Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

‘Wine?’ he asked, holding up the bottle above an empty glass.

When he looked up, it was to see the look of a cautious animal approaching.

Whiskers settled herself in the chair opposite as she held the slate board against her chest, then folded her hands neatly in her lap. He watched her as he poured out a generous measure of wine.

They played in silence, with the shouts and laughter from the street muted by the thick panes of window glass. Indeed she could play, at least enough to make a game of it at the beginning. Che went easy on her anyway, wanting to make it last a while. She played along with that too, an amused awareness in the occasional glance shot from beneath her thick eyebrows.

With each move she made, she held the slate against her chest so it wouldn’t get in the way as she leaned forward over the game board. Che finally pointed at the thing, catching her eye. ‘Please. Take that thing off.’

She blinked at him.

He pointed again, and made a gesture of removing it over her head.

She looked down at the slate, studied it for a moment. Then she pulled it off her with a rough hasty motion, and set in down against a leg of the table.

‘Now, how about the rest of your clothes?’

He watched her closely as she watched him. Was there a flush of colour on her face again, just a hint of it?

His curiosity only intensified.

Whiskers took a drink of wine, then deployed three of her pebbles, using them to flank one of his own, picking it up with her calloused fingers to place it next to her other captured stones.

‘I leave in the morning,’ he said, watching her eyes closely as he did so. ‘With the fleet. We go to wage war on the non-believers.’ Nothing. No change in her expression.

Che carelessly drove his black stones against her gathered whites, now huddling for protection in one quadrant of the board. He allowed himself a few mistakes until his offensive stalled and she rallied with her own. She didn’t take long with her moves, as though she was hardly taking the game seriously herself. She seemed more interested in the wine.

He refilled her glass, and waited until she’d nearly finished that helping too. When next he caught her eye, he declared: ‘I’ve been told by my handler to kill the Holy Matriarch.’ And the words sounded loud in the dim quietness of the apartment.

Her eyes danced wildly, watching him. Che could feel the sudden charge in the air between them.

‘If she runs from battle, that is. Or looks as though she might be captured. It seems they will not allow that. She must win or fall. Nothing else.’

He placed a pebble down, picked up another, placed it next to the first. A third snuggled in behind them. ‘Now, I mostly wonder who my handlers are. I wonder who I am really working for after all this time, if they can order the death of a Matriarch.’

Whisker’s face thrust towards him. ‘Hush now!’ she said with an uneven voice, the tones slightly off. Her hands gripped either side of the table.

For a moment, Che was startled enough to say nothing. He simply swallowed hard.

‘What?’ he replied quietly, and gave a toss of his hand. ‘You think they’re listening in the walls?’

She looked up from his mouth, her chest rising and falling fast; a silent panting. ‘You will cause us both harm with talk like this. Why say these things to me?’ Her face was so close he could feel her hot breath against his own.

‘Because, I thought you couldn’t understand me,’ he said slowly. ‘You’ve been pretending as much since we first met. Pretending you couldn’t read my lips.’ And he fixed her with a hard, accusing stare.

‘I owe you no loyalty,’ she snapped back at him with her strange tone of voice. ‘I am not your wife, to be telling your woes to. And neither am I your mother.’

At once Che’s mood darkened. It was like a lamp going out.

‘I know very well what you are,’ he growled, and of their own accord his eyes glanced at the slave collar about her neck.

Her eyebrows arched high. ‘Oh? And what is that, if not a slave of a slave, then?’ And her gaze darted around the walls of the apartment. ‘They afford you a finer cage than the rest of us, that is all.’

Slowly, Che tipped over the ylang board until the pebbles began to slide one by one onto the wooden floor, where they clattered and rolled as the two players locked stares. As the final pebble settled and silence returned once more, he dropped the edge of the board back against the table with a snap.

Whiskers sat back trembling.

‘Are you working for them?’ he demanded. ‘Do you report to them about me?’

‘Who?’ the woman replied blankly.

Che exhaled a long breath of air. He stared long at her, torn inside between anger and anguish.

‘Go,’ he told her. ‘Get out.’

She rose, lifting her slate as she did so. Walked without another word for the door.

‘Here,’ he snarled as she glanced back, and he corked the half-empty bottle of wine and tossed it into her hands. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, but then she composed herself. She took the bottle with her, closing the door behind as she left.

Che leaned back in the chair, found that he was staring down at the scattered pebbles on the floor – something in the pattern of them he could not quite read.

The Bastards of St Charlos

The fat man guarding the top of the stairs fell into her arms with a groan of surprise. She tottered there against his weight for a few moments like a young wife handling a drunken husband, then helped his body to fold neatly and silently onto the landing.

Swan flicked the blood from her knife, inadvertently scattering some of it across the damp wall. The woman stared at the spatter of droplets she had created, liking the contrast of crimson against the yellowing plaster.

‘What are you doing?’ Guan asked her as he stopped by her side. ‘Are you high?’

‘Only a little. Stop worrying, brother. It keeps me sharp.’

Together, the two priests stepped over the corpse and stopped before the door. A gabble of loud voices came from the other side of it. She could hear a baby crying half-heartedly.

‘Please people, one at a time! Milan, I saw you raise your hand first.’

‘I only wanted to say, if we do call off this plan of action then we should do it for deliberate reasons, not because we’re afraid of what they’ll do to us.’

‘But, Milan,’ came another voice. ‘During the week of the Augere? They’ll murder us where we stand for disrupting the holy week like that.’

‘And who would work the mills and steelworks along the Shambles then?’ a woman replied. ‘Or do you think they’d be content to lose their profits while they trained a new workforce?’

‘Pish!’ shouted another. ‘In the mills they could turn around a new workforce within a few weeks. That isn’t the point here. The point is they’re vulnerable during the Augere. All these pilgrims gathered from around the Empire. All these representatives of the Caucus. The whole world is supposed to be celebrating the unity of Mann this week. One big happy Empire, with all of us waving our flags and feeling like we’re part of it like the good sheep they teach us to be. And meanwhile, behind closed doors, they make their latest deals for squeezing us even further. No, they won’t like it one bit when we show them up by taking to the streets. But if they want to settle quickly, without a bloodbath in front of everyone, they’ll have to consider our terms.’

‘We aren’t here to discuss a revolution, Chops. What if they wait until the pilgrims have left, then burn us all alive in the Shay Madi for sport, like they do with the homeless, and then fill the factories with those poor souls who really are true slaves?’