Stands a Shadow (46 page)

‘Well, say something, won’t you?’ prompted Guan. ‘Why don’t you explain to us why you turned traitor?’

His silence was making him angry, Ché could see. He allowed a corner of his mouth to curl up, taunting him.

The man looked to his sister. She shrugged, helping herself to another pastry.

Guan raised the gun above the table and pointed it at Ché’s face. His sister wiped her lips and swallowed the last of the pastry, then climbed to her feet. She went to the door, her pistol out, and waited there. She nodded.

Ché held a single finger up.
One moment
. It caused Guan to hesitate. Ché watched the end of the gun barrel through the flickering candle flame. He leaned forward towards him.

Ché pursed his lips and blew.

The Keratch in his mouth jetted through the flame, igniting it in an even greater fire that roared across the Diplomat. The gun went off with a shocking bang. Guan toppled backwards with his clothes on fire, and Ché heaved against the edge of the table and flung it onto its side after him.

He lurched to his feet, staggering for balance as he turned to the window, the smoke of the flames making him gag. He yanked open the curtains and tried to pull the shutters open. They refused to budge.

Swan was kneeling over her brother, trying to put out the flames.

Ché grabbed Curl’s wrist while she stood there locked in panic. She tried to resist him as he pulled her to the window, managed to jerk her arm free from his grasp. ‘They’ll kill you too!’ he snapped at her, then turned for the window and charged the shutters with his shoulder.

They sprang open easier than he had expected, and with a cry Ché tumbled out through the window, landing on his back on a slope of soft lakeweed. Curl landed on top of him, and they both slipped and spilled down the slope towards the water’s edge.

They stopped themselves just in time, and helped each other roughly to their feet. Ché held his hand over his eyes against the blinding white daylight.

A gun fired from the window. Neither saw where the shot went.

‘Who are they?’ Curl demanded. ‘I don’t understand!’

‘This way,’ Ché said, and set off at a rambling jog towards the nearest boardwalk.

The streets were empty of civilians. They ran as fast as they could, but he kept veering to one side as though the ground was tilting beneath him, so that Curl had to keep him straight. They ran until they were breathless, and kept on running. For a few moments it seemed as though the pulse in his neck was slowing ever so slightly. But then it hastened again, and he knew the two Diplomats were on their tail.

‘Where are we going?’ Curl wanted to know, angry more than frightened now.

But Ché had no answer for her. He was too busy vomiting as he hobbled along the boardwalk, stabbing a finger down his throat whenever his gag reflex needed prompting, trying to empty his stomach of alcohol. ‘We should seek help,’ she shouted, with an arm around him, more sure on her feet than he was. ‘Find some guards!’

‘No soldiers,’ growled Ché with the bile scalding his breath. He kept running, leading them into the western district of the city. He tried to load his pistol on the move, but struggled getting the cartridge slotted into it. Curl swore and took them from him, loading the gun as she glanced behind her. ‘They’re coming,’ she panted.

He looked back. His vision was a sickening wash of tones and forms. Squinting through it, trying to focus, he saw that Swan was on the left side of the street and Guan on the right, hugging the frontage of houses with their pistols held low. The upper half of Guan’s clothing was a burned and ragged mess. Swan jabbed a finger across the street. Guan nodded and took a side street, where he disappeared from view.

Ché reckoned they should be near the house by now, for the street looked familiar to him. Not wanting to be outflanked by Guan, he turned them right into an alleyway and ran along it, then left so they were heading west again. He turned and aimed the pistol as Swan looked round the corner of a wall, ducked her head back. He stood waiting but she didn’t present herself again.

‘Go,’ he said, and they started off alongside the walls of thatch that ran along the left side of it, screens for back gardens.

Again he turned and aimed half-blind at Swan. She ducked aside just as he fired.

A squad of Red Guards came into view, turning towards the sound of the gunshot. Curl staggered up to them before Ché could stop her. He hung back as she spoke, pointing back towards their pursuers. The men saw Swan and spread out as they moved towards her position.

Ché tugged Curl’s sleeve, jerked his head for her to follow him. Slower now, both of them spent, they jogged along the street, Ché looking left and right for a sign of Guan or the house.

Something flapped in a breath of wind.

It was his cloak, dangling from the upstairs window where he’d hung it out to dry.

They went over the thatched wall at the back. Ché fell and rolled across a surface of wood chippings. When Curl helped him to his feet, he led her through the garden, around the edge of the house to the front.

‘Here,’ he said with his neck pounding, and they went inside and closed the door behind them. Ché drew the night bolt. The house was just as he’d left it. He pounded up the stairs and into his bedroom, where he pulled out his backpack and rummaged for the vial of wildwood juice. He shook a drop of it onto his tongue. The girl stood in the doorway, watching him.

Ché went to the window. He stood to one side of it and glanced out.

No one in sight.

Cautiously, he drew his cloak inside, felt that it was bone dry.

He pulled Curl into the room and closed that door too, then sat down on the bed with his pistol and fumbled to reload it. He snapped it together and waited there with it in his hands. They could hear loud snoring from the room next door.

The beat of the pulsegland seemed to be diminishing. He wasn’t sure at first, but then, after an endless time, he grew more certain of it.

At last he sighed with relief.

‘They’re gone,’ he said, and flopped back on the bed with a groan. His head was still reeling.

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded.

‘You want to tell me who they were?’

‘Old friends,’ he tried. ‘I owe them money.’

‘What are you, a thief?’

Ché rose awkwardly and went to the window again and looked out, but still he couldn’t see anyone out there. When he turned back towards her, she was trying to get the door open to leave.

