Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

In no time they were rushing back towards the lines behind them, back towards where the Matriarch was positioned. Others in the fore joined them, retreating from the concussions of mortars raining down from the overlooking ridge.

Che was shoved from behind by this sudden surge of men as he tried to stride forwards.

He fell, rolling through the muck as he held fast to his sword. When he regained his feet he saw men flooding past Sasheen’s position. Her Acolytes and mounted bodyguards struggled to shove them aside or back into the fray. Swords swung, felling some of them – dead men being better than routing ones.

Che looked back. He could no longer see the impostor in the sudden milling press of bodies.

What am I doing? he demanded of himself.

He had more urgent matters at hand. The Khosians were fast approaching the Matriarch’s position, who sat shocked on her jittery white zel with its tail dyed a pretty black.

Che shoved a fleeing soldier out of his way. He took out the pistol loaded with its poison shot.

Waited to see what Sasheen would do next.

Bahn came to a with a gasp, and found that he was being dragged along the ground by a bearded soldier.

A woman was fussing over him.

‘Marlee?’ he croaked.

It was Curl, though, not his wife, and she was bent over him with a vial of smelling salts in her hand. She looked surprised at his recovery, even managed a nervous twitch of her lips.

‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘You may be concussed.’

He looked up into the bruised and bloodied face of the soldier. The man nodded to him, kept dragging him along.

He had no recollection of how he’d come to be here. One instant, Curl had been treating his wounded arm… then blackness. ‘What happened?’ he rasped.

‘You’re all right,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

‘Was I hit?’

‘You were caught in a blast. You’re lucky to be in one piece.’

He looked at his body, saw that everything was still there.

Around them the battle was still raging. The entire formation continued to push forwards. ‘Get me to my feet,’ he said, and held his hand out weakly.

Curl frowned, then grasped his hand, and she and the soldier hauled until Bahn stood on his own two feet. He felt faint, nauseous.

‘We’re still here, then,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ said the soldier in his roughened voice. ‘Afraid so.’

Contact

It was unlike him, to be thinking so fluently in the midst of action. Ash was wholly unable to find his stillness here on this icy field.

The Acolyte who’d been about to challenge him had vanished in the confusion of the rout. As Ash approached Sasheen’s position, cold anger was all that he felt now.

Within it, memories were surfacing like corpses, bloated and awful.

He recalled Nico, standing behind the bars of the Bar-Khos jail where they’d first been introduced, the boy scared and red-eyed from crying with his mother, Reese, a woman determined to save her son that day. He had made a pledge to her, a promise to protect the boy, even if it meant giving his own life first.

He saw Nico on the burning pyre again in the Q’os arena, his apprentice breathing his last breath, dropping his head as fiery tendrils took hold of his body.

Ash’s anger was complete. He pushed his way through the routing troops, shoving them aside as he strode forwards. Without pausing he slipped through the ring of Acolytes that surrounded the Matriarch’s and her mounted bodyguards.

The guards’ war-zels stood firm against the flow, redirecting it around the animals’ steaming flanks. Ash stopped as a guard turned his zel to block his way.

He thrust his blade into the man’s side, piercing through his chainmail, not taking his eyes from Sasheen three strides distant. Ash jerked the blade free even as the bodyguard raised his own sword high. A flare was peaking in the sky above the man, illuminating a passing cloud.

Half blinded, he ducked as the man swung his blade downwards, bending from his saddle to reach him.

Ash blinked with the light still cloying in his eyes. Stabbed out with his blade again, felt its point cleave through into the man’s heart.

He stepped around the zel as the guard tumbled to the ground. In the midst of them Sasheen was trying to turn her zel around, to get clear of the position.

A space opened in their rear and Ash sprang forward, sword ringing from its sheath.

The Khosians were chanting as they pushed forwards. Arrows had begun to pepper down around the Matriarch’s standard. Archgen-eral Sparus, not far from her, was exhorting his officers to maintain the line, trying to restore solidarity to an army tottering on the dangerous edge of individualism and full rout.

Che looked towards the Matriarch’s position, where she was desperately close to the advancing Khosians and the explosions of mortars that seemed to be walking towards her. She was attempting to withdraw, despite Sparus calling out to stand firm.

So it had come to this, then.

Some part of Che was suddenly awed by the possibility now facing him. The pistol hung loose in his hand. To kill a Holy Matriarch; to topple her from her empire with a single shot to the head… His mouth went dry at the thought of it. His features set into a hardened mask.

It’s hardly different from all the people you’ve murdered at her whim, he tried to tell himself.

Che licked his lips and glanced around in search of Swan and Guan, but he was unable to see the two Diplomats anywhere. He was fairly certain they had orders to kill him once this campaign had reached its end. The note left in the Scripture had been right. He knew too much.

Don’t stay, then. Leave now and hope they consider you to be amongst the dead. What is there for you here but more pain and anguish ?

Only his mother, he knew. But she’d already been lost to him, and he from her, all those years ago when he’d first been sent to Cheem to be turned as a Roshun. Nothing had been left to him by the order of Mann, nothing but this hollow complexity of a life that he’d never wished for, had never chosen.

Che chose now to raise the pistol firmly in his hand.

He steadied it with his other hand, tried to draw an aim on the Matriarch as he waited for an opening in the ring of mounted guards surrounding her. A flare went up. Men illuminated in shaking light jostled past him, interrupting his aim.

Che fought to hold steady. He caught a brief glimpse of Sasheen as she tugged her zel around, and then she was blocked again by the tightening shields of her bodyguards. She would be away within moments.

Damn it, he swore silently.

He couldn’t get a clear shot.

Suddenly, one of the bodyguards swung around with his zel. The man’s sword rose high in the air then drove down onto someone on foot. As he carried through with the swing, the bodyguard bent low in his saddle.

Sasheen’s head came into view.

Che’s pistol flared and fired.

Ash saw Sasheen lurch backwards in her saddle as he closed with her. The Matriarch’s white zel cried out as it reared up on its hind legs, backing a few steps towards him. Riders jostled and hollered all around them.

He saw an armoured rider lying next to its white zel.

It was Sasheen, sprawled in the muck with her life-blood pumping from her neck. Her bodyguards were gathering where she lay, holding their shields aloft to protect her, their movements as jerky as frightened boys’.

He cried out as though robbed of a prize rightly his, struggling to his feet with his sword hanging like a thing forgotten.

She was dead or dying. That was all that mattered, he consoled himself.

Ash barely noticed the mounted bodyguard circling around him. From the corner of his eye, he spotted the guard raising his sword. His gaze remained fixed on the motionless bundle that was the Holy Matriarch of Mann.