Honor among thieves

Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

The crowd of devout citizens gasped and ran as a massive wagon covered by a tarpaulin came rumbling down the hill toward them. A dozen men were pushing against it from the front, trying to slow its headlong descent and mostly failing.

Running ahead of the wagon, Slag carried a long brass staff topped by a hook that looked like the head of a snake. Meanwhile, sitting atop the wagon’s burden, Balint waved a cloth back and forth, cheering and shouting curses.

“You’ll all be flatter than a spinster’s tit if you don’t scarper right now!” she cackled. She looked like she’d never had more fun in her life.

“I am well pleased to see you,” Malden said as Slag hurried toward him. “I take it this is your secret project.”

“It’ll be the world’s most expensive heap of scrap if we take this hill too fast, lad,” Slag explained. “Help us!”

Malden hurried toward the wagon. He recognized the men straining against it as workers from Slag’s shop. Some had burned faces and hands wrapped in bandages, but they seemed less concerned with their own hurts than with slowing the progress of the wagon. Malden put his own shoulder against the wagon’s boards and was shocked to feel how heavy its cargo must be. “What is this made of, Slag? Twice-refined lead?”

“Bronze, mostly. Put your fucking back in it, boys!”

They heaved and struggled and strained. The wagon roared as it rolled over the cobbles. The wheels screamed and the axles spat sparks. Somehow they managed to avoid crashing at the bottom of the hill. It was far easier moving it through the relatively level streets beyond, even with no dray animals. Slag suddenly called a halt, and Malden looked up for the first time.

Directly before him was Ryewall.

High above, his thieves and whores were busy taking random shots at targets on the other side. Loophole and ’Levenfingers moved along the ramparts of Westwall and Swampwall, shouting orders like they were born serjeants, calling out targets. When Loophole saw Malden, he gave a cheery wave-even as a barbarian arrow shot past his ear, inches from skewering his head.

“It’s begun, lad,” the oldster called down. “You’d best join me up here.”

Malden grabbed Slag’s shoulder-the one still attached to an arm. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“As close as I fucking can be,” the dwarf told him.

Malden glanced at Balint. “She gave you no trouble?”

A twitching smile passed across Slag’s face as he tried to maintain a sober countenance. “Oh, she distracted me a bit from what I was doing. But after the-well, after some initial, ah, fractiousness, we, ah, we got along right well. She had some excellent ideas, actually, about brisance and containment.” He glanced away from Malden’s feet. “Very imaginative lass, our Balint.”

Malden laughed and slapped the dwarf on the back. “What exactly should I expect from this thing?” he asked, changing the subject. “Are you going to shoot a giant arrow at the barbarians, or will it throw a flaming rock like a catapult?”

“Neither. It’ll either explode when I set it off, and make a much bigger bang than we did at the cloisters, or, it will actually work. In which case-” Slag’s face grew dark with evil excitement. “-it’ll put the fear of fucking dwarves into those stinking cocksuckers.”

“Do your worst, when I give the signal,” Malden said. Then he hurried up the steep, narrow stairs that led to the top of Westwall.

It was only then he saw what he was really up against. The barbarians had massed and armed themselves, and he looked out over a sea of iron and shaved heads and eyes burning with hatred and bloodlust. The warriors out there filled the land as far as he could see. Off in the distance it looked like some of them were fighting each other, which he couldn’t quite understand. Maybe they were just running through practice drills-or perhaps they’d grown so tired of waiting to kill that they’d started hacking at one another for something to do.

Then again, perhaps No. His luck couldn’t be that good. So far everything that could possibly go wrong had, and the idea of something actually working in his favor felt wholly out of the equation.

Yet soon he couldn’t deny the evidence of his own senses. “Look,” one of the archers said, pointing at a line of flags in the distance. Over where the barbarians were fighting a rearguard action. “Those are the Burgrave’s colors!”

Malden’s eyes weren’t as good as hers, but he squinted and strained and-yes, he saw it. The Army of Free Men had come at last to relieve the city.

Now that it was almost surely too late. Directly below him, hundreds of berserkers danced and howled. Foam flecked their lips and cheeks, and their eyes were wide with insanity. The Burgrave had plenty of men but they were poorly trained, poorly armed-no match at all for the reavers and berserkers out there. Tarness could do no more than pick away at the barbarian horde. And he most certainly could not break through in time to save Ryewall from coming down, or the berserkers from overrunning the city.

A stroke of good luck, but good luck too late, Malden thought. He would have to stick to the plan he’d already made.

He signaled to the archers around him-Elody’s whores, women he’d known for years. They looked at him with trusting eyes. They were counting on him, he realized. Expecting a miracle. He truly hoped he had one left in stock. “Don’t waste shots on the berserkers, unless you think you can actually kill a few. They don’t feel pain or wounds. When they come through the-”

Down below he heard Morget’s voice. The barbarian shouted, “Pull, you weaklings! Pull or die!”

Under Malden’s feet, the very stones of the wall began to shake.

“Get back, get back from Ryewall,” he shouted, again and again. Soon he couldn’t even hear his own voice. The noise of the wall was just too loud.

It started as a low creaking, like an unoiled hinge being ripped from its nails. The noise grew to an unearthly moan, accompanied by the percussion of stones falling from a great height. As Malden watched in horror, the Ryewall began to shimmy, its ramparts swaying up and down as if made of water on a foaming sea.

“Pull!” Morget screamed again, and unlike Malden’s, his voice carried. “Again! Pull!”

Below and behind Malden, Slag tore the tarpaulin off his secret weapon.

“That’s it?” Malden demanded.

It didn’t look like much. Just a metal tube ten feet long and two across, dull yellow in color. Bands of steel were wrapped around its length like the hoops of a barrel. One end was open, and Balint stuffed handfuls of nails and broken weapons and old horseshoes down its mouth. Slag busied himself at a small charcoal fire a little ways off. It looked like he was just trying to get warm.

“This is what you’ve been working on? The thing that was going to turn them back?” Malden demanded. “It looks like a giant pestle. Do you need me to drive the barbarians into the world’s largest mortar?”

“Pull!” Morget roared.

And Ryewall fell.