At the least, he was not the only one to suffer. Chigenda hardly seemed to care, and Essa put on a brave face, but Rowan looked positively mortified. Already, the proud swordsman had retched half a dozen times into the streets. What shadows they found in the alleys took care to step far and abreast of them, with hands clasped tight to noses.
There was a reservoir near the rear of the city, which this time of night met with few patrols. Chigenda wished to press on, but Rurik insisted, if for nothing more than the sake of the sickened-looking children. It was easy enough to break in, and even the chill of the manmade lake felt good in the stifling humidity of the night air. They dove, and dove again, and dared not shed their clothes for the act—until each and every one of them looked like sailors cast ashore, but felt possessed of new life.
Only when they were done, and shivering their way down the ringing streets, did any of them dare speak again.
“What now?” Essa asked.
What, indeed? The question had plagued Rurik all the way down the shaft of that damnable shithouse, and through the darkness to freedom. Next to the overwhelming odor, it had been the only thought left with any relevance. We could flee. They would call me coward, but what have I left to call pride? We should flee. I have the children, I have Anelie again, and I will never lose her…never again… It was the only true option. It was the one and only certainty.
But. There was always a but, he realized. Perhaps it was a condition of youth, but he could not shake it. He remembered what Usuri said, and he had taken it to heart. She believed wholeheartedly in that shrewish princess locked within that tower. He could not say why, cared not to second-guess it, but there was still one thing left to him. One act which could not be ignored.
He remembered Usuri’s words. But he also remembered the guards’. The family had remained within their towers, but the lord was in the city, toasting to his victory.
And a man was never so vulnerable as when he thought himself secure.
He felt a hand clap him on the shoulder and he turned to find Chigenda watching him. “Slapped us. Man no leave wit’out slap back,” the Zuti rumbled.
Now that he smelled something more than his own self, Rurik could smell the thin spit of rain in the air. It mingled with the taste of dead men—the burn, the slow fire all believers set for the honored dead—and there was a lot of them, given how it clawed. A flavor of ale and sweat and jubilee did its best to override it all, of course, but there were some things that simply couldn’t be ignored.
* *
They no longer waited. As the nearly full moons pulled their bright glares higher and higher across the clouded sky, and the world drifted deeper into the shifting waves of manmade fire, they were as rats, scuttling through the hold of a ship, tracing their way through this newfound labyrinth.
Early on, they ascertained their escape was not nearly so clean—a word Essa would never consider quite the same again—as they might have hoped. The soldiers were not fools. Patrols were already out in the city, and the nature of cat and mouse was decidedly against them. Yet they could not hide. They could only hope to stay ahead of these men, and this they did with poise, asking questions in the brightly lit places, mapping alleys in the dark, taking the measure of all that was to come.
Nor did it suit them to keep solely to back streets, as Alviss likely would have recommended. Their quarry was not hiding in the dark. For that very reason, he was not a hard man to find. Harder was making the preparations, and finding those particular shadows with still less scruples than most—those men to whom liberality, and the arts, and even victory all meant nothing; the men for whom popularity was nothing without gold in hand.
What they had, they gave liberally. Perhaps it would mark them, but at this juncture, there was little for it. Showing that they meant their business was more important for their goal than the possibility of a rat.
It was Chigenda who managed to pull prediction from his cap, though. One thing to know where a man stood, but quite another to know where he would stand. Though he was oft busy that night scowling at the people who passed him, it was Chigenda and Chigenda alone who caught a breakaway from Walthere’s visitations.
The soldier was careful, it needed to be said. He was not colored by drink, and his route carried turns and feints within it; no doubt so he could watch for watchers. He was dressed in a coat of maille, with short, stubbly hair. A crossbow was clutched between his grubby fingers, menacing as those little metal punchers could be. Often he looked back, though he never seemed to look straight at them. Essa suspected he already knew he was being followed. Probably thought it was pickpockets, though.
Neither she nor Chigenda let him know that they knew, however, by tipping their hands too soon.
When the man took a turn down a dingy alley, she followed him into the grimy stonework, ready for the shock. She could hear the shuffle of his feet, then nothing. Careful footsteps guided her own motions, and it was her care that got an arm up in time to block the man’s fist. It had already been swinging when she came into the darkness.
She hit the wall, but smiled for all that. Not scared. Never scared. It felt good to have an enemy, and one she understood better than he understood himself. A dagger followed, and she thought he might have stabbed her rather than asked a question, but before she could find out, something darted from the conjunction and sent him reeling. Something crunched. The man staggered, one dark fist following another and knocking him senseless.
He was slow and dizzy and even his blade did not seem to cut properly. Chigenda had his wrist tight before it could do any damage, followed that with an elbow to the man’s throat and dropped him gurgling to the cobbles.
“My savior,” Essa said.
“Fool risk,” the Zuti countered.
So much for teamwork.
The Zuti stomped the man’s side and rolled him over on his back, his arms settling across the man’s chest with his machete ending up pressed against the fool’s rasping throat. The soldier tried to twist free, but Chigenda had him fast, and the blade quickly stilled any further dissension.
“What see?” Chigenda asked.
