company of your Grey-jackets will be dropped behind the imperial lines. Overrun that ridge and hold it at all cost. I repeat, at all cost. We must have the high ground for ourselves.’
General Creed, Lord Protector of Khos, faced his officers with a sombre intensity. The story he had offered was as close to a rousing battle speech as he would ever make. He wasn’t a man to spoil it now with some glib words of victory and duty, not when asking men to lay down their lives at his command.
‘Questions?’
Bahn waited to see if anyone else would speak. ‘Our cannon,’ he said at last, his tongue a dry slab in his mouth. ‘What of our cannon?’
‘They’ll be of little use to us once battle is joined. And vulnerable too. Better if we send them to Tume along with the rest of our baggage. Anything else?’
Still no one spoke up. By the general’s side, Halahan observed their uneasy silence with a quiet amusement. He hunched slightly over the stick of wood he leaned upon, using his weight to screw the tip of it deep into the snow, then cocked his head a little to one side. ‘Aye, General,’ he said; and he exhaled a puff of smoke from around his pipe, simple tarweed for once. ‘I was just wondering why you were carrying that damned Mannian knife around your neck, is all.’
‘Why?’ responded Creed with a flash of his eyes. ‘Because, Colonel, if we reach the Matriarch herself, I intend to cut her bloody throat out with it.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Clash of Arms
Ash awoke to the ground pounding against his ear, and recognized the sound in an instant.
The old Roshun leapt up with his sheathed sword in hand and scanned the perimeter of wagons. Riders, tearing in through the night. Shouts of alarm rising in their wake.
A zel vaulted the yoke of a drawn wagon, threw up clods of snow from its hooves as it landed and regained its footing. Its rider yanked hard on the reins and Ash saw something in his hand with a smoking fuse trailing from it. The man tossed the jar into the wagon, which instantly burst into flames.
Someone screamed through the night. More riders were charging into the baggage camp, throwing firebombs at every wagon they could see. People yelled and ran for cover. The riders cut them down as they ran.
This is my chance.
Ash glanced to the north, where the tents of the Matriarch’s encampment stood glowing with inner light.
He started to jog.
It was a damned foolish time to be flying. The air up here was frigid enough to cover everything on the little skyboat with ice. The silk envelop overhead, the sweeping control vanes along its flanks, all shone with a stark whiteness, while frozen diamonds of moisture covered the frozen tiq spars and rigging that fixed the wooden hull to the gas bag. Even worse, the light could not be relied upon, for the snow-covered valley floor below them kept fading into blackness each time a cloud obscured the waning moons, reducing their visibility to almost nothing. For Halahan, it only made the experience more thrilling.
‘A cold night for it!’ he said to his staff sergeant over the sound of the thrusters.
The man was huddling amongst the men at the very centre of the narrow deck, as far from the rails as he could be. Staff Sergeant Jay, a fellow Nathalese veteran, only smiled miserably and closed his eyes again, and continued to chant a prayer beneath his breath.
Halahan casually chewed on his unlit pipe and surveyed his fellow Greyjackets. They held their longrifles upright in their arms and shivered beneath their coats, eyes flashing white in the gloom. A few passed around flasks of spirits, though none of them spoke beyond the odd whisper. Good fighters, all of them, he knew. Men he could rely upon, each one an exile from a conquered land.
Past their heads he spied the distant lights of the imperial army, and he chewed his pipe a little harder.
His own homeland of Nathal had fallen years ago, after he’d spent half his life as a preacher of Eres teaching the oneness of all. Now, Nathal was nothing more than another colony of Mann, the people exploited and oppressed worse than they ever had been by their own Nathalese nobility.
Halahan massaged his bad leg where it was throbbing from the chill – or perhaps it was from nothing more than old memories. He had gained the wound after the Imperial Fourth Army had invaded his homeland, a calamity that had caused him to set aside his preaching, and in the greatest of ironies to fight alongside Queen Hano and her forces. In the penultimate battle of the war along the banks of the Toin, his leg had been crushed by a skipping cannon shot, and he’d been left for dead when the army had been routed. Dragging himself away in the darkness, only the kindness of a local forest woman had saved him.
In the aftermath that followed, with the country set upon by the full force of the Mannian occupation, his faith had been the very last thing he had lost.
Halahan shifted his leg, blinking from the pain of it.
He looked to the pilot behind the wheel, wrapped in leathers and a scarf and ordinary flight goggles. The man pulled on levers next to the wheel to fire short bursts of the thrusters along the sides of the hull, while another crewman clambered through the icy rigging overhead, and struggled to open a frozen valve cap on the envelope itself, needing to release air from one of the ballast bladders to keep their nose low. Two more crewmen worked on this little skyboat commonly known as a skud. One sat behind the swivel-cannon as immobile as stone. Next to him perched the lookout, a woman wearing a pair of Owls, guiding the pilot on his course with silent gestures of loosehand.
The colonel watched her glove glow a ghostly blue in the dimness, impregnated as it was with a dye derived from the lakeweed of Simmer Lake. Each fresh signal was answered with another short puff of the thrusters, or a creak of ropes as one of the manoeuvring sculls was adjusted.
He patted Sergeant Jay on the shoulder and made his way forwards through the press of men. Neither of the two crewmen at the prow acknowledged his presence; both peered over the forward rail with utter attention. They stank of sweat, but then everyone on board did, including Halahan. Worse was the wind from all their loosening bowels.
They’ll smell us before they see us, he thought wryly.
Ahead of the skyboat, the lights of the imperial encampment grew ever closer. Shouts came to his ears, men bawling in surprise or panic. A low rumble announced the Khosian cavalry charging through their camp.
The skud was shedding height fast as it approached the enemy positions, picking up speed in its descent. Halahan shifted around in his crouch to look back along the deck over the heads of his men. Following the skyboat, he could see the odd flush of light against the night sky as one of the other skuds fired a brief burst, manoeuvring itself to stay on course in their wake. Seven squads of men in all, ten Greyjackets in each one. He hoped it would be enough to take the ridge and hold it.
The pilot burned the thrusters for another second, but then the lookout raised her hand and made a fist.
The pilot cut the thrusters and they drifted downwards in silence.
They were sailing over a fringe of the camp now. To the left, Halahan could see the road exposed beneath churned snow, and the distant travellers’ lodge and cottages around it, their windows all lit, and the countless glimmers of the camp covering the surrounding plain. Shadows were flitting across the open ground. Specials, running towards the enemy lines in their four-man squads.
A cloud was moving clear of the moons, lighting up the scene below once more. The struts creaked as the gunner scanned the skies ahead, searching for Mannian birds-of-war. Ice cracked on tensing ropes. The high breeze was pushing them slightly sideways as they went, and the pilot peered through the gloom at the luminous glove of the lookout, but she held it held it there, still clenched in a fist, not moving.
There it was. A ridge of high ground running along the southern flank of the imperial camp, its slopes dotted with sparse, scrawny trees. The skud was approaching on a diagonal course that would take them past the westernmost point of the ridge, where it rose in a steep and treeless bluff. Soldiers were moving on the ground directly beneath them, rousing themselves and gathering arms, though it looked as if their attentions were fixed on the attacks in the main camp.
