Stands a Shadow (40 page)

‘Sparus and the army will be coming through here soon enough,’ Ché muttered, almost to himself. Then, louder, so that Ash might hear him: ‘No choice for it,’ and he tugged the zel along as they set off towards the city.

‘Sweet Mercy,’ declared Kris, hitching her medico pack higher on her back. ‘I think my feet are about to drop off.’

Curl looked at the older woman and found she hadn’t the energy to think of a response. Her own feet ached terribly, made only worse now that they were crossing the hard planking of the floating bridge that led into Tume.

They were surrounded by the walking wounded, battered soldiers who limped and shuffled and helped each other along as best they could. Like Curl, the men were too far gone for talk now. Their dull expressions were filthy with grime and blood save for where their helms had covered their faces. Their eyes looked blasted, as though they’d been staring hard into a furnace all night. Curl felt a fierce camaraderie with these fighting men now. Together they had come through the worst of it. Today, she found that she no longer carried herself like a civilian, but as one of them.

Against the flow of the army, a much more presentable stream of Tume citizenry were pushing and pulling their belongings along as they attempted to flee the city. They glanced nervously at the soldiers in passing, seemed to see them not as saviours but as harbingers of defeat. Curl wasn’t certain that they were wrong.

She tugged her cloak tighter about herself against the falling sleet. Her hair was pasted wet across her skull and her ears burned from the cold, making her wish dearly that she had a hood with which to cover her head. She swiped her face clear and kept her narrowed eyes focused on the back of the soldier before her. The man was shivering, his own cloak gone and his arms clutched tight around his sides. His breath rose over a bloody bandage wrapped about his skull.

Past him, along the far-reaching lines of trudging men, a fortified gatehouse stood at the end of the bridge with its gates cast open. Tume sprawled beyond it and ranged far to either side.

Only the citadel stood on firm ground, the walls and turrets built on a prominence of rock that rose high above the rooftops. The rest of the buildings of the city, all of them constructed of wood like the bridge itself, floated on great rafts of what Kris had simply called lakeweed; some form of vegetation natural to the lake, which filtered the water for minerals and nutrients and kept it clear as a mountain pool. Curl could see all the way to the muddy bottom, the algae-covered rocks and plantlife down there. Near the surface, she glimpsed shoals of fish nibbling on the loose tendrils at the edges of the floating weeds.

It was clear to her now why the lake had been given its name. It bubbled in parts, particularly along the southern shoreline, where the surface churned and boiled and released wafts of mist into the cooler air.

‘If you go down to the shoreline there,’ Kris said, noticing her interest, ‘you can dig a hole, and wait for the water to seep into it, and then cook your breakfast.’

Curl managed a nod. She wondered how anyone could even think about eating in such circumstances, when the air smelled so badly of rotten eggs.

Ahead, she noticed that some of the men were looking off to the east and the far shore there. Curl could not see what they were looking at for all the citizens passing by.

‘Listen,’ said Kris, and she did. The breeze across the water shifted, and the sounds of it came to her, dull cracks of gunfire.

‘They’re coming,’ said Kris.

The people of Tume could hear it too. A murmur passed along their column, then shouts of alarm. Some began to turn around, to return to the safety of the city. Others began to push harder, wanting to be clear of there.

The army marched onwards, thinking only of shelter and a hot meal.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Burning Bridges

It was said that the tortoise was three hundred years old, as old as the citadel it had known all that time as home. In its long and ponderous life, the creature had lived through times of famine and prosperity, of peace and war, even of revolution. Its eyes had witnessed the ruling family of Tume grow old and die within these damp walls of stone, one generation after the other. It had seen the bloody births of children, the grand balls and banquets, the bitter arguments, the feuds, the affairs, the mortal illnesses, until it had become a part of living history itself, a connection to ancestors gone and descendants still to come.

The tortoise seemed hardly concerned with such prestigious things as it balanced awkwardly against a low table on its hind legs, its neck stretched long and leathery as it reached for a green apple in a bowl of fruit, fastidiously ignoring the many soldiers seeking spaces for themselves around the walls of the great hall.

So calm was its temperament that it even ignored the pair of gauntlets that crashed onto the table next to the bowl, and the man marching past the table without breaking his stride. The tortoise dragged the apple to the floor, began to munch away on it as the figure marched towards the people gathered around the fire in the central hearth.

The man looked huge in his anger and his great bearskin coat.

‘Where are my damned reinforcements?’ General Creed hollered to the Principari of Tume, his voice ringing beneath the domed ceiling of the hall. ‘The Al-Khos reserves?’ he shouted, as he saw the man turn from the flames to confront him.

Vanichios opened his eyes a fraction wider beneath the brim of his blue velvet cap, his face bare of the paint usually worn by the Michinè.

The Principari gave a nod of his head to dismiss the men gathered around him, all clad in the grey garments of advisers. He clasped his hands behind his back and waited as Creed approached him, his diamond jewellery glittering within the sheen of his silk robes.

Creed stopped before him out of breath. He was surprised when Vanichios held out his hands, and offered a kiss on each cheek as though they were still friends. The Principari smelled faintly of elderberries and soap.

‘General,’ Vanichios said in his smooth voice, appraising Creed’s condition with concern. ‘Come, we must speak.’

Without waiting for a response, he led the way to an alcove free of soldiers, where his wife, Carine, oversaw a group of servants removing paintings and precious books from the shelves that were nestled there.

