The White Towers (37 page)

Her eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to put down his compliment, when he suddenly swung away and she realised they were passing beneath the massive boughs of The Hanging Oak.

Trista looked up. The ancient oak creaked, massive boughs shifting. The upper reaches were lined with snow, giving the tree a slightly jolly look. From a distance. Which was massively at odds with the purpose it was now used for, by the law-makers of Zanne.

“I wonder how many people have died here?” she said, and glanced at the floor, as if expecting to see blood seeping up and out from the roots; as if the great oak had spent the last hundred years absorbing the fluids of its victims as they swung, either strangling or with broken necks, and was now willing to regurgitate that stored-up life-force for her visual entertainment…

“Fucking lots,” said Narnok, rounding on her. He pointed with his axe. “We had a garrison headquarters over yonder. Every day we’d look out and take bets on whether it’d be a neck-snapper or a slow strangulation. Ahh, the fun we had watching bad criminals die.”

“How could you be sure they were all criminals?”

Narnok shrugged. “Well, you had to trust in the judges, didn’t you? I’m sure they got it right. Most of the time.”

“How fucking incredibly unfair,” snapped Trista. “What about all the times they got it wrong?”

“Tough luck?” shrugged Narnok.

“Yeah, tell that to the wives and the children.”

“Oh, we saw a good few women hang as well,” said Narnok, grinning. “Not so many children, though.”

“Well that makes it completely all right,” said Trista.

“Equal rights for all, that’s what I always subscribe to,” said Narnok gruffly.

They moved again through the shadows, boots crunching snow. They left the Hanging Square behind, and stopped in a narrow alley between two four-storey white stone buildings with arches high overhead, and fancy carvings of gargoyles, long tongues curled out, pointed teeth promising pain.

“It’s up this way,” said Faltor Gan, “but my scouts have reported a lot more elf rat activity. We’d better be careful. We’ve had it lucky so far.”

The warriors readied weapons, or readied them
more,
and they padded down the narrow alleyway. Now they could smell smoke, and as they reached the end of the alley they could see another tree burning.

“The Red Thumbs have gone to work again,” said Faltor.

“Under your instruction?” enquired Narnok.

“Aye. We have several hundred throughout Zanne; or we
did
have. I do not know how many survive, but we learned pretty fast that burning the blackened, twisted trees hurt the damn elf rats a whole lot.”

“Does it kill them?”

“Horribly,” said Faltor Gan, with a grin. “Only problem is, the trees don’t burn easy when they turn. You need an awful lot of lantern oil to get one started. Unfortunately, by that point you’ve usually been discovered.”

“How do they die, when you burn the trees to which they’re… connected?”

“They catch fire, from the inside out. Die writhing.”

“Isn’t it quicker just to cut their damn heads off?” snapped Narnok.

“Well at the moment, they’re proving themselves to be quite… formidable,” said Faltor, quietly. He smiled. “We must forge ahead. Our city, indeed, our
Vagandrak
won’t save itself.”

“And there’s me thinking all you Red Thumb thieving, lying, back-stabbing, scumbag, horse-shit bastards were just in it for the money, and the whore sex.” Narnok’s single mad eye was challenging.

“Not at all,” said Randaman, coming up fast from behind and slapping Narnok on the back. It did little to rock the big axeman. It was like slapping a bull. “But we
need
equilibrium. These elf rats are messing everything up. There’s no point bloody
killing everybody;
if everybody is
dead,
or twisting into horrible deformed tree creature things like the elf rats themselves, being taken over by some toxic tree plague, then, well, there’s no rich people left, is there? So who do we rob?”

“You could simply loot the houses of the dead and diseased,” said Narnok, voice and eyes cold.

“Ha! Where’s the fun in that?”

There were several burning trees, but no sign of elf rats. The survivors of the museum battle ran across a wide road, heading into a maze of dark alleys that led, weaving, in a northerly direction towards Zanne’s high outer walls.

