Honor Among Thieves (56 page)
T
he crowd of devout citizens gasped and ran as a massive wagon covered by a tarpaulin came rumbling down the hill toward them. A dozen men were pushing against it from the front, trying to slow its headlong descent and mostly failing.
Running ahead of the wagon, Slag carried a long brass staff topped by a hook that looked like the head of a snake. Meanwhile, sitting atop the wagon’s burden, Balint waved a cloth back and forth, cheering and shouting curses.
“You’ll all be flatter than a spinster’s tit if you don’t scarper right now!” she cackled. She looked like she’d never had more fun in her life.
“I am well pleased to see you,” Malden said as Slag hurried toward him. “I take it this is your secret project.”
“It’ll be the world’s most expensive heap of scrap if we take this hill too fast, lad,” Slag explained. “Help us!”
Malden hurried toward the wagon. He recognized the men straining against it as workers from Slag’s shop. Some had burned faces and hands wrapped in bandages, but they seemed less concerned with their own hurts than with slowing the progress of the wagon. Malden put his own shoulder against the wagon’s boards and was shocked to feel how heavy its cargo must be. “What is this made of, Slag? Twice-refined lead?”
“Bronze, mostly. Put your fucking back in it, boys!”
They heaved and struggled and strained. The wagon roared as it rolled over the cobbles. The wheels screamed and the axles spat sparks. Somehow they managed to avoid crashing at the bottom of the hill. It was far easier moving it through the relatively level streets beyond, even with no dray animals. Slag suddenly called a halt, and Malden looked up for the first time.
Directly before him was Ryewall.
High above, his thieves and whores were busy taking random shots at targets on the other side. Loophole and ’Levenfingers moved along the ramparts of Westwall and Swampwall, shouting orders like they were born serjeants, calling out targets. When Loophole saw Malden, he gave a cheery wave—even as a barbarian arrow shot past his ear, inches from skewering his head.
“It’s begun, lad,” the oldster called down. “You’d best join me up here.”
Malden grabbed Slag’s shoulder—the one still attached to an arm. “Are you ready?” he asked.
“As close as I fucking can be,” the dwarf told him.
Malden glanced at Balint. “She gave you no trouble?”
A twitching smile passed across Slag’s face as he tried to maintain a sober countenance. “Oh, she distracted me a bit from what I was doing. But after the—well, after some initial, ah, fractiousness, we, ah, we got along right well. She had some excellent ideas, actually, about brisance and containment.” He glanced away from Malden’s feet. “Very imaginative lass, our Balint.”
Malden laughed and slapped the dwarf on the back. “What exactly should I expect from this thing?” he asked, changing the subject. “Are you going to shoot a giant arrow at the barbarians, or will it throw a flaming rock like a catapult?”
“Neither. It’ll either explode when I set it off, and make a much bigger bang than we did at the cloisters, or, it will actually work. In which case—” Slag’s face grew dark with evil excitement. “—it’ll put the fear of fucking dwarves into those stinking cocksuckers.”
“Do your worst, when I give the signal,” Malden said. Then he hurried up the steep, narrow stairs that led to the top of Westwall.
It was only then he saw what he was really up against. The barbarians had massed and armed themselves, and he looked out over a sea of iron and shaved heads and eyes burning with hatred and bloodlust. The warriors out there filled the land as far as he could see. Off in the distance it looked like some of them were fighting each other, which he couldn’t quite understand. Maybe they were just running through practice drills—or perhaps they’d grown so tired of waiting to kill that they’d started hacking at one another for something to do.
Then again, perhaps—
No. His luck couldn’t be that good. So far everything that could possibly go wrong had, and the idea of something actually working in his favor felt wholly out of the equation.
Yet soon he couldn’t deny the evidence of his own senses. “Look,” one of the archers said, pointing at a line of flags in the distance. Over where the barbarians were fighting a rearguard action. “Those are the Burgrave’s colors!”
Malden’s eyes weren’t as good as hers, but he squinted and strained and—yes, he saw it. The Army of Free Men had come at last to relieve the city.
Now that it was almost surely too late. Directly below him, hundreds of berserkers danced and howled. Foam flecked their lips and cheeks, and their eyes were wide with insanity. The Burgrave had plenty of men but they were poorly trained, poorly armed—no match at all for the reavers and berserkers out there. Tarness could do no more than pick away at the barbarian horde. And he most certainly could not break through in time to save Ryewall from coming down, or the berserkers from overrunning the city.
A stroke of good luck, but good luck too late, Malden thought. He would have to stick to the plan he’d already made.
