Honor Among Thieves (40 page)

Chapter Eighty-One

N
orth of Helstrow, Croy took to the road.

It was risky, but it meant they covered far more ground every day. The barbarians seemed wholly uninterested in the land beyond the royal fortress. He had not seen any sign of patrols or even pickets for days. For that matter, he hadn’t seen any sign of life at all. The farmland that passed by on either side of the road was frozen solid, and if there were peasants still living in that cold region, they wisely stayed indoors. He was a bit worried by the fact that he hadn’t seen a smoking chimney for some time, but he assumed the locals were just being careful.

He should have followed their example.

Bethane had fallen asleep against his back, and he was paying more attention to making sure she didn’t fall off the horse than to the road. He was vaguely aware they were about to enter a copse of trees that narrowed the road on either side, but gave it little thought—until he heard someone cough.

He pulled up sharply on the reins. His horse bridled but dragged to a stop, just as Croy heard a taut rope being cut with a twang. A heavy log shot down from the treetops, swinging on the end of a line so it arced directly across the road at the height of Croy’s chest. Had he not stopped in time, it would have knocked him clear off the horse and left him sprawling and broken in the road.

Instead it collided with the rearing horse’s neck. Croy heard bones shatter and the horse scream, its hot breath lancing upward in the air. Beneath him he felt the animal falter and begin to collapse.

Ghostcutter jumped into his hand as he leapt to the ground, dancing backward to avoid the falling horse. Bethane, wakened by the horse’s pitiful cry, slid down and was nearly crushed by the dying animal. Croy had no time to get her clear as three monstrous shapes came rushing toward him out of the trees.

They were bundled so heavily in furs he could not get a sense of how big they really were or if they were even men. They wielded hatchets and hay forks with wickedly sharpened tines. One jabbed at him before he was fully ready, and he felt metal pierce his flesh.

Perhaps thinking they had him, the other two men moved in for the kill. Croy swung wildly with Ghostcutter and sheared through the haft of a fork. A hatchet came swinging down toward his face but he kicked out and caught its owner in the chest, knocking him back and off his feet.

The bloody fork swung low for another attack and Croy smashed it aside with the flat of his blade. His side sang with agony as he twisted at the waist to block another blow, but he ignored the pain and swung hard for the opponent who had wounded him. Ghostcutter bit deep through layers of fur until it found flesh and laid open the veins of the man’s neck.

The man let out a gurgling scream and dropped to his knees. Perhaps realizing that Croy was not such easy prey as they’d believed, the other two turned and ran for the trees.

Croy was breathing heavily as he stepped back toward the horse, intent on making sure Bethane was all right. His heart raced when he saw she was not there.

Casting about wildly, he saw a fourth man running away across an open field. Bethane was over the man’s shoulder, kicking and punching at him. He probably couldn’t even feel the blows through all that padding.

Croy gave chase but the kidnapper had a long lead on him, and the wound in his side slowed him so that he couldn’t sprint. He followed as best he could, desperately trying to keep his quarry in sight.

He nearly lost them—but then heard Bethane scream his name, and he raced toward the sound. The kidnapper had hurried toward a leafless orchard a quarter mile away. Croy pressed one hand against his side and ran into the trees. It could easily have been another trap, but he didn’t care. He would fight his way through whatever they sent him, or die in the attempt. He could not let them have the queen.

In the middle of the orchard stood a humble croft, a low house with a thatched roof that descended to within a foot of the ground. The entrance was more hatch than door. Croy found it locked, but he bashed in the latch with Ghostcutter’s pommel, threw open its panels and stumbled inside.

He nearly tripped and broke his leg. The house was mostly dug out of the ground and was accessed by a ladder leading down to a muddy floor. He had not expected that—he’d assumed the floor inside would be level with the ground outside—and he fell into the dugout room, the floor rushing up to meet his face. He managed to twist to the side—he felt his wound open wide as he did so—and crash down into a bin of moldering apples.

There were four people in the room. One was Bethane. Two others were holding her down while she struggled. The fourth held a rusty knife.

Croy rolled out of the bin and drove Ghostcutter straight into the heart of the knife-wielder. Before the others could react, he cut them down, groaning in pain as the wound in his side oozed blood. When they were all dead, he slumped down on the floor and could do nothing but listen to Bethane scream for a long time.

Eventually she stopped. Eventually she came over and lifted his cloak away. His side was clotted with blood. She cleaned his wound and bandaged it. He thanked her as best he could. He could not stand up.

Bethane went over to one of her kidnappers and started pulling furs away from the dead man’s face. Perhaps she wished to know if her attackers had been barbarians or men of Skrae. Croy didn’t have the strength to stop her.

“By the blessed hem of the Lady’s green robe,” the queen said. Croy looked over and saw the face of the thing he’d killed. It belonged to a boy. A child, not much older than Bethane herself. He’d slaughtered a child.

