‘You three,’ he said, picking out some of his men with a finger, ‘on my signal go in by the door. You three, come with me.’
One of them, a Northman, shook his head with starting eyes round as full moons. ‘It’s . . . him,’ he whispered.
‘Him?’
‘The . . . the . . .’ And in dumbstruck silence he folded the middle finger on his left hand back to leave a gap.
Jubair snorted. ‘Stay then, fool.’ He trotted around the side of the fort, through shadow and deeper shadow, all the same to him for he carried the light of God within. His men peered up at the building, breathing hard, afraid. They supposed the world was a complicated place, full of dangers. Jubair pitied them. The world was simple. The only danger was in resisting God’s purpose.
Fragments of timber, rubbish and dust were scattered across the snow behind the building. That and several arrow-shot men, one sitting against the wall and softly gurgling, hand around a shaft through his mouth. Jubair ignored them and quietly scaled the back wall of the fort. He peered into the ruined loft, furniture ripped apart, a mattress spilling straw, no signs of life. He brushed some embers away and pulled himself up, slid out his sword, metal glinting in the night, fearless, righteous, godly. He eased forward, watching the stairwell, black with shadows. He heard a sound from down there, a regular thump, thump, thump.
He leaned out at the front of the building and saw his three men clustered below. He hissed at them, and the foremost kicked the door wide and plunged inside. Jubair pointed the other two to the stairwell. He felt something give beneath the sole of his boot as he turned. A hand. He bent and dragged a timber aside.
‘Conthus is here!’ he shouted.
‘Alive?’ came Lorsen’s shrill bleat.
‘Dead.’
‘Damn it!’
Jubair gathered up what was left of the rebel and rolled it over the ragged remnant of the wall, tumbling down the snow drifted against the side of the building to lie broken and bloody, tattoos ripped with a score of wounds. Jubair thought of the parable of the proud man. God’s judgement comes to great and small alike, all equally powerless before the Almighty, inevitable and irreversible, and so it was, so it was. Now there was only the Northman, and however fearsome he might be, God had a sentence already in mind—
A scream split the night, a crashing below, roars and groans and a metal scraping, then a strange hacking laugh, another scream. Jubair strode to the stairs. A wailing below, now, as horrible as the sinful dead consigned to hell, blubbering off into silence. The point of Jubair’s sword showed the way. Fearless, righteous . . . He hesitated, licking at his lips. To feel fear was to be without faith. It is not given to man to understand God’s design. Only to accept his place in it.
And so he clenched his jaw tight, and padded down the steps.
Black as hell below, light shining in rays of flickering red, orange, yellow, through the holes in the front wall, casting strange shadows. Black as hell and like hell it reeked of death, so strong the stench it seemed a solid thing. Jubair half-held his breath as he descended, step by creaking step, eyes adjusting to the darkness by degrees.
What revelation?
The leather curtains that had divided up the space hung torn, showered and spotted with black, stirred a little as if by wind though the space was still. His boot caught something on the bottom step and he looked down. A severed arm. Frowning, he followed its glistening trail to a black slick, flesh humped and mounded and inhumanly abused, hacked apart and tangled together in unholy configurations, innards dragged out and rearranged and unwound in glistening coils.
In the midst stood a table and upon the table a pile of heads, and as the light shifted from the flames outside they looked upon Jubair with expressions awfully vacant, madly leering, oddly questioning, angrily accusatory.
‘God . . .’ he said. Jubair had done butchery in the name of the Almighty and yet he had seen nothing like this. This was written in no scripture, except perhaps in the forbidden seventh of the seven books, sealed within the tabernacle of the Great Temple in Shaffa, in which were recorded those things that Glustrod brought from hell.
‘God . . .’ he muttered. And jagged laughter bubbled from the shadows, and the skins flapped, and rattled the rings they hung upon. Jubair darted forward, stabbed, cut, slashed at darkness, caught nothing but dangling skin, blade tangled with leather and he slipped in gore, and fell, and rose, turning, turning, the laughter all around him.
