Could such an ‘inner keep’ actually be defended? Anbarius did not know, but he suspected not. Had it been made of stone, then yes. But a wooden keep? Unlikely. Of course it didn’t really matter. The whole thing was just for show. The real purpose of the structure was to conceal the collection of boulders beneath the false keep, and to conceal the men and what they did there.
Horrus O’Rockwall took his time, lining up his shot carefully. “Waste of good arrows.” Gulbert O’Bremmin said, but Horrus shushed him. He breathed in and breathed out, waiting for his hand to steady. Not many men could handle a longbow with this much pull, but Horrus’ arm strength had been getting better and better with every day they spent at the targets, and he handled the weapon with familiarity. He breathed out one last time and the arrow flew straight and true. The fat black raven fell from the tree with a single half-choked squawk. The arrow had gone all the way through, though, and he’d have a devil of a time recovering it.
“Orders is orders.” He said to Gulbert. “Get to it. I think I saw a sparrow in them brambles there.”
Soolit shrugged at the fyrdman while he stalked the weasel he was sure he’d seen a minute ago. “Alls I can say is it beats swinging a pick.” He said. His fyrde were walking in a line, along with half a dozen other fyrdes, tasked with killing every single rodent, mouse, weasel or other animal they found on the hill inside of the sleeping fort. Third Swords had killed a badger, and they were tossing the thing about and laughing. The spear fyrdes were helping the carpenters put up a wooden keep that looked like a damned castle, but Soolit figured the thing would go up like kindling if the Auligs got any flame arrows into it.
The fyrdman grimaced. “We should be drilling.” He said grimly. “There’s at least thirty thousand of the Cthochi down in the flat, and the Privy Lord has us killing rodents.”
“Orders is orders.” Soolit replied, savoring the opportunity to turn the fyrdman’s own oft-repeated mantra against him.
“You really think their shaman can talk to animals?” Aelfric asked Tuchek. The Aulig shrugged.
“It’s what they say.” He replied. “Supposedly the mice and the birds can give him messages, or perhaps he can see through their eyes. If it’s true, right now they’re probably telling him it’s the end of days.”
“All right.” Aelfric replied. “The men think it is a waste of time, but we don’t need them for anything else right now, so keep them at it.”
Busker nodded. “Aye sir. The bird and rodent patrol continues.”
By nightfall, the wooden castle within the sleeping fort was finished, and Busker looked at it with some amusement. If they were forced to defend this place to the last man, the structure might actually come in handy, but of course, aside from a few archer fyrdes and a few spear and sword men to give the place an air of being occupied, this entire position would be vacant by noon tomorrow. It would give the horsemen a good camp to run their patrols from, for they couldn’t cross the Redwater River until they had a bridge.
But the infantry could. Busker and Faithborn had insisted on seeing Eskeriel’s tunnel for themselves, and it was wide enough for a column of four. The two lord captains had walked nearly a quarter of a league down it, and it stretched on as far as their torchlight would go, vaguely to the north and west. Tomorrow was going to be a hell of a march.
When Haim got the order from his captain to assemble his fyrde inside the wooden keep with all of their gear, including their marching gear, he thought it must be a mistake. The order came at first light, and he’d already been up and watching other fyrdes moving, and they had all marched into the wooden keep. Haim had been inside of the thing, and there was scarcely room for twenty fyrdes within it, and that would be packed cheek to cheek. It had a roof, but no floors other than the ground, and there was no way the carpenters had put any in last night. He would have heard them if they did.
But orders were orders, so he assembled his men into marching order. “We’ll be tighter than a tick’s asshole in there.” Limver O’Topwater said, and Haim nodded.
“I guess so, spearman. I hope you bathed yesterday.”
But when they reached the false keep they found only three fyrdes ahead of them, and these were marching down into the earth, following a path lit by torches among the boulders. “Every man takes three torches.” Captain Tolric said. “But you only light one for the fyrde. When that one is about to burn out, you light another one. If you light them too fast, you’ll be marching in the dark. Follow the lights ahead of you, although you’re unlikely to get lost.”