The condition of the buildings got worse and worse the further they moved away from the southern and central quarters of Zanne, and into the Factory Quarter. Here, the streets were narrower, with hundreds of buildings on shallow foundations and leaning gradually in one direction or another. Many had blackened or stained exteriors, from the furnaces, with oils and great machines and chemicals used in some of the larger factories, tanneries and slaughter houses. Everywhere, windows were smashed or boarded up. Some buildings had been daubed with slogans, with several quite offensive towards King Yoon. He was not exactly what you could call a
People’s King.

They passed various huge walls and windowless buildings, vast factories of various purposes, everything from forging armour and weapons for the king’s armies to making smocks and cloaks and boots for peasants and noblemen. The grime and lack of pride in the Factory Quarter was self evident; even from before the elf rats had plagued and plundered the area.

The group moved, stealthy and slow, through a maze of narrow corridors, stepping carefully over dead rats and litter, and the occasional dead body. Faltor Gan gestured with his right hand,
up ahead,
but did not speak. The rest followed, weapons gleaming in the gloom, until they came to a massive rectangular block which could only be identified as a factory because of one huge chimney stack, to the rear, which rose above the city like a dark spear.

Faltor stopped by a thick iron door, and looked carefully around. Then he gave a complicated series of taps, and the portal opened with surprising smoothness and silence, on oiled hinges, and the Iron Wolves and the Red Thumbs entered in single file, Mola muttering calming words to his dogs, who were growling with menace, hackles raised and fangs bared, in a perpetual mask of hatred and threat.

Trista found herself channelled into a series of long, narrow corridors, and then out into a vast dark space where a cool breeze soothed her and a smell of fish oil and mud invaded her nostrils. Massive, towering machines surrounded her, exuding cold and the oil stench. All around were stacks of metal slabs, and bins filled with screws and bolts, shavings and irregularly shaped off-cuts of iron. There were huge tubs filled with black oil, rancid and stinking, and the ground was uneven and littered with more metal debris. They passed long workbenches filled with tools, hammers and files, and intricate looking devices for threading nuts and bolts. All the hammers had black handles, the wood ingrained with dark oil. Trista found the whole place utterly desolating, the antithesis of the large ballrooms and gala functions where she felt she really belonged; the sort of place to meet newly married couples, and slit their throats afterwards whilst they slept.

The factory was a grim place and, Narnok imagined, not much more fun than the Breakneck Prison, which awaited if you didn’t work here and couldn’t pay your taxes. Damned if you did, damned if you didn’t. Narnok gave a nasty grin. How he loved the way the world worked.

Suddenly, the corridors of machines opened into a large central space. Lounging around the outsides were perhaps fifty large men, some still wearing their prison overalls. Many had shaved heads, some bushy beards, all had the piercing looks of men you did not fuck with. Narnok stopped dead, eyes sweeping the group, searching out old enemies. He’d decided, in this situation, if there was going to be any trouble he was going to instigate it; chop off a few heads, nip the problem in the bud, so to speak. Many men met his one-eyed stare, unperturbed by the snarls and the heavily scarred face from a torturer’s wet dream. Some turned away. Thankfully, there were none Narnok knew – or at least, none he remembered – and Trista put her hand on his arm and made a soothing sound. “Calm down, Narnok.”

“I just ain’t a fan of this crowd. I’m a soldier, is all. Not a prison bird.”

“Soldiers end up in prison as well, Narn,” she said, not unkindly.

“Well, I don’t know any.”

“What about Black Jake? He cut his wife’s throat.”

“All right, I’ll give you Black Jake. But he was a bastard through and through.”

“And what about Rebecca the Whore? She started off in the bloody King’s Guard, Narnok. Ended up infecting various married high ranking officers; got herself locked away for crimes against the military High Command.”

“Yes yes, I’ll give you Rebecca the Whore as well…”

“And there was Maggot Boy Memm, who…”

“
You’ve made your point
,” snapped Narnok, and coughed, watching Faltor Gan move to three of the large men – presumably, those in charge of this happy little bunch – and shake hands, then share an embrace, as between brothers who loved one another.

The Iron Wolves stepped forward, Narnok, then Trista, then Mola with his dogs straining at their leashes, growling and begging to be allowed to chew out throats. Narnok stared at the men ranged before him, hard men, tattooed and ragged and beaten; but still proud.

“So, what we got here, then?” said Narnok.

