“Here’s the plan. Nairn stores his coin at his building downtown. It’s so well guarded that there’s no way to assault it, so we’re not going to. We’re just going to make it look like we are. With Nairn’s gold under attack, it’ll draw most of his guards there, while we steal from his residence instead. There are sure to be spoils to be had there, and with his guards distracted, we’ll get in and out before we’re even noticed.”
The plan was brazen, but it could work.
“Rat will scout both locations, at least as much as he can. Birdy will scout the interior of Nairn’s residence.”
“How’s she going to do that undetected?” Rat asked.
“In plain view. I have a cousin who can get her hired as a cleaning girl. A little help from Marija and she could easily look the part.”
With no further questions and much to be done, they divided up and began preparations.
Rat started by scouting Nairn’s vault in the center of town. He found that it was as impenetrable as reputed, but a small number of men could make it look like they were a more significant force and at least give the impression of challenging its defenses. The problem would be to escape. Once they had engaged with Nairn’s men, it would be exceedingly difficult to disengage. Rat reported this to Baron and puzzled over solutions.
Rat also scouted all the possible approaches to Nairn’s residence, while Kala scouted that which could be better ascertained from inside it. Nairn’s home proved to be more vulnerable than his vault and therefore posed fewer challenges as long as the number of guards could be reduced. Kala also located where his many girlfriends were housed and where they stored their jewelry and spending coin. Nairn, while a tyrant as a merchant, at least spent extravagantly on his girlfriends.
With a plan for Nairn’s residence figured out and half a plan for Nairn’s vault, Baron convened a meeting of his men.
“We’ll execute our plan in two nights’ time. The moon will be full and provide sufficient light to move about without torches. We’ll divide in two. We need capable fighters to make the assault on the vault look believable. Rat, you’ll lead the attack, and your team will include Finn, Cordell, and Roald; and take Birdy.”
Rat nodded his acceptance and beckoned to his band.
Baron continued. “The group at Nairn’s residence will have to spread out to break into many different buildings at the same time, so we’ll need most of us there. I’ll organize the attack and Thane will lead it. I’ll place you in teams, and you’ll rehearse your roles using drawings that we’ve put together from Rat’s and Birdy’s scouting.”
Baron paused to let all of this sink in. “The final piece of the plan is getting Rat’s team out once the diversion accomplishes its goal of drawing the guards away from Nairn’s residence. Once Thane’s forces complete the robbery, he’ll lead some of them to cause a diversion to Rat’s diversion. They’ll attack Nairn’s forces from the rear, and in the confusion, Rat’s and Thane’s teams can slip away. Brilliant, isn’t it?”
Baron didn’t ask if anyone had questions. He just ended with, “Rat, you figure out the attack on the vault, and I’ll tackle the residence. I have faith in you. Everyone not on Rat’s team, follow me to the warehouse, and we’ll continue planning the assault on Nairn’s residence there.”
Rat sent his team to get their bows, crossbows, and daggers. “Missile weapons will be the way to do this. If we find ourselves needing melee weapons, we’re dead before we start.”
The men dispersed, but because Kala had all of her weapons in the rafters above, she remained.
“I don’t like having to rely on Thane for anything, let alone my life,” she began.
“Don’t worry. He won’t be coming.”
“He’ll just send his men and hang back?”
“No. I don’t think anyone will be coming.”
“Baron is going to let us die?”
“I don’t think that bothers him. I think that’s part of his plan. Did you notice that he picked Finn and Cordell? They were sweet on two of the girls who escaped from the warehouse, and I think Baron suspects their involvement. And he picked Roald, who’s getting on in age and has a time limit on his future utility. You and I obviously make him feel threatened. He picked our entire team because we’re expendable.”
“Why’d you accept the mission then?”
“You can’t say no to Baron. We’ll just do our best to find a way to get out of there and hope some of us make it.”
The men returned, and Rat started explaining his plan to them. It involved simultaneously attacking from the rooftops on multiple sides of the building to make the attack seem more substantial and well-coordinated. Then, they’d rally near the entrance to make an incursion look more plausible, or at least sow seeds of doubt that the attack could be a diversion for an attack on one of the other sides. We need them to be confused and concerned enough to call for assistance from Nairn’s residence. We can’t allow them the luxury of sitting back and patiently discovering how insignificant a threat we actually pose. Understood?”
They nodded.
“I want you all to spend the next two days working on your marksmanship. You need to be accurate enough to cause concern and fast enough for it to appear that our numbers are greater than they are. I’ll bring you to the site one at a time and walk you through where to set up for both the initial attack and the frontal attack. Finn, come with me now. The rest of you, practice.”
Kala put her bow down and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Rat asked.
“I can already hit a squirrel running across a tree branch. There’s something I have to check out.”
Rat didn’t press further, so she left on her errand.
On the night of the assault, Rat’s and Thane’s teams agreed on timings and signals, then parted ways. Rat led his team to the center of town. Arriving at their destination, their first order of business was taking out the lookouts on the rooftops of the buildings that surrounded Nairn’s vault. The lookouts were professional, but years of inactivity had made them complacent, and they fell quickly and silently to Rat’s party.