“We’re marching through a cave?” Haim asked. “Where is Lord Aelfric?”
Captain Tolric was aware that this fyrdman was friendly with the Privy Lord, and he knew that they talked often, so he answered the question instead of upbraiding the big fyrdman for insubordination. “Lord Aelfric’s probably a league down the tunnel by now, fyrdman. You want to talk to him, you’re going to have to do it on the other side.”
Haim walked down a staircase of sorts, although it looked more like a natural formation than anything ever carved by men. A wide chamber with an impossibly high ceiling rose around him as his fyrde descended, following several others that he could see. The line of torches led between huge mounds of brown claylike stuff, but the floor was clear of it. “It’s guano.” Brelic O’Dustin explained. “Bat shit. Probably fifty tons of the stuff. You can sell it in Flana for a copper a bushel. The farmers use it for fertilizer.”
Haim looked up and saw that what he had taken for dark moss on the ceiling was actually a massive carpet of living bats. They shifted and moved occasionally when the sound of men walking disturbed them. Haim had heard an old man once say that bats were blind, but that never really made any sense to him. How could they fly if they couldn’t see? They must have been here a hundred years to make such a pile of shit, for only the vertical walls were gray here, the color of the natural stone. Everything else was brown or black. He wondered idly if their camp had been pitched on a pile of bat shit, and decided that it probably had.
The line of torches continued onward in long descending arcs, but once they reached the floor of the first great cave the torches started upward again, then they disappeared around stone formations that looked like towers or columns or curtains or falling water. Huge spikes of stone hung from the ceiling, and Haim knew they must have weighed many tons. If one of those fell on a man, he would never again need a doctor. Every time Haim was sure the passage must come to an end, it rounded a bend or went through a hole in the rock ahead. Some great mountain giant or troll must have hollowed out these chambers, for surely men couldn’t have done it. Over the sound of the marching men Haim could hear a constant dripping of water plunking into pools here and there.
After an indeterminate length of time the caves ended in a massive rectangular doorway that had been carved into a wall at least fifteen paces high. There was no door here, but fragments of flat sculpted stone lay about the doorway, and Haim suspected there must have once been a stone door here, although he couldn’t imagine how it could have been carried so far down the ways his fyrde had come. There was no way to say how long ago the door had been broken and thrown down, for there was no dust. It could have happened yesterday or an age ago.
Beyond the doorway the fyrdes had formed into four columns, and as the space between them grew closer, the torches seemed to gleam brighter, casting the walls of this tunnel into stark relief. Tunnel it was, and unmistakably man made, for the walls were smooth and straight and the floor was level, although an occasional sunken puddle here or there showed where water had come through. Haim had no sense of direction underground, or he would have known they were marching westward, and that the mighty Cthochi army of Kerrick the Sword was right now only seventy paces above his head.
Still they marched onward, and occasionally a side corridor would branch off from the tunnel. Where these corridors went none of them could say, but they posted a guard at each one while the men marched by. When Haim passe
d them, he saw that their eyes were wide with wonder or fear, as he supposed his own eyes must be. It was a long march.
“This is it.” Tuchek said, and Aelfric looked at the side corridor doubtfully. The tunnel they had been marching through continued for as far as they could see, or at least as far as their lights went. They stood before yet another branching corridor, this one completely blocked by a solid rectangular wall of stone, three paces to a side. The only clue that the wall was in fact a door was an oddly shaped rod of black metal jutting from the center, a heavy rod with a star-shaped cross section.
“This is a door?” Faithborn asked. The whole Privy Council was here, with the exception of Celdemer, who was patrolling the land around the false keep on the Mortentian side of the river. Aelfric had tried counting paces to see how far they had marched, but had given up around four thousand or so. He knew from looking at a map that the tunnel had not gone directly under the Redwater River. It had crossed the river at an angle, so that they had spent much longer with a million tons of water over their heads than he would have liked. “I don’t see any hinges or any sign that it has ever been opened.”
