Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

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 Che 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, Che 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 Roshun was only another concern to occupy his mind.

In the end he gave up on any notions of sleep, and groaned and rose from the bed, rubbing his face to rouse himself.

In the next room, Ash lay wrapped in blankets, breathing heavily as he slept. There was an empty bottle of wine on the floor next to the bed, and a jar of what smelled like honey. The farlander coughed a few times, scratched himself beneath his blanket, but he did not wake.

Che took the blanket he had been using and threw it loosely over the sleeping man. From the table in his own bedroom, he rifled through his backpack until he found the wrapped vial of wildwood juice. He tried to recall how much he was meant to take in order to suppress his pulsegland, for he’d never used the stuff before. It was easy to take too much of it, he knew that much at least; and too much could trigger the suicide response that was otherwise only summoned by will.

He placed a tiny dab of it on his tongue and returned the vial to his pack, then pushed the pack under the bed where it would be safe. The wildwood juice tasted foul and bitter in his mouth.

Che checked that his pistol was loaded and tucked it into its holster. His cloak was still sodden through, and he glanced at the sky through the window, saw that stars were clearly visible between the scattered clouds. He opened the window and hung the plain cloak out to dry.

The juice was tingling against his tongue as he descended the stairs to the ground floor of the big empty house, and stepped out through the front door and the gate beyond. On the wet boardwalk of the street he stood for a moment, listening to the exchanges of gunfire in the east.

Che looked in the opposite direction at the nearby waters of the lake, a black expanse visible between the two rows of housing. Drawn to it, he walked along the street and crossed the broad thoroughfare, and scrambled down onto the slick littoral of lakeweed until he stood with the water at his feet.

Campfires twinkled now all along the far shores. Rafts still drifted across the lake. They would be heading for the mouths of the Chilos and the Suck, hoping to make it clear to safety.

I should be on one of those rafts, he thought sourly. I should be getting as far away from here as I can.

Reluctantly, Che turned his back on it.

He faced the distant lights and noise of the city’s heart, wondering how long he had left before they came for him.

The old woman crouched on the shoreline of the floating island, ankle-deep in the water with her skirts tied up around her thighs, using a knife to cut through a strand of lakeweed, which she dropped into a bucket by her side.

For a moment the guns ceased firing from the direction of the crackling bridge. The old woman heard a tiny splash not far from her, and then the sudden sluice of water running clear of something.

She stopped what she was doing to look up, her free hand settling for balance on the basket.

‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, her voice shaking with age.

No one answered, though she could sense the presence of someone nearby, watching her.

She stood up with the knife in her hand. Another splash. More water running free. ‘Who’s there!’ she demanded again, and took a few steps backwards until she was clear of the water.

‘It’s me, old mother, your child,’ came a female voice, young, close. It made the old woman jerk in alarm.

‘What? I have no children. Who is that?’

She felt a ripple of water spill across her toes. Smelled a spicy breath against her own.

‘Stop playing with her, can’t you see that she’s blind.’ A man’s voice, a whisper. ‘Swan, help me with these clothes before we freeze to death, will you?’

‘Blind or not, she’s still a witness.’

The woman’s heart stopped as a cool edge pressed against her throat. She did not dare move. Her useless eyes moved of their own accord.

‘Old blind woman with no children,’ chided the woman’s voice once more.

‘ Swan! ’

A burning pain shot across her throat. She coughed wetly, choking, held a hand up to her neck to feel a hotness spill across her fingers. Her knees gave out, and she sagged to the surface of lakeweed, one hand lolling into the water, her mouth gasping like a landed fish.

‘This one should thank me,’ was the last thing she ever heard.

Hundreds choked the streets and milled in confusion around the great Central Canal, competing for spaces on the few boats still preparing to leave, or those ferries with crews brave enough to have returned for more.

Che saw folk desperate enough to be loading families onto makeshift rafts, mats of lakeweed with doors thrown across them; women clutching babes in their arms, children holding baskets, pots, the leashes of barking dogs; old grandparents muttering prayers.

The Khosian army had bedded down in the citadel at the heart of the floating city, and in the streets and buildings that surrounded it. The Tume Home Guards struggled to maintain some sense of order, while soldiers of the army staggered drunk and weary, or pissed in alleyways, or splashed like children in public cisterns, or fornicated with prostitutes desperate enough for coin to linger a while. He stepped over a Red Guard snoring in the middle of the boardwalk, and beneath the awning of a shop he glimpsed a brief fight between two squads of men, one of them spilling backwards with a knife sticking from his thigh.

The aftermath of battle, Che supposed. Men like himself, exhausted to the bone but now, having survived the fight, too spirited for simple rest. They hardly seemed the same men that had impressed him so deeply the night before as whole.

A door was flung open as he passed the mouth of an alleyway, and a couple tottered through it, shrouded in smoke. Music and laughter following them from within. Che stopped to look at the sign above the door; Calhalee’s Respite, it read above a picture of a wavy-haired woman with a fish dangling from her mouth.