David Gunn - Death's head

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“Looks like I should be asking you, sir,” says Haze, glancing at my shoulder.

“Like shit,” I say. “And you?”

“Also, shitlike, but better…” He hesitates. “Do I want to know how you did it?”

“What has seven braids and takes a long time to kill?”

It sounds like a riddle, but my question is straight. I’ve seen three-braids and five-braids, but the last of my kills was taller, harder, and faster than anything I’ve faced since the ferox. And a bit of my mind is burned, as if something cold seared it along the edge. When I look up, Haze is frozen about three steps into the room.

“Seven?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Ugly bugger.”

He doesn’t even break a smile. “A general,” he says. “How many chest tubes?” Haze mimes pipes going in and out of his own chest.

“Three, maybe four,” I tell him. “Fat as my arm.”

“And he was tough?”

I touch my chest, watched by the doctor, who is undoing what looks like a tiny jewelry roll made from black leather. “Very tough, also very reluctant to die. Until I cut off his head.”

Haze vomits.

He makes it out of the room and into the night, but we can all hear him spew onto the cobbled courtyard. On the way out he passes the silverhead, staring from its bucket. I’m not sure that helps.

“Lazlo,” says Haze, when he returns to the room. “General Lazlo…He was leading their troops.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugs. “I hear things.”

The boy might mean rumors, but somehow I think he means exactly what he says. Haze hears things, and that’s fine, because I hear things, too. Not recently, and not since Haze decided to stay out of my thoughts, but I hear things all the same.

“It’s okay.”

“No,” he says. “It’s not. They’re going to slaughter you.”

When I wake the doctor is gone, my shoulder is bandaged, and I’m tied to a chair in the kitchen. The towels beneath my chair are blood-soaked, and some of them have been ripped apart for rags. Franc is emptying a bucket of pink-tinged water and Haze is ashen, clutching his stomach as if someone has just kicked him in the guts.

“What’s with him?”

“So,” says Shil. “You’re back.”

She drops to a crouch in front of me and everyone suddenly decides they want to be someplace else. One after another the Aux traipse from the kitchen, until only Haze is left.

“Thank you,” he says, then shuts the door behind him.

“You know,” says Shil, “I’m really tempted to leave you there.” But she doesn’t; she cuts the ropes on my chair, helps me upstairs, and puts me to bed, then takes off half her clothes and climbs in beside me.

“Molest me,” she says, “and you’re dead.”

These are the last words I hear before sleep takes me. She’s still there when I wake, next to me when I sleep again, and still there the morning after, although my sense of time is screwed and three weeks have gone before I reach for Shil, and it’s for more than the simple comfort of knowing someone is there.

She slaps away my hand hard enough to mean it.

“We need to talk.”

“Later.”

“No. We want to know who you really are.”

“Sven,” I tell her. “Sven Tveskoeg, lieutenant, Obsidian Cross second class.”

For a second Shil looks as if she’s about to punch me.

“Don’t even think about it,” I say, then grab her wrist before she can launch herself off the bed. She’s fully dressed, which must mean I’ve been getting noticeably better.

“All right.” My voice is resigned. “What do you want to know?”

When she turns it’s her thinness I really notice. Her arms are shrunken and her wrist is sticklike beneath my grip; as for her face, it’s made mostly from hollows.

“Have you been ill?”

She looks at me, and there’s something dark in her eyes. “You’ve been gone for three weeks,” she says. “It was a good choice. We’ve begun walling our dead into cellars to stop the living from eating them.”

I remember soups and stale bread, softened in water.

“You gave me your food?”

“Everyone did,” says Shil.

She pushes me back when I try to sit up. There’s enough strength in my body to get past her, but I stay where I am and let Shil sit next to me. “No one had to give you their food,” she says. “We chose. And we understand about the gate. It’s just…”

“Say it.”

“Haze says you’re like him. NewlyMade.”

“Bullshit.”

“And Colonel Nuevo’s been sending some kid hourly to see if you’re awake and everyone says the Silver Fist will attack any day.”

“The colonel?”

She nods, scowling.

“How’s the weather?”

Shil looks puzzled by my change of topic, but something’s been worrying away at the edges of my thoughts since I killed the seven-braid and I’ve just remembered what it is. Any attack on us is going to come before the river melts.

“It’s getting warmer,” she says.

“Get me my uniform and my gun.”

My jacket’s been washed and patched. Someone’s pinned an enamel star onto my sleeve. Serious wound-I don’t need a badge to remind me of that. Just putting my feet on the floor and trying to stand reminds me.

“About fucking time,” says the gun as it swallows a battery pack. “Next time you go walkabout inside your own head, try feeding me first.”

Four officers I don’t know guard the door to the old bank. They’ve all been awarded the Obsidian Cross third class. And I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was a corporal the last time our paths crossed.

Not good. In fact, so not good that I understand before I’m even through the door that we’re into the end days, and Colonel Nuevo expects to lose. So do I, but it’s the colonel’s job not to let it show.

The officers salute.

I salute.

My gun snorts.

I start to give my name and rank, but the four know it already. The youngest knocks on the door, three raps, followed by two, followed by another three. As a piece of code or security mechanism it’s worthless.

“The colonel will see you now.”

A girl stands at the top of the stairs. She’s beautiful; she’s also roughly the same age as Franc and speaks the local patois. The kid should be keeping her distance from us because most of the inner city will soon discover that their lives depend on swearing they hate us, have always hated us, and have never collaborated in any way. Even that may not be enough to save them.

“Pretty,” says my gun.

“The girl?” I ask, surprised.

“Her rig.”

Looking closely, I can see she’s wearing a neat little holster beneath her left arm; it obviously carries a very slim gun, because I’d missed it.

“Local?”

“Doubt it,” my gun says. “Not built like that. Way too foxy.”

It’s still talking about the weapon.

“Come in,” says a voice when I hammer on the colonel’s bunker door.

Colonel Nuevo wears full military uniform. A silver stripe runs down the side of his dress trousers. Medals hang in an imposing row across his heart, and braid cascades down his chest; chain-mail epaulets protect each shoulder.

His rank is declared by his collar badges, while his Obsidian Cross first class hangs on a black ribbon around his neck.

“Join me,” he says.

His first bottle is already empty, so the colonel pulls another from his desk. Someone’s used my glass before me-maybe two or three people, judging by the overlapping fingerprints. The spirit is bitter, clear as ice, and so strong that inhaling its fumes makes my throat tighten.

“Got a room full of this stuff,” he says. “I can spare you a few if you’d like. I mean”-Colonel Nuevo smiles almost happily-“it’s not as if I’m likely to have time to drink it all.”