“It’s a door. It’s a door that will take maybe twenty men to open, but it’s a door. Let me show you how it is done.” Tuchek lined up twenty of his strongest scouts and tied a strong rope that he had brought for this purpose to a ring on the end of the metal rod. “Now everyone pull.” He ordered.
The twenty scouts pulled for all they were worth, but the rod did not budge. The rope began to fray a bit with the tension on it. “Okay, stop.” Tuchek said. He asked about for a large hammer, and one of Anbarius’ people provided him with a wooden mallet like they used for pounding in tent stakes. “Again.” He ordered, and the men pulled with all of their strength, feet struggling for purchase on the smooth floor. While they pulled, Tuchek pounded on the sides of the iron bar, first one side and then the other. After a moment there was a barely perceptible shift in the metal, then three paces of it came out all at once, and several men fell on their asses.
“That’s done it.” Tuchek said. “Now draw it all the way out.” The men did so, and when they were finished fully five paces of the strange black metal rod lay on the floor before them.
“What is this made of?” Anbarius asked, curious. “I’ve never seen a metal like it. It’s been here in the damp for years, obviously, and not a spot of rust.”
“I don’t know.” Tuchek replied. “But here’s some more of it.” He went and picked up another heavy piece of the stuff from a place beside the wall, a smaller rod perhaps half a pace long, one end shaped to fit the same hole as the long rod, and on the other end was a wide socket of metal, placed perpendicular to the rod. At Tuchek’s direction the men ran a long wooden pole into the socket so that the ends stuck out from both sides.
“Now we turn it.” He explained, and five men grabbed one side and five men grabbed the other. With one side pushing up on the pole and the others putting all of their weight on it, they attempted to turn or twist the stone wall, but it did not move until Tuchek again pounded it several times with the hammer. There was an audible crack in the stone as something came loose, and then it began to roll away to the right, the great stone slab revealing itself to be a wheel of many tons. When it rolled back into the place designed for it, another wall with a similar socket arrangement appeared in front of them.
This wheel of stone rolled to the left, the next one to the right, and the fourth and final one to the left again. Each slab required the same procedure with the key and the pole, and by the time the corridor beyond this massive gate was revealed, the laborers tasked with opening them were sweating and gasping for breath. “It is made to defend the tunnel.” Tuchek explained. “It is much easier to close than to open. Two strong men could do it.”
“How did you know of this place?” Aelfric demanded of Tuchek.
“I’ve been here before.” The Aulig scout replied. “Not this door, but one much like it, very far to the north. There are things that live in these halls sometimes, but not here, or at least I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be here. I only ever saw them far north of here.”
“Things?” Busker O’Hiam asked. “What kind of things?”
“Things with teeth and claws.” Tuchek replied. “Nothing I couldn’t handle then, and nothing we couldn’t handle now.”
“Sweet Lio.” Faithborn said. “You could have warned us, Eskeriel.”
“And have you marching down the hall with a panicked army behind you and looking all about?” Tuchek asked. “I said they were far to the north, not here.”
“Let’s see where this corridor takes us.” Aelfric said, interrupting the discussion, which was on its way to becoming an argument. “Scouts?”
Tuchek guided a score of his men, dressed in mottled clothing of green and brown, down the hallway. They returned in less than half of an hour. “It’s better than I’d hoped.” The Aulig said. “It’s just a couple hundred paces to the surface. A few small caves, then a bigger one with a stairway up. I didn’t see any Cthochi around, and it’s a good site for a sleeping fort, I think. Anbarius will have to gauge that, though.”
