by Garth Nix
There was a door in the side of the hut. A simple wooden door, no different than the one to the mill at home, with a rope-pull for the latch inside. Odo and Eleanor moved up to it and listened.
They could hear a voice inside.
“Turn the wheel, Old Ryce, turn the wheel. One hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and three —”
Odo pulled the rope, lifting the latch, and eased the door open.
Soft lantern light spilled outward across the dam. Odo and Eleanor entered together, ready to fight, only to stop suddenly and stare.
The hut was only the topmost part of a tower that extended some way down into the body of the dam. Odo and Eleanor stood on a small platform that protruded over the space below. A series of ladders extended down from there, while another ladder led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
The inside of the tower was almost completely filled with an enormous cylindrical container made of hundreds of bronze plates riveted together. Black pitch oozed out around many of the rivets, and the whole thing stank of sulfurous fire.
At the base of the cylinder, some thirty feet below, was a thick tangle of huge pipes connected to a huge wheel, also of bronze, which was being turned by an old but muscular man dressed only in a loincloth and a leather apron that extended from his neck to his ankles. His arms were wiry and hairless in patches, where they had obviously been burned. His feet were bare. On his head he wore a tattered acorn hat that leaked strands of flyaway white hair.
“Turn the wheel, Old Ryce, turn the wheel,” he sang to himself, oblivious to his visitors above. “One hundred and six, one hundred and seven, two thousand turns for the dragon to roar … one hundred and nine!”
“Stop doing that!” ordered Odo.
“One hundred and —”
“Stop!” roared Odo.
The old man froze with his hands on the wheel and looked up.
“Who are you?” Odo asked.
The old man blinked and said in a hesitant voice, “Old Ryce, Your Honor.”
“What are you doing?” asked Eleanor.
“Turning the wheel, turning the wheel,” answered Old Ryce. “Got to do it two thousand times. It’s a pump, you see, a most ingenious device, if I do say so myself … but Old Ryce is not supposed to talk to you. How did you get past the guards?”
“Guards?” asked Odo, looking behind him but seeing no one.
“Are they down there with you?” Eleanor asked.
“Gone to get dinner! Only Old Ryce here. Those others is afraid of the device. The first one I made, it burst, I admit, but none were killed. And Cobb got a new name — One-Eye, a perfectly good name —”
“You made this device?” asked Odo. “This engine that flings fire to the sky?”
“Oh, yes,” said Old Ryce with pride. “I’m a master smith, and an artificer besides. I followed the old book, true, but I made it, and the two little ones before. Just as the Captain ordered, Old Ryce.”
“Who is the Captain?” asked Odo.
Old Ryce looked up and down and sideways, and did not immediately answer.
“Come up here and talk to us, you mangy cumberwold,” ordered Eleanor, getting tired of shouting.
Old Ryce raised his leg with the jangle of steel links. His right ankle was manacled to a chain that was set into a staple in the floor.
“The Captain’s not very trusting, no she isn’t,” he said sadly. “Let Old Ryce get back to turning. They’ll be watching for the dragon fire. No bread and water for Old Ryce if he don’t turn the wheel. She doesn’t like shirkers, oh no.”
“She?” asked Eleanor and Odo, both at the same time, their expressions almost identical.
“What’s the Captain’s name?” asked Odo.
“The Captain? Oh, the Captain …” Old Ryce gripped the wheel tighter than ever, though he didn’t try to turn it. “The Captain will be back soon, Old Ryce, and if the Captain finds them the Captain will kill them and then kill Old Ryce too. She doesn’t need another device; she doesn’t need Old Ryce no more if he won’t turn the wheel. She said so —”
“Tell us the Captain’s name,” Eleanor insisted.
“Vile,” said Old Ryce. His lower lip quivered.
“I know she’s vile, but what’s her name!”
“Vile,” repeated Old Ryce. “Vile … heart. The Captain. Captain Vileheart, and never was there a truer name.”
“Vileheart?”
