Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
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 a rickety stool, with a pipe in one hand, caught in the act of lighting up. With his sleeves rolled
up, his shirt open halfway down his chest, he looked no less fierce and strange than he did out in the swamps. It was as though someone had dressed up a savage as a civilized man.
The other was the camp quartermaster, a man she knew by sight. Heavy-built, unshaven and jowly, he slumped within the confines of a vastly moth-eaten, stuffed-leather chair that had seen many
and varied better days. She had always seen him before in scruffy civilian attire, the tail of his shirt hanging out, the top button of his breeches unbuttoned beneath his swelling belly. Here,
though, he appeared a true man of means in his club, with a blue-and-gold checked waistcoat complete with watch-chain.
‘Emily, you know Daffed Mallen, of course,’ Tubal said, indicating Mallen. It was her first indication that the man even had a first name. ‘And this reprobate and general
no-good individual is our quartermaster, Mr John Brocky. Gentlemen, I would like to introduce my sister-in-law, Emily Marshwic.’
‘To what end?’ Brocky asked suspiciously. ‘Are you pimping her?’
Before Emily could retort, Tubal got in. ‘I am proposing her for membership.’
‘A new member?’ Brocky laughed. ‘A little late for that, no? And a woman? Can’t be done.’
‘Rules say nothing about it,’ Mallen noted quietly.
Brocky squinted at him. ‘I’d have thought you’d be with me on this, Mallen.’
Mallen looked from Emily to the fat quartermaster, and back. ‘I know Miss Marshwic. Knows her business, she does. She gets my vote.’
Tubal gave him a nod of thanks, but Emily was too surprised to stay silent. ‘Master Sergeant—’
Mallen raised a finger. ‘Club rules, no ranks.’
‘Where’s his lordship?’ Tubal asked.
‘In the next room, opening a bottle or two,’ Brocky told him. ‘Let’s call him in, get a second opinion. I’ll wager he’ll back me. Sorry, Miss Marshwic, but,
really . . .’
A third man had appeared at the narrow doorway leading to the next room, a corked bottle in one hand and a blankly surprised look on his face. ‘What . . . ?’ he began.
She did not recognize him at her first glance. Out of context, out of uniform, it took a second look to match his face and the sheared-copper colour of his hair to her distant memories.
‘Mr Scavian,’ she said, and feared that he would still not know her. Two brief conversations, one crowded evening, a lifetime ago and a country away. How could he be expected to
recall? But a faint smile was coming to his lips, although his eyes were bewildered, still, and unsure. ‘Upon my soul,’ he said, ‘Miss Marshwic. What . . . what brings you to this
place?’
How far we have travelled
, she thought, but this was the same man she remembered so clearly.
‘You can’t know each other,’ Brocky complained, somewhere in the background. ‘It isn’t fair.’
‘Looks like you’re in, Em,’ Tubal told her, but she barely heard him, approaching Giles Scavian as though he might vanish at any moment.
‘I looked for you,’ she told him. ‘I remembered, but you weren’t there. The only Warlock was—’
‘Lascari,’ he finished. The scowl he gave did not suit him. ‘I learned soon enough not to wear the blue. Nineteen Warlocks have been sent to the Levant. Only two yet live,
myself included. The Denlanders learned to aim at our robes. They know to fear us.’
‘Excuse me, club rules, or do you put a shilling in the jar?’ Brocky objected. ‘All too serious, no?’
‘Brocky, this is not club business. This is my renewing an old acquaintanceship, in truth,’ Scavian told him with dignity.
‘Then you’re agreed that Emily can be a member,’ Tubal said to the quartermaster in triumph.
‘Shall we say I’m resigned to it,’ Brocky grumbled sourly. ‘Look, Scavvers, if you’re going to sweet-talk the lady, can you at least finish fetching the brandy as
you do it?’
Scavian coloured a little, and backed off into the next room. Emily followed him in, expecting a map room, a war room. Instead, she discovered something of a secret larder. Bottles, she saw;
bales of pipe tobacco; dried meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling. ‘What is all this?’ she asked. ‘There’s nothing like this stuff in the stores.’
‘Our quartermaster has a multitude of contacts,’ Scavian explained. ‘In every shipment from Locke there’s something of his crated up and marked “medical
supplies”. Miss Marshwic . . . I do not know whether I am glad to see you or not.’
‘Oh . . .’
He hauled the cork from the bottle in a single violent motion. ‘Were we anywhere else, I would be overjoyed,’ he said, ‘but this is no place for . . .’
‘For anyone,’ she finished. ‘Mallen excepted, perhaps. But here you are, and here I am. I don’t think anyone would have chosen the way things have fallen out, Mr
Scavian.’
‘No, in truth, they would not.’ He had a quartet of glasses ready there, and he added a fifth whilst pouring into the first.
‘How many members of this Survivors’ Club are there, anyway?’ she asked his back.
