Farlander (64 page)

Ash withdrew the blade, air whistling from the gaping wound. The man toppled on to his side, gasping like a fish out of water behind his mask.

Baracha stepped over him. A brief scuffle sounded from within the sentry post. He emerged grim-faced. They stepped on to the bridge.

Aléas still carried the bag in his hand, limp now. The king rat had stopped squirming. He cast a look over his shoulder and saw a shapeless mass following behind them. The tower loomed overhead, hidden eyes watching their approach. Loopholes ringed the lower reaches of the temple, jutting out from its sheer sides so that archers could fire straight down. Aléas tried to walk normally in his robes and with his heavy burden.

They halted at the base of the tower itself, in front of the massive iron gate. A grate slid open, at waist level, revealing only blackness beyond.

Aléas moved as instructed. He pulled open the neck of the bag, easily snapping the hair which bound it, and emptied the animal through the hole.

Almost immediately its fellow rats emerged from the fog and rushed for the gate. The three R
shun swung away to either side, batting the swarming creatures from their legs. Against the gate, the rats piled upwards like a drift of leaves until they were able to squirm through the open grate.

‘Smoke,’ demanded Ash, flapping his open hand. Aléas fumbled beneath his robe for one of the small bags filled with jupe bark and barris seed, and tossed it to him.

Shouts sounded from within. An alarm went up, a bell clanging fiercely.

The farlander bent and lit the bag’s fuse with a match. He tossed it to the ground, where it began to spew clouds of white smoke that helped to augment the natural cover of fog. A bolt shattered at Aléas’s feet and without even thinking he raised his double crossbow to aim at a loophole some twenty feet above his head, and snapped off a shot. From a different loophole a rifle spurted a blast of smoke and a hurtling lead shot, which couldn’t be seen save for its bloody and instantaneous progress through Baracha’s left ear.

‘Aléas!’ bawled the Alhazii. Aléas twisted and fired again.

While he was at this business of returning fire, Ash and Baracha were working to free one of the two small casks of blackpowder that hung beneath his robe. Baracha ignored the ruin of his ear, which hung in tatters, dripping blood. ‘You tie knots just like my mother,’ the Alhazii grumbled to Ash, both of them struggling to get the cask loose. More shots crashed down. The noise was deafening, shards of wood flying up around their feet. The cask finally came loose. Aléas reloaded his crossbow and huddled by the side of the gate, knowing they would be shot through in no time like this, smoke or no smoke. But he could hear shouts from the loopholes now, and guards yelling in panic. The rats had reached them.

His master’s gruff voice could be heard above the gunfire: ‘We need to use more,’ he was shouting. ‘We need to use both casks.’

Ash wasn’t listening, though. He laid the wooden cask by the gate, soaked its fuse with water, scurried away.

‘Clear away!’ hollered Baracha, and all three jumped down from either side of the bridge on to the concrete foundations beneath it.

The fuse was a short one, though it seemed an eternity as they waited for it to soak through. The blackpowder cask was constructed from a single piece of wood, with a finger-wide hole at its top filled with thick, semi-hardened tar. The fuse poked through this, and when it sucked the water to the contents within, it would ignite from the sudden contact with moisture.

It exploded suddenly. An ear-jarring rush of air crashed overhead, followed by reeking black smoke and portions of wood and rat that splashed into the water of the moat in a brief shower of debris. Coughing, they poked their heads back up. The gate was still intact.

Baracha yelled as he jumped back on to the bridge. He waved his arms at the gate. A shot raced past his head, though he didn’t flinch. Instead he straightened and looked up with a scowl.

Ash leaped up, too, and helped Aléas back on to the remnants of the bridge. Aléas’s ears were still ringing from the explosion. No time to think, though. Through the smoke he could see that planks of the bridge had blown away to leave only the concrete foundation, exposed and blackened; the gates too were blackened, badly buckled, but seemingly intact. Before them Ash stood stroking the scabbard of his sword. He exchanged a glance with Aléas, his eyebrow raised. Aléas bent to reload his crossbow. More shots crashed out. One took the skin from Baracha’s shoulder, before it skipped off the concrete, sailing past Aléas’s right knee.