He signaled to the archers around him—Elody’s whores, women he’d known for years. They looked at him with trusting eyes. They were counting on him, he realized. Expecting a miracle. He truly hoped he had one left in stock. “Don’t waste shots on the berserkers, unless you think you can actually kill a few. They don’t feel pain or wounds. When they come through the—”
Down below he heard Mörget’s voice. The barbarian shouted, “Pull, you weaklings! Pull or die!”
Under Malden’s feet, the very stones of the wall began to shake.
“Get back, get back from Ryewall,” he shouted, again and again. Soon he couldn’t even hear his own voice. The noise of the wall was just too loud.
It started as a low creaking, like an unoiled hinge being ripped from its nails. The noise grew to an unearthly moan, accompanied by the percussion of stones falling from a great height. As Malden watched in horror, the Ryewall began to shimmy, its ramparts swaying up and down as if made of water on a foaming sea.
“Pull!” Mörget screamed again, and unlike Malden’s,
his
voice carried. “Again! Pull!”
Below and behind Malden, Slag tore the tarpaulin off his secret weapon.
“That’s it?” Malden demanded.
It didn’t look like much. Just a metal tube ten feet long and two across, dull yellow in color. Bands of steel were wrapped around its length like the hoops of a barrel. One end was open, and Balint stuffed handfuls of nails and broken weapons and old horseshoes down its mouth. Slag busied himself at a small charcoal fire a little ways off. It looked like he was just trying to get warm.
“This is what you’ve been working on? The thing that was going to turn them back?” Malden demanded. “It looks like a giant pestle. Do you need me to drive the barbarians into the world’s largest mortar?”
“Pull!” Mörget roared.
And Ryewall fell.
C
roy brought Ghostcutter around and disemboweled a gray-bearded reaver, then ducked as an axe whistled over his head. He lost his horse at some point—he barely remembered when—and had been wading through the melee ever since, cutting down any man who came before him. The clatter of glancing blows on his armor and helm drowned out the thoughts in his head. The strength in his good arm saw him through.
He laid about him left and right, barely looking at the men he killed. If they wore furs or had shaved heads, it was enough. Ghostcutter lifted and fell, swung out and took lives on the backswing. He dodged under blows that would have cut through his armor like rotten silk, rolled away whenever they knocked him to the ground and leapt back to his feet. Wounds didn’t matter. The fatigue of the long march south didn’t matter. Anger—if nothing else—could sustain him. Rage.
Cythera.
Cythera, he kept thinking. Just her name. Her face swam before his eyes, that beloved face now distorted by betrayal. He had trusted her. He had trusted in her pledge, her faith, her constancy. Cythera, he thought as he stabbed a man in the kidneys. Her name formed on his lips and he slashed through the tendons of a barbarian’s neck. Cythera.
Malden.
Malden, whom he had put in charge of Cythera’s protection. Malden, whom he had asked—pleaded with—to preserve her chastity. What had he been thinking? The man was a thief! Malden never saw anything that belonged to someone else, save that he wanted to steal it. Croy slashed open the belly of a reaver and was washed in hot blood. Of course Malden had stolen the one prize in all of Skrae worth having! “Malden!” he screamed.
Three men came at him, all at once, with axes and maces. They howled like wolves as they piled on to him, but Croy stabbed one through the stomach and bashed in the face of another with his pommel on the return swing. The third raised his mace to crush Croy’s skull, but before the blow could connect a knight on horseback came galloping through and cut the barbarian’s throat nearly to the spine.
In the breaking light of dawn, Croy looked up and saw Sir Hew come trotting back around to salute him. He forced himself to focus, to hear what his brother Ancient Blade had to say. “It’s going hard for the Free Men, but they’re holding their lines,” Hew said. “The Skilfingers are a wonder. Worth ten times what we paid. And still no berserkers have engaged us—do you think Mörget’s holding them in reserve?”
Croy gasped for breath and wiped Ghostcutter on the fur of a fallen barbarian. He knew he should say something—give some order, perhaps, or ask for a more detailed report. He only resented the interruption, however. Free of enemies for a moment, his brain started to work again.
Images of Cythera cluttered his thoughts. Cythera, with Malden writhing atop her, strewn across a whore’s bed—
It was almost a welcome distraction when the wall of Ness collapsed.
The Burgrave came racing past them, his lance pointed up in the air. “Not my damned city, you don’t!” he cried, and behind him a hundred Free Men with bill hooks cried out as they rallied behind their leader.