Kala and the men took up their positions and waited for Rat’s signal. Rat drove a wagon slowly past the vault’s front gate. When alongside it, he pulled a lever that dropped one side of the wagon’s floor and large, oil-filled barrels rolled toward the entrance. In the confusion caused by the barrels rolling toward the gate, he dashed for cover into the entryway of the opposite building. Rat had sawed the barrels to weaken them, but he’d never been able to conduct a full-scale test and hoped it would go according to plan. A couple of the barrels veered off, but most rolled straight and smashed against the gate, releasing their contents. Rat lit an arrow from a torch hanging on the wall and fired it at the spilled oil. It caught fire, and soon the entire gate was aflame in dense, choking smoke.
This signaled the others in Rat’s party to roll their own barrels of oil off the roof on their sides of the building. They had disguised the barrels of oil to look like rain barrels and had secretly installed them the previous day. They similarly ignited the oil that now soaked the streets below. Thick black smoke billowed up the walls of Nairn’s fortress from all four sides, obscuring the view of the guards stationed on the walls. A bell rang out, calling all of Nairn’s guards to their stations now that the building was under attack.
Rat’s party took potshots at the confused guards and succeeded in felling several of them. Once they’d made their presence felt, they raced down the stairs of their buildings and headed for the building across from the vault’s gate. Finn and Cordell took up positions in windows, Roald and Kala on the roof, and Rat stayed in the doorway below. Each station had two loaded crossbows and a bow with an ample supply of arrows. They harried Nairn’s guards as best they could, attacking from all angles.
Roald took an arrow in the leg, but broke it off, ducked below the roof’s edge, crawled right or left and kept popping up to fire from different positions.
Finn and Cordell moved between windows, but they had fewer occasions to do so without exposing themselves to withering counterfire. The guards at the gate had Rat pinned in an alcove off the entryway of the building.
It was bad enough facing the guards within Nairn’s vault. If more from Nairn’s residence joined the fray, Rat’s team would be quickly overwhelmed. Kala could wait no longer. She bolted for the back of the roof and slid down a rope that she’d secured earlier. Roald watched her go with a look of damning disappointment but kept up his attack.
Kala hit the ground running. She headed straight for the nearby temple. She’d heard rumors that it housed a secretive cult that worshipped death and she’d scouted it a couple of days before. The monks within, armed as they were, looked like they dealt death more than they worshipped it. Kala scaled the temple wall and raced among the shadows of the courtyard for the central building.
She climbed a drainpipe, edged along a stone ledge, and entered through an open window. She found herself high above a small library. The circular room was ringed with bookcases radiating outward from a display case that contained scrolls laid out under glass with evident reverence.
She lowered herself quietly from the window to the top of the bookcase below, which teetered but didn’t fall. She climbed down to the floor and approached the display case. She pulled the sword from her back and used it to shatter the glass. The crash was loud enough to wake the gods. She threw aside her sword and snatched up a small scroll.
The door burst open, and two armed monks stormed in. Kala turned on her heel and raced for the nearest bookcase with the monks charging after her. She tucked the scroll under her chin and freed her hands to pull herself up the spine of the bookcase. Kala reached the top just in time to evade the swing of a long sword. She leaped to the adjacent bookcase, causing the one that she’d jumped from to tip over and crash into the bookcase beside it. She bounded from bookcase to bookcase toward the open window, causing each to topple over in succession. The monks tracked her from the floor below, shouting curses.
Kala was getting closer to the window when she saw that the first bookcase that she’d toppled had caused the one beside it to crash into the next, and so on until the cascade rounded the room at her from the opposite direction. She had to hurry, despite the slippery dust beneath her feet challenging her footing. The only reason she kept her balance was her momentum.
She leaped for the window just as the wave of crashing bookcases crested beneath her. The room lay in carnage under a billowing cloud of dust. She looked back to see that several monks had joined the first pair and seeing her in the window, turned for the door. Kala jumped for the drainpipe, caught it, and slid its length to the ground. Shouting and torches came from all angles now.
Kala wasted no time in rushing back along the way she’d snuck in. Racing across the courtyard, doors burst open around her as though she were a lit fuse igniting the building. She scaled the rough stone wall and vaulted over it to the street below, wincing at the impact. To her left, shouting monks spilled into the streets from the Temple gate, waving all manner of weapons.
Kala raced down the street pursued by the angry wave of monks that got closer with every stride. She spied the glow of flames at Nairn’s vault and prayed she’d make it there in time.
Several streets away, Roald lay bleeding on the roof, the arrows of several of Nairn’s archers having found him. Finn and Cordell had abandoned their windows and joined Rat at ground level, and now all three were trapped in alcoves off the entryway. Archers at the gate across the street continued to fire through the entrance, pinning them against the walls. Guards from Nairn’s residence had arrived and filled the street. Only the narrowness of the passageway in which the three men sheltered kept them from being overrun. Rat held them back with carefully thrown daggers, but he had precious few left. The guards were preparing to rush the entryway.
Kala rounded the corner with an army of angry, weapon-brandishing monks at her heels. Nairn’s guards froze for the briefest of moments as they realized they were under attack. A guard charged at Kala.