Eleanor looked at Odo in puzzlement. “I thought it was going to be …”
“It is,” said Odo. “It has to be.”
He leaned over the railing and shouted down at Old Ryce. “Does Captain Vileheart have other names?’
Old Ryce nodded and quivered.
“Many, many names,” he said. “Terrible names.”
“Is one of them Sir Saskia?”
Old Ryce let out a shriek and collapsed beneath his wheel.
“Sir Saskia, Captain Vileheart, the Lady of the Bloody Hand, the Swordmistress of Skynadar,” he gibbered. “They’re all her, and more besides. She’ll come and kill us all!”
“She might well kill us — but not before we get rid of this dam and get the river back, I swear it,” said Odo, surprised by his decisiveness. Sir Saskia would not have her way this time! “Eleanor, can you please keep watch?”
Odo started down the ladder. Old Ryce was still shrieking below.
Eleanor opened the door and went out on to the dam wall, just as the three guards Old Ryce had mentioned arrived. Two men and a woman in the dirty leather armor of Sir Saskia’s brigand group. None of the three had weapons ready. The closest had his hands full with a loaf and a wheel of cheese, the second was drinking from a stone bottle of ale, and the third had her thumbs through her belt.
Runnel was already in Eleanor’s hand, and her practice, first with Odo and Biter and then with the older sword, made the required movements second nature.
The enchanted sword cut across in a lightning move that sent cheese and bread flying. The brigand holding them staggering back, clutching a long but shallow wound across his chest.
The other two went for their weapons, and the stone bottle flew at Eleanor’s head. She ducked beneath it, and moved in to strike as the second brigand tripped in his haste to attack and impaled himself on Runnel.
It happened so quickly that Eleanor didn’t have time to react. Her enemy went down gurgling from a terrible wound to his throat.
The third raised her hands and cried, “Quarter! Give quarter!”
Even with this traditional cry for mercy, Runnel went to lunge. Eleanor dragged her back, wrestling the sword to her side. She had seen plenty of blood before, from her father’s patients, but never so much as a result of her own actions. Her gorge rose. She fought it back down.
Odo shouted something from inside and below. Eleanor heard it as if he were even farther away. She was shaking, almost unable to comprehend that she had defeated three bandits. One wounded, one dying … maybe … and one surrendered.
This was knight’s work. And she had done it.
“Are you all right? What’s happening?” shouted Odo, and a few moments later he came panting out the door, having climbed back up the ladder faster than any mill rat ran up a beam to escape a ratting dog.
“Enemies,” said Runnel in Eleanor’s stead. “Bandits, who should pay the penalty for their foul misdeeds: death.”
“Yes,” said Biter, shifting in Odo’s hand. “Their lives are forfeit.”
“No,” croaked the man with the wound to his chest. He had both hands pressed against it, his fingers bloody. “Not us. There’s been some mistake. We serve Sir Saskia the knight.”
“You mean Captain Vileheart,” said Eleanor.
The two survivors exchanged a look of hopelessness.
“I never wanted to be a bandit,” said the woman. “It wasn’t my fault. The harvest failed —”
“Enough!” said Eleanor. “We’re not going to kill them, are we, Odo? I mean … I already … and if we
have to, of course … but …”
“No,” said Odo, frowning. For all the talk of knights fighting, he’d never thought to see someone seriously wounded, maybe killed … someone who a few minutes before had been utterly unharmed.
He drew himself up to his full, quite imposing height, which seemed all the more considerable with the enchanted sword in his hand, the emerald in its pommel flashing green.
“Tend to your wounds, take the dead man, if he is dead, and go. But if we encounter you again in these lands, your lives will truly be forfeit.”
“Thank you, thank you, gentle sir, noble maid,” gabbled the wounded man. He gestured at the woman, and they both picked up the fallen man.
“Leave your weapons,” Eleanor ordered. Runnel emphasized her words by darting forward.
A minute later, Eleanor and Odo were alone again on the dam wall, the only sign the brigands had been there three heavy and badly made swords, three daggers, and a bloodstain.