He was across the room in three strides. Curl gasped as he snatched her wrist. ‘Wait,’ he was about to say, but before he knew it they were pressed against the closed door, their breaths hot in each other’s faces.

And then they were kissing, and tearing at each other with their hands, all thoughts flown in passion and need.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Gauntlet

A Greyjacket fell in the darkness as Halahan jogged past him, dead before he even hit the ground. Halahan scrabbled through the debris of a storehouse, and stopped next to Sergeant Jay where he squatted behind an upturned wagon, ducking down next to him. Archers to either side of them were firing wildly over the barricade that stretched across the street. He took a quick glimpse over the wagon, saw bright flashes of gunfire and the streak of shots through the night.

Shapes flitted through the rubble of the gatehouse, bent low as they ran. Beyond them, through the siege-shields on the hastily finished bridge, more figures were massing for a second wave of attack.

‘Where is he! Did you send another runner?’ he shouted into Jay’s ear. The staff sergeant nodded, then looked through a gap in the wood, staring grimly at swarms of Imperials crossing the bridge.

An explosion made the sergeant duck next to him; grenades tossed ahead of the assault.

Halahan looked up at the surrounding buildings. Riflemen and archers were firing down with everything they had now. In the night air over the lake, cannons roared at each other as skyships engaged.

Somehow, the fire-positions in the shattered buildings along either side of the gatehouse had fallen. Now, reports were coming in of enemy units trying to flank the second line of defence. Hala-han suspected Commandos, using stealth to swim in from positions on the bridge or from the shore itself. They seemed to be attacking all along the southern edge of the island, if the crackles of gunfire were anything to go by.

Halahan scowled as he saw Red Guards and Specials falling back into the road from a side street they’d been defending. Next to Hala-han, an archer stood and shot at an Imperial clambering up the opposite side of the wagon. More were bounding up it, howling like wild dogs, with the wagon shaking under their weights. Red Guards on both sides of him pushed forwards, their chartas licking out, back again; a man’s insane face glared at him before toppling backwards beyond sight.

He swung to look back along the street with a curse on his lips, but then he saw the great dark bulk of Creed striding towards his position, the general’s bodyguards jostling around him. Halahan ran to meet him. The general’s face was red with passion as he shouted over the noise. ‘They’re attacking all along the south with rafts and swimmers. How long can you hold here?’

‘Hold? Does it look as though we can hold?’

‘We have two thousand men still in the city, Colonel. You must give us time to get them all out.’

‘I’m aware of our problems, General. But I’m telling you, we can’t hold here any longer.’

Creed looked up, as they all did, at an explosion rippling through the sky to the east. A skyship was disintegrating in brilliant tumbles of fire.

‘Fine, then,’ Creed shouted. ‘Pull back in good order, but slow them as much as you can. I’ll have a boat waiting for you all.’

‘Is that a promise, General?’

They stared hard at each other for a moment, both angry, both wanting to shout in other’s faces for no other reason than the need to vent their frustrations. But then Creed’s expression softened, and Halahan saw that he held out his hand. Halahan clasped it and shook hard.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he told him.

It was obvious that Principari Vanichios knew what he was going to say before he even spoke the words.

Creed said it anyway: ‘It’s now or never, old friend. We have to go.’

The Michinè laid his hands against the parapet and stared south across the city. From their vantage on the citadel’s highest tower, they could see the entirety of Tume spread out around them. Gunfire crackled along the streets to the south. A few buildings burned, trailing banners of fire in the breeze that blew in from the east. Soldiers were streaming back in disorder, heading for the Central Canal where the last ferries were preparing to leave.

‘Will you get all your men out in time?’ Vanichios asked him.

‘No,’ Creed admitted heavily. ‘Some pockets are trapped in the south-west. We can’t break them out in time.’

‘And the rest. You have room for them?’

‘We’re improvising. There’s still a place for you and your men if you want it.’

The man’s stare slid away from him. Flames bobbed in his eyes. He had nothing more to say on the matter.

For a moment, Creed thought of pinning his great arms around Vanichios and dragging him from his ancestral home by force. But there would be no dignity in that, not for this man. He was Michinè. Without dignity he was nothing.

In the east the sky battle was still raging. He could see coughs of fire lighting up the hulls of the skyships, broadsides hammering each other.

‘I did not think I would be this afraid,’ came Vanichios’s quiet voice.

Creed flinched. He felt like a villain, deserting him like this.

‘Farewell,’ he said at last, and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.

Vanichios did not look at him as he left.

Ash shivered beneath the blankets, his eyes swimming with phantoms of colour. He had long ago drawn the curtains over the window of the bedroom, yet still the moonlight leaking in around the edges was too much for his closed eyes, so that he kept his head covered while he coughed and sputtered in his fever, and felt as though the whole bed was spinning.

In his mind, the distant gunshots were only the sounds of maize husks popping on a fire. He was half dreaming of the drinking house of his home village of Asa, the room hot with the fire burning in the hearth, the black pot above it tended by Teeki as the warming maize clattered within it and filled the smoky room with its aroma.

He was sitting alone in a corner, eyeing his step-uncle across the room with a growing sense of hatred.

Ash had been sitting there all evening, getting quietly drunk like the old regulars at the bar, mulling over the rice wine that was their nightly respite from the world. His own burdens had refused to lighten, though. Even now, he did not wish to return home to his young wife and child, and all the responsibilities that they represented.

They had lost another of their breeding dogs to the shaking disease that morning. Ash had no idea how they were going to find the money to replace it, nor even how they were going to repay the debts they already owed.