01 - Honour of the Grave (18 page)

Elennath gave out another agonised cry, then Toby did the same.

“Not there! Not there!” he whimpered.

“Of course they trusted me! Am I not the issue of Athel Loren? Heir to the
Council Sylvan?”

“Spare us your elfy hogwash!”

“And are you not a pair of drunken, vicious louts who couldn’t be relied on
to find their own hairy feet at the ends of their stunted little bowlegs?
Get
us down from here!”

“You’re sure eighty crowns is all you’ve got?” called Angelika.

“Get us down!”

She shrugged. “Better than nothing, I suppose. Throw down the purse!”

“I can’t reach it!”

“Work at it until you can!”

“How do I know you won’t just take it, and leave us up here?”

“I am going to leave you up there, to get free by yourselves. Otherwise I
have no assurance that Henty won’t pick up that axe of his and start swinging it
about as soon as the net comes down.”

“Harlot!” Henty shouted.

“You’ll notice the branch that holds you is already groaning under your
weight. Another half hour or so of vigorous bouncing, and I’m sure it’ll give.
In the meantime, this is what I’ll do for you. Lukas, come here.”

Lukas moved back. “What?”

She bent to retrieve the cord they’d used to trigger the trap. “Sadly, this
is another of those times where you have to be tied up.”

“What?”

Franziskus got between them. “Angelika, you can’t be serious.”

“You heard them. The Castello is the safest place for him. The safest place
we can get him to, at any rate. And this way, we still get eighty crowns.”

The mercenaries began to bounce themselves. The branch creaked.

“I want no part of their filthy money!” Franziskus said.

“That’s generous. Now move aside.”

Lukas’ knees hit the dirt. He clasped his hands together and shook them at
Angelika. “Please, you can’t mean to leave me in the hands of these murderers!”

“It’s me and Franziskus they want to kill, not you.” She seized his
outstretched hands and looped the cord around his wrists. “So you’ll excuse me
if we give ourselves the head start we need.” She cupped a hand to her mouth, to
shout at Elennath. “Be still, and toss down the purse, or I’ll untie him and
take him with us!”

The three stopped moving. The net gently swung.

“Now lie down,” she told Lukas.

“Please don’t leave me.”

“You despise me, remember? Now lie down!”

He stretched supinely in the dirt. As she was trussing his ankles, she heard
a metallic clink. She sprang over to the spot beneath the net, seized up a small
leather bag, and opened it. It contained Imperial crowns. A brief look confirmed
that there were probably eighty of them. She pulled the drawstring tight without
investigating further, and shoved it into her belt.

Franziskus was at Lukas’ side, murmuring; Angelika knelt beside him, too,
and told him that he had no reason to worry. Later, she assured him, he would look back on this and conclude that
she’d done him the greatest of favours. Before he could reply, she was up and
had gathered the contents of her pack. She ran along the trail, towards the
north. Close behind her, she heard Franziskus’ footsteps.

They ducked off the trail after a short run, into a gully obscured by
foliage. They took their bedrolls from their packs, laid them out and rested on
them. They could hear the sound of crickets and, in the distance, chirruping
frogs. Above them came the momentary flutter of bat wings. Perhaps an hour
later, there was a commotion on the trail: the piercing, nasal tones of Lukas’
voice, mixed in with Plenty’s grunts, as well as various leers and snorts from
Toby. The trail was too far off to make out words, but the boy was still clearly
alive—they could hear him complaining.

Franziskus waited until they’d passed to say: “You did not grab your knife
and charge after them.”

Angelika settled down into her bedroll. She’d found a particularly lush patch
of vine leaves to spread it out on, and she meant to enjoy it. “Why, in the name
of sanity and reason, would I do that?”

“I thought you might have another sudden change of heart.”

“That was a once-only mistake. This time it’s on my terms.”

“Just when I think I understand you at last, you spin my head again,
Angelika.”

“Beware predictable people; they’re either stupid or fanatically dangerous.”

“Now you find fault in consistency of character? Is there no virtue you don’t
decry?”

“I’m too tired to argue. All I know is he’s better off in Prince Davio’s
dungeon than the von Kopf family crypt. Now I hope you don’t find my desire for
sleep somehow unusual.”

