Honor Among Thieves (46 page)
M
örg was no fool.
He would have heard some of the murmurs in the camp. Of late it had become open talk—how could he have not heard it? Though still the chieftains turned their faces away and fell silent when he came near, he must understand it would not always be that way. A challenge was coming.
Mörget watched his father’s tent all day, endeavoring to be no fool himself. He watched as those most loyal to the Great Chieftain found excuses to always be near the tent. Mörgain went into the tent early in the day, coming quickly as if she’d been summoned. She left again a few moments later, fury twisting her face, striking out at every man who got in her way. She did not return, but always there were berserkers and loyal chieftains standing around, warming themselves by the fire Mörg kept, drinking his mead. Even those with specific duties elsewhere—those tasked with finding more stones for the trebuchets, those who were stationed to watch the walls of the besieged city, looking for signs of new defenses—found time to come around and joke with Hurlind, or feed morsels to Mörg’s filthy hound.
And always—always—there was Torki, the Great Chieftain’s champion, standing like an oak tree before the flap of the tent. Torki with his burnt face and his massive double-bladed battle-axe. Torki did not move. He did not smile when Hurlind made jest of him. He did not drink when the mead horn was passed around.
He only stood, and waited.
“If you don’t strike soon,” Balint told Mörget, “you’ll lose your chance. Mörg’s smarter than a crow sitting on a gallows tree. He’ll find some way to convince the chieftains his way is the right way.”
“They’ve grown tired of this waiting game,” Mörget insisted. “They are ready for action.”
“They’re bored, and looking for some passing diversion,” Balint said. “If you don’t provide it, someone else will. They’ll back your throw only if it promises them some reward. Mörg can make promises, too.”
Mörget roared and grabbed her up off the pile of furs. “Shouldn’t you be building another trebuchet right now?”
“Why?” she asked as he dangled her in the air. She was no coward, he had to admit. “There aren’t enough stones for the three we have.”
He dropped the dwarf and went to sharpen his axe again, even though it was already keen enough to cut through steel.
Night came quickly, and with it snow. Huge soft flakes filled the air and collected everywhere, danced in the guttering flames of the camp’s many fires, collected in beards and on hair. The temperature dropped to the point where even barbarians wanted to be inside and away from the wind. Suddenly the berserkers and loyal chieftains weren’t crowding around Mörg’s tent so thickly anymore. Hurlind went to fetch his master’s dinner.
“This is the moment!” Balint urged. “If you keep anything in those breeches at all, you’ll do it now.”
“I don’t need your advice,” Mörget insisted, and kicked at her. She managed to roll away before he broke her in half.
Torki was still there, his face that of a frost giant, his battle-axe white with rime.
It didn’t matter. Mörget had bested the man before. He threw his own axe down, unbuckled his sword belt and dropped it as well. Then he stepped out into the storm.
Torki didn’t move until Mörget was within striking range. Then he only shifted on his feet and opened his mouth to speak. “The Great Chieftain is busy,” he said.
“I have a right to speak with him at any time,” Mörget insisted.
“Not even chieftains may bother their leader when he takes his meals,” Torki said.
“But sons may,” Mörget said. “Look at me. I am unarmed.” He threw open his furs to show that he carried nothing more deadly then a belt knife. Then he grabbed for the flap of Mörg’s tent and tried to step inside.
The flat of Torki’s axe caught him in the ribs and sent him sprawling. “For my next blow, I use the edge,” the champion said. And then he went back to standing still as a stone, waiting for Mörget to try again.
“A son has rights to his father’s house!” Mörget shrieked. And then he threw himself at the champion.
Torki had not attained his post for being slow, or for flinching from combat. The battle-axe came up faster than Mörget had expected and swung for his neck. Mörget dodged to the side even as Torki started to recover and brace himself for another blow.
An axe that big, that heavy, could cut a man in half—even a man as thick and sinewy as Mörget. It was a slow weapon, though, and its momentum was not easily checked. Mörget let Torki start his second stroke—then moved slightly to his left and punched Torki in the nose as hard as he was able.
Blood spurted down the champion’s face. Torki barely flinched. Barely, but enough. Mörget ducked low and got his shoulder into the champion’s armpit. He brought his fists together and hammered downward with them on Torki’s hand where it held the axe. The bones there cracked audibly and the axe fell into the snow. Still Torki didn’t cry out.
After that it became a wrestling match, and Mörget had been winning those since he was six years old. Torki tried to grab Mörget’s belt, perhaps intending to throw him to the ground, but Mörget spun around him and threw an arm around the champion’s neck.
