Honor Among Thieves (23 page)
T
he air in Coruth’s house felt like it had been replaced with thick jelly. Cythera gasped in great breaths of the thick stuff and stared at the candles around her. The flames burned low and greenish, as if they burned not wax but strange vapors. She was too weak to ask why, too weak to do anything but hold her head up as she slumped in a straight-backed chair.
Directly before her she saw her mother’s face, framed by its wild iron-gray hair. Coruth’s eyes met hers exactly, stare for stare. Then the old witch nodded, just once.
“Good,” she said. “You did well.”
Cythera struggled to speak. Every muscle in her body felt heavy and weak. What she’d done . . . what they’d done together, made no sense to her. She had felt the power moving through the room, like a wind so subtle it could not even stir her hair, and yet so vast and world-engulfing she thought it might pitch all of Ness into the sea.
“Is . . . it . . . always . . .” she gasped. She couldn’t finish the thought.
She didn’t need to. “It will get easier,” Coruth told her. “You’ll learn to work with the natural currents and eddies of the ether, rather than fighting them. That is what a witch does. She works with what is already there. Do you understand?”
Cythera thought she might be starting to get it. And that terrified her.
“Was . . . it . . . ?”
“Necessary?” Coruth asked. “You want to know why we thwarted your lover. It does seem strange, doesn’t it? I like the boy. I did not choose this to inconvenience him, girl. I am not that petty. Close your eyes.”
Cythera felt Coruth’s thumbs touch her closed eyelids, felt her mother’s fingers digging through her hair to her scalp. Coruth’s nails were ragged and they scratched her skin. “I’m going to give you a vision now, child. Just a little glimpse.”
What she saw then made Cythera scream for her mother to stop. War—bloodshed—bodies piled before city walls—fire lancing across battlefields—a sword—always the sword—
the
sword, Acidtongue, the one she’d enchanted just as dawn came up. The sword she’d touched with her own power. She saw the sword in a number of different hands, and knew she was seeing possible futures. She saw Skrae fall. She saw the barbarians driven back, cut to pieces as they screamed for mercy, and Skrae saved. She saw a war that never ended. All the images were superimposed one atop the other, yet she could make each one out distinct and so vivid it had to be real.
The hands that held the sword were all bloody, but Malden’s hand—she recognized it instantly—was only flecked with gore, where others were stained so red they could never be washed clean.
“Nothing is necessary,” Coruth said. “But some things are more devoutly to be wished for than others. The sword must stay with Malden. No matter what.”
“Even if—he doesn’t—want it?”
Coruth clucked her tongue. “This is the problem with being able to see the future. You see how little what people want matters. And you watch them make terrible choices, and do things you know they will regret. Malden will have no joy of that sword. But if he does not keep it, everyone will suffer.”
Cythera understood—though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Being a witch was about making hard choices. Or maybe it was about having no choices at all.
“Even if Malden keeps the sword, though . . .” she said, close to sobbing now. She was certain she would collapse soon, and fall into black, deep sleep. She lacked the energy for anything else, but she could not rest until she knew. “Even if he—keeps it. I saw—I saw multiple futures where he still held it. Which one will come to pass?”
“That’s not for me to say. It’s up to you.”
“Me?”
“There’s a reason I demanded you start your training now. Malden will have a role to play in the shape of destiny to come. Yours will be even larger—and darker.”
The look on Coruth’s face was almost sympathetic now. Cythera knew why, because she’d seen herself in those glimpses. She’d seen her own fate.
In some of those futures Malden put down the sword and took up a golden ring which he slipped on her finger. Those futures were already fading, receding as they became less and less probable.
In some—still bright and lucid, still distinctly possible—he turned away from her and they never saw each other again.
And in others just as real to her, he used Acidtongue to strike her down, to slay her, while tears rolled down his cheeks.
M
örget whirled his axe through the air and brought it down hard against his makeshift pell—a block of fire-hardened wood driven into the ground. The axe bit deep into the post and he felt the bones of his arm flex and twist with the blow. The pell was already scarred in a hundred places, and chunks had been taken out of its sides, revealing pale wood underneath.
He lifted the axe for another stroke.
He had, after all, nothing better to do.
At his back two thousand warriors cooked food or sang old drinking songs or sharpened weapons or gambled or fought among themselves. Most of them were drunk. It was the oldest barbarian remedy for boredom. But Mörget never touched ale or mead. He drank milk when he could get it, or water when he must. Unlike most people, he never got sick from drinking well water. Whatever fate drove him would not let the flux or an ague bring him low. His abstemiousness made him a rarity among the eastern clans, and added to his fearsome reputation.
But it did mean he had to sit through every boring moment of a warrior’s life (of which there were far too many) stone cold sober—and therefore prey to his own dark thoughts.
Two hundred yards away the walls of Redweir loomed over him, blocking out the morning sun. Whatever architect or engineer had designed this place had done a better job than they did at Helstrow. The bricks of the wall were made of red sandstone, impervious to any weapon the barbarians had brought with them. The city’s gates were sealed tight and barred with stout iron that would resist his battering rams. The defenders inside refused to be drawn out to fight for their city, despite constant taunting and the threat of a protracted siege. Though Mörget had been camped for three days outside the wall, well clear of arrow range, occasionally the soldiers inside would still come out on the battlements and fire an arrow at them. The barbarians made sport of running out into the no-man’s-land to collect these missiles and then running back before the archers could nock another arrow. Only one man had been killed, when the defenders had been smart enough to send up two archers at a time.
