A
n hour before dawn the snow burned a deep blue. Fires burned low in the barbarian camp, untended now by men who expected to be inside walls and warm in a little space of time. Mörget dropped to his knees before the wall of Ness and spread his hands wide, for that was how the men of the East prayed.
O mother, O Death, come today for my enemies,
he beseeched silently, for no man of the East prayed aloud when another could hear.
O my mother, come for my men, too, my warriors, who I would slay myself to please you, until their blood painted this world. Come for the little people of the West, and conquer their little gods. Come for the innocent. Come for the women. Come for the children, and even the little babes.
Slake this thirst inside me with hot blood.
Or come for me, if that is my doom.
But come, and reap, and take many souls into your arms.
No one was there to ask him what he begged for. Hurlind the scold was passed out drunk in his tent. Balint the dwarf was gone, spirited away in her own tunnels by hands unseen. Mörgain was riding for Helstrow, well beyond Mörget’s reach. Mörg the Wise, Mörg the Merciful, Mörg the Great Chieftain was dead by his son’s red hand. The chieftains who remained, their reavers and their warriors, their thralls and their berserkers, did not dare approach a man communing with his
wyrd
.
Mörget was alone. No one remained to share in his glory.
Which meant it would all be his.
Everything was in readiness, and everything was planned for. The berserkers would be first and already they danced before the wall of the city, danced wildly, working their blood up, danced and sang with great ululating shrieks and shouts, with atonal, wordless chants to drive themselves mad. When the wall came down they would rush inside and slaughter indiscriminately anyone they found. After them the clans would pour through, a river of iron to wash away any defenders that remained. He would be in among them, with axe and Dawnbringer, and he would reap a great harvest.
Or so it had been planned. Yet destiny, or doom, whichever it might be, was known to laugh at men who schemed, and so it was to be that day.
The sign, the portent of what was truly to come, was a ring of steel against iron, and it was repeated not once but a hundred times even before Mörget looked up from his prayer. Behind him at the edge of the camp horses screamed and men cried out in pain. Mörget jumped to his feet and grabbed his weapons.
He was not expecting this, but still it brought a smile to his face. He hurried past surprised-looking chieftains standing outside their tents, past thralls holding the ropes that would bring down the wall of Ness. He hurried to where men held weapons in their hands, and pushed into their ranks so he could see what gift his mother had brought him.
An armored man on a horse nearly put a lance-tip through Mörget’s chest as he looked around him. Mörget was fast enough to spin out of the way and bury his axe deep in the haunch of the horse as it passed. The animal faltered and went down, and the knight on its back had to jump down into the snow.
Mörget did not recognize the armor the man wore, nor the way he braided his mustache. This was no man of Skrae. He found this fact deeply intriguing.
The knight got to his feet while Mörget waited. The barbarian could have struck his enemy down a dozen times, but he wanted to see what this new foeman would bring to bear. The knight had a long, tapering shield across his left arm, and his right hand came up with a flail, three spiked steel balls whirling over his head. If they found purchase on Mörget’s flesh, they would tear away skin and muscle and crush his bones. With an ease and a grace that came from a hundred such encounters, Mörget stepped inside the knight’s reach and thrust Dawnbringer into the air. The Ancient Blade burst with light as it fouled the chains holding those deadly orbs, clattered as they wrapped around and around Mörget’s foible.
Mörget’s axe came around and bit through the wooden shield that came up to meet it. The boards groaned and split and the steel rim of the shield twanged as it snapped away. The shield fell to pieces and the arm underneath it steamed with blood.
The knight let go of his flail—trapped and useless now—and punched Mörget hard in the face with a steel gauntlet. Mörget’s head spun around to the side and spittle launched from his lips as his entire skull rang with the impact.
He shook off the blow and brought his head back around to see the knight dancing backward, reaching for a long dagger at his waist.
“Very good,” Mörget laughed. “You’re very good,” he said, in the same moment that he flicked Dawnbringer to the side to free it of the entwined flail. The knight did not reply as he brought his knife around, the blade held diagonally across his chest to ward off Mörget’s next blow.