‘Carine,’ said Vanichios softly to his wife, ‘Please, leave it all. You and the children must make yourselves ready.’

Carine brushed the grey hair from her face, and stared at Creed as her husband introduced them.

‘Welcome, General,’ she said with a nod. ‘Please, make yourself at home, you must be exhausted.’

There was no rancour in her voice, only civility. At once, Creed felt abashed at his loud words, standing there in his reeking armour with his men making themselves at home all about her. He bowed his head in reply, not knowing what to say.

In truth, he’d expected a cooler welcome in this hall of the Prin-cipari, this man who had once been his friend, when both had been bachelor officers in the ranks of the Red Guards. They hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. Not since the day of the duel, and Creed’s subsequent marriage to the woman they had fought it over.

As Vanichios bade his own wife to depart – and with the duelling scar still clearly visible on his right cheek, his face drawn tight and haggard by sleeplessness and worry – Creed realized that of course all that was so much water under the bridge; that he’d stomped angrily into the home of a man who bore him no ill any longer, the home of a family suddenly beset by the arrival of war. He watched the looks exchanged between the two of them, the bond they shared, as Carine turned to leave.

Marsalas felt a pang of longing, though not for this woman. For his own.

‘The reserves,’ prompted Creed, quietly now, as Vanichios gestured to a chair then sank himself into the one opposite. ‘Why are they not here?’

‘Because they are as yet four days’ forced march away,’ announced the Principari as he gently settled himself, and tossed a corner of his robe about his lap. ‘They left Al-Khos only yesterday.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Creed.

‘It would seem that Kincheko has been quibbling over the matter of releasing his reserves to us.’

Creed grasped for his forehead as though in pain. For some moments he composed himself, letting the import of the news sink in.

‘I’ll have his damned head for this.’

‘Not if I have it first,’ Vanichios replied, and Creed saw how incensed he truly was behind the cool facade of his manners.

The general straightened in his chair, his armour and the ancient stuffed leather both creaking. He fixed Vanichios with a stare. ‘We can’t hold this city. Not without the heavy cannon they’re meant to be bringing.’

Vanichios’s gaze was just as firm. He gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

‘We have the guns you sent us,’ he said.

‘Those field guns won’t be much use in the siege that’s coming. I was only hoping to keep them out of Mannian hands.’

He could see that Vanichios already knew this.

Creed blew out a breath of frustration and looked about the hall. He followed the smoke from the fire pouring up to the domed ceiling, filtering out through its circle of blackened chimney slots or recoiling from sleety gusts. Trees were growing up there, purple-leaved nightshades sprouting from the walls themselves and hanging out over the hall. Below their high canopy, his men sat or lay resting across the littered floor. Others were still coming in, collapsing wherever they could find a clear space on which to sleep.

‘Four days late,’ he mused, without looking at Vanichios. ‘What prompted him in the end?’

‘I threatened Kincheko to a duel if he did not send them.’

‘Hah!’ exclaimed Creed. ‘He must be a worse blade than you, then.’

Together they smiled in the midst of their troubles. Vanichios even flicked the scar on his cheek, mock indignation on his face. They laughed aloud, drawing the attention of the men around the chamber.

‘It’s good to see you are well and still in one piece,’ said Vani-chios, with warmth. ‘Truly, I mean that. We have left this reunion much too long, and now . . .’ he waved a hand in the air. ‘Now we are neck-deep in trouble, with no time to catch up at all.’

Creed wiped a tear of laughter from his eye. Yes, it was good to be here, he realized. Good to be speaking again.

War could be many loathsome things, yet it cut through the ordinary nonsense of life like nothing else. Creed was reminded of the decency of this man before him, his humanity towards those less fortunate than himself when even Creed would see nothing but wretchedness. A result, he always supposed, of the fact that Vani-chios had grown up as the youngest of four brothers, the lowest position within the traditional pecking order of a Michinè family.

Vanichios had outlived his father and his brothers, and he’d found himself the lord of Tume after all; the last thing he’d ever wanted to be, Creed knew. Yet he wore the role well, Creed thought now. It fitted him.

Vanichios leaned forwards to narrow the distance between them. His voice was gentle as he said, ‘I sent my condolences. I hope you received them in time.’

‘Yes,’ said Creed, blinking. ‘I appreciated your words.’ He remembered that now. A letter had arrived after his wife’s funeral. In his black grief he had ignored it, and somehow over time it had become lost.

‘I wept, when I heard the news of her passing,’ Vanichios said bravely, then looked away quickly, as though to stop himself from saying more. He had loved Rose deeply himself.

Creed patted the arm of his chair, not knowing what to say in return. How poor he was at these things.

A puddle was gathering on the floor beneath him, his greatcoat shedding its melted sleet. Droplets plopped into it loudly. ‘They’re right on our heels, old friend,’ he declared. ‘We need to burn the bridge now, before they can storm it.’

Vanichios drew his hands together beneath his chin. Again that tiny nod of the head, his lips pursed.

‘That should hold them off for a few days at most until they string a new one across. After that . . .’ Creed shook his head, thinking on his feet. It was the talent he most relied upon. ‘We must begin a full evacuation of the city,’ he decided. ‘And we must begin it now.’

The Principari’s left eye twitched. ‘You really think our situation is as bad as that? I heard rumours that the Matriarch was dead.’

‘Rumours, aye. We don’t yet know for certain. Either way, they’ll want Tume before they push on for Bar-Khos. It’s too risky for them to leave us here at their backs.’

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.’