A couple of times he thought about donning his own uniform hat, hiding behind the authority it gave him, and then dismissed the idea. His former colleagues would be on the lookout for him in any case, and there was no point in making himself even more visible. They’d be bound to hail another watchman, even if they didn’t recognise his face at once, to exchange news and information, and all the other Caps he’d seen were in groups of two or three. Alone, he’d be far more noticeable than he would be just trying to blend in with the civilians surrounding them.
They passed into the Suiddock ward at last, and his steps became hesitant. He didn’t know the streets here the way he did in the Winkelmarkt, just the main thoroughfares, and remaining concealed would be far more difficult. On the other hand, the crowds around them had grown as well, teamsters and stevedores hurrying to work, the bustle of the dock area never entirely still even at this pre-dawn hour. Indeed, several cargoes seemed to be on the move already. Taking Hanna by the elbow, he led her in among a tightly packed string of wagons heading for the Draainbrug. With a bit of luck they might be able to cross it, concealed by the surrounding traffic.
That hope was soon extinguished, however. Long before they could reach the marvel of dwarf engineering, the wagons stopped, blocked by a milling throng of pedestrians and other carts.
“What is it?” Hanna asked anxiously. “What’s going on?”
The carter on the wagon beside them glanced down, and gestured in the vague direction of the bridge.
Craning his neck, Rudi could just make out the huge tower in the middle of the river around which the mighty structure pivoted.
“The bridge is open,” the man said. He stood up on his seat for a better view, glancing left and right. “That’s funny. There doesn’t seem to be a ship coming.” Rudi fought to keep his face neutral. Of course, he thought. The first thing the Suiddock watch would have done after getting Gerrit’s message would be to open the bridge, trapping the fugitives in the southern half of the city. The disruption would be severe, of course, but the authorities would be prepared to tolerate it for a little while if it meant catching a couple of dangerous heretics.
“Come on.” He led Hanna through the growing, and increasingly restive, throng. Before long, some of the Suiddock Caps would be turning up to keep order, and they wouldn’t be able to evade detection once that happened. The bridge was flanked by jetties where water coaches could usually be found, the Bruynwater being just as much an artery of commerce for the local communities that lined its banks as it was for the city as a whole, and if they were quick enough they ought to be able to hail one before too many of the people surrounding them had the same idea. “Stick close.”
“Like a poultice,” the young witch assured him grimly. He’d been worried that her exhaustion would return, and that she wouldn’t be in any condition to continue, but whatever preternatural energy was sustaining her seemed undiminished.
As they slipped through the crowd, he glanced back, and almost froze. A trio of Black Caps was forging its way through the crush towards the bridge, and a couple of them were carrying the unmistakable silhouettes of blunderbusses. That would have been worrying enough, but the third member of the group made the breath catch in his throat. Rauke van Stolke was clearing the way for her colleagues, none too gently with the flat of her sword, directing a bitter tirade back over her shoulder as she did so.
“Typical,” Rudi heard above the babble of the crowd. “I finally meet someone who looks like he’s halfway decent, and he turns out to be a witch-rutting Chaos worshipper.” She vented her anger by barging a halfling peddler out of the way with unnecessary vigour.
Rudi flushed. Woe betide any petty lawbreaker coming to her attention today, he thought. With a pang, he found himself remembering the pleasant meal they’d shared only the evening before, and the sense of wellbeing that had followed it. He’d enjoyed her company, and had been looking forward to experiencing more of it. He lowered his head, although from embarrassment at having hurt the woman’s feelings or the more practical necessity of evading detection he couldn’t have said.
“Keep moving,” Hanna urged him in an imperative undertone, and Rudi nodded, relieved at the distraction. The steps to the jetty were close at hand, and so far no one appeared to have noticed the two fugitives. As they descended the wooden steps, the snow closed in around them, cutting them off from the commotion at street level, and he glanced back for a final look around at the confusion above.
