gate beyond. On the wet boardwalk of the street he stood for a moment, listening to the exchanges of gunfire in the east.
Ché looked in the opposite direction at the nearby waters of the lake, a black expanse visible between the two rows of housing. Drawn to it, he walked along the street and crossed the broad thoroughfare, and scrambled down onto the slick littoral of lakeweed until he stood with the water at his feet.
Campfires twinkled now all along the far shores. Rafts still drifted across the lake. They would be heading for the mouths of the Chilos and the Suck, hoping to make it clear to safety.
I should be on one of those rafts, he thought sourly. I should be getting as far away from here as I can.
Reluctantly, Ché turned his back on it.
He faced the distant lights and noise of the city’s heart, wondering how long he had left before they came for him.
The old woman crouched on the shoreline of the floating island, ankle-deep in the water with her skirts tied up around her thighs, using a knife to cut through a strand of lakeweed, which she dropped into a bucket by her side.
For a moment the guns ceased firing from the direction of the crackling bridge. The old woman heard a tiny splash not far from her, and then the sudden sluice of water running clear of something.
She stopped what she was doing to look up, her free hand settling for balance on the basket.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, her voice shaking with age.
No one answered, though she could sense the presence of someone nearby, watching her.
She stood up with the knife in her hand. Another splash. More water running free. ‘Who’s there!’ she demanded again, and took a few steps backwards until she was clear of the water.
‘It’s me, old mother, your child,’ came a female voice, young, close. It made the old woman jerk in alarm.
‘What? I have no children. Who is that?’
She felt a ripple of water spill across her toes. Smelled a spicy breath against her own.
‘Stop playing with her, can’t you see that she’s blind.’ A man’s voice, a whisper. ‘Swan, help me with these clothes before we freeze to death, will you?’
‘Blind or not, she’s still a witness.’
The woman’s heart stopped as a cool edge pressed against her throat. She did not dare move. Her useless eyes moved of their own accord.
‘Old blind woman with no children,’ chided the woman’s voice once more.
‘Swan!’
A burning pain shot across her throat. She coughed wetly, choking, held a hand up to her neck to feel a hotness spill across her fingers. Her knees gave out, and she sagged to the surface of lakeweed, one hand lolling into the water, her mouth gasping like a landed fish.
‘This one should thank me,’ was the last thing she ever heard.
Hundreds choked the streets and milled in confusion around the great Central Canal, competing for spaces on the few boats still preparing to leave, or those ferries with crews brave enough to have returned for more.
Ché saw folk desperate enough to be loading families onto makeshift rafts, mats of lakeweed with doors thrown across them; women clutching babes in their arms, children holding baskets, pots, the leashes of barking dogs; old grandparents muttering prayers.
The Khosian army had bedded down in the citadel at the heart of the floating city, and in the streets and buildings that surrounded it. The Tume Home Guards struggled to maintain some sense of order, while soldiers of the army staggered drunk and weary, or pissed in alleyways, or splashed like children in public cisterns, or fornicated with prostitutes desperate enough for coin to linger a while. He stepped over a Red Guard snoring in the middle of the boardwalk, and beneath the awning of a shop he glimpsed a brief fight between two squads of men, one of them spilling backwards with a knife sticking from his thigh.
The aftermath of battle, Ché supposed. Men like himself, exhausted to the bone but now, having survived the fight, too spirited for simple rest. They hardly seemed the same men that had impressed him so deeply the night before as whole.
A door was flung open as he passed the mouth of an alleyway, and a couple tottered through it, shrouded in smoke. Music and laughter following them from within. Ché stopped to look at the sign above the door; Calhalee’s Respite, it read above a picture of a wavy-haired woman with a fish dangling