Stands a Shadow (35 page)

Bahn turned away from it all. He sought out the reassuring bulk of General Creed, saw that Koolas, the war chatt
ē
ro, was bending his ear.

‘We seem to be grinding to a halt!’ the man was saying.

‘What?’

‘I said we seem to be grinding to a halt! Is there anything we can do?’

‘Do?’ replied the general. ‘If there was something we could do, man, we’d be doing it.’

Koolas looked as though he’d been hoping for something more inspiring than this. He glanced at Bahn, and Bahn could see that he was visibly shaking.

‘We still have one advantage,’ declared the general, and both Koolas and Bahn leaned closer to hear him. ‘Since we’re entirely surrounded, our men have nowhere to run. We will not be routed, in any case.’

Bahn blinked rapidly. Creed slapped his arm, almost bowling him over with the force of it.

‘We grabbed hold of the bear! Now we must suffer its grip while we work our way to its throat.’

Even now, Koolas had his mind on his story. ‘And what if she runs for it, General? The Matriarch. What then?’

‘Then her own people might finish her for us. These Mannians hold great store in their leader’s courage.’

‘And you think – if we kill her – they will break?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps Sparus will succeed in holding them together. Who knows?’ General Creed flashed his teeth, a rare display. Perhaps it was only for the benefit of this man and his writings. He turned away and started to holler more orders.

Despite what the general had just claimed, men were starting to break from the front ranks to the left. Officers struck the fleeing soldiers down or screamed in their faces, shoving them back into the lines.

‘
Where are you running to
?’ Bahn imagined the officers shouting. ‘
Where is there to run, you fools
?’

Koolas was feigning his composure well, for all the trembling of his body. Bahn warmed to him a little in that moment, and he offered a nod of the head as the chatt
ē
ro fixed his cloak tighter about his belly then strode off towards the troubled ranks.

Another runner approached Bahn from the forward chartassa. He stood to attention, his reddened cheeks blowing in and out as he gasped for air. ‘Chartassa Three – they’ve been stopped – by a fresh assault. Acolytes, they’re saying.’

Chartassa Three, thought Bahn with a twist of fear in his belly. That was a square of Hoo, in the vanguard of the formation just to the right of centre. Their very best.

Sweet Dao, they were no longer even advancing.

He took a deep breath before he approached the general with the news.

‘Acolytes,’ Creed spat. And he put his hands to his hips, feet wide apart, and looked for inspiration somewhere high up in the night sky.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Ridge

They came along the top of the ridge, a squad of imperial infantry with their shields interlocked and shortswords at the ready. Ghazni regulars, by the looks of the feathers sprouting from their helms.

‘Stand firm,’ Halahan shouted to the two lines of Greyjackets standing along the waist of the ridge, the foremost covering the rear with borrowed shields. He didn’t doubt that they would. He simply wished to remind them that he was there, that they weren’t alone.

It was the first organized counter-attack since his Greyjackets had taken this high position overlooking the imperial camp. On the slopes of scraggly yellowpine, the bodies of imperial troops lay contorted where they had fallen, after their initial ragged attempts to retake it. Since then, the Imperials had contented themselves with firing missiles onto the position, rifle shots, arrows and bolts mixed with the occasional grenade. His own men lay around the westernmost point of the ridge in a thin line of defence. They were firing down on the enemy while they used bodies and propped shields for cover.

In the very centre of the ridgeline, other Greyjackets had taken over the imperial mortars they had captured there. The men handled the shells with the utmost of care and attention, removing them from their waterproof wrappings like newborn babes. Each shell resembled an oversized rifle cartridge, though with a short fuse poking out from the open top of cartridge paper. After a crew soaked the fuse from their water flasks, they would quickly drop the thing down the stubby mortar while they flung themselves behind the cover of the wicker screens already in place there. An instant later, with the charge punctured by a firing pin at the bottom of the tube, the blackpowder ignited at the sudden exposure to moist air and the live shell – nothing more than a large grenade – shot out of it too fast to see with a solid
whump
.

Halahan watched them for a lingering moment then looked away. He had more pressing matters at hand – the enemy assault along the ridge, for one.

‘Fire away!’ Staff Sergeant Jay shouted at the Greyjackets along the waist, and they unleashed a volley that struck into the front rank of the advancing infantry. Half of the Ghazni regulars went down. Others stumbled over them.

Their vacant positions were quickly occupied. imperial officers shouted orders to keep the line and press on. Another volley of rifle shots, another bloody tumble of men. Still they advanced closer.

With ten feet to go, the advancing infantry gave a roar and charged. The two lines met with a crash of men and shields. Hala-han watched through a puff of drifting pipe smoke.

The shock of such a clash could be enough to stun some men, so that they froze with open mouths while they pissed their breeches or worse. Sometimes, if they were truly green, they could even drop their weapons and hold their hands out against the press, calling out to their assailants to stop, pleading for sanity, for respite.

Two of the inexperienced Greyjackets went down quickly like that, stunned into inaction or breaking entirely. Then three. Then four.

Halahan wasn’t overly concerned as he watched the medicos rush to give them aid. It always went this way at first. As for the fallen men themselves, those who would not recover, who would leave loved ones grieving behind – Halahan had no time for such sentiments. Leave them be until later. Leave them for the bottle.

A fifth man fell, a stump of an arm shooting blood. The line bulged inwards.

‘Staff Sergeant Jay – half the men in the first platoon to reinforce the second!’

Sergeant Jay ran along the crouched Greyjackets on the southern edge of the ridge, tapping every other man on the shoulder. They stood in turn, drawing their swords and, grabbing what shields they could find, and rushed to join the fighting. The line almost broke, but it steadied itself with the timely arrival of the reinforcements. Slowly, they pushed themselves back into shape.

