window to look outside. The sleet had stopped at last, and the wind tore at the clouds so that occasional starlight filtered through. It was enough to light a band of smoke spreading high and thin from the city.
Ash observed the fleet of boats heading westward, the vessels leaving an eerie blue glow in their wakes. Che said, ‘With our chances of leaving diminishing with every boat that departs.’
Ash placed a palm against the windowframe and leaned against it. His chest burned with every breath he took, but the air seemed to help a little, laden as it was with its harsh whiff of sulphur.
He narrowed his eyes and took in the vague shoreline around the lake. There were pinpricks of torchlight out there, a great number of them. They could be seen all along the southern and northern edges, and fires too shooting up into the night, buildings alight. As he watched them, he saw how the torches were spreading, creeping slowly along the western shore that was the edge of the Windrush forest.
‘On a lake presently being surrounded by the enemy.’
Clumsily – for his coordination was still off – Ash dragged another chair across the room, banging and catching it against a leg of the bed, the sounds seeming overly loud in the empty house. Beside the window he sat with his gourd of water, sipping occasionally as he and Che both gazed out at the night.
‘Leave if you wish to,’ he told the dark form opposite him. In the dimness, he saw Che’s eyes regard him coolly.
‘I wouldn’t wish to rob you of your retribution.’
Ash tossed the gourd into the young man’s lap and observed the flinch of his eyes. Che righted the gourd as water dripped from his lap onto the floor.
‘You think,’ growled Ash, ‘that because you saved me from a bad spot, you have paid for all you have done? Do not think that, Che. And do not jest about what must be settled between us. I find no humour in it.’
Che turned his face back to the window. ‘Do what you must, old man,’ he sighed. The Diplomat scratched at his neck lazily, and Ash was reminded of this young man when he had been a Roshun apprentice at Sato; a small intent boy with troubled eyes; a laughter that could burst from him at any moment like a rush of startled birds.
‘You were one of us,’ Ash accused him.
‘So I believed too.’
‘Yet you left us for Mann.’
Che set his thin lips in a humourless smile. ‘I was always of Mann,’ he mused. ‘I just didn’t know it at the time.’
‘Explain yourself.’
The young man scratched even harder, barely noticing he did so. Gently, Ash reached over and grasped his wrist. He felt the shock of their connection, then slowly drew Che’s hand away from his neck, the man’s pulse beating fast beneath his grip. ‘Che?’
The Diplomat closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he spoke as a man reciting the story of another, without any emotional attachment at all.
‘The Mannian order has ways of playing with your mind, Ash. They played with mine, as a boy. They made me think I was someone else, then sent me off to be play at being Roshun. Truly, it was no deception of mine. I thought I was nothing more than an innocent apprentice. But when I became twenty-one, my real memories came flooding back to me, as my handlers intended they should. My mission became clear.
‘ Now, remove your hand old man, before I remove it for you.’
Ash drew his hand clear, sat back in some bewilderment.
‘You have condemned the lives of everyone at Sato,’ he told him.
The young man was a mere shadow on the chair, the whites of his eyes gleaming as they stared out at the lake. ‘I acted as I did to protect the life of my mother. So they wouldn’t harm her. There was no other way for me, you understand?’
‘You had no choice.’
‘No.’
‘And what of your mother now, Che? Will they harm her now that you have deserted them?’
The young man’s eyes were bright.
Ash suddenly regretted his words, though before he could say anything, the moment was lost in another fit of coughing.
Che offered the water again as Ash leaned and spat onto the floor. He took a drink to soothe his throat, and then Che reached down and picked something up and tossed that onto Ash’s lap too. It was a loaf of stale bread wrapped in paper, half of it eaten already. Ash heard his stomach growl as his eyes devoured it.
Something within Ash gave way as he ate; the anger he felt towards this young man, the sense of betrayal, crumpled into itself. He chewed the last mouthful and swallowed it down, and sat there unmoving for a while, not knowing what to say. Flocks of birds flapped through the night, calling out to each other, disturbed from their roosts by snaps of gunfire that sounded like nothing more than fireworks. A man called someone’s name frantically in the streets outside.
‘We could swim for the shore, if it comes to it,’ Ash said.
Che looked him up and down. ‘In this weather? You look as though a cold bath would be enough to finish you off, never mind a swim.’
‘Give me a day or two, you will see. Besides, the water here is not so cold.’
‘What will you do then, if we make it out?’
Ash followed the torches as they spread across the western shoreline. After some moments, he released a long, pent-up breath. ‘I will warn my people, Che. That is what I will do.’
He felt the weight of the clay vial about his neck, tugging at his conscience.
‘But first, I must see a mother about her son.’
There was a trick to falling asleep at night, and Che had known it once. He’d been able to lay his head against a pillow and relax ever more deeply into his breathing, until after only a short time he would slip into a welcome oblivion.
But he’d been a youth then, when he had known the trick, and he had lived in the moment as all youths do, rather than in the days behind him or the ones still to come. He had not yet suffered from that fretful mindset of adulthood, where his thoughts became a chattering compulsion that only heightened in the silence of a bed, so that falling asleep became a matter of will rather than relaxation, a fight rather than a submission, in which the trying caused the simple knack of it to be lost.
And so, despite his great weariness, Che tossed and turned throughout the long hours of that night, barely sleeping at all. He kept thinking of his mother in Q’os, and of phantoms with garrottes stealing towards her where she lay. He thought too of a boyhood spent in the heady confines of the Sentiate temple, lonely in his play without other children his age, bored with the endless schooling on Mann, hardened by the occasional Purging.
Most of all, though, he thought of how he wasn’t free of them even now. He knew the order would never allow a Diplomat to turn rogue and survive.
Sasheen would send the twins after him. Even now they might be on their way.
Some time during the night, he heard Ash knocking something over in the bedroom next to his. His ears followed the creaks of his steps as the old farlander walked down the stairs; the rattle and bangs in the kitchen; the footsteps returning, the bedroom door closing once more.
The Roshun was only another concern to occupy his mind.
In the end he gave up on any notions of sleep, and groaned and rose from the bed, rubbing his face to rouse himself.
In the next room, Ash lay wrapped in blankets, breathing heavily as he slept. There was an empty bottle of wine on the floor next to the bed, and a jar of what smelled like honey. The farlander coughed a few times, scratched himself beneath his blanket, but he did not wake.
Che took the blanket he had been using and threw it loosely over the sleeping man. From the table in his own bedroom, he rifled through his backpack until he found the wrapped vial of wildwood juice. He tried to recall how much he was meant to take in order to suppress his pulsegland, for he’d never used the stuff before. It was easy to take too much of it, he knew that much at least; and too much could trigger the suicide response that was otherwise only summoned by will.
He placed a tiny dab of it on his tongue and returned the vial to his pack, then pushed the pack under the bed where it would be safe. The wildwood juice tasted foul and bitter in his mouth.