Mörget feinted with his axe, and the knight drove hard with his knife to parry. That left his chest open, so Mörget impaled him on Dawnbringer. The blade lit up inside the knight’s body and red light glowed from inside the dying man’s rib cage.
Mörget spun around, even as he pulled his sword free of the corpse. All around him more horses were circling, the knights on their backs lashing out left and right with morningstars and cavalry spears, cutting down thralls and warriors.
Who were these knights? From whence had they come? They were nearly as vicious and well-trained as his own warriors, and they knew how to use their horses to their advantage. They were a real threat, for once, and Mörget’s blood sang with excitement. A real battle!
Then, behind the horses, he saw a pike square advancing toward him. Each was made of a score of men, each man armed with a ten foot pole with an iron spike at its end. Five men stood shoulder-to-shoulder with no break between them, while another five walked sideways to their right and left, and a final five brought up the rear, walking backward, trusting the men in front to lead them. Simple weapons, simple tactics, but Mörget knew how dangerous pike squares could be. The length of the pikes made it impossible to get at the men directly, while they could jab outward with impunity.
Of course, the tactic assumed that when presented with such a wall of spikes, any sane warrior would retreat, knowing he was beaten. In civilized lands pike squares could drive a whole flank back, or break a main charge, or even hold their own against cavalry. But Mörget was not civilized. And he was not altogether sane.
Howling a war curse, he ran straight into the midst of the pikes. One spike lodged in his neck but he tore free of it and pushed in closer. His axe swung in a wide vertical arc that sliced through the wooden hafts of the pikes until their severed ends bounced and drummed around his feet.
Dawnbringer took the head of one pikeman, and suddenly there was a gap in the square, and just as suddenly Mörget was inside it, looking at the unsuspecting backs of the men in the rear. One of them glanced over his shoulder and dropped his weapon in terror.
The square tried to turn in on itself, but the pikes were useless in close quarters. The pikemen were as likely to stick each other as Mörget. The barbarian’s axe and sword flashed left, smashed right, came around, circled, cutting everywhere, slashing and stabbing and thrusting and lunging until twenty dead men fell against Mörget and threatened to knock him off his feet. He jumped over the falling bodies before they’d even stopped breathing and looked up to see four more pike squares coming toward him, even as the knights on horseback kept charging through the camp, slaughtering men who were still half asleep.
“Well played,” Mörget said, addressing the unseen commander of this ambush.
Yet one quick sortie of overwhelming power did not a rout make. Mörget had his own gambit to try. This assault of mixed foot and cavalry was deadly, but only on open ground. If he could get the clans inside the city wall before they were cut to pieces, he could build a defensive barricade and hold off his enemies forever with arrows.
He dashed toward the city wall just as the first limb of the sun crested the horizon, shouting, “The ropes! The ropes! Bring down the wall now!”
O mother
, he prayed,
O Mother Death you have blessed me this day!
A
s soon as Malden could stand on his own two feet, Cutbill disappeared into the shadows without so much as a parting word of advice. Perhaps, Malden thought, that suggested the guildmaster of thieves had such confidence in him that Cutbill thought he no longer needed guidance.
Or perhaps Cutbill went to make his own exit from the city, just like Velmont, while the getting was still good.
Malden clenched his hands, released them again. His fingertips burned as the blood rushed into them. Cutbill had warned him there would be pain when—
“Gaah!”
he shouted, unable to stop himself. A violent cramp had run up and down his whole left side, as feeling returned to his trunk. He felt a vein in his temple curl and spit venom like a snake, and he cried out again.
The agony was enough to drive him to his knees.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time for pain just then. His cry had drawn attention from the nearby streets. A man with a torch came hurrying around the corner, leading a half dozen curious citizens. One of the six was dressed all in red, like a priest.
If the priests caught him now, he knew better than to expect them to apologize for seizing him and threatening him with human sacrifice.
“Blast,” he muttered, looking around for a convenient shadow to hide in. But the torch-bearer was already shouting that he’d found the Lord Mayor. Malden glanced over at the wagon that had brought him this far, and the three dead bodies lying around it. He looked intently at the horse, still standing there, waiting patiently in its traces.
The horse turned its head to look back at him with impassive eyes.
