by David Keck
He twisted, and a crossbow’s bolt hacked at his mailed arm. The thing could have struck Deorwen. Only a few paces down the battlement, a sentry stood, his crossbow clattering as he scrabbled for a mace at his belt.
And the man fell with Durand’s grappling iron in his jaw. Durand followed the iron hook in the next heartbeat, mashing the man’s mouth shut and whipping a dagger across his throat.
Deorwen was gasping. But even before Durand could roll away, some bit of the mad darkness overhead seemed to tumble free. It swooped to dart between Durand’s wrists and snatch at the dying soldier’s lips. A raven, the thing flapped in just as the poor devil breathed his death rattle, then it was away.
“Hells! It’s taken his last breath.” Durand rocked onto his haunches. His hands were greasy with blood, shaking. Coen, Badan, Deorwen—feeding this damned soldier to the crows. He could stand nothing else.
“Durand,” Deorwen said. “Durand! There isn’t time.”
But Durand could only shake his head; her voice was too much.
“There are others on the wall.” She touched him. “Please.”
And Durand fought his thoughts into order. He forced himself to give the battlements a good look. Fires in the streets below the parapet threw high shadows. But faces glowed here and there where sentries peered down into the inferno—one no more than a dozen paces away, a few more beyond that.
Deorwen was looking up into Durand’s face, and Durand understood that he must have been staring. “Durand, we cannot stay here. Wipe off your hands. I didn’t scale a building to die on the first landing. We must leave this place. They’ll find us.”
They covered an open stretch of gleaming cobbles before the first building. Durand could hear Radomor’s men roaring over the ramparts, sprinting with messages, and fighting at the gates. In this poorer quarter of the city, there were even a few poor fools still cowering at their windows.
As they lurched onward, Durand struggled to get command of the spinning through his aching head. He’d been a fool not to understand how hungry Coensar must be. He’d been a fool to stay so near the wife of his lord and master. That was enough. Now, he would break Radomor’s hold over the Duke of Mornaway and end the fight if he could.
Below the second rampart, Ferangore was a single street. Above, the city began to sprawl. Without Deorwen leading, Durand might have blundered anywhere. But, as it was, she led him ducking through gutters and alleys till they came up against the third rampart.
And, in an instant he knew that although he had been to Ferangore, he had never really paid attention to the third rampart. Now, it loomed above his broken head and shoulder like a storm cloud. The earthwork at the base stood as high as a castle mount, while the curtain wall atop the bank soared like the walls of Acconel.
Deorwen had the grapnel in her hands. “Durand, can you throw so high?”
Durand thought of the men dying in the city behind them. Carrion birds zipped above the wall and rooftops overhead as he opened and closed his fists. “Hells.”
“God,” said Deorwen. “And I think that’s shouting.” Durand heard the howls of alarm. “They’ll have found our friend. There’s no place to hide here. We’ll have to find another way onward,” said Deorwen. Already he could hear the boots in the alleys behind them. “Durand! We will find another way. There will be a longer rope or a drain or a doorway or just—”
But Durand had seen something as he stared at the rooftops and the sky. Some of the crooked rooftops stood very near the wall.
“No,” Durand said. “Follow me.”
With a bound into the street, he found the tenement door and was groping his way up narrow stairs and passageways, even as the aged building shifted and creaked under his feet. He barged through door after door, sometimes startling whole dens of wide-eyed children in dark and musty cells. Higher and higher.
Deorwen whispered after him: “Are you all right?”
The thin walls thrummed like a drum skin at the touch of rough voices outside. Durand heaved himself to the stair’s creaking end and a last meager room. The racket of horsemen rang from the street below the tenement.
Durand found neither smoke hole nor rear windows. The room was hardly broad enough for two people to stand. He heard shouts.
“They’re right outside,” Deorwen said. “It’s up or nothing.”
“ ‘Up or nothing,’ ” Durand repeated, seeing no way up. But, as he made to turn in the narrow space, his aching shoulder brushed what he had taken for another patch of scabbed plaster—and outdoor air spilled into the room. He’d blundered into a hairy curtain of wool.
