“The Young Lion!” someone called, in what sounded very much like full-throated support.
“The Darling o’ the Slums!” came a woman’s voice. “You saved my—” Cut off in a squeal.
“Freedom! Freedom!” Though for who and from what was not explained.
A kind of fever had broken out. A madness of hope, fear and fury. Like the one on the day the Breakers first took the city, maybe. People scrambled for the doors. Ran for safety, for their families. Others fought their way to the railings of the gallery to bellow their disgust or their encouragement.
“Death to Aristocrats!”
“Enough bloodshed! Enough bloodshed!”
“Down with the Great Change!”
“Hang ’em all!”
“Bastards!”
There was even a plaintive cry of, “Long live the king!” Over-earnest, entirely mad or simply an early bet on a new reality, it was impossible to say.
“I fucking doubt it,” snarled Judge. She pointed at Orso with a finger sporting at least four stolen wedding rings. “Since you’re so keen to denounce yourself on her behalf, you can take the long drop with her. Corporal Halder, bind this fool!”
Halder looked like he’d much rather have slipped out of a side door, but the habit of obedience was hard to break. He and one of his fellows pulled Orso’s arms behind him and the cord painfully tight about his wrists, while Broad brought Savine down from the dock and bound her hands, his heavy jaw fixed, his red eyes staring.
“Burners, to me!” screeched Judge, and they began to converge from every part of the court. From the benches, from the galleries, from their places on guard around the walls. Men and women with red-daubed clothes, red-spattered armour, the fire of fanaticism still hot in their eyes. Men and women who would rather go down in flames than see any hint of the old Union return.
Halder grabbed Orso under the arm and started to march him towards the aisle, a good four-score Burners gathering around them in a grim knot, weapons drawn, with Judge their furious spear-point.
The door shuddered against Vick’s shoulder with a sound of splintering wood.
They’d brought an axe, then, and from the feel of it a big one. She wondered how long she and Gorst could hold the door shut. She wondered how many Burners were out there. She wondered what would happen when they got in. She didn’t like any of her answers.
The axe blows stopped and there was a sudden shove on the door, harder than ever, so hard it nearly flung Vick to the ground.
She’d wedged pieces of a broken spear into the brackets where the bar would’ve gone, but they didn’t fit, jumping and flexing. She could hear them outside, one voice calling the rhythm. “Shove! Shove! Shove!”
There was a faint squealing, and with a chill horror Vick saw one of the brackets was working loose, rusted nails easing from splintering wood at the pressure outside.
“The frame’s rotten!” she hissed through her gritted teeth. The door had eased open a chink, and then wider, the grunts and growls coming louder than ever from beyond.
Gorst’s eyes met hers, and she got the feeling they’d come to the same conclusion: they weren’t going to be able to hold that door shut much longer.
“On three,” he hissed, keeping one shoulder braced against the wood, but sliding out his short steel with the other hand, “we open it.”
“We fucking what?” Vick snarled back at him.
“And fight.”
The door jerked open another finger’s breadth. Something slid through, so close to Vick she had to twist her face away, staring at it cross-eyed. The blade of a spear. Someone was using it as a lever, working the door open.
“One,” squeaked Gorst.
Vick gave the door a last parting shove then scrambled back, clawing her bloody mace up from the floor.
“Two.”
The bracket dropped free of the frame and bounced away, the pieces of broken spear tumbling, Gorst’s boots sliding as he was forced back.
“Three!”
And he jumped clear, sweeping out his long steel. Between the half-light and the panic, Vick wasn’t sure how many burst through into the chain room. Too many. They were shouting. She’d no idea what, over her own quick breath. Just swearing, maybe. Just mindless shrieking, maybe. She might’ve been shrieking herself.
One came tottering bent over, almost falling from the pressure behind. Gorst’s long steel hacked into the back of his head in a spray of blood. Another got the short steel through his guts and floundered about, screeching, tangled up with his own halberd. Another came with a shield up, barrelled into Gorst and managed to shove him away from the door.
