Honor among thieves

Chapter Eighty-Two

“Nock! Draw! Fire!” Herwig the madam shouted, beating time against her leg with a fan. A row of women loosed their bows, and their long arrows flashed through the air. Most of them at least hit the archery butts at the far side of the square-they’d been practicing nonstop since Malden first recruited them as archers, and Herwig had proved a merciless drill instructor. “Nock!” she called, and the women, all of them harlots from the House of Sighs, lifted arrows to their bows, rested them against their thumbs as they’d been taught. “Draw!” Herwig shouted, and her charges did as they were told, though one very young woman at the end of the row managed to drop her arrow before she’d managed to draw fully. The others laughed at her. Herwig came storming down the row, cold fury in her eyes.

“Is there a problem, Guennie?” she demanded.

“It’s just-I bumped my breast on the draw and it-startled me,” the young whore said, looking down at her feet.

“In the Old Empire they tell stories still of the female warriors of Thune,” Herwig said, raising her nose in the air. “They were fiercer than the men by far. When they encountered this very same problem, they thrust torches to their bosoms to burn off their own left breasts. That,” Herwig said, “made it much easier to draw. Perhaps you’d like to do the same?”

“No, milady,” Guennie said, her eyes very wide.

“Then prove to me you don’t need to,” Herwig said. “Pick up that crooked little thing you call an arrow and draw!”

Slag laughed as the whore archer bent to do as she was told and Herwig rapped her across the neck with her fan. Malden just shook his head.

“Cutbill was right. We should have been doing this weeks ago.” He’d seen real improvement in the last few days, but the female archers were hardly ready-Herwig’s company of archers were the best of the lot. Elody’s women were barely able to string a bow yet. The thieves of the guild more often than not failed to show up for practice at all, though Velmont threatened them with dire punishment.

The thieves and the whores were all Malden had, though. Of the honest population of Ness, by far the great majority of the men were old and infirm or too young to even lift a bow. The honest women were needed elsewhere.

“Will they be ready, when we need them?” Malden asked, mostly to himself.

The dwarf laughed again. “They’ll not be sharpshooters, that’s for fucking sure. But with all those barbarians out there, they’re like to hit one or two if only by mistake,” he pointed out. “Anyone can hit a target as big as an army.”

“Come on,” Malden said. “We’re not helping here-we’re probably just making them nervous so they don’t shoot as straight. Let’s go see how the other work is progressing.”

Malden and Slag hurried north to see to the reinforcement of the Reeve’s Gate. Under Slag’s instructions, the women of Ness used cranes and winches to stack pompions-wicker baskets full of rocks-against the gate, while others hammered a scaffolding of wooden beams together to hold the stacks in place. There was not enough iron available to properly bolster the scaffolding, but a one-legged blacksmith oversaw the construction of a massive bracket that would help a little.

“It won’t be as strong as the wall around it,” Slag said, inspecting the work, “but I’d like to see the battering ram that could get through that.” He seemed very pleased with himself.

A lot of people did that day. For all their fear of Herwig, the archers had been rosy-cheeked and ready at the crack of dawn to get to work. The crews at the gates joked among themselves and sang songs while they toiled.

Everywhere the people of Ness were, for once, happy and productive. Maybe just having something to do was better than huddling in their houses waiting for death to come. Maybe it just helped they couldn’t see over the city wall.

“You’d think the barbarians weren’t out there,” Malden said. He had seen over the wall. He’d seen plenty, and now he couldn’t seem to forget it. Every time he closed his eyes he remembered what he’d seen from the top of Castle Hill. The barbarians had encircled the city and their tents stretched out across the fields as far as the eye could see. Berserkers danced endlessly on the banks of the Skrait, while Morgain and her skull-faced crew rode circles around and around the circumference of Ness, daring each other to come closer and closer to the wall.

So far not a shot had been fired from either side. The barbarians had made no attempt to attack, nor even communicate with the defenders inside the city. Malden knew that would not last. There were very dark days to come.

Yet for the moment Ness was ruled by good cheer. Even the ceaseless flood of petitions and demands on his time as Lord Mayor had slowed to a trickle. The guildmasters of the mercers and the cordwainers both sent him messages of support and confidence. The beggars of the city declared a holiday and threw him an impromptu, if slightly odorous, parade.

