Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

‘He’s right,’ added Che, and she stopped struggling in his grasp. He released her.

‘What are you?’ Curl asked the old man suddenly.

When Ash would not respond, she looked to Che instead.

‘It’s a long story,’ he told her. ‘Now come.’

Ash darted through one of the back doors of the tenement building, his head darting left and right. They both hurried to keep up with him.

They went through the door and up a series of steps to the third floor, the uppermost floor. Ash entered one of the open doorways into a small apartment. He inspected the ceiling of each of the three small rooms while Che and Curl waited in the hallway, keeping watch. The old farlander returned and strode back down the hallway, still examining the ceiling.

At last he stopped by a window. He opened the shutters and peered outside, then hopped up onto the sill. As they looked on he jumped again and caught hold of the eaves of the roof. He tried to pull himself up; gasped and could not manage it.

‘Give me a hand there,’ he said as he dangled in front of the window.

Che tucked his pistol into his belt and offered his cupped hands as a stirrup. With a grunt the old man was up.

‘You next,’ said Che to Curl, and helped her to do the same before climbing up himself.

On the sloped roof, Ash was tugging free the wooden tiles and setting them to one side. Che stopped and scanned the streets surrounding the building.

When he turned, Ash was gone and a hole in the roof had replaced him. Che ducked his head inside and saw a small dark attic space beneath the eaves. He dropped his backpack down to Ash, helped Curl down after it, then climbed down. Carefully, he settled his feet on one of the beams of wood that ran across the top of the plaster ceilings below, between the old straw stuffed flat in the wide spaces.

Che held his nose for a moment, resisting the urge to sneeze. ‘No trapdoors in the ceilings. No access. I like your thinking.’

Pass me down the tiles,’ Ash told him, and then he laid the tiles out across two beams so that they would have somewhere to sit.

They sat in silence while motes of straw danced in the beam of daylight. What water they had was shared around equally. None of them had anything to eat.

Che held his head in his hands, feeling sorry for himself. His hangover seemed to be worsening, if that was possible. He felt as if he was dying. ‘If you still intend to kill me, old man,’ he said, ‘I’d advise you take your chances now.’

The farlander surprised him with a smile. ‘What was it, Keratch?’

With a nod he replied, ‘It was forced on me.’

‘You were the one who kept asking for it,’ Curl snapped.

Ash tutted, as though admonishing two children. ‘I am told that in old Khosian, Keratch means a serious injury to the head.’

‘Yes,’ said Che. ‘That sounds about right.’

The farlander studied Curl in the shafts of light. ‘You look a little young for this.’

‘I’m seventeen,’ she told him crisply. ‘Old enough for most things, don’t you think?’

He seemed to agree. ‘Well, Curl, I am Ash,’ and he held out his hand. She shook it, tentatively.

Ash stood and poked his head out through the hole in the roof, resting his arms on its edges. Below him, Che fumbled through his pack until he found his covestick, then poured the last of his water from his flask across it and scrubbed his teeth in the gloom. ‘How are you?’ he asked Curl from around the brush, hoping to break through her frostiness.

‘I could do with using that after you.’

‘If you don’t mind sharing,’ he said. He looked to Ash. ‘Anything of interest out there, old man?’

Ash said nothing. He seemed to be fixated on something in the distance.

Che spat and offered the covestick to Curl, then hobbled over to Ash to poke his head out too. He followed his gaze through the rising pillars of smoke, focusing on the citadel that reared up at its very heart. ‘Tell me what you see there,’ Ash said.

‘A flag, flying from the citadel.’

‘What kind of flag.’

Che squinted. The light was good today, the sky a clear blue. He felt a jolt of shock pass through him.

‘I thought you said she was dead,’ Ash remarked drily.

Che glanced down to see if Curl was listening. He bit his lip, adjusted his footing beneath him on the beams as he pondered for a moment.

‘It could be a ruse of some kind,’ he said quietly. ‘Perhaps they don’t wish to announce her death just yet. Or perhaps she’s dying even now.’ He shook his head.

The Roshun grunted. His gaze remained fixed on the distant flag on top of the citadel: white in colour, a black raven upon it, flapping in the wind like a challenge.

Prisoners of War

The pit was ten feet deep and covered by a screen of wooden bars. Looking up from its filthy earthen floor, the sky was a circle of brilliance that held aloft the occasional bird, tilting its wings in a wind they couldn’t feel. The men craned their necks to watch that circle. There was nothing else for them to see down there, save for each other; sad battered reminders of where they were, and how they suffered.

It was their third day of captivity. Each wore a grubby one-piece suit of yellow finely woven cotton, with buttoned flaps they could release when they needed to relieve themselves. They were shackled hand and foot. All of them bore bruises, cuts, internal injuries.

Bull had just spat a mouthful of water onto the floor, and was staring at a rotten tooth he had just plucked from his jaw.

‘Here,’ he whispered, and passed the skin of water to his old comrade in arms.

Bahn failed to respond at first. He was staring at the opposite wall of earth and far beyond it, his face a filthy smear but for his reddened eyes, and the purplish swelling of his cheek where a gash had inflamed the skin. He had a hand resting on his outstretched leg, and it was trembling badly. His other hand was pressed against his growling stomach. They were all underfed and hungry.

Bahn had complained of not being able to hear in his right ear, so Bull nudged him, and the man turned his head slowly, and looked at the waterskin, then looked at Bull. He returned to staring through the wall.

Weakness rode through Bull like nausea. He tossed the water-skin to the staff sergeant, Chilanos, instead, who refused to speak either, only offered a flicker of gratitude with his eyes. The next man along took it from him when he was done with it. This tepid water was all they had by way of luxury; they each sipped it like fine wine.

For three days now, the small group had been deprived in every way that mattered. They weren’t permitted to talk, though they did so anyway, surreptitiously, when boredom finally dulled the edges of their fears. Neither were they left alone to sleep. Their guards would drop small stones on those who had their eyes closed. At night, men would come to urinate on them as they huddled down in exhaustion.

For a while, Bull had searched amongst the soldiers that often stood above them, trying to spot the giant tribesman who had saved him. He wanted to shout up at him, ‘ Look – look what you saved me for !’ but there was sign of the man, and he knew he must have died of his wounds.

Every so often, a squad of imperial hard-men would descend on a ladder into the pit, and would chose one of them seemingly on a whim, and would lay into him with their wooden staves. At first they had tried to protest these actions. But each time they did so they were beaten just as brutally, until even Bull could take no more of it, and it made more sense for them to simply sit there, and listen.

Humour was what Bull used in the bleakest of times to help them through it; when one of them was crawling across the floor after a beating; when one of them was standing over the bucket pissing blood.