‘God?’ mumbled Jubair, and he could hardly speak the holy word for a strange feeling, beginning in his guts and creeping up and down his spine to set his scalp to tingle and his knees to shake. All the more terrible for being only dimly remembered. A childish recollection, lost in darkness. For as the Prophet said, the man who knows fear every day becomes easy in its company. The man who knows not fear, how shall he face this awful stranger?
‘God . . .’ whimpered Jubair, stumbling back towards the steps, and suddenly there were arms around him.
‘Gone,’ came a whisper. ‘But I am here.’
‘Damn it!’ snarled Lorsen again. His long-cherished dream of presenting the infamous Conthus to the Open Council, chained and humbled and plastered with tattoos that might as well have read give Inquisitor Lorsen the promotion he has so long deserved, had gone up in smoke. Or down in blood. Thirteen years minding a penal colony in Angland, for this. All the riding, all the sacrifice, all the indignity. In spite of his best efforts the entire expedition had devolved into a farce, and he had no doubt upon which undeserving head would be heaped the blame. He slapped at his leg in a fury. ‘I wanted him alive!’
‘So did he, I daresay.’ Cosca stared narrow-eyed through the haze of smoke towards the ruined fort. ‘Fate is not always kind to us.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ snapped Lorsen. To make matters worse – if that were possible – he had lost half his Practicals in one night, and that the better half. He frowned over at Wile, still fussing with his mask. How was it possible for a Practical to look so pitiably unthreatening? The man positively radiated doubt. Enough to plant the seeds of doubt in everyone around him. Lorsen had entertained doubts enough over the years but he did what one was supposed to, and kept them crushed into a tight little packet deep inside where they could not leak out and poison his purpose.
The door slowly creaked open and Dimbik’s archers shifted nervously, flatbows all levelled towards that square of darkness.
‘Jubair?’ barked Cosca. ‘Jubair, did you get him? Answer me, damn it!’
Something flew out, bounced once with a hollow clonk and rolled across the snow to rest near the fire.
‘What is that?’ asked Lorsen.
Cosca worked his mouth. ‘Jubair’s head.’
‘Fate is not always kind,’ murmured Brachio.
Another head arced from the doorway and bounced into the fire. A third landed on the roof of one of the shacks, rolled down it and lodged in the gutter. A fourth fell among the archers and one of them let his bow off as he stumbled away from it, the bolt thudding into a barrel nearby. More heads, and more, hair flapping, tongues lolling, spinning, and dancing, and scattering spots of blood.
The last head bounced high and rolled an elliptical course around the fire to stop just next to Cosca. Lorsen was not a man to be put off by a little gore, but even he had to admit to being a little unnerved by this display of mute brutality.
Less squeamish, the captain general stepped forward and angrily kicked the head into the flames. ‘How many men have those two old bastards killed between them?’ Though the Old Man was no doubt a good deal older than either.
‘About twenty, now,’ said Brachio.
‘We’ll fucking run out at this rate!’ Cosca turned angrily upon Sworbreck, who was frantically scratching away in his notebook. ‘What the hell are you writing for?’
The author looked up, reflected flames dancing in his eyeglasses. ‘Well, this is . . . rather dramatic.’
‘Do you find?’
> Sworbreck gestured weakly towards the ruined fort. ‘He came to the rescue of his friend against impossible odds—’
‘And got him killed. Is not a man who takes on impossible odds generally considered an incorrigible idiot rather than a hero?’
‘The line between the two has always been blurry . . .’ murmured Brachio.
Sworbreck raised his palms. ‘I came for a tale to stir the blood—’
‘And I’ve been unable to oblige you,’ snapped Cosca, ‘is that it? Even my bloody biographer is deserting me! No doubt I’ll end up the villain in the book I commissioned while yonder decapitating madman is celebrated to the rafters! What do you make of this, Temple? Temple? Where’s that bloody lawyer got to? What about you, Brachio?’
The Styrian wiped fresh tears from his weepy eye. ‘I think the time has come to put an end to the ballad of the nine-fingered Northman.’
