this life too. In so many ways, he knew he was better at this than he had ever been at supporting a family.
Ash could feel the prayer belt wrapped tight like a linen bandage around his abdomen, its ink-brushed words pressing against his sweating skin. Within its bounds he carried a letter from his wife delivered to him only a week before. Her words, carved into a thin sheet of leather, had pleaded once more for his forgiveness.
‘Father,’ said his son by his side as the enemy grew nearer. The boy was holding aloft one of the lances, his face slick with sweat. Ash took it, and the shield too. On his left, Kosh’s son did the same.
‘Are you ready?’ Ash asked his son, not unkindly.
The boy frowned, though. He leaned and spat in the same way as his father sometimes did. ‘I’ll stand, if that’s what you mean,’ he declared maturely, but he said so in a voice still unbroken with age. There was anger in his tone, at the perceived insinuation that he might run on this day, like he had in his first real battle, overcome by it all.
‘I know you will. I only ask if you are ready.’
The boy’s jaw flexed. His stare softened before he looked away.
‘Stay in the rear, close to Kosh’s boy. Don’t come to me unless I signal, do you hear?’
‘Yes, father,’ answered Lin, and then waited, blinking up at him, as though expecting something more.
The thin leather of his wife’s letter felt cool against Ash’s stomach.
‘I’m glad you’re here, son,’ he heard himself say, and his throat clamped tight around each of the words. ‘With me, I mean.’
Lin beamed up at him.
‘Yes, father.’
He turned and sauntered away, and Ash watched him leave as other battlesquires filtered back through the ranks. Kosh’s son joined him, slapping the boy on the back; a joker like his father.
A soft thunder rumbled across the heat of the plain.
The Yashi were charging.
Ash pulled the goggles down over his eyes and the scarf across his face. Beneath him, he could feel the tremor of the ground transmitted through the bones and muscles of his zel. He glanced to General Oshō, as did every other man of the formation. Still the general refused to move.
‘With heart,’ he told Kosh.
Kosh pulled his own scarf up. Some kind of awkwardness kept his gaze clear of Ash. One way or the other, they would probably never fight side by side like this again; comrades, brothers, crazy fools of the revolution.
‘And you, my friend,’ came Kosh’s muffled reply.
They gathered their zels’ reins tighter in their fists as General Oshō levelled his warhead at the approaching enemy. Ash lowered his own lance.
Osh’s zel sprang forward.
As one, the men of the Shining Way followed him with a roar.
CHAPTER ONE
Beneath the Gaze of Ninshi’
Ash awoke with a groan, and found that he was drenched in freezing sweat and shivering beneath a sky full of stars.
He blinked in the darkness, wondering where he was, who he was, experiencing a moment of delicate affinity with the All.
And then he saw a smear of light track high above him. A skyship, its tubes trailing blue fire across the face of Ninshi’s Hood, her one eye glimmering red as she watched the ship and Ash and the rest of the world turning beneath her.
Q’os, Ash remembered with a sudden sensation of sickness in his stomach. I’m in Q’os, on the other side of the ocean, at the spitting end of the Silk Winds, thirty years in exile.
The remnants of his dreams vanished like so much wind-blown dust. He let them go, the fading tastes and echoes of Honshu. It was a loss of something irreplaceable, but it was better that way. Better not to dwell on these things while he was awake.
The light of the skyship faded slowly on its course towards the eastern horizon. It diminished in the hazy air above the city, occasionally blocked from sight by the dark, towering shape of a skysteeple. In the starlight, Ash saw his breath coil from his open mouth.
Damn it, he thought as he pulled his cloak tighter about his neck. I need to piss again.
Twice already he’d awoken in the night; once with a straining bladder, the other time for no apparent reason at all. Perhaps there had been a distant shout in the streets below, or a spasm in his aching back, or a gust of cold wind, or he’d simply coughed. At his age, everything woke him