Stands a Shadow (42 page)

Sool hesitated, then bowed and took a few steps backwards. Sasheen asked for water, and caretaker Heelas dribbled some past her dry lips. ‘Did we win?’ she asked him quietly.

The old priest nodded his head, concern in his eyes.

She spoke up as best she could. ‘Archgeneral,’ she said to Sparus, who was standing with his helm under his arm, facing young Romano, both their faces flushed. The two generals turned to regard her. ‘What is our situation?’

‘Matriarch,’ Sparus began with a bow of the head. ‘Creed has taken refuge in Tume. He evacuates the citizens and has torched the bridge, though we hold one half intact. We will begin rebuilding it at first light. Our light cavalry and skirmishers surround Simmer Lake as we speak. Our artillery is moving into position. It’s only a matter of time before the city falls.’

‘So what is at issue here?’

Sparus looked to the ground with his lips pressed tight.

‘General Romano?’

The young man stiffened. He looked at her as a wolf looks at its wounded prey. She noted how he did not bow, and in an instant all her loathing for him came flooding back. ‘Matriarch.’

‘Speak your mind.’

‘We have no idea how long it will take for Tume to fall. According to our local guides, winter may be coming early to the islands. It will hamper us badly, should we fail to take Bar-Khos before it fully arrives.’

‘And?’

‘We can take half the army and push hard for Bar-Khos. Nothing stands in our way now.’

‘Archgeneral?’

Still Sparus would not meet her eye. It was her physician, Klint, who spoke out. ‘We can’t move you far in your condition. A jolt on the road might still kill you.’

She blinked at the ruddy-faced man, then at Romano.

‘I see,’ Sasheen said, seeing the bind that she was in.

Romano wished to push on for Bar-Khos to gain the glory for himself, knowing it would strengthen his claim for the throne. And if she sent Sparus instead, that would only leave her in the hands of Romano, surrounded by men loyal to his purse.

I’m holding up our plans
, she realized, and her gaze flicked around the tent, seeing the downcast faces, how they refused to meet her eye. She saw how pitiful she must appear to them, the divine leader of the Holy Empire, immobilized in her bed with her doctor fussing around her.

Her hands clawed at the sheets. Sasheen found herself trying to rise from the mattress.

Sool rushed over and pushed her down hard. ‘
Enough now
!’ the woman hissed. Sasheen tried to fight against her for a moment, but it took what little strength remained in her. She ceased her efforts and collapsed back against the mattress, her nostrils flaring. A sense of helplessness washed over her, filling her belly with nausea.

Sasheen’s sigh filled the awkward silence of the tent. There was never any respite from it, she reflected. Even here, on campaign, she must fight always to maintain her position. And as she thought of that, she felt her body grow suddenly heavy, as though all the burdens of these few years in power were trying to crush her.

Perhaps the Royal Milk was wearing off at last.

‘We must stay together,’ she croaked to them. ‘All of us. At least until we have taken Tume.’

Her words brought a scowl to Romano’s face. Sparus bent low, though, as did the rest of them.

For a moment, Sasheen closed her eyes and drifted.

‘Matriarch,’ came a distant voice, and she looked about her, and sensed that some time had passed.

‘Leave me,’ she whispered, but then she saw that they had already gone, and only Klint remained, warming his hands by the brazier, and the twins Swan and Guan were there too now, standing over her bed.

‘Matriarch,’ Guan said again. His face was wet, and he rubbed a hand across his scalp to clear the water from it. ‘There is something you need to know. Your Diplomat has deserted.’

‘Ché?’

Some droplets fell from his chin as he nodded his head.

‘You are mistaken.’

‘He was seen leaving the encampment after you fell,’ Swan told her.

Sasheen was too tired for this. ‘You are mistaken,’ she breathed. ‘He is loyal. He has proven it to me.’

‘Holy Matriarch. He has
gone
.’

Klint stepped into view next to the two Diplomats, though they ignored him and continued to gaze down at Sasheen.

She couldn’t fathom what it meant, and she stared at the canvas roof of the tent as it flapped violently in the wind, something forlorn and angry about it.

‘Do what you must,’ she said quietly, and she closed her eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A Game of Rash

Ash awoke coughing in a darkened room. He tried to recall where he was while his hands groped against bedsheets soft and luxurious.

‘Easy,’ said a voice, and he turned his head towards the source of it, his breath wheezing. A figure rose from a darkened window, approached the bed with something held in its hand.

Ash pushed himself up against the deep pillows and accepted the wooden gourd passed to him. He coughed once more as he took a sip of cool soothing water, then drank more deeply.

‘Thank you,’ he rasped as Ché returned to a chair by the window.

With delicate care, Ash he swung his feet off the bed and settled them on the cold wooden floor. His head lurched with nausea. His skull throbbed dully where the lump had formed. He felt hardly rested at all.

‘Where are we?’ Ash managed after a few shallow breaths.

The silhouette of Ché turned to regard him. ‘Holed up in a city that everyone else seems fairly desperate to leave,’ the man said, and then turned back to the view beyond the window.

Ash rose to his feet, cracked his back with loud pops while he waited for his head to stop reeling. Gunfire could be heard in the distance, and he smelled something burning in the air. With a groan he padded over to the window to look outside. The sleet had stopped at last, and the wind tore at the clouds so that occasional starlight filtered through. It was enough to light a band of smoke spreading high and thin from the city.

Ash observed the fleet of boats heading westward, the vessels leaving an eerie blue glow in their wakes. Ché said, ‘With our chances of leaving diminishing with every boat that departs.’

Ash placed a palm against the windowframe and leaned against it. His chest burned with every breath he took, but the air seemed to help a little, laden as it was with its harsh whiff of sulphur.

