Che checked that his pistol was loaded and tucked it into its holster. His cloak was still sodden through, and he glanced at the sky through the window, saw that stars were clearly visible between the scattered clouds. He opened the window and hung the plain cloak out to dry.
The juice was tingling against his tongue as he descended the stairs to the ground floor of the big empty house, and stepped out through the front door and the gate beyond. On the wet boardwalk of the street he stood for a moment, listening to the exchanges of gunfire in the east.
Che looked in the opposite direction at the nearby waters of the lake, a black expanse visible between the two rows of housing. Drawn to it, he walked along the street and crossed the broad thoroughfare, and scrambled down onto the slick littoral of lakeweed until he stood with the water at his feet.
Campfires twinkled now all along the far shores. Rafts still drifted across the lake. They would be heading for the mouths of the Chilos and the Suck, hoping to make it clear to safety.
I should be on one of those rafts, he thought sourly. I should be getting as far away from here as I can.
Reluctantly, Che turned his back on it.
He faced the distant lights and noise of the city’s heart, wondering how long he had left before they came for him.
The old woman crouched on the shoreline of the floating island, ankle-deep in the water with her skirts tied up around her thighs, using a knife to cut through a strand of lakeweed, which she dropped into a bucket by her side.
For a moment the guns ceased firing from the direction of the crackling bridge. The old woman heard a tiny splash not far from her, and then the sudden sluice of water running clear of something.
She stopped what she was doing to look up, her free hand settling for balance on the basket.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, her voice shaking with age.
No one answered, though she could sense the presence of someone nearby, watching her.
She stood up with the knife in her hand. Another splash. More water running free. ‘Who’s there!’ she demanded again, and took a few steps backwards until she was clear of the water.
‘It’s me, old mother, your child,’ came a female voice, young, close. It made the old woman jerk in alarm.
‘What? I have no children. Who is that?’
She felt a ripple of water spill across her toes. Smelled a spicy breath against her own.
‘Stop playing with her, can’t you see that she’s blind.’ A man’s voice, a whisper. ‘Swan, help me with these clothes before we freeze to death, will you?’
‘Blind or not, she’s still a witness.’
The woman’s heart stopped as a cool edge pressed against her throat. She did not dare move. Her useless eyes moved of their own accord.
‘Old blind woman with no children,’ chided the woman’s voice once more.
‘ Swan! ’
A burning pain shot across her throat. She coughed wetly, choking, held a hand up to her neck to feel a hotness spill across her fingers. Her knees gave out, and she sagged to the surface of lakeweed, one hand lolling into the water, her mouth gasping like a landed fish.
‘This one should thank me,’ was the last thing she ever heard.
Hundreds choked the streets and milled in confusion around the great Central Canal, competing for spaces on the few boats still preparing to leave, or those ferries with crews brave enough to have returned for more.
Che saw folk desperate enough to be loading families onto makeshift rafts, mats of lakeweed with doors thrown across them; women clutching babes in their arms, children holding baskets, pots, the leashes of barking dogs; old grandparents muttering prayers.
The Khosian army had bedded down in the citadel at the heart of the floating city, and in the streets and buildings that surrounded it. The Tume Home Guards struggled to maintain some sense of order, while soldiers of the army staggered drunk and weary, or pissed in alleyways, or splashed like children in public cisterns, or fornicated with prostitutes desperate enough for coin to linger a while. He stepped over a Red Guard snoring in the middle of the boardwalk, and beneath the awning of a shop he glimpsed a brief fight between two squads of men, one of them spilling backwards with a knife sticking from his thigh.
The aftermath of battle, Che supposed. Men like himself, exhausted to the bone but now, having survived the fight, too spirited for simple rest. They hardly seemed the same men that had impressed him so deeply the night before as whole.
A door was flung open as he passed the mouth of an alleyway, and a couple tottered through it, shrouded in smoke. Music and laughter following them from within. Che stopped to look at the sign above the door; Calhalee’s Respite, it read above a picture of a wavy-haired woman with a fish dangling from her mouth.
He’d read of that name before, somewhere. Calhalee. Founding Mother of Tume, her twenty starving children the progenitors of the city’s major blood clans.
Che approached the open doorway and stepped inside. He descended a set of wooden steps and entered a long basement, barely large enough to hold the few hundred soldiers who filled it from wall to wall. The men were riotous drunk, all of them competing to see who could shout the loudest above the noise of the band playing on stage. He could taste the musty humidity of sweat in the air, amongst the smoke of hazii and tarweed that swirled thick as clouds.
Che could hardly hear himself think here, and he was glad of that. He stepped towards the bar that ran along the left side of the long room. Officers had gathered there, lounging on stools or standing against it, a host of prostitutes amongst them. His foot slipped beneath him and he looked down at a puddle of dark liquid, and saw that he stood upon a section of floor made from glass. A large well lined with wood had been cut through the deep foundations of lakeweed beneath them. Between pairs of boots, he saw glimmers of ghost-light in the waters deep below.
It was a gambler’s instinct that caused Che to push onwards until he reached the back of the room, where he saw a large oval table and a game of rash in play. The room was quieter at this end, the men intent on their cards.
He studied the game for a moment and saw that two players remained in the pot, a man in the purple robe of the Hoo and a short-haired girl in the black leathers of the Specials. The chairs were all taken, though one of the players sat with his head lolled back and his mouth open, soundly asleep. With a finger, Che gently pushed his shoulder until he fell sideways off the chair.
A few chuckles arose as he slid into his place like a jockey settling into the saddle. Cards were shown; the girl in leathers watched her coins being scraped away from the centre of the table.
‘What’s the limit?’ he asked those around him.
‘Our souls,’ rumbled a voice from his side.
The man was dressed in civilian clothing and was large around the stomach. He had a mug of wine and a plate of meat skewers laid out before him, and he licked his greasy fingers as Che offered him a nod.
‘High stakes,’ replied Che, and took his money pouch from his pocket. He slid a handful of coins into his palm, and settled them in a column on the table. They were local currency, silvers and a few eagles; his emergency stash.
The dealer dealt out a fresh round of cards while each of the players threw a copper into the pot. Che glanced at the girl sitting opposite him. Her eyes were closed now, but when the old soldier to her right looked at his cards and threw them away in disgust, she opened her eyes a fraction to study her own cards, her lips pouting as she did so.
A little young for a Special, thought Che, before he noticed the white band of a medic around her arm.
Carefully, she took a silver coin and tossed it towards the pot.
The man on her left looked at her askance, threw his own cards away. The folds continued around the table. When it came to the fat man’s turn he matched the bet, then scribbled something on a notebook before him.
The girl met Che’s gaze with her large, intoxicated blue eyes.
‘Are you playing or staring?’ she asked him.
‘A little of both,’ he told her, then looked down to study his own two cards; a three-armed black Monk and a white Foreigner.
Che considered his position. He wasn’t bothered about winning tonight. He was content enough to sit in the
