Stands a Shadow (31 page)

His thighs were burning by the time he came alongside Swan. She lashed at him with a broken branch, laughing again as he fended her off with his hand.

And then from his left came Guan, veering towards him with a branch in his hand ready to strike at his head. Ché ducked and felt the breath of it cross the stubble on his scalp.

He pulled hard on the zel’s mane until it reared to a halt. It skittered a few steps and then settled, the steam shooting from its nostrils. There he sat unmoving, while slowly the twins circled back towards his position, moving in separate orbits so as to remain on either side of him.

Ché simply looked from one to the other, and waited.

At last they came together and stopped before him. In the uneasy silence, the zels dropped their muzzles to the ground and began to pull at the long grasses that poked through the snow.

‘Wildwood juice,’ he said with a nod to Guan. ‘For subduing the reflexes of a pulsegland.’

His words brought only amusement to their expressions. ‘Come, now,’ replied Swan on behalf of her brother. ‘You thought you were the only Diplomat on this whole campaign?’

‘That’s what I was led to believe,’ he told her sourly. ‘Does the Matriarch know of this?’

‘Of course she knows,’ drawled Guan.

‘And what are your orders?’

Silence; the wind buffeting his ears.

‘We’re here as backup, nothing more,’ offered Guan, and Swan shot her brother a dark look.

Ché leaned back on the zel, looking at each of them in turn. He tried to breath calmly, to clear his mind.

They don’t ask me my own orders
.

‘You know what I have been tasked to do,’ he realized aloud.

Guan opened his mouth to speak, but Swan kicked her zel forwards so that it butted her brother’s to one side.

‘You sound troubled by your work, Ché,’ Swan said. ‘Does it keep you up at night, tossing and fretting?’

He studied the woman, saw how her usually pretty features were gone now in this windy place, replaced by a bitter scowl of contempt.

‘We follow our orders,’ she pressed. ‘It would be to your advantage if you did the same.’

‘What? You doubt I’ll go through with it if it’s required of me, is that it?’

‘You hardly sound certain of yourself. What do you think, Guan?’

The brother, chewing on something, said, ‘Perhaps it’s his devotion that is lacking. Perhaps his heart is no longer in it.’

‘I’ve proved my loyalty,’ Ché responded hotly, regretting the words even as he spoke them.

‘Oh, please,’ said Swan. ‘As though the Section ever relied upon loyalty. You should know as well as anyone what happens when a Diplomat strays from their mission. Your mother is a Sentiate, is she not? Well, a whore is the easiest person of all to make disappear.’

Ché blinked, the only outward sign of a sudden rage clamouring to be released from him. The heat of his anger revived him, focused him.

He leaned towards her, his eyes thinned to slits.

‘If you come for me,’ he said plainly, ‘I will mark you out first for the carving.’

And he turned his zel away and kicked it into a trot, eager to be away from them.

That morning, the dawn sun rose over a plain of bleached emptiness, across which others were emerging from beneath their snow-mounded shelters, like an army of the dead rising from the frozen ground.

Ash could see his own breath in the air before it was whipped away in the wind. He huddled against the cold bite of the gusts and thought,
damned early for snow
.

The head pains had subsided to a dull throb at last, but he still carried a lingering hangover from the night before. He wandered slowly back to the camp to discover cries of sorrow mingling with the ordinary business of the day. There had been deaths in the night – mostly older camp followers or those already ill. People struggled to cut graves in the hardened earth.

Ash bought himself a breakfast of liver paste and tackbread, and a mug of hot chee from a canteen run by a husband and wife team, their supplies heaped on the back of a wagon supporting an awning under which they cooked. The river had partly frozen over during the night, and people around him were muttered about the sudden change in the weather. They worried that it was more than just a cold spell; that perhaps winter was approaching early.

It took even longer than usual for the army to set forth on the march.

First to leave were the skirmishers and light cavalry, who headed off while the rest of the army pulled itself together. One by one the steaming companies of infantry took to the road that ran along the Cinnamon valley, its passage marked by snow tramped down to mush. The Holy Matriarch and her Acolytes followed after them, protected by more screens of light cavalry. By the time the baggage train finally began to move out, the column was stretched thin and long beneath clouds dark enough to threaten more snow. The price of clothing tripled in the space of an hour.

Following the road, they came down at last into the Silent Valley, which turned them west towards Tume and the floodland of the Reach. The valley was five laqs across at its widest points, and the hills and mountains to the south of it were barely visible beyond the flat plain of tilled fields and deserted homesteads, with the Cinnamon widening and meandering down its middle. It was as quiet as its name suggested, save for the rush of air that ran through it, giving the place a lonely feeling, something oversized about it.

By late afternoon, the procession began to bunch up as those behind came up against those ahead. The van of the army had stopped for some reason. Soon, rumours were filtering back down the line that the Khosian army had been sighted ahead.

The First Expeditionary Force prepared itself for battle.

A group of rancheros were given permission to break off from their herd. They galloped forwards to see what was happening at the front, their hands clamped to their wide-brimmed hats as they whooped for effect and slapped their zels for speed. The rest of the baggage train drew up in a vast circle with the wagons dotted around the perimeter. People armed themselves as best they could. Within half an hour the price of weaponry had risen by a factor of five. The mood grew tense.

The rancheros returned after a short time and came to a stop in the press of bodies seeking news. It was an army, all right, but hardly of a size to concern them.

The gabble of the camp followers rose with excitement.

‘When will the army engage?’ someone wanted to know.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ one of the rancheros replied. They would rest and ready themselves tonight, then attack at first light.

‘What if they attack us first?’ came Ash’s cool voice from the back of the crowd.

