Stands a Shadow by Buchanan Col

Author:Buchanan, Col [Buchanan, Col]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780230761001
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Clash of Arms

Ash awoke to the ground pounding against his ear, and recognized the sound in an instant.

The old Rōshun leapt up with his sheathed sword in hand and scanned the perimeter of wagons. Riders, tearing in through the night. Shouts of alarm rising in their wake.

A zel vaulted the yoke of a drawn wagon, threw up clods of snow from its hooves as it landed and regained its footing. Its rider yanked hard on the reins and Ash saw something in his hand with a smoking fuse trailing from it. The man tossed the jar into the wagon, which instantly burst into flames.

Someone screamed through the night. More riders were charging into the baggage camp, throwing firebombs at every wagon they could see. People yelled and ran for cover. The riders cut them down as they ran.

This is my chance.

Ash glanced to the north, where the tents of the Matriarch’s encampment stood glowing with inner light.

He started to jog.

It was a damned foolish time to be flying. The air up here was frigid enough to cover everything on the little skyboat with ice. The silk envelop overhead, the sweeping control vanes along its flanks, all shone with a stark whiteness, while frozen diamonds of moisture covered the frozen tiq spars and rigging that fixed the wooden hull to the gas bag. Even worse, the light could not be relied upon, for the snow-covered valley floor below them kept fading into blackness each time a cloud obscured the waning moons, reducing their visibility to almost nothing. For Halahan, it only made the experience more thrilling.

‘A cold night for it!’ he said to his staff sergeant over the sound of the thrusters.

The man was huddling amongst the men at the very centre of the narrow deck, as far from the rails as he could be. Staff Sergeant Jay, a fellow Nathalese veteran, only smiled miserably and closed his eyes again, and continued to chant a prayer beneath his breath.

Halahan casually chewed on his unlit pipe and surveyed his fellow Greyjackets. They held their longrifles upright in their arms and shivered beneath their coats, eyes flashing white in the gloom. A few passed around flasks of spirits, though none of them spoke beyond the odd whisper. Good fighters, all of them, he knew. Men he could rely upon, each one an exile from a conquered land.

Past their heads he spied the distant lights of the imperial army, and he chewed his pipe a little harder.

His own homeland of Nathal had fallen years ago, after he’d spent half his life as a preacher of Erēs teaching the oneness of all. Now, Nathal was nothing more than another colony of Mann, the people exploited and oppressed worse than they ever had been by their own Nathalese nobility.

Halahan massaged his bad leg where it was throbbing from the chill – or perhaps it was from nothing more than old memories. He had gained the wound after the Imperial Fourth Army had invaded his homeland,

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