The long columns of men were no longer marching. There had been a long pause, then an order to march, then an order to stop, and now they were moving in fits and starts, no longer even attempting to stay in step. Haim’s fyrde had used up about half of their torches, and the tunnel or hallway or corridor or whatever you wanted to call it was starting to stink of smoke. Some of the fyrdes ahead of him had put theirs out, for there were no obstructions to speak of, and the tunnel continued on flat and straight, seemingly forever.
Eventually the hedgehog fyrde came to the gateway Tuchek had opened, and they marched through it, stepping carefully for the floor was oddly grooved to accommodate the great wheels of stone. Each one looked to weigh many tons, and the men stepped past them quickly. If they decided to roll back into the corridor, they would all be smashed to pulp.
The passage beyond the stone wheels looked like an abandoned mine, and in places the walls were rough and scored with water and tool marks. In other places, the caverns looked completely natural, at least to his eye. In a couple of places, the passage went alongside deep pits and the men had to be careful, and in one place, there was a narrow bridge of stone over a deep pool of water. In the distance, Haim could see light, not the flickering orange of the torches, but real daylight. The men’s pace quickened beside him.
When the Hedgehogs emerged from the last large cave and stepped out into daylight, the scene was familiar. Anbarius and his old men were issuing orders, the engineers were making lines in the dirt, and pick men and spade men were already busy digging out the trench for a sleeping fort, even though Haim could clearly see that it was barely mid-afternoon. Men with axes were cutting trees, and men with adzes, chisels and hatchets were already shaping them into the timbers needed for the night’s fort. Haim walked the Hedgehogs to their assigned place and put them to work, paying special attention to Sir Rioman. That the knight was unused to laboring with his hands was obvious, and Haim worked beside him to make sure he did not slack.
“It’s three hours, knight.” Haim said. “Three hours hard labor and we sleep safe and sound. That’ll be a mighty comfort now that we’re on the Cthochi side of the river.”
Chapter 68: The Sally’s High Touch, Northcraven Deep, Leath 1
Parry Meade had a long pole in his gloved hands and a triple folded cloth of heavy linen wrapped over his mouth and nose. Coril Jemms watched the mate as he pushed another body away from the Touch’s hull. It was one of the speckled ones, a man perhaps, or possibly a woman, so swollen from being in the water that it resembled a man. Meade pushed it gently into the current and away from the ship, and Coril watched it drift slowly out of the harbor. Meade left the business end of the pole in the water, for nothing that had touched one of the sick could be allowed on deck, and he tied the pole to the rail.
Coril was in the rigging and he was
hungry, but he was always hungry these days, and at least he had something. When Captain Berrol had come back from his meeting with the duke, he’d stopped their unloading of flour immediately and explained the trap they were in. He’d paid the duke gold for the right to retain half a ton of the flour he was supposed to deliver to the man, then he’d put the crew on half-rations. For a month and a half they’d all spent most of the day either fishing or gathering clams or crabs, but the fishing had stopped when word of the pox reached them.
On that very day, Berrol had weighed anchor and moved the Touch away from the pier and as far into the harbor as space would permit. He would permit no other ships to come near, and all the talking he did to the people on the piers or in other ships he did with a speaking horn, a tube of metal he held to his mouth while he shouted.
Morning meal was a bit of flour porridge boiled in hot water, noon meal was nothing and dinner was a single small biscuit, but it was something, and that was better than the poor souls in the city had. Five tons of flour split among thirty thousand mouths was basically one or two poor meals, and the cattle that had come in with the other ships were long gone, boiled down to bones and the marrow drawn out for soup. Now and then Coril could smell meat cooking in Northcraven, but he didn’t like to think what kind of meat it was. Certainly there wasn’t an uncaught rat, cat or dog in the entire place, but there were plenty of dead.
Four other ships had sailed into the harbor, for with the frigate gone, there was nothing to prevent it. Like the Touch, however, the food they brought was consumed within two or three days of arriving, and their crews were now either dead of the pox or similarly starving.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 91