Which is how one could come straight at Vick, screaming at the top of his voice. She caught a glimpse of him as he pounded through a shaft of light, lips curled back, a smear of Burner’s red paint across his cheek.
Then her mace crunched into his mouth, bits of tooth flying. His head snapped up, his roar turned to a squawk. She tried to swing again but he blundered into her, so the mace missed his head and thumped weakly against his back. She stumbled, caught her heel on a fallen body and went over on her arse. With a kind of wounded bellow, the Burner she’d hit in the mouth flopped towards the nearest windlass, drooling blood.
“Fuck!” Vick scrambled up, rearing over him, swinging the mace with both hands. She smashed in the back of his head, but his hands were already around the lever. Now he sagged onto it, a dead weight.
There was a heavy clunk. Gears whirred as the portcullis began to drop in its frame, its cross-hatched shadow shifting on the wall.
There was a clatter as Gorst dropped his steels and caught the windlass. It dragged him along for a moment, but he twisted, teeth clenched, got his shoulder against one handle and braced himself, trembling, growling, having to strain with all his strength to hold it up. For an instant, everything was oddly still.
Then someone stepped through the door behind him. Corporal Smiler, and by no means smiling. He saw Gorst, he saw all the dead Burners, plus one still screaming, crawling, screaming as he tried to hold his guts in. He heaved up an outsized axe, the one he must’ve been using on the door, its blade near scraping the ceiling, ready to split Gorst’s skull in half.
He gave a surprised ooof as Vick charged into him, drove him crashing into the wall, the axe bouncing off her back and onto the floor. She went at him with everything she had. Tried for his balls with a clumsy jab of the mace but only hit his hip, dug her other fist into his stomach but barely got a wheeze from him. She straightened up so she could swing at his throat.
She caught a flash of movement in the darkness, then a sick crunch.
She gave a snorting gurgle. Mouth full of blood. Her face felt weird. Someone was screaming. Choking, horrible screams. Was that her?
There’d been something important she had to do. Couldn’t think what. Couldn’t think at all.
Something about a tunnel. Ah, portcullis! She groggily shook her head. She could see Gorst, still straining at the windlass, jaw squirming, but he looked a long way off. Everything dim.
There was something tight around her neck. Tried to slap it away but her hands were so weak. It squeezed tighter, and tighter. Couldn’t breathe.
Smiler had her around the throat, pressed up against the wall, her feet barely touching the floor. He was snarling in her throbbing face. She tore at his hands with her nails, her mouth blowing breathless, bloody squelches in his face. She wriggled, struggled, but he was too strong. Couldn’t breathe.
She managed to work her heel up the wall behind her. He twisted her head up, back, as if he was killing a chicken. Wringing her neck. She wriggled, squirmed, till her fishing hand found the grip of the knife in her boot. Felt like he was going to twist her head off, felt like her skull was going to burst. Couldn’t breathe.
He kept holding her with one hand, made a big fist with the other, bringing it back to smash her face again, and she pulled the knife and lashed at him, overhand. Her arm was numb, tangled with hi
s elbow on the way, but the blade still caught something.
He let go and she flopped down on hands and knees. She could just hear his wail over the sudden roaring of blood in her ears. She saw him lurch away, one hand clapped to the side of his head, and he tripped in the darkness and went over backwards.
Fuck, she wanted to lie down. The bastard with the guts was curled up on his side now, sobbing. She wanted to join him. Instead she struggled to her feet, clinging to the corner of a crate full of flatbow bolts, knees bent like a sailor on the slick deck of a storm-tossed ship. She gasped for air, wheezing, braying, wanting to puke with each breath. Her face was one pulsing mass of pain.
Gorst was still straining at the handles of the windlass, veins bulging from his neck, sweat beaded on his forehead, the mechanism grinding. His eyes flickered to his steels, on the floor beside his boot, then to the other side of the room. Over there, in the shadows, Smiler clambered up, growling through gritted teeth. He had a great ragged wound down the side of his head, blood pattering his shoulder and streaking his armour, his ear hanging off by a shred of gristle. A wound bad enough to make him very angry. But not bad enough to put him down.