Perhaps it was his wound that kept him from feeling the guilt that honor demanded. He closed his eyes and tried to just breathe. His wound was deep and he feared it might have touched his vitals.

“But what could they have wanted from us?” Bethane asked. “They didn’t ask us for money. I would gladly have given them coin for safe passage.”

Croy didn’t answer. He was afraid he knew, but he couldn’t say it aloud.

It was only when Bethane approached a soup pot on the hearth that he found his voice again. He knew she was hungry—they’d eaten little but mushrooms and tree bark tea for days. The soup smelled divine, hearty and rich and well-spiced. It smelled of good fresh meat.

“Don’t,” he managed to say. “Don’t even look in that pot.”

Did she understand? He couldn’t tell. If he’d had the strength, he’d have made up some story about witch’s cauldrons and the foolish people who tasted their contents. Or about northern peasants being accustomed to a diet that would be too crude for a royal stomach to digest.

“Don’t look,” he said, which was all he could muster.

She stepped back from the pot and came to curl up by his side.

Chapter Eighty-Two

“N
ock! Draw! Fire!” Herwig the madam shouted, beating time against her leg with a fan. A row of women loosed their bows, and their long arrows flashed through the air. Most of them at least hit the archery butts at the far side of the square—they’d been practicing nonstop since Malden first recruited them as archers, and Herwig had proved a merciless drill instructor. “Nock!” she called, and the women, all of them harlots from the House of Sighs, lifted arrows to their bows, rested them against their thumbs as they’d been taught. “Draw!” Herwig shouted, and her charges did as they were told, though one very young woman at the end of the row managed to drop her arrow before she’d managed to draw fully. The others laughed at her. Herwig came storming down the row, cold fury in her eyes.

“Is there a problem, Guennie?” she demanded.

“It’s just—I bumped my breast on the draw and it—startled me,” the young whore said, looking down at her feet.

“In the Old Empire they tell stories still of the female warriors of Thune,” Herwig said, raising her nose in the air. “They were fiercer than the men by far. When they encountered this very same problem, they thrust torches to their bosoms to burn off their own left breasts. That,” Herwig said, “made it much easier to draw. Perhaps you’d like to do the same?”

“No, milady,” Guennie said, her eyes very wide.

“Then prove to me you don’t need to,” Herwig said. “Pick up that crooked little thing you call an arrow and draw!”

Slag laughed as the whore archer bent to do as she was told and Herwig rapped her across the neck with her fan. Malden just shook his head.

“Cutbill was right. We should have been doing this weeks ago.” He’d seen real improvement in the last few days, but the female archers were hardly ready—Herwig’s company of archers were the best of the lot. Elody’s women were barely able to string a bow yet. The thieves of the guild more often than not failed to show up for practice at all, though Velmont threatened them with dire punishment.

The thieves and the whores were all Malden had, though. Of the honest population of Ness, by far the great majority of the men were old and infirm or too young to even lift a bow. The honest women were needed elsewhere.

“Will they be ready, when we need them?” Malden asked, mostly to himself.

The dwarf laughed again. “They’ll not be sharpshooters, that’s for fucking sure. But with all those barbarians out there, they’re like to hit one or two if only by mistake,” he pointed out. “Anyone can hit a target as big as an army.”

“Come on,” Malden said. “We’re not helping here—we’re probably just making them nervous so they don’t shoot as straight. Let’s go see how the other work is progressing.”

Malden and Slag hurried north to see to the reinforcement of the Reeve’s Gate. Under Slag’s instructions, the women of Ness used cranes and winches to stack pompions—wicker baskets full of rocks—against the gate, while others hammered a scaffolding of wooden beams together to hold the stacks in place. There was not enough iron available to properly bolster the scaffolding, but a one-legged blacksmith oversaw the construction of a massive bracket that would help a little.

“It won’t be as strong as the wall around it,” Slag said, inspecting the work, “but I’d like to see the battering ram that could get through that.” He seemed very pleased with himself.

A lot of people did that day. For all their fear of Herwig, the archers had been rosy-cheeked and ready at the crack of dawn to get to work. The crews at the gates joked among themselves and sang songs while they toiled.

Everywhere the people of Ness were, for once, happy and productive. Maybe just having something to do was better than huddling in their houses waiting for death to come. Maybe it just helped they couldn’t see over the city wall.

“You’d think the barbarians weren’t out there,” Malden said. He had seen over the wall. He’d seen plenty, and now he couldn’t seem to forget it. Every time he closed his eyes he remembered what he’d seen from the top of Castle Hill. The barbarians had encircled the city and their tents stretched out across the fields as far as the eye could see. Berserkers danced endlessly on the banks of the Skrait, while Mörgain and her skull-faced crew rode circles around and around the circumference of Ness, daring each other to come closer and closer to the wall.

