anticipated, but he didn't reckon they would be too much to handle.
He screamed an order. The Night Guard merged, locked shields above their heads and in front, utilizing the hoplon's shape to form a phalanx formation. Arrows came crashing into them, an inexorable iron rain.
Under this metal shell, they nudged forwards.
*
Voland almost despaired at the sight of another delivery of casualties. Most of the time he felt like he was merely patching up the living dead.
Over the last two days he had slept for maybe eight hours in all. It was a job without gratitude, a life without motivation. As soon as one bed was cleared, another two bodies were waiting to use it. Time and time again, he had tentatively touched the detonator-collar round his neck, but it didn't seem as if it could ever be removed.
A moment of peace, finally, as he seized a few minutes to take a sip of water and contemplate his surroundings. He was in a chamber of the temporary hospital, a lantern-lit hole with a few empty cups, a few bits of stale bread.
Where is she now? he wondered.
The light suddenly blew out and he was left in darkness, uttering a weary sigh. Suddenly a wind caressed, one he was familiar with, like an old friend. Or friends.
'Voland…' they chimed.
'… we've found you again.'
'We want to help you, but we bring bad news.'
'Bad.'
'Sad.'
'Oh, so sad.'
Voland stood up, discerning the faintest glimmer of their wraithlike wisps. The devil chorus had returned. 'What is it?'
'Nanzi has left us, Voland.'
'Died.'
'We felt it, so sad.'
'Oh, so sad.'
Like an arrow in the heart, it struck home. He sat down, stunned. He tried to process what the Phonoi had just told him as they spun around his head. They were dizzying. He felt sick.
'What happened?'
They told him all.
He crumpled to the floor. All meaning had petered out of his life, nothing making sense any more, and soon confusion turned to frustration turned to rage.
Nanzi. The woman he adored, the woman he had helped to save once already, the woman he had helped to craft: there was as much of him in her as there was in himself.
She's gone…
There was a void in his heart so sudden and terrifying, he did not know what to say. In this suffocating darkness he could barely breathe. She died for those people up there, the riffraff. She had no business with their lives, and she was forced to it against her will because of a crime that should not have been thought a crime. It is their fault she isn't with me any more… my Nanzi.
'We're so sorry, Voland.'
'Please let us help you.'
'You have been so kind to us.'
'We want to make you feel better.'
Sobbing on his knees he managed a 'Thank you'. He then wept openly in front of the Phonoi for some time – he couldn't tell how long. Time had begun to lose any context, and slowly anger began to establish clarity in his thoughts.
When he had finally regained his composure he shuffled his way by touch towards the door. Opening it, he stood in the half-light, looking across a sea of the wounded, the dead-to-be.
It was their fault.
FIFTY
Dawn of the fifth morning, Malum was smoking a roll-up, standing at a smashed window, enjoying the contrast of the hot ash he occasionally flicked, and the cold wind. He was watching the Empire's soldiers mount an offensive against the border between Althing and the Ancient Quarter, buffer zones lying just 0east of the city centre. The savage shouts of war seemed so remote, so unreal. Grey clouds whipped across the horizon, over violent white-tipped surf. Smoke from pyres on the outskirts formed horizontal trails blowing down across Villiren.
The floorboards whispered underfoot as JC came up to him. 'Boss, someone to see you.'
On exiting, the man's footsteps crunched over crumbled masonry.
After a silence came a voice: 'Malum…'
Beami. He took another drag, exhaled calmly. She didn't really bother him any more.
'How did you find me?'
'It's not difficult for someone like me,' she replied. 'You leave enough of a trail wherever you go.'
'Even with the city in a state like this?' A half-hearted gesture towards the city, but she didn't say anything. The silence provoked him, eventually, to ask, 'Fuck do you want, Beami?'
'I never realized just how much of this you lorded over. I mean, I knew you had all your business interests and the like, and the odd fight, but all these violent men-'
'Fuck do you want?' Didn't want to look at her, didn't want to let her get the chance to affect him again.
'Won't you take off your mask?'
He considered his answer: 'No.'
'OK. Well, I tried to go back to our house – there was something I left behind, and it's completely empty. Where did you put all our things?'
'My things, mostly.'
'Come on…'
'The hell does anything I own got to do with you?' Eventually he had to face her, a black hood revealing only the outer angles of her face. The rest of her clothing was dark-coloured and tight-fitting, and something about its condition suggested that she'd seen some action in the war. He didn't know quite what to make of that.
Behind her, in the doorway, stood several of his men, but he motioned for them to go.
'You've every right to hate me,' Beami said.
He did and didn't. Most of all he just didn't care any more, and he told her so.
'Well, that's fine – and I don't feel any anger towards you. I want you to know that.'
'I'm surprised you didn't leave the city.'
'I've been doing my bit for the Empire,' Beami replied. 'I took out several hundred Okun at the moment of invasion.' Then, 'That seems like forever ago now.'
'Impressive,' he mumbled, more jealous of that achievement than he was of her other man.
'Look, Malum, I need a relic that I had to leave behind. Can you tell me where I'll find it? I'll understand if you don't want to cooperate-'
'Probably in the underground vault, where we keep all the gang's hauls.'
'So you didn't destroy it then?'
Silence was all he offered. There was nothing to say other than of course he had fucking loved her, so wouldn't simply get rid of her belongings just like that. But he couldn't bring himself to actually let her know such things, preferring to leave the constructs of his ego intact. His mask… what was left of his sanity, intact.
'Can you show me where that vault is?' Beami asked. 'I need to know, Malum. It's urgent.'
'No,' he replied, and heard her gasp. 'But someone else can show you.'
