Honor among thieves

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.

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.

In the space of minutes, however, all was at peace again-the barbarians safely out of range, the archers lowering their bows. They flickered out of existence one by one as they were no longer needed. Only the original men and women from whom they’d been copied remained.

Over Castle Hill, only a few birds still flew, circling madly. Eventually even they slowed and flapped wearily toward the nearest roost, utterly drained.

Malden waited another hour, to make sure the barbarian retreat was not just a ruse. Eventually he sat down on the battlements and rested his face against the cold stones of a merlon.

It was there that Slag found him.

“Lad,” the dwarf said, “there’s something you need to see.”