Honor Among Thieves (42 page)
“G
et me out of this ridiculous stuff,” Malden growled, trying to yank the gauntlet off his left hand. It felt like some of his fingers would come off with it if he pulled too hard. Slag hurried forward with a screwdriver to help Malden out of the armor, but Cythera just stood back and laughed at him.
Velmont couldn’t stop peeking over the wall. It was as if the Helstrovian thief had never seen a horde of barbarians before.
In fact he hadn’t. Malden had given strict instructions that no one was allowed up on the walls without his permission. He’d said it was so no one would become a target for some sharp-eyed barbarian bowman, but really he just hadn’t wanted anyone to see what they were up against and lose heart.
A piece of steel dug hard into his side. It felt like it drew blood. “Quicker, if you please,” Malden snarled.
“You want it done fucking right, or you want me to take half your skin off?” Slag asked. When Malden had decided to actually hear what the barbarians had to say—it was that or listen to their scold shout himself mute—it was decided that he had to look like an actual knight. The problem had been that the Burgrave, when outfitting his Army of Free Men, already took every complete set of steel armor in Ness. The few pieces Slag was able to scrounge had been of different sizes, and some showed the signs of repeated and ill use. The Burgrave had left these pieces behind for good reason. Getting Malden into the armor was torture—getting it off would be worse.
“You told him for certes,” Velmont said, in the voice of a man who has just seen a ghost. “You told him good. Did you e’en hear him, though, what he offered?”
“To let us all walk out of here? It was an empty promise,” Malden said. Slag started disassembling the complicated pattern of rivets holding his breastplate together. Ignoring the constant pinching of his skin, Malden tried to focus on the Helstrovian. Velmont didn’t just look scared. He looked like he was about to soil himself. “Mörg might have kept his word and let us walk out of the gate. He said nothing about what would happen to us afterward. Most likely he would have enthralled us all. Even if he meant to let us free, then what? We don’t have any food left to carry with us. We could starve out there in the fields, with no place to go. Alternatively we can stay here and starve where it’s warm.”
“You could’ve asked for time to ponder,” Velmont said. “Bought us some breathin’ room, at the very least—” He shook his head and seemed to recover himself. “Sorry, boss. There’s just so many of ’em. I don’t like our chances, is all.”
Malden could hardly disagree with that.
Velmont came over to help Slag with the greaves, and soon Malden was naked on the battlements, freezing in the wind. Cythera draped a cloak around him and led him down to the level of the streets. As they made their way back toward the Lemon Garden, Velmont and Slag gave him reports on where they stood. The food shortage was the main topic of conversation. Even with strict rationing, the people of Ness would be without so much as a crumb in two weeks. Malden had already recruited a legion of oyster rakers and fisherman to try to drag food up out of the Skrait, but eight hundred years of cultivation had left the river a poor pantry. Short of food dropping from the heavens (or, slightly more likely given the city’s religious bent, flowing up from a crack in the earth, stinking of the pit), people were going to starve.
“Galenius tells us that starvation is the most effective weapon in siegecraft, far more powerful than any catapult or ram,” Malden said, thinking out loud. He had learned this in one of his frequent sessions with Cutbill. The former guildmaster of thieves was reading to him from the
Manual of Fortifications
like a mother telling stories to her toddler to help him sleep. The contents of the book, however, had left Malden with more than one sleepless night. “The siege of Hollymede, four hundred years ago, lasted two and a half years. There were a hundred thousand men and women inside the city walls when the siege began, and only six thousand still alive when the gates were opened—and the invaders never fired an arrow or bloodied a sword. Of course, many of the deaths were the result of disease and thirst. We have plenty of small beer on hand, and if we have to we can drink water, but we’ll need to watch for outbreaks of plague. Velmont, make a note of that—I want a committee of the public health set up. Any sign of disease must be taken seriously. Report to me if anyone gets so much as a running nose.”
“Mother and I can help with that, a little,” Cythera said. “Much of learning how to be a witch is the study of health and sickness.”
Malden nodded appreciatively. “Slag—how many archers can I muster right now? If the barbarians decide to scale the wall in the night, will we be able to repel them?”
“Depends how serious they are, lad,” the dwarf admitted. “If they all came at once? Not a fucking chance. If it’s just a few we might be all right.”
He turned to Cythera next. “Has Coruth been keeping an eye on the Burgrave and his free men? Galenius makes it sound like the only way to break a siege is with help from outside. We need them to move, and now.”
