by Col Buchanan
Vanichios inhaled, filling himself up with it. ‘This citadel has stood for three hundred years, Marsalas. I have five hundred men in my Home Guard. Sound men, men who will fight hard.’
‘This citadel was built for different times. For armies with ballistae and tub-thumpers. With the Empire’s cannon, they’ll have the gates down in a matter of hours. You know this, old friend.’
‘That is hardly the point,’ said the Principari. ‘Tume has been my family’s home for nine generations, Marsalas. I cannot simply desert it.’
‘If you don’t, you’ll die here.’
A lively silence fell between them.
‘I should never have allowed them to take away the city’s guns all those years ago,’ Vanichios mused. ‘We would not be in this fix now, if only I had stopped them.’
‘Then the Shield might have fallen. This is hardly the time for ifs and buts.’
‘The Shield may yet fall. It’s under heavy attack even as we speak. General Tanserine is hard pushed to hold Kharnost’s Wall.’
It was Creed’s turn to wince. Tanserine was the soundest defensive general that they had. If he was struggling to hold, the attack must be as bad as they’d ever seen.
The doors of the hall swung open, allowing a gust of sleet to enter. A breeze blew across the nape of his neck.
Men cursed and shouted to close the door. For a moment, as the new arrivals struggled to close them, the sound of cannon could be heard in the distance, the army’s pitifully few guns firing onto the shore.
‘We must hurry,’ commented Creed, though he found that he was unable to rouse himself.
‘Yes,’ agreed Vanichios, not stirring either.
In exhaustion, Creed looked around him, seeking to call out for Bahn. But then he recalled that Bahn was not with him this time. That Bahn was dead.
He rubbed his face and eyes as though shutting out the world for a welcome moment. Grief for the men he had lost lay waiting at the back of his mind; but there was relief too, that his plan had worked, miraculously, that somehow he’d led them into battle and led them out again without losing them all.
The sensation of it was so powerful it made Creed’s fingers tremble, his eyes smart with emotion.
‘Are you all right, Marsalas?’
‘I’m just tired,’ said Creed, feeling lost for a moment. Old.
‘War is for young men,’ Vanichios offered, ‘and fanatics of self-worship bent on conquering the world.’
‘That it is.’
‘Well, piss on all of them,’ the Principari declared, and his eyes gleamed with a sudden proud fierceness.
It was a look that took Creed back fifteen years and more, and it brought a lump to his throat, and sharp affection in his heart.
He realized that his old friend was preparing himself to die.
Ash pulled his cloak over his head, though it irritated the stitched swelling of his wound. He was trying hard not to cough for the pain that it caused him. The zel plodded wearily along the wooden boardwalks of Tume, and he lolled with the rhythm of it, half asleep, half awake, aware of all that was happening in a dreamlike, disjointed way.
The Diplomat walked ahead with the reins held in his gloved hand. Around the young man, thousands of people were thronging the boardwalks, carrying what they could as they headed towards the canal that ran parallel to the main thoroughfare. Boats of all sizes were setting off into the lake, or rocking deeper in the water as they filled with people and belongings. A horn was blaring incessantly from the nearby citadel, and bells tolled from the temples, only adding to the sense of urgency.
Ash had never felt so tired in all his life. Through his swimming vision he watched a lone boy, only four or five, standing in the street with tears running down his reddened cheeks, shuddering with the fear of being left alone. Ash tried to speak to the child as he plodded past him. His mouth was a dry numbness, though, and he only coughed a few times, looking back even as the small figure was lost amongst a squad of soldiers trying to maintain some semblance of order.
‘They’re leaving,’ Ché was shouting up at him. ‘They’re all leaving!’
Ash merely squinted at the man. He heaved a dry breath of air and coughed again into his hand, a harsh and rattling sound.
‘All right,’ said Ché. ‘I hear you.’
They turned into a side street and wound their way through a district of dark-timbered tenement buildings. The zel trod along a narrow boardwalk with the bare, brown lakeweed visible on either side. Up close, the vegetation looked like seaweed, flat fronds tangled together with boils of air bulging along them. People were taking shortcuts across the slippery surfaces with arms held out for balance.
