Stands a Shadow (28 page)

‘You fool,’ growled Bull. ‘It’s bad luck to steal people’s offerings. You want to bring a curse on your head?’

Wicks waved his hand. ‘What difference does it make? They throw the coins away and never see them again.’

There was no point trying to explain it to him. The lad simply had no concept of tradition or belief.

Again that roar of throats in the night. It sparked a decision within him.

Bull climbed slowly to his feet.

‘Where are you going?’ Wicks asked in sudden interest.

‘To pick a fight,’ he told him as he cast his cloak aside. ‘Want to come?’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Wicks, and tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet. Bull had to help him up in the end. ‘We should pool our coins. I’ll lay the bets for you.’

‘Wicks,’ Bull said with a grin that split his face from ear to ear; and then the smile vanished in a flash. ‘You really think that anyone’s going to bet against me?’

Bahn was walking a little easier tonight. The pains in his calves and back from riding all day were no longer excruciating, as they had been on the previous nights of the forced march, for he was finally getting used to the saddle again. They were covering almost twenty laqs a day at their present pace. It was as hard as General Creed dared to push the army, for they still had days of travel ahead of them. The Lord Protector wanted the men fighting fit once they engaged.

In front of Bahn the general and Halahan strolled side by side. They were in good spirits tonight, having reached Juno’s Ferry on schedule, where the army had joined the two thousand men of the Hoo. The mood of the men too seemed especially boisterous. They had crossed the Chilos, and now faced a march through the lands of the Reach, hard-bent on closing with the enemy. Tonight the reality of their situation was beginning to hit home. They were in need of some distractions.

Bahn could smell the hazii weed from Halahan’s pipe as they walked. He didn’t smoke the stuff normally, but tonight he would have welcomed a proper pull on a hazii stick. Now that they had crossed the Chilos, he too had felt a sense of cold reality coming over him.

‘They’re approaching Spire, according to our scouts,’ Creed was saying before him. ‘Following the Cinnamon as we expected. In a day or two they’ll be entering the Silent Valley. We’ll engage them there, before they reach Tume. If it goes badly for us we can fall back to Tume and regroup.’

‘Vanichios will be glad to see you,’ Halahan drawled, causing Creed to shoot him a dark look.

Bahn recalled the name. There was history between the general and the Principari of Tume, though his recollections were vague on the subject. Something about a duel.

‘The reserves from Al-Khos,’ Halahan ventured from beneath the wide brim of his straw hat. ‘Do we know when they’ll reach Tume?’ His crippled leg was causing him to limp more than usual this evening, a result, he had said, of his knee playing up in the falling temperatures.

‘If they’re pushing hard enough, they should be halfway there by now. That is, of course, if that fool Kincheko doesn’t dither around.’

‘You think he will?’

Creed gave a shake of his head. ‘Who knows with that fool? He might linger for a day or two just to show his contempt for my orders.’

‘It was a greater fool who made him Principari of Al-Khos in the first place.’

‘Aye, well Michinè blood is thicker than wine.’

A squad of Specials, just arrived in from the ferry, tramped by burdened with their backpacks and arms. They nodded in turn as they stepped past the general in a ragged line. One of them knew Bahn, an old friend of his brother Cole. The man surprised him with a warm embrace and words of good luck, before hurrying to catch up with his squad.

‘What’s going on over there?’ Creed had stopped, and was studying a crowd of men gathered in a clearing of poplars next to the river. The men were Volunteers and Greyjackets mostly, cheering and jostling each other as they watched two men stripped to the waist slugging it out.

A detachment of Red Guards was attempting to break them up, led by an officer on zelback, though the Volunteers shouted the officer away, jeering at him and spooking his zel by waving their hands at it. The animal reared, almost tossing the rider from the saddle. Other Volunteers were stepping in between them to try to diffuse the matter. Bahn saw the general’s eyes narrow.

