‘Hold the bastard still,’ he hissed.
Quintillian, desperate and struggling still, threw every ounce of strength in his body into holding the man for just a moment and, as the nomad’s thrashing temporarily lessened, Asander thrust forward with the spear.
The prince felt a thin, hot line of pain across his hand as the spear tip whispered past his flesh and slammed into the nomad’s face. He could hear the crunch of bone and the shudder-inducing meaty sawing noise as the blade entered the man’s face and drove deep, dividing his brain. The body clutched in his arms was shaking now rather than struggling, quivering in its death throes. He heard the spear being pulled back out and felt the wash of blood and brain matter flow down over his hands. Still he kept tight hold, fearing that even in death the man might scream. Only when the nomad fell still did he remove his hand from the mouth. The ruined face was the stuff of nightmare as the guard fell onto his back in a pool of his own ichor.
‘We can’t take him with us,’ Quintillian hissed, wiping his hands on the man’s tunic once he’d found the cleanest spot. ‘But we can’t just leave him here.’
Asander shot him a scathing look. ‘You don’t think the huge pool of blood will be a giveaway anyway?’
‘True. All right. Speed over stealth, then. Problem is, that means we don’t have time to wait for the guard to be relieved. There goes the idea of jumping the relief and taking his place.’
‘Not quite. You don’t have to look too far to find a nomad’s war gear you can don!’
Quintillian grinned. Thanks to the attire they had been given in the palace, all he would need to do was slip on the heavy boots instead of their leather shoes, then strap on the weapons, the fur headgear and the heavy cloak and he could easily pass for one of them in the gloom. The man had no bow, which was unusual for one of the nomads, but then what use would a bow have been in the corridors of the palace, so that was no surprise, really.
‘Who gets the gear?’
‘You do,’ Asander said. ‘You’re the one with the fair hair. I’m nice and dark, but you could never pass for a nomad without the hat.’
Quintillian nodded and quickly slipped on the outer gear of the fallen guard, belting the sword in place. ‘You’ll have to take all the blankets then, and stay behind me in the shadows until I give you the signal.’
‘Would the signal by any chance be the death rattle of a clansman?’
‘Something like that. Keep your eyes and ears open.’
The two men left the open vestibule, the body of the dead guard, lying in the pool of viscera, a grisly centrepiece. Quintillian tried to decide between keeping the blade sheathed at his side for the appearance of normality and drawing it to carry bared in preparation for trouble. Subtlety won out and he left the blade in its sheath, pulling out the dagger instead and hefting it as Asander tested the pole-arm and prepared himself to use it in more open combat.
Together, the pair scurried along the passages, trying to maintain a steady balance between speed and stealth. Once, at a junction, they had to recoil into the shadows as a slave with a bleak face and an arm full of platters passed across the end. Praying to the goddess of fortune that the hapless thrall didn’t stumble across the ravaged body of the guard, the two men waited for the man’s footsteps to fade and then ran on, turning one more corner and finding themselves in the small room with the table and the water cask. Pausing for a moment, Quintillian rinsed the worst of the crimson goo from his hands in the keg, and doused the knife to clean it. Asander did the same with the spear point. The two men stopped, looked each other in the eye, and both nodded. This was it.
Quintillian crossed to the heavy wooden door and, temporarily sheathing the dagger, heaved the large wooden bar from it, resting it on its end against the wall as before. Slowly, carefully, he inched the door inward. The space between the palace and the settlement wall was so much less distinct at night. The gloom was oppressive and very obscuring. In fact, it took precious long moments for their eyes to adjust enough to pick out the shape of the refuse pit outside the door.
‘Come on. Just stay at the edge in the deepest shadow.’
‘You mean rather than throwing myself forward into the pit?’ hissed Asander, rolling his eyes.
Quintillian threw a withering look at his companion and slipped from the door, leaving the palace for the first time in five days. The air was cloying and thick with the smell of urine and rotten food, and the entire pit steamed gently. The prince felt around the side of the door and grasped the timber surface of the palace’s outside wall as best he could, shuffling out along the lip of the 3-foot drop into sucking nightmare.
It was not far – just three paces – but it felt like a thousand miles, with the slowness and difficulty involved in not falling into the murk. Once he reached the wide grass, Quintillian stepped out onto it and heaved several deep breaths in and out, despite the reek. Behind him Asander slipped along the outer edge of the palace, suffering a heart-stopping moment when his foot slipped and he almost plummeted into the unpleasantness. Finally, the two men were both on the open grass in the shadow of the palace wall.
‘Now comes the bit for which I couldn’t plan. Who knows how the man at the top will react. Be ready. As soon as he’s down or all hell breaks loose, you need to be climbing that ladder with the blankets. At that point, it becomes all about speed. All right?’
‘We’ve been over this twenty times this afternoon, Quintillian. I know what we’re doing.’