A knot of tension tightened itself in the pit of his stomach. The trio of Black Caps was unmistakably heading in their direction, and he cursed himself for his stupidity. Of course, they’d send someone to secure the jetties too. If he and Hanna couldn’t find a boat in the next few minutes they’d just walked into a trap.
CHAPTER TWO
The snow was falling more heavily than ever, obscuring the shipping channel in the darkness beyond, but to Rudi’s relief the wooden jetty was illuminated by a couple of torches, hissing fitfully as the occasional snowflake drifted into the flames.
“Boats,” Hanna said, sudden hope colouring her voice.
Rudi nodded. “Let’s hope there’s someone here who can sail one for us.” He had only ridden in one of the innumerable skiffs that plied for hire along the waterways of the city a handful of times, but that was enough for him to know that the intricacies of handling the sail would be far beyond him. He could probably manage the oars well enough, but that would be time consuming, and the sky was already taking on the first flush of grey, which warned that dawn was not far off. They’d stand a far better chance of making it to the candle wharf on Luydenhoek in time with a water coachman piloting the boat for them. Most, he knew, would still be at home, but there were usually a few about in the hours of darkness. Marienburg never completely slept, and there would be coin to be earned for those willing to put up with the inconvenience and occasional danger of providing transport during the night.
“I think we’re in luck.” Hanna nudged his arm, and pointed. Beneath a sconce about halfway along the wooden walkway, a handful of men huddled around a brazier, their breath misting in the air as they talked among themselves. Their clothing and manner marked them out as watermen, and Rudi approached them briskly.
“I need passage to Luydenhoek,” he announced, as if that was a perfectly reasonable request at this hour. “I’ll pay two shillings to anyone who can get us there by dawn.”
“Two shillings?” One of the water coachmen looked at him narrowly, and noticing the suspicious expressions on the faces of the man’s companions, Rudi cursed himself quietly under his breath. That was over four times the regular fare: hardly the best way to keep a low profile.
“That’s right.” Rudi smiled, hoping to look like a late-returning reveller again, suddenly acutely conscious of the bow slung across his back, hardly a common sight in the streets of Marienburg. He indicated Hanna. “The bridge is open, and if I don’t get my girlfriend home before her father notices she’s missing, she’s going to be in real trouble.”
“I see,” the boatman said, probably more inclined to believe the two shillings than the story attached to it, if Rudi was any judge. He shrugged, smiling insincerely. “Wish I could help you, laddie, but the Caps have said no sailing until further notice, and that’s that.” He spat into the water. “Typical. Some half-wit shouts, ‘witch’ and the whole city grinds to a halt. Never mind our livelihoods.”
“Damn right,” somebody else said, and the little knot of boatmen aired their grievances among themselves for a moment, apparently forgetting their putative clients entirely.
“You have to help, please.” Hanna sounded tearful and frightened, her voice changing completely, as it had on the moors when she’d tried to bluff her way past Gerhard’s soldiers. “My father has such a temper. You’ve no idea what he’ll do if he finds I sneaked out of the house.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.” The boatman’s voice hardened. “If we got caught, I’d be fined, couple of guilders
at least. I could lose the boat over a debt like that.”
“Two guilders, fine.” Rudi dug the gold coins out of his purse, suddenly conscious of the stares of the men around him. He could hear their thoughts as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud. That’s a lot of money. Wonder how much more there is in that purse. There’s only one of him, and six of us. He brushed the hilt of his sword casually as he returned the purse to his belt, and the moment passed. The boatman nodded.
“All right, but if we get caught you pay the fine, on top of this. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Rudi said. The man gestured to a nearby boat.
“That’s mine. Get in.” He watched while Rudi helped Hanna aboard, and unhitched the line securing the tiny craft to the dock. He turned to his companions. “If the Caps come back and notice I’m missing, tell them I’ve gone to Gerda’s to thaw out.”
“She can thaw me out any time,” one of the other boatmen said, to ribald laughter.