He narrowed his eyes and took in the vague shoreline around the lake. There were pinpricks of torchlight out there, a great number of them. They could be seen all along the southern and northern edges, and fires too shooting up into the night, buildings alight. As he watched them, he saw how the torches were spreading, creeping slowly along the western shore that was the edge of the Windrush forest.

‘On a lake presently being surrounded by the enemy.’

Clumsily – for his coordination was still off – Ash dragged another chair across the room, banging and catching it against a leg of the bed, the sounds seeming overly loud in the empty house. Beside the window he sat with his gourd of water, sipping occasionally as he and Ché both gazed out at the night.

‘Leave if you wish to,’ he told the dark form opposite him. In the dimness, he saw Ché’s eyes regard him coolly.

‘I wouldn’t wish to rob you of your retribution.’

Ash tossed the gourd into the young man’s lap and observed the flinch of his eyes. Ché righted the gourd as water dripped from his lap onto the floor.

‘You think,’ growled Ash, ‘that because you saved me from a bad spot, you have paid for all you have done? Do not think that, Ché. And do not jest about what must be settled between us. I find no humour in it.’

Ché turned his face back to the window. ‘Do what you must, old man,’ he sighed. The Diplomat scratched at his neck lazily, and Ash was reminded of this young man when he had been a R
ō
shun apprentice at Sato; a small intent boy with troubled eyes; a laughter that could burst from him at any moment like a rush of startled birds.

‘You were one of us,’ Ash accused him.

‘So I believed too.’

‘Yet you left us for Mann.’

Ché set his thin lips in a humourless smile. ‘I was always of Mann,’ he mused. ‘I just didn’t know it at the time.’

‘Explain yourself.’

The young man scratched even harder, barely noticing he did so. Gently, Ash reached over and grasped his wrist. He felt the shock of their connection, then slowly drew Ché’s hand away from his neck, the man’s pulse beating fast beneath his grip. ‘Ché?’

The Diplomat closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he spoke as a man reciting the story of another, without any emotional attachment at all.

‘The Mannian order has ways of playing with your mind, Ash. They played with mine, as a boy. They made me think I was someone else, then sent me off to be play at being R
ō
shun. Truly, it was no deception of mine. I thought I was nothing more than an innocent apprentice. But when I became twenty-one, my real memories came flooding back to me, as my handlers intended they should. My mission became clear.

‘
Now
, remove your hand old man, before I remove it for you.’

Ash drew his hand clear, sat back in some bewilderment.

‘You have condemned the lives of everyone at Sato,’ he told him.

The young man was a mere shadow on the chair, the whites of his eyes gleaming as they stared out at the lake. ‘I acted as I did to protect the life of my mother. So they wouldn’t harm her. There was no other way for me, you understand?’

‘You had no choice.’

‘No.’

‘And what of your mother now, Ché? Will they harm her now that you have deserted them?’

The young man’s eyes were bright.

Ash suddenly regretted his words, though before he could say anything, the moment was lost in another fit of coughing.

Ché offered the water again as Ash leaned and spat onto the floor. He took a drink to soothe his throat, and then Ché reached down and picked something up and tossed that onto Ash’s lap too. It was a loaf of stale bread wrapped in paper, half of it eaten already. Ash heard his stomach growl as his eyes devoured it.

Something within Ash gave way as he ate; the anger he felt towards this young man, the sense of betrayal, crumpled into itself. He chewed the last mouthful and swallowed it down, and sat there unmoving for a while, not knowing what to say. Flocks of birds flapped through the night, calling out to each other, disturbed from their roosts by snaps of gunfire that sounded like nothing more than fireworks. A man called someone’s name frantically in the streets outside.

‘We could swim for the shore, if it comes to it,’ Ash said.

Ché looked him up and down. ‘In this weather? You look as though a cold bath would be enough to finish you off, never mind a swim.’

‘Give me a day or two, you will see. Besides, the water here is not so cold.’

‘What will you do then, if we make it out?’

Ash followed the torches as they spread across the western shoreline. After some moments, he released a long, pent-up breath. ‘I will warn my people, Ché. That is what I will do.’

He felt the weight of the clay vial about his neck, tugging at his conscience.

‘But first, I must see a mother about her son.’

There was a trick to falling asleep at night, and Ché had known it once. He’d been able to lay his head against a pillow and relax ever more deeply into his breathing, until after only a short time he would slip into a welcome oblivion.

But he’d been a youth then, when he had known the trick, and he had lived in the moment as all youths do, rather than in the days behind him or the ones still to come. He had not yet suffered from that fretful mindset of adulthood, where his thoughts became a chattering compulsion that only heightened in the silence of a bed, so that falling asleep became a matter of will rather than relaxation, a fight rather than a submission, in which the trying caused the simple knack of it to be lost.

And so, despite his great weariness, Ché tossed and turned throughout the long hours of that night, barely sleeping at all. He kept thinking of his mother in Q’os, and of phantoms with garrottes stealing towards her where she lay. He thought too of a boyhood spent in the heady confines of the Sentiate temple, lonely in his play without other children his age, bored with the endless schooling on Mann, hardened by the occasional Purging.

Most of all, though, he thought of how he wasn’t free of them even now. He knew the order would never allow a Diplomat to turn rogue and survive.

Sasheen would send the twins after him. Even now they might be on their way.

Some time during the night, he heard Ash knocking something over in the bedroom next to his. His ears followed the creaks of his steps as the old farlander walked down the stairs; the rattle and bangs in the kitchen; the footsteps returning, the bedroom door closing once more.

The R
ō
shun was only another concern to occupy his mind.