The longer it takes, the better …

  But all too soon the admiral turned, advancing on Richter and pointing at him accusingly.

  Suddenly, the party atmosphere was utterly gone, and the yacht was silent, save for the admiral’s furious stream of Grappoli invective. The green-tunicked dragoons moved rapidly to stand on either side of him, and now their rifles were trained on the Bar-Selehm parliamentary faction.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Richter demanded. “How dare you!”

  “You have betrayed us, sir!” said the admiral, in heavily accented Feldish. “You try to trap us!”

  “What are you talking about, man?” Mandel demanded, glaring at him through his monocle. “Marino! Tell him.”

  “He has already told us!” said the admiral. “Everything.”

  “There seems to be some mistake,” said Richter, shelving his usual hectoring rhetoric in favor of something more conciliatory, now that he was looking down the barrel of a rifle. “The plan is as it was. We have prepared the city for your arrival. The coast guard vessel is of no consequence. You may destroy it with our blessing.”

  “And the fortresses?” demanded the admiral. “Who will they destroy?”

  “They are in your command,” said Richter. “I really don’t see—”

  “Not according to the ambassador,” said the admiral.

  “What? Marino!” snapped Richter. “What is the man talking about?”

  “Your duplicity, Prime Minister,” said the ambassador. “Your lies. You invite us here only to destroy us, to take the advantage of our fleet being directly under your guns so that you can sink them.”

  “Nonsense!” said Mandel. “What rot is this?”

  “I believe you may drop the pretense now, gentlemen,” said the ambassador, stepping forward. “Your plot against us has failed. And our ships will return to home waters before you have chance to do them damage.”

  Mandel was shaking his head and making a face as if he couldn’t understand what he was hearing, but Richter’s countenance hardened.

  “I see,” he said. “I always worried about you. Your tastes. Your interests. Well, now we see just how much you have gone native. I’m afraid, my lord admiral,” he continued, turning to the man in the bicorne hat, “that your ambassador has betrayed the Grappoli Empire. Do not believe a word he says. You and your men are welcome to the city. I suggest you put this man in custody and try him according to your own laws for treason in the highest degree.”

  The admiral faltered, looking from Richter to the ambassador and back, and speaking quickly again in his own language. The ambassador shook his head vigorously, but I thought he looked uncomfortable.

  “What is he saying?” asked Mandel. “If the fortresses are still in Bar-Selehm’s control, ask him why they haven’t fired a shot! Go on! Ask him that, and damn his lying eyes.”

  It was, I thought, an excellent question. Hooking my arms through the rigging of the ladder so that I could use my hands, I plucked the cardboard tube and the metal box from my satchel. With unsteady fingers, I opened the box, tore one of the phosphorus-dipped wooden splints from the block and struck it. It burst into sudden flame, which I touched to the fuse of the tube as I aimed it out over the bay.

  The mortar went off with a bang and a dull whoosh, and the firework shot high over the river mouth and burst in an orange flare, which hung in the sky like a beacon. Suddenly the dark, flat water showed shapes mustering out to sea.

  Ships.

  There was chaos on deck again as the soldiers tried to track me with their rifles while Richter and Mandel shouted incoherent orders and demands, but then the guns from the north bank battery opened up, and they forgot about me entirely.

  “What the hell is going on?” roared Mandel, rounding on the ambassador. “Marino, you assured us that your men—”

  “Not my men,” said the ambassador smoothly. “I am a diplomat. I do not control the Grappoli military.”

  “Who fired that flare?” Richter barked. “I saw someone. A girl in the rigging. Where is she?”

  I was sprinting back to the stern, hoping against hope that I could leap clear and still reach the ropes and ladders that hung from the bridge. As I ran, I drew my kukri and hacked at a rope lashed around a hefty spool, sending chain whipping through its cleats as the anchor plunged through the water and the ship juddered and creaked. Whatever happened next, they would not simply sail away.

  “To the shore!” yelled Richter at the marines in their barges. “Get them on land. It’s started!”

  As the barges steamed for the beach, I kept running, leaping cables and hatches, not breaking stride even as I heard the staccato crack of rifles and the zip of bullets in the air, planting one foot on the rail and vaulting with all my strength at the stanchion of the bridge and the rope ladder hanging down it.

  My muscles shrieked in protest, but I caught, held on, and began to climb. Even as I did so, the light of sudden explosions in the sky showed an amazing thing: three long boats powered by black oarsmen, hide shields hung over the sides, spears sticking up, and crouching riflemen in the prow. In the back of one, standing like a warrior god in some ancient tomb painting, with his queen beside him, was Mnenga.

  In the same instant, a cry came from the bridge above me: a command. A dozen black riflemen aimed and fired a volley at the closest barge. I looked up to see Emtezu, pointing and shouting to his troops. The sight of him spurred me on, and I surged up the ropes. Moments later, as the Grappoli marines returned fire, sending bullets spinning off the stone and metal of the bridge, I pulled myself over the rail and dropped into cover. Emtezu, sweating and bloodied but whole, met my eyes.

  “The Ridleford fortress?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But we’re not done.”

