Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

‘Go,’ he said, and they started off alongside the walls of thatch that ran along the left side of it, screens for back gardens.

Again he turned and aimed half-blind at Swan. She ducked aside just as he fired.

A squad of Red Guards came into view, turning towards the sound of the gunshot. Curl staggered up to them before Che could stop her. He hung back as she spoke, pointing back towards their pursuers. The men saw Swan and spread out as they moved towards her position.

Che tugged Curl’s sleeve, jerked his head for her to follow him. Slower now, both of them spent, they jogged along the street, Che looking left and right for a sign of Guan or the house.

Something flapped in a breath of wind.

It was his cloak, dangling from the upstairs window where he’d hung it out to dry.

They went over the thatched wall at the back. Che fell and rolled across a surface of wood chippings. When Curl helped him to his feet, he led her through the garden, around the edge of the house to the front.

‘Here,’ he said with his neck pounding, and they went inside and closed the door behind them. Che drew the night bolt. The house was just as he’d left it. He pounded up the stairs and into his bedroom, where he pulled out his backpack and rummaged for the vial of wildwood juice. He shook a drop of it onto his tongue. The girl stood in the doorway, watching him.

Che went to the window. He stood to one side of it and glanced out.

No one in sight.

Cautiously, he drew his cloak inside, felt that it was bone dry.

He pulled Curl into the room and closed that door too, then sat down on the bed with his pistol and fumbled to reload it. He snapped it together and waited there with it in his hands. They could hear loud snoring from the room next door.

The beat of the pulsegland seemed to be diminishing. He wasn’t sure at first, but then, after an endless time, he grew more certain of it.

At last he sighed with relief.

‘They’re gone,’ he said, and flopped back on the bed with a groan. His head was still reeling.

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded.

‘You want to tell me who they were?’

‘Old friends,’ he tried. ‘I owe them money.’

‘What are you, a thief?’

Che rose awkwardly and went to the window again and looked out, but still he couldn’t see anyone out there. When he turned back towards her, she was trying to get the door open to leave.

He was across the room in three strides. Curl gasped as he snatched her wrist. ‘Wait,’ he was about to say, but before he knew it they were pressed against the closed door, their breaths hot in each other’s faces.

And then they were kissing, and tearing at each other with their hands, all thoughts flown in passion and need.

The Gauntlet

A Greyjacket fell in the darkness as Halahan jogged past him, dead before he even hit the ground. Halahan scrabbled through the debris of a storehouse, and stopped next to Sergeant Jay where he squatted behind an upturned wagon, ducking down next to him. Archers to either side of them were firing wildly over the barricade that stretched across the street. He took a quick glimpse over the wagon, saw bright flashes of gunfire and the streak of shots through the night.

Shapes flitted through the rubble of the gatehouse, bent low as they ran. Beyond them, through the siege-shields on the hastily finished bridge, more figures were massing for a second wave of attack.

‘Where is he! Did you send another runner?’ he shouted into Jay’s ear. The staff sergeant nodded, then looked through a gap in the wood, staring grimly at swarms of Imperials crossing the bridge.

An explosion made the sergeant duck next to him; grenades tossed ahead of the assault.

Halahan looked up at the surrounding buildings. Riflemen and archers were firing down with everything they had now. In the night air over the lake, cannons roared at each other as skyships engaged.

Somehow, the fire-positions in the shattered buildings along either side of the gatehouse had fallen. Now, reports were coming in of enemy units trying to flank the second line of defence. Hala-han suspected Commandos, using stealth to swim in from positions on the bridge or from the shore itself. They seemed to be attacking all along the southern edge of the island, if the crackles of gunfire were anything to go by.

Halahan scowled as he saw Red Guards and Specials falling back into the road from a side street they’d been defending. Next to Hala-han, an archer stood and shot at an Imperial clambering up the opposite side of the wagon. More were bounding up it, howling like wild dogs, with the wagon shaking under their weights. Red Guards on both sides of him pushed forwards, their chartas licking out, back again; a man’s insane face glared at him before toppling backwards beyond sight.

He swung to look back along the street with a curse on his lips, but then he saw the great dark bulk of Creed striding towards his position, the general’s bodyguards jostling around him. Halahan ran to meet him. The general’s face was red with passion as he shouted over the noise. ‘They’re attacking all along the south with rafts and swimmers. How long can you hold here?’

‘Hold? Does it look as though we can hold?’

‘We have two thousand men still in the city, Colonel. You must give us time to get them all out.’

‘I’m aware of our problems, General. But I’m telling you, we can’t hold here any longer.’

Creed looked up, as they all did, at an explosion rippling through the sky to the east. A skyship was disintegrating in brilliant tumbles of fire.

‘Fine, then,’ Creed shouted. ‘Pull back in good order, but slow them as much as you can. I’ll have a boat waiting for you all.’

‘Is that a promise, General?’

They stared hard at each other for a moment, both angry, both wanting to shout in other’s faces for no other reason than the need to vent their frustrations. But then Creed’s expression softened, and Halahan saw that he held out his hand. Halahan clasped it and shook hard.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he told him.

It was obvious that Principari Vanichios knew what he was going to say before he even spoke the words.

Creed said it anyway: ‘It’s now or never, old friend. We have to go.’

The Michine laid his hands against the parapet and stared south across the city. From their vantage on the citadel’s highest tower, they could see the entirety of Tume spread out around them. Gunfire crackled along the streets to the south. A few buildings burned, trailing banners of fire in the breeze that blew in from the east. Soldiers were streaming back in disorder, heading for the Central Canal where the last ferries were preparing to leave.

‘Will you get all your men out in time?’ Vanichios asked him.

‘No,’ Creed admitted heavily. ‘Some pockets are trapped in the south-west. We can’t break them out in time.’

‘And the rest. You have room for them?’

‘We’re improvising. There’s still a place for you and your men if you want it.’

The man’s stare slid away from him. Flames bobbed in his eyes. He had nothing more to say on the matter.

For a moment, Creed thought of pinning his great arms around Vanichios and dragging him from his ancestral home by force. But there would be no dignity in that, not for this man. He was Michine. Without dignity he was nothing.

In the east the sky battle was still raging. He could see coughs of fire lighting up the hulls of the skyships, broadsides hammering each other.

‘I did not think I would be this afraid,’ came Vanichios’s quiet voice.

Creed flinched. He felt like a villain, deserting him like this.

‘Farewell,’ he said at last, and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.