They crossed smaller canals and further streets until they neared the western shore of the island, and entered an area of finer housing, three-storey mansions walled within their own grounds, their gates locked, their windows firmly shuttered, no lights within. The street was deserted here, but at the end of it a wide thoroughfare ran from north to south. Beyond the road, through a fall of sleet, tangles of lakeweed ran down like oily beaches into Simmer Lake, the surface dull in the twilight, stretching away to a hazy shoreline of dark trees.
Ché fussed at a locked gate while Ash gazed at the boats already heading across the water away from the island, not thinking much of what that meant.
The Diplomat cursed and shook his hands to warm them. He glanced back once at Ash as though daring him to comment. Ash looked up at the house that stood before them, wondering if he was dreaming. It was a fancy Khosian country house, with quality glass in its windows and a roof the shape of a bell, the eaves reaching far out from the structure and curling wildly at the edges to form elaborate gutters; cisterns stood beneath them at every corner to catch rainfall.
The gates creaked open and Ché led them into the grounds of the place. He stopped the zel and approached the front door. A gust of wind blew hard against Ash’s face, stirring some life back into him. He saw Ché open the front door to a dim interior within.
Ash tried to climb down from the saddle, but his body wasn’t working right. He fell heavily to the ground and simply lay there, gasping, as Ché muttered something about sorry old farlanders and grabbed him beneath his arms. He dragged him into the house.
‘There,’ said Halahan, looking through his eyeglass. ‘On the right. A shoulder.’
Hoon squinted through the scope on his longrifle. It was trained on the end of the bridge through windblown sleet and twilight. A line of log siege-shields were slowly creeping along the planking, pushed by imperial Commandos, the distant figures staying in cover behind them. Hoon shifted his aim by the slightest of degrees. ‘I see it,’ he said, then exhaled and pulled the trigger.
The gun went off with a sharp report that once would have left Halahan’s ears ringing for days, but which now he barely registered, for his hearing was ‘shot’, as they said. He watched the magnified image through his eyeglass, which trembled only slightly from the cold shiver of his hands, and saw a dark spume appear on the shoulder of the Commando behind the rightmost shield, before the man vanished from sight.
‘Confirmed,’ he commented in the lingering reek of the black-powder. Hoon broke open the longrifle, took out the spent cartridge and placed it in his bag of cast-offs. He blew into the breach for luck and reached into his ammunition belt for another one.
They knelt on a balcony on the right turret of the gatehouse that spanned the entrance to Tume. His men were tired, though those who had been with him on the ridge had been able to snatch a few hours’ sleep after the skuds had dropped them off in the city. Halahan had ordered rush oil to be passed around to keep them alert, and made sure they were well fed.
Above them, on the very top of the gatehouse, one of the army’s field cannons fired a blast of grapeshot towards the far end of the bridge. The chains lashed and skittered across the planking, taking the side rail with them before they splashed impotently into the water.
Halahan stayed fix
ed to his eyeglass, focused on those few siege-shields that had paused in their movements on the bridge. They were being used as sniper positions; puffs of smoke blossomed and then the claps came a moment later, a sense of detachment to it all as he looked on, even when the odd shot spat into the stone-clad crenellations protecting him and his men. Already, young Cyril lay dead with a hole in his forehead the size of a coin. The other Grey-jackets who kneeled around the parapet ignored the dead boy, and fired grimly at the enemy advancing over the bridge, keeping their heads low, remaining calm.
‘Get a move on,’ Halahan muttered as he adjusted his focus to take in a scene much closer to them: the Tume Home Guards in their tan cloaks, pushing their own siege-shields across the bridge in a ragged line. They were almost halfway across now, and coming under sustained fire from the opposite wall of shields and from the secondary snipers positioned on the far bank. Behind the Home Guards lay a trail of dead and wounded. More were rolling great clay jars of oil along the planking, dragging bodies out of the way as they went.