  I nodded, then looked down to the black water. The yacht was still snagged in the gap between the pontoon causeway, but the first barge was cutting through the shallows and into the shingle bank. A few men had gone down, but dozens more were packed in tight and leaning forward as the boat ran aground. In seconds, the barge was half empty as the marines vaulted out and splashed ashore.

  Only then did I see that, as Mnenga’s boats angled in on them from behind, the shore was thronging with people: black and Lani laborers, dockworkers, and factory hands armed with wrenches and sledgehammers, picks and crowbars, standing feet spread, neck and shoulders rolled in grim and resolute silence. Before the marines even knew they were there, they closed fast.

  On the deck of the yacht, Richter and Mandel were pointing and roaring their outrage, caught between the jaws of all they hated. The Grappoli soldiers onboard had taken cover among the wreckage of the party, but under the yacht’s lamps, they were well-lit targets and could do little more than hide. They had realized what was only just dawning on the politicians: the only way they were going to live through this was by getting out of sight, either by going below decks or by getting off the yacht entirely. The former was only a short-term solution, but the latter was considerably more difficult, so I was amazed to see Richter and Mandel hurriedly making for the very rope ladder I had climbed up to the bridge.

  The night was a riot of gunfire and shouting. The Mahweni attack boats had reached the second barge. The packed marines were
struggling to turn and meet the lunging spears of the furious tribesmen. With the marines thus occupied, Emtezu’s squad had, for a moment, free range and were picking their targets with care.

  “Hold your fire! You men. Do you know who I am? I order that you hold your fire!”

  Unbelievably, it was Mandel. Richter was at his shoulder. Their formal dress uniforms were smeared with oil and the greenish filth of the river, and their faces were pink and breathless, but they clearly thought their authority untarnished.

  “I am your commanding officer,” Mandel bellowed, “and I demand that you lay down your arms.”

  Emtezu did not hesitate. He strode over, drawing his revolver and aiming at Mandel’s throat.

  “Colonel Archibald Mandel,” he said, flat and decisive, “I hereby arrest you for treason to the city-state of Bar-Selehm.”

  He plucked a pair of metal cuffs from his pocket and tossed them to another of his troops, never taking his eyes off Mandel, who was sputtering, “How dare you! I’ll have you court-marshaled.”

  But Emtezu did not flinch, and a second later, Mandel was being forced to his knees as his hands were fastened behind his back.

  “This is an outrage!” Richter announced.

  “You’re next, Prime Minister,” said Emtezu.

  “Oh, I think not,” said Richter.

  It took me a second to make sense of his smile, and then one of Emtezu’s men went down clutching his belly, shot not from the river or shore, but from the south end of the bridge. A company of wild-looking gunmen were coming from the Ridleford fortress on the south bank to relieve their Grappoli comrades. Leading the charge, like something out of a nightmare, was a troupe of leaping, shrieking baboons.

  The circus special forces.

  Emtezu turned, roaring. “About-face! Incoming!”

  His soldiers revolved, dropping to their knees and taking aim, but the attackers had the advantage, and another of Emtezu’s men went down.

  And another. This one with a throwing knife in his chest.

  Through the smoke of the rifle fire, I saw the man who had called himself Blogvitch, clad in the outlandish leaden armor still, like some ancient knight, a goblin-man of mystical, terrible power. I stepped back in alarm and fear, shrinking away from the first of the baboons that hurled itself into Emtezu’s troops, biting and flailing with its clawed paws, and saw Richter, sheltering behind an iron girder, a man nowhere near accepting defeat. I glanced down to the river where the marine barges were a boiling mass of hand-to-hand combat, but I could make no sense of how things were going.

  And then, as the future of the city hung in the balance, a cry of surprise and alarm came from the far end of the bridge. Some of Blogvitch’s dangerous irregulars were turning in surprise as if they were being attacked from behind. The group parted, and in the gap I saw two unlikely figures, one wild, misshapen, and shrouded, and one poised but older than anyone else in the fight, a pair of short swords whirling over her head.

  Vestris and Madame Nahreem, united at last in purpose.

  My heart leapt, and tears came to my eyes. It was a desperate, suicidal attack. Two fell to their blades as they cut and stabbed—Vestris animal and lightning fast, Madame Nahreem balanced, neutral, and deliberate—but the advantage of their sudden appearance had already gone, and they were badly outnumbered. I had no idea what was happening down on the riverbank or whether the regular thud of the northern gun battery would be enough to keep the rest of the Grappoli navy at bay, but I knew it was only a matter of time before Richter’s citizen militia joined the fray.

  Vestris sprang and lunged, and Madame Nahreem parried and spun, but the group of fighters around them tightened, grew more resolute.

  We were out of time.

  I glanced to Emtezu, who met my eyes, his face blank, then watched as he left the kneeling Mandel where he was, stepping forward and shooting precisely. I drew my kukri and went with him.

  One last, desperate charge …

  I stepped over a dead baboon, jostled by one of the Bar-Selehm dragoons as he fixed his bayonet and shouted his defiance. Thinking nothing, driven by the grief and rage of the last days, I matched his roar of fury and ran at the enemy.

