She went for her pistol, but got it tangled between her shirt and the improvised belt, and then the indigene was right in her face. It had a strange smell, something of the swamp but with an acrid musk overlying it, and it was tugging fiercely at the red of her jacket with its free hand.
‘Mar’n!’ it yapped, and there was something human in its tone: it thought she was an idiot.
‘Mallen?’ She gaped at it.
‘Mar’n! Mar’n!’ it repeated, and there was no mistaking the exasperated confirmation. With the linguistics cleared up, it scuttled off a dozen paces, wiping its hand on the greenery to rid it of her touch, then turned back to watch her. There was no beckoning, no human gesture to explain it, but she understood. She heaved herself onto her feet, and stumbled after the indigene as it led her further into the swamps.
An hour later she was in sight of the camp. She looked around to thank her guide, but it had vanished without her ever seeing it go.
Step after dragging step, she walked out into full view of the tents, and the sentries spotted her and raised a shout. Moments later, Tubal came running from the camp’s edge towards her, with an expression of amazed joy on his face.
‘Hell and damnation, Em!’ he shouted. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ He clasped her to him fiercely. ‘God, but it’s good to see you! I thought . . . Well you can guess what I thought!’
‘It’s good to see you, too, Tubal.’ She slumped against him a moment, feeling utterly drained. Out of the swamps at last, the air was chilly, the sunlight too bright.
‘You must be the last of us,’ he said. ‘There can’t be anyone else, now.’
She caught his eye. ‘How many? How many dead?’
He sighed. ‘Well, nobody ever said it was going to be easy.’
‘Tubal, how many?’
‘Our current strength is six hundred and thirty-six soldiers-at-arms, Em, besides thirteen assorted officers.’
Two hundred dead and more. She shivered.
‘Between your lot getting caught in the field, and Sergeant Shalmer’s boys getting pinned down early on, not to mention me getting cut up going in to help Pordevere,’ he said. ‘On which subject, Fat Squirrel lost well over one man in three.’
‘One in . . .’ She could not quite imagine it. There had been a thousand souls under the Bear Sejant banner only this morning.
And one of those dead men is my doing. Amongst such a welter of the dead, she found that she could muster no remorse for Master Sergeant Sharkey.
‘Pordevere put them in too fast and too soon. They were taking the Denlanders’ full fire for a long time before we turned up. Dead Cat got off lightly, no more than twenty or thirty down.’
Because they were late, she thought. And, because they came late, we suffered.
‘The enemy?’ she asked.
Tubal’s smile was small and pained. ‘Oh, we won, no question. We broke up their entire camp. Wherever they’ve retreated to, it’s a damn sight further back. Hooray for our side, right?’
‘Hooray,’ she echoed hollowly. ‘I need to sit down, Tubal. I need to eat.’ A sudden thought, and with it, guilt that it had not occurred sooner. ‘Tubal, is Mr Scavian . . . ?’
‘Perfectly alive and well, despite a few near misses,’ he assured her, with a smile a touch too knowing for her comfort. ‘He gave them good service, I hear. For all he hates the fight, our Giles does seem to be particularly good at it.’
*
She slept through from before dusk until just after dawn, a blessedly dreamless rest. Only in the morning did she think to go and see John Brocky.
He had made the storehouse his own special sanctum, a labyrinth of skewed crates and boxes without labels. He was clearly doing his best to make himself irreplaceable. She found him poking around under some shelves with a broom handle, an expression of intense concentration on his face.
‘Rats?’ she asked.
‘Snakes,’ he explained. ‘Our good friend Mallen, out of the kindness of his little heart, decided I should have some snakes to keep the rats down. Now the rats won’t come near this place, and I can quite understand them.’ He straightened up mournfully. ‘Once again, outwitted by a reptile.’ His tone could have meant either the snakes or Mallen. ‘What can I do for you, Ensign? Good to see you well.’
‘I need my letter back,’ she explained.
He spread his hands. ‘Can’t help you there, Marshwic. Your pretty little