“Dead folk,” the soldier spat.
Unfortunately for him, Chigenda had never been a particularly patient man. Elbow met face for a second time, and pinned, the man was helpless to stop it. It was astounding how quick bouncing a man’s head off stone tended to take the fight out of him. Blood began to run down the soldier’s face in dark streaks, but he was more talkative by then.
Essa took that moment to sidle up for a word. “What my companion means to say is, where’s the count headed tonight, friend?”
Tears beaded in the corner of the man’s eyes, like glittering stars themselves, but he talked. Usually without much additional prompting.
* *
Rurik Matair, the third son of the late lord Kasimir Matair, perched at the end of a dark alley and looked across space and time, through geological layers of hate and fear, to the specter of a lion. Each wrapped themselves in the narrow light of a half-moon striding across shallow rooftops. The city was alight with the amusements of nighttime, and with the drums of victory, but Rurik ignored them.
It seemed to him that there were auspicious moments in history, rarely beheld before, but dearly picked over after. Something as simple as one alley chosen instead of another, or sun rising where one had expected storm—these things could alter the destiny of a land, and more importantly, of the myriad lives within them, often imperceptibly at first.
Before him, jutted like an obsidian tombstone above the jubilant city, a castle was a rattle of arms and armor, angry men given leave to hunt. Behind him, a vast plain opened itself to any who might wish to flee, to disappear into the night and be gone from history, memory; it was already littered with dead, though, that plain, and Rurik knew no matter which path he took he would likely never see them again.
This was the downside of rebirth. Men forever walked the cycles, but in their way, they foreve
r walked the world alone; new faces emerged, life after life, but rarely those one had known before. He could not think of a more poignant loneliness than this.
The time had come. Though runners doubtless scoured the city, none had yet found Count Walthere Cullick. He could have no knowing of the foolishness Rurik had worked this night.
About them, the warehouses were dark and closed, the alehouses raucous with their absence. A homeless man sang pitiably to the owls, and in their celebration, the city had given generously to his box for alms. Rurik rolled the copper coin between his fingers, considered contributing it for luck.
He breathed deep. Perhaps Essa had a point. Cities like this—they were predictable, in their way. If he dwelt long enough on the sounds, he might have told you precisely what might happen next, and where. For so long, places like these had been the home of his dreams. Then war had come. The cities had not changed. It was he who was different.
This did not mean he could not still turn aside. There was time. The lion and his pride fanned across the alleys, as errant residents greeted them with the cheer which was their due. Would this make him the better man? Would it make him pure? He could ask himself the questions a thousand times, but truth changed for no man.
Mud and filth seeped through his boots. Strange beyond his reckoning, it reminded him not of disease-addled war, but of his mother’s garden. Of days drawing figures in the muck, as baby Anelie danced fingers on her toes and laughed. Of fierce women roaming hedgerows, sticks in hand, calling themselves warriors and naming themselves friends. Childhood was sweet. Bittersweet.
The blade shifted in his hand, black iron, lowered to keep it from the streaking moonlight. At the other end of the alley, he knew, Essa waited with bow drawn. Chigenda would be opposite her, intending to plug the gap. They would take the group between them and kill them. Or they would die in turn. Choices. A differing of an instant could change the fate of all.
It was not suicide by arrogance. He knew the risks. This time, he had taken precautions. Among them, only Rowan was not present, precisely because he held Rurik’s undivided trust. Children in hand, that one had faded into the night with a word: “Just ask yourself, at least, why you have lived this long…” and the children, seeing only dejection, and rejection, cried out in turn ,“I hate you, I hate you, why must you do this?” but they were safe, and that was all that mattered. They were safe, and he could focus.
“Hey, you!” A child stepped into the alleyway. Others skittered like liquid shadows at his back. The lion’s pride pressed forward, unconcerned. Then the boy rattled a bottle. “Drink up!” The bottle cracked against the cobblestones and spilled a brownish sludge in front of the lion’s guards. They gave shout, started forward, when other jeering children launched rocks and still more bottles, and under the cover of night, began to run. Several of the guards chased after them, hurling curses as they went.
But armored men were not built for chasing children.
“Children run amok,” Rurik heard the lion mutter.
Which is when the first arrow snapped the torch from one of his attendant’s hands and plunged flames onto the muck. Instead of snuffing, it flared. Alcohol fumes latched onto the flames and went howling up from the earth. Men scattered, yelped, the disaster inconceivable. Most huddled closer to their lord, well-trained. Those few revelers on the street became an awkward mass of gawkers, startled by the unpredictable.
The time had come.
An armored man was beating at the flames as another arrow punched through his shoulder. It was swiftly followed by a second which caught him above the collar and spun him screaming. His companions pressed a bewildered Cullick back, and those that had taken to chasing the urchins, suddenly aware of what was transpiring behind them, gave up on any sense of poise and drew, shouting for the street to clear. They needn’t have bothered, for anyone not involved was already doing just that.
Rurik raised their informant’s crossbow with his good arm and tapped the trigger. It was weightier than he was used to—say what one would about his little drakkon, but the thing was light—and awkward for that, but he still managed to sink a bolt into the man nearest Cullick’s fore. He took it in the gut, doubled up, and dropped like a sack of flour.
