familiar environment of the gaming table and forget everything else for a while. On a whim he matched the girl’s bet, then raised her by throwing in two more silvers, wanting to see her reaction.
The girl half closed her eyes again, and settled back in her chair while she waited her turn.
‘Your accent. You’re not from Khos, are you?’ It was the fat man again, sipping wine.
‘I come from all over,’ Che answered casually.
The man wiped his hand on his woollen tunic and held it out to him. ‘Koolas,’ he said.
‘Che.’ They shook, and Che wondered if the man was merely gaining the measure of him.
‘What brings you here, friend?’
‘Some business,’ said Che. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I dabble in war correspondence, when I’m not writing my own impressions.’
‘Koolas?’ Che in surprise. ‘The same Koolas who wrote The First and the Last?’
The war chattero smiled proudly at that. ‘The very same,’ he admitted. ‘You’re well read, friend. They didn’t make that many copies.’
Che offered a modest tilt of his head.
The dealer spread four cards on the gaming table, face up. Che spotted a red Foreigner before he glanced at the rest. The other two cards were red too.
Again the girl bet first, this time even more strongly, throwing five silvers clinking into the pot.
Che sat back and tried to read her. Calm, he thought. She didn’t look as though she was bluffing. There was every chance that she had something, even possibly a flush.
They waited on Koolas, the big man studying his cards and those on the table, his left eye squinting. He glanced at the girl.
‘Nope,’ he said, flicking his cards away.
Che was enjoying himself. He knew that he was probably beaten here, yet still he reached for his stack of coins, and played with them for a moment, listening to their metallic clinks. She was pretending to ignore him as he stared at her, and he used the moment to glance down at her chest, its curves compressed by leather.
You can’t bluff this girl, he decided at last, and with regret slid his two cards forward. He gestured with his hand to the pot. It’s yours.
She retrieved her winnings without expression. Just once she chanced a look at Che, and a small smile tugged the corner of her mouth.
A damned bluff, he realized with a start. The little bitch had bluffed them all.
Che leaned back and barked with laughter. It felt good enough just then that he kept on laughing, the sound of it lost in the din of the crowd, and when he finally stopped he felt better for it, and another hand was already in progress. He caught the eye of one of the barmaids and called for her to bring some water, and good wine.
The wine she brought him was passable, the water tasted as though it had come from the lake.
‘How goes the evacuation?’ enquired Koolas.
‘Shouldn’t you be seeing it for yourself, correspondent?’
‘I’ve seen enough for now, thank you,’ the man replied quietly.
Che folded his next few hands, too worthless even to bluff with, wanting to see the run of play and the styles employed by the other players before he started working them.
A fight broke out near to the bar. A man was standing on top of it, his prick hanging out, waving it over the jeers of his friends. A table crashed to the floor spilling drinks. The drums of the band picked up a beat, and the music ran without pause into a different song, the singer wailing with urgency and passion now, her words a high ululation of purest old Khosian, almost Alhazii in their intonations. Che turned around to watch her perform.
The singer was dressed in a black, skin-tight dress of satin. Her hair was bound up by sticks of lacquered wood. Her eyes were lined with kohl. She swung her hips as she sang, moving in a way that caught the eyes of the men in the room, and the women too, so that they all gazed transfixed in desire of her, or desiring to be her. The woman held their stares, her arms cradling her head as she writhed amongst the coils of smoke.
‘Calhalee!’
Che turned to the table. ‘What?’ he replied to the girl.
‘Calhalee,’ she shouted again over the noise. ‘They say she owns this place.’ He noted how the girl spoke with the thick burr of a Lagosian accent.
‘She’s good,’ he said, glancing back.
The wine was heady stuff; he could feel it already. Che leaned over the table and extended his hand. ‘Che.’
‘I heard,’ she replied, and she studied him for a moment, before reaching out to clasp his hand, ‘Curl,’ she told him, and as their skins touched he felt a quickening of his blood and saw her lips part slightly. He squeezed her hand tighter, wanting her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Desires
‘General Creed, some trouble has broken out in the western quarter.’
It was Corporal Bere, holding the reins of his sweat-lathered zel. The officer was freshly returned from relaying a message to Captain Ashtan, who was manning the western shore of the island with units of Red Guards.
‘Trouble with whom?’
‘Some panicked civilians. They’ve decided not to heed our warnings about the Suck and the Chilos. They think they can still make it through on rafts.’
Creed looked at the man in the pearly light of dawn. Bere was filthy, as they all were. His helm was gone, his hair sticking up wild and hard, and his crimson robe hung tattered over his armour. Yet he stood with his back straight and his eyes sharp – a good man, it seemed, when the pressure was on him.
Creed recalled that he was in need of a new chief field aide. But that involved accepting that Bahn was now lying dead at Chey-Wes, and the Bahn that he’d always known was still very much alive in his mind.
‘And what would you suggest, Corporal?’
Bere looked surprised to be asked his opinion. ‘I don’t know, General. Perhaps more men to contain them.’
Creed considered his words.
‘They’re still a free people,’ he decided. ‘If they want to chance it, let them chance it.’
The corporal nodded and climbed back onto his zel. Creed’s bodyguards cleared the way as he kicked the animal into a gallop, scattering the soldiers that clogged the city boardwalks.
Creed was standing in the middle of the bridge that spanned the wide Central Canal. He placed his big hands on the rail with a slap, and looked out over the scene of chaos without expression. A skyship was lifting off from the roof of a nearby warehouse, overloaded with wounded men and civilians.
The mood of the remaining citizens was becoming desperate as a new day rose around them and they found themselves still here. They wanted out by any means now. But the Chilos and Suck had effectively been sealed off by the Imperials, so that anyone passing into the mouth of either river ran a gauntlet of missile fire from both banks. An hour previously, Captain Trench, of the skyship Falcon, had reported that the Chilos was running red with corpses.
They have no faith in us to protect them, Creed reflected as he watched the pandemonium around the canal.
He could hardly blame them for that. The army had staggered into Tume shattered and harried by the enemy. They hadn’t looked as though they could hold a single bridge, let alone a city, and without heavy cannon it was doubtful they could.
A cold breeze ran fingers through Creed’s long hair. He tilted his head back, smelled the dank rot of the lakeweed amongst the other scents of the city. He had always liked it here in Tume, those times long ago when he’d visited with his old comrade Vanichios to wench and gamble and drink like the bachelor officers they were, and with all the luxuries afforded to the son of the Principari.