‘Look at them. Always disregarding discipline at the first opportunity. This is why we Khosians have the finest chartassa in all the Free Ports.’

Halahan chuckled by his side. ‘They’re only having their fun while they still can.’

‘Fun? It isn’t fun they need, Colonel. This is an army here, not a rabble.’

‘Oh, come now, once its morning again and we’re back on the march, they’ll be as tame as kittens.’

Creed snorted.

They walked on, the general showing his face to the men and seeing for himself how they fared. He spoke to some of the animal handlers in the corrals where the war-zels were quartered, and to the quartermaster as he flustered over the supplies being ferried across. They even stopped at one of the skyships that had landed for the night, asking the crew if they needed anything, careful not to show them his frustrations at the lack of skyships accompanying the army; a mere three of them and a handful of small skuds, hardly adequate for controlling the skies.

Amongst the Hoo, the men of the elite chartassa, Creed sought out Nidemes, the colonel who had fought with Creed and Tanser-ine in Coros. Creed talked with the small quiet man alone for a time, while Halahan smoked his pipe and leaned on his knee while he talked with some of the men, veterans all of them; and Bahn blinked across the flames at heavily scarred soldiers with hard eyes, who sat wrapped in their purple cloaks, saying nothing.

‘He’s worried,’ Creed told Halahan when they continued onwards. ‘He wanted to know our plan of attack.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘The truth. That I’m still thinking on it.’

Halahan chuckled drily, and the sudden sound of it irritated Bahn for some reason.

‘These men face an army of forty thousand,’ he heard himself say. ‘And you laugh because you haven’t a plan yet.’

Halahan plucked the pipe from his mouth and flashed his mocking eyes at him. ‘And I’ll be there with them, won’t I?’

Bahn closed his mouth in exasperation.

‘What’s bothering you, Bahn?’ asked the general. ‘Speak up. Spit it out, man.’

Bahn lowered his tone of voice. ‘It just seems to me, General, that we’re marching into certain defeat here, and that you’re both happy enough to be doing it.’

Creed started walking again, more briskly now. The other two strode after him.

‘Nothing is ever certain, Bahn,’ Creed snapped over his shoulder.

‘No. But you can always consider the odds.’

‘
Pff
. Odds? We lost those a long time ago.’

He didn’t wish to push him any further. When all was said and done, he still had every faith in this man.

Bahn had fought on the Shield in those early days of the war, after all. Back then, General Forias had still been Lord Protector of Khos, that decrepit nobleman who had gained his role through family connections. Even before the siege had begun, when the Mannians had first taken Pathia to the south and refugees had flooded towards Bar-Khos, it had been General Creed, not dithering Forias, who had ordered the gates to be opened so they could gain sanctuary within.

For the first year of the siege, Forias had commanded the defence of the city, and the Khosians had reeled as the walls had fallen one by one. Old Forias hadn’t been entirely inept in his role as Lord Protector: he had ordered the slopes of earth to be piled against the surviving walls to ward off the constant barrages of cannonfire, and at times had even fought on the walls themselves next to the men, risking his neck with the rest of them. But still, he lacked the charisma and bravado that was needed most of all in those dark days of plummeting morale. He simply hadn’t been a warleader who inspired hope in the people. Public protests were made against him. Mass calls for his resignation. Still old Forias, backed by the Michinè council, refused to step down.

When the news came that the Imperials had invaded distant Coros also, in their attempt to open up a second front against the Free Ports, the Michinè had agreed to make a token gesture in the League’s desperate defence of the island. General Creed, still frowned upon for having given the order to open the gates to the refugees, and no doubt by then considered expendable, had been dispatched to lead the small Khosian contingent of chartassa there. While he was gone, and with the siege of Bar-Khos entering its lowest point so far, Lord Protector Forias had withdrawn into his private mansion, claiming illness, and then had killed himself, or died in his sleep, depending on whom you believed.

