Stands a Shadow (2 page)

His hand stopped halfway towards the boy, and for several heartbeats they both stared at it, hovering there, as though it represented everything that had ever stood between them.

‘Water,’ Ash muttered, though he wasn’t thirsty. Without comment, the boy hefted up the bulging skin.

Ash took a sip of the tepid, stale water. He rolled it about in his mouth, swallowed a trickle, spat the rest out again. Where it fell the tindergrass hissed and crackled. He returned the skin to Lin and straightened in his saddle, angry at himself.

‘They come,’ announced Kosh.

‘I see it.’

Across the entire enemy front, a roiling carpet of dust began to rise into the air. The Yashi trotted forwards in their formations, high banners bobbing from the backs of riders, flying the colours of Wings and their shifting locations of command. Horns sounded; windwhirls wailed like calls to the dead, the sounds washing slow and rhythmic over the ranks of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Ash’s zel snorted, becoming lively again.

On this flank alone, the overlords’ forces numbered twenty thousand at least, a deep mass stretching to the right towards the haze of the battle line’s distant centre. Their black armour soaked up the harsh daylight; helms bobbed with tall feathers. Sunlight sparkled from thousands of metal points, a bright dazzle amidst the dust raised by the advancing army, as the hooves of their zels crunched the tindergrass of the plain into pieces fine as powdered talc.

Before the advancing Yashi, clouds of moths and flies rose up from the short grasses, and birds too in their thousands. They rushed over the heads of the People’s Revolutionary Army in a great crying wave of flapping wings, so many in number that the air cooled for a moment in their shadow.

Below, the zels snuffled and rolled their eyes as a hail of loose feathers and guano droppings fell upon them. Lin hefted the wicker shield over his head to protect himself. Others along the line did so too, so that it appeared as though they were sheltering from sudden missile fire. Jokes sounded from the veterans, laughter even, the rarest of sounds this close to a fight.

Ash wiped his forehead clear and surveyed the hardened men of the Shining Way, this Wing of the army in which he had fought with for over four years now; an old veteran himself now at the age of thirty-one. The Wing numbered six thousand in mounted infantry. They wore simple leather skullcaps tied down around their ears, white cavalry scarves knotted around black faces and wooden goggles to mask their eyes from the sunlight. Many of their armoured coats had long ago been painted with stripes of white like the zels the men lived and fought upon, and ornamented with the teeth of their enemy as lucky charms. Squinting, peering beyond these men, Ash could make out the great curve of the rest of the army, this great conglomeration of Wings.

He wondered how many would return to their families and their old lives if they won here today. The revolution had become a way of life to them over the years, bloody and cruel as it was. The People’s Army was a home and family to them all. How would they cope with giving up the freedom of the saddle, the bonds they had formed with each other, the highs of action, when they returned to their farmsteads and their regular, mundane lives armed with nightmares and faraway stares?

He supposed he would find out himself. If they won here, and Ash and Lin survived, he would return with his son to the northern mountains and their lofty village of Asa, to their homestead and his wife whom he hadn’t seen in years; try to forget the things they had seen and done in the name of the cause. Yet he would miss this life too. In so many ways, he knew he was better at this than he had ever been at supporting a family.

Ash could feel the prayer belt wrapped tight like a linen bandage around his abdomen, its ink-brushed words pressing against his sweating skin. Within its bounds he carried a letter from his wife delivered to him only a week before. Her words, carved into a thin sheet of leather, had pleaded once more for his forgiveness.

‘Father,’ said his son by his side as the enemy grew nearer. The boy was holding aloft one of the lances, his face slick with sweat. Ash took it, and the shield too. On his left, Kosh’s son did the same.

‘Are you ready?’ Ash asked his son, not unkindly.

The boy frowned, though. He leaned and spat in the same way as his father sometimes did. ‘I’ll stand, if that’s what you mean,’ he declared maturely, but he said so in a voice still unbroken with age. There was anger in his tone, at the perceived insinuation that he might run on this day, like he had in his first real battle, overcome by it all.