Cythera sighed. “I wish I could tell you otherwise, but the truth is, Tarness is building a winter camp, thirty miles north of here. He’s staying close, but he shows no sign of moving to rescue us.”
“The bastard!” Malden swore. “He’s getting revenge for what we did to Pritchard Hood, most like.”
“Or,” Slag said carefully, “he simply knows he hasn’t got an arsehole’s chance of beating Mörg, and he doesn’t want to lose everything just to make a demonstration.”
Malden sighed. “All right. We’ve done what we can. Galenius is also quite clear on the fact that the most important skill a besieged general needs to learn is when to sleep. We might be here quite a while, and we all need to keep ourselves as rested and sharp as possible. I’ll see you two in the morning.”
Velmont and Slag glanced at each other and shared a discreet smile.
Malden shrugged it off. He didn’t care who knew that he and Cythera spent every night together now. He loved her—he’d always wanted the world to know that. He’d only kept it secret so long because he knew Croy would kill him if he ever found out.
That seemed the least of his problems now.
Cythera turned down the sheets of their bed upstairs at the Lemon Garden and warmed it with coals in a covered pan. Malden watched her in this simple domestic task and found his heart nearly broke. He’d never expected her to be a real wife to him. Not the way most men seemed to think of their spouses—as free labor they could exploit mercilessly, and beat if they ever complained. That was something he’d never wanted, and especially not from Cythera. He’d never thought she would cook for him either.
He’d never thought she would mend his hose. Or share a roof with him. Or hold him in her arms when he woke screaming in the middle of the night, terrified the barbarians were already inside the walls.
He’d never thought she would truly so much as love him.
Yet here she was, warming his bed. Literally. In a moment she would do it again, figuratively. “I love you,” he said, because it was the only thing he could feel at that moment.
“I love you, too,” she said with a smile.
It couldn’t last much longer. Already Coruth was preparing for Cythera’s initiation. And witches didn’t marry. No one would give Malden a proper explanation for why they couldn’t, but everyone knew it. Witches lived alone, growing old and twisted as their powers expanded. There were scores of old stories about famous witches, and not one of them included a man about the house.
In a few days Cythera would be a witch, and this domestic bliss would be over.
A few more nights would have to be enough. That night Malden was too tired for much lovemaking, but he took what he could get. Eventually they fell asleep in each other’s arms. Malden thought he could sleep the whole day through like that.
Alas, it was not to be. Just after dawn a crashing noise tore through the city, a report loud enough to make their bed jump on its four feet. Malden leapt out from beneath the covers and threw open the window that faced Castle Hill.
Just in time to see the spire of the Ladychapel fall into Market Square, with a noise far louder than the one that woke him.
M
alden hurried through the streets, headed for the bridge to Castle Hill. He doubted anyone was inside the Ladychapel when it fell—the place abandoned since the priest and his followers left—but there might have been plenty of townsfolk in Market Square, setting up what few market stalls still had anything to sell.
He hadn’t covered three blocks when the barbarians struck again.
He saw it coming—saw the impossibly big stone hurtling through the air. Its shadow fell across his path and he danced backward as if it was going to fall right on him. Then it was gone, past the rooftops on the far side of the street.
Malden grabbed a timber on the front of a house and pulled himself upward, reached and grabbed for the edge of a balcony, hauled himself up to the shingled roof. He ran to its ridgeline and looked out over the city, trying to see where the stone had gone. Then it struck home with a rumbling boom and he nearly fell from his perch as the whole city shook underneath him. He struggled to get upright again, to get his feet underneath him so he could see what had happened.
As he watched, a house in the Stink collapsed in on itself. Timbers and plaster shredded with a series of horrible shrieks, stones rattled and bounced. A plume of dust swirled up into the air. And then he heard a woman screaming, and knew that this time there had definitely been casualties.
He was trying to determine where he should go first—Market Square or the Stink, both about equal distance away—when he heard someone calling him.
“Lord Mayor! Get down from there! It’s not safe!”
He ran back to the edge of the roof and looked down. A one-armed beggar was in the street, waving at him. The man ducked his head as a third stone came flying over the city.
Maybe the beggar had a point. Malden hurried down the side of the house and grabbed the man’s shoulders. “Go home,” he said. “Get to a cellar—anywhere but out in the open.” The beggar hurried away, moments before Malden realized that the last place anyone wanted to be when a flying rock hit their house was underground.
There was nothing for it. He couldn’t chase after an unhurt man while citizens might lie dying in the rubble. He hurried toward Market Square, thinking he might be able to help there. Do something. Anything.