“Any time you’ve got sixpence in your purse,” the waterman said, jumping into the skiff. That provoked another round of laughter, but through it, Rudi was sure he could hear the clattering of feet on the steps leading up to the street above: the Caps. Without thinking, he glanced in that direction, catching sight of Rauke and her colleagues jogging down the wharf towards them, their outlines blurred by the flurrying snow.
“What’s up?” the boatman asked, reading his expression, and glancing in the same direction. He must have taken in the sight of the approaching Caps almost at once, because he lunged at Rudi without warning, raising his voice to a shout. “Help! They’re stealing my boat!”
Under any other circumstances, the sheer effrontery of it would probably have taken Rudi completely by surprise, but after everything he’d already been through that night, he was ready for any eventuality. He blocked the man’s clumsy rush without thinking, not even bothering to evade it, and punched him hard in the face. The boat rocked alarmingly. Hanna cried out and clung to the gunwales as freezing water slopped over the side, and Rudi sat down hard on the seat facing the stern.
The boatman wasn’t so lucky. With an inarticulate cry, he lost his footing and pitched backwards over the side. A gout of foetid canal water broke over the boat, drenching the fugitives with its freezing spray, and the man surfaced, spluttering.
“Get them!” Rauke shouted, and the two gunners with her dropped to one knee, bringing their clumsy weapons up to fire. Clearly perceiving the danger he was in, the boatman struck out for the jetty, and the reaching arms of his friends, protesting loudly as he did so.
“Oi! That’s my living! Don’t you dare go blowing holes in it!”
Rudi cringed. He’d seen a blunderbuss discharged once before, during a raid on a weirdroot den. The cone of shot had blasted a thick wooden door off its hinges, and taken down the three would-be ambushers waiting behind it. Wallowing out here in the water, he and Hanna were sitting ducks. There was no way the watchmen could miss at this range.
“Who are they?” Rauke asked as the boatman floundered up onto the wharf, hauled to safety by his friends. Then her eyes nailed Rudi’s. An expression of loathing and anger boiled up in them, following the spark of recognition. “It’s the witches!” she yelled. “Fire!”
“Grab the oars,” Hanna said, her voice surprisingly calm. Rudi complied, although he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. He dug the blades into the water, heaving with all his strength, trying to get the tiny craft moving. If he could just throw the gunners’ aim off, and by some miracle they both missed, it would take them at least half a minute to reload, perhaps longer with cold-numbed fingers. By that time, he and Hanna would be well underway, obscured by the darkness and the flurrying snow, and the short-ranged weapons might not get time for another shot.
None of which actually mattered, of course, because the hail of hot metal would have shredded them both by then.
Rudi flinched at the sound of a double report from the wharf side, which echoed across the water in a curiously flat fashion, anticipating the agony of a dozen miniature musket balls ripping their way through his body, but the searing pain never came. He heaved at the oars, astonished at their good fortune.
Despite the urgency of their predicament, he was unable to resist glancing back at the wharf, trying to gauge how long they had left before the men reloaded, and almost froze with astonishment. Both gunners were down, thrashing about on the snow-covered planks like landed fish. Bright blood leaked through charred and blackened flesh, vivid against the backdrop of flurrying white.
“Keep rowing!” Hanna snapped.
Rudi did so, opening up the distance from the dock, heedless of the drama playing out behind them. Rauke was kneeling beside one of the downed gunners, apparently directing the boatmen to assist her fallen colleagues. She glanced in the fugitives’ direction and shouted something, which perhaps fortunately was lost in the muffling snow, before returning her attention to the wounded.
“What happened?” Rudi asked. Hanna shrugged.
“They were carrying powder flasks. I’m a pyromancer, remember?” Rudi nodded grimly, recalling the way the oil lamps at the coaching inn on the Altdorf road had suddenly burst into flame while they were trying to escape the landlord who’d threatened to turn them over to the Roadwardens. It seemed that his companion was still able to use her abilities after all.
“How did you manage that?” he asked. “I thought you were all in?”
Hanna shrugged. “So did I,” she said, pulling the skaven’s stone out from beneath her bodice. As Rudi had half expected, it was still glowing faintly. “This seems to be helping me somehow.”