With a last look at his friend, the prince breathed slowly three times – in, out, in, out, in, out – and trotted from the shadow across the grass. The wall was perhaps between 40 and 50 feet in height, formed of the tallest logs possible from the sparse forests of the upper steppe – slim full-grown iron-wood trunks, in fact, rather than branches. Observation or fighting platforms rose behind it every 50 paces or so around the circumference, and each platform consisted of a single wooden walkway behind the parapet, standing atop a timber scaffold, with just about enough room for three people to stand side by side, and no railing to prevent a man tumbling into the darkness. Quintillian wondered idly how many drunken nomads had died on guard duty, all from a simple fumbled step.
The ladder that rose up the gantry to the platform was actually a series of three separate ladders, one atop the other, each pegged and roped to the timbers that supported the walkway. Quintillian had never had trouble with heights, but looking up the vertiginous scaffold to the nomad atop it was heart-stopping even for him. The guard had not noticed the new figure moving across the grass in the shadows far below, but Quintillian realized with relief that, even if the man or his neighbours happened to be looking down there, it was highly unlikely they would spot a man moving across the grass in the darkness. Subtlety would likely be forgotten entirely very soon, though. Biting into his lip in an effort to stay loose and steady, he crossed to the ladder and wrapped his hands around the rough timber.
He began to climb.
Every five rungs without their world crashing down around them seemed a monumental achievement, and – to add pressure to an already tense situation – even five rungs reminded him how far there was to fall either side of the wall. The ascent seemed to take forever, and the closer he got to the summit the more he simply couldn’t believe that the man at the top had not yet spotted or heard him.
Then, almost without warning, the nomad guard came to the edge and peered down. Fortunately the creak of his footstep on the timbers as he turned gave Quintillian just enough time to lower his gaze to the ladder in front of him, so that from above he would not be so obviously clean shaven – well, with several weeks’ growth, but still far short of the norm for the clans.
‘Chun hval?’ the nomad said quietly, with curiosity but not concern.
Quintillian clenched his teeth for a moment. He’d been half-prepared for this. He had three responses playing around his head of the few words he had learned, depending upon what the man sounded as though he’d asked. The
problem was that he had no idea what Chun hval meant, and the tone had been so level he could glean nothing from inflection. He breathed levelly and paused in his climb for a heartbeat.
‘A’atum!’ Quintillian replied in a hissed tone, trying to load it with sarcasm on the assumption that the lack of timbre and the heavy inflection would mask his undoubtedly poor pronunciation.
A’atum. It was the first word he had learned in their tongue and had a thousand uses. It was also, therefore, the most flexible of all replies. It meant, simply: shit.
The guard at the top of the ladder let out a low guffaw and stepped back from the edge. Quintillian continued to climb, grateful for his acute hearing this past week and his apparent easy smoothing of a dangerous situation because of it. A thought occurred to the prince, and as he climbed the last few rungs he glanced left and right. The two adjacent platforms were far enough away that the figures on them were indistinct in the darkness. The nomads knew their business well enough to not position torches at the top of the rampart in order to preserve the night vision of the lookouts, but that also made the various platforms fairly hazy at distance. Neither of the figures seemed to have noticed the brief exchange. If that was the case, he might be better risking one short noise than the potentially prolonged sound of a struggle. Settled on his course of action, and casting up his thousandth prayer that things go his way, he clambered up the last few rungs and, attaining the level of the platform, rather than climbing up onto it, he reached out and grasped the ties that wrapped the guard’s leggings. Gripping them as tightly as he could with his left hand while holding on to the top rung for dear life with his right, he jerked back.
The guard was taken enough by surprise that he failed to adjust his balance in the tiniest moment available to him, and he fell like a sack of turnips. At least one of the more influential gods must be listening to Quintillian’s prayers, for as the nomad fell, rather than arcing out wildly over the edge, his lower half went out into space but his torso hit the timbers hard, the brunt of it being borne by his face. He had let out a stifled squawk as he dropped, but it was cut off by the solid platform before it could become a scream and he was, blessedly for him, only half conscious as his upper body slid slowly backwards and out over the edge.
Quintillian hung on to the ladder and watched the man fall. The drop was far enough that the body had time to flip end over end before he hit the turf below head-first with a faint thud. The prince could see only the faintest outline of the figure in the shadow, and even then only when he squinted and concentrated. He then saw Asander’s dark shape detach from the gloom and cross to the fallen guard. There was a pause and some movement around the body, which would clearly be the scout making sure the nomad was dead, and then Asander was over to the ladder and beginning to climb.
Quintillian hauled himself up to the platform and stood upright, trying not to get too close to the vertiginous edge. Instead, he peered over the parapet, which turned out to be little better, and filled him with a dull terror of what was shortly to come. So far things had gone much better than expected. How long, though, could such luck hold?
His answer came a moment later with a shout in the guttural nomad tongue. He swung round and looked down towards the palace. The slaves’ pit door was brightly illuminated by guttering torches, and the figure of Ganbaatar was clearly visible amid them.
‘Shit!’ muttered Quintillian and looked down the ladder to where Asander was climbing as fast as he could. ‘Come on!’ he hissed.
‘Oh, like I’m dawdling,’ snapped the scout as he heaved himself up at speed, arm over arm, the rope blankets dangling around him causing him extra weight and difficulty.
Ganbaatar sidled round the pit with surprising ease and yelled something else, gesturing to one of his men.
