‘We have two thousand men still in the city, Colonel. You must give us time to get them all out.’
‘I’m aware of our problems, General. But I’m telling you, we can’t hold here any longer.’
Creed looked up, as they all did, at an explosion rippling through the sky to the east. A skyship was disintegrating in brilliant tumbles of fire.
‘Fine, then,’ Creed shouted. ‘Pull back in good order, but slow them as much as you can. I’ll have a boat waiting for you all.’
‘Is that a promise, General?’
They stared hard at each other for a moment, both angry, both wanting to shout in other’s faces for no other reason than the need to vent their frustrations. But then Creed’s expression softened, and Halahan saw that he held out his hand. Halahan clasped it and shook hard.
‘I’ll see you there,’ he told him.
It was obvious that Principari Vanichios knew what he was going to say before he even spoke the words.
Creed said it anyway: ‘It’s now or never, old friend. We have to go.’
The Michine laid his hands against the parapet and stared south across the city. From their vantage on the citadel’s highest tower, they could see the entirety of Tume spread out around them. Gunfire crackled along the streets to the south. A few buildings burned, trailing banners of fire in the breeze that blew in from the east. Soldiers were streaming back in disorder, heading for the Central Canal where the last ferries were preparing to leave.
‘Will you get all your men out in time?’ Vanichios asked him.
‘No,’ Creed admitted heavily. ‘Some pockets are trapped in the south-west. We can’t break them out in time.’
‘And the rest. You have room for them?’
‘We’re improvising. There’s still a place for you and your men if you want it.’
The man’s stare slid away from him. Flames bobbed in his eyes. He had nothing more to say on the matter.
For a moment, Creed thought of pinning his great arms around Vanichios and dragging him from his ancestral home by force. But there would be no dignity in that, not for this man. He was Michine. Without dignity he was nothing.
In the east the sky battle was still raging. He could see coughs of fire lighting up the hulls of the skyships, broadsides hammering each other.
‘I did not think I would be this afraid,’ came Vanichios’s quiet voice.
Creed flinched. He felt like a villain, deserting him like this.
‘Farewell,’ he said at last, and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.
Vanichios did not look at him as he left.
Ash shivered beneath the blankets, his eyes swimming with phantoms of colour. He had long ago drawn the curtains over the window of the bedroom, yet still the moonlight leaking in around the edges was too much for his closed eyes, so that he kept his head covered while he coughed and sputtered in his fever, and felt as though the whole bed was spinning.
In his mind, the distant gunshots were only the sounds of maize husks popping on a fire. He was half dreaming of the drinking house of his home village of Asa, the room hot with the fire burning in the hearth, the black pot above it tended by Teeki as the warming maize clattered within it and filled the smoky room with its aroma.
He was sitting alone in a corner, eyeing his step-uncle across the room with a growing sense of hatred.
Ash had been sitting there all evening, getting quietly drunk like the old regulars at the bar, mulling over the rice wine that was their nightly respite from the world. His own burdens had refused to lighten, though. Even now, he did not wish to return home to his young wife and child, and all the responsibilities that they represented.
They had lost another of their breeding dogs to the shaking disease that morning. Ash had no idea how they were going to find the money to replace it, nor even how they were going to repay the debts they already owed.
The more he drank, the more he thought of running away and leaving it all behind him. This was hardly the life he’d imagined for himself, not when he’d been growing up as a youth on his family farm, watching his mother and father work themselves into the ground trying to meet their own rising debts and taxation. Ash had dreamed of striking out on his own when was old enough, of earning his way as a soldier, a sailor, anything but this.
And then he’d fallen in love, of all things, and had married, and settled down… so that in the blink of an eye, it seemed, here he was, trying to drink away his burdens like his father before him.
Ash stared at his step-uncle across the room, brooding. Lokai was headsman for a dozen villages within the outer ranges of the Shale Mountains, a tax-collector in regal clothing, appointed by an official of the overlord Kengi-Nan. He doubled as the local moneylender too, lending back to the villagers his own skim of their taxes at extortionate rates.
A useful man to have in the family, Ash would have thought. Yet his step-uncle was obsessed with increasing his wealth, and with the power over others that it gave him. When it came to money, he seemed little impressed by ties of blood.
Lokai was enjoying himself tonight. In the midst of the banter with his henchmen, he deigned to acknowledge Ash’s piercing glare. The man stared back, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back just enough to look down his nose. Even from here, through the smoky atmosphere of the room, his eyes seemed to be laughing at him.
Ash had no idea why he suddenly snapped just then. A drunken intuition perhaps. A sense that in those mocking eyes lay knowledge that warranted such a reaction from him, even if he was ignorant of what it might be.
Ash saw the man’s eyes widen as Ash lurched to his feet, stumbled drunkenly across the room towards Lokai.
He slurred words he did not fully understand himself, while his step-uncle struggled to rise and his henchmen around him did the same.
A table scattered. Lokai rolled to the floor with it, the drinks spilling everywhere, a flash of blood on the man’s face.
Ash’s knuckles stung as he roared over his sprawling form.
Men grabbed him from behind. He surged against them until he was spent of breath and grew still in their arms. He stood there heaving for air as he glared down at the man.
‘You think yourself something special?’ his step-uncle demanded from the floor, holding a hand to his bloody nose. ‘You think because you have my pretty niece as your wife, because you married your way into a better family than your own, it makes you someone?’ And he slapped off the helping hands of his henchman as he staggered unsteadily to his feet. ‘You’re nothing but a fool,’ he snapped. ‘And your own wife makes you the greatest fool of all!’
Silence in the room. The words so incongruous to Ash that it took several moments for them to sink in.
‘What are saying?’ came his thick voice.
The man was in full flow by then. ‘What do you think I’m saying? When you needed money, the year you were wed, to buy your damned dogs. You think I loaned you those coins freely? I had my way with her by way of a down payment.’ He paused then, to look about at the other men standing there gaping. ‘Aye, I did that, and there isn’t a damned thing any of you dare say about it.’
He drew a breath to say more.
Ash realized that the tin mug he had been drinking from was still clutched in his left hand, the contents gone from it. He lunged forwards without warning, breaking free of the men’s grasps as he swung the mug with all his might, a black rage upon him.
When they dragged Ash to his feet, his step-uncle was lying on the floor with his face caved in like a bowl. Blood was bubbling from a hole at the very bottom of it. The man’s left foot kicked a beat against the planks of the floor, and then he gasped and died as they all stood there watching.
He’s murdered the headsman, someone muttered.
Ash fled into the darkness of the night.
