Stands a Shadow (39 page)

‘I’m a Diplomat,’ snapped Ché, ‘who lacked any other choice but to live. And what I did, old man, was save your life.’

Ché tried to calm himself as the farlander peered at him in disbelief. Emotions swelled in his body.

It is over, then
, the ancient Seer had said to Ché sadly as they’d sat watching the R
ō
shun monastery burning in the Cheem night. All the people he had known over his years of living there, the ones who had befriended him, who had been a family to him, all dead or dying in the flames.

Better finish me, Ché
, the old Seer had told him.
Do it now, for I would prefer that it was you and not some stranger
.

Ché swallowed. He looked at Ash across the pitiful fire, knowing that the old R
ō
shun was one of the last of his kind now, and that he did not even know it.

The knowledge felt like a dirty secret in his mind.

‘They know the R
ō
shun are in Cheem,’ Ash finally said, and his eyes swept up to accuse him with sudden anger.

Ché would not speak of it.

The old man threw aside his cloak and made a lunge at Ché, though he collapsed to the ground before he could reach him. Ché remained still. He watched as the farlander tried to push himself up, but it was beyond him.

He stood and dragged Ash back to where he’d been lying. Threw the cloak over his shivering body again. Ash looked up at the clouds with his chest rising and falling fast. Ché was moved enough to speak, to share with him something of his own loss, but then he paused, his mouth gaping.

The old R
ō
shun was chuckling; a broken sound filled with bitterness.

‘All is lost,’ Ash cackled to himself.

Ché tilted his head to one side, curious. He watched the smile fade from the farlander’s face, Ash growing sober once more.

Ché said, ‘You wish to kill me, I suppose.’

The old farlander stared at him hard. ‘When I have the strength for it.’

He looked away, saw the young hawk lift from the far side of the valley, its great wings flapping. It clutched something in its talons, a shape struggling to be free.

He lay back and closed his eyes.

In the early glow of dawn, Bull watched imperial soldiers searching the battlefield for survivors. They were moving in pairs, and when they found one of their own still breathing they called out for a stretcher-bearer, and when they found a wounded Khosian instead they checked first that the man wasn’t an officer, then stabbed him dead with their spears.

A pair of these clean-up men had stopped not far from where Bull was lying. They looked down upon a wounded Red Guard as the soldier lifted a hand above the surface of corpses around him. One of the Imperials kicked the hand aside and stood on his arm to keep it down. His partner stabbed him twice, his eyes as blank as the grey sky over their heads.

Bull looked away, tired and beyond hope now.

All night he had lain trapped under the mountainous weight of the northern tribesman. The flow of the giant man’s blood had steamed in the freezing air, warming Bull’s torso even as his great body died, so that he wasn’t cold, only near suffocated by the pressure on his broken cuirass, which was enough to tighten it against him and make breathing a laborious command of will.

It had taken Bull the finest bladework of his life to bring this giant down in the heat of the battle. They’d fought like two pit-fighters up close and physical. Bull had taken the worst of the battering. He’d known there was only a slim chance of winning the fight – and he’d taken it, boldly, even as his own legs were giving out on him. A perfectly timed jab caught the northerner in the lower thigh, hamstringing him, and Bull had experienced the brief thrill of victory before the giant had lunged out and grappled him, and his weight had borne Bull to the ground, trapping him where they fell.

Blood caked his face where his right cheekbone seemed to be fractured. He was unable to open his right eye, nor move his left hand. With all his strength he’d been unable to move the man off him.

A fine mess, Bull had thought to himself, and had stared at the night sky overhead, listening to the ever-fading clash of arms, knowing that he had been left behind.

Around them, the dead and wounded had lain scattered and draining of heat. A man wept, broken; others sobbed from the pain and shock of missing limbs. A youth cried out for his mother, long past shame for such a thing, then howled that he was not ready to die. Voices gasped, whispered prayers; not only Khosians, but the Imperials amongst them too. Someone in a northern accent talked to their wife, telling her he would be back soon, that he loved her, that he was sorry for betraying her. Another called to comrades now gone from the field, or lying dead nearby, for no one answered him.

At one point, the great tribesman had awakened with a shudder. He spat blood and looked about as best he could, his lips trembling. He tried to move his great body without success. He sensed Bull lying breathing beneath him, still alive.

In guttural Trade, the man asked how long it might be before dawn.

For a time they had chatted.

Ersha, he offered for his name. A mercenary from a tribe called the Sengetti, all the way from the cold northern steppe.

The man had slipped once more into unconsciousness as snow had fallen again in the middle of the long night, settling over their twisted shapes like a blanket thrown upon them by the great Mother of the World.

Now, in the gathering daylight, a groan sounded from the Ersha; a gasp of air escaping his lips as though he’d been holding his breath for an endless time. They had fused during the night into one single mess of drying blood and numb muscles. Once more the tribesman shoved hard with his arms in an effort to pull free from Bull, but he failed, nearly crushing Bull as he settled back down with a sigh.

‘You Khosians make for poor beds,’ the tribesman commented in his rough Trade.

Bull grunted. ‘And you northerners make for poor quilts.’

A wheezing sound. Something like laughter.

Bull grimaced as the tremor of it ran through the weight that pressed down against his broken armour. The two men said nothing more for a while. The tribesman seemed to be having his own difficulties with breathing.

It was the discomfort in the end that caused Bull to speak again, if only to take his mind away from it. ‘Tell me,’ he asked. ‘Is it true your women pierce their parts with jewellery?’

Ersha lifted his head, and his bearded face turned to look down at him. His teeth were sharpened into points. ‘Aye. It’s true. It was our way long before the Q’osians began doing the same.’