Vick could certainly have used Gorst’s help. But if he let go and that portcullis dropped, all their plans were fucked.
“Thtay!” she snarled at him, her battered throat hardly able to get the air, her battered mouth hardly able to make the words. “I’ll handle thith.”
She caught the haft of the big axe and dragged it towards her, blade scraping against the stones. Bloody hell, it was a weight, thick haft riveted with strips of steel, she could scarcely even lift it.
Smiler was on his feet, facing her from the other side of the chain room, near the open door, one of his dead comrades’ fallen swords in one hand, the other clapped to the gash Vick had dug into the side of his head. His leather jerkin was splattered all over, no way of telling what was red paint, or his blood, or hers. His face twisted into a snarl.
“Come here, bitch!” he roared at her.
Vick charged. Or at any rate she half-stumbled, half-fell. But not straight at him. Sideways at the portcullis. She dropped, which wasn’t hard to do, and slid the axe along the floor, ramming the haft straight through the grating until the blade caught against it.
Gorst let go of the windlass. There was a whirr of gears as the portcullis dropped, then a clank as one of the steel bars caught on the axe haft and was held there, loose chains faintly rattling.
Gorst gave a soft growl as he peeled his hands from the handles. He bent down, narrowed eyes fixed on Smiler. He came up with his bloody steels in his fists. He worked his shoulders, then stretched his neck one way, then the other.
“Come here, bitch,” he said in that piping voice.
Smiler glanced at Vick. She stayed on her knees and gave a little shrug. He tossed away the sword and bolted through the open doorway. Gorst stepped over one of the corpses, put his shoulder to the door and heaved it shut again, ended up sitting on the floor with his back to the wood. The Burner who’d been stuck in the guts had stopped screaming. Just lay there on his side in a great slick of blood, each breath a shallow squeak.
“You hurt?” asked Gorst.
Vick put her fingers gingerly to her nose. A barely recognisable sticky mass on the front of her throbbing face.
“I’ve had worth,” she mumbled. Would’ve sounded more dauntless if she could’ve made the “s” sound, maybe. She thought she could hear something. The blood rushing in her skull, or hooves at a distance? She stumbled on wobbling legs, gripping hard at her aching hip, over to the slit windows facing the dry moat. She squinted into the brightness outside, face pressed to the stone.
She saw the bridge. The slogan-daubed buildings beyond. The wide street that led into the city. And coming up it, at a clattering canter, a great mass of horsemen. Armed and armoured, bristling with steel. Leo dan Brock’s lion standard flew at the head, the sun of the Union beside it.
“They’re here,” she croaked. Would’ve felt more relief if her neck hurt less, maybe. She tried to sniff and failed, then worked her tongue around her mouth and spat more blood. “So… that’s good.”
The scarred walls of the Agriont rushed up to meet them.
Leo’s eyes were narrowed against the wind, his horse jolting wildly on the cobbled street, riders shouting and jostling all around him, but he saw now that the portcullises were still raised, their iron teeth gleaming in the ceiling of the entrance tunnel.
Teufel had come through. The woman made herself hard to like, but Leo much preferred competence to charm these days. The archway of white light beckoned at the far end. The way into the Agriont was open.
Leo grinned sideways at Jurand, and Jurand smiled back. By the dead, he’d forgotten the feeling of riding at the enemy with good men beside him.
People scattered from the gateway. Shocked faces as they dived aside. Could’ve been Breakers, Burners, fools come to gawp at Savine’s trial or fools running for their lives. All Leo was sure of was that they were in his way.
He gave his horse the spurs, sending a stab of pain through his own leg, knocking a man spinning from his horse’s flank to crash into the tunnel wall. His scream was lost in the thundering echoes. Smashing hooves, rattling armour, ringing weapons, roared orders, all the sounds Leo most loved. He was the Young Lion again.