‘Four. Five now,’ he said, dipping the bottle from glass to glass expertly, not wasting a drop. ‘There were eleven founder members, I believe, but we had to expel
some.’
‘Why . . . ?’ She stopped herself, because abruptly it seemed to her that there was only one way to be expelled from the Survivors’ Club.
Brocky’s voice bellowed from the other room. ‘Make sure she’s got fifty pounds to her name, Scavvers!’
‘Ask her yourself,’ Scavian replied mildly. ‘You mustn’t mind John, Miss Marshwic. He just loves to complain.’
‘Mr Scavian . . .’ He turned to her, a glass in each hand, and she took them from him, holding his eyes. ‘If he is John to you . . . you may call me Emily, if you will. I would
not wish to bring too much ceremony here just because I’m a woman.’
His uncertain smile returned. ‘To each other’s faces we call each other by the family name, as soldiers do. Between ourselves, though – you and I – I would find no
greater pleasure but to call you Emily, and have you call me Giles.’
They rejoined the others, and Emily found herself seated in an uneven chair as the brandy glasses were passed round. The drink smelled acrid to her: it was not a lady’s usual libation.
‘To the King, gentlemen,’ said Tubal, and they all raised their glasses and sampled the deep brown liquor. Emily made a face at it, despite herself. It was sharp on the back of her
throat, fiery all the way down. The men were sipping appreciatively, though, and Brocky was taking compliments on his best find yet.
‘What’s this about fifty pounds?’ she asked them.
‘Well,’ Brocky shifted expansively in his chair, which had also presumably been crated in marked ‘medical supplies’, ‘each of us, all the members of the
Survivors’ Club in fact, have put a note of promise in the kitty, you see. It’s a strict condition of membership, in case you were wondering.’
‘To what end?’ she asked, and Mallen gave her a dry look.
‘Last man gets it,’ he said. ‘Last man standing.’
‘You can cover the sum, I take it?’ Brocky insisted.
‘But . . . that’s cold,’ she said, and at the same time she was thinking that the accounts at Grammaine would surely suffice.
‘We’re at war, Em,’ said Tubal. ‘And it’s hard, and it hurts, and the only way to avoid the knife is not to take it seriously. Hell and fire, we’ve all buried
friends here. We might as well play a game with it, show death we’re not so scared. We all know the next killing shot could be ours; we all want to leave something to help the friends that
survive us.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘Except for one fellow, of course, who’s already earmarked the kitty as “the John Brocky benevolent fund”.’
‘The quartermaster knows where he’s safest,’ Brocky announced loftily. ‘Damned if you’ll get me out in the mud with a gun, when I don’t have to.’
‘You don’t fight?’ Emily asked him.
‘Far too valuable, not like you spear-carriers,’ Brocky replied, without rancour. ‘Your basic quartermaster’s a skilled professional, see? I was a dispenser back in
civvies. I brew that muck they make you drink to ward off the bugs and the plagues. If I don’t want to get this blessed body of mine shot full of holes, neither the colonel nor the Ravens are
going to make me.’
‘Is that . . . fair?’ she asked, and they were all grinning.
‘Anything within the rules, Marshwic,’ Mallen told her.
‘War isn’t a stickler for niceties,’ Scavian added. ‘Why should we be? If Brocky stays home, or I take off my coat and dress like a soldier, all’s fair.’
Eleven founding members,
she thought
. These four are the true survivors, worthy of the name. And now I have joined them.
She sipped her brandy again. Somehow it wasn’t so bad now. It tasted like
inclusion
, like being part of something. Mallen was shuffling a deck of cards, his pipe jammed between
his teeth.
‘Serg— Mallen, you . . . seem comfortable with civilized niceties,’ she noted.
He shot her a humorous look. ‘Just a jungle savage, me. You want to play a hand, rob me blind?’
The other men hooted with laughter at that. ‘You didn’t fall for that native-guide act of his, did you?’ Tubal asked her.
She frowned. ‘But he said – you said you were here before the war came,’ she accused Mallen.
‘I was.’
Brocky snorted on his brandy. ‘Oh, he was here all right. But only because the University of Colemansworth gave him a stipend.’
‘University . . . ?’
‘Our friend Mr Mallen is a scholar,’ Scavian clarified. ‘I suppose the pre-eminent scholar on the swamps here. In truth, there wasn’t much competition. We’re lucky
to have him. Things would be a lot worse otherwise.’
‘Enough of the compliments.’ Mallen dealt five hands with the air of long practice. He caught her stare, still accusing, and shrugged. ‘So what? My father, his father, they
came here and met the indigenes. Family trade, you understand? Nothing wrong with an education.’
‘He’s written books,’ Brocky chuckled. ‘Papers, lectures, you name it! You’re right, though, at heart he’s just a dumb swamp-boy brought up by the dingies,
aren’t you, Mallen?’