Malden knew how to ride, if just barely. He’d never mounted a horse before without someone to give him a leg up, but he decided it didn’t matter now.
There was no time to get the animal unhooked from the cart, so instead he looked up, his natural instinct when being pursued to climb. He ran at a half-timbered wall that offered so many hand- and footholds it might as well have been a ladder and leapt to catch a particularly thick beam.
The drug Velmont had given him was still at work in his blood, however. His leap was more of a lopsided hop, and when his fingers latched onto the side of the house, he was barely able to cling to it without falling.
Looking back, he saw his pursuers were only seconds away. “Hold, damn you,” he grunted at his own hands. They’d never failed him before. He managed to swing one arm up and grab the ledge of a second story window. Cramps ran up both his ankles and made him gasp for breath. When the muscles there relaxed again, he swung his right leg up to get purchase on the top of the door frame.
“Lord Mayor!” someone shouted below. “Please—your people need you! We need you at the Godstone!”
“He’s slaughtered this crew,” someone else said in a hollow voice. A woman screamed. “They were Sadu’s ministers—what has he done?”
“Please,” a third voice shouted. “Think of us! Think of our safety!”
Malden didn’t have the breath to waste on a reply. Pain wracked his arms but he managed to pull himself up onto the shingles of the house’s roof. He lay there gasping for a moment, staring up at the sky, while the entreaties continued from below.
The sky was a peculiar shade of purple. He turned his head and saw orange clouds on the horizon.
No, it can’t come so soon
. But he could not deny the evidence of his senses. Dawn was about to break.
He had to get to Ryewall as quickly as possible, to lead the counterattack.
He rolled over onto his side, then painfully rose to his feet. He was halfway across the city and could barely trust his legs. What if he had a cramp in the middle of leaping from one rooftop to another?
There wasn’t anything he could do about that, though. He would have to take his chances.
Moving as quickly as he dared on feet still half numb, Malden scurried over a roof ridge and down the other side. The street beyond was blessedly narrow, and he managed to hurl himself across and roll along the shingles on the far side. Bits of wood, brittle from the cold, broke away underneath him and pattered down into the road, but he managed to get his footing. Ahead of him lay a long row of rooftops, the houses all attached to one another. He kept low as he ran from eave to eave, even as cries went up all around him.
“His blood! He demands His blood!” they shouted.
Malden scowled but kept running. There was no time to convince the people of Ness that he was worth more to them now alive than dead.
Up ahead lay a broad street—Crispfat Lane, where a dozen butchers had their shops. The gap between the rooftops was too wide to jump, even if he’d been in a condition to do so. He ran to the edge and looked down.
The snowy street was almost deserted—but not quite enough. He saw women holding candles peering into every alley, every alcove. No doubt looking for the appointed sacrifice of their god. The priests must have put out a general hue and cry to find him. The damn fools didn’t seem to understand that every able-bodied citizen of Ness was needed to repel the invaders—these women looked strong enough to hold polearms.
There was nothing for it. He would have to scramble down into the street and up the houses on the far side. If the searchers tried to stop him, he would have to fight them off. He hurried down a gutter pipe as quietly as he could, praying the dark of night would be his ally as it had so many times before.
Halfway down a searing pain burst through his stomach and his hands turned to spasmodic claws. He lost his grip as he screamed in agony and fell the last ten feet into a snowdrift. For a while he could do nothing but curl around his midsection and blink sweat out of his eyes.
The pain felt like it would never let him go. He could not move, could not even think as the agony wracked his body. It was all he could do to keep breathing. As the snow melted on his face and hands, paining him still further, he tried to force it away, tried to unclench his closed eyelids.
Eventually it worked.
When he looked up, a small crowd had gathered to peer down at him by candlelight. “Lord Mayor,” one woman said, “you’ve come to your senses. If you’ll just come along with us now. We want no trouble.”
Malden rose carefully, the pain in his stomach still making it impossible for him to stand up straight. He reached for Acidtongue’s hilt with a hand that barely obeyed his command.
It would have gotten ugly just then if Slag hadn’t come tearing down the street, screaming, “Make way! Make way or get fucking crushed, you pissants!”