Stands a Shadow

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

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It was unlike him, to be thinking so fluently in the midst of action. Ash was wholly unable to find his stillness here on this icy field.

The Acolyte who’d been about to challenge him had vanished in the confusion of the rout. As Ash approached Sasheen’s position, cold anger was all that he felt now.

Within it, memories were surfacing like corpses, bloated and awful.

He recalled Nico, standing behind the bars of the Bar-Khos jail where they’d first been introduced, the boy scared and red-eyed from crying with his mother, Reese, a woman determined to save her son that day. He had made a pledge to her, a promise to protect the boy, even if it meant giving his own life first.

He saw Nico on the burning pyre again in the Q’os arena, his apprentice breathing his last breath, dropping his head as fiery tendrils took hold of his body.

Ash’s anger was complete. He pushed his way through the routing troops, shoving them aside as he strode forwards. Without pausing he slipped through the ring of Acolytes that surrounded the Matriarch’s and her mounted bodyguards.

The guards’ war-zels stood firm against the flow, redirecting it around the animals’ steaming flanks. Ash stopped as a guard turned his zel to block his way.

He thrust his blade into the man’s side, piercing through his chainmail, not taking his eyes from Sasheen three strides distant. Ash jerked the blade free even as the bodyguard raised his own sword high. A flare was peaking in the sky above the man, illuminating a passing cloud.

Half blinded, he ducked as the man swung his blade downwards, bending from his saddle to reach him.

Ash blinked with the light still cloying in his eyes. Stabbed out with his blade again, felt its point cleave through into the man’s heart.

He stepped around the zel as the guard tumbled to the ground. In the midst of them Sasheen was trying to turn her zel around, to get clear of the position.

A space opened in their rear and Ash sprang forward, sword ringing from its sheath.

The Khosians were chanting as they pushed forwards. Arrows had begun to pepper down around the Matriarch’s standard. Archgen-eral Sparus, not far from her, was exhorting his officers to maintain the line, trying to restore solidarity to an army tottering on the dangerous edge of individualism and full rout.

Ché looked towards the Matriarch’s position, where she was desperately close to the advancing Khosians and the explosions of mortars that seemed to be walking towards her. She was attempting to withdraw, despite Sparus calling out to stand firm.

So it had come to this, then.

Some part of Ché was suddenly awed by the possibility now facing him. The pistol hung loose in his hand. To kill a Holy Matriarch; to topple her from her empire with a single shot to the head . . . His mouth went dry at the thought of it. His features set into a hardened mask.

It’s hardly different from all the people you’ve murdered at her whim, he tried to tell himself.

Ché licked his lips and glanced around in search of Swan and Guan, but he was unable to see the two Diplomats anywhere. He was fairly certain they had orders to kill him once this campaign had reached its end. The note left in the Scripture had been right. He knew too much.

Don’t stay, then. Leave now and hope they consider you to be amongst the dead. What is there for you here but more pain and anguish?

Only his mother, he knew. But she’d already been lost to him, and he from her, all those years ago when he’d first been sent to Cheem to be turned as a Rōshun. Nothing had been left to him by the order of Mann, nothing but this hollow complexity of a life that he’d never wished for, had never chosen.

Ché chose now to raise the pistol firmly in his hand.

He steadied it with his other hand, tried to draw an aim on the Matriarch as he waited for an opening in the ring of mounted guards surrounding her. A flare went up. Men illuminated in shaking light jostled past him, interrupting his aim.

Ché fought to hold steady. He caught a brief glimpse of Sasheen as she tugged her zel around, and then she was blocked again by the tightening shields of her bodyguards. She would be away within moments.

Damn it, he swore silently.

He couldn’t get a clear shot.

Suddenly, one of the bodyguards swung around with his zel. The man’s sword rose high in the air then drove down onto someone on foot. As he carried through with the swing, the bodyguard bent low in his saddle.

Sasheen’s head came into view.

Ché’s pistol flared and fired.

Ash saw Sasheen lurch backwards in her saddle as he closed with her. The Matriarch’s white zel cried out as it reared up on its hind legs, backing a few steps towards him. Riders jostled and hollered all around them.

He saw an armoured rider lying next to its white zel.

It was Sasheen, sprawled in the muck with her life-blood pumping from her neck. Her bodyguards were gathering where she lay, holding their shields aloft to protect her, their movements as jerky as frightened boys’.

He cried out as though robbed of a prize rightly his, struggling to his feet with his sword hanging like a thing forgotten.

She was dead or dying. That was all that mattered, he consoled himself.

Ash barely noticed the mounted bodyguard circling around him. From the corner of his eye, he spotted the guard raising his sword.His gaze remained fixed on the motionless bundle that was the Holy Matriarch of Mann.

Ash was stillness.

The sword came down.