‘I know you will. I only ask if you are ready.’

The boy’s jaw flexed. His stare softened before he looked away.

‘Stay in the rear, close to Kosh’s boy. Don’t come to me unless I signal, do you hear?’

‘Yes, father,’ answered Lin, and then waited, blinking up at him, as though expecting something more.

The thin leather of his wife’s letter felt cool against Ash’s stomach.

‘I’m glad you’re here, son,’ he heard himself say, and his throat clamped tight around each of the words. ‘With me, I mean.’

Lin beamed up at him.

‘Yes, father.’

He turned and sauntered away, and Ash watched him leave as other battlesquires filtered back through the ranks. Kosh’s son joined him, slapping the boy on the back; a joker like his father.

A soft thunder rumbled across the heat of the plain.

The Yashi were charging.

Ash pulled the goggles down over his eyes and the scarf across his face. Beneath him, he could feel the tremor of the ground transmitted through the bones and muscles of his zel. He glanced to General Osh
ō
, as did every other man of the formation. Still the general refused to move.

‘With heart,’ he told Kosh.

Kosh pulled his own scarf up. Some kind of awkwardness kept his gaze clear of Ash. One way or the other, they would probably never fight side by side like this again; comrades, brothers, crazy fools of the revolution.

‘And you, my friend,’ came Kosh’s muffled reply.

They gathered their zels’ reins tighter in their fists as General Osh
ō
levelled his warhead at the approaching enemy. Ash lowered his own lance.

Osh’s zel sprang forward.

As one, the men of the Shining Way followed him with a roar.

CHAPTER ONE

Beneath the Gaze of Ninshi’

Ash awoke with a groan, and found that he was drenched in freezing sweat and shivering beneath a sky full of stars.

He blinked in the darkness, wondering where he was, who he was, experiencing a moment of delicate affinity with the All.

And then he saw a smear of light track high above him. A skyship, its tubes trailing blue fire across the face of Ninshi’s Hood, her one eye glimmering red as she watched the ship and Ash and the rest of the world turning beneath her.

Q’os
, Ash remembered with a sudden sensation of sickness in his stomach.
I’m in Q’os, on the other side of the ocean, at the spitting end of the Silk Winds, thirty years in exile
.

The remnants of his dreams vanished like so much wind-blown dust. He let them go, the fading tastes and echoes of Honshu. It was a loss of something irreplaceable, but it was better that way. Better not to dwell on these things while he was awake.

The light of the skyship faded slowly on its course towards the eastern horizon. It diminished in the hazy air above the city, occasionally blocked from sight by the dark, towering shape of a skysteeple. In the starlight, Ash saw his breath coil from his open mouth.

Damn it
, he thought as he pulled his cloak tighter about his neck.
I need to piss again
.

Twice already he’d awoken in the night; once with a straining bladder, the other time for no apparent reason at all. Perhaps there had been a distant shout in the streets below, or a spasm in his aching back, or a gust of cold wind, or he’d simply coughed. At his age, everything woke him if he wasn’t thoroughly sodden with alcohol before he attempted to sleep.

Grumbling, the old R
ō
shun assassin cast the cloak aside and clambered to his bare feet, his joints popping loud enough to be heard in the still air of the rooftop.

The roof was a flat expanse of gritted pitch, and the grit felt sharp beneath the soles of his feet. It was little better to lie on, even with a spare cloak laid flat for bedding. He turned and looked at the tall prominence of concrete that rose at the centre of the grey, starlit space: a concrete cast of a great hand, its forefinger pointing skywards. Ash rubbed his face and stretched and groaned once more.

He didn’t make use of the gutter that ran around the foot of the roof-edge parapet, or any of the small drainage holes in each corner of the roof, clogged green with algae. He didn’t wish to betray his presence to someone in the streets far below.