‘By all that is holy!’ Baracha bellowed up in rage. ‘Will you aim at someone else, just this once!’ He snatched the crossbow from Aléas and aimed at a loophole still boasting a cloud of drifting smoke. He fired twice. A shout of pain rang out. He tossed the piece back to his apprentice.

‘Now what?’ he demanded, rounding on Ash. ‘I told you we needed to use both casks.’

Ash held a finger to his lips, attempting to hush the big man. He stepped through the clearing smoke and placed a palm against the smaller door set into the gate, which was now warped and partly ajar. He tilted himself forwards, pressing hard.

The door fell inwards. It clanged to the ground without any hint of a bounce. Within lay only smoke and darkness.

The pair of them swept through. Behind, Aléas hobbled under his load. An Acolyte lay writhing on the ground, smothered in a carpet of rats. They trod a path around him, not looking.

A wide entranceway lined with murder holes. Another gate at its end. But it lay open.

Beyond was a large, starkly gas-lit chamber, where several riding zels stood with their reins tied to posts, and next to them a few empty carts. Troughs of water lined two walls and a stable was close at hand, if the smell was anything to go by. Passages led off from the open space. The R
shun chose the one directly ahead, Ash going in front, Aléas taking the rear.

This passage led into the lower sanctum of the Temple of Whispers, the largest open area to be found within the tower. The walls of the space were the same colour as exposed flesh; a sacrificial altar, of pure white stone, stood at its far end in a pool of gaslight turned low. Columns of pink marble ran in two rows the entire length of the sanctum, rising into the dimness of a ceiling arching high overhead, which was covered entirely in friezes of Mann – images that reflected much of the chaos to be found on the floor below.

The chaos was one of panic: a desperation to escape the torrent of crazed vermin now converging on everything that moved. Acolytes struggled across the open space as though they were on fire, each enveloped in a mass of writhing fur. Some rolled on the floor, trying to crush their attackers. Yet the three R
shun stood amongst it all, unmolested.

‘I did not expect this to be so easy,’ quipped Baracha, which only an Alhazii could say while his ear dangled loose from his head.

The rats cleared a path for them as they trod through the mayhem. An enclosed spiralling stairwell occupied each corner of the temple space, three of them leading upwards. The nearest one, on their right, led downwards, however. The R
shun hovered next to it, peering into the gloom below.

‘Slave quarters,’ announced Ash.

‘How can you tell?’

‘The stink.’

The R
shun converged on the far end of the sanctum, before a shallow pool of water that extended across the entire floor, and separated the rest of the temple from the altar. They stopped to confer.

‘You think Kirkus is still in the Storm Chamber?’ Baracha asked, as an Acolyte charged past him and dived into the water. They all ignored him.

‘We have no choice but to assume so.’

‘There should be a climbing box,’ said Baracha. ‘All of these towers have one. Can you spot it?’

‘There,’ said Aléas, motioning to a door he could just discern in the wall behind the altar.

‘We try the climbing box, then,’ said Baracha. ‘We’ll never make it if we have to fight our way through every floor to get to the top.’

‘Agreed.’

Ash mounted the thin bridge that vaulted the pool, his sword, even now, still in its sheath. Baracha stepped straight into the water and waded across. Aléas chose the bridge.

The twin doors of the climbing box were small, cast-iron, and firmly shut. There appeared to be no hole for a key, or any other obvious way in which it could be opened. ‘Crowbar,’ demanded Baracha with a snap of his fingers, hand outstretched.

Aléas began fumbling within his robe, till Baracha impatiently tore the front of the garment open to expose the harness. He snatched the crowbar from it, and set to working on the doors.

Still, they wouldn’t open.

‘We need to blow them,’ he grunted, handing back the crowbar. Ash consented, and they took the remaining keg of blackpowder, set it against the door, soaked the fuse.