Honor among thieves

Chapter Ninety-Three

The workshop stank of brimstone and urine, enough to make Malden’s eyes water. It was hot inside, despite the snow that lay six inches thick on every surface outside the windows. Slag had his workers skimming orange crystals off the top of reeking vats or burning wood for charcoal, night and day. Other workers sat at narrow benches, grinding together the three necessary substances, or mixing it together with their fingers until it formed grains the size of corn.

“Finer! Grind it finer than this, you fucker,” Slag said, sifting black pebbles through his fingers. The apothecary’s apprentice he had admonished ducked his head and bent over his mortar and pestle again. “Malden, it must be ground finer. I need some kind of mill, maybe an upright wheel to crush the substance. And some kind of multiple-sieve refining sleeve to break it up smaller. I’m also going to need some kind of carriage for the device. I need iron, or better yet-bronze. As much as you can get me.”

Malden shrugged. “There’s a bronze statue of Juring Tarness in the Golden Slope. I doubt he’ll mind much if we melt it down.” He had no idea what Slag was after, really. The dwarf had tried to explain the nature of his secret project many times-apparently it was some kind of huge siege engine, far more powerful than a ballista, but operating on completely different principles. There was fire involved, and some kind of projectile, but beyond that it made very little sense to Malden. He assumed the dwarf knew what he was doing.

He had other things on his mind. He doubted that Slag cared much about what happened outside of his workshop-dwarves were notorious for their obsessions when they had a project to work on. Still, Malden needed to talk to someone about this, and Cythera was… no longer available. “Six cows, slaughtered and left to rot before the Godstone. Someone must have been hiding them when I did my last census of foodstocks. Do you know how much soup we could have made of those animals?” he asked. “Now they’re frozen to the cobbles so solidly no one can shift them, not even with pry bars.”

Slag shrugged. “Humans and religion. Never figured that one out myself, lad. Seems like you lot need somebody to tell you what to do. If there isn’t an overlord looming over your shoulder all the time, you invent one.”

“The barbarians only sent one stone over the wall today, so far,” Malden said. “The people seem to think these sacrifices are having an actual effect.”

Slag gave him a dubious look. “You ought to nip that in the damned bud,” he said. “They’ll start thinking soon that a human sacrifice will stop the attacks altogether. Or maybe they’ll try something far worse.”

“Worse than slaying each other for their blood?” Malden asked.

“Aye. Maybe they’ll think dwarf blood will work even better, since it’s a much rarer commodity. You! Don’t just dip your ladle in that piss! Skim the surface, skim, like this!” He made gentle sweeping motions with his hands. “All we want is the crusty bits from the top.”

Malden put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder and squeezed. Slag winced out from under his grasp. “You-mind that brimstone! The stuff burns if you get it too close to the fire, you clumsy fucker!”

Malden took his leave without a farewell. Outside, the cold air felt good on his face. It smelled better than the air inside the workshop as well. Malden, who had grown up in a city without any kind of public sanitation, where the only known method for dealing with waste was dumping it in the river, had never imagined that Ness could smell good before.

Ness. His city. Imperiled and fraught with confusion it might be, yet he still loved the place more than he hated it. He truly wanted to save it from destruction. If he could only figure out how. So far he’d just found ways to delay the inevitable. He strained his mind for answers, for solutions. His thoughts grew less focused as he walked. Perhaps he was just tired, having slept very little in weeks. Perhaps he was just His reverie came to an abrupt halt when he heard a cry from the top of the wall. “Archers! Archers to your posts!”

That couldn’t be good. He scampered up the side of a tavern that abutted the nearest stretch of wall and jumped over the battlements. Men and women were running everywhere, gathering up quivers and bows. No one stopped to tell him what was happening. A hoarding stood nearby, a wooden gallery built over the edge of the wall from which archers could fire without being exposed themselves. Malden ducked inside and peered out through the firing slit.

Down below, the barbarian camp was a sea of movement and hurry. A wave of fur-clad warriors was headed right for the wall, and they were carrying ladders. Clearly they intended to scale the wall and fight their way inside. This is it, Malden thought. This was the moment he’d been dreading, because he knew that in a direct confrontation with the barbarians he could not win.

That didn’t mean he was allowed to give up. Croy had taught him that.

“Forks!” he called. He grabbed the man nearest to him-a thief who was so nervous he couldn’t seem to string his bow. “Get every able-bodied man up here you can, and have them bring forks.”

The thief looked confused. “What kind of forks?”

“It doesn’t matter! Pitchforks, turning forks, any bit of wood with a hook on the end, anything. Go! And send word I need Velmont.”

Rus Galenius, in his Manual of Fortifications, described scaling ladders in exquisite detail-the best wood for their construction, the proper time and manner of their use, the number of men who should be on one at any given time. The counterstrategy for dealing with ladders was so ancient and so simple the author seemed to disdain its mention, giving it a single sentence. Malden had actually been paying attention the day Cutbill read him that passage, however.

The first ladder touched the wall not a hundred feet from where Malden stood, and berserkers started scrambling up the rungs. “You,” Malden said, pointing at a group of female archers in the next hoarding over. “Don’t let them reach the top!”

Bows flexed and arrows shot downward at flat angles. The berserkers were easy targets, unable to move out of the way as the archers poured shafts into them. Soon the men near the top of the ladder looked like pincushions for all the arrows sticking out of their arms and backs. Unable to feel pain, they kept climbing until they died and fell away.

At the base of the ladder a hundred more men waited their turn.

An old man carrying a pitchfork came up to Malden and saluted. It took Malden a second to remember how to salute back. “Thank the Bloodgod you’re here,” Malden said. “Do you see that ladder, where its end sticks up over the wall?”

The oldster nodded and gave Malden a wicked grin. He hefted his fork and made toward the ladder.

“Wait,” Malden said. “Not quite yet.” He waited until the topmost berserker on the ladder had nearly crested the wall. Below him the ladder bowed with the weight of half a dozen more. “Now,” Malden said.

The old man caught the top rung of the ladder with the tines of his fork and heaved. The ladder weighed too much for him, so Malden grabbed the end of the fork and lent the strength of his own back to the effort.

The ladder twisted and bent and then fell backward. Some of the men clinging to it jumped free. Some lacked the presence of mind to do so. Bodies made horrible crunching noises when they struck the frozen ground below. The ladder shattered as it spun away from the wall.

“Good,” Malden said. “Like that! Every time. Wait until they’re nearly at the top, so you get as many of them as possible. But don’t wait so long that even one of them gets over the side.” He turned to look around him. “Where is Velmont?” he demanded.

His Helstrovian lieutenant appeared a moment later. “I came as fast as I could,” he pleaded.

Malden grabbed his forearms and dragged him out of the hoarding, making room for more archers to crowd inside. “Something’s changed,” he said. “I don’t know what, but it’s not good. Last night they were still intent on waiting us out-letting us starve in here, until we begged them to come in and feed us. Now they’ve lost their patience. I don’t know why. But this is what we’ve been dreading. A real attack! Get every single archer you can up here. Get me watchers at every tower along the wall, get me reports-I need to know if the attack is just in this one place or if they’re everywhere. Go! Quickly!”

Velmont dashed off to do Malden’s bidding. Malden needed that information. And yet, in the pit of his heart, he already knew what Velmont would report.

This was the moment Ness would be lost. All the planning he’d done, all the hard work, had been designed around one simple principle: that the besiegers would wait him out. Clearly that belief had been founded on the wrong principles. There would not be enough archers, nor enough old men with pitchforks, if the barbarians were serious about scaling the wall. And in his experience, he’d never known Morget’s people to be less than serious about anything.