Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

Elsewhere in the cold space of the warehouse, she had heard a young man calling out from his own nightmares of the battle.

Curl had risen quietly, and had ventured out alone in search of some distraction. From a busy street vendor she had purchased a wrap of dross folded in graf leaf, and had taken it all before wandering towards the sound of drifting music.

Finding herself in the Calhalee’s Respite, she’d sat down at the game of rash with the grey dust blowing through her blood, and had played with half her mind on the game and the other half on the men around her, the young and pretty ones, and the spirited veterans.

She’d placed Che in the former category when first he had sat at the table opposite her and flashed his winning smile, and there and then she had thought, This one. The man played good cards, won more money than he lost, though in a loose uncaring way. And gradually she’d got into the game too. Played with him and the others with their cards and their coins, losing herself in the same way that she might have done with a man in bed, getting more drunk with every mouthful of the bitter Keratch she bought from the bar.

By morning the rash game had settled into an endurance event, the basement taverna calmer now that the soldiers’ needs had turned to food and sleep. Hot meals were doled up by the few remaining members of staff, with Calhalee the owner amongst them, the woman refusing all payment now. Lanterns were refilled around the room, though the natural light brightened from the glass floor so that it reflected in blue flickers along the ceiling and walls.

Men left the table and were replaced by others, but a core remained, the fat war correspondent Koolas amongst them, and the man Che, who appeared to be on a similar mission of drunkenness and distraction to her own, for he drank heavily.

Her thoughts spun slow and languid like the passing hours, her mind blown. She talked with Che and the other players at the table, making jokes and laughing in return; but all the while, some frightened stunned part of her was still standing on the night field of Chey-Wes, while around her men stabbed and hacked each other to death.

‘Tell me,’ she said to Koolas. ‘What can those of Mann lack that makes them wish to conquer the whole world?’

The man was scribbling something in his notebook while he played. He looked up with a start. ‘Hair?’ he suggested simply, before returning to his notes.

‘We have a story in Lagos,’ she went on. ‘The story of the Canosos. Of the end of the age. It tells of how a time will come when lies are seen as truth and truth is openly despised. A time when a host of dead souls rule the world in their own image. When only a few men and women remain to resist them.’

Koolas nodded absently. ‘I believe I’ve heard of it. Lagos ends up drowning in its own tears, am I right?’

Curl recalled that part of the tale too. Her face flushed, even as Koolas looked up quickly, and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-’ His words trailed away, the man suddenly awkward.

‘There’s a similar story told in the High Pash,’ Che interrupted in his slurred, drunken voice. He was still cradling her skin of Keratch, which she’d allowed him to try. ‘About a Great Hunger that turns man against the world itself. Eres swallows them up in the end. All but those who resisted.’

‘I hope it’s true,’ she said, and she could hear the shaking hatred in her own voice, surprising her with its venom. ‘I hope that every last one of them is wiped from the face of this world.’

The man Che was watching her oddly, one eye partly closed.

‘I might have known I’d find you here.’

Curl looked up to see Kris standing there, the woman holding a cup of something in her hand.

‘Kris. Come and join us.’

The woman shook her head. ‘Not my thing. I’m just doing the rounds to see where everyone is.’

Curl reached over and retrieved the skin of Keratch from Che’s grasp. ‘Any word on when we’re pulling out yet?’

‘Tomorrow morning, Bolt just told me. He needs some medicos to stay until the last boats are leaving.’ She watched as Curl took a deep drink. ‘Better take it easy with that stuff. It’s getting crazy out there.’

‘Kris, it’s either this or scream at the top of my lungs for an hour.’

‘Still, watch yourself. Don’t go wandering around on your own.’

‘I won’t,’ Curl replied, as though she meant it.

Kris glanced to the man Che then back at her.

‘Catch you later.’

‘Hoon – get your bloody head down, man!’

Halahan hollered the words even as another cannon shot crashed into the crenellations in an explosion of dust and masonry. Hoon was unharmed, miraculously, as he rolled choking from the dust with a fellow Greyjacket, Halahan patting them down as though they were on fire.

Another shot smashed against the thick facade of the gatehouse, even as their own cannons replied in kind, tossing balls over the partly destroyed bridge to land before the enemy artillery on the far bank. The imperial snipers were firing rapidly now. It was hard to breathe with all the rock dust scattering and falling over the balcony. Halahan’s ears rang so loudly they hurt.

The fire-position looked like a scene from the Shield in the earlier days of the war. The men hunkered down as low as they could on the debris that covered the flagging, cleaning out their barrels or struggling to reload. A medico was applying pressure to a Grey-jacket’s bloody side; three others lay dead at the back of the space, their eyes still open. Halahan stayed low as he crossed over to Staff Sergeant Jay, who was crouched against the parapet, watching the bridge and the far bank through Halahan’s eyeglass.

The sergeant seemed to sense Halahan’s approach. He turned just as Halahan bent beside him, and shouted into his ear without preamble, ‘We’re getting the thick of it now!’

Halahan accepted the eyeglass and adjusted its focus until he saw the heavy cannon belching smoke some way back on the opposite shore. The Imperials had three batteries positioned against them now, heavy guns with longer ranges than their own smaller field cannon.

He handed the glasses back to the sergeant, looked down at the bridge. The burned half, the half closest to them, lay low in the water, the wood a long ribbon of charcoal black. Much of the lakeweed it sat upon had sunk just beneath the surface, and where it rose again intact, a line of Mannian siege-shields stood protecting the snipers there and the work crews behind them. Around the shield wall, groups of figures darted forwards burdened with bundles of lakeweed and logs of wood, tossing them onto the remnants of the collapsed bridge before running back for cover.

They were slaves – Khosians by the look of them. At first the Grey-jackets had refused to shoot at the running figures, but then Halahan had gritted his teeth and given the command, and his multinationals had bent down to the grim task of picking them off one by one, while the Khosian soldiers watched on in stunned silence. The slaves fell like ragdolls, but there seemed to be endless numbers of them. Gradually, the ruined portion of the bridge was being rebuilt.

A tremor ran through Halahan’s feet. Another cannon strike. A portion of the parapet slid away to their left, and part of the stone floor too, so that Hoon and his fellow sharpshooter had to jump backwards to safety.

Through the gap, Halahan looked across the gatehouse to the balcony on the left, where Captain Hull, his Lagosian second-in-command, was likewise stationed with a platoon of men, all of them cowering down against the sudden volley of cannon fire.

‘ Oh no,’ someone said as they watched the balcony slowly crumble apart beneath their comrades’ feet.