“Good.” Rudi hauled on the oars until he felt his back would break with the effort. “Right now, we need all the help we can get.”
At least one of the gods must have been keeping an eye on them, Rudi thought, because they made it across the shipping channel without drowning or being swept out to sea. The tide was just on the turn, the water slack, and the realisation lent him renewed vigour. Shenk would want to make use of the surge of incoming seawater to help counteract the current of the Reik, making the going easier as the Reikmaiden began her long journey. The riverboat would be casting off any time now, just as soon as the water level in the canals began to rise.
Despite the surge of adrenaline the thought gave him, he began to slow down again after only a handful of minutes. Since waking around noon the previous day, he’d fought for his life more times than he could remember, become a fugitive again, and walked or run across what felt like half the city. Even the unusual reserves of strength he was somehow able to call on in times of stress weren’t limitless. He was exhausted, and hard as he tried to force his body to do what was necessary with the clumsy oars, he misjudged his stroke several times, doing nothing more than flick a spray of freezing water into the boat. Each time he did it they wallowed, losing their way and the prow of their tiny craft veered alarmingly.
“Move over.” Hanna reached out and took the oars briskly. Too numbed to protest, Rudi acquiesced, changing places with her, so that he was now facing forwards, towards the far bank. At least there was no chance of getting lost in the darkness, he thought. Despite the obscuring snow, still enclosing them in a pocket of chilling anonymity, the lights of Luydenhoek were clearly visible in the distance.
He fought down the memory of their frantic swim for the banks of the Reik, after Shenk had realised they were fugitives and became determined to collect whatever reward they were worth. Then they’d only made it to safety by luck, or so it had seemed at the time, the pitch darkness surrounding them and the chilling water robbing them of any sense of direction. Now they were trusting their lives to the riverboat captain again, a prospect he hardly relished, but at least this time he’d be on guard for any treachery, he thought. That, at least, was a lesson he’d learned well since leaving Kohlstadt. No one could really be trusted, however benign they seemed to be.
“Can you manage?” he asked, although Hanna see
med to be rowing the boat with no difficulty at all, the strange energy imparted by the skaven’s stone still evidently suffusing her body. He tried not to think about that either. Magic, he knew, always exacted a price for its use, and he hoped his friend wouldn’t pay too dearly for the assistance she was getting.
“I’m fine,” Hanna assured him, her strokes deft and fluid, propelling the tiny craft faster and more efficiently across the water than he had. She grinned, with the closest thing to good humour he’d seen on her face for some time. “I could do with the exercise. Helps warm me up.” Knowing that one of her talents was regulating the temperature of the air around her, Rudi doubted that, but tried to smile in response.
“I think there are some steps over there,” he said, craning his neck to see past her shoulder. Hanna turned the boat in the direction he’d suggested, as expertly as if she’d been on the water all her life, and made for the jetty he’d indicated. After a moment the wooden hull grated against stone, and he scrambled out, his feet slipping slightly on the weed-grown surface beneath his boot soles. Hanna followed nimbly, and turned to push the boat off again with her foot as soon as she’d gained the sanctuary of the steps. “Why did you do that?”
“You told the boatman we were heading for Luydenhoek,” Hanna pointed out. “Your little friend with the unbecoming hat will have had the bridge closed again as soon as she reported in, and messages sent to every watch house this side of the water.”
Rudi nodded. He knew enough of how the watch worked to know that this was true. If anything, the Suiddock Caps would have been relieved at the news that they’d stolen a boat. Closing the Draainbrug wouldn’t be popular, and the last thing the watch needed was a large and restive crowd getting more angry and frustrated by the minute. Time was money in Marienburg, more literally than anywhere else in the known world, and they’d be under pressure from the mercantile guilds to get the lifeblood of commerce flowing again as soon as possible. “No point making it obvious where we’ve come ashore.”
[Blood on the Reik 03] - Death's Legacy Page 2
