Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

There was another story, one the Great Fool had himself used to instruct his followers, which Ash remembered too from that time.

A madman is held in a cage, with a blinded tiger as a companion.

For as long as he can remember, the madman has been walking from one side of the cage to the other, circling the tiger as it circles him, the animal snarling in hunger. For as long as he can remember, he has been leaping aside from its blind attacks, or standing silently in a corner watching it work its slow way around the bars. Never has it stopped this ranging about, so powerful are its desires.

One day, the madman finds he can no longer carry on this way. He stops his pacing. He turns his back on the tiger. He sits down and waits to die.

He falls asleep, or so he assumes – for when he opens his eyes again, all is different.

The door of the cage is hanging open. At long last, freedom beckons him.

The madman steps outside. He sees how everything is one in this place of all-consuming light. He sees how the bars of his confinement have been dividing his vision into narrow vertical slices for all this time. He looks to the tiger still prowling the cage. He sees how he has attached a name to it, and an identity, and a story of all the times they have shared together. He sees too how immature and petty, how strong and noble, the tiger truly is.

It is then that the man steps back into the cage with his earnest companion. The animal wishes to devour him even now; it still fears for its lasting survival.

But it does him no harm, for he is the master here.

He is sane.

It was in this way that Ash was no longer certain of himself. He no longer knew if he was flowing skilfully with the Dao in clear and detached purpose. Perhaps, in his grief, he had lost the Way.

How to know, though? How could he ever know the right way from the wrong way, when everything seemed equally as dark and unclear to him now?

Just breathe and go with it, the Chan monks of the Dao would have said. So Ash inhaled the cool night air deep into his lungs, and exhaled in a single long release all the pressure and confusion that was caught up within him; and from his stillness he launched himself from where he sat, springing up like a man on fire and sprinting through the darkness across the hard paving of the quayside, out onto the wooden planking of a jetty, pounding all the way to the very edge of it, where he leapt with a whoosh of breath and dived headfirst into the sea.

The Breach

The procession of cloud-men walked along the cobbles with their black robes flapping in the wind and their voices loud as they chanted the solemn words of the death rite. Clatters sounded from the occasional coin dropped into their begging bowls; incense trailed grey and pungent around their shaven heads. In the hands of the oldest monk, following at the very back of their procession, a wooden aeslo clapped together like the jaws of a mouth, beating a slow and steady rhythm that was a jolt to the senses every time that it sounded.

Bahn offered nothing as they passed by. It wasn’t that he wished to refuse them a donation; he simply couldn’t rouse himself enough to perform the simple act of it. He was standing as though buried ten feet within himself, looking out through a bramble of whispered thoughts in a weariness that had become familiar to him now.

All he desired just then was to skip his duties this afternoon, and catch a rickshaw back to their home in the north of the city, and climb into bed, and pull the blankets over his head, and shut out the world until morning.

He had been plagued with this lethargy for a week now. Achieving sleep had always been a nightly struggle for Bahn, his head spinning with reflections and concerns. Yet now, no matter how much sleep he was able to manage, whether three hours of tossing and turning or ten hours of total oblivion, he would still wake feeling lifeless and drained.

It was all he could do to watch indull silence as the monks rustled along the street between the lines of onlookers paying their respects; and after them, the pale mourners who followed, the small jar of ashes cradled in a young man’s arm, his even younger wife next to him, barely able to walk without support.

Bahn needed to resume walking again, if only to invigorate his senses. Not wishing to show his disrespect by rushing past them all, he stepped behind the mourners for a while, trying not to yawn as he watched their grief from behind.

He headed south, through the bustling Quarter of Barbers, that district where Bahn had been born and raised, along with his two brothers. From there the Mount of Truth could be seen rising gently over the rooftops to the west, the hill with a crown of green parkland around its flattened summit, and a building of white that was the Ministry of War, where Bahn reported on most days to his superior, General Creed.

Not today, though. With the lull in the fighting, the general had taken the opportunity to fly to Minos on a personal mission of diplomacy, or so he had deigned to explain it when Bahn had voiced his curiosity. Bahn hoped he would not be long in returning. It had become a daily chore of his to field the endless missives from the Michine council, demanding to know when the Lord Protector would be back, why he’d failed to seek their consent before deserting Bar-Khos and the Shield for so long.

Bahn had begun to respond with the same stock answer every time. He simply copied it from a carefully worded page he kept lying on his desk.

He passed a long line of refugees and locals waiting for their bread rations from one of the council-sponsored bakeries. It made him wonder if he should buy some food for the energy it might give him. Bahn had been eating less lately too, often giving his share of their meagre supplies to Marlee and the children. When he walked through Hawkers’ Plaza, though, the food stalls of the small bazaar were nearly empty, and what little was on display bore prices he could hardly justify squandering with his few coins. Better to grab some plain bread and beans from one of the mess tents when he could.

He stopped as he emerged onto the High King’s Road, the longest thoroughfare of Bar-Khos, running from east to west along the coastline for the entire breadth of the city. The High King’s Road crossed the mouth of the Lansway, the thin isthmus that ran out towards the distant southern continent, and upon which stood the distant ranked walls of the Shield. The road too overlooked All Fools here, the closest district to the Shield and the only civilian area to be found on the isthmus proper, packed now to bursting with refugees. Beyond it lay the canal that intersected the Lansway to connect both harbours, and, beyond that, a line of construction that was a new wall in the making, dwarfed by Tyrill’s Wall, which rose as sheer and massive as a cliff, given scale by the occasional small speck of a Red Guard patrolling its crenellated crown.

Reluctantly, Bahn trod towards it.

The no-man’s land between the walls were churned expanses of planked walkways and sagging field tents, bordered on either side by the sea-walls and ahead and behind by the larger walls of the Shield, so that the space within them contained the acoustics and light of a deep valley trough. The chaos of city life was replaced with orderly discipline and the raw mood of men who fought every day on the top of the ramparts, and below them.

A full army was garrisoned here in these spaces between the foremost two walls of the Shield. Stepping out of a postern gate in the penultimate wall, Bahn found himself in the principal military encampment of the war. Ahead stood Kharnost’s Wall. It was the only thing now standing between himself and the Imperial Fourth Army on the other side.