‘Catch you later.’
‘Hoon – get your bloody head down, man!’
Halahan hollered the words even as another cannon shot crashed into the crenellations in an explosion of dust and masonry. Hoon was unharmed, miraculously, as he rolled choking from the dust with a fellow Greyjacket, Halahan patting them down as though they were on fire.
Another shot smashed against the thick facade of the gatehouse, even as their own cannons replied in kind, tossing balls over the partly destroyed bridge to land before the enemy artillery on the far bank. The imperial snipers were firing rapidly now. It was hard to breathe with all the rock dust scattering and falling over the balcony. Halahan’s ears rang so loudly they hurt.
The fire-position looked like a scene from the Shield in the earlier days of the war. The men hunkered down as low as they could on the debris that covered the flagging, cleaning out their barrels or struggling to reload. A medico was applying pressure to a Grey-jacket’s bloody side; three others lay dead at the back of the space, their eyes still open. Halahan stayed low as he crossed over to Staff Sergeant Jay, who was crouched against the parapet, watching the bridge and the far bank through Halahan’s eyeglass.
The sergeant seemed to sense Halahan’s approach. He turned just as Halahan bent beside him, and shouted into his ear without preamble, ‘We’re getting the thick of it now!’
Halahan accepted the eyeglass and adjusted its focus until he saw the heavy cannon belching smoke some way back on the opposite shore. The Imperials had three batteries positioned against them now, heavy guns with longer ranges than their own smaller field cannon.
He handed the glasses back to the sergeant, looked down at the bridge. The burned half, the half closest to them, lay low in the water, the wood a long ribbon of charcoal black. Much of the lakeweed it sat upon had sunk just beneath the surface, and where it rose again intact, a line of Mannian siege-shields stood protecting the snipers there and the work crews behind them. Around the shield wall, groups of figures darted forwards burdened with bundles of lakeweed and logs of wood, tossing them onto the remnants of the collapsed bridge before running back for cover.
They were slaves – Khosians by the look of them. At first the Grey-jackets had refused to shoot at the running figures, but then Halahan had gritted his teeth and given the command, and his multinationals had bent down to the grim task of picking them off one by one, while the Khosian soldiers watched on in stunned silence. The slaves fell like ragdolls, but there seemed to be endless numbers of them. Gradually, the ruined portion of the bridge was being rebuilt.
A tremor ran through Halahan’s feet. Another cannon strike. A portion of the parapet slid away to their left, and part of the stone floor too, so that Hoon and his fellow sharpshooter had to jump backwards to safety.
Through the gap, Halahan looked across the gatehouse to the balcony on the left, where Captain Hull, his Lagosian second-in-command, was likewise stationed with a platoon of men, all of them cowering down against the sudden volley of cannon fire.
‘ Oh no,’ someone said as they watched the balcony slowly crumble apart beneath their comrades’ feet.
‘Get out!’ someone else yelled with their hands cupping their mouth, but it was too late. An outer section of the curving parapet went first, men toppling out over the crumbling crenellations. He saw Captain Hull in his white scarf, waving the rest of his men back towards the stairwell – and then the whole balcony fell away in a crashing spilling roar, with Hull and the others tumbling amongst it.
A cry rose from the far shore. The Imperials baying in victory.
Halahan closed his eyes for a moment. Slowly he wiped his stubbled face with hands grown numb from the cold. He hadn’t slept in two nights now. With a growl he turned his back on the scene and tried to think through his fugue of fatigue and anger. The rest of the men were watching him, ready to run at the first command.
He gave a single nod of his head.
The Greyjackets began to grab up their gear and dart for the stairwell.
In the street below, rifle shots were whining overhead or skipping off the walls of the gatehouse. His men scattered to their secondary fire-positions in the surrounding buildings. Red Guards were still manning the streets behind the cover of makeshift barriers.
Halahan ran across Sergeant Jay as he jogged over the smashed gates.
‘We’re falling back to our secondary positions,’ he called out to the sergeant.
‘Any word yet on when we’re being relieved?’
They both jumped over a line of rubble, Halahan holding onto his straw hat.
‘Our orders remain the same, Staff Sergeant. We hold this position until the morning.’
The sergeant glanced at him sidelong.
‘I know, old timer,’ said Halahan. ‘I know.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A Meeting of Diplomats
Che had forgotten he was playing a game of rash, so drunk was he by then.
It was the girl’s fault, Curl with the pretty face who conversed with him occasionally as she played or laughed at one of his jokes, but who mostly just shared her large wineskin of Keratch while pretending not to be interested in him. Che drank until the noise of the taverna became something muted, distant, unreal, and he fell ever deeper into himself.
At some point, Koolas and the rest of the players gave up trying to jeer him back to life. Instead, they lifted him – chair and all – away from the table so that another could take his place. ‘Get away,’ he drawled at them, but they paid him no heed.
Che’s head was pounding. He couldn’t recall a time he had drunk as much as this. For a while he simply sat in his chair while something tried to push its way out of his neck. He swiped at it, but the throbbing sensation refused to go away.
They had seated him at an empty table, it seemed. He saw a mug in front of him, filled with water, and he drank it down gratefully.
He found himself leaning to one side as though his balance was adjusting to a tilted world. The motion was checked by someone’s shoulder. It was the girl, sitting next to him.
‘Come back with me,’ he heard himself say into her ear.
‘And why would I want to do that?’ she teased.
He tried to focus on the words he needed to say. ‘Because,’ he began, ‘I’d like you to.’
A press of a knee against his own.
‘We can get a room here,’ the girl suggested. ‘Have some food sent up. You look as though you could do with some.’
The girl helped him to his feet, and then he stood there swaying as she wandered off for a moment. When she returned she was smiling. ‘This way,’ she said, and led him towards a set of stairs lit by a single flickering lamp.
Someone whistled behind them and shouted words of encouragement. He glanced back but couldn’t see who it was.
He failed to notice the two figures stepping into the taverna, a man and a woman dressed in civilian clothing, their shaven heads covered by felt hats, their hard stares fixed upon him.
Through the eyeglass, Archgeneral Sparus watched a pair of skyships taking off from the heart of Tume, Red Guards standing along the rails, their cloaks blowing in the breeze as the vessels lifted ponderously into the air. He snapped the eyeglass together and handed it to the officer closest to him, Captain Skayid. So it was true: Creed was evacuating the fighting men from Tume now.
Sparus knew that the Lord Protector would be one of the last to leave the floating city, and, knowing that, he was pushing the bridge rebuilding effort hard.
He was loath to allow the man to escape once again. He wanted Creed alive; he wanted very dearly to set his best people to work on him. They would break him, as they broke everyone, with narcotics and mind games and carefully applied measures of pain, until Creed was nothing more than a wreck of a man, malleable to all that they
