Baracha crossed his arms. His jaw clenched tightly from side to side, as though indeed he was biting through his own tongue.
Both boys were stained with sweat and dirt and, as they stopped before the assembly of Rshun, their eyes said they were finished with this business, regardless of what anyone else had to say about it. As one gesture, they tossed the net and the dead trout in a heap before their masters.
'Enough of this,' Aleas muttered to Baracha, and the big man inclined his head.
The Rshun gathered closer around the two apprentices, and Kosh slapped each on the back, while Aleas put an arm around Nico's shoulders with a quiet grin.
It was Osh who first spotted the arrival of the Seer. He drew Ash's attention by taking a few steps forwards, casting his gaze towards the entranceway where the old man stood, waiting in the heat.
A hush descended as the rest of the Rshun began to take notice. Breaking away from their ranks, Osh and Ash approached the ancient man.
'Something's wrong,' observed Aleas, drawing Nico with him.
'Ken-dai,' the Seer proclaimed to Osh, his voice loud in the sudden silence.
'Ken-dai,' replied Osh.
'What is it?' Nico whispered, but then the Seer went on to say: 'Ramaji kana su.'
Aleas leaned close to his ear. 'He has had a dream,' he translated.
'San-ari san-re, su shid matasha.'
'He thinks we should know of it, before the world turns any further.'
'An Rshun tan-su… Anton, Kylos shi-Baso… li an-yilich. Naga-su!'
Aleas drew a deep breath, as did all those around him. In the quietness of the moment, he whispered: 'Our three Rshun, those we sent against the son of the Matriarch… they have all been killed in Q'os.'
'An Baso li naga-san, noji an-yilich.'
'Baso took his own life, in the old way, rather than fall into the hands of the priests.'
Nothing stirred now in the large open space. They waited for something more, but seemingly he had nothing further to tell them. 'Hirakana. San-sri Dao, su budos,' the Seer said finally, brushing his hands together once. Then he spun on his heels and headed off, his extended ears flapping from side to side as he disappeared back through the courtyard gate.
'That is all. Be with the Dao, my brothers.'
All eyes turned to Osh. Nico noticed how the farlander's fists were clenched tight, though his expression remained one of perfect calmness.
The silence stretched on as the assembled Rshun waited for a word from their leader – perhaps a speech of some kind, or a few words honouring their dead comrades. Nothing came from him, though. Slowly, the silence expanded into an emptiness needing to be filled.
Nico's attention stayed on Osh's hands, the fingers clenched white with tension. As the awkwardness of the moment increased, some of the younger Rshun shifted with unease.
Ash began to take a step forward. At the sight of it, Baracha did the same. They both tried to speak at once.
'I will go,' declared Ash.
'As will I,' said Baracha, and he and Ash eyed each other with visible surprise.
Behind them, Nico and Aleas did the same.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The War Below Bahn spent most of the day underground.
He had been sent by General Creed into the warren of tunnels and chambers that cut through the earth and rubble foundations of the outer wall – Kharnost's Wall – where the sappers and the Specials worked endlessly to stop the Shield being undermined by the enemy. His instructions were simple: assess, through independent eyes, the present condition of the men below.
Like ghosts, Bahn concluded, in his first hour of being underground in those cold dark spaces where they toiled and sometimes fought.
The sappers were ragged and filthy. Many were criminals pardoned only on condition of working here, though some had volunteered, ex-miners and skilled labourers mostly. Any patch of their skin still free of grime shone sickly white in the pale swing of the lanterns. They dug dirt and carried dirt and shored up roofs with tarred timber in abject silence like that of a coffin. Working days for the slaves were merciless and exhausting, leaving little time for sleep. They worked in shifts of eleven hours, a half day, which in the tunnels felt more like twice that length of time, then rotated back to the surface where they drank the fresh air and rubbed their eyes in the burning daylight like men restored from the dead.
The Specials were a different breed entirely. Lean and wild-looking in their creaking, compact casings of black- leather armour and with their bare faces heavily scarred, they sat around in squads in small rooms barely large enough to hold them all, playing cards or fixing kit or simply waiting, eyes dulled by boredom, for some sudden signal of alarm. They had dogs with them, strong blunt-faced animals specially bred for underground baiting, just as scarred as their handlers. These lay with their leashes tied to posts, their bodies similarly encased in a simpler form of leather armour; occasionally their ears would twitch at the distant barking of other dogs below ground.
The air was foul and tasted spent. The low light strained eyes. The silence became a pressure on the ears, like the prelude to something terrible.
This was the first time Bahn had ever visited the tunnels. Like most ordinary soldiers he was glad to avoid them, and would listen to stories of the underground fighting with a mixture of horror at what those men went through and relief that he was not down there himself. He could not help but think of his own brother once living in these tunnels, passing each shift in tedium as a volunteer Special, knowing that at any moment an alarm might ring out, calling him to a desperate squalid fight in some pitch-black passageway no taller or wider than himself. His brother Cole had lasted two years in these tunnels before he had cracked under the strain of it, and had deserted the army and abandoned his family and everything else that he knew. He had never once spoken of his experiences below ground, not even to Bahn.
Coming to the end of a tunnel so low that Bahn had to stoop to avoid the sagging roof beams half-eaten with rot – a tunnel which zigzagged for hundreds of yards lit by lanterns strung too far apart for their light to meet, and sealed at every juncture by a heavy door that was opened and closed behind them by a Special, and with a hard- packed earth floor that dipped and then rose up again, heading beneath Kharnost's Wall then out beyond it, out beneath no man's land. At the end of the great tunnel, with that sense of weight pressing above his head like a sky of earth, Bahn found himself guided to a wooden stool set in the eerie confines of a listening post, a room just large enough to contain a pair of bunks, a desk, a bucket for crapping in, and two sweating Specials. He sat down with some uncertainty and pressed his ear to the opening of a conical device that resembled a bullhorn, itself in turn pressed against a wall of solid dirt.
In the silent depths of this place, Bahn listened to the dim and frantic howls of a man.
'Enemy sapper, I imagine,' one of the Specials explained. 'Trapped in a collapse somewhere.'
Bahn looked up and saw that he was grinning.
'Must be new at this, too, otherwise he wouldn't be shouting like that.'
The other Special looked up from where he sat whittling a length of wood. 'They always carry a bell with them, so, if they get trapped, they can untie the clapper and ring it for help. Uses up less air that way, than shouting.' He jerked his head towards the wall. 'He's panicked, though.'
Bahn eventually left them in their dingy cell of a room. On his way back, riding in the same small-wheeled cart drawn along two metal rails by a dwarf mule, an alarm sounded out. They had reached a crossing of tunnels where, from a passage on the left, came the clanging sound of a bell loud enough to spook the draught mule.
'Come on, now,' said the driver, attempting to sooth the frightened animal, just as a detachment of Specials ran across the junction before them, moving at a crouch and armed with punch-knives.
The mule shied up in alarm and kicked its hooves at the air. Failing to jump free of its harness, it only grew worse in its panic.
