Honor among thieves abt-3

by David Chandler

  Malden took his leave without a farewell. Outside, the cold air felt good on his face. It smelled better than the air inside the workshop as well. Malden, who had grown up in a city without any kind of public sanitation, where the only known method for dealing with waste was dumping it in the river, had never imagined that Ness could smell good before.

  Ness. His city. Imperiled and fraught with confusion it might be, yet he still loved the place more than he hated it. He truly wanted to save it from destruction. If he could only figure out how. So far he’d just found ways to delay the inevitable. He strained his mind for answers, for solutions. His thoughts grew less focused as he walked. Perhaps he was just tired, having slept very little in weeks. Perhaps he was just His reverie came to an abrupt halt when he heard a cry from the top of the wall. “Archers! Archers to your posts!”

  That couldn’t be good. He scampered up the side of a tavern that abutted the nearest stretch of wall and jumped over the battlements. Men and women were running everywhere, gathering up quivers and bows. No one stopped to tell him what was happening. A hoarding stood nearby, a wooden gallery built over the edge of the wall from which archers could fire without being exposed themselves. Malden ducked inside and peered out through the firing slit.

  Down below, the barbarian camp was a sea of movement and hurry. A wave of fur-clad warriors was headed right for the wall, and they were carrying ladders. Clearly they intended to scale the wall and fight their way inside. This is it, Malden thought. This was the moment he’d been dreading, because he knew that in a direct confrontation with the barbarians he could not win.

  That didn’t mean he was allowed to give up. Croy had taught him that.

  “Forks!” he called. He grabbed the man nearest to him-a thief who was so nervous he couldn’t seem to string his bow. “Get every able-bodied man up here you can, and have them bring forks.”

  The thief looked confused. “What kind of forks?”

  “It doesn’t matter! Pitchforks, turning forks, any bit of wood with a hook on the end, anything. Go! And send word I need Velmont.”

  Rus Galenius, in his Manual of Fortifications, described scaling ladders in exquisite detail-the best wood for their construction, the proper time and manner of their use, the number of men who should be on one at any given time. The counterstrategy for dealing with ladders was so ancient and so simple the author seemed to disdain its mention, giving it a single sentence. Malden had actually been paying attention the day Cutbill read him that passage, however.

  The first ladder touched the wall not a hundred feet from where Malden stood, and berserkers started scrambling up the rungs. “You,” Malden said, pointing at a group of female archers in the next hoarding over. “Don’t let them reach the top!”

  Bows flexed and arrows shot downward at flat angles. The berserkers were easy targets, unable to move out of the way as the archers poured shafts into them. Soon the men near the top of the ladder looked like pincushions for all the arrows sticking out of their arms and backs. Unable to feel pain, they kept climbing until they died and fell away.

  At the base of the ladder a hundred more men waited their turn.

  An old man carrying a pitchfork came up to Malden and saluted. It took Malden a second to remember how to salute back. “Thank the Bloodgod you’re here,” Malden said. “Do you see that ladder, where its end sticks up over the wall?”

  The oldster nodded and gave Malden a wicked grin. He hefted his fork and made toward the ladder.

  “Wait,” Malden said. “Not quite yet.” He waited until the topmost berserker on the ladder had nearly crested the wall. Below him the ladder bowed with the weight of half a dozen more. “Now,” Malden said.

  The old man caught the top rung of the ladder with the tines of his fork and heaved. The ladder weighed too much for him, so Malden grabbed the end of the fork and lent the strength of his own back to the effort.

  The ladder twisted and bent and then fell backward. Some of the men clinging to it jumped free. Some lacked the presence of mind to do so. Bodies made horrible crunching noises when they struck the frozen ground below. The ladder shattered as it spun away from the wall.

  “Good,” Malden said. “Like that! Every time. Wait until they’re nearly at the top, so you get as many of them as possible. But don’t wait so long that even one of them gets over the side.” He turned to look around him. “Where is Velmont?” he demanded.