Instead, he padded to the southern side of the roof as the city of Q’os lay silent all around him, the curfew still in place since the death of the Holy Matriarch’s only son. He lowered himself onto the adjoining rooftop with a throb of complaint from his bladder. This roof was flat and tarred too, though it was interrupted by the raised triangular skylights that served the luxury apartments beneath them. Each was pitch dark, save for the nearest.

The widow
, Ash thought.
Up again in the middle of the night
.

Ash stood relieving himself in his usual spot, while he peered into the candlelit warmth of the apartment below. Through the sooty glass he could see the lady sitting at the dining table in a cream woollen nightshift, her white hair tied back with a bow. Her delicate, wrinkled hands were poised with knife and fork over a small plate of food as she chewed with deliberate care.

Four days now Ash had been on his rooftop vigil, and each night he had observed this woman eating by herself without any servants in sight; sitting in the chill black hours next to the empty head of the table, staring off into the depths of the candle flame before her as she ate, her knife or fork occasionally striking the plate with a harsh ring that to Ash sounded, for some reason, of loneliness.

He’d created a story for this night owl in his curiosity. A young woman of privilege once, a great beauty, married off to a man of high status. No children, though – or if there were, then long flown from her life. And the husband, the master of the house, carried off by illness perhaps in his prime. Leaving her with only memories, and a bitter lack of appetite save for whenever dreams of the past awoke her.

Or perhaps she’s also wakened easily by her bladder
, Ash thought, and grunted, and considered himself an old fool.

A tinkle against the glass alerted him to the fact that he’d swung around too much in his curiosity, and was now splashing over a corner of the skylight. The flow ceased abruptly as the woman glanced up.

Ash held his breath, not moving. He was fairly certain she couldn’t see him in this light; though for a curious instant he almost wished that she could.

She looked down at the table again, returned her attentions to her meagre meal. Ash shook himself dry, wiped his hands on his tunic. He nodded a silent goodnight to the woman and turned to make his way back.

Just then, a flicker of the candlelight caught his eye. A large fire-moth, alight with its own inner glow, bobbed around the candle flame as though in courtship. The flame fluttered against the briefest of touches. Ash and the widow both stared transfixed as the creature became ensnared in the flame. A wing stuck fast to the melting wax of the wick. The wing curled and crisped and ignited; the other beat a frantic rhythm as the moth’s body caught fire, and the other wing too, until the creature was a struggling form burning alive in a miniature, crackling pyre.

Ash looked away, a bitter taste in his mouth now. He couldn’t bring himself to look back a second time. Instead, he scrambled up the brickwork of the wall as fast as he could, as though to escape the sudden images flickering unwanted at the edges of his vision.

They came anyway. As he rolled over the parapet, for an instant he saw nothing but a young man struggling on a different pyre. His apprentice, young Nico.

Ash sucked in a breath of air as one might do from a sudden, sharp knock. His gaze rose to the Temple of Whispers, the towering shadow wrapped by ribbons of windows lit from within. She was in there somewhere, the Matriarch, mourning her own loss; most likely in the Storm Chamber at its very peak, itself brilliantly illuminated. It had been lit like that for the last four nights Ash had been watching.

He blew into his hands and rubbed them together for warmth. Always he felt the cold more these days. He noticed that his left hand was trembling, though not his right one. Ash clenched it into a fist as though to hide the shaking from himself.

After a moment he sat down on his bedding and made himself comfortable before the eyeglass perched there on its tripod, aimed resolutely at the Storm Chamber. He lifted the skin of Cheem Fire and pulled the cork and took a short pull from it.
For the cold
, he told himself.
To help me sleep
. He tossed the skin next to his sword, which rested upright against the concrete hand, and the small crossbow with its double strings removed to keep them safe from the weather. He squinted into the eyeglass. Caught a vague passing of a silhouette in the wide windows of the Storm Chamber.