  As the troops abandoned the frenzied and fumbling reloading between shots, there was an eerie silence as body met body with blade and fist and boot. Men fell all around me, stunned and bleeding. Someone screamed—a terrible shriek of surprised agony—and one of the greenish trapeze artists emerged from the throng in front of me, armed with a sword with a curved cutting edge. I dropped into a crouch, releasing my kukri and snatching up the abandoned rifle of one of Emtezu’s fallen men, bringing it up, aiming and squeezing the trigger in one fluid motion.

  Nothing happened. The gun had been discharged and not reloaded. A minute smile flitted across the face of the lean and sinewy acrobat as he came on. In the madness of battle, his outlandish makeup made him demonic, a creature of death and hatred from another world. He leapt into the air, the sword high over his head, his free hand out for balance. I lunged with the empty, bayonetless rifle, striking him in the chest as he came down. It was just enough to knock him off-balance, and his wild, slicing stroke cut the air instead of my throat. He rocked back, momentarily awkward, like an elegant bird—a spirit in the air, but clumsy on land—and I shifted my grip. I turned into a tight spiral dragging the length of the rifle in a rapidly intensifying spin. The heavy butt of the gun caught him full in the jaw. He went over backwards and did not get up again.

  But the delay had cost me. I looked up to see Blogvitch unleash one of his deadly knives at Madame Nahreem. She moved fractionally, not simply leaning away from it but bringing one hand up and snatching it out of the air. As he drew another, she fired the first right back at him. It caught him just left of his sternum, and he collapsed, turning toward me so that I could see the amazement in his face.

  Emtezu brought another acrobat down with his elbow, then laid him out with a swinging smack of his revolver, and Vestris kicked another so hard that he spun away, collided with the low rail which ran along the side of the walkway, and went over, crying out as he made the long drop to the black water of the Kalihm.

  People were running up from the south bank.

  The citizen militia, I thought, despair smothering me again.

  But it wasn’t. It was Tanish and Sarn and twenty or thirty other gang members, mostly brown but a few white too.

  I faltered, feeling the panic of the Grappoli circus fighters, as they looked wildly around them, feeling the noose close, and I looked down to where their comrade marines were fighting with the same unnerved desperation as their plans fell apart. There was no sign of further support from the Grappoli navy, and the north bank gun batteries continued to fire on the ships in the bay.

  We were winning. Madame Nahreem was coming toward us like Vengeance or Justice, her black sari unfurling like a flag about her as her swords sang.

  Against all possible odds, hope emerged.

  The gunshot was so close it sounded like it came from right beside me, so loud and surprising that for a moment I thought I’d been hit. I winced away from it, but turned and saw Richter himself standing almost alone in the carnage behind me, the smoking pistol in his outstretched hand.

  I followed his line of sight, down the barrel and across the bridge to where Madame Nahreem was crumpling to her knees, blood welling out over the black silk of her sari.

  “No!”

  I shouted it, but I wasn’t the only one. Vestris ran to Madame Nahreem, dropped to cradle her head and neck, and my sister’s face opened as she screamed her rage and sorrow. For several seconds, she was frozen there, like a mother nursing an infant, hugging the old woman to her so that I could not see if Madame Nahreem spoke or was even conscious. My sister raised her face to the sky and howled, a cry at once terrifyingly animal and profoundly human, the kind of grief and rage that can only be forged in the heart from things shared. Very slowly, the battle seeming to grind to a halt around
her as the fighters became spectators at this strangest of tragedies, Vestris laid her down, and when she got slowly to her feet again, I knew that Madame Nahreem was dead.

  Stricken, overwhelmed, all thought driven from my head in a tidal wave of wild emotion, all red and black and murderous, I scooped up my kukri, felt its reassuring weight, and turned to face Richter.

  Time seemed to stop as the moment I had always felt possible rushed in on me, and I knew with absolute certainty what I was going to do. He was fifteen feet away. I walked slowly, decisively, my body preparing for the moment when I would seize his gun arm with my left hand as my right brought the heavy blade chopping down at the point where his neck met his shoulder. One cut would probably do it, but two or three would make sure.

  I was almost on him when his revolver fired again, and again I winced, wondering where I had been hit.

  I hadn’t. Richter’s actual target had been Vestris, who had flown at him with such wild speed and ferocity that she might have reached him before I did. He had hit her, fatally, I think, but she came on anyway, and when he tried to shoot again, she barreled into him, sending him sprawling backwards, but not down. Her knife found his chest, but still she clasped him in a furious embrace, propelling him back, and half turning to me so that her eyes met mine as they both went over the rail, and fell.

  I screamed and ran to the side of the bridge, but they were gone. I think they were both dead before they hit the water.

  CHAPTER

  32

  THE GRAPPOLI NAVY NEVER came upriver. As soon as the circus fighters had thrown down their weapons, which happened the moment they realized Blogvitch was dead, Emtezu took the remains of his men down to the Ridleford fortress, and minutes later, the south bank battery opened fire, sending those ships that had survived thus far into hasty and crippled retreat.