Honor among thieves

Chapter Eighty-Six

“Fascinating. In the space of one night they built three trebuchets? I would have thought the technique far beyond them.” Cutbill mused silently for a moment. “Unless they had help. Perhaps an engineer seized at Helstrow. Or a dwarf.”

“For all I know Morgain has a degree in divinity from the university at Redweir. For all I care she may have two,” Malden insisted. “You’re missing the point. They’re throwing stones even now!”

“What does Slag say? I assume he’s had a look at the engines. Was he impressed or disdainful of their construction?”

Malden ground his teeth together. “Disdainful, on the whole,” he admitted. “They’re using traction engines, apparently. That means that instead of using counterweights, they actually have teams of men pulling on ropes to launch the stones. He seemed to find that grossly inefficient. I understood very little of his reasons why. I was too busy looking at the great heaps of missiles they had ready to fire at us. Those heaps were as big as houses!”

“They’ll run out eventually. There are no proper boulders out in the farmland where they camp,” Cutbill pointed out. “Most likely they’ve already taken to demolishing stone buildings for ammunition.”

“You’re not seeing this,” Malden insisted. “My people are dying.”

Cutbill leaned back in his chair and turned his eyes to face the ceiling. He sighed deeply for a moment, then said, simply, “Malden. You must think, not feel.”

The thief-the Lord Mayor-jumped to his feet. “What? What say you now? Is your blood so cold you can’t even mourn your fellow citizens? A little girl-just a little girl, crushed-broken as if she’d been worked over by torturers for a month. An entire family in the Stink, dead, save their piteous wretch of a mother, spared by uncaring fate just so she could watch her babies die-”

“Malden,” Cutbill said again, perfectly calm.

“What, damn you?”

“Malden, this is a war. I thought you understood that.”

“I’ve thought of nothing else in days!”

Cutbill sighed again. Malden had grown to hate that sound. “In war, people die.”

“Volunteer soldiers, perhaps. Foreign mercenaries. The enemy. But-”

“You’ve had your first real taste of war, and it galled. That’s perfectly understandable. Only a bronze statue of a man would not have this reaction. Yet you must not let this horror consume you. If you don’t steel yourself now, you’ll be mad in a week,” Cutbill pointed out. “Many people will die. You may lose half your constituents before this is over. And if you don’t win this battle, the other half will be enslaved. Or worse.”

Malden’s heart seized in his chest. He cried out, an inarticulate noise of rage and fear and utter sorrow. “I never wanted this! I never even wanted to be Lord Mayor. I didn’t want to take over your guild! I never asked for any of this responsibility, and I don’t want it now. I’ve done all this only because no one else would, or could-because if I didn’t the people of Ness would be without a protector. And now I’ve failed them!”

“It is to the good, in some part, that you feel so much for them,” Cutbill said. “That will help you when you must inspire them to fight on in the face of despair. Your sincerity will be a far greater weapon than your magic sword.”

“I cannot bear this,” Malden moaned.

“You can, and you must. Every prince in history has felt this way, I imagine. They learned to cope. The good ones anyway. And so shall you. They learned that pawns on a game board cannot be treated as individuals. That one must think strategically, even when one’s heart is breaking.”

Malden fell back in his chair and stared at the man.

Could anyone truly be so callous?

But yes. Yes, they could. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Every time the Burgrave had ordered some man hanged as an example, just to improve the public order. Every time some bastard reeve in the field had beaten a peasant because he wasn’t working hard enough, because the crops had to be harvested or everyone would starve. He’d seen it a million times in his life, this ability to armor one’s heart against cries of mercy and compassion, and do the hard thing.

He’d fought all his life against the men who ran the world. He’d learned to sneak around their rules and controls, and find some space of breath, some freedom, for himself. Always he had hated them for their cruelty.

And now he was one of them.

“If you are going to prevail,” Cutbill said, “you must find a way to take the battle to the barbarian. You cannot simply hide your head now. Let us discuss methods for repaying this injustice, shall we? I think we’ll begin with a reading from Galenius. We were discussing, on your last visit, the proper use of fascines and ramps. Make yourself comfortable, and we’ll begin.”

Malden got up and started walking toward the door. “Not now,” he insisted.

“Malden, if you have an ounce of sense you’ll come back here and-”

“I said not now,” Malden grated, and pushed his way out into the sunlight. Somewhere in the distance he could hear screaming.