A crowd had begun to gather—made of equal parts of Mörg’s reavers and Mörget’s own loyal chieftains. None of them rushed to Torki’s defense. They only stood there in the blowing snow, watching with wide eyes. Mörget studied the crowd, looking for Mörgain, but didn’t find her.
Good. She could ruin everything with a word or a single blow. He hoped she was far, far away.
Torki fought valiantly as Mörget squeezed down on his windpipe. The champion bashed and scratched at Mörget’s flesh, but Mörget could take a little pain and blood. Little by little he felt Torki’s life draining away as the champion struggled for air that wouldn’t come.
Torki fought for long minutes, his face purple, the veins on his neck and shoulders standing out and then popping one by one. Mörget squeezed ever harder, until he heard vertebrae crack inside the champion’s neck. Only then did he let go.
Panting a little, sweating under his fur cloak, he made eye contact with as many men in the crowd as he dared. He challenged them all to step forward, but none did. Then he picked up the fallen battle-axe and stormed inside the tent.
Inside, Mörg sat naked on his furs, feeding morsels to the pathetic dog. When the Great Chieftain looked up and saw Mörget standing there, he patted the dog’s back and told it to run off. Looking confused, the animal darted between Mörget’s legs and out into the snow.
“Look me in the eye,” Mörget said.
Mörg yawned and stretched his arms over his head. Had he been sleeping all day? He looked utterly unconcerned for a man who was about to die.
“The clans have spoken,” Mörget told him.
Mörg simply nodded. He poured himself a horn of mead and drank deep.
How many times had he dreamed of this moment? As a child, growing up in this man’s shadow, he’d envisioned it a million times. As he grew into manhood he’d realized how difficult it could be—how wily an opponent Mörg was. As a chieftain he had given it true and serious thought. He had planned it out thoroughly. Seen it from all angles. He had never doubted for a second that this appointment would come. That he would be the one to take his father’s life.
In those daydreams, Mörg had always pleaded for mercy. He had begged to be exiled, which was the worst fate a warrior of the clans could imagine. Or sometimes he had looked on his son with approval, knowing this was just. Rarely, in his imaginings, Mörg would pause to impart some secret wisdom. An answer to a question Mörget could only ask himself in dreams:
Where does my rage end? What is its purpose?
Mörget hesitated. The axe grew heavy in his hands. He could feel events conspiring around him, could feel the gathered clans outside drawing a collective breath. He stalled for time.
“Mörgain came in here earlier. She did not like what you told her.”
Mörg spoke for the first time. “I told her I loved her.”
Mörget’s blood hissed in his veins.
Love?
Love was not something a Great Chieftain expressed to his chieftains—or to his children. It was what he spoke of to his thrall concubines. Perhaps to his horse.
“I told her I was proud of her, and that I loved her.” Mörg sighed. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to say, though I knew she would take it hard. And she did. But now, when it’s come to this—I can think only of myself. Enough! Who else is there that I should think of now? And soon, I will cease thinking even of my own petty sufferings. Death will take away all my concerns. It will leave me at peace, something I’ve always wished for. It’s odd, I never considered that before. So many years searching for a calm place in the storm of life. And here, now, I find it.”
“What—of me?” Mörget asked. He could not frame the words properly.
“Make sense, boy.”
Mörget scowled and grunted and thumped himself hard on the chest. “You had words for her. Do you have any for me?”
Mörg looked up at him then, with eyes as deep as oceans. There was nothing there but wisdom, not anymore. Mörg the Wise, they called him. For the first time in his life Mörget thought he understood what that meant. The torment of it. What horrors had Mörg seen in his time? Bad enough to watch a thousand men die. But understanding it—understanding everything. What greater curse could there be?
“You have a
wyrd
on you, boy.”
The word could mean many things. It could mean destiny, or it could mean doom. In the language of the barbarians there was very little distance between those concepts. It meant a driving fate, a power that possessed a man and made him do things others would go white to even imagine. Things that would destroy him—and make his name glorious.
“You think I don’t know that?” Mörget asked.
“You want wisdom now? From me? Why do I owe you that? Don’t answer. I know the answer. You’ll say that you are my son.” Mörg nodded to himself. “And you’ll be right. Very well.”
Mörget took a step closer. He did not put the axe down.
“Here: take this message, as you please, and use it as you see fit. Mörget Mountainslayer, you will not be able to stop yourself. You are too weak to defeat your own strength. Someone else must stop you, and you should hope they do it soon.”
Mörget screamed in rage. “You give me riddles, like a scold!”
“Some truths,” Mörg said, “cannot be made clear. They must be lived to make sense. Now.”
“What?” Mörget demanded.