‘What was that?’
‘He’s called… for his bow,’ managed Asander between heaved breaths as he climbed.
‘Then we have to go now. You know he’ll be able to pick us off.’
‘Will you stop… stating the fucking… obvious… our Highness,’ grumbled Asander as he climbed the last few steps. A thud drew Quintillian’s startled glance and he turned to see an arrow protruding from the timber next to him, vibrating gently from the impact. Along the rampart, on the next platform, a nomad was nocking a second arrow to his bow.
‘This is getting shittier by the moment.’
Asander heaved himself up onto the platform, gulping in breaths, and the two men began to try and secure the blanket ropes. Quintillian dropped the prepared loop over the pointed tip of the enormous tree trunk, while Asander attempted to tie the two lengths together.
‘Is it secure?’ Quintillian asked, as he peered back down. Ganbaatar seemed to have given up on waiting for his bow and was now starting to climb the ladder behind them. Another arrow swept past from the same direction, nicking a small chunk from Quintillian’s ear, and another whispered from the far side, pinning the blanket rope to the wood. Asander dropped his half-finished knot and wrenched out the arrow to free the rope.
‘We have to go, now,’ he said.
‘Is it secure?’
‘No.’
Quintillian stared in mounting panic as Asander threw out the two ropes over the far side. The prince looked down. Between them the ropes descended more than a third of the way, almost a half. That would make a difference. Also, due to the curve in the circular palisade, once they were over the edge they would be hard to target on their descent. ‘Who go…’ Quintillian began, but Asander pushed him to the parapet and, needing no further prompting, Quintillian swung himself out into the 50-foot space that descended to freedom.
The rope slipped and gave alarmingly, and Quintillian felt himself drop several feet three different times before the rope seemed to anchor itself. Just as his heart began to steady a little, Asander cast his spear down into space and swung out over the parapet above him. Arrows hissed through the air from left and right, though neither of the adjacent nomads could get a clear shot around the curve. After heart-stopping moments, Quintillian reached the end of the blanket rope. The remaining drop still looked terrifyingly far to him, but this was no time for doubt. Clenching his teeth and tensing himself ready to try and hit the ground as flexibly as he could, he let go.
Despite the fact that he moved straight into a roll on impact, the reverberation up through his legs and echoing across his whole body made him feel instantly sick. Plus, his sword had caught badly against his ribs on landing, and his organs all felt jumbled up, as though they had been swirled around inside and left in new positions. He felt utterly bruised. He forced himself to his knees and tried to rise to his feet, but had to pause to vomit copiously into the grass.
Recovering, he turned and looked back up in time to spot three things, each more alarming than the last.
Firstly, the ropes were stretching rather worryingly as the knot connecting the two unravelled a few feet above Asander. Secondly, the two adjacent archers were nocking arrows and sighting down towards where the prince now floundered, where they stood more chance of success. And, thirdly, Ganbaatar had reached the top and was bellowing furiously from the platform.
Then the ropes separated. Asander gave a brief sharp curse and fell awkwardly. He landed with a thump and lay motionless. Quintillian stared in horror and disbelief, and then his heart began to beat again as his friend rose slowly to his knees declaring all the gods to be bitches and bastards. Above him, Ganbaatar had climbed out and was beginning his own descent. Somehow Quintillian couldn’t see the powerful giant being fazed by the drop.
Now Asander was up and running, though Quintillian was dismayed to see that one of his legs was injured and he was limping, which slowed him drastically. The prince dithered, in a minor panic as to what to do. That was when an arrow struck him in the shoulder so hard that it spun him to the side and sent him flying to the grass again.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ Asander barked. ‘Run!’
Hissing with pain, the princ
e rose swiftly to his feet and, with just a momentary glance at Asander, started to pelt away across the turf, up the slope towards the distant, looming figures of the rocks. As he ran, he reached round and grasped the shaft stuck in his shoulder. Thankfully the head had punched into muscle but scraped on his shoulder blade, causing the impact that had thrown him, rather than lodging in. It was a quick task, though a mighty painful one, to yank the shaft out and throw it away.
As he ran, he detached the heavy cloak and let it fall, recognizing it as an encumbrance that outweighed its protective value. His fur hat went the same way, though he kept his sword and dagger belted in place in spite of them thumping repeatedly against the massive bruise they had caused in the fall.
Slowly, he noted the incline as he began to hurtle up the side of the huge grassy bowl. He paused after a few more moments to take a breath and turned. Another arrow thudded into the grass a couple of paces from him, indicating that he was not yet completely out of the archers’ range.
His heart fell at what he saw.
Asander was way back and dropping further behind all the time. And the most horrifying sight of all: Ganbaatar was stomping speedily and purposefully across the grass, catching up with every step. Could Quintillian do this? How could he leave Asander behind after all they had been through together? He felt a duty of kinship, of comradeship, of mutual respect. But in his heart it battled with the duty he knew he owed to the empire to warn them of the threat that was coming.
Tears began to flow as he turned and struggled up the slope towards the nearest of the stone stacks. The war raging in his heart threatened to tear him in two so that half of him at least wanted to go back and help.
Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4) Page 11