They plunged out into the brightness. There was something like resistance further down the road, where the way narrowed between two white buildings. A few dozen Burners, all daubed with red, trying to throw up a barricade around an upturned cart.
Leo couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to, and he didn’t. “For the Union!” he roared, aching from the effort of clinging to his horse. “Charge!”
He picked his spot, hunched low as he jumped a few tangled chairs and crashed down among the shrieking Burners on the other side, scattering bodies.
He had to drop his reins to free his sword. You’d think with one arm you could still swing a blade well enough, but without his leg to grip his horse or his other arm to give him balance, he wobbled in the saddle, flailed uselessly, struck someone with the flat and nearly fumbled the grip. His own clumsiness filled him with fury and he clenched his teeth, hacking about him, finally landing a decent blow on the other side, blood spattering yellow hair.
He wasn’t the man he used to be, that was plain. He was streaming with sweat under his armour, gasping for breath, useless arm throbbing numbly.
Riders kept smashing into the remnants of the barricade. Jumping over it, blades flashing in the sunlight. Jurand had his teeth bared, swinging away. A couple of horses lay dying, one of Leo’s officers was on his knees, coughing blood, but the Burners were shattered, already running.
Some of Forest’s men tore after them on horseback, the lord marshal himself close behind, couched over his saddle as his horse jumped the half-built barricade. “Save the king!” he roared over his shoulder and Leo spurred after, clinging to sword and reins at once.
The park opened up before them, a muddy, overgrown mockery of the shimmering greenery he’d swaggered through when he first visited Adua. There were running figures everywhere. Running towards him, running away. Almost as much chaos as the day of the Great Change. Over the roofs ahead he could see the great gilded dome, gleaming dully beneath its streaking of soot, and beyond it the black spike of the Tower of Chains.
The thought suddenly floated up of how much simpler things might be if Savine had already taken the long drop.
Leo pushed it angrily away. She was his wife. The mother of his children. He was duty-bound to do everything he could to save her. The Young Lion might not be swept away by every feeling any more, but he still took his duty very seriously.
“Forward!” he roared over his shoulder. “To the Lords’ Round!” He’d be damned if anyone would call it the Court of the People ever again.
The Sentence
Savine had become something of a connoisseur of mayhem. She had
been caught up in the vicious uprising in Valbeck, been a prisoner in the Agriont on the day of the Great Change, borne personal witness to the terror that followed. But the chaos in the Square of Martyrs now was not the purposeful kind that the Breakers, then the Burners, had chosen to impose upon the Union. This reminded her more of the rout after Stoffenbeck. The outright panic of the losing side in a battle. The vicious frenzy of every person for themselves.
Quite a crowd must have gathered for her execution, but now, with news of the approaching royalist army, it was their own imminent deaths that were commanding all their attention. Mobs had formed around the archways leading off the square, people screaming and shoving and trampling one another, tangled with riders and hawkers’ carts. Here is how things end: not with some grand drama, but a shameful scuffle in a gate.
Over the slaughterhouse squealing of mortal terror, Savine thought she could hear the faint sounds of fighting. The same distant clamour of men and metal she had heard at Stoffenbeck, and it sparked that same mixture of hope and fear, though with an even more desperate edge now.
Judge glowered back up the rubbish-strewn steps towards the Lords’ Round. The Commons’ Round. The Court of the People. The heart of the Union, whichever version of the Union you subscribed to, rebuilt even more grandly on the grand ruins of the one Bayaz had laid waste to, its stonework pocked and scarred and daubed with the slogans of the Great Change.
“Burn it,” she said.
The way they set to the task it must have been a plan long arranged. Burners trotted off with torches and a few moments later Savine was shocked to see flames flicker up the sides of the building. Wood stacked in readiness, she supposed, and buttresses painted with pitch.
Judge took a long breath and blew it out in a sour grunt, like a woman looking back on the dream home from which she has just been evicted. “Court stands in recess,” she muttered. “Let’s go.”
The Wisdom of Crowds Page 43