“Do it now. Before you lose the stomach for it. Now, while you hate me! I could not bear you to love me when you do this thing!”
Red light burst behind Mörget’s eyes as the axe came down. And down again. And again. He did not swing it like a blade, but dropped it like a hammer, over and over, sometimes the edge catching on flesh, sometimes the flat smashing against bone.
When it was done the red ruin on Mörg’s furs was not a man at all, but raw meat.
Mörget plunged his hands into the gore and used his father’s blood to paint his face. Berserkers painted half their face red, because they were mad only half the time. Mörget covered his shaved scalp, the back of his neck, plugged his ears with blood. It still was not enough.
Outside the tent the cold air could not touch him. The snow turned to steam when it tried to land on his face or hands.
He was aware of people all around him, of gasping mouths and staring eyes, but they seemed unconnected to him. They did not seem to matter. He thought of something. “The dog,” he said. His father had loved that dog. The dog had loved Mörg back. Was that what Mörg wanted from his children? He would not let Mörg have that, not even in death. “Find the dog. Bring me its skin, so I may wear it around my neck, and every man know what I’ve done!”
If anyone responded he did not hear them.
He went back to his own tent, blind to the whole world, knowing nothing but fury.
He threw himself upon his furs and waited for his rage to cool. When he could finally talk again without shouting, he turned to look at Balint.
“At dawn you will do your worst. If even my father’s blood cannot cool my brow, I will have this city for consolation. Whatever devious scheme your black heart can concoct, I will make it happen.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” she told him, her voice low and husky. “You just made me happier than a nine-month’s pregnant girl on her wedding day.”
T
he workshop stank of brimstone and urine, enough to make Malden’s eyes water. It was hot inside, despite the snow that lay six inches thick on every surface outside the windows. Slag had his workers skimming orange crystals off the top of reeking vats or burning wood for charcoal, night and day. Other workers sat at narrow benches, grinding together the three necessary substances, or mixing it together with their fingers until it formed grains the size of corn.
“Finer! Grind it finer than this, you fucker,” Slag said, sifting black pebbles through his fingers. The apothecary’s apprentice he had admonished ducked his head and bent over his mortar and pestle again. “Malden, it must be ground finer. I need some kind of mill, maybe an upright wheel to crush the substance. And some kind of multiple-sieve refining sleeve to break it up smaller. I’m also going to need some kind of carriage for the device. I need iron, or better yet—bronze. As much as you can get me.”
Malden shrugged. “There’s a bronze statue of Juring Tarness in the Golden Slope. I doubt he’ll mind much if we melt it down.” He had no idea what Slag was after, really. The dwarf had tried to explain the nature of his secret project many times—apparently it was some kind of huge siege engine, far more powerful than a ballista, but operating on completely different principles. There was fire involved, and some kind of projectile, but beyond that it made very little sense to Malden. He assumed the dwarf knew what he was doing.
He had other things on his mind. He doubted that Slag cared much about what happened outside of his workshop—dwarves were notorious for their obsessions when they had a project to work on. Still, Malden needed to talk to someone about this, and Cythera was . . . no longer available. “Six cows, slaughtered and left to rot before the Godstone. Someone must have been hiding them when I did my last census of foodstocks. Do you know how much soup we could have made of those animals?” he asked. “Now they’re frozen to the cobbles so solidly no one can shift them, not even with pry bars.”
Slag shrugged. “Humans and religion. Never figured that one out myself, lad. Seems like you lot need somebody to tell you what to do. If there isn’t an overlord looming over your shoulder all the time, you invent one.”
“The barbarians only sent one stone over the wall today, so far,” Malden said. “The people seem to think these sacrifices are having an actual effect.”
Slag gave him a dubious look. “You ought to nip that in the damned bud,” he said. “They’ll start thinking soon that a human sacrifice will stop the attacks altogether. Or maybe they’ll try something far worse.”
“Worse than slaying each other for their blood?” Malden asked.
“Aye. Maybe they’ll think dwarf blood will work even better, since it’s a much rarer commodity. You! Don’t just dip your ladle in that piss! Skim the surface, skim, like this!” He made gentle sweeping motions with his hands. “All we want is the crusty bits from the top.”
Malden put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder and squeezed. Slag winced out from under his grasp. “You—mind that brimstone! The stuff burns if you get it too close to the fire, you clumsy fucker!”
Malden took his leave without a farewell. Outside, the cold air felt good on his face. It smelled better than the air inside the workshop as well. Malden, who had grown up in a city without any kind of public sanitation, where the only known method for dealing with waste was dumping it in the river, had never imagined that Ness could smell good before.
