Honor among thieves abt-3

by David Chandler

  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.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Malden 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 stone
s 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!”

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  “Fascinating. In the space of one night they built three trebuchets? I would have thought the technique far beyond them.” Cutbill mused silently for a moment. “Unless they had help. Perhaps an engineer seized at Helstrow. Or a dwarf.”

  “For all I know Morgain has a degree in divinity from the university at Redweir. For all I care she may have two,” Malden insisted. “You’re missing the point. They’re throwing stones even now!”

  “What does Slag say? I assume he’s had a look at the engines. Was he impressed or disdainful of their construction?”

  Malden ground his teeth together. “Disdainful, on the whole,” he admitted. “They’re using traction engines, apparently. That means that instead of using counterweights, they actually have teams of men pulling on ropes to launch the stones. He seemed to find that grossly inefficient. I understood very little of his reasons why. I was too busy looking at the great heaps of missiles they had ready to fire at us. Those heaps were as big as houses!”

  “They’ll run out eventually. There are no proper boulders out in the farmland where they camp,” Cutbill pointed out. “Most likely they’ve already taken to demolishing stone buildings for ammunition.”

  “You’re not seeing this,” Malden insisted. “My people are dying.”

  Cutbill leaned back in his chair and turned his eyes to face the ceiling. He sighed deeply for a moment, then said, simply, “Malden. You must think, not feel.”

  The thief-the Lord Mayor-jumped to his feet. “What? What say you now? Is your blood so cold you can’t even mourn your fellow citizens? A little girl-just a little girl, crushed-broken as if she’d been worked over by torturers for a month. An entire family in the Stink, dead, save their piteous wretch of a mother, spared by uncaring fate just so she could watch her babies die-”

  “Malden,” Cutbill said again, perfectly calm.

  “What, damn you?”

  “Malden, this is a war. I thought you understood that.”

  “I’ve thought of nothing else in days!”

  Cutbill sighed again. Malden had grown to hate that sound. “In war, people die.”

  “Volunteer soldiers, perhaps. Foreign mercenaries. The enemy. But-”

  “You’ve had your first real taste of war, and it galled. That’s perfectly understandable. Only a bronze statue of a man would not have this reaction. Yet you must not let this horror consume you. If you don’t steel yourself now, you’ll be mad in a week,” Cutbill pointed out. “Many people will die. You may lose half your constituents before this is over. And if you don’t win this battle, the other half will be enslaved. Or worse.”

  Malden’s heart seized in his chest. He cried out, an inarticulate noise of rage and fear and utter sorrow. “I never wanted this! I never even wanted to be Lord Mayor. I didn’t want to take over your guild! I never asked for any of this responsibility, and I don’t want it now. I’ve done all this only because no one else would, or could-because if I didn’t the people of Ness would be without a protector. And now I’ve failed them!”

  “It is to the good, in some part, that you feel so much for them,” Cutbill said. “That will help you when you must inspire them to fight on in the face of despair. Your sincerity will be a far greater weapon than your magic sword.”

  “I cannot bear this,” Malden moaned.

  “You can, and you must. Every prince in history has felt this way, I imagine. They learned to cope. The good ones anyway. And so shall you. They learned that pawns on a game board cannot be treated as individuals. That one must think strategically, even when one’s heart is breaking.”

  Malden fell back in his chair and stared at the man.

  Could anyone truly be so callous?

  But yes. Yes, they could. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Every time the Burgrave had ordered some man hanged as an example, just to improve the public order. Every time some bastard reeve in the field had beaten a peasant because he wasn’t working hard enough, because the crops had to be harvested or everyone would starve. He’d seen it a million times in his life, this ability to armor one’s heart against cries of mercy and compassion, and do the hard thing.

  He’d fought all his life against the men who ran the world. He’d learned to sneak around their rules and controls, and find some space of breath, some freedom, for himself. Always he had hated them for their cruelty.

  And now he was one of them.