Their shield wall had stopped moving, Halahan observed. The men who had been pushing them were drawing their blades and fitting arrows to bows.
He swept the eyeglass towards the enemy siege-shields, readjusting the focus.
Movement there. Commandos pouring out from behind their cover, rushing the long expanse of bridge between them and the Home Guards. Four squads, Halahan counted, as the Commandos clustered into loose groupings, seeking what little cover they could along the side rails.
One fell as the snipers on the left turret of the gatehouse opened fire on them. The men on his own balcony did the same, their guns popping. Overhead the cannons bucked and fired, and wood burst asunder on the bridge. The Commandos moved through the incoming fire with grim determination.
He swept the glass back to the Home Guards. One of their sergeants had turned to wave back at the men who were rolling the clay jars. The nearest was still half a throw away from him; the soldier stopped and looked back at the others strung out behind him. The sergeant shouted something. The soldier drew his sword and chopped off the mouth of the jar. Oil splashed out.
‘Not yet, you fools,’ muttered Halahan, and then he saw the rest of the soldiers drawing their blades and hacking at the jars too. Hala-han chewed on the end of his unlit pipe as his worst fears played out before his eyes.
A grenade went off in front of their siege-shields. Men hunkered down as a cloud of smoke enveloped them.
The sergeant stumbled out of it, waving again, shouting again. One of their archers tried a shot at the closing Commandos; Home Guards jostled for position behind the shields.
Another explosion; this one behind the shield wall. Men fell to left and right. A burning shard went spinning towards the nearest soldier emptying one of the clay jars. The man simply stood there gaping as the shard bounced through the spreading pool of oil and ignited it. Flames combusted across the planking; blue flickers rising into fiercer reds and yellows. The soldier turned to run as fire washed over him. He ran like a burning wick to the rail, where he pitched over the side with his arms waving and plummeted into the crystal-clear waters.
Halahan chewed his pipe, watching a sandal burn on the surface as its owner sank into the depths.
‘Sweet Mercy,’ intoned Hoon as he straightened from his gun.
Halahan lowered the precious eyeglass and scanned the bridge with his own eyes. It was all going up in flames, this side of it, anyway. Burning men shrieked and dived from the edges. The Home Guards at their shields fought a holding action now against the Commandos, pressed hard by their assault and by the fires roaring behind them.
‘Half a bridge,’ Halahan cursed as he stood to feel the heat of the flames against his face, smelled the reek of burning oil and lakeweed on the wind. His men watched him as he turned from the scene and strode fast for the steps.
‘Half a bloody bridge!’
It was for her own good, Klint her personal physician had explained in his soothing tones. If she moved a single muscle in her neck she might die. So Sasheen lay there on the bed with a wooden brace strapped to her head and shoulders, immobilized by it, feeling weak and feverish, a little ridiculous.
She’d been shot, Klint had informed her. The lead ball had partially fractured going through the amour that protected her neck, and while most of it had passed cleanly through her, he’d removed a small fragment lodged in her flesh. Beyond the coagulants and the remedies to ward off blood-poisoning, there was nothing more he could with what he had.
Will I live, Sasheen had asked in a whisper, upon first hearing what he had to say.
Klint had placed a clammy hand on her arm, though she could barely feel it. Perhaps, with a miracle, he told her grimly. And then he had smiled, and asked for her permission to perform one, explaining how.
Moments later, the physician had returned with a vial of Royal Milk held aloft in his hands. With care he’d peeled off the bandages on her neck, and as her aides held her down had poured some stinging drops into the wound.
Now, in the draughty heart of her tent, with the canvas flapping and tugging all about her and the priests and generals arguing at the top of their voices, Sasheen felt calm, and strong, as the Royal Milk still coursed through her blood. They were arguing over what to do with her; what to do with the army’s advance. Sasheen barely listened to their words. For a while she studied the flames of one of the braziers as a draught coaxed and flattened them, the smoke lingering beneath the roof before it trickled out through one of the vents. She thought of Q’os and home and the son she had so recently lost. But their voices grew more insistent, became a cacophony in her head.