Anyone who couldn’t move fast enough was being shoved or sliced. An innocent man, frozen in shock and terror, was sliced near in half by one of Cullick’s bodyguards.
A runner broke for the end of the street. The arrows turned to him and dropped him as he ran. By then Rurik had discarded his crossbow. He couldn’t have reloaded it if he tried. He lacked the strength, and the hands. He pulled steel instead, and watched Chigenda break from the other side of the road.
At the sight of the whooping, seemingly mad Zuti, the count’s men began a fighting retreat. The returning men-at-arms aimed to surround Chigenda, while the rest of the group bundled their master between them and lit out for busier thoroughfares. Or they would have, if Essa hadn’t gotten a cart into the lane. The addition of fire there might have lit up her position then as sure as any torch in the night, but it had the desired effect.
One of the soldiers rushed her screaming, “Cullick!” as though invoking the lion’s name might produce some divine intervention on his behalf. The remaining pair of men abruptly turned into a neighboring shop. Turned might have been the wrong phrase, though. The door didn’t give when they tried it. So one of the men took an axe to the handle. Homes in the slums weren’t quite as good as their upscale counterparts. It gave without too many strokes, and the men disappeared inside, shoving their lord ahead of them.
Which was Rurik’s own cue to move. Slipping the last of their military pay into the hands of a ruffian who went simply, fittingly, by “Grunge,” Rurik bowed out of the main scene, trusting in Essa and Chigenda to find their way through. Behind him, the half a dozen less than sober brawlers he had just paid for treason picked up their fists and rushed to join Chigenda’s street side brawl.
It wouldn’t be long now. None of the soldiers had gotten out, but not everyone could be bought. Nature of the game. There were always variables one couldn’t control. Most on the street would be doing their utmost to hide, but that didn’t mean all of them would be without devotion. That, and panic had its way of spreading. One man tells another, tells another, and eventually, the right people see…
He quick-shuffled down the alleys, weaving between shops and homes, sometimes one and the same. It was all wood here, scarce stone, solidly built but still poor. Few of them had back ways. What was the point in having more than one door when few had more than a single room? Like most cities, what homes could built up rather than out. They had windows, though. Not bound by glass or anything so pricey, but closed up with hide or oiled parchment. Drab places. Dark.
That actually made it rather easy to tell where his quarry were fleeing. One man was already out the back of the building as he came up on it, with Count Cullick beside him, wringing his hands and casting this way and that. The other man was just climbing out the hole in the wall.
If the odds were poor before, Rurik found them downright abysmal now. Such was the curse of realism. Both the men with Cullick were nothing if not fighters, and men who might actually spoil for a fight, at that. They looked more solid than some of the homes here, and they were drummed out in thick, old style coats of rings, as the northerners liked to wear. That meant they were slow, too, but given that at least one of the men had a jaw like a mule and there looked to be half an armory between them, Rurik found his throat very, very dry.
Time is what we will. It might have done for a house credo, had he ever had that chance. But then again, the man who had taken that chance away from him was here before him. As vulnerable as he would ever be. One has to be realistic, I suppose. Or at least keep perspective.
For what felt like three times too many that night, he rushed. The alleys were cramped here, the buildings looming up against one another in crooked, dingy angles. The air was heavy on his fingers, which ting
led with the weight of his sword. For all this, for all the thunderous beating of his heart and the shuffle thump of his pained limbs, he almost thought he could make it without them noticing him.
Almost. Cullick gave a startled cry as he hurdled the final gap between them, and the one man turned with violence already setting his jaw. My god, Rurik thought, this madness really does make ugly fools of us all. He caught Rurik’s sword before it thrust him through the gut, but he only managed to turn it, not parry it entire, and the force of it snapped off several links of his coat and a streak of blood with it. The man heaved back on that leg even as he swung through, trying to catch Rurik with a fist designed to capitalize on his own momentum.
Rurik came aside, and lunged for Cullick. The fat man yelped and backpedaled, but it was not him Rurik was worried about. The bodyguard, on instinct, overextended himself trying to get between Rurik and his master. A reverse slash buckled his knee as he tried. When his sword came up to block the perceived strike, Rurik did not disappoint, and for all the maille in the world, it was not enough to save his fingers.
Three little jingling lumps went one way and the man’s sword went the other. He yowled, his hand still extended, as though by will alone he might stretch it out far enough to snuff Rurik’s life.
Before Rurik could recover for the execution, though, another mailed fist lit off a white hot explosion in his jaw that brought the stars into focus. Rurik reeled and felt his body go under him. Something white preceded him, and it was only when copper invaded his tongue and the yawning gap of something lost flooded down the back of his throat that he realized it was one of his teeth.
Huh, he thought, all of a second before the follow-up knocked him flat on his back. An axe-point made another star in the night sky. He had wit enough to roll aside from it, but not enough to avert the backhand slap which knocked him about some more. By this time his face was feeling swollen as the Jurree in spring, and about as messy, and that little voice inside cried out: Fight, fight or you will die here, die just feet from what you have always wanted.
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