  “If you are going to prevail,” Cutbill said, “you must find a way to take the battle to the barbarian. You cannot simply hide your head now. Let us discuss methods for repaying this injustice, shall we? I think we’ll begin with a reading from Galenius. We were discussing, on your last visit, the proper use of fascines and ramps. Make yourself comfortable, and we’ll begin.”

  Malden got up and started walking toward the door. “Not now,” he insisted.

  “Malden, if you have an ounce of sense you’ll come back here and-”

  “I said not now,” Malden grated, and pushed his way out into the sunlight. Somewhere in the distance he could hear screaming.

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Bethane slumped down to sit on a rock and rub at her feet. If she had as many blisters as he did, Croy thought, every step must be torture to her. He wished he could carry her on his shoulders, but even his strength had flagged over the last few miles. The wound in his side was festering and he could barely lift his left arm. So instead he knelt before her and carefully unwrapped the rags he had wound around her feet. The rags stank and were blotchy with blood and pus. He used some of their precious water to wash her feet, then wrapped them up again in the same dirty rags because he had no fresh cloth. Eventually she managed to stand again, and start shuffling forward, again.

  Neither of them said a word the whole time. It was not the first time he’d washed and wrapped her feet. It would not be the last.

  North of the orchard where Croy had been wounded, the Whitewall Mountains curled to the west and shrank to rough hills, their tops cluttered with wind-slumped trees. It was bad country, dry and cold, and in many places snow gathered in ravines and defiles deep enough to swallow a man whole. That snow was their only source of water, but to get it he had to make a fire, and every fire they lit was a beacon to their enemies. There was no food to be had there at all.

  The hills were going to kill them, Croy believed. He would gladly have turned south, turned away from that desperate country. But the hills also represented his only hope. They formed a natural border between Skrae and Skilfing, the closest of the Northern Kingdoms. If he could cross that treacherous land, he would have fulfilled his duty and delivered Bethane to some kind of safety.

  Then, he thought, perhaps he could lie down and die. If not for Cythera.

  His betrothed was in his thoughts at all times, though such fancies tortured him as much as they spurred him onward. Cythera. The Lady had brought her into his life, surely. No one else could have done him suc
h an honor. His mind kept casting back toward the day in Ness when she had almost signed the banns of their marriage. When, but for a bottle of spilled ink, she would have been his. Instead they had postponed things and raced off to the Vincularium for one last adventure before they entered a new life together.

  He had laughed so much back then. He’d had a fair hand to kiss, and a lady’s kerchief to tie around the end of his lance. It had made so much sense.

  Now Cythera was hundreds of miles away, if she wasn’t already dead. He had no way of knowing whether the barbarians had taken Ness yet. He was certain that if they had, Malden would never have allowed them to take Cythera alive-the thief was a good friend, and would know what he would want done if things came to that pass. That was the true reason why he’d given Acidtongue to Malden.

  He’d told and convinced himself that Malden could someday be an Ancient Blade. That the thief had the potential to be something more. No one had taken the idea seriously-not even Malden himself. Croy persisted in this folly because he knew on some level Malden cared for Cythera almost as much as he did himself. He had treated Malden like a knight because he wanted the little man to act like one. He’d wanted someone to take care of Cythera when he couldn’t.

  He hoped he’d made the right choice.

  Ahead of him on the path, Bethane tripped over something and fell forward on her face, barely catching herself with her hands. Croy rushed to her side and helped her sit up. The palms of her hands were scratched and filthy. She made no sound of pain or discomfort, though. Both of them were well past feeling small scrapes. Croy brushed as much dirt off her hands as he could and helped her stand.

  He looked back idly, trying to see what had snared Bethane. An exposed tree root, probably, or maybe just a rough patch of ground. He did not expect to see the haft of a poleaxe lying astride the trail.

  Bethane didn’t even look. She started hobbling forward again, one small step at a time. Croy didn’t tell her to stop-every foot of ground they covered was precious.