It came to him slowly, vaguely, that he would die of exposure if he stayed here.
Ash groaned as he pushed himself to his knees. Standing was a deliberate process, moving one muscle after the other until at last he swayed on his feet. His legs trembled, ready to buckle at any moment.
When our legs are spent we must walk on our will, he recited in his mind, as the rainbow flicker of exhaustion played around the edges of his vision, and he stumbled onwards.
Other shipwrecked survivors were dotted along the beach; sailors, soldiers and camp followers. They walked to and fro as though in a daze, with their feet leaving confused, meandering trails in the sand. Wails of grief added to the high keen of the storm. They were all wretchedly exposed here, from the wind and rain that lashed so thickly it felt as though Ash was breathing water again. He wiped a hand across his face, blinked to see clearly. On his right, people huddled together amongst the dunes; ahead, others were setting off towards the bay.
Once more he wiped the rain from his eyes. The rainbow colours were expanding, creating a tunnel in his vision. He was aware of staggering into the dunes to seek some place to lie down out of the wind. Lightning sheeted overhead – he saw the sloping sand beyond his feet studded with pits from the impacts of rain.
Ahead a woman’s voice shouted out in anger, and others joined her. A scream. The laughter of men. The wind shifted and carried away the sounds, and Ash sniffed. His nostrils caught the lingering scent of woodsmoke.
A fire!
On all fours he struggled up the slope of a dune, panting ragged like a dog. At the top he righted himself. His eyes narrowed, taking in the scene below – a group of men, short glints of steel in their fists; a group of women being set upon before a fire.
The hope of warmth and shelter revived Ash momentarily. He focused on what he was seeing, and made out an older woman, wild-haired and defiant, shouting at the men and fighting them off with a length of driftwood. The men – sailors, he thought – seemed only to be sporting with her.
‘ Ho!’ Ash shouted, and every face turned to look up at him.
Lightning flashed again. He thought it an apt moment to sweep his blade from its sheath.
With a sudden nervousness the sailors eyed each other and backed away from the women. The older woman dropped the length of wood and gathered her girls around her.
Run, you bastards. I have not the strength for this.
They were waiting to see what he would do next. Ash took a step down from the dune, was hardly surprised to feel his legs buckle beneath him. He was quick enough to get his other foot out in front in time, and to turn his fall into something that approximated a downward rush. In his plummet he held his blade out for balance.
When he collapsed in front of the fire he was relieved to see the backs of the sailors fleeing into the night. He was shivering hard, and another gust flattened the flames across the wood, causing the embers to glow brightly. When the wind subsided, the flames crackled with renewed effort. The heat warmed Ash’s soul.
‘You,’ he croaked to the older woman. ‘Have you water?’
The woman ignored him. As he sat up she fussed over her girls, setting them around the fire beneath a stretch of canvas. There were five of them in all, and she talked to them curtly, businesslike, as though she was an old aunt to them. Satisfied, she wrapped a shawl over her head and shoulders and came across to join him. He saw a flask in her hand, which she offered freely.
Her eyes took in the colour of his skin.
‘Only rhulika,’ she said, settling down next to him and readjusting her dress. ‘Good for starting fires and warming the belly. Drink, old farlander. It’s the least I can offer you.’
He would have preferred freshwater just then but he drank it down anyway, his teeth chattering against the wooden spout. He swallowed the whole lot in one go, and the alcohol flared in his stomach, sent tendrils of heat threading through his spent limbs.
The flask dropped from Ash’s limp fingers. The rush of alcohol crashed against the weight of his exhaustion.
Close to his face, the woman’s pale features were reeling in and out of focus, her mouth moving quickly, saying something.
With a groan, Ash toppled forwards and fell through the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Paintings of Memory
The echoes of his own footfalls bounded ahead of Bahn as he rushed through the endless corridors of the Ministry of War, his hobnailed boots offering little purchase on the polished floors of marble. Bahn slid clumsily as he rounded a corner, regained his footing, and pounded towards the doors of the general’s office, too breathless to shout aside the guards standing there at attention.
The two guards took one look at his fevered face and his hands waving them out of his way, surmised that he had little intention of stopping – or indeed, was even capable of doing so in time – and smartly sidestepped out of his way.
Bahn flung himself through the heavy oak doors in a panting burst of drama. ‘They’ve landed!’ he declared to the room beyond.
General Creed, standing in the early morning light by the opposite expanse of windows, and facing an easel over which his hand hovered with a brush, inclined his head slightly, but said nothing.
‘General,’ Bahn tried again. ‘They-’ but the brush flicked across the page: once, twice, three times, and Bahn faltered.
Creed inspected the result of the strokes closely, then nodded, and set down the brush.
He turned and took the measure of Bahn in one burning glance. ‘Where?’ rumbled his heavy voice, and he grabbed up a rag and began to clean his hands with it.
Now that he was required to speak, Bahn found the words sticking in his throat. ‘Here,’ he managed to say. ‘At Pearl Bay.’
‘When?’
‘Last night. The first birds from the bay forts have started to come in.’
‘Numbers?’
Bahn shook his head. ‘Conflicting so far. The fleet is still unloading. But by the size of it, at least forty thousand fighting men.’
‘Acolytes?’
‘Yes. And General, the Matriarch herself is leading them. Some of our rangers spotted her standard flying from the flagship. They also report seeing the standard of Archgeneral Sparus on the beach.’
General Creed tossed the blackened rag onto his desk and sat down in his leather chair. He inclined back and settled his boots on the varnished surface of the desk, with his long legs crossed and his hands clasped loosely, his thumbs toying with each other, his face a flinty cliff.
He takes it well, thought Bahn, whose stomach was still quailing inside.
He’d always supposed that composure was an excellent quality in a leader. Instead, right then, it made him feel like a scared youth.
‘Perhaps the death of her son has made her reckless,’ Creed mused, though Bahn offered no response, for the general was only thinking out aloud.
Bahn’s body wanted to move, to act. In nervous impatience, he gazed out the window beyond the general’s head. The Lansway and the Shield were visible from here, and he could even see the encampment of the Imperial Fourth Army, spread across the waist of the isthmus in its neat grid.
The lull in the fighting made perfect sense now. It had been more than an observance of mourning for the Matriarch’s son; they had been waiting for the invasion force to arrive, the hammer to their anvil, with Bar-Khos caught in between. Bahn wondered how long it would be before they renewed their assaults on the walls with everything they had.
At the thought of the fighting to come, his gaze turned to the easel and canvas next to the window, and the vision of peace the painting had captured. It was rendered in the minimal farlander style so favoured by General Creed. Rather than portraying the view outside, it was instead a scene from memory; gentle slopes covered in vines, rising towards distant mountains.