Authors: Miles Cameron
‘Fuck you, farmer,’ spat the bravo. ‘Stay clear of my sword.’
Long Paw crawled away, turned a corner and bolted. He’d had three days to get to know the area and he still found it difficult in the darkness. He went down an alley, got turned around, and had to climb a rickety fence. A small church gave him his bearings – he was, after all, less than a stadion from the palace.
He tossed his smelly farmer’s overshirt and his straw hat, got his scabbarded sword in his left hand, and ran.
The man sitting on the whore’s bed was wearing mail. His two henchmen filled the rest of the room, and they both had heavily padded jupons and heavy clubs.
‘So,’ the man said. ‘You two want to leave the Emperor’s service?’
Cully shrugged. ‘Maybe, and maybe not,’ he said. ‘I heard there was money in it.’
Bent couldn’t quite squeeze into the room. He watched the young woman slip down the corridor with real regret. He also noted that armed men were starting to fill the common room below.
‘Looks to me like you plan to have us whether we want to come or not,’ he said.
The man on the bed spread his hands. ‘You know,’ he said with a nasty smile, ‘either way, your mates will think you deserted, eh, foreigner?’
The Captain had been firm – they were to play the part of greedy mercenaries all the way to the end. Cully narrowed his eyes. ‘You mean there’s no money?’ he asked. He had a hand on his dagger.
The two thugs in jupons moved towards him, raising their clubs.
‘We’ll talk about money later,’ said the man on the bed. ‘That’s not my decision to make.’
‘I don’t like these odds,’ Bent said. He’d been leaning in the doorway, cramped by his own size and the smallness of the room. Now he seemed to uncoil. He didn’t fully draw his sword, but rather he slammed the pommel into the teeth of the nearest thug, who had somewhat foolishly chosen to ignore him. The man bent over, spitting teeth, and Bent broke his nose and kneed him in the groin in a single breath while Cully drew his dagger right-handed and mystified the other thug by swapping hands – the man blocked his empty right and received the left in his right eye. He fell, dead. Bent’s man fell wheezing, and opened his mouth to scream.
Cully looked at Bent. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said.
Bent stepped on his fallen adversary’s throat.
The man on the bed turned white as a sheet. ‘Don’t you touch me,’ he said. ‘My people are all around you.’
Cully shook his head. ‘So – there’s no money?’
The man bit his lip.
‘If you scream, I’ll gut you,’ Bent said. He pulled the door closed. To Cully, he said, ‘There’s twenty men down there. I don’t think they plan to negotiate.’
Cully shook his head. ‘Fuck me. You thought you could take us down with two fat fucks?’ He sounded annoyed. ‘And now you’re alone with us. Doesn’t that seem like bad planning?’
‘He’s not their boss,’ Bent said. ‘Look at him.’
The man was terrified.
Cully reached for the heavy shutters on the window. Bent stopped him. ‘Crossbows,’ he said.
‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Cully. ‘What have we got ourselves into?’
Ser Alcaeus spent more time with his mother than with the rest of the company – not by choice, but because the princess’s hold on the throne was more precarious than the Alban mercenaries seemed to imagine and his mother, the Lady Maria, was working very hard to fill the posts of the court and to get the basic machinery of justice and tax collection running properly. In their short time back in Liviapolis, Ser Alcaeus had twice had to debate a point with his mother’s inner council and then sat in on one of the Red Knight’s – the Duke of Thrake’s – meetings and had to debate the same point again. Once, he’d found his view changed and ended up debating the opposite point of view.
Eight days of riding the tiger and Alcaeus was exhausted. He avoided his chambers in the palace – he was too easy to find there – and walked across the Outer Court to the Athanatos barracks. Alone of the men in the company, he knew what a symbolic honour it was for a company of mercenaries to take the barracks of what had once been the Empire’s elite cavalry regiment.
He’d played in the neglected barracks as a child – he’d kissed a pretty Ordinary there and taken her by the hand and run into the barracks as an adolescent, on a perfumed May day.
Now the barracks were clean and full of life, and he passed the outer door as the great gates of the Outer Court were opened behind him.
Bad Tom was sitting at the duty desk. He looked up. ‘Ah! Where the fuck have you been, then?’
‘And a pleasant evening to you, too, Ser Thomas,’ said the Morean.
Tom rose from behind the desk. ‘You have the duty, ser.’
The Morean groaned.