Mörget’s axe came down and chopped a scroll of wood off the side of the pell. His back ached with the effort. He prepared for another blow.
Before he could strike, however, he heard a hollow voice echo up from a hole in the ground near his feet.
“—mud in places I can’t wash,” the voice grumbled. “Mud so far down my ears it’s coming out my arse.”
Mörget set down the axe.
Balint and her sappers emerged from the hole, climbing wearily up a ladder to the surface. The dwarf’s men were westerners—thralls now, recruited from the great mass of prisoners taken at Helstrow. They looked like their souls hurt worse than their backs. They carried mattocks and picks that they tossed on the grass as if they loathed the very touch of their tools.
“It’s done?” Mörget asked.
Balint hauled the end of a rope out of the hole. “I used to live in this city, you know. There’s a whole colony of dwarves in there, maybe twenty of ’em, all living together in a palace all their own. This is the only place in Skrae you can get proper dwarven ale before it goes flatter than a spinster’s chest.”
“Were you successful?” Mörget asked again.
Balint reached up to touch the spiked iron collar around her throat. Mörget had fastened it there himself, after he spared her life.
“Aye,” she said softly. She handed him the end of the rope.
Mörget hurried to attach the line to the harness of a team of oxen, big woolly beasts he’d had brought over from the eastern steppes. They could haul away the ocean, he’d been told, if you could find a way to chain it. Their drover lowered his goads and they started stumbling forward.
“You’re a bastard, you know that?” Balint asked.
Mörget frowned, unsure of what she meant by that. Marriage was a rare occurrence in the East, and most children were born of passion, not wedlock.
“You know. A son of a bitch,” Balint tried.
Mörget shrugged. He knew very little about his mother, actually. “The woman who birthed me was a thrall from the North. When they brought me to her, moments after I came howling into this world, she turned her face away, and then she died.”
“After giving birth to a pillock as big as you,” Balint said, “I would
want
to die.”
“Death is my mother now,” Mörget said. He turned away from this cryptic debate and roared at the drover to redouble his efforts.
The rope Balint had brought him led down into a tunnel she’d been digging for three days. Its far end was attached securely to a series of supports directly under the wall of Redweir. She had so thoroughly excavated down there that the supports were the only thing holding that wall up.
The oxen hauled on the taut rope, digging their feet deep into the reddish soil. The rope creaked. The oxen lowed. If the rope broke—ah—but suddenly it went slack and the oxen hurried away.
For a moment it seemed the rope had simply snapped, and achieved nothing. Then he began to feel the ground roll under his feet. Very good—it was done.
Mörget turned to face his army. He lifted Dawnbringer over his head, and to a man, no matter how drunk they might be, the barbarians gathered their weapons and stirred. “Now,” he said, as a deep rumbling noise began to sound from the tunnel.
The barbarians screamed and rushed toward the wall. The defenders, jumping up and down in their bewilderment, rushed to the battlements and started drawing their bows. A random volley of arrows swept toward the horde and a few barbarians were knocked down and trampled. Still, Mörget’s army howled toward the impenetrable wall. They weren’t even headed toward one of the gates—just an unbroken stretch of red sandstone brick, as if they meant to dash their heads against it.
Before they reached the wall, it was gone.
It came down in a spectacular cascade of falling masonry and red dust. They swept through a cloud that choked them and brought tears to their eyes. They stormed over a pile of rubble that was still settling.
Of what happened then, numbers speak louder than words.
The garrison at Redweir numbered less than five hundred. Even the best-trained serjeant in that company had been a professional soldier for less than a year, and had held his command position for only a few months. At least a third of the defenders perished in the collapse of the wall.
Inside the town lived five thousand souls—workmen, scholars, children. These defended themselves to the best of their ability with whatever tools and cutlery they could find. None of them had any military training at all.
Against these forces were arrayed two thousand screaming barbarians, each of whom had been fighting since the day he escaped from the womb.
The streets of Redweir, cobbled in the ubiquitous red sandstone, ran bright with blood that day. The town had been built on top of a massive dam with a wide spillway. It would be an exaggeration to say the river Strow ran red as far as the sea—but it was definitely tinged with pink.
The fighting—the slaughter—went on for hours. It would not, truly, stop for days. Mörget led the way down the town’s sole high street to the spiritual center of Redweir—its famous library, the largest collection of books and scrolls and manuscripts outside of the Old Empire. He had been there once before, long before Cloudblade fell and the barbarians swept into Skrae. He had come seeking knowledge, and offered violence to no man. At that time he’d been treated as a curiosity, an exotic figure of disdain, because he had come alone.
Now he was feared more than all the demons in the pits.
The massive doors of the library were not built for defense. Mörget’s men hewed them down with axes in a matter of minutes.
Inside, a monk of the Learned Brethren stood waiting for him. He bore no weapons—such were forbidden to holy brothers—but he raised his hands in a gesture of defiance.
“You must not defile this place!” the monk shrieked. “If you burn this building to the ground, the knowledge of a thousand years will be lost! The works collected here can never be replaced. I warn you, barbarian. It would be a sin of the greatest magnitude.”
Mörget laughed his booming, wicked laugh. “Fear not, little man,” he said. “My father, the Great Chieftain, has already declared your books sacrosanct. He is a lover of learning, and I am bidden not to harm one page, not to deface one word of your precious collection. We need every book you possess.”
The monk slowly lowered his hands. His face trembled with relief.
“We don’t need any monks, though,” Mörget went on. And then he brought his axe down in a whistling sweep, as he had a million times before.