‘Your women must make for interesting bedmates.’

‘Don’t,’ wheezed the man. ‘You’ll have me thinking of my wives. I doubt you’d want me to have a hard-on just now.’

Bull tried hard not to laugh blackly.

‘Let me tell you. You already have one.’

‘You jest.’

‘I wish that I was.’

A moment of silence followed. ‘You would think,’ came the tribesman’s hushed voice, ‘that bleeding out all night would diminish such a thing.’

‘You would.’

‘That was a nice cut to my leg, by the way.’ It was the second time the man had offered him the compliment. Bull replied with the same words as before.

‘You left it open. Your lower defence is wanting.’

‘It’s the height. You must have the same problem.’

‘Aye.’

The clouds were brightening above their heads. They moved almost imperceptibly, though the longer Bull stared at them, the more he felt that it was he that was moving, and the rest of the world beneath him.

In the distance, another voice was cut off in mid-shout.

‘You should be glad, Bull. What is better? To die like this next to your broken charta, or to rot away in a cell for the rest of your life?’

‘This is hardly a glorious end here, pinned to the ground by an erection.’

‘Don’t,’ chuckled the man again. ‘It hurts, very badly, when I laugh.’

Bull winced at the shaking weight of him.

‘You did not tell me what you did – to deserve such a punishment as that.’

Bull smacked his dry mouth. His throat was burning from thirst. ‘I killed a man,’ he said. ‘A hero of Bar-Khos.’

‘A hero? And what had he done to you, this hero?’

‘He took advantage of my younger brother. And then he broke his heart.’

‘Ah, now I see.’

For a while he listened to Ersha’s breathing as it grew ever-more shallow. The man was struggling to remain conscious.

Bull had met Adrianos once, hero of the Nomarl raid. Two years ago, when the crowds had come to watch Bull take on the champion from Al-Khos. He had liked the man and his quick wit, had even felt a measure of admiration for what he’d accomplished against the Imperials.

Bull’s younger brother had admired Adrianos too, when he’d first become a Special under his command. Last year, only twenty-four years of age, he had died in a fight in a taverna, a fight he’d started when a group of Adrianos’s friends had walked in proclaiming the man’s virtues. Bull had been shocked out of his mind by his younger brother’s death; even more so when he’d discovered the reason for the fight and for his sudden hostility towards Adrianos.

He felt his anger start to rise just in recalling it.

Bull turned his head to one side and breathed the memory out of him. Through his tears he could see nothing but bodies, a carpet of them in every direction he cared to look. He hoped that Wicks was all right. He hoped the lad wasn’t lying here somewhere amongst the fallen.

A pair of boots stepped into view. Bull blinked his eyes clear, looked up to see two soldiers leaning on their spears and gazing down at him.

‘Here’s one,’ said the shorter of the two men, and hefted his spear and aimed the bloody warhead at Bull’s neck.

Bull refused to flinch. He waited with open eyes, only wishing for it to be swift.

‘No,’ croaked Ersha, and the great man twisted his neck to look at them. ‘This one – this one is mine.’

The soldiers squinted, taking in the giant man’s condition.

‘They gave the order,’ said the shorter of the two. ‘No slaves to be taken. Kill all save for officers.’

‘I don’t give a shit for their orders,’ growled the tribesman. ‘This one is mine, do you hear me?’

‘Yours? You’ll be lucky to see the end of the day.’

The tribesman tried to reach his side. He swore, then jerked something free. A black string hung from his grip.

Ersha wheezed as he placed the necklace about Bull’s head, pulled it down onto his neck. The necklace carried a stone marker.

‘
Mine
,’ he said through gritted teeth.

Ché and Ash spoke little as they travelled through the lowland hills bordering the Silent Valley, trying to distance themselves from the scene of battle by skirting west along the valley’s course. Even higher ground rose to the south of them, and beyond it mountains with spindly peaks covered with ice, glimpsed through the boughs of trees as the pair traversed ravines and sage-choked valleys.

Both of them had reversed their white cloaks so the grey inconspicuous lining faced outwards. Ché led the zel while Ash rode in the saddle. The farlander was still weak. Often he called for a halt so that he could be sick amidst plumes of his own breath.

They had nothing to eat between them. Ché plucked berries as he they went, though Ash refused them, claiming he would not hold them down. It was a concussion all right, and Ché knew that the last thing he should doing was moving the old man like this. But another night in the freezing cold might be even worse for him. Ash didn’t have the look of a man who would survive that.

By late afternoon they halted on a high ridge with their eyes narrowed against the biting wind, and looked down onto the broad floodplain known as the Reach. The fertile land was dusted white with frost and snow. Farms and villages dotted the open fields, and stands of birch and yellowpine and tiq. Amongst them, pillars of smoke rose from burning fields where immature crops still grew. Along the dirty scratches of roads, families were pulling carts and driving cattle as they left their homes behind them.

The air was startling in its clarity today. He could just make out Simmer Lake ten or so laqs to the north-west, where the city of Tume floated as a pale smudge, a sliver of black rising from the heart of it; the ancient citadel, he presumed. Directly to the north, the frozen Cinnamon snaked its way towards the lake, accompanied by the straighter line of the main road. The road itself was clogged with trudging men; the Khosian army in retreat.

‘They head for Tume,’ Ché declared.

He squinted, taking in the great lake again and the island city. A black dot was moving in the air above the citadel. A skyship.

He looked up at the clouds growing ever darker, suspecting it would snow soon. Ché glanced back at Ash in hope that the old R
ō
shun might offer a suggestion. The farlander’s head, though, was nodding in exhaustion.