When he arrived he found he wasn’t the only one who’d had the same idea. Say what you wanted about the people of Ness—that they were corrupt, lazy, and mostly stupid. True enough. But they did come together in a crisis.
The falling spire had deposited itself as a line of rubble and debris all the way to the gate of Castle Hill, cutting the square in half. Teams of citizens were hauling away rocks and broken wood, piling it on the cobbles as if they wanted to sort through it later.
“There’s a girl in there!” someone shouted at him.
Malden rushed up and grabbed half of a broken gargoyle. He passed it to a man who appeared behind him. He thought of nothing else as he worked, his back aching and his arms weak with fatigue. It didn’t matter. Little by little he cleared the rubble. He only stopped when he heard joyous shouting and looked over to see a group of women digging furiously at one spot in the mess.
Hurrying over, he used his status to make a way through the crowd of onlookers. The women had already unearthed the girl by the time he arrived. Her face was white with dust except where saliva had etched a clean track down one side of her mouth. Her eyes saw nothing. When the women picked her up, her head and limbs hung as limply as a doll’s.
“Is she breathing?” Malden asked. One of the women shrugged, but another thought to check.
The girl was breathing. She was alive. It looked like half the bones in her body were shattered. Malden didn’t know if she would live long enough for them to set, but he didn’t care. The girl was alive.
“Take her to the Isle of Horses—Coruth the witch will help her, if anyone can,” he commanded. A cart was brought up. There were no horses to pull it, but a band of old men offered to stand in the traces. They were turning the cart around, making ready to go, when a fourth stone flashed across the sky.
It came down inside the defensive wall of Castle Hill and bounced around the ruins there for a while. At least no one was in there to be hurt, Malden thought—and then he remembered his prisoners inside the gaol were inside that wall. He called for help and rushed to the gate to help them, if he could.
The stone had stopped bouncing when he got inside. It had settled in the great courtyard before the palace, where the Burgrave’s personal guard once marched in parade order. The stone was four feet across, and some effort had been made to carve it in a regular shape. It didn’t look nearly as big or as dangerous as when it had been flying through the air.
Malden ignored it and ran down the steps to the gaol. The men inside were screaming to be let out, or to be put to death instead of suffering so, or just to learn what was going on. Dust filled the air and a wide crack ran across one wall. The gaoler was nowhere in sight—most likely he’d gone to help the people in the square. Malden found the keys to the three occupied cells and opened them one by one. He had no idea what he was going to do with the men inside. One was a rapist, one a bravo who had killed for money. The third was Malden’s first charge, the madman who’d killed his own daughter for the Bloodgod’s favor. The lunatic was raving as Malden hauled him out of the cell and dragged him toward the stairs. “You two,” he said to the rapist and the bravo, “go up top and help the people there. There could be more people in that mess.”
“What’s going on?” the bravo demanded.
“The barbarians are attacking with some kind of catapult,” Malden told him. “They knocked down the spire of the Ladychapel. Now go help!”
The madman couldn’t find his own way out of the gaol. Malden had to lead him every step of the way. When they reached sunlight, a crowd was waiting for him.
“There! There, do you see!” the madman shrieked. He pointed at the ruined stump that was all that remained of the Lady’s church in Ness. “Sadu has spoken! He made it fall. He made it fall!”
Malden tried to push his way through the crowd but the madman kept grabbing at onlookers, snagging his fingers in their tunics or their hair.
“He must have His blood. He must have His blood. He must have His blood,” the madman blathered. Malden wondered if he could find a safe place to put the man in the Ashes, where his raving wouldn’t bother anyone. Then he considered the folly of that. A safe place? What place could possibly be safe when stones fell from the sky?
“He must have His blood, or we are all doomed. Give Him His blood!”
“Be quiet! I’m trying to think,” Malden demanded, but the madman shouted over him.
“His blood! Give Him His blood! His blood!”
There was something wrong with the sound of the madman’s voice. Had he been deafened by the noise of the falling stones? Malden wondered. It was like a strange echo accompanied the madman’s chanting.
“His blood! His blood His blood His blood His blood!”
Then he understood.
“His blood!”
“His blood!”
“Give Him His blood!”
“He must have His blood!”
It wasn’t just the madman. Half the crowd was chanting for blood as well. They’d taken up the raving cry.
Did they think Sadu could make the barbarians stop? Did they think the Bloodgod could grab the stones out of midair and save them?”
“His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood! His blood!”