by Dave Duncan
“Behind you!” roared the Grand Duke.
Bellman spun around and recovered, parrying a cut from Samuil. He recovered again, backing away from a murderous series of slashes until he was almost pinned against the timber doors. He slipped away to his left and recovered back the way he had come. The one-eyed brother was good, but he was going to wear himself out very soon. Bellman was almost back where he had started, near the door, and just as he remembered that Gerlach’s body was somewhere there, he stepped on an arm and almost stumbled. Samuil followed, teeth bared in a grimace of hate. The traitor was fighting for his life, too. Only the winner would survive this battle for long.
Right! The brethren were warriors, not duelists. They were edge men, trained with longsword or saber against armor or on horseback. Bravado had an edge, but she was lighter, more nimble, and had a point as well. Bellman went on the offensive, lunging and thrusting, keeping his distance as much as possible. Samuil deserved credit for trying to fight at all with only one eye, for he could not know his opponent was in almost as bad a shape. He was also aging, already out of breath, but there could be no mercy or surrender in a treason case. Bellman deliberately turned him and drove him along the line of cells, jabbing Bravado’s deadly point at his face.
When he had put the Grand Duke in the dungeon, Cantor Samuil should have chained his ankles as well as his neck, because Rubin was now sitting on the floor with both legs extended through the bars of the dungeon door. Unaware of this trap behind him, Samuil tripped and lost his balance. Bellman killed him with a thrust through the heart. Before he could free his blade, the Duke yelled, “Look out behind!” and Bellman leaped around, parrying Achim’s scythe stroke. Clang!
The big kid had followed him and was whipping that bastard sword about almost as well with one hand as he had with two. Now it was Bellman recovering, being steadily forced away from the door, trying to catch his breath and measure this opponent. The last of three was bound to be cautious. And desperate. Achim’s left arm was running blood, but he would need a long time to bleed to death. He was still the best of the three. He had Bellman level with the fourth dungeon and was about to drive him back against the end wall. Clang!
Bellman knew he was very close to the end of his strength. “You’re good, Brother Achim!” Clang! “Drop your sword—” Clang! “—and I’ll give you a—” Clang! “—royal pardon.”
Achim laughed. Clang! “I’ll give you a state funeral.”
“My jailbird twin will confirm—” Clang! “—the offer! Won’t you, brother?”
Rubin said, “Absolutely.”
Clang!
Even Radu was into the fight now. He had scrambled back on his knees, pulling the dungeon gate with him until it stood wide. In a last desperate spurt, Bellman rushed Achim, whirling Bravado in a silvery mist to drive his foe into the trap. Achim recovered—one step…two…
And Radu hurled himself forward as if to close the gate, swinging it at Achim’s back. The brother heard the squeak of hinges, or just sensed it coming. He managed to dodge but he was too distracted to parry the thrust that went through his eye and into his brain. He fell with a thud and thrashed a few times, but it was all over.
The silence was broken only by Bellman’s desperate gasping for breath and some quiet clapping from the Grand Duke in his cell.
• 5 •
The stairs descended about twenty steps between damp stone walls to end in a wide blackness. Ringwood, coming last, found his companions standing in unhappy silence, holding lanterns high and peering around. The air was dank and fetid, but it told of vegetable rot, not animal; it held no trace of bad meat or rodent-hunting cats. Square stone pillars marched in rows ahead, to left, to right, every one branching upward into four arches, but there were also many stubby small pillars, of uneven height and spacing. This was an incomplete cellar and those were piles of flagstones waiting to be laid. The existing footing was uneven, wet, and rubbly. Shadows lurked everywhere, as did junk, at least here beside the exit—upturned wheelbarrows, rotted baskets, masons’ trowels, hammers, shovels.
Lanterns could illuminate only so far, but he could see walls in the distance. Certainly there was a masonry ramp off to the right.
“Where does that go?” He pointed with his sword.
“Barrel ramp,” Ranter suggested. “To the yard?”