Defeat had hung in the city air like a fog.

Creed, though, had changed all of that. He had returned from their unexpected victory in Coros within a week of old Forias’s funeral, now hailed as a hero and seen by many as their most likely saviour. The population of the city had taken to the streets to demand he be made the new Lord Protector. In the end, the Michinè had been left with little choice but to concede to them.

And so Creed had set about defying what had seemed, until then, the natural course of the war. He launched daring counter-attacks against the imperial army; developed the network of fighting tunnels beneath the walls to stop them being undermined; roused the hopes of the soldiers and the people by the example he set for them all. Gradually the imperial advance was slowed, and the siege settled into years of resistance that no one had dared believe was even possible.

Now Bahn and the rest of them hoped for another miracle from this man.

‘General!’

They turned just as they were nearing the command tent. Two Khosian cavalry scouts were approaching with a civilian rider in between them, a man with a bandana around his head and a gold ring in his ear. They drew to a halt before Creed with the nostrils of their zels snorting vanishing clouds of steam. ‘A Mannian ambassador, General,’ one of the riders announced. ‘He wishes to speak with you. We’ve searched him for weapons already.’

All three of them studied the civilian who sat slouched in his saddle, something of the brigand about him.

‘Greetings to you, Bearcoat,’ he declared with a rueful grin.

‘Come on now, you have to tell us more than that!’

‘Leave it alone, will you? It’s embarrassing.’

Curl laughed along with the other men and women in the warm space of the medical tent. They were seated around the surgical table with their cards and coins before them, their pallid faces shining in the light of the single lantern that hung from the roof.

Andolson was playing on a jitar at the back of the room, crooning something obscene and ridiculous about the fallen king of Pathia. Kris stood next to a side-table, a collection of bottled wines and leather mugs arranged before her, carefully adding to each of the mugs drops from a medicinal bottle of sanseed. As for the rest of the medicos, they mostly chattered across each other, hands waving drunkenly over the table, parting the thick coils of hazii smoke that filled the tent.

Young Coop stumbled out once more to be sick.

‘A damned waste of good wine!’ Milos hollered after him.

They were a strange bunch, these medicos of Special Operations whom Curl had fallen in with. Many had painted symbols and words onto their black leathers; the Daoist circle of unity, or quotes from all manner of sources, some even Mannian. Their hair was as often long as it was short, their faces scarred, their tempers hot, their moods unpredictable. Long inured to working in the tunnel systems beneath the walls of the Shield, they were a wild and troubled group of individuals, and they’d taken to Curl easily, and she to them.

The woman Kris was making another round of the table with her concoction of drinks. ‘Some more, madame?’

‘Thank you,’ said Curl, and accepted the offered mug and took a welcome sip from it. The wine was strong, but still she could taste the small amount of sanseed within it; liquid dross, essentially, used as a painkiller for the wounded. ‘If I’d known I could get this stuff for free I would have enlisted a whole lot sooner.’

‘That’s why old Jonsol enlisted,’ quipped Milos. ‘Isn’t that right, Jonsol?’

Jonsol was leering at her from across the table. The grey-haired man leered at every female within talking distance of him, though, and Curl’s scowl was a light-hearted one. Jonsol leaned back and howled at the canvas roof like a forlorn dog.

Curl had been fortunate from the outset, for the story of her outburst in the recruitment office had preceded her. The medico corps of the Specials had assumed she was a hot-tempered bitch not to be messed with, and she’d seen no reason to disabuse them of their illusions.

‘I’ll call,’ Jonsol said loudly, and threw in a few coppers. Only he and Curl remained in this hand, and the final card lay face-up on the table between them. A High King.

Curl spread the three cards in her hand face-up on the table. More laughter sounded as they realized she had won once again. Curl acknowledged their praise and curses as she swept the small pile of coins towards her.

‘You’re a fool, Jonsol. You walked right into it all over again.’