‘Finally some sense! Bring up the other tube. I want that excuse for a fort levelled to a stump. I want that meddling fool made mush, do you hear? Someone bring me another bottle. I am sick of being taken fucking lightly!’ Cosca slapped Sworbreck’s notebook from his hands. ‘A little respect, is that too much to ask?’ He slapped the biographer to boot and the man sat down sharply in the snow, one hand to his cheek in surprise.
‘What’s that noise?’ said Lorsen, holding up a palm for silence. A thumping and rumbling spilled from the darkness, rapidly growing louder, and he took a nervous step towards the nearest shack.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dimbik.
A horse came thundering from the night, eyes wild, and a moment later dozens more, surging down the slope towards the camp, snow flying, a boiling mass of animals, a flood of horseflesh coming at the gallop.
Men flung their weapons down and ran, dived, rolled for any cover. Lorsen tripped over his flapping coat-tail and sprawled in the mud. He heard a whooping and caught a glimpse of Dab Sweet, mounted at the rear of the herd, grinning wildly, lifting his hat in salute as he skirted the camp. Then the horses were among the buildings and all was a hell of milling, kicking, battering hooves, of screaming, thrashing, rearing beasts, and Lorsen flattened himself helplessly against the nearest hovel, clinging with his fingernails to the rough-sawn wood.
Something knocked his head, almost sent him down, but he clung on, clung on, while a noise like the end of the world broke around him, the very earth trembling under the force of all those maddened animals. He gasped and grunted and squeezed his teeth and eyes together so hard they hurt, splinters and dirt and stones stinging his cheek.
Then suddenly there was silence. A throbbing, ringing silence. Lorsen unpeeled himself from the side of the shack and took a wobbling step or two through the hoof-hammered mud, blinking into the haze of smoke and settling dirt.
‘They stampeded the horses,’ he muttered.
‘Do you fucking think so?’ shrieked Cosca, tottering from the nearest doorway.
The camp was devastated. Several of the tents had ceased to be, the canvas and their contents – both human and material – trampled into the snow. The ruined fort continued to smoulder. Two of the shacks were thoroughly aflame, burning straw fluttering down and leaving small fires everywhere. Bodies were humped between the buildings, trampled men and women in various states of dress. The injured howled or wandered dazed and bloodied. Here and there a wounded horse lay, kicking weakly.
Lorsen touched one hand to his head. His hair was sticky with blood. A trickle tickling his eyebrow.
‘Dab fucking Sweet!’ snarled Cosca.
‘I did say he had quite a reputation,’ muttered Sworbreck, fishing his tattered notebook from the dirt.
‘Perhaps we should have paid him his share,’ mused Friendly.
‘You can take it to him now if you please!’ Cosca pointed with a clawing finger. ‘It’s in . . . the wagon.’ He trailed off into a disbelieving croak.
The fortified wagon that had been Superior Pike’s gift, the wagon in which the fire tubes had been carried, the wagon in which the Dragon People’s vast treasure had been safely stowed . . .
The wagon was gone. Beside the fort there was only a conspicuously empty patch of darkness.
‘Where is it?’ Cosca shoved Sworbreck out of the way and ran to where the wagon had stood. Clearly visible in the snowy mud among the trampled hoof-prints were two deep wheel-ruts, angling down the slope towards the Imperial Road.
‘Brachio,’ Cosca’s voice rose higher and higher until it was a demented shriek, ‘find some fucking horses and get after them!’
The Styrian stared. ‘You wanted all the horses corralled together. They’re stampeded!’
‘Some must have broken from the herd! Find half a dozen and get after those bastards! Now! Now! Now!’ And he kicked snow at Brachio in a fury and nearly fell over. ‘Where the hell is Temple?’
Friendly looked up from the wagon-tracks and raised an eyebrow.
Cosca closed his hands to trembling fists. ‘Everyone who can, get ready to move!’
Dimbik exchanged a worried look with Lorsen. ‘On foot? All the way to Crease?’
‘We’ll gather mounts on the way!’
‘What about the injured?’
‘Those who can walk are welcome. Any who cannot mean greater shares for the rest of us. Now get them moving, you damned idiot!’