  His Helstrovian lieutenant appeared a moment later. “I came as fast as I could,” he pleaded.

  Malden grabbed his forearms and dragged him out of the hoarding, making room for more archers to crowd inside. “Something’s changed,” he said. “I don’t know what, but it’s not good. Last night they were still intent on waiting us out-letting us starve in here, until we begged them to come in and feed us. Now they’ve lost their patience. I don’t know why. But this is what we’ve been dreading. A real attack! Get every single archer you can up here. Get me watchers at every tower along the wall, get me reports-I need to know if the attack is just in this one place or if they’re everywhere. Go! Quickly!”

  Velmont dashed off to do Malden’s bidding. Malden needed that information. And yet, in the pit of his heart, he already knew what Velmont would report.

  This was the moment Ness would be lost. All the planning he’d done, all the hard work, had been designed around one simple principle: that the besiegers would wait him out. Clearly that belief had been founded on the wrong principles. There would not be enough archers, nor enough old men with pitchforks, if the barbarians were serious about scaling the wall. And in his experience, he’d never known Morget’s people to be less than serious about anything.

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  “They’re scaling Ditchwall now, and there’s no one to stop them!” Cythera sent her consciousness winging over Ness, trying to watch in every direction at once. “There are two more ladders at Wheatwall. One just fell, but- No! Malden!”

  “He’s not your lover anymore,” Coruth growled. “This is why you had to renounce him. Do not tarry with him-tell me where else the barbarians are attacking.”

  Cythera watched as Malden hurried toward Ditchwall, shouting for forks and archers. If the barbarians reached the top of the wall and surrounded him, even Acidtongue wouldn’t save him from “Tell me what you see, girl!”

  Coruth’s voice was tinny and small, as if she were very far away. Even though she sat directly next to Cythera in the main room of their house on the Isle of Horses. It was so hard to stay aware of her body, to keep talking even while her eyes saw things in a hundred places at once. How could anyone do this? How could any witch bear seeing so much and not slip free of her body altogether?

  “You may be one of the initiated, but you’re still learning,” Coruth told her, and suddenly the older witch’s voice was much louder. Cythera felt like her being was yanked sideways, pulled away from Ditchwall, as if she were a kite whose string had been tugged. “Look, daughter. Look everywhere-we must know what they’re doing.”

  “But why?” Cythera demanded. She couldn’t see Malden anymore-was he overrun? Was he already dead? “What’s the point? Just knowing where the barbarians are doesn’t help anyone. We can’t tell them where to concentrate their forces. We can’t fight them ourselves.”

  “Do as you’re told!”

  Cythera tried not to think of Malden, to spread her consciousness wider. It was so hard-she’d just learned how this was done a few hours before. “Mother, the city will fall in the next hour-there are so many of them!” At Ryewall a barbarian climbed up on the battlements, only to be struck down by three arrows fired from different directions. At Westwall a fork pushed away another ladder, even as the barbarians raised two more. “We have to stop this. We have to do something, not just watch!”

  “And what would you do?” Coruth demanded.

  “Cast a spell. Set the ladders aflame, or-or call down a storm, they can’t climb if the ladders are too slick with rain to hold onto.” />
  “You think those things are in my power?”

  Cythera couldn’t bear it. Ness was about to be overrun-the siege broken. The barbarians were about to take the city and there was nothing she could do. “They’ll kill everyone, Mother. They’ll kill every single person in this city.”

  “So now you’ve seen the future?”

  “I’ve seen enough to know how much blood they’ll shed once they’re inside the walls,” Cythera insisted.

  “So the time has come,” Coruth said.

  “What time? Mother, we have to help!” Cythera said. She felt as light as a scrap of silk floating on the wind. Her head reeled and her senses were on fire.

  A slender thread snapped somewhere, and twanged like a broken bowstring. Cythera felt as if she were being pulled through the air faster than a trebuchet ball, and then she was falling, falling so fast.