Faltor Gan introduced Breakneck Prison’s finest. “This is Bones, Meatboy, Darkdog and Cunt.”

Narnok raised a single eyebrow. “Cunt? Really?”

The large slab grunted, and nodded.

“May one ask
why
?”

“Cos I’m a real cunt, ain’t I?”

“Ahh. Of course you are.”

Faltor grinned at Narnok. “Hard men, for sure. Just the kind we need for assaulting Zanne Keep, don’t you think?”

Narnok looked around the hardened bunch. At the cheap harsh weapons, jagged and chipped. At the bad tattoos, the shaved heads, the hard muscles, the grim demeanours. He smiled. “I reckon this is about as good as it gets,” he said.

 

Clouds covered the moon. Another fall of snow made the ground soft and slippery. They ran in groups of ten, down narrow alleys, across iced cobbles, across frozen ridges of corrugated mud. Various Red Thumbs had cut a hole in the rear wall of the Gardens of the Winter Moon several nights earlier; more as a bolt hole whilst they were on their travels burning black trees, than any real attempt to
assault
the Keep. Zanne Keep. Eight stories high, a massive slick black cube with six towers riding its highest walls. Now, however, the temporary portal, a respite from fighting the elf rats, afforded the Iron Wolves, the Red Thumbs and the recently escaped prisoners of Breakneck Prison, a handy back door. They slid through the gap quickly, whilst lookouts with swords and daggers kept fearful watch. And then they were beyond the high wall and inside the gardens themselves.

Zanne Keep was buried deep within ten acres of walled, private garden; or more precisely, the Gardens of the Winter Moon. These had been a distant project of a distant relative of King Yoon; great-great-
great-great
-grandfather, or something. He’d never bothered to find out. Quite an explorer, this ancient relative had scoured the modern world for flora and fauna, his servants bringing back tubs of shrubs and ferns and trees and flowers from many and varied distant climes; from Oram and Parissia, from Falanor and Zakora, no land went un-raped by the distant relative’s urgent need for a vast variety of plants never before witnessed by the nobility of Zanne, and indeed, Vagandrak.

Now, the resultant forest of exotica was something to both see and inhale, and was – or had been – carefully tended by an army of gardeners numbering near fifty. Alas, the gardeners were gone, and even here the symptoms of the city’s invasion could be seen. Huge green ferns were black and sagging at their bases. Flowers once colourful were deflated and withered. Grass looked scorched and limp. The Gardens of the Winter Moon were a victim of the poison in the land, the toxicity of the invading elf rats.

The group moved slowly through the vegetation, on edge lest it carried hidden assassins, elf rats with bows, warriors with blood-dripping swords. But there was nobody waiting. No elf rats leapt out, snarling and aiming for disembowelment. Narnok was frowning constantly; it simply didn’t feel right.

Zanne Keep reared above them as they came through the trees and shrubs, ferns and withered flowers. It was vast and black, dominating the area, the walls formed from huge blocks and offering only scant handholds in the cracks.

Narnok looked up at the sheer expanse. “That’s one hell of a fucking climb,” he said, hissing, and wondering in his heart if he could really make it. He was a big lad, heavy, and fingertips could only support so much mass. It was one thing to talk about it, in some fire-warmed hall after a couple of honeyed ales; but another to put a broken neck on the line if he slipped on the damn icy wall because he had two left feet and gammy ribs. “Damn.”

“What about my dogs?” said Mola, looking around at the others. “My dogs can’t possibly climb up that.”

“Leave them behind,” said Faltor Gan, face impassive.

“I… I wouldn’t like to be leaving them at the mercy of these elf rats.”

“They’ve fought the elf rats before and survived,” said Randaman. “They are hard and vicious indeed.”

“Yeah, but… but we were together. Like a pack. If I leave them, and something terrible happens, something where I could have given my life to save them…”

“You love those mangy mutts so much?” barked Narnok. Then he saw the tortured look on Mola’s face. He grinned. “Yeah. I expect you do. Why doesn’t Mola wait here, guard the ropes so to speak. That way he can shout and scream if trouble comes forcing in from behind. A rearward entry.” He said it with a straight face.