Sir Hew stared toward Ness. “Sappers, would be my guess,” he said, sounding shocked. “If they can get inside the city—”
“We’ll have to besiege Ness ourselves,” Croy replied, nodding. That would be next to impossible, with winter growing colder and the snow piling deeper every day. They couldn’t feed the Skilfinger mercenaries for another week, not and besiege the city at the same time.
“Give me an order,” Hew demanded.
Croy shook his head. “Press the attack. Hurt them as much as we can before they get inside.” He thought he knew now why Mörget had held his berserkers in reserve. Once those battle-mad warriors were inside the wall, no force inside the Free City could hold against them. They would slaughter the citizens of Ness indiscriminately, hacking and slashing until the streets were slick with blood.
Once that slaughter began, there would not be a single thing he—or the Burgrave, or Hew, or anyone else—could do to stop it.
W
hen Ryewall collapsed, Malden was thrown from his feet. He was luckier than some of his archers, who were tossed off the wall altogether. Dust filled the sky and stones bounced off nearby rooftops, smashing chimney pots or shattering on the cobbles with great thuds. When the dust started to clear and Malden was able to stand again, he looked across a great gap in the wall, wide enough to march an army through.
Which was exactly what Mörget had in mind. “For Mother Death!” the chieftain called, and six thousand gruff voices answered with a cheer that made Malden’s teeth rattle in his head. Below him the berserkers bit their shields and screamed and started running toward the gap, their axes flashing all around them, ready to kill without discernment. They made no attempt at formation as they came through the wall, stumbling over each other in their rage, their red-stained faces burning with blood.
Once they were inside, once they passed the wall, there would be no stopping the orgy of death they wreaked. Malden shouted for his archers to slaughter them, but the whores and thieves around him seemed too stunned to lift their bows.
Luckily, the dwarves kept their heads.
“She’s charged!” Balint called, and raced away from Slag’s engine, as if terrified that it was going to erupt in fire at any second.
The berserkers scrambled over the pile of rubble that was the sole remnant of Ryewall. They leapt and cried like birds of prey as they came.
With perfect calmness, Slag reached into his fire with a pair of tongs. He brought out a piece of wire glowing red hot. He fixed this to the serpent head of his brass staff.
He seemed completely unaware that a horde of deadly berserkers was bearing down on him, only seconds away.
Malden could only watch in terror as that human flood came boiling toward his friend. Had Cythera sacrificed so much, had Slag lost his arm, had all of his own desperate hopes and Cutbill’s schemes and the fears of an entire city come down to this? To a dwarf playing with a piece of hot wire?
Malden could just make out a tiny hole bored into the closed end of the bronze tube. He watched, not knowing what to think, as Slag carefully inserted his wire into the hole—and then dropped his staff and ran as fast as his short legs could possibly carry him.
“Go, go, go!” Mörget shouted. It sounded like he was right below Malden’s feet.
Then there was a sound that Malden had never heard before. A sudden, horrible noise, louder than a lightning strike, which ran through his body and threatened to crack his bones.
The noise alone was enough to strike a man dead.
But the noise was only a side effect of what Slag had wrought upon the world. Immense gouts of smoke and sparks burst from the mouth of the engine. The force it unleashed drove the engine backward, sent it flying into the front of a house directly across from the ruins of Ryewall. It smashed through plaster and beams and set the whole building ablaze.
In the gap, the berserkers froze in place as they were buffeted by the explosion. They seemed transfixed as a thousand whizzing noises shot past them, a million trails of sparks and fire. Iron tacks, horse brasses, broken and twisted pieces of door latches, soup spoons and farthing coins, andirons, candle snuffers, leather punches, signet rings and steel spurs—any metal scrap that Slag could find at the last moment, dozens of pounds of the stuff, countless pieces—came flying out of the mouth of the tube so fast and with so much force that they cut through flesh, shredded tissue, shattered bone into fragments. Lines of blood appeared on every berserker face and hand. Severed limbs tumbled through the air, as time itself slowed to a crawl. Whole bodies were taken to pieces as thoroughly—if not as neatly—as if they’d been worked on by a master butcher. Hair caught flame. Shields went spinning away like wagon wheels. Iron axes fell from broken, bloodied hands.
Those few berserkers who survived the blast stopped in their tracks. Their mouths hung open, their eyes wide, but no longer with the fury of battle. For the first time in the history of the eastern clans, someone had discovered a way to break the berserker trance.
Not howling, not foaming at the mouth any longer, but crying for mercy, the berserkers turned and ran as fast as they might for the safety of their own camp. Not a single one of them made it through the wall.