down on one knee beside her, gun to his shoulder and waiting for his moment.
‘Ready?’ he asked her. She nodded, breathlessly. The Denlander would have reloaded, too. He would be just as ready as them.
‘On three,’ he said. ‘One . . . two . . .’ His knuckles whitened on his gun.
There was a brace of shots from up ahead, and then a third loud enough to have come from straight in front of them.
‘Three!’ Tubal hurled himself up, gun first, and Emily was right behind him. They smashed through the cycad stand they reckoned the Denlander was in, and caught him frantically dropping another ball into his gun. The small man, his grey uniform as mud-streaked as their own, dropped his musket and tried to hurl himself away, but they fired at once. They never knew which of them had hit him, but he dropped, clutching at a dark mark in his chest. All around them there were sporadic exchanges of fire. It was impossible to tell where the lines had been drawn.
They reloaded, standing back to back, watchful eyes on their surroundings. The firing was growing steadily less.
‘Ready?’ he asked again and, at her nod, they pressed forward and left, hoping to recover the end of the line. Almost immediately the entire swamp around them seemed to explode with gunfire. Two or three shots passed between them, and Emily hurled herself into the muddy water at her feet, with Tubal following. For a moment, she thought he had been shot, like Elise. It could be as sudden, as unremarked, as that. Instead he lifted his face from the mire and grimaced at the world in general.
‘What the hell?’ he asked.
Someone bolted past them, almost over them: a Denlander unarmed and fleeing. He was gone before either of them could get their guns up, dashing off between the trees.
‘We are way off course,’ Tubal observed. Emily hushed him and then they could both hear more coming, at a walk this time, a cautious walk. She took up her gun and found it clogged with mud.
‘Tubal . . . Sir . . .’ she gestured. His own gun was ready for the newcomers and, after a second, she slid her sabre from its scabbard, aware of the awkward, wrist-twisting weight of it.
Three men broke cover suddenly, and Tubal came within a hair’s breadth of firing at them, but the red of their jackets warned him off just in time. He put a hand up and stood, Emily along with him.
‘Dead Cats.’ He noted the company badges.
‘Bad Rabbits, is it?’ said his opposite number, a sergeant managing half a salute. ‘Guess that means there’s no more of them.’
‘Someone might have told me it was a pincer movement,’ Tubal complained. The Leopard Passant sergeant merely shrugged.
High and clear through the trees came Mallen’s whistle calling: Regroup. It was over. Seven Lascanne soldiers had been killed, and a rough count reckoned up some fifteen fallen Denlander scouts, whose position Mallen’s people had pinned down the day before.
By the standards of the Levant front, it was a great victory. That was the terrible thing about it.
*
‘So,’ Tubal said, ‘here we are. I invite you to look upon the fashionable address of my new club. Splendid, isn’t it?’
It was the headquarters shed of the Stag Rampant. The yellow flag, with its deformed animal in black, sagged limply above. She glanced at Tubal to see if he was making fun of her. He had always possessed a quietly wicked sense of humour.
‘No lie,’ he assured her. ‘I hereby formally invite you into the town address of the Survivors’ Club, positively the most elegant resort for any gentleman of leisure on the Levant front. Or lady, either.’ He stepped forward and pushed the rickety door open, and a surprising wave of warmth washed over them from inside, the play of firelight and the smell of pipe smoke. Emily recoiled before it, momentarily bewildered. It was as if the door led somewhere else, somewhere like home. It had no right to open where it did.
Another glance restored her sense of reality. They had done their best to commandeer the place in the name of civilization, but the board walls, the two narrow rooms it was divided into, had defeated them. It would have made a better prison cell than a club lounge, no matter how hard they had tried.
There were two men in the room already. One was Mallen, to her surprise. He sat at a table on