  With a start she lurched forward and found herself sitting in her chair, back on the Isle of Horses. Her consciousness was firmly back inside her body. She tried to extend her vision again, to see farther, but she could not. It was like she’d never been trained to be a witch at all.

  Beside her, Coruth sat, her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. “You’re done for the day,” she said.

  “What? But the attack-the barbarians-”

  “There’s supper to get ready,” Coruth said, as if it were just an ordinary day. “And you need to sweep out the grate. There’s a week’s worth of ashes piled in there. I expect it all done by the time I return.”

  Cythera couldn’t believe it. The siege was about to be broken and her mother could only talk of chores? “Wait-when you return from where?”

  “I had hoped there would be more time to train you before things came to this dark pass,” Coruth said. “I can only hope you’ve learned enough.” And then her body erupted in a welter of blackbirds that winged around the room, smashing against the walls and ceiling as they desperately tried to find their way through the open window.

  The chair where Coruth had sat was empty.

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  There seemed to be no end to the berserkers willing to scale the wall, even when every ladder was knocked away, even when Malden’s archers kept cutting them down. Messengers kept running in to tell him of new ladders reaching for other sections of the wall-the barbarians were too smart to let him mass his archers anywhere, and instead were sending up ladders on every side of the city. They must have constructed hundreds of them overnight. The ladders were easily destroyed, pushed back by forks, and every time one fell a half-dozen barbarians fell with it.

  Yet they kept coming.

  “Two at Swampwall!” a messenger shouted. Malden dispatched archers that were already too thinly spread where he stood on Ditchwall. He raced around the circumference of the city, calling for more forks, more people to push the attackers away. He had no lack of volunteers-women and men were pouring out of the Stink, looking for any way to help. They found things they could use for forks, things Malden would never have thought of-threshing flails on six foot long poles, the long brass candle snuffers from the ruins of the Ladychapel-and he put them to work as soon as they presented themselves. Still more ladders came.

  A team of old women pushed a ladder away from the wall not a hundred yards from Malden-but not before one crazed berserker was able to grab on to the hoarding there. He swung by a hand for one moment as archers peppered him with shafts, but he did not lose his grip. Like a demon out of the pit he laughed and struggled to pull himself up onto the wall. No one could stop him. The moment his feet hit the top of the wall, the fur-clad attacker came at the old women with axe in hand, clearly not caring who he killed, only wanting blood. Malden had to dash in with every ounce of his speed to beat him to his kill. The barbarian was foaming at the mouth and his bloodshot eyes never blinked as Malden drew Acidtongue and sliced his head off. The head went bouncing down inside the city to smash off the chimney pot of a house far below. Malden kicked the body the other way, to crash down on the frozen soil outside the wall.

  It was the first time he’d ever killed a human being with his magic sword. His entire body shook and he thought he might throw up. But now he understood. This was why he wasn’t allowed to give it to the Burgrave. This was why Croy had demanded he take it. Why fate had decreed he should hold it.

  He hated the world in that moment. The world where such things were necessary.

  “Lord Mayor,” someone said. It sounded like they were very far away. Then he looked up and saw one of Elody’s girls staring into his eyes. She couldn’t be more than sixteen. She held a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other and she looked like a little girl playing with toys. She was terrified, and she needed someone to make everything okay. “Lord Mayor, please-they’re still coming.”

  Malden looked down at the sword in his hand, at the blood on its blade, and suddenly he could think again. He looked down, over the parapet, and saw another ladder reaching up toward him, more barbarians scrambling up its rungs.

  “Archers! Bring me more archers!” he screamed, though he knew there were no more to be had. There was so much wall to cover that if the archers spread out evenly all around Ness, they would have to stand a hundred feet away from each other. There was no way they could cover every part of the wall, and no way they could kill every barbarian that tried to climb up. It took half a dozen shots to bring down even one berserker-Malden wondered if he’d even had enough arrows made, or if they would exhaust their supply before long.