“They’ll go straight to Sir Saskia,” said Runnel. “You shouldn’t have let them go.”
“Maybe,” said Eleanor. She picked up one of the regular swords and hefted it, testing its weight. “But unless they have horses, it’ll take them several days. Here.”
She gave the sword to Odo.
“We need no other swords, squire,” said Biter indignantly.
“He’ll need it to get the chain off Old Ryce,” she said. “I’m guessing you don’t want to be used like a chisel on old iron?”
“No, indeed,” said Biter, shuddering from tip to pommel.
Odo sheathed Biter and swung the sword over his shoulder.
“First we release Old Ryce,” he said, nodding. “Then we start a fire under that huge copper kettle. It’s full of pitch and sulfur and who knows what else. The log wall will burn, the dam will collapse —”
Eleanor grinned. “And then the river will be free!”
It’ll be a powerful big fire,” cautioned Old Ryce as they hurried along the broad path downstream from the dam. “There’s enough pitch, naptha, and sulfur in my cylinder for nine dozen dragon breaths.”
“Good,” said Odo without pausing. After freeing Old Ryce, he’d used the brigand’s sword to loosen some of the bronze plates to let the incendiary mixture in the cylinder leak out faster. He had left it pooling at the bottom. After climbing out he’d thrown a burning torch down into the pool. The pitch had caught immediately, though Old Ryce had assured him it would take half an hour or more before enough plates buckled and the whole lot went up.
When that happened, the dam would burn too, very quickly. The timbers were what kept the earth fill in place. Once enough of them burned, the dam would go, and the lake would empty back into the river.
There would be a flood. Odo was a miller’s son, and knew a lot about sluices, mill ponds, and winter floods. He’d thought, looking at the complete emptiness of the river ahead and the size of the lake behind, that all that water gushing out would mostly go along the river rather than spread sideways and cause havoc.
Now that it was closer to actually happening, he wasn’t so sure, and he also wasn’t so sure about Old Ryce’s timing. One thing he did know was that they wouldn’t want to be inside the river gorge in the case of a flood.
“Faster!” he urged Eleanor and Old Ryce, taking a moment himself to look back. There was a bright glow in the middle of the dam, a very bright glow, and even more smoke then when the “dragon breath” column of fire was burning. He turned and ran after the others, urging them to go faster still.
They had barely made it out of the gorge entrance when a titanic explosion came from behind them.
First, a flash so bright that everything was lit up as if it were day. A moment later, a savage shock of hot air that knocked them all down, accompanied by a clap of thunder so loud it left everyone’s ears ringing.
“Never thought it would all go at once,” shouted Old Ryce as they shakily got to their feet. “Under pressure, I s’pose … acts like the burning powder stuff the Karnickans have been mucking about with.”
“What?” shouted Eleanor. She was distracted by the earth trembling beneath her feet. Slightly addled by the explosion, it took her a full second to work out what was causing the shake.
“The flood!” she cried. “Quick! To high ground!”
Odo pointed and ran at the same time, towards the slope of the nearer hill, some two hundred paces from the gorge entrance across entirely flat ground, extending from the low mound of the riverbank.
The dam, instead of slowly burning and opening up to allow a slower flood, had been completely destroyed in an instant by that stupendous blast.
Now, all the water it had held back was coming down the gorge — all of it at once!
“Run!” Odo yelled.
Eleanor raced past him, always faster on foot than he was, despite her shorter stride. Odo glanced behind. Old Ryce was hobbling along, his legs weakened by his long imprisonment at the base of the tower in the dam.
Odo ran back, picked up the old man, threw him over his shoulder, and started running again.
Behind him, a wall of water sixty feet high exploded out of the gorge, an enormous wave that immediately spread sideways, sweeping up everything in its path.
Eleanor made it to the hill, panting and entirely breathless. She ran up a dozen paces, climbed a massive stone, and only then looked back.