“They’ve draped a window!” said Deorwen.
Durand tore the thing away, but found only a construction of pine boards thrust out above the alley. A sad twist of wire held a dry spray of pennyroyal above a hole in the floor.
“A privy,” said Deorwen, close. “We are trapped.” The tenement was already shaking to the din of new boots on its rickety stair.
“Not yet.” Durand ducked into the creaking perch, his shoulder powdering the flowers. Walls and ceiling were nothing but dry pine. With a quick crash, Durand was looking at the eaves of the tenement, only a few feet away.
“Here,” he said.
He took big handfuls of thatch in his fists and, despite the protests of every bone, hauled himself up. In moments, Deorwen was crawling on the black straw beside him.
Even on the very peak of the roof, the battlements stood five fathoms over their heads. He unlimbered the grapnel and, tottering on the rotten straw, managed a fierce throw that caught the battlements at the very limit of his reach.
There were soldiers shouting in the pennyroyal room.
Durand caught Deorwen up and jumped into a crushing pendulum swing that slammed his elbows into the masonry.
But he climbed, strangling with Deorwen’s arms around his neck.
ATOP THE WALL, the bulk of the upper city loomed. Here were the empty mansions of the sensible rich and the abandoned halls of the craft guilds. Durand took it all in with a weaving glance. The heart of Ferangore stretched from the battlements behind them to the final rampart, a sixty-acre jumble. Above it was the last tier. Durand could see the citadel and sanctuary spire, bone gray without its cloak of ravens.
“One last hurdle and we’ll be up with the Rooks and their sanctuary,” he said, and Deorwen touched his cheek. “Now we must be moving,” he muttered—and hauled himself into motion once more.
There were soldiers between the rich men’s walls. Once, a horse’s clatter drove the pair into a vaulted doorway. Next, watchmen’s shouts had them skirt a square of open flagstones. In the end, they ran a zigzagged league to cover a stone’s throw of the city. Finally, though, Durand pitched into a broad, cobbled street. Above him towered the last and most fearsome of the ramparts: the wall of the citadel upon which stood Radomor’s keep and the high sanctuary.
“In a thousand years, our host could not have climbed so high,” Durand murmured.
All the walls below were toys beside the one that guarded the citadel. Under the churning crows, this gray wall soared twenty fathoms from the street to its rude crown of timber hoardings. Durand imagined standing in those wooden galleries with the whole city small below one’s feet.
He felt the rope in his hands, hairy, rough, and useless.
“It is too much,” Deorwen murmured.
Even on Durand’s best day, the climb would have been impossible. The wall stood easily twice the height of the tallest mansion in the streets below. “I’d do better trying to hook the moon.”
A creak from the hoardings hinted at the presence of sentries in the high dark—an arrow from that height could end the climb in an instant. Durand and Deorwen slipped through the black door of a nearby building.
As bent, trying to catch his breath, he realized that he and Deorwen had stepped into the front room of a proper inn with long wooden benches and a flagstone floor—and that it was all very familiar. “Hells,” he said
. “I’ve been in this place.” The smell of the dining hall took him back half a year—back to an evening when dust had sifted from the ceiling at the street-side windows as he’d peered through shutters up at Alwen’s tower. “With Radomor and the Rooks and that bloody Gol Lazaridge.” He opened and closed his hands, thinking that there’d still be blood in the creases. He had killed Gol just as he’d killed the soldier on the wall down below: with a knife across the gullet. “This is where we waited for poor Alwen to play her tune. They took Radomor upstairs to witness. The stairs will be back there.” He waved at the gloom.
“I don’t—” murmured Deorwen.
“She played to call her lover.”
“Oh.”
“Aldoin of Warrendel . . .” Durand began. But he stopped, remembering: Aldoin had known a way into the keep.
