Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

Suspicion, suddenly. ‘It costs half an eagle for a bottle of this stuff. It isn’t watered down already, you know.’

The coin skittered across the bar, turning every head in the room.

The proprietor licked his lips. He took the gold eagle and hefted it for weight. His tongue poked out and he dabbed it against the coin.

‘Very good,’ he proclaimed with satisfaction. He left the bottle where it stood and took out a chisel and small mallet from beneath the bar. The eagle, like all eagles, was stamped with two deep lines across its face, one crossing the other so as to divide it into quarters. He aligned the end of the chisel with one of the lines and pounded once, hard, with the mallet. The coin broke in two. He scooped up one half, returned the other.

Ash swirled the contents of the glass for a moment, took a sniff, then downed it.

The swarthy woman was studying him with her kohl-lined eyes. She looked Alhazii, he saw. Her eyes seemed overly fascinated with his skin.

‘What brings you to Bilge Town, stranger?’ she asked of him, and her voice was deep and rich, and it made him think of dusk.

‘My feet,’ he said, and threw the fiery liquid to the back of his throat, and refilled his glass to the brim.

Ash hired a room for the night, a dreary upstairs cubicle barely large enough for its dusty bed, where he left his sword and nothing else. He went back downstairs, and sat in a corner of the taproom with his bottle of Cheem Fire, where he began the slow but appealing process of drinking himself into the ground.

He spoke to no one all that long evening, and the look of him told them all to leave him be. The Cheem Fire soothed the pain in his skull, but most of all numbed him to himself. When the proprietor finally called for time, Ash found himself unwilling to climb to his empty room just yet. The drink had made him melancholy. He knew he would find sleep difficult, and would dream of things he would rather not be dreaming.

Ash finished off the glass in his hand and banged it down on the table. He took the bottle with him as he gathered his longcoat from the cloakstand and put on his hat, then tugged the door open.

Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, and the wind was tossing it about so that it stung as it struck his face. It was bitterly cold even with the coat fastened tight about him, and the hat tied firmly to his head. The tide was washing in with the high swells, and much of the lower Shoals was submerged in a foot or so of churning water. Ash clutched his bottle of Cheem Fire and staggered down through the dark shingle street towards it.

He tracked along the water’s edge, negotiating the shacks that perched in his way. Once or twice he stumbled, had to catch himself before he fell into the surf. He walked until the dwellings petered out, and the slope ended at a bluff that ran down into the sea.

He sat on the flattened top of a boulder with his feet dangling above the lapping waves and the rock smooth and chilly against his haunches. He stared out at the wildness of the sea, watching the sleet falling as though from nowhere. In the distant darkness, the Lansway stretched towards the far continent, and the great walls of the Shield stood tall and black. Explosions flickered across the scene occasionally, their low grumbles reaching him a moment later.

Ash wondered how much longer they had left to them. It certainly felt like the end now, though perhaps that was only his own end he was sensing.

In ruins, Ash. In ruins.

He could not stop thinking off Sato, and all those who had been slain when the Mannians had struck; most of all the few surviving comrades from the People’s Revolution, men who had shared the same fate of exile as himself.

It should be fury he was feeling now. Yet all he truly felt was despair and isolation, a mood only deepened as he watched the bombardment against the far walls continuing. Once this city fell like Sato, the island would fall too, and then the rest of the Free Ports would be starved into submission. The darkness would finally have conquered the flame.

Strange, how only now he felt such a bond of solidarity with these people, now that he had lost everything to Mann, now that they stared defeat in the eyes. But then, perhaps it was not so strange. He had been the same with Nico. Unable to open up to the boy, to invest himself in what he could never bear to lose again. Like everything else that had ever mattered in his life since being cast from the old country.

He saw the full awful waste of his life, and could hardly bear it.

We should have joined the Few, when they first began writing to Osh.

We should have chosen a side.

Ash made a toast to the brave people of Bar-Khos, and drank deep.

The old Roshun sang sad drinking songs from Honshu as he worked his way through the rest of the bottle. He steadily grew wearier and drunker and colder, and all the more dull-headed for it. At last, the bottle produced only a single drip against his tongue.

Ash clutched the empty bottle to his chest. He spoke into it.

‘Hello,’ he said in a mocking voice that was deepened by the echo from the glass. ‘I’m stranded. Nowhere to go. Send help. More drink.’

With a few moments of concentration, he stuffed the stopper back into its neck, hefted the bottle, and flung it as far out as he could.

His eyelids drooped. Tired. Time for bed.

Ash lay down on the rock and curled himself into a ball. He began to snore.

The falling sleet grew worse.

In his dreams Ash climbed the valley towards the monastery of Sato, the slope growing steeper with every step that he took.

He pushed on, trying to hurry, keen for a glimpse of his home amongst the forest of mali trees shivering in the wind.

He couldn’t see it at first, even as he grew closer. Panic filled him as he rushed headlong through the trees. At last he stopped before a great mound of smoking ashes.

He could not comprehend it, that scene.

It must be a mistake, he thought. In my old age I’ve gone and hiked up the wrong valley.

He could feel the soft fall of ashes against his face, strangely cold, and against his lips, as tasteless as ice.

Ash squinted, peering closer at the ruins.

From the centre of the mound of ashes, a single young mali tree was growing. Its bronze leaves were shaking in a gust he could no longer feel. Already, around it, as Ash looked on, the wind was scattering the ashes to nothing.

A figure picked its way through the falling sleet. It carried a bundle of driftwood in its arms, and occasionally it stooped to gather up another branch or a broken length of planking left stranded by the waves. The figure stopped when it came across the huddled form of a man curled on the rock. He was shuddering, and moaning something in his sleep.

‘ Hmf,’ Meer said, and nudged him with a toe.

The sleeping man groaned louder and shifted in his sleep.

‘An old fool farlander,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll die of exposure sleeping out here on a night like this.’

Meer sighed, dropped his armload of wood, and with effort hoisted the man from where he slept and slung him over his shoulder. He adjusted the weight of him, then turned and went back the way he had come, past the bluff of rock, further away from the shacks.

Ash had to stop waking up like this, stiff necked and in a place he did not expect.

It was early morning, judging by the pale daylight that filtered in from behind him, casting a bluish tint to the smoke that rose from the small fire in its hearth of rounded stones. He was lying on a reed mat, and was covered in his longcoat with his head resting on one of his boots. It was a cave, this place; manmade, by the looks of it. The curving walls were covered in sky-blue plaster, though the plaster was damp and flaking in many places to reveal the naked rock behind.