Halahan strode towards the edge of the ridge and the Greyjack-ets firing down from their prone positions there. Missiles hummed through the night air or struck the ridge with dull slaps. Halahan ignored them, too proud and stubborn to do otherwise.

A flare shot into the sky. It screamed like a firework as it rose on its smoky trail, lighting the boiling scene beneath it in hues of green. It illuminated a bird-of-war far over the east of the camp. Another skyship was pursuing it, firing its prow gun at its envelop.

The ridge ran from east and west along the edge of the imperial camp, and afforded a full vantage of the field. It was going badly down there, he could tell. The Khosian formation stretched before him long and thin, a great dark mass of glinting squares surrounded by hundreds of torches and thousands of the enemy. In parts it was bulging inwards, or breaking apart. Far off to his right, he could see how the front of the formation had been stopped in its tracks. At this rate, the army wouldn’t last another half-hour.

Halahan doubted he could hold onto the ridge for half that time.

He squinted, judging the distance between the ridge and the Khosian formation. He called for the corporal of the platoon that was manning the mortars.

‘Curtz,’ he said as the rangy man towered above him. ‘The front enemy lines there, facing our chartassa,’ and he pointed to the forward clash of Khosians and Mannians. ‘Could those mortars make it from here?’

The man studied the distance, then held his nose in the air to catch the breeze. Curtz had been an artillery sergeant in the Pathian army and knew his business well. ‘Aye, Colonel, I think so. We’d have to be right careful though.’

‘Pass the command, then. Target the lines directly in front of our own chartassa.’

The order was passed on. Curtz handled the first shot himself, adjusting the elevation of the mortar and noting its setting. He soaked the fuses and slotted the cartridge into the tube then squatted there while his men retreated behind the nearest screen.

Whump
went the shell. Curtz gazed down on the plain, waiting. Long moments later, a brightness of flames erupted amongst a dark mass of predoré not far from the Khosian front. A remarkable shot.

He turned his face to Halahan. ‘I can’t do any better than that.’

Halahan chewed the stem of his pipe.

‘Continuous fire!’ he barked.

Beyond the Matriarch’s encampment, almost deserted when Ash came to it at last, he followed a column of white-robes as they marched at the head of the imperial standard towards the scene of fighting. At their fore hung Sasheen’s raven standard.

He paused as he came upon a medical station blazing with light within the main camp. Stretcher-bearers were moving in a steady flow towards it, and corpses had been arrayed in the snow behind the main tent. No sentries were in sight.

Boldly, Ash walked up to the corpse of an Acolyte and pulled free the white cloak and then the mask. He glimpsed a surgeon at work within the brightly lit tent, the man sawing through a limb as his patient gabbled in a delirium.

Ash moved on, shadowing the Matriarch as she headed towards the clash of arms.

They were taking heavy losses now. Bahn himself had been wounded by an arrow that had gone through the flesh of his lower arm, nicking his tendons, he thought, for he could no longer clench his left hand fully. It hurt like fire, and as he kept pace with General Creed he gritted his teeth and bore it silently while a medico hastily treated the injury.

All was not lost, for they were moving again. Halahan’s Grey-jackets on the ridge seemed to be lobbing mortar shells onto the imperial lines directly before their formation, thinning them enough to allow the forward chartassa to push through. Creed’s mood had lifted at this development, as though his prayers to they sky had been answered. The general eyed the fighting chartassa before him, willing them onwards.

‘Keep your arm still!’ the medico hollered at Bahn as she cleaned out his wound with a flask of alcohol.

Through the pain of it, he looked down at the young woman in the black leathers of the Specials, noticing her properly for the time. She was no more than a girl, he saw, and pretty too, in a thin, fragile sort of way. Her tongue poked out from the corner of her mouth as she worked. Her honey-coloured hair was smeared over her head in a flattened mess.

For a moment he didn’t recognize her. Not here. Not in this place.

‘Curl?’ he croaked in surprise. ‘Is that you, girl?’

Her eyes met his for a moment before they returned to her task. ‘I wondered if you’d recognize me,’ she panted.

‘What are you doing here, for Fool’s sake?’

‘Fixing your arm, so you don’t bleed to death.’

‘Are you all right?’

She paused to look up at him. ‘No,’ she said with a shake of her head, and tugged a bandage from her bag. ‘Are you?’

She was white with fear, he saw, and her eyes held a haunted look to them, as though she had witnessed things she’d vowed never to see again.

He recalled that she was a Lagosian, and that she’d survived all the crimes the Mannians had perpetrated against her people. In that moment, and with the greatest of intensity, Bahn thought:
These bastard Mannians . . . if there is any justice in this world at all, we will somehow win this fight, and crush this army, and hang their Holy Matriarch by her stiff neck
.

A body in the way, clearly dead. They both stepped over it as they walked onwards. Curl pressed a wad of bandage against his wound. ‘Hold that a moment,’ she told him, and searched through her bag again. She pulled out another bandage, began to wrap it around his arm. ‘You can let go of it now.’

Bahn reached for his flask of water. He pulled the cork out with his teeth and held it in the same hand as the flask and took a quick drink of the cool water. He was losing track of time here. How long had they been fighting now?

‘Drink?’ he asked Curl.

She opened her mouth and let him pour a little into it. When she finished tying the knot in his bandage, she took the cork from his hand and closed the flask and hung it across her shoulder from its strap. ‘I need it more than you,’ she told him. ‘For the wounded.’

He missed his chance to reply. Creed had spotted something up ahead, and was striding forwards to peer through the bristling spikes of the forward chartassa.

Bahn followed his gaze, barely believing what he saw. The Matriarch’s standard was flying directly ahead of them. Sasheen had joined the battle.