They laughed at that, for they thought it was a joke.

The mood lightened after this appraisal of their position. Profit, most people were talking of. A battlefield after the fighting was done could be a place for rich pickings. With hungry eyes, they settled down around their fires to wait.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Bearcoat

‘Rather a lot of them,’ Halahan casually remarked, puffing on his pipe beneath the brim of his straw hat.

General Creed showed no sign that he was listening. He stood in the cold twilight on their vantage point above the valley, his long hair hanging in stillness about the shoulders of his fur coat, his eyes fixed on the imperial encampment in the far distance, the campfires already glittering in their hundreds.

Bahn and the rest of the officers waited in silence as the colours of the day slowly faded. Early stars were already pricking through breaks in the clouds, which had thinned in the last hour without dumping further snow.

The imperial army had settled in for the night on a stretch of the road around a hamlet known as Chey-Wes. As far as the eye could see they occupied the road and the valley plain that it followed, bordered on the north by the flow of the Cinnamon and Hermetes Lake, and on the south by a thin ribbon of elevated land, one of several that ran along the spine of the valley like the ridged back of a whale.

‘No earthworks around the main force,’ commented Halahan, hoisting the fallen branch he had been leaning on to jab at the distant camp. Trickles of snow fell from its tip. ‘They reckon themselves safe in their numbers.’

Bahn listened to these remarks in silence. He was trembling, and he didn’t mind admitting to himself that it was more than the mere chill of his armour. He looked away from the awful sight of the invasion force and turned his head to look back at the setting sun, savouring it for long moments as though it was his last. In its diminishing glow the Khosian army was preparing its own camp for the night, small enough to remain hidden behind the rise of ground the officers stood upon. Far beyond it, he could just about discern the sparkles of Tume reflecting off Simmer Lake.

The officers waited for Creed to say something, to lead them, but he was still deep in thought, his jaw muscles working as he ground his teeth in concentration.

Bahn knew all these men in his capacity as Creed’s aide. From the corner of his eye, he studied each of them in turn. General Nidemes of the Hoo, and his old rival General Reveres of the Red Guards, two grey-haired veterans who could have been brothers for all their similarities in features. Colonel Choi of the Free Volunteers, Coraxian by birth. Major Bolt, commander of Special Operations for the field army. Colonel Mandalay of the Lancers, their contingent of cavalry. And Halahan, positioned closer to Creed than the rest of them.

Each wore a pair of Owl goggles about their necks, priceless items of equipment made with lenses cast in the Isles of Sky. Each stood with his cloak wrapped tight about his armour, travel stained with all the days of forced marching. None looked remotely happy to be there, save for Halahan.

‘There are six thousand of us, brothers,’ Creed declared as he turned his back on the imperial army. ‘In all, we face over six times our number. I can tell you now, from what information we have gained from captured scouts, that many are veterans of Lagos and the High Pash campaigns. Two thousand more are Mannian Acolytes. For cavalry, the numbers are unclear; we believe they lost a large number of zels during their voyage. They have a sizeable contingent of archers and riflemen. Added to that, of course, is their artillery. They have ten heavy pieces for every one of ours.

‘Options, if you please.’

General Reveres of the Red Guards cleared his throat and spoke first. ‘We dig in here and fight a holding action. We can hardly defeat them in open battle with so many cannon facing us.’

‘May as well have stayed in Bar-Khos then,’ quipped General Nidemes.

‘You disagree?’ asked Creed.

Nidemes’s gaze was hard and unflinching. ‘Absolutely. We should attack them at first light. It will be the last thing they expect of us. If we’re lucky, we might catch their batteries unprepared.’

‘That still leaves forty thousand fighting men to contend with,’ argued Reveres.

Nidemes was unimpressed. ‘So? We were outnumbered in Coros too.’

General Creed wore his heavy bearskin coat over his armour. He tugged it tighter around himself, then crossed his arms in silence.

‘I agree with Reveres,’ said Choi, the bearded, blond-haired colonel of the Volunteers. ‘We should dig in here and hold them off as long as we can. You said yourself our intention was to buy time.’

‘Colonel Halahan?’ Creed enquired of his old friend.

The colonel replied with a wolfish grin. ‘You know what I would have us do, General.’

Creed fell quiet again, musing.

Bahn watched the general and waited. Even now, he believed the man could save them.

‘You know how I killed this bear?’ Creed asked suddenly to no one in particular, and held his fur coat open for show.

‘It chased me off when I was checking some fish traps my father had placed in a stream. I was a boy, and I had a gutting knife with me, a tiny thing, about twice the size of this one,’ and he looked down at the curved dagger that hung against his chest, the Mannian ceremonial blade, which he had placed there for some reason known only to himself.

‘I needn’t tell you I was scared out of my wits. Couldn’t move for the life of me, in fact. But when my heart started beating again, and I saw how the bear was breaking into the traps, I knew I was even more terrified of what my father would do if I stood there and did nothing. So I charged at it, tried to frighten it away, if you can imagine that. The most foolish thing I’ve probably ever done in my whole life. And that’s when it grabbed my arm in its jaws and tried to rip it off me. Still, I had the knife in my hand. I fought back with it. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground with the blood pumping out of me, and the bear was gone.

‘I crawled back to the homestead, where they saved my arm. And the next day, my father tracked the bear through the hills, and found it dead a few laqs from the broken traps. It had bled to death from the stab wounds in its throat. I was sorry to hear that. But proud too.’

Creed tilted his head back and looked at them all. ‘And that’s what we shall do here, with these invaders,’ he declared. ‘We will get in close, and we’ll go for their throats while they try to crush the life from our body.’