Odo was thirty paces behind her.
Just that little bit too far. The sideways wave that caught him was only a fraction of the height of the great flood tearing deafeningly down the river channel, but it was still taller than the boy and immensely powerful.
“No!” shouted Eleanor as the flood picked up Odo and Old Ryce, turned them over, and smashed them down, covering both old man and boy instantly in a tide of muddy brown water and debris, including broken timbers from the dam and entire trees wrenched out of the riverbank.
The wave broke at the foot of Eleanor’s rock, and the flood turned to flow aside, seeking lower ground. Eleanor jumped down and waded in a few paces, but immediately had to retreat. The current was so incredibly strong she could barely keep her footing.
“Odo!” she called. “Odo!”
No answer came. She couldn’t see anything. The moon wasn’t bright enough, the water was too muddy.
Odo had been wearing his hauberk. He had Ryce over his shoulder.
If she didn’t do something immediately, he would be drowned for sure.
“Runnel, help me! I have to see!”
A flash of ruby light shone out over the water. Two shadows struggled under the surface. One of them, the larger one, held the other in a tight grip, but he seemed to be going in the wrong direction, deeper into the muddy water. On seeing the red flare, his direction righted.
A sword broke the surface of the water and rose high, Odo hanging on for grim life with Old Ryce under his arm. Eleanor was there to help him. Slowly, they waded through the churning waters, took two paces up the muddy slope, and collapsed.
Odo lay weakly on his stomach, coughing up dirty water while Eleanor pounded his back.
“Ow! Not so hard,” he complained between coughs. “I’m all right.”
“You could have drowned!” protested Eleanor.
“Especially me,” said the old man weakly. He rolled over on his back and looked up at the night sky with pale, rheumy eyes. “Thanks to you for coming back, young knight. There’s few indeed who would do such a thing.”
“Sir Odo is a most valiant knight,” declared Biter.
“A fairly stupid one,” said Odo. “I was too eager to destroy the dam and free the river. There’ll be a lot of damage downstream.”
“Most of the closer villages will be empty, scared off by the ‘dragon’ and Sir Saskia,” Eleanor reassured him.
Old Ryce flinched as she mentioned that name.
“Yes,” said Odo, a troubled look settling on his face. “Sir Saskia. We still need to do something about her. We must warn Sir Halfda
n and the others at home particularly.”
“Home?” asked Eleanor. “But our messages, the ones we sent from Hryding — they will be warned. Besides, she won’t get there for weeks, not if she does her bandit trick in every village in between.”
“I think she’ll head straight for Lenburh,” said Odo. “She’ll know it was us and will want revenge. Did you see, when we left the gorge? There was a tent and a hitching rail?”
“You mean …” said Eleanor with a sinking heart. “The bandits we let go … they did have horses?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Odo. He groaned and sat up. “At least one horse, anyway. They’ll tell Sir Saskia we were at the dam, and she’ll wreak bloody vengeance on our home.”
“No one with honor would countenance such tactics,” said Runnel. “To attack innocents is beyond reproach.”
“Sir Saskia is a wicked and most perfidious individual,” said Biter. “She cannot possibly be a real knight.”
“We have to get there first and warn everyone,” said Eleanor, thinking of her father. He was a healer, not a fighter. He wouldn’t last a moment against those fiends.
“How?” asked Odo. “She’ll get word in two days or less, and then if she hurries … How far did you say a laden knight could go in a day, Biter?”
“Six leagues,” replied Biter. “On a path or road.”
Eleanor was looking over the floodwaters, glittering in the moonlight.
“There might be a way to beat her there,” she said.
Odo looked up at her, and then where she was looking. The waters were receding, ebbing back into the channel, though that still surged in flood and would do so for days yet.
“Oh, of course!” he exclaimed. “The river! We can make a raft!”
He stood up, forgetting his weariness and many minor bruises, and clapped Eleanor on her back. She was knocked forward and turned to him with a scowl.
“Hey, just returning the favor,” said Odo.