“That’s right.” Rudi smiled, hoping to look like a
late-returning reveller again, suddenly acutely conscious of the bow slung
across his back, hardly a common sight in the streets of Marienburg. He
indicated Hanna. “The bridge is open, and if I don’t get my girlfriend home
before her father notices she’s missing, she’s going to be in real trouble.”
“I see,” the boatman said, probably more inclined to believe
the two shillings than the story attached to it, if Rudi was any judge. He
shrugged, smiling insincerely. “Wish I could help you, laddie, but the Caps have
said no sailing until further notice, and that’s that.” He spat into the water.
“Typical. Some half-wit shouts, ‘witch’ and the whole city grinds to a halt.
Never mind our livelihoods.”
“Damn right,” somebody else said, and the little knot of
boatmen aired their grievances among themselves for a moment, apparently
forgetting their putative clients entirely.
“You have to help, please.” Hanna sounded tearful and
frightened, her voice changing completely, as it had on the moors when she’d
tried to bluff her way past Gerhard’s soldiers. “My father has such a temper.
You’ve no idea what he’ll do if he finds I sneaked out of the house.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.” The boatman’s voice hardened. “If we got
caught, I’d be fined, couple of guilders at least. I could lose the boat over a
debt like that.”
“Two guilders, fine.” Rudi dug the gold coins out of his
purse, suddenly conscious of the stares of the men around him. He could hear
their thoughts as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud.
That’s a lot of
money. Wonder how much more there is in that purse. There’s only one of him, and
six of us.
He brushed the hilt of his sword casually as he returned the
purse to his belt, and the moment passed. The boatman nodded.
“All right, but if we get caught you pay the fine, on top of
this. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Rudi said. The man gestured to a nearby boat.
“That’s mine. Get in.” He watched while Rudi helped Hanna
aboard, and unhitched the line securing the tiny craft to the dock. He turned to
his companions. “If the Caps come back and notice I’m missing, tell them I’ve
gone to Gerda’s to thaw out.”
“She can thaw me out any time,” one of the other boatmen
said, to ribald laughter.
“Any time you’ve got sixpence in your purse,” the waterman
said, jumping into the skiff. That provoked another round of laughter, but
through it, Rudi was sure he could hear the clattering of feet on the steps
leading up to the street above: the Caps. Without thinking, he glanced in that
direction, catching sight of Rauke and her colleagues jogging down the wharf
towards them, their outlines blurred by the flurrying snow.
“What’s up?” the boatman asked, reading his expression, and
glancing in the same direction. He must have taken in the sight of the
approaching Caps almost at once, because he lunged at Rudi without warning,
raising his voice to a shout. “Help! They’re stealing my boat!”
Under any other circumstances, the sheer effrontery of it
would probably have taken Rudi completely by surprise, but after everything he’d
already been through that night, he was ready for any eventuality. He blocked
the man’s clumsy rush without thinking, not even bothering to evade it, and
punched him hard in the face. The boat rocked alarmingly. Hanna cried out and
clung to the gunwales as freezing water slopped over the side, and Rudi sat down
hard on the seat facing the stern.
The boatman wasn’t so lucky. With an inarticulate cry, he
lost his footing and pitched backwards over the side. A gout of foetid canal
water broke over the boat, drenching the fugitives with its freezing spray, and
the man surfaced, spluttering.
“Get them!” Rauke shouted, and the two gunners with her
dropped to one knee, bringing their clumsy weapons up to fire. Clearly
perceiving the danger he was in, the boatman struck out for the jetty, and the
reaching arms of his friends, protesting loudly as he did so.
“Oi! That’s my living! Don’t you dare go blowing holes in
it!”
Rudi cringed. He’d seen a blunderbuss discharged once before,
during a raid on a weirdroot den. The cone of shot had blasted a thick wooden
door off its hinges, and taken down the three would-be ambushers waiting behind
it. Wallowing out here in the water, he and Hanna were sitting ducks. There was
no way the watchmen could miss at this range.
