another sip of water. Smacked his lips and stared at the flask between his legs for some moments.
At last he lifted his head with some clarity in his eyes.
‘The battle,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
Che offered a weak shrug. ‘The Expeditionary Force rallied. The last I saw of the Khosians they were fleeing across a frozen lake.’
‘Sasheen. Is she dead?”
‘I hope so. She was shot through the neck. I’m curious, though, why you were there trying to kill her?’
Ash was fumbling for something in his tunic. He drew out a leather pouch, dug his fingers into it to find that nothing was there. In disgust he tossed the empty pouch into the fire. He coughed long and hard, his eyes screwed in pain. At last he coughed a gob of phlegm into the flames, where it sizzled for a moment while he hung his head between his knees.
‘The boy was yours, wasn’t he? The apprentice she burned to death in Q’os?’
‘Aye, he was mine,’ came his voice, husky.
‘But he wasn’t wearing a seal.’
‘No.’
So the old farlander was human after all, Che mused.
He studied the man in the pale daylight. Ash had aged since Che had last seen him all those years ago in Cheem. He was thinner than he recalled. The bones of his face were sharp and pronounced beneath his dark skin, which was creased with wrinkles, and papery thin. His wedge of grey beard had overgrown. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and faintly yellow.
He looked like a man nearer death than not.
‘What am I doing here?’ Ash asked him. ‘This makes no sense to me.’
‘I’ve been sitting wondering the same thing myself.’
The farlander lifted his head and studied Che for a long moment. His eyes settled on the stubs of the young man’s little fingers. He winced. ‘What are you doing here, Che?’ he said. ‘Are you one of them?’
Che turned away.
‘Che?’
As the moments dragged on, he could sense the old man’s suspicions growing.
‘You left Sato without telling us,’ ventured Ash.
Che looked to the bird once more, saw it hovering again. Part of him wished to confess it all to the old man just then, to tell him what part he had played in the destruction of the Roshun order. But he found himself unable to say it.
Still, realization gradually dawned on the old farlander. ‘You were with them all along. With the Empire. But how? The Seer would have seen it in you.’ Ash sat up straighter, though it brought him pain. ‘Che – what are you? What have you done?’
‘I’m a Diplomat,’ snapped Che, ‘who lacked any other choice but to live. And what I did, old man, was save your life.’
Che tried to calm himself as the farlander peered at him in disbelief. Emotions swelled in his body.
It is over, then, the ancient Seer had said to Che sadly as they’d sat watching the Roshun monastery burning in the Cheem night. All the people he had known over his years of living there, the ones who had befriended him, who had been a family to him, all dead or dying in the flames.
Better finish me, Che, the old Seer had told him. Do it now, for I would prefer that it was you and not some stranger.
Che swallowed. He looked at Ash across the pitiful fire, knowing that the old Roshun was one of the last of his kind now, and that he did not even know it.
The knowledge felt like a dirty secret in his mind.
‘They know the Roshun are in Cheem,’ Ash finally said, and his eyes swept up to accuse him with sudden anger.
Che would not speak of it.
The old man threw aside his cloak and made a lunge at Che, though he collapsed to the ground before he could reach him. Che remained still. He watched as the farlander tried to push himself up, but it was beyond him.
He stood and dragged Ash back to where he’d been lying. Threw the cloak over his shivering body again. Ash looked up at the clouds with his chest rising and falling fast. Che was moved enough to speak, to share with him something of his own loss, but then he paused, his mouth gaping.
The old Roshun was chuckling; a broken sound filled with bitterness.
‘All is lost,’ Ash cackled to himself.
Che tilted his head to one side, curious. He watched the smile fade from the farlander’s face, Ash growing sober once more.
Che said, ‘You wish to kill me, I suppose.’
The old farlander stared at him hard. ‘When I have the strength for it.’
He looked away, saw the young hawk lift from the far side of the valley, its great wings flapping. It clutched something in its talons, a shape struggling to be free.
He lay back and closed his eyes.
In the early glow of dawn, Bull watched imperial soldiers searching the battlefield for survivors. They were moving in pairs, and when they found one of their own still breathing they called out for a stretcher-bearer, and when they found a wounded Khosian instead they checked first that the man wasn’t an officer, then stabbed him dead with their spears.
A pair of these clean-up men had stopped not far from where Bull was lying. They looked down upon a wounded Red Guard as the soldier lifted a hand above the surface of corpses around him. One of the Imperials kicked the hand aside and stood on his arm to keep it down. His partner stabbed him twice, his eyes as blank as the grey sky over their heads.
Bull looked away, tired and beyond hope now.
All night he had lain trapped under the mountainous weight of the northern tribesman. The flow of the giant man’s blood had steamed in the freezing air, warming Bull’s torso even as his great body died, so that he wasn’t cold, only near suffocated by the pressure on his broken cuirass, which was enough to tighten it against him and make breathing a laborious command of will.
It had taken Bull the finest bladework of his life to bring this giant down in the heat of the battle. They’d fought like two pit-fighters up close and physical. Bull had taken the worst of the battering. He’d known there was only a slim chance of winning the fight – and he’d taken it, boldly, even as his own legs were giving out on him. A perfectly timed jab caught the northerner in the lower thigh, hamstringing him, and Bull had experienced the brief thrill of victory before the giant had lunged out and grappled him, and his weight had borne Bull to the ground, trapping him where they fell.
Blood caked his face where his right cheekbone seemed to be fractured. He was unable to open his right eye, nor move his left hand. With all his strength he’d been unable to move the man off him.
A fine mess, Bull had thought to himself, and had stared at the night sky overhead, listening to the ever- fading clash of arms, knowing that he had been left behind.
Around them, the dead and wounded had lain scattered and draining of heat. A man wept, broken; others sobbed from the pain and shock of missing limbs. A youth cried out for his mother, long past shame for such a thing, then howled that he was not ready to die. Voices gasped, whispered prayers; not only Khosians, but the Imperials amongst them too. Someone in a northern accent talked to their wife, telling her he would be back soon, that he loved her, that he was sorry for betraying her. Another called to comrades now gone from the field, or lying dead nearby, for no one answered him.
At one point, the great tribesman had awakened with a shudder. He spat blood and looked about as best he could, his lips trembling. He tried to move his great body without success. He sensed Bull lying breathing beneath him, still alive.
In guttural Trade, the man asked how long it might be before dawn.
For a time they had chatted.
Ersha, he offered for his name. A mercenary from a tribe called the Sengetti, all the way from the cold
