'Finish him,' said Aleas, with ice in his voice. 'There might still be time to save Nico.'
Ash shifted his stance and set his blade against Kirkus' white throat.
'Hold!' wailed the young priest. 'You do this for gold, yes? Well I have gold, more gold than you could spend in a lifetime.'
'Then what good would it be to us?' replied Ash, and with an almost gentle motion flicked the tip of his blade across the young man's throat.
Kirkus goggled. His tongue emerged from his gaping mouth. He reached a hand to his throat, trying to fix it. A dark crimson appeared suddenly between his fingers. As it spurted, he slowly choked to death.
They watched until the Matriarch's son lay lifeless.
When they returned to him, Baracha was conscious and trying to get to his feet. Aleas marvelled at the man's resilience.
'Is it done?' he asked, as Aleas helped him up. Aleas nodded.
'What of the boy?'
'The Shay Madi,' said Aleas grimly.
'Perhaps he lied,' the Alhazii offered, more to Ash than to his apprentice. But Ash ignored him, and descended the steps.
They rode the climbing box back down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Day for Rejoicing Bahn was glad of the incense that drifted through the dim atmosphere of the inner temple. He stood beneath the high windowless domed roof of the building, in a silence permeated by the low murmurs of the Daoist monks performing their ritual, swaying only slightly in the armour he had been wearing for twelve hours altogether, and which by now weighed like an extra man upon him. The rigid, contoured plates and sheaths were coated in a fine grey dust streaked with sweat, and it itched where the leather insides pressed against his tacky skin. He was aware of how badly he must smell to those around him, but he was almost glad of that, too. It would help to mask any lingering scents of sex.
His wife seemed glad merely that he had made it at last, even if their daughter's naming ceremony had already begun in his absence. Marlee knew to appreciate these chances Bahn snatched of returning home from the Shield, not least because it signified a lull in the fighting.
Part of Kharnost's Wall had collapsed during the previous week, heralding another round of infantry assaults from the Mannians as they attempted to exploit this sudden weakness in the city's defences. The Khosians, in return, had struggled to hold the invaders off long enough to repair the breach as best they could. Bahn himself had so far not fought during the week-long defence of the wall. He had been there merely in his usual capacity as General Creed's aide, his role to observe and to stand back from the fighting. When the Mannians had attacked again last night, Bahn had been stationed with the field-command team on the second wall, from where he had watched through the long darkness as the battle ebbed and flowed around the latest breach and upon the far parapet. He had perceived only dimly the fighting taking place in the flame-lit darkness, and in sudden spells of brightness made stark by shadow and light as flares had drifted from the sky, like a dream he had once had of burning misshapes of men tumbling from the stars.
Bahn had done nothing all night except for this silent watching and the regular despatch of runners to the Ministry of War with reports relating to the ongoing defence. Occasionally he had replied to one of the comments of the command team, or had shown his acknowledgement of some black joke they had made in their attempts at relieving the tension. Still, it was the sixth prolonged assault in as many nights, and Bahn was exhausted from it. As the sun had risen in the east, across their left shoulders and over the skirting wall that protected the coast of the Lansway on that side, the enemy had withdrawn, bearing their wounded with them, and the assault had at last, and with sweet mercy, faded away.
A new landscape emerged in the aftermath of withdrawaclass="underline" a broken and twisted one with movement dotted all about it, though movement ragged and spent and without much direction. Bahn observed the city's men staggering around with comrades, as though drunk – most likely they were – or sagging to their knees in the mud or on the blood-slick stones of the parapet. Some called out to the dawn sky, or called out to others, or laughed, simply laughed. With the din of battle now gone, Bahn felt as though a harsh wind had been battering his flesh all these long hours of darkness and vigilance, and then had suddenly vanished. He listened to distant gulls cry out in their eternal hunger. He looked at the other haggard faces of the command team, and returned their hollow gazes with his own.
Cold without and numb within, Bahn had climbed the Mount of Truth to report to General Creed, the old man awake in his Ministry chambers with the curtains still drawn, oil lamps flickering in the corners, looking as though he had not slept. The enemy had been repulsed at the cost of sixty-one defenders dead, Bahn informed him. Some were still unaccounted for. Countless more had been wounded. Repairs on the breached wall were now resuming, though it was still doubtful they could seal it in any way save for a makeshift one.
'Very well,' Creed's tired voice had replied, his back turned to Bahn in the deep leather armchair he sat within.
Knowing he was late, Bahn had stayed only long enough in the Ministry to wash his face and hands free of grime. He had also begged for some bread and cheese from the kitchen, and eaten that on the trot as he hurried down off the hill to the nearby Quarter of Barbers, the dawn streets lively, almost festive, as was their wont in the aftermath of such an attack.
His family temple was to be found in this quarter – Bahn's side of the family, in this area where he had been born and raised. On Quince Street, the prostitutes were still out from the night before, tending to business with those soldiers still drifting out from the walls, made lustful with relief and the shedding of blood.
As Bahn passed the women, a few called out to him by name, the older ones who still remembered him as a youth. He nodded with a tight smile, kept marching. At the corner of Quince and Abbot he caught the eye of one girl in particular. His stomach clenched at the sight of her. She recognized him, too, and not from long ago but from only recently, from mere days ago, as she curved her spine to pronounce her small bosom and peered out from under her heavy lashes.
So young, Bahn thought, with something close to despair in him.
He had made a promise to himself, that first and last time, that he would not do this again. Bahn strode onwards with every intention of passing the girl by. He turned his head only to nod a greeting, but then the girl's lips parted to speak, and he saw the colour of them, the soft red blush of them, and he halted.
Close up, he could see the red soreness around her nostrils from inhaling dross, and the sunken look of the addict in her eyes. She appeared thinner since last he had encountered her.
'How are you?' Bahn asked the girl, his words sounding gentle enough, though his voice was tense from the blood pulsing through him.
'I'm well', she had replied, and her look of hunger reached out to his own, stirring deep eddies of need.
His gaze roamed over her pale shoulders, the smooth skin of her chest under her low-cut dress. For a delicate moment he thought of savouring her small breasts in his mouth.
Bahn had taken her in an alleyway behind the side-street tenements, his sense of time suddenly diminished to a series of images as fractious and disconnected as in battle; consumed in all entirety by a need to empty his frantic lust inside her, along with incipient self-loathing certain to rally in strength later on, and those sights and sounds and scents that had surrounded him all through that awful bloody night and the ones before it, and the guilt too – shame even – at his pampered role in this war, the awareness of his own self-preservation as he looked down at men, at comrades, hour after hour, dying, while he did nothing but watch.