‘Enough,’ she commanded in a croak, not at all what she’d been expecting.
Still, it silenced them.
‘Matriarch,’ said her old friend Sool as she hurried to her bedside. ‘Please, you mustn’t talk.’
‘Hush yourself woman,’ Sasheen responded. ‘Talk is all I’m good for now.’
Sool hesitated, then bowed and took a few steps backwards. Sasheen asked for water, and caretaker Heelas dribbled some past her dry lips. ‘Did we win?’ she asked him quietly.
The old priest nodded his head, concern in his eyes.
She spoke up as best she could. ‘Archgeneral,’ she said to Sparus, who was standing with his helm under his arm, facing young Romano, both their faces flushed. The two generals turned to regard her. ‘What is our situation?’
‘Matriarch,’ Sparus began with a bow of the head. ‘Creed has taken refuge in Tume. He evacuates the citizens and has torched the bridge, though we hold one half intact. We will begin rebuilding it at first light. Our light cavalry and skirmishers surround Simmer Lake as we speak. Our artillery is moving into position. It’s only a matter of time before the city falls.’
‘So what is at issue here?’
Sparus looked to the ground with his lips pressed tight.
‘General Romano?’
The young man stiffened. He looked at her as a wolf looks at its wounded prey. She noted how he did not bow, and in an instant all her loathing for him came flooding back. ‘Matriarch.’
‘Speak your mind.’
‘We have no idea how long it will take for Tume to fall. According to our local guides, winter may be coming early to the islands. It will hamper us badly, should we fail to take Bar-Khos before it fully arrives.’
‘And?’
‘We can take half the army and push hard for Bar-Khos. Nothing stands in our way now.’
‘Archgeneral?’
Still Sparus would not meet her eye. It was her physician, Klint, who spoke out. ‘We can’t move you far in your condition. A jolt on the road might still kill you.’
She blinked at the ruddy-faced man, then at Romano.
‘I see,’ Sasheen said, seeing the bind that she was in.
Romano wished to push on for Bar-Khos to gain the glory for himself, knowing it would strengthen his claim for the throne. And if she sent Sparus i
nstead, that would only leave her in the hands of Romano, surrounded by men loyal to his purse.
I’m holding up our plans, she realized, and her gaze flicked around the tent, seeing the downcast faces, how they refused to meet her eye. She saw how pitiful she must appear to them, the divine leader of the Holy Empire, immobilized in her bed with her doctor fussing around her.
Her hands clawed at the sheets. Sasheen found herself trying to rise from the mattress.
Sool rushed over and pushed her down hard. ‘Enough now!’ the woman hissed. Sasheen tried to fight against her for a moment, but it took what little strength remained in her. She ceased her efforts and collapsed back against the mattress, her nostrils flaring. A sense of helplessness washed over her, filling her belly with nausea.
Sasheen’s sigh filled the awkward silence of the tent. There was never any respite from it, she reflected. Even here, on campaign, she must fight always to maintain her position. And as she thought of that, she felt her body grow suddenly heavy, as though all the burdens of these few years in power were trying to crush her.
Perhaps the Royal Milk was wearing off at last.
‘We must stay together,’ she croaked to them. ‘All of us. At least until we have taken Tume.’
Her words brought a scowl to Romano’s face. Sparus bent low, though, as did the rest of them.
For a moment, Sasheen closed her eyes and drifted.
‘Matriarch,’ came a distant voice, and she looked about her, and sensed that some time had passed.
‘Leave me,’ she whispered, but then she saw that they had already gone, and only Klint remained, warming his hands by the brazier, and the twins Swan and Guan were there too now, standing over her bed.
‘Matriarch,’ Guan said again. His face was wet, and he rubbed a hand across his scalp to clear the water from it. ‘There is something you need to know. Your Diplomat has deserted.’
‘Ché?’
Some droplets fell from his chin as he nodded his head.
