reflected sunlight shone in his dark pupils, the whites bloodshot from the heavy drinking of the night before. The boy had sat up late around one of the campfires, joking and throat-singing with the older battlesquires of their Wing.
A different person, Ash now thought, to the half-starved urchin who had stumbled into their base-camp two years ago, having run away to join his father as his battlesquire. The boy’s bare feet had been shredded from a trek that most grown men would have baulked at.
And for what? For the love and respect of a father who could no longer tolerate the sight of him.
Ash felt a sudden kindling of pain in his chest; a sense of overwhelming shame. In that moment he felt the need to touch his son, to reassure him with the press of a hand, as he had with the zel a few moments before. He lifted his gloved hand from the pommel of the saddle and reached out with it.
Lin glanced up. Ash gazed down upon the heavy brows and the turned-up nose that reminded him so much of the boy’s mother, and of her family, whom he’d grown so much to despise. Features that seemed not in any way to be his own.
His hand stopped halfway towards the boy, and for several heartbeats they both stared at it, hovering there, as though it represented everything that had ever stood between them.
‘Water,’ Ash muttered, though he wasn’t thirsty. Without comment, the boy hefted up the bulging skin.
Ash took a sip of the tepid, stale water. He rolled it about in his mouth, swallowed a trickle, spat the rest out again. Where it fell the tindergrass hissed and crackled. He returned the skin to Lin and straightened in his saddle, angry at himself.
‘They come,’ announced Kosh.
‘I see it.’
Across the entire enemy front, a roiling carpet of dust began to rise into the air. The Yashi trotted forwards in their formations, high banners bobbing from the backs of riders, flying the colours of Wings and their shifting locations of command. Horns sounded; windwhirls wailed like calls to the dead, the sounds washing slow and rhythmic over the ranks of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Ash’s zel snorted, becoming lively again.
On this flank alone, the overlords’ forces numbered twenty thousand at least, a deep mass stretching to the right towards the haze of the battle line’s distant centre. Their black armour soaked up the harsh daylight; helms bobbed with tall feathers. Sunlight sparkled from thousands of metal points, a bright dazzle amidst the dust raised by the advancing army, as the hooves of their zels crunched the tindergrass of the plain into pieces fine as powdered talc.
Before the advancing Yashi, clouds of moths and flies rose up from the short grasses, and birds too in their thousands. They rushed over the heads of the People’s Revolutionary Army in a great crying wave of flapping wings, so many in number that the air cooled for a moment in their shadow.
Below, the zels snuffled and rolled their eyes as a hail of loose feathers and guano droppings fell upon them. Lin hefted the wicker shield over his head to protect himself. Others along the line did so too, so that it appeared as though they were sheltering from sudden missile fire. Jokes sounded from the veterans, laughter even, the rarest of sounds this close to a fight.
Ash wiped his forehead clear and surveyed the hardened men of the Shining Way, this Wing of the army in which he had fought with for over four years now; an old veteran himself now at the age of thirty-one. The Wing numbered six thousand in mounted infantry. They wore simple leather skullcaps tied down around their ears, white cavalry scarves knotted around black faces and wooden goggles to mask their eyes from the sunlight. Many of their armoured coats had long ago been painted with stripes of white like the zels the men lived and fought upon, and ornamented with the teeth of their enemy as lucky charms. Squinting, peering beyond these men, Ash could make out the great curve of the rest of the army, this great conglomeration of Wings.
He wondered how many would return to their families and their old lives if they won here today. The revolution had become a way of life to them over the years, bloody and cruel as it was. The People’s Army was a home and family to them all. How would they cope with giving up the freedom of the saddle, the bonds they had formed with each other, the highs of action, when they returned to their farmsteads and their regular, mundane lives armed with nightmares and faraway stares?
He supposed he would find out himself. If they won here, and Ash and Lin survived, he would return with his son to the northern mountains and their lofty village of Asa, to their homestead and his wife whom he hadn’t seen in years; try to forget the things they had seen and done in the name of the cause. Yet he would miss this life too. In so many ways, he knew he was better at this than he had ever been at supporting a family.
Ash could feel the prayer belt wrapped tight like a linen bandage around his abdomen, its ink-brushed words pressing against his sweating skin. Within its bounds he carried a letter from his wife delivered to him only a week before. Her words, carved into a thin sheet of leather, had pleaded once more for his forgiveness.
‘Father,’ said his son by his side as the enemy grew nearer. The boy was holding aloft one of the lances, his face slick with sweat. Ash took it, and the shield too. On his left, Kosh’s son did the same.
‘Are you ready?’ Ash asked his son, not unkindly.
The boy frowned, though. He leaned and spat in the same way as his father sometimes did. ‘I’ll stand, if that’s what you mean,’ he declared maturely, but he said so in a voice still unbroken with age. There was anger in his tone, at the perceived insinuation that he might run on this day, like he had in his first real battle, overcome by it all.
‘I know you will. I only ask if you are ready.’
The boy’s jaw flexed. His stare softened before he looked away.
‘Stay in the rear, close to Kosh’s boy. Don’t come to me unless I signal, do you hear?’
‘Yes, father,’ answered Lin, and then waited, blinking up at him, as though expecting something more.
The thin leather of his wife’s letter felt cool against Ash’s stomach.
‘I’m glad you’re here, son,’ he heard himself say, and his throat clamped tight around each of the words. ‘With me, I mean.’
Lin beamed up at him.
‘Yes, father.’
He turned and sauntered away, and Ash watched him leave as other battlesquires filtered back through the ranks. Kosh’s son joined him, slapping the boy on the back; a joker like his father.
A soft thunder rumbled across the heat of the plain.
The Yashi were charging.
Ash pulled the goggles down over his eyes and the scarf across his face. Beneath him, he could feel the tremor of the ground transmitted through the bones and muscles of his zel. He glanced to General Osho, as did every other man of the formation. Still the general refused to move.
‘With heart,’ he told Kosh.
Kosh pulled his own scarf up. Some kind of awkwardness kept his gaze clear of Ash. One way or the other, they would probably never fight side by side like this again; comrades, brothers, crazy fools of the revolution.
‘And you, my friend,’ came Kosh’s muffled reply.
They gathered their zels’ reins tighter in their fists as General Osho levelled his warhead at the approaching enemy. Ash lowered his own lance.
Osh’s zel sprang forward.
As one, the men of the Shining Way followed him with a roar.
CHAPTER ONE
Beneath the Gaze of Ninshi’
Ash awoke with a groan, and found that he was drenched in freezing sweat and shivering beneath a sky full of stars.
He blinked in the darkness, wondering where he was, who he was, experiencing a moment of delicate affinity with the All.
And then he saw a smear of light track high above him. A skyship, its tubes trailing blue fire across the face of Ninshi’s Hood, her one eye glimmering red as she watched the ship and Ash and the rest of the world turning