“Durand, you make little sense. I—”
“He was swimming for the great hall, Deorwen. Aldoin waited for Alwen to play from her tower window—and then he found some way. There were cisterns. Something under the city. A well.” Though he’d heard it all from the Rooks’ crooked mouths, the story had been true enough to drown Warrendel under Radomor’s keep.
He could almost hear the murderous duke creaking on the floorboards upstairs, almost feel the brooding man about to charge down. The place swelled with memory.
“Aldoin had a house,” Durand gulped. “A bawdy house. Or so Heremund said. Once. The Maiden and the Mother at the door, I think it was.”
Deorwen spoke into the empty room. “Durand, we’ve just passed such a place.”
And Durand caught her arms, ignoring her flinch of pain. He wanted very much to get out of Radomor’s inn. “Can you remember where?”
They pelted back into the smoke once more while the sanctuary spire peered down over the shoulders.
_________
HER PATH TOOK them very near Radomor’s main gate—and so near the fifty mailed soldiers on guard that the garlic on their breath stung Durand’s nostrils as he panted by the stone Queen of Heaven at Aldoin’s doorway.
The doors on the other side of the Queen’s hip were locked and studded with iron. The house was strong. A quick glance showed no ground-floor windows in the stone walls that a man could slip through. And Durand could think of nothing but to try his remaining strength against the doors. A running start might do it.
Deorwen raised her hand. “Wait!”
“There’s no time.”
But Deorwen was right. At Radomor’s gate, some of the guards were hopping off their backsides. There were hooves clattering closer up some other road, and the men were jumping to the windlasses to haul the gate high.
Every man was distracted.
As that providential rider swung through the gates, Durand lurched into the street—free to be seen by any fool who glanced—and bowled into the doors with all the weight of man, mail, and madness.
The doors cracked and Durand reeled. Instead of walls and floors and furnishings, he pitched into a house of broken beams, landing in a deafening clatter of debris where the ceiling was open to the carrion birds wheeling above.
Behind him, Deorwen pushed the broken doors shut—or as nearly as she could.
“What happened here?” Deorwen gasped.
Durand crushed his face with both hands. Stone walls and gloom had conspired to make him forget. “The Rooks. A fire. Radomor set the place ablaze when Aldoin swam. Quickly!”
“He couldn’t swim back. . . .” He could see the thought trembling in her eyes.
“There must be a cellar door or a wellhead here somewhere.” Durand scrambled off among broken beams and scorched walls. Joist ends stood like blades from the walls ringing the place.
But Deorwen had slipped through to an interior courtyard, knowing better what a nobleman’s town house should be. “It would have been here, I think.” She heaved back a knot of joist or rafter to reveal a narrow ring of broken limestone. “Here,” she said. As Durand ducked close, sure enough, he felt the chill of dank air curling up from that dark throat.
Once more, voices reached them. As he made to pull one timber loose, swaggering talk flickered over the ruin. The jingle of mail coats and harsh laughter told him that an armed patrol was nearby. Remembering the half-broken doors, Durand ripped the black throat of the well open.
“How deep?” Deorwen said.
Durand shook his head. He was already shucking off his iron coat; the thing was so loud, like a rain of coins. Boots scuffed in the street just beyond the broken door. He dared not even whisper.
Deorwen peered around the broken courtyard. “We will have to tie the—”
But Durand caught her close, breathing his words into her ear. “Deorwen, when the battle’s done, you’ll look for a wise woman.” She struggled, but he crushed her tight. “Make your way to your father’s people.” He didn’t want to tell her that the swim was madness—to face the duke alone was madness. He was leaping into death. “Please. I swore to Lamoric.”
“Here. What’s this?” said a voice—just outside.
Deorwen pushed him back, just far enough to see: nose to nose. In her eyes, Durand read a thousand moods.
But the door was opening. “Hide,” Durand said, and threw himself into the dark.
IF HE’D HAVE landed straight, he’d have snapped both legs. As it was, he tumbled backward in the long, black plunge before he slapped the water. Every splash echoed through leagues of dark vaults, and the light of the smoky world above fell in one dancing circle upon the black water. Beyond this, a man could see only rumors of low arches hunkered over squat columns of stone.