So far not a shot had been fired from either side. The barbarians had made no attempt to attack, nor even communicate with the defenders inside the city. Malden knew that would not last. There were very dark days to come.

Yet for the moment Ness was ruled by good cheer. Even the ceaseless flood of petitions and demands on his time as Lord Mayor had slowed to a trickle. The guildmasters of the mercers and the cordwainers both sent him messages of support and confidence. The beggars of the city declared a holiday and threw him an impromptu, if slightly odorous, parade.

“Don’t they understand that we’re all probably going to die, or at the least be enslaved, within the week?”

“Ah, lad, you’re overestimating the faculties of human fucking reason,” Slag told him. “That’s still seven days away. Right now they’re safe and reasonably well fed. And they’re learning something dwarves have always known—if you don’t have time to sit around doing nothing, you don’t have time to fucking complain.”

It was true. There was so much to be done that Malden had found employment for every idle hand. Wooden hoardings had to be built at strategic locations atop the wall, then covered in hides and wetted down so the barbarians couldn’t set them on fire. An enormous arsenal of weapons had to be cleaned, sharpened, and rubbed with animal fat to keep off rust. Arrows by the barrelful had to be carved, straightened, fletched, and headed. Everyone who could stand on two legs and fight with at least one arm had to be trained and made ready.

There had been a time, he thought, when even the prospect of hard work or—Bloodgod forbid—sacrifice was enough to start a riot in Ness. Now the entire city was energized with the effort of the countersiege.

“They’re united for the cause,” Slag said finally. “They’re working toward their own buggering salvation, and they know it. Show a little civic spirit yourself, you dumb bastard!” Slag slapped Malden on the forearm and laughed uproariously.

It seemed the dwarf shared the people’s spirit of camaraderie against the common enemy.

“I just wish any of it felt like enough,” Malden admitted. “Most of this will make no difference. The barbarians know how to fight against archers on a city wall. They didn’t batter down the gates of Redweir—we still don’t know how they breached the wall there, but they didn’t go in through a gate. At Helstrow simple trickery and momentum saw them through. If only I had some secret weapon, some power uncheckable to draw on . . .” He thought of Coruth and how she was training Cythera to be a witch. Magic would come in very useful right about then, but he knew better than to count upon their arcane assistance. History books were stuffed full of examples of lords who’d relied upon witches and sorcerers, and paid for it when magic proved more fickle than iron.

“Lad,” Slag said.

“Hmm?” Malden had been lost in his thought.

“Lad, come over here,” the dwarf whispered. He led Malden around a corner into the shadow of a mews. “Lad—maybe I can give you just that.”

The thief felt like he’d been doused in cold water. “Give me . . . what?” he asked carefully.

“A power fucking uncheckable.” The dwarf’s eyes blazed in the darkness. “It won’t be easy. Or cheap.”

“You have my full attention,” Malden promised.

“You remember that book I found in the Vincularium?”

“Not really,” Malden confessed.

Slag shook his head. “All right, all right. You remember how Balint managed to bring the place down?”

“Vividly.”

Slag nodded. “I’m going to need a workshop, somewhere in the Smoke will do, some place private. This is not something we can let anybody talk about. No-fucking-body talks. And I won’t make you any promises it’ll work.”

“What do you need?” Malden asked.

“Well, now, let me see . . . charcoal, for a start, as much as you can get. As much stale urine, too.”

Malden grimaced.

“Don’t look at me like that. Fullers use piss all the time. It’s part of how they make felt. There’ll be barrels of it in every woolery shop in town. And we can start collecting it from the citizenry, too, though we’ll need a good cover story for that. Then there’s the last ingredient I need, and it’ll be hard to come by—brimstone.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve taken up sorcery and need to conjure demons. Though if you do tell me that, I’ll ask you how many demons you had in mind and when we can expect their aid.”

“Maybe something better than that, lad. Just—trust me. I’ll also need workers. Alchemists, apothecaries. I’ll take fucking tanners if they don’t stink too much. Bakers and millers would be good. Anybody who can grind and mix ingredients. I’ll need all manner of equipment. Best I make a list and you have Velmont fill it. Mostly, though, I need time. This is untested stuff. Purely experimental.”

“Time is the one thing I’m short on,” Malden said, “but you’ll have as much as I can spare you, I promise.”

“It’s going to be dangerous, too. I’m likely to burn myself to a cinder working with this stuff. If that happens—promise me one thing.”

“Of course,” Malden said.

“You’ll give me the biggest damned funeral this city ever saw. No expense spared. But you’ll keep the coffin closed. If this goes up in my face, what’s left of me won’t be pretty.”

“That’s a hopeful thought.”

Slag laughed again. Malden had never heard a dwarf laugh so often. “Optimistic to a fucking fault, that’s me. All part of that damned civic spirit, eh?”