“Who are they?” Rauke asked as the boatman floundered up onto
the wharf, hauled to safety by his friends. Then her eyes nailed Rudi’s. An
expression of loathing and anger boiled up in them, following the spark of
recognition. “It’s the witches!” she yelled. “Fire!”
“Grab the oars,” Hanna said, her voice surprisingly calm.
Rudi complied, although he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. He dug the
blades into the water, heaving with all his strength, trying to get the tiny
craft moving. If he could just throw the gunners’ aim off, and by some miracle
they both missed, it would take them at least half a minute to reload, perhaps
longer with cold-numbed fingers. By that time, he and Hanna would be well
underway, obscured by the darkness and the flurrying snow, and the short-ranged
weapons might not get time for another shot.
None of which actually mattered, of course, because the hail
of hot metal would have shredded them both by then.
Rudi flinched at the sound of a double report from the wharf
side, which echoed across the water in a curiously flat fashion, anticipating
the agony of a dozen miniature musket balls ripping their way through his body,
but the searing pain never came. He heaved at the oars, astonished at their good
fortune.
Despite the urgency of their predicament, he was unable to
resist glancing back at the wharf, trying to gauge how long they had left before
the men reloaded, and almost froze with astonishment. Both gunners were down,
thrashing about on the snow-covered planks like landed fish. Bright blood leaked
through charred and blackened flesh, vivid against the backdrop of flurrying
white.
“Keep rowing!” Hanna snapped.
Rudi did so, opening up the distance from the dock, heedless
of the drama playing out behind them. Rauke was kneeling beside one of the
downed gunners, apparently directing the boatmen to assist her fallen
colleagues. She glanced in the fugitives’ direction and shouted something, which
perhaps fortunately was lost in the muffling snow, before returning her
attention to the wounded.
“What happened?” Rudi asked. Hanna shrugged.
“They were carrying powder flasks. I’m a pyromancer,
remember?” Rudi nodded grimly, recalling the way the oil lamps at the coaching
inn on the Altdorf road had suddenly burst into flame while they were trying to
escape the landlord who’d threatened to turn them over to the Roadwardens. It
seemed that his companion was still able to use her abilities after all.
“How did you manage that?” he asked. “I thought you were all
in?”
Hanna shrugged. “So did I,” she said, pulling the skaven’s
stone out from beneath her bodice. As Rudi had half expected, it was still
glowing faintly. “This seems to be helping me somehow.”
“Good.” Rudi hauled on the oars until he felt his back would
break with the effort. “Right now, we need all the help we can get.”
At least one of the gods must have been keeping an eye on
them, Rudi thought, because they made it across the shipping channel without
drowning or being swept out to sea. The tide was just on the turn, the water
slack, and the realisation lent him renewed vigour. Shenk would want to make use
of the surge of incoming seawater to help counteract the current of the Reik,
making the going easier as the
Reikmaiden
began her long journey. The
riverboat would be casting off any time now, just as soon as the water level in
the canals began to rise.
Despite the surge of adrenaline the thought gave him, he
began to slow down again after only a handful of minutes. Since waking around
noon the previous day, he’d fought for his life more times than he could
remember, become a fugitive again, and walked or run across what felt like half
the city. Even the unusual reserves of strength he was somehow able to call on
in times of stress weren’t limitless. He was exhausted, and hard as he tried to
force his body to do what was necessary with the clumsy oars, he misjudged his
stroke several times, doing nothing more than flick a spray of freezing water
into the boat. Each time he did it they wallowed, losing their way and the prow
of their tiny craft veered alarmingly.
“Move over.” Hanna reached out and took the oars briskly. Too
numbed to protest, Rudi acquiesced, changing places with her, so that he was now
facing forwards, towards the far bank. At least there was no chance of getting
lost in the darkness, he thought. Despite the obscuring snow, still enclosing
them in a pocket of chilling anonymity, the lights of Luydenhoek were clearly
visible in the distance.
He fought down the memory of their frantic swim for the banks
of the Reik, after Shenk had realised they were fugitives and became determined
to collect whatever reward they were worth. Then they’d only made it to safety
by luck, or so it had seemed at the time, the pitch darkness surrounding them
and the chilling water robbing them of any sense of direction. Now they were
trusting their lives to the riverboat captain again, a prospect he hardly
relished, but at least this time he’d be on guard for any treachery, he thought.