“Bricked up.” János seemed as lost as the others, but he had probably never been down here before, either. “I’m going to see you hang for this, you Chivian scum. And that’s nothing to what my sons will do to you if I die.”
“Naw, they’ll be too busy fighting among themselves,” Ranter said. “Which way to the secret passage?”
“Find it yourself.”
“When did your brother die?” Ringwood asked. “How long ago?”
“Ask him. He’s still around here somewhere.”
Thirty years? Longer. János had sons older than that, and they must have been born after the disaster.
The Duchess whimpered. She looked frozen, although the air was not especially cold, just damp and rank. She needed Bellman to comfort her. The big fellow would comfort them all, or he might have seen the trap sooner and saved them from having to be here. Ringwood mostly wanted to hug True, but hugging was not an option when every hand held a sword or lantern.
“Don’t let him scare you, Your Grace,” he said. Only a fool would not be scared here. Things kept moving in the corner of his eye, making tiny shuffling noises. He felt a million dead eyes watching him, could see a million places where shadowmen might be hiding from the lanterns. It would be folly to assume that they had all been waiting by the door. “You’re in this with us, your lordship. Which way to the keep?”
János answered with an obscenity, yelped when Ranter jabbed him.
“Keep that for when it’s needed, brother,” Ringwood said. At least he need not worry about their hostage running away. János must be as scared as the rest of them, just more experienced at disguising the fact. “Let’s go exploring. This way first.”
He headed over to the abandoned barrel ramp and a conical hill of rubble beside it. Also more rotting wheelbarrows.
“There’s one!” True yelped and everyone turned to stare where she was pointing. There was nothing visible by that time.
“Can you sense them, love?” Ringwood asked.
She shivered. “Oh, yes. They’re around. I can’t pinpoint them, though.”
“We’re safe enough. We have lots of light. Don’t let the Count get too close to you.” He wished she had not brought the broadsword. If the former knight-brother grabbed it away from her, things might turn nasty.
Oh, they’re not nasty now?
The heap was mud and pebbles, not builders’ waste. “I think this,” Ringwood said, “is what they dug out when they were tunneling over to the keep. They piled it here so other men could take it up the ramp to wagons in the yard. But if they weren’t able to complete the tunnel, they’d just put most of it back. Does that make sense?” Would Bellman have agreed?
Ranter kicked at a pile of rotting timber. “This was to shore up their diggings?”
“Good man! Of course.” But was that tunnel still open? The builders would not have installed permanent walls and roof until they knew their efforts would serve some purpose. There were no stacks of building stone waiting. Work must have stopped the moment they broke through to the castle crypt, and how big a hole did a shadowman need? Would the air be so stale here if there was open access to the keep?
“Here’s the trail,” True said. On the far side of the tip the floor had been paved, and muddy tracks showed where the barrows had come forty years earlier. “This way!”
“Wait!” Ringwood said. “The Count first. Stay in order. And keep together.”
Menaced again by Ranter’s sword, János stumped off along the ancient trail. At the first pillar, a figure lunged out at him, hands clawing for his face. He screamed and staggered back, dropping both his lanterns as he tried to defe
nd himself. Glass shattered, darkness surged in. János went down under the attacker’s weight.
Ranter roared and attacked the wraith with light and sword. He would have done better with one or the other, not both. Invincible passed harmlessly through an apparition. Fortunately he had stabbed horizontally, for a downward cut might have killed János. Other lights arrived; the mirage scuttled away on all fours, joining a collection of other shapes at the edge of darkness. The enemy was in view now, a lot of them.
The intruders’ seven lanterns were down to five. Ringwood tried to count the watching shadowmen, but they kept shifting. More than a dozen, certainly. Their silent hatred oppressed him. If they would moan or shout abuse they might seem less dangerous.
“You all right, my lord?” Johanna asked, going down on one knee.