Durand had just begun to stand when Deorwen flashed through the light. He broke her fall with a slap of open hands. Agony was like lightning. “God.” But he gripped her hard, and felt her muscles against him. She was mad. She was a fool. They would both die and no one would know where or why.
“They’ll have heard us,” she spluttered, her lips against his jaw.
Right overhead, the well hung like a moon in the dark ceiling. Their fall had taken them through a massive stone vault and now they waded in a cistern that had hollowed the hilltop. A man looking down might spot them.
“Come on,” she said, shrugging to strip off her woolen outer layers until she stood in nothing more than a boy’s linen shirt and breeches. “We must get away from the well. I don’t know what they’ll think up there. Which way?”
Durand took his eyes from the girl, peered up at their patch of sky, and did his best to guess. In a moment, the wellhead rang with shouts.
COLD WATER IS a crushing thing that twists the muscles tight and squeezes the marrow in a grip of creaking pain. As Durand sloshed out of the light, he picked out fanciful creatures snaking around the capitals of each stout column. Fiends leered and plowmen danced.
He pushed on into a gloom without shape.
“This is where Aldoin came,” breathed Deorwen, her voice all shivers in the dark.
“He’ll have been the last man to walk this way, I’d guess.”
There was a moment’s breathing hesitation. “I wonder: Did Alwen know where her man went when she called for him?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Durand said. He hardly needed to think. “Imagine what would have happened if he’d told her.” If Alwen had known, she would never have summoned him to drag himself through. “He’ll have kept his trap shut.”
The frigid grip of the water worked higher round Durand’s chest and soon he was swimming awkwardly and fighting to breathe. He heard skitterings among the bright and hollow sounds of water, but could see nothing.
Finally, his paddling fingers struck a stone wall—blank, without seam or flaw. For an instant, he shut his eyes.
Deorwen sloshed up at his side, scrabbling in vain for purchase. “How did he get on from here?” she asked.
“God knows.” Durand felt her foot flutter against his numb shin.
“Are you sure you’re up to this. I can hear you breathing—”
&
nbsp; “There’ll be some kind of pipe,” Durand said. “There must be something.”
With an awkward kick, he pushed off along the wall, scrabbling at the clammy stone until his fingers juddered over something under the surface like a lip of pottery.
“Here!” he gasped, groping around an empty ring.
“It is the right way,” said Deorwen. “Gods. I think. I see the wellhead behind us. We might have come anywhere. I don’t know how much longer I can keep swimming.”
Durand felt a rim of pottery—a curve above and below—and he thought that the tunnel the two arcs described might be broad enough to let him pass. Just.
“An opening. Big enough, I think. We go under,” Durand breathed. And with luck they would come up in the keep’s well. “Yes?”
“Under. Yes. Queen of Heaven!”
Durand closed his eyes, steeling himself for the duck into the frigid black.
“Don’t think, ‘How many conduits must run from this place?’ ” said Deorwen.
Durand reached out. He wanted to only touch her, to know that she was more than a voice in the dark. Or so he thought. At the touch of her skin, he could do nothing but crush his cold lips to her cheek, her brow, the gasp of her lips.
When he shoved himself clear, he gulped deep and dove below, a traitor to the end.
HE KICKED THROUGH a space tighter than barrel hoops. He pulled at black joints where sections met, his damned shoulders lodging and forcing him to twist.
In these frigid confines, he closed his mind. There wasn’t space to turn back. He already felt the ache of drowning in his lungs. But he clawed onward. And yard after yard, he came upon nothing but more of the narrow conduit.
Dark thoughts shivered up like bubbles: if this Aldoin swam like a water rat, Durand would drown. If Aldoin had been slim as an otter, Durand would drown. An omission as simple as either of these from the story would leave him jammed in a clay pot coffin with Deorwen behind him—and she unable to turn back. He remembered the bodies tied in the Rushes under the twining crystal of their river tombs. He squeezed his eyes shut against a sudden ache for air.