  “Pick your shots with care,” he instructed, and Elody’s girl nodded grimly. “Only shoot the ones at the tops of the ladders-they’re the ones most likely to get in. Aim for their eyes-no-aim for their hands. Leave them unable to climb, and they’ll stall the ones below!”

  He ran everywhere, trying to see every side of the city at once. But Ness was too big. His archers were too spread out. He saw barbarians clambering up over an unprotected section of wall. He ran toward them, knowing he had gotten lucky with the berserker he’d beheaded, that if it came to a real fight he would be unable to hold them back. “Get me anyone who can fight,” he shouted. “And archers! More archers!”

  He waded into the midst of the barbarians coming over the wall, Acidtongue whirling around him, cutting open arms and stomachs and faces. Some of the barbarians screamed and fell away from the wall, but others-berserkers-didn’t seem to notice they were faced by a madman with a magic sword. One gnashed his teeth at the blade as if he would take a bite out of it. His axe swung at Malden’s head, and Malden knew he couldn’t block it in time. He winced backward, expecting to die.

  A dozen arrows appeared in the barbarian’s neck and side and back, knocking him back. Blood spurted from the wounds. The barbarian tried to bring his arm down, tried to follow through with his axe stroke-and five more arrows cut through the muscles of his shoulder. He fell away in tatters, stumbling over the parapet to fall into the streets below.

  Malden whirled around to see who had saved him-and saw a dozen archers standing there. He thought they must have come from all over the city and left huge stretches of wall unguarded, only so they could save him. Except there was something wrong with these men-they stood in a perfect line, each of them with their feet spread exactly the same distance apart, each of them holding their bows at the same angle. They even seemed to be dressed identically. He studied their faces and found the features of Tyburn, one of his thieves. They all had Tyburn’s face.

  Malden turned slowly around and saw another dozen archers behind him. Every single one of them looked exactly like Guennie, one of Herwig’s girls. As he watched, flummoxed, the Guennies lifted their bows and easily picked a barbarian off a ladder. Their arrows flew in perfect synchrony and hit the same man, the points hitting his flesh no more than an inch apart from one another. More barbarians came scurrying up the ladder, but six identical one-armed men heaved at a fork they’d made by lashing their crutches together, and the ladder spun away to fall and collapse.r />
  The archers, the one-armed men, they didn’t look like ghosts. They looked as real to Malden as he was. Yet it was impossible, utterly impossible.

  “Witchcraft,” Malden gasped.

  Over Castle Hill, a flock of dark birds were circling, faster and faster. Watching them made him dizzy. Malden turned to look at the next section of wall over, the length called Ditchwall. It was crowded with archers and fork-bearers. They stood side by side, so close their elbows touched. No-not just touched. As they moved to pick new targets or rushed to push back a ladder, they passed right through each other, no matter how solid they seemed. They were illusions, products of some spell Coruth was casting.

  And yet their arrows were wickedly real. The forks they wielded pushed with real force against the ladders. How could it be? In Malden’s experience, such phantasms could never touch the living, and certainly could offer them no harm. He thought of the ghostly horses on Coruth’s island, or the illusions he had bested inside Hazoth’s villa the summer before. Those had been diabolically clever and led him toward destruction, but were unable to hurt him on their own.

  Coruth’s doubles were killing barbarians as fast as they could come at the wall. The energy she was expending must be enormous. He looked at the circling flock again, and saw one of the birds falter and drop like a stone. For a second Parkwall was bare of archers again, but then they flickered back into existence.

  Coruth could not have kept the spell going much longer. Fortunately, she didn’t have to. When they saw what they were facing atop the walls, someone in the barbarian camp was smart enough to call a retreat.

  As quickly as it had begun, the attack broke off. Ladders fell, abandoned, against the wall. Bodies were left to lie where they’d broken. The phantom archers kept up a withering fire that followed the barbarians all the way back to their camp, and more than one berserker, too far gone into rage to properly retreat, was cut down while trying to rush the walls with his bare fists.