‘And you can have it again tomorrow – just to teach ye to read the roster. Eh?’ Tom grinned, and got up – all six foot five inches of him – from behind the desk. ‘All yours, with my compliments.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ Alcaeus moaned. ‘I’m shot! I’ve done the throne’s paperwork all day. I’m not even armed.’
Ser Thomas grinned. ‘You need more exercise, boyo. Let’s fight tomorrow.’
Alcaeus met the big man’s eye and matched his grin. ‘Horse or foot?’
‘That’s my boy. Let’s be a-horse. I’ll be gentle on ye, and let ye sleep in after yon stint at the night watch. Go get your armour.’
Alcaeus found Dmitry, his squire, awake, and managed to get himself armed in less than fifteen minutes. The Morean boy was all contrition. ‘I tried to find you and tell you you had the duty, ser!’ and so Alcaeus learned that the Imperial Ordinaries had turned the boy out of the palace. He sighed, scraped his knuckles on his vambrace, and ran back to the guard room with Dmitry following him carrying his sword and helmet.
Tom nodded. ‘All yours. Long Paw is out in town on a pass with Cully and Bent. The rest are in barracks. The Captain – the Duke – doesn’t want the lads and lasses loose in the fleshpots until we’re better liked here so you should have a quiet night.’ He paused. ‘The – er – Duke ordered that the quarter guard keep their horses saddled and ready though. You might want to order the same for your own.’ He smiled nastily. ‘Perhaps not such a quiet night after all, eh?’
Tom clapped his shoulder and retired, sabatons snapping crisply on the stone floor. Alcaeus leaned back in the heavy chair, breathing hard, and cursing his luck. He waved Dmitry to see to his horse, and the younger man went out into the cold night. Alcaeus leaned back in the big seat – big enough for a man in armour. His eyelids were heavy and he cursed.
The last thing I need is to fall asleep on duty.
He poured himself some mulled cider, heating on the hearth, his arms heavy in harness, drank it off, and felt a little better.
No Head sat at the other table, and he was writing furiously. Alcaeus leaned over and found that the man was copying a poem from a copybook – in low Archaic.
As Alcaeus loved poetry, he began to follow along.
‘Do ye mind?’ No Head asked. ‘I don’t like to be watched.’
Alcaeus rose and apologised. He could hear commotion in the courtyard. ‘That’s good stuff. Where’d you get it?’ he asked.
No Head looked up. ‘No idea. Ser Michael gave it to me to copy.’ The man stretched his right hand. ‘He’s teaching me to read and write.’
Alcaeus, who took literacy for granted, paused and then reordered his thoughts. ‘Ah – I crave your pardon. I wasn’t watching you write, I was reading the poem.’
No Head laughed. ‘It is a poem, I suppose. I can’t read it. I’m just copying the letters.’ He leaned back. ‘And it cramps my hand worse than a sword fight. But I’m keen to learn – I want to write a book.’
Alcaeus thought he should stand watch more often. He’d seldom met anyone who struck him as less bookish than No Head. ‘Really?’ Alcaeus asked, worrying in the same moment that he sounded a little too surprised.
No Head leaned over. ‘I hear you are a writer, eh?’
Alcaeus nodded. ‘I think I write all the time. In my sleep, even.’ He shrugged. ‘If I’m not scribbling, I’m thinking about it.’
No Head nodded. ‘That’s just it, ain’t it? It is like a bug that bites you, and then you can’t let it go. What do you write about?’
Alcaeus shrugged. ‘Life,’ he admitted. ‘Love. Women. Sometimes war.’ He shrugged. The commotion in the courtyard was growing closer. ‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I want to write a book about how to conduct a siege,’ No Head said. ‘How to build the big engines – how to choose the wood, how to make the torsion ropes, how to site ’em. How to dig a trench, and how to hold it. How to make fire.’
Alcaeus laughed. ‘That’s a good title.
How to Make Fire
.’ He sighed. ‘Or maybe
Kindles Fire
. It sounds different from my books – but half the world would want a copy, I suppose. Have you thought that you might be telling someone how to lay siege to you? You could be on the receiving end of your own—’
At that moment, the doors to the guardroom opened and a pair of Nordikans stood there with a tall, bearded man in a black travelling gown.
‘Your man doesn’t know the passwords,’ said the smaller of the two Nordikans. He grinned at Alcaeus.
Alcaeus had never seen the man before, so he shook his head. Then he thought of the latest command meeting and the Duke’s instructions about spies. His mother’s comments in the same vein.
