Ash had never felt so tired in all his life. Through his swimming vision he watched a lone boy, only four or five, standing in the street with tears running down his reddened cheeks, shuddering with the fear of being left alone. Ash tried to speak to the child as he plodded past him. His mouth was a dry numbness, though, and he only coughed a few times, looking back even as the small figure was lost amongst a squad of soldiers trying to maintain some semblance of order.
‘ They’re leaving,’ Che was shouting up at him. ‘ They’re all leaving! ’
Ash merely squinted at the man. He heaved a dry breath of air and coughed again into his hand, a harsh and rattling sound.
‘All right,’ said Che. ‘I hear you.’
They turned into a side street and wound their way through a district of dark-timbered tenement buildings. The zel trod along a narrow boardwalk with the bare, brown lakeweed visible on either side. Up close, the vegetation looked like seaweed, flat fronds tangled together with boils of air bulging along them. People were taking shortcuts across the slippery surfaces with arms held out for balance.
They crossed smaller canals and further streets until they neared the western shore of the island, and entered an area of finer housing, three-storey mansions walled within their own grounds, their gates locked, their windows firmly shuttered, no lights within. The street was deserted here, but at the end of it a wide thoroughfare ran from north to south. Beyond the road, through a fall of sleet, tangles of lakeweed ran down like oily beaches into Simmer Lake, the surface dull in the twilight, stretching away to a hazy shoreline of dark trees.
Che fussed at a locked gate while Ash gazed at the boats already heading across the water away from the island, not thinking much of what that meant.
The Diplomat cursed and shook his hands to warm them. He glanced back once at Ash as though daring him to comment. Ash looked up at the house that stood before them, wondering if he was dreaming. It was a fancy Khosian country house, with quality glass in its windows and a roof the shape of a bell, the eaves reaching far out from the structure and curling wildly at the edges to form elaborate gutters; cisterns stood beneath them at every corner to catch rainfall.
The gates creaked open and Che led them into the grounds of the place. He stopped the zel and approached the front door. A gust of wind blew hard against Ash’s face, stirring some life back into him. He saw Che open the front door to a dim interior within.
Ash tried to climb down from the saddle, but his body wasn’t working right. He fell heavily to the ground and simply lay there, gasping, as Che muttered something about sorry old farlanders and grabbed him beneath his arms. He dragged him into the house.
‘There,’ said Halahan, looking through his eyeglass. ‘On the right. A shoulder.’
Hoon squinted through the scope on his longrifle. It was trained on the end of the bridge through windblown sleet and twilight. A line of log siege-shields were slowly creeping along the planking, pushed by imperial Commandos, the distant figures staying in cover behind them. Hoon shifted his aim by the slightest of degrees. ‘I see it,’ he said, then exhaled and pulled the trigger.
The gun went off with a sharp report that once would have left Halahan’s ears ringing for days, but which now he barely registered, for his hearing was ‘shot’, as they said. He watched the magnified image through his eyeglass, which trembled only slightly from the cold shiver of his hands, and saw a dark spume appear on the shoulder of the Commando behind the rightmost shield, before the man vanished from sight.
‘Confirmed,’ he commented in the lingering reek of the black-powder. Hoon broke open the longrifle, took out the spent cartridge and placed it in his bag of cast-offs. He blew into the breach for luck and reached into his ammunition belt for another one.
They knelt on a balcony on the right turret of the gatehouse that spanned the entrance to Tume. His men were tired, though those who had been with him on the ridge had been able to snatch a few hours’ sleep after the skuds had dropped them off in the city. Halahan had ordered rush oil to be passed around to keep them alert, and made sure they were well fed.
Above them, on the very top of the gatehouse, one of the army’s field cannons fired a blast of grapeshot towards the far end of the bridge. The chains lashed and skittered across the planking, taking the side rail with them before they splashed impotently into the water.
Halahan stayed fixed to his eyeglass, focused on those few siege-shields that had paused in their movements on the bridge. They were being used as sniper positions; puffs of smoke blossomed and then the claps came a moment later, a sense of detachment to it all as he looked on, even when the odd shot spat into the stone-clad crenellations protecting him and his men. Already, young Cyril lay dead with a hole in his forehead the size of a coin. The other Grey-jackets who kneeled around the parapet ignored the dead boy, and fired grimly at the enemy advancing over the bridge, keeping their heads low, remaining calm.
‘Get a move on,’ Halahan muttered as he adjusted his focus to take in a scene much closer to them: the Tume Home Guards in their tan cloaks, pushing their own siege-shields across the bridge in a ragged line. They were almost halfway across now, and coming under sustained fire from the opposite wall of shields and from the secondary snipers positioned on the far bank. Behind the Home Guards lay a trail of dead and wounded. More were rolling great clay jars of oil along the planking, dragging bodies out of the way as they went.
Their shield wall had stopped moving, Halahan observed. The men who had been pushing them were drawing their blades and fitting arrows to bows.
He swept the eyeglass towards the enemy siege-shields, readjusting the focus.
Movement there. Commandos pouring out from behind their cover, rushing the long expanse of bridge between them and the Home Guards. Four squads, Halahan counted, as the Commandos clustered into loose groupings, seeking what little cover they could along the side rails.
One fell as the snipers on the left turret of the gatehouse opened fire on them. The men on his own balcony did the same, their guns popping. Overhead the cannons bucked and fired, and wood burst asunder on the bridge. The Commandos moved through the incoming fire with grim determination.
He swept the glass back to the Home Guards. One of their sergeants had turned to wave back at the men who were rolling the clay jars. The nearest was still half a throw away from him; the soldier stopped and looked back at the others strung out behind him. The sergeant shouted something. The soldier drew his sword and chopped off the mouth of the jar. Oil splashed out.
‘Not yet, you fools,’ muttered Halahan, and then he saw the rest of the soldiers drawing their blades and hacking at the jars too. Hala-han chewed on the end of his unlit pipe as his worst fears played out before his eyes.
A grenade went off in front of their siege-shields. Men hunkered down as a cloud of smoke enveloped them.
The sergeant stumbled out of it, waving again, shouting again. One of their archers tried a shot at the closing Commandos; Home Guards jostled for position behind the shields.
Another explosion; this one behind the shield wall. Men fell to left and right. A burning shard went spinning towards the nearest soldier emptying one of the clay jars. The man simply stood there gaping as the shard bounced through the spreading pool of oil and ignited it. Flames combusted across the planking; blue flickers rising into fiercer reds and yellows. The soldier turned to run as fire washed over him. He ran like a burning wick to the rail, where he pitched over the side with his arms waving and plummeted into the crystal-clear waters.
Halahan chewed his pipe, watching a sandal burn on the surface as its owner sank into the depths.
‘Sweet Mercy,’ intoned Hoon as he straightened from his gun.
Halahan lowered the precious eyeglass and scanned the bridge with his own eyes. It was all going up in flames, this side of it, anyway. Burning men shrieked and dived from the edges. The Home Guards at their shields fought a holding action now against the Commandos, pressed hard by their assault and by the fires roaring behind them.
‘Half a bridge,’ Halahan cursed as he stood to feel the heat of the flames against his face, smelled the reek of burning oil and lakeweed on the wind. His men watched him as he turned from the scene and strode fast for the steps.
‘Half a bloody bridge!’
It was for her own good, Klint her personal physician had explained in his soothing tones. If she moved a single muscle in her neck she might die. So Sasheen lay there on the bed with a wooden brace strapped to her head and shoulders, immobilized by it, feeling weak and feverish, a little ridiculous.