János was huddled in a heap on the flagstones. He didn’t look all right. He looked big, because he wasn’t standing, but he was mumbling, gasping, almost sobbing. A man of his age could die from a shock like that.
“Did you see what I saw?” Ranter said. “Youngish lad, old-fashioned clothes, tattered but originally quite fancy, I’d think. Those others out there, see? Most of them are half-naked workmen. This one was special. And his legs—”
“That’s enough!” Ringwood barked. His legs were short? That had been Luitgard himself. Or itself, now? Poor old János had been attacked by his brother of forty years ago. Ringwood shivered. “On your feet, Count! We have to find a way out of here. Give him a light, Your Grace. One lantern for each of us. You lose it, you do without. Hurry!”
Johanna helped the old man rise. He wasn’t the bully boy of Brikov anymore; he had shrunk and aged. His beard had lost its bristle.
Two more pillars brought them to a wall with alcoves in it, and in one of those alcoves some ashlar blocks had been removed. As a doorway, it was small, barely head high and only just wide enough to admit a wheelbarrow. Here the long-dead Luitgard had begun his illicit tunnel over to the keep.
“We’ll take turns looking inside,” Ringwood said. “The rest of us must keep light around the entrance.”
He waited until last to make his inspection. The tunnel sloped down gently, no wider than the entrance, with a shadow at the limit of his sight that might be a branching tunnel. The roof was framed with timber, but some of the planks had sagged badly, and the props looked unsafe. In places the shoring had collapsed, heaping debris on the floor. What a pathetic, incompetent Blade he was to bring his ward to this!
He emerged to consult the others. They stood in a half-circle, facing the shadow-infested darkness.
“Don’t say you wouldn’t go in there if your life depended on it,” Ranter said cheerfully, “because it does.”
“It slopes down,” Ringwood said, “and the floor’s wet. Seepage.”
“Wood’s all rotten,” the Count growled. He kept rubbing his throat as if it hurt. His brother’s corpse had tried to strangle him.
“Yes, but there must be drainage somewhere. I know it may be no bigger than a mouse hole. We just can’t be sure unless we go and look.”
“I can’t go in there!” The Duchess was hugging herself, as if she felt very cold. “I just can’t.”
“Nor I,” János said. “I won’t. I’m going back and you’ll have to kill me to stop me. I think you should all come. Let the boy go if he wants to.”
Commander Ringwood faced his first mutiny. “Tell us the truth, then, my lord. You sent word to the Brotherhood that you had Her Highness in your power and would sell her for a suitable price?”
The Count’s attempt to shout emerged as a painful croak. He coughed. “Fool boy!” he whispered. “No. And you don’t bargain with Vamky! Yes, I was a knight-brother until…this.” He jerked a thumb at the tunnel behind him. “Forty-four years ago I left the Order. For forty-four years I never heard a word from them. They left me alone. Then orders came. Not by Harald. You were wrong there, too. After he’d gone, about Fifthmoon. Obey or else!”
“Else what?” Ranter asked, as if really wanted to know.
“Else anything you can imagine. I was ordered to lock up the Duchess or any of her companions if they showed up. I was to send word to Vamky.”
Ringwood said, “But that was months after she’d left! Why did they wait until then?”
“I don’t know!” the Count yelled. “I didn’t ask! Finally, last week, I was told to arrest Radu and question him about what he had seen that he shouldn’t have. I did. I reported. I got orders to hang him.”
“But you didn’t,” Ringwood said. “You waited, hoping he would do the decent thing and die quietly in the hole so you wouldn’t have to hang a brother. You freed Radu when Her Highness turned up. You didn’t lock her up, either.”
“Because you convinced me he was telling the truth,” János said. “Volpe is engaged in high treason, him and the Abbot. I want none of that. I hold my lands from the Duke, not Volpe. So I defected. I didn’t report that Her Highness was back. Well, girl? Am I lying?”
True said, “No, my lord,” and shot Ringwood a worried glance.
