Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

‘She’s good,’ he said, glancing back.

The wine was heady stuff; he could feel it already. Che leaned over the table and extended his hand. ‘Che.’

‘I heard,’ she replied, and she studied him for a moment, before reaching out to clasp his hand, ‘Curl,’ she told him, and as their skins touched he felt a quickening of his blood and saw her lips part slightly. He squeezed her hand tighter, wanting her.

Desires

‘General Creed, some trouble has broken out in the western quarter.’

It was Corporal Bere, holding the reins of his sweat-lathered zel. The officer was freshly returned from relaying a message to Captain Ashtan, who was manning the western shore of the island with units of Red Guards.

‘Trouble with whom?’

‘Some panicked civilians. They’ve decided not to heed our warnings about the Suck and the Chilos. They think they can still make it through on rafts.’

Creed looked at the man in the pearly light of dawn. Bere was filthy, as they all were. His helm was gone, his hair sticking up wild and hard, and his crimson robe hung tattered over his armour. Yet he stood with his back straight and his eyes sharp – a good man, it seemed, when the pressure was on him.

Creed recalled that he was in need of a new chief field aide. But that involved accepting that Bahn was now lying dead at Chey-Wes, and the Bahn that he’d always known was still very much alive in his mind.

‘And what would you suggest, Corporal?’

Bere looked surprised to be asked his opinion. ‘I don’t know, General. Perhaps more men to contain them.’

Creed considered his words.

‘They’re still a free people,’ he decided. ‘If they want to chance it, let them chance it.’

The corporal nodded and climbed back onto his zel. Creed’s bodyguards cleared the way as he kicked the animal into a gallop, scattering the soldiers that clogged the city boardwalks.

Creed was standing in the middle of the bridge that spanned the wide Central Canal. He placed his big hands on the rail with a slap, and looked out over the scene of chaos without expression. A skyship was lifting off from the roof of a nearby warehouse, overloaded with wounded men and civilians.

The mood of the remaining citizens was becoming desperate as a new day rose around them and they found themselves still here. They wanted out by any means now. But the Chilos and Suck had effectively been sealed off by the Imperials, so that anyone passing into the mouth of either river ran a gauntlet of missile fire from both banks. An hour previously, Captain Trench, of the skyship Falcon, had reported that the Chilos was running red with corpses.

They have no faith in us to protect them, Creed reflected as he watched the pandemonium around the canal.

He could hardly blame them for that. The army had staggered into Tume shattered and harried by the enemy. They hadn’t looked as though they could hold a single bridge, let alone a city, and without heavy cannon it was doubtful they could.

A cold breeze ran fingers through Creed’s long hair. He tilted his head back, smelled the dank rot of the lakeweed amongst the other scents of the city. He had always liked it here in Tume, those times long ago when he’d visited with his old comrade Vanichios to wench and gamble and drink like the bachelor officers they were, and with all the luxuries afforded to the son of the Principari.

Beyond the Central Canal stood the citadel, an ancient fortress on the crown of the rocky island. A moat circled the base of the small island in the form of a canal. It was empty of boats now that Vanichios had sent away his family and civilian staff the previous night.

His friend refused to be dissuaded from his decision to stay and fight. Even now, his remaining Home Guards pulled wagons of supplies inside the citadel for the forthcoming siege, while on the parapets the canvas covers were being removed from the ballistae and bolt-throwers. Despite Vanichios’s own belief, the Principari’s Home Guard had been deserting in droves throughout the night, so that less than half of them now remained for its defence. Vani-chios had cursed and called them cowards and dogs in their absence. With his eyes gleaming, he’d exhorted Creed not to evacuate the army from Tume, but to stand and defend the city by his side.

For a moment Creed had been swayed by his old friend’s passion. It was galling to run once more from the Imperials. Yet cold, common sense had returned before he could speak.

Tume was a grave waiting to be filled. To defend the city now would cost the lives of his surviving men, for the Al-Khos reserves were still three days away with their heavy cannon, too far to make a difference now. Meanwhile, word had just arrived from the gatehouse that the Imperials were starting work on rebuilding the half-destroyed bridge, even though the defenders were keeping them under fire. By their reckoning, the enemy could have it finished within a day if they pushed hard and recklessly enough. Creed had no doubt that they would.

It would be street-to-street fighting once they were across, with no telling how long the defenders could hold on as a cohesive force before it became every man for himself, his army disintegrating around him.

No. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

The general gazed down upon the Central Canal and the ferries moored there, those that had made it back from their last runs.

The tall boats were covered with gangs of work crews hammering and sawing wood as they fixed sections of roughshod armour into place, protection for the rails and boathouse on each hull. Colonel Barklee of the Red Guards strode amongst them, jumping on and off the boats to inspect the firing holes they were cutting into the wood, the only experienced marine officer that they had.

The boats would need all the protection they could get. Once the remaining civilians and wounded were lifted out, there was still the matter of evacuating the rest of the army. Some could be taken out by the skuds and skyships. The rest would have to cram onto the ferries and run the gauntlet of the Chilos river mouth, hoping to break through so they could drift south with the current to Juno’s Ferry, where Creed had decided to rally and draw a defensive line.

They were fortunate, in one respect, for they still controlled the skies, the imperial birds-of-war having withdrawn after a few initial engagements. How long that would continue, though, no one could know.

Creed was intent on getting everyone out by tomorrow morning, before the Imperials finished repairing the bridge.

Anyone still here after that would be on their own.

Curl liked this one. There was something lonely about him, and rootless, and wounded, though he carried himself well, with a kind of last-stand defiance in his eyes, and his honest laugher was infectious.

Who are you? she wondered as she watched Che play. He didn’t have the look of a Khosian. She noted the blond stubble on his scalp, shorn close like a military man. The eyes that were dark and quick beneath thin brows. The square handsome face. His fine hands.

For once, Curl felt the need for some male companionship. Or at least she had done, during the night when she’d wakened on the cold floor of the warehouse they had been quartered in with the wounded, chased from sleep by the ghosts of nightmares, the faces of young men crying out at her to save them. While some volunteers and monks from the city tended to the needs of the wounded, Kris had lain soundly asleep, the woman snoring, and Andolson too, with his jitar, whom they’d spotted when they entered Tume. He had informed them that Milos and young Coop were dead, and the rest of the medicos they had known likely scattered throughout the army.