‘Bring him here,’ Alcaeus ordered.
‘I’m not a member of the company,’ the man said quietly.
Alcaeus shook his head in exasperation. There was more commotion out in the courtyard, and the door was open and cold air was pouring into the guardroom.
Long Paw came through the door with three more Nordikans.
‘Quarter guard,’ Long Paw shouted.
Alcaeus choked. It was the company’s habit to keep almost a quarter of their men in full harness, archers with bows strung, at all times when under threat, but in barracks in the palace, they’d reduced this commitment to just twenty men. And he hadn’t inspected them—
But of course, Tom had. And as the shout went up, they came pounding down the corridors – Oak Pew was the first one through the double doors at the barracks’ end of the guardroom. She had a war bow in her fist and she already had a steel cap on her head. Ser Michael was next, and then the Captain himself, appearing fully armed from his office with Toby at his heels, and then the rest of them – Gelfred looked as if he’d been asleep in full harness while John le Bailli looked fresh, and right behind him was one of the new men-at-arms – Kelvin Ewald, a small man with a long scar. He wore a fancy harness.
‘To horse,’ said the Captain.
Long Paw said, ‘There are twenty or thirty men to take them. It was an ambush.’
The Captain was already getting his leg over his new gelding, bought from the Imperial stables. He cursed.
Long Paw rolled onto a small Eastern horse, and they were off, and the Nordikans had the gate open. Then they rode across the square and thought the streets – first a broad street, and then a sharp corner, and then another, the street narrowing all the way, and then another turn, a Y intersection . . .
Long Paw raised his arm.
There were two more men – dead or dying – in the doorway of the tiny room, and Bent had a dagger wound in his left arm.
The man on the bed was unconscious, as Cully had punched him in the head.
‘My turn,’ Cully said. ‘Make room.’
He and Bent switched – even this movement was the result of practice, and they changed like dance partners. Cully had his buckler off his hip, and he wrapped it around Bent from the left, caught a blow intended for the wounded man and made a short slash with his arming sword as Bent ducked away behind him. His new adversary didn’t really want to be there, alone, against a much better swordsman, and he backed away, assuming that Cully wouldn’t follow him from the safety of the doorway.
He was wrong, and he died for it, and then Cully was loose in the corridor, and he cut down two men – whirled, and managed to slam his buckler into the archer’s head – there was an archer in the corridor, looking for a shot he never took. Cully’s point sliced through the candle in a wall sconce, and a kick smashed the table with a dozen small oil lamps.
In the comparative saftey of a considerably darker corridor he got his back into the room, and took a knee.
‘I’m too old for this shit,’ he said.
Bent cackled.
And then a faint smell of smoke caught at the back of Cully’s throat.
Long Paw sent half a dozen archers down the black maw of an alley. He turned to the Duke and shook his head. ‘Never thought they’d have so many men. They have archers on two buildings, that I saw – maybe more.’
The Duke scratched under his chin. ‘I’d like to take them all.’
‘We’d lose Bent and Cully,’ Long Paw said.
The Duke grinned. ‘Can’t have that. Well, Michael said he wanted a fight. If the men in harness go on foot to clear the tavern we can let the archers try and clear the roofs. Yes?’
Ser Alcaeus nodded. ‘We’ve got a handful of Scholae. They followed us.’
The Duke whirled his horse. ‘Watch them.’
‘Watch them?’ Ser Alcaeus asked. ‘I’m related to half of them.’
The Duke wasn’t to be swayed. He leaned in close. ‘Alcaeus, this is all an elaborate attempt to catch a spy. This place is riddled with traitors, and the palace—’
Long Paw was motioning. ‘The taverna’s afire,’ he called.
The Duke shrugged. ‘Too late for talk. Dismount – horse holders. Helmets on, armoured men on me, unarmoured go with Long Paw. I want as many prisoners as can be taken, commensurate with not losing one of you.’
Oak Pew laughed aloud. The Duke frowned at her, and Sauce swatted the top of her steel cap with a gauntlet. ‘Prisoners,’ Sauce said with a nod.
Then they were off into the dark. Alcaeus knew this part of town well enough from his Academy days, but not in the dark – or rather, the streets he knew in the dark were closer to the waterfront. He followed Ser Michael, who followed Ser Alison, who followed the Duke.
They didn’t have to go far. They crossed one intersection and jogged noisily down a very narrow alley full of rubbish, and then they emerged into a small square lit by a burning building.