That, at least, was a lesson he’d learned well since leaving Kohlstadt. No one
could really be trusted, however benign they seemed to be.
“Can you manage?” he asked, although Hanna seemed to be
rowing the boat with no difficulty at all, the strange energy imparted by the
skaven’s stone still evidently suffusing her body. He tried not to think about
that either. Magic, he knew, always exacted a price for its use, and he hoped
his friend wouldn’t pay too dearly for the assistance she was getting.
“I’m fine,” Hanna assured him, her strokes deft and fluid,
propelling the tiny craft faster and more efficiently across the water than he
had. She grinned, with the closest thing to good humour he’d seen on her face
for some time. “I could do with the exercise. Helps warm me up.” Knowing that
one of her talents was regulating the temperature of the air around her, Rudi
doubted that, but tried to smile in response.
“I think there are some steps over there,” he said, craning
his neck to see past her shoulder. Hanna turned the boat in the direction he’d
suggested, as expertly as if she’d been on the water all her life, and made for
the jetty he’d indicated. After a moment the wooden hull grated against stone,
and he scrambled out, his feet slipping slightly on the weed-grown surface
beneath his boot soles. Hanna followed nimbly, and turned to push the boat off
again with her foot as soon as she’d gained the sanctuary of the steps. “Why did
you do that?”
“You told the boatman we were heading for Luydenhoek,” Hanna
pointed out. “Your little friend with the unbecoming hat will have had the bridge
closed again as soon as she reported in, and messages sent to every watch house
this side of the water.”
Rudi nodded. He knew enough of how the watch worked to know
that this was true. If anything, the Suiddock Caps would have been relieved at
the news that they’d stolen a boat. Closing the Draainbrug wouldn’t be popular,
and the last thing the watch needed was a large and restive crowd getting more
angry and frustrated by the minute. Time was money in Marienburg, more literally
than anywhere else in the known world, and they’d be under pressure from the
mercantile guilds to get the lifeblood of commerce flowing again as soon as
possible. “No point making it obvious where we’ve come ashore.”
“Good point,” Rudi said, suspecting he ought to feel a little
more sympathy for the boatman whose livelihood was beginning to drift slowly
upstream with the swelling tide, but unable to summon any. Someone would
probably find it and sell it back to him anyway. That was how things were in
Marienburg. The abandoned craft was moving surprisingly quickly, and only a
handful of the steps above them bore a thin coating of weeds and mud, indicating
that they were still below the high water mark.
As he turned his head to watch the drifting boat he could see
the first flush of red marking the sky beyond the rooftops of the Rijkspoort,
the easternmost ward of the city, where the mighty river entered its precincts.
The sight galvanised him: they had even less time to reach safety than he’d
feared. “We’d better get moving.”
“Right,” Hanna agreed. Cautiously, they made their way to the
top of the steps, finding a row of warehouses facing the waterfront. Even at
this hour several of them appeared to be busy, but none of the carters or
stevedores spared them so much as a glance, engrossed as they were in their own
concerns. “Which way?”
“East,” Rudi said, as decisively as he could. His only
previous trip to the candle wharf, where the
Reikmaiden
was berthed, had
been the previous afternoon to arrange passage with Shenk, but he remembered
enough about the layout of Luydenhoek to know that they were still too far to
the west. Once they got closer, with any luck, he’d be able to recognise a
landmark. He was still a skilled tracker, he reminded himself, even in an urban
environment so different from the forest he’d grown up in, and his old instincts
hadn’t let him down yet.
He led the way through the bustling streets, trying not to
worry about the way the crowds were thickening all the time, and how the thin
grey light was growing brighter. It was hard to be sure beneath the snow clouds,
but he had an uneasy feeling deep in his gut that the sun had risen already, and
that the riverboat would be under way by now. He forced the thought away
irritably. The last thing they needed was to be sapping their confidence with
unfounded speculation.