had been since he had enjoyed a hot drink or a meal. Mistress Cheer squinted at him, taking in the dark tone of his skin. ‘What are you – a mercenary? You’re a little old for this work, don’t you think?’
‘Bodyguard,’ he said without thinking.
‘Oh? And your employer?’
Ash nodded in the direction of the sea.
She blinked quickly, evaluating his meaning, and said, ‘Then you’re a timely stroke of good fortune, is all I can say. Our own man couldn’t swim, though he thought it too unimportant to mention until we were neck-deep in water. My girls are in need of some protection, as you might have noticed.’
They both looked towards the girls she spoke of. He caught glimpses of them beyond the flames as they were dressing; the stretch of smooth calves and thighs; the sway of a heavy breast; lips being painted; a pair of dark-kohled eyes glancing across at him.
Ash looked away and cleared his throat.
Prostitutes, he realized, feeling thick-headed. Here to follow the army during its campaign.
Ash sipped his chee and considered her offer. It would take time to find his bearings here, and to discover a way through to the Matriarch. It could take days, he knew, if not longer. All the while, he would have to keep up with the army.
Ash could recognize a gift of fate when he came across one.
‘Pay?’ he enquired, though the question was merely for show.
‘Oh, we have money. I can pay you campaign rates of ten marvels a day, and meals on top of that when we get ourselves back on our feet.’
‘Fifteen,’ he said, again for the sake of appearances.
‘Agreed,’ she allowed him with a gracious nod of her head. ‘And thank you, again. Truly. That was a courageous act, stepping in to help us like that in your condition.’
‘It was your fire I was really after,’ he confessed, but she only smiled as though he was joking.
Ash left them to finish their preparations, and, with his sodden boots perched next to the fire, he went for a swim to clean and wake himself.
The beach appeared even more desolate in the light of day. Wreckage lay strewn in heaps amongst frayed cordage and seaweed; bodies too, the early crabs clambering over whitened skin. Birds shrieked in the air, squabbled over scraps on the sand. Ash walked to loosen his limbs, seeing how the beach curved inwards into the bay itself, where the fleet rode at anchor in the choppy waters, barely diminished, for all the battering the storm had given it. He could see rafts and boats bringing in men and supplies; even cannon poking out over the bobbing gunwales.
The invasion force stopped him in his tracks. The imperial army had established a beachhead on the white sands and the system of dunes behind them. Smoke drifted from a thousand campfires and more, and the ground swarmed thick with figures all the way to the first sloping pastures that rose between the tawny hills. A village lay in blackened ruins on a ridge that overlooked the far end of the bay, a bleak counterpoint to the smouldering fort on the opposite side of the beachhead.
Ash looked for any sign of Sasheen, and almost immediately spotted an army standard of a black raven on a white field, flapping on the beach amongst several others. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see the Matriarch amongst so many.
One step at a time, he thought to himself.
He picked his way through the survivors gathering what they could from the storm wreckage. He stripped at the water’s edge, then waded out into the sea with the waves frothing around his thighs. Scrubbing himself, he noticed the bruises on his arms, the black fingerprints where the sailor had clutched him in the sinking ship.
Ash dived into the water and swam for a while, easing the tensions in his muscles. Now and again, he glanced across the beachhead towards the fluttering standard of Sasheen, squinting for a sight of her.
The wind was whipping the drying grains of sand from the dunes, and the Matriarch strode through the hiss of it with her eyes narrowed down to slits. Ahead, her bodyguards cleared the way ahead of milling soldiers and civilians, while behind her straggled her field aides, hiking up the flanks of the mounds and down into their troughs in a long line of bleached-white robes, a procession that extended all the way back to the churned beach.
Not now, Archgeneral Sparus thought in irritation. I