Ness. His city. Imperiled and fraught with confusion it might be, yet he still loved the place more than he hated it. He truly wanted to save it from destruction. If he could only figure out how. So far he’d just found ways to delay the inevitable. He strained his mind for answers, for solutions. His thoughts grew less focused as he walked. Perhaps he was just tired, having slept very little in weeks. Perhaps he was just—
His reverie came to an abrupt halt when he heard a cry from the top of the wall. “Archers! Archers to your posts!”
That couldn’t be good. He scampered up the side of a tavern that abutted the nearest stretch of wall and jumped over the battlements. Men and women were running everywhere, gathering up quivers and bows. No one stopped to tell him what was happening. A hoarding stood nearby, a wooden gallery built over the edge of the wall from which archers could fire without being exposed themselves. Malden ducked inside and peered out through the firing slit.
Down below, the barbarian camp was a sea of movement and hurry. A wave of fur-clad warriors was headed right for the wall, and they were carrying ladders. Clearly they intended to scale the wall and fight their way inside. This is it, Malden thought. This was the moment he’d been dreading, because he knew that in a direct confrontation with the barbarians he could not win.
That didn’t mean he was allowed to give up. Croy had taught him that.
“Forks!” he called. He grabbed the man nearest to him—a thief who was so nervous he couldn’t seem to string his bow. “Get every able-bodied man up here you can, and have them bring forks.”
The thief looked confused. “What kind of forks?”
“It doesn’t matter! Pitchforks, turning forks, any bit of wood with a hook on the end, anything. Go! And send word I need Velmont.”
Rus Galenius, in his
Manual of Fortifications
, described scaling ladders in exquisite detail—the best wood for their construction, the proper time and manner of their use, the number of men who should be on one at any given time. The counterstrategy for dealing with ladders was so ancient and so simple the author seemed to disdain its mention, giving it a single sentence. Malden had actually been paying attention the day Cutbill read him that passage, however.
The first ladder touched the wall not a hundred feet from where Malden stood, and berserkers started scrambling up the rungs. “You,” Malden said, pointing at a group of female archers in the next hoarding over. “Don’t let them reach the top!”
Bows flexed and arrows shot downward at flat angles. The berserkers were easy targets, unable to move out of the way as the archers poured shafts into them. Soon the men near the top of the ladder looked like pincushions for all the arrows sticking out of their arms and backs. Unable to feel pain, they kept climbing until they died and fell away.
At the base of the ladder a hundred more men waited their turn.
An old man carrying a pitchfork came up to Malden and saluted. It took Malden a second to remember how to salute back. “Thank the Bloodgod you’re here,” Malden said. “Do you see that ladder, where its end sticks up over the wall?”
The oldster nodded and gave Malden a wicked grin. He hefted his fork and made toward the ladder.
“Wait,” Malden said. “Not quite yet.” He waited until the topmost berserker on the ladder had nearly crested the wall. Below him the ladder bowed with the weight of half a dozen more. “Now,” Malden said.
The old man caught the top rung of the ladder with the tines of his fork and heaved. The ladder weighed too much for him, so Malden grabbed the end of the fork and lent the strength of his own back to the effort.
The ladder twisted and bent and then fell backward. Some of the men clinging to it jumped free. Some lacked the presence of mind to do so. Bodies made horrible crunching noises when they struck the frozen ground below. The ladder shattered as it spun away from the wall.
“Good,” Malden said. “Like that! Every time. Wait until they’re nearly at the top, so you get as many of them as possible. But don’t wait so long that even one of them gets over the side.” He turned to look around him. “Where is Velmont?” he demanded.
His Helstrovian lieutenant appeared a moment later. “I came as fast as I could,” he pleaded.
Malden grabbed his forearms and dragged him out of the hoarding, making room for more archers to crowd inside. “Something’s changed,” he said. “I don’t know what, but it’s not good. Last night they were still intent on waiting us out—letting us starve in here, until we begged them to come in and feed us. Now they’ve lost their patience. I don’t know why. But this is what we’ve been dreading. A real attack! Get every single archer you can up here. Get me watchers at every tower along the wall, get me reports—I need to know if the attack is just in this one place or if they’re everywhere. Go! Quickly!”
Velmont dashed off to do Malden’s bidding. Malden needed that information. And yet, in the pit of his heart, he already knew what Velmont would report.
This was the moment Ness would be lost. All the planning he’d done, all the hard work, had been designed around one simple principle: that the besiegers would wait him out. Clearly that belief had been founded on the wrong principles. There would not be enough archers, nor enough old men with pitchforks, if the barbarians were serious about scaling the wall. And in his experience, he’d never known Mörget’s people to be less than serious about anything.