“Catch!” she yelled and tossed the man the scroll she’d been carrying. He caught it, and Kala slid past him in a spray of gravel. The wave of monks crashed into Nairn’s men, and the two sides clashed. Kala regained her footing and sprinted away in the chaos.
“Now’s our chance,” Rat said and made to move.
Finn stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “We know what you did for our girls. Thank you.” He nudged Cordell, and the two men roared into the corridor and a hail of arrows. Rat leaped out behind them and raced down the hall deeper into the building. Arrows whistled past him, but Finn and Cordell’s bodies shielded him from the worst of them.
Rat burst through a door into the back alley. A couple of Nairn’s men had gotten there first and charged at him. He pulled out his sword and engaged them. The men were skilled, but Rat’s desire to live edged out their desire to kill and he found openings to dispatch them.
Rat heard a call of “Rat, help!” from above. He looked up to see Kala carrying Roald over her shoulder and swinging out on the rope she’d secured to the roof. She slid down it, and Roald’s extra weight burned her hands as she held tightly to the rope. Rat caught them and helped support Roald. They propped him up on both sides and carried him away.
The din of battle receded the farther away they got. They eventually made it to Baron’s and dragged Roald into the great room, which was filled with the men of the party that had sacked Nairn’s residence.
“How the hell?” Baron greeted them. Then, “Thane…” as he began to justify the lack of a diversionary attack.
“Roald needs help,” Rat interrupted him. “Call a healer.”
Baron waved to a man to summon a healer. “Rat and Birdy. My menagerie has returned to me. Thank the gods.” Something in his tone did not sound particularly thankful at all.
25
Forest
Forest stumbled through the gates of her village delirious with exhaustion after having walked for days. She’d given the sacked village a wide berth, and that meant that she was never sure that she was walking a true path home. Forest lost days retracing her steps when the countryside began to look utterly foreign. She used distant landmarks to orient herself, along with the position of the sun, but it was very slow going.
As it had been with Kala, the villagers seemed reluctant to approach her, as though having been in the woods so long made her contagious. Word of her return spread quickly, however, and Calix was the first to reach her. He sent a pair of children off to ensure that Lily and Cera knew that she’d made it back, but that she was in no condition to do anything but rest. He helped her to her cottage and laid her in her bed. She passed out sometime before or after; she couldn’t remember which. He kept watch over her as she’d never looked so spent or so thin. Lily hugged him on her return and sent him home with a promise to call for him when Forest woke.
When she finally did wake, she found herself in her bed, miraculously in her nightclothes. She felt bone-weary.
“You gave us quite the scare,” Lily greeted her, moving closer to stroke her hair.
“Whatever possessed you to be gone so long?” Cera asked with frustration and a hint of anger. Her nerves were frayed by keeping Lily from breaking down during Forest’s extremely long absence. Cera had to keep reminding her how long Kala had been gone and still returned, changed maybe, but unharmed.
Forest struggled to sit up. “Call the Council,” she demanded with an urgency that surprised them all. When they only sat there staring at her, she yelled, “Now!”
“Of course. Just rest while we arrange it,” Lily pacified her. Though she thought Forest’s request to be strange, her intensity scared her, so she asked Cera to find Calix so that he could ask his father to request that the Council come to the cottage. Somewhat mollified, Forest slumped back, and Lily’s touch soothed her back to sleep.
Forest awoke again to the sounds of bickeri
ng.
“This is highly out of the ordinary,” Councilor Sayer picked up from where he’d left off.
“We’re not to be summoned like dogs,” Janus added with rancor.
“Can’t you see that the girl is too unwell to come to us?” Fayre pointed out to reduce the tension. “Don’t you find her long absence at least somewhat curious?”
Councilors Janus and Sayer grumbled, but they had to admit that they were intrigued by what the young girl had been doing for so long in the woods and what she felt was so pressing that she had requested an audience. In truth, she had demanded it, but they couldn’t accept that, so they acted as though they had complied with her request out of benevolence and concern.
The Council had initially refused to come until Calix pleaded with his father. As the newest member of the Council, Emrys didn’t have much pull, but because his son was so insistent, he overstepped his standing a little. Now, here they all were, milling around the tiny cottage, waiting for Forest to wake and probably regale them with some matter that was of importance only to a child.
Councilor Eilidh was the first to notice that Forest had woken up. “She’s awake!” she announced, then turned to her, “What is so important that it warrants the Council’s attention, child?”
“We’re in grave danger,” Forest began.
Janus rolled his eyes.
Forest caught it and suppressed the urge to get up and punch him. She pushed down her anger and continued, “North of here, perhaps ten days’ hike, lies the smoldering ruin of a village like ours, its people slaughtered.”
The Council stared at Forest while they struggled to digest this.
Janus was the first to comment, “There can’t be a village only ten days from here. We’d know about it.”
Forest was shocked. A village has been torched, its inhabitants murdered, and all you care about is its location? She kept herself calm and replied, “No one goes out for more than a half-day hike. Of course, we wouldn’t know if we had neighbors.”
Raven's Wings Page 21