“Don’t they understand that we’re all probably going to die, or at the least be enslaved, within the week?”

“Ah, lad, you’re overestimating the faculties of human fucking reason,” Slag told him. “That’s still seven days away. Right now they’re safe and reasonably well fed. And they’re learning something dwarves have always known-if you don’t have time to sit around doing nothing, you don’t have time to fucking complain.”

It was true. There was so much to be done that Malden had found employment for every idle hand. Wooden hoardings had to be built at strategic locations atop the wall, then covered in hides and wetted down so the barbarians couldn’t set them on fire. An enormous arsenal of weapons had to be cleaned, sharpened, and rubbed with animal fat to keep off rust. Arrows by the barrelful had to be carved, straightened, fletched, and headed. Everyone who could stand on two legs and fight with at least one arm had to be trained and made ready.

There had been a time, he thought, when even the prospect of hard work or-Bloodgod forbid-sacrifice was enough to start a riot in Ness. Now the entire city was energized with the effort of the countersiege.

“They’re united for the cause,” Slag said finally. “They’re working toward their own buggering salvation, and they know it. Show a little civic spirit yourself, you dumb bastard!” Slag slapped Malden on the forearm and laughed uproariously.

It seemed the dwarf shared the people’s spirit of camaraderie against the common enemy.

“I just wish any of it felt like enough,” Malden admitted. “Most of this will make no difference. The barbarians know how to fight against archers on a city wall. They didn’t batter down the gates of Redweir-we still don’t know how they breached the wall there, but they didn’t go in through a gate. At Helstrow simple trickery and momentum saw them through. If only I had some secret weapon, some power uncheckable to draw on…” He thought of Coruth and how she was training Cythera to be a witch. Magic would come in very useful right about then, but he knew better than to count upon their arcane assistance. History books were stuffed full of examples of lords who’d relied upon witches and sorcerers, and paid for it when magic proved more fickle than iron.

“Lad,” Slag said.

“Hmm?” Malden had been lost in his thought.

“Lad, come over here,” the dwarf whispered. He led Malden around a corner into the shadow of a mews. “Lad-maybe I can give you just that.”

The thief felt like he’d been doused in cold water. “Give me… what?” he asked carefully.

“A power fucking uncheckable.” The dwarf’s eyes blazed in the darkness. “It won’t be easy. Or cheap.”

“You have my full attention,” Malden promised.

“You remember that book I found in the Vincularium?”

“Not really,” Malden confessed.

Slag shook his head. “All right, all right. You remember how Balint managed to bring the place down?”

“Vividly.”

Slag nodded. “I’m going to need a workshop, somewhere in the Smoke will do, some place private. This is not something we can let anybody talk about. No-fucking-body talks. And I won’t make you any promises it’ll work.”

“What do you need?” Malden asked.

“Well, now, let me see… charcoal, for a start, as much as you can get. As much stale urine, too.”

Malden grimaced.

“Don’t look at me like that. Fullers use piss all the time. It’s part of how they make felt. There’ll be barrels of it in every woolery shop in town. And we can start collecting it from the citizenry, too, though we’ll need a good cover story for that. Then there’s the last ingredient I need, and it’ll be hard to come by-brimstone.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve taken up sorcery and need to conjure demons. Though if you do tell me that, I’ll ask you how many demons you had in mind and when we can expect their aid.”

“Maybe something better than that, lad. Just-trust me. I’ll also need workers. Alchemists, apothecaries. I’ll take fucking tanners if they don’t stink too much. Bakers and millers would be good. Anybody who can grind and mix ingredients. I’ll need all manner of equipment. Best I make a list and you have Velmont fill it. Mostly, though, I need time. This is untested stuff. Purely experimental.”

“Time is the one thing I’m short on,” Malden said, “but you’ll have as much as I can spare you, I promise.”

“It’s going to be dangerous, too. I’m likely to burn myself to a cinder working with this stuff. If that happens-promise me one thing.”

“Of course,” Malden said.

“You’ll give me the biggest damned funeral this city ever saw. No expense spared. But you’ll keep the coffin closed. If this goes up in my face, what’s left of me won’t be pretty.”

“That’s a hopeful thought.”

Slag laughed again. Malden had never heard a dwarf laugh so often. “Optimistic to a fucking fault, that’s me. All part of that damned civic spirit, eh?”