Ringwood’s laugh startled even him. “That was why you were so hard on Wolfgang! You hadn’t realized he was spying on you. Did you hang him?”
The Count shook his big head. “I told them to heal him and leave him in the pit till I got back. I agree with you on that, kid. Brother shouldn’t hang brother.”
“Who’s your handler at Vamky, my lord? Who did you send the message to?” Why did that matter? It didn’t. Ringwood just needed time to think.
“Dunno. I write to a cell number. He knew the password they gave me when I left, that’s all that mattered.”
“And now someone’s smashing your windows? Who? And how did they learn Her Highness was here?”
“I dunno.”
“That may be my fault,” True said. “Wolfgang said he didn’t know of any more spies in the valley. He didn’t say there weren’t any. I think he suspected someone, maybe even the Count.”
“It doesn’t matter!” János roared. “They’re on to us. We have to get out of here before they burn the house down on our heads, and there’s nothing for us in the keep. We go back.”
“We’ll take a vote,” Ringwood said unhappily. “Go back or explore the tunnel. True?”
“I vote with you, love.”
He’d sheathed his sword, so he had one arm free to hug her.
“We go back!” the Duchess said. “I’m choking down here. There’s no air!”
“Brother Ranter, you have the deciding vote.” And would probably have the command from now on, too, if the Duchess had lost confidence in the present Leader.
Ranter shrugged. “You’re Leader. I’m with you.”
“Then I…You are?” Ringwood wondered if he’d misheard.
“All the way. You think I want to be in charge of this disaster? You got us in, brother, you get us out.” Ranter could do the right thing sometimes, he just could never say it.
“Thank you, brother.”
“ ’Sides, I don’t think we’d make it back to the stairs alive.”
János said, “That’s the truth,” and disappeared.
He lay on his back, spread-eagled, while a rock the size of a baby’s head rolled away into the passage. A sizable dent had appeared in his forehead. His lantern, amazingly, had not shattered.
“Inside!” Ringwood roared, and grabbed the Duchess. She screamed and struggled, but he wrestled her into the tunnel over the Count’s body. True followed with the Count’s lantern. Ranter came last, dragging the Count himself, who was no mean burden in such a confined space.
Rocks came flying in after them. Why had they never realized that the shadowmen could use real weapons? Even if everything they had with them when they died—like the Yeomen’s halberds—shared in their curse and faded away in brightness, shadowmen were solid enough in darkness, and a stray rock remained a rock. That must be how they had destroyed Luitgard and his workmen. Another miscalculation, Sir Ringwood, an
d probably a fatal one!
“Don’t jostle the pit props!” True shouted. “Keep going, love.”
Ringwood led the way along the burrow, stooping and stumbling. The floor was littered with pebbles that had fallen from the walls. Those would make perfect missiles for the shadowmen if they followed. In places the sides had crumbled, spilling heaps of clay or sand as well. Ranter, being rearguard, was holding a board up as a shield, and Ringwood could hear rocks rattling off it like hail. They reached the branching he had noticed earlier and it was merely an alcove where two barrows might pass, not deep enough to provide shelter. He could see the ancient wheel tracks.
He paused there, though, to take stock and fight down a rising panic that said he was going to die now and his ward with him. The barrage of rocks had slackened, most likely because the passage did not offer enough room to throw things.
“Where’s the Count?”
“He was turning transparent, Leader,” Ranter said in a small voice.
So Boy Commander had now lost a man, caused a death, lost his innocence, proved himself a useless dung beetle. He should have stuck to mending pots. What’s the use of doing something with your life if it’s the wrong thing?
The barrage had stopped. “Are they following us?”
Ranter peeked around his makeshift shield. “Yes, Leader. Lot of the buggers. Creeping closer all the time.”
“Then let’s keep going. Can’t be much farther. They wouldn’t be following us if there wasn’t a way out.” Ringwood didn’t really believe that, but perhaps someone would. Five lanterns and four people left.