Stands a Shadow by Col Buchanan Page A

the smoke engulfed them entirely; and then Coya was sprawled on the deck with a great weight pressing down on him, and another bang tried to squeeze the insides out from him.
    When the smoke cleared, Marsh was still standing there with his hands now empty save for a knife. He was turning to track the monk vaulting over the rail to his death.
    Coya gasped as the man vanished over the side.
    ‘Are you all right?’ asked Creed, patting him down before helping him to his feet.
    Coya found his voice again. ‘I’m fine, I think,’ he said as he stooped awkwardly for his cane. ‘And you?’ he asked, as he leaned on it for support and looked up at the general. ‘You seem to be bleeding, on your head, there.’
    Creed dabbed at his head where a shallow wound ran crimson. The general frowned then turned to look over the rail. Coya was curious too.
    Below, a great distance below, a canopy of white drifted down towards the surface of the sea. As the wind carried it in the direction of the coast, he saw a man dangling beneath it, the burned orange of his robes unmistakable.
    Creed shook his head in obvious fascination.
    ‘These Diplomats. They grow crazier every year.’

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    The House on Tempo Street
     
    In sweat, they lay with their lungs heaving and their cries still ringing in their ears, both of them splayed like martyrs on the sodden bed, their bodies glistening in the daylight cast through the tattered, mouldy curtains of gala lace that hung across the open window.
    Bahn blinked to clear his eyes. Through the air above the bed the dust motes were dancing as though in play, whipped up by the frantic action of the last hour.
    ‘We make too much noise,’ she muttered next to him, but without much concern in her voice, even as a child’s yell rang up through the thin boards of the floor, and voices murmured from behind the even thinner wall at their heads.
    Bahn could only gasp and wait for his galloping heart to stop racing. He was burning up, and he kicked away the thin blanket that had snared itself around his ankles. He wiped his stubbled face dry, and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning.
    The room was a cupboard-like space with a triangular, slope-beamed ceiling too low for a man to stand properly beneath. It reeked of dampness, sex, and the spiced smoke from an incense burner sitting beneath the open window. A perch , they called this kind of attic room in Bar-Khos; the preserve of prostitutes and street hustlers, or those in hiding from the law.
    Bahn looked down at the girl as she rolled against his side and rested an arm across his stomach, her white skin as smooth as paper. Like her face, her small breasts were flushed, and he lay there and enjoyed the sensation of them flattening against his chest while the soft lilt of her voice played in his ears. ‘Or rather, you make too much noise,’ she was saying in her Lagosian accent, and she slid her hand downwards past his stomach, and stroked his downy hair with painted nails.
    ‘You were hardly quiet yourself,’ he breathed, and felt his scrotum tighten as her nails explored him further – sweet Mercy, he was responding again already. He could not get enough of this girl.
    Absently, Bahn wondered if a shade had possessed him these past days and weeks; one of those spirits of mad impulse that seized hold of lives and spurred them headlong into tragedy with their insatiable needs.
    If only I believed in such things , Bahn considered in his usual rational way. He knew that this weakness was his alone to carry. He thought of Marlee, his wife, and felt the usual first flutters of guilt in his stomach, a nausea he would carry with him for the rest of the day. He sighed heavily.
    The girl beside him knew that sound by now, and she drew her hand away to leave him in peace. She cradled her head against the nook of his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on the low sloping beams of the ceiling above them. He observed the spikes of her