‘Yes, sir,’ muttered Dimbik, pulling off and sourly flinging away his sash which, already a ruin, had become thoroughly besmirched with dung when he dived for cover.
Friendly nodded towards the fort. ‘And the Northman?’
‘Fuck the Northman,’ hissed Cosca. ‘Soak the building with oil and burn it. They’ve stolen our gold! They’ve stolen my dreams, do you understand?’ He frowned off down the Imperial Road, the wagontracks vanishing into the darkness. ‘I will not be disappointed again.’
Lorsen resisted the temptation to echo Cosca’s sentiments that fate is not always kind. Instead, as the mercenaries scrambled over each other in their preparations to leave, he stood looking down at Conthus’ forgotten body, lying broken beside the fort.
‘What a waste,’ he muttered. In every conceivable sense. But Inquisitor Lorsen had always been a practical man. A man who did not balk at hardship and hard work. He took his disappointment and crushed it down into that little packet along with his doubts, and turned his thoughts to what could be salvaged.
‘There will be a price for this, Cosca,’ he muttered at the captain general’s back. ‘There will be a price.’
Nowhere Fast
Every bolt, bearing, plank and fixing in that monster of a wagon banged, clattered or screeched in an insane cacophony so deafening that Temple could scarcely hear his own squeals of horror. The seat hammered at his arse, bounced him around like a heap of cheap rags, threatening to rattle the teeth right out of his head. Tree-limbs came slicing from the darkness, clawing at the wagon’s sides, slashing at his face. One had snatched Shy’s hat off and now her hair whipped around her staring eyes, fixed on the rushing road, lips peeled back from her teeth as she yelled the most blood-curdling abuse at the horses.
Temple dreaded to imagine the weight of wood, metal and above all gold they were currently hurtling down a mountainside on top of. Any moment now, the whole, surely tested beyond the limits of human engineering, would rip itself apart and the pair of them into the bargain. But dread was a fixture of Temple’s life, and what else could he do now but cling to this bouncing engine of death, muscles burning from fingertips to armpits, stomach churning with drink and terror. He hardly knew whether eyes closed or eyes open was the more horrifying.
‘Hold on!’ Shy screamed at him.
‘What the fuck do you think I’m—’
She dragged back on the brake lever, boots braced against the footboard and her shoulders against the back of the seat, fibres starting from her neck with effort. The tyres shrieked like the dead in hell, sparks showering up on both sides like fireworks at the Emperor’s birthday. Shy hauled on the reins with her other h
and and the whole world began to turn, then to tip, two of the great wheels parting company with the flying ground.
Time slowed. Temple screamed. Shy screamed. The wagon screamed. Trees off the side of the bend hurtled madly towards them, death in their midst. Then the wheels jolted down again and Temple was almost flung over the footboard and among the horses’ milling hooves, biting his tongue and choking on his own screech as he was tossed back into the seat.
Shy let the brake off and snapped the reins. ‘Might’ve taken that one a little too fast!’ she shouted in his ear.
The line between terror and exultation was ever a fine one and Temple found, all of a sudden, he had broken through. He punched at the air and howled, ‘Fuck you, Coscaaaaaaaa!’ into the night until his breath ran out and left him gasping.
‘Feel better?’ asked Shy.
‘I’m alive! I’m free! I’m rich!’ Surely there was a God. A benevolent, understanding, kindly grandfather of a God and smiling down indulgently upon him even now. ‘Sooner or later you have to do something, or you’ll never do anything,’ Cosca had said. Temple wondered if this was what the Old Man had in mind. It did not seem likely. He grabbed hold of Shy and half-hugged her and shouted in her ear, ‘We did it!’
‘You sure?’ she grunted, snapping the reins again.
‘Didn’t we do it?’
‘The easy part.’
‘Eh?’
‘They won’t just be letting this go, will they?’ she called over the rushing wind as they picked up pace. ‘Not the money! Not the insult!’
‘They’ll be coming after us,’ he muttered.
The Great Leveller Page 182