She woke in the morning to a grey sky and a softly snoring Franziskus. He’d
dozed off without shaking her awake for her watch. She decided to let him sleep,
and not to scold him for his lapse. Nothing had come in the night to carry them
off or chew on their limbs, and that was all that mattered. She slunk into the
bushes to relieve herself. When she got back, Franziskus had clearly been looking around for her. She sat down
next to him, and worked the tension from her cramped shoulders. Then she opened
her pack to hunt for the last of the field salami. She cut it in two and handed
the noticeably smaller half to Franziskus. He drank from his waterskin.

Angelika remembered the money. She took out the purse and clanked it in her
palm. It wasn’t four hundred crowns, or even a hundred and twenty-five, but it
was still her biggest haul in a long time. Certainly since Franziskus had
attached himself to her.

“So what will you do with your reward?” he asked, slathering the final word
of his sentence with a thick layer of irony.

“Hmp,” Angelika replied.

“That’s enough to buy yourself a cottage, in some small town up north. A good
one, sealed from drips and drafts. Moreover, with a touch of frugality, you
could live off it the rest of your days.”

“Pah!” she said.

“Many a peasant makes do with less.”

“I’m impressed by your knowledge of the rustic life.”

“Just think: no more sorting through rotting corpses for buttons and beads.
No need to cross blades with cutthroats, or wander through this awful
wilderness, with its orcs and Chaos beasts. Now you can retire to an existence
more properly fitting to your sex.”

“Franziskus, no one is more obnoxious than a person who enjoys giving
advice.”

“But ever since we met, nearly all I’ve heard from you is your craving for
gold. Now that you have it, I’m merely curious to see what comes next.”

“Your curiosity will have to go unsatisfied, my friend. Or whatever you are.”
She rose, to get her bearings.

“I’ve offended you.”

“Of course you have. You should be able to get back to the Castello before
nightfall. I’ll meet you there in a day or two.”

“But where are you going?”

“For reasons that currently escape me, I’ve trusted you with my life. But I
won’t trust you to know where my gold is.”

“I care not a whit for gold.”

“Exactly—you value it too lightly. You don’t understand what it means.” She
hefted her pack onto her back. “If I turn back and see you following me, I’ll
treat you as I would any other enemy. Understand?”

She could not read the look on Franziskus’ face as she tramped off.

Miles away, and many hours later, she stood over a patch of sod, surveying it
for hints of disturbance, and differences from the neighbouring ground. For the
hundredth time, she looked all around her to make sure that no one observed her.
Her mouth was dry; she’d used up nearly all her water. She was tired and wanted
to rest, but would not do it here, in case someone noted her presence in this
spot. Angelika walked until she came to a stream, where she’d sat before, on
similar occasions. There was a flat rock she liked, and she kept going until she
found it. She sat down, pulled her boots off, and dangled her throbbing feet in
the chill, clear water. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation of
rushing water on her legs.

She was glad that Franziskus hadn’t followed her. It would have been
unpleasant to have had to insert a knife between his ribs. She had no doubt that
she could do it—easily, if the truth be told. She’d seen enough of his fighting
to know his weaknesses well. His swordsmanship was all training and no instinct.
He repeated the same moves with clockwork regularity. In particular, there was a
moment during his forward feint, when it would take just a single sidestep for a
person to shove a dagger into him all the way to the hilt. On occasion, she’d
been tempted to point this out to him, but had decided to keep the fact in
reserve, in case she needed it later.

A cottage! Frugal living for the rest of her life! Pursuits proper to a
woman! What rot! But if there were a way she could use her money to ensure that
she could spend the rest of her life here, with her feet in this water, with
warm sunlight on her face, knowing that she would never grow hungry or get bored—or suffer attacks from enemies, or have to listen to the stupid prattling of
other people—well, then, that would be a retirement worth considering! Barring
that, she would just have to keep all her crowns safely buried until she found a good
reason to do otherwise.

She could be free of Franziskus now. She’d promised to meet up with him
again, but that meant nothing. All she had to do was go further south, perhaps
to some other settlement run by a different border prince. It was more dangerous
down there, but it was also where all the good battles were. He might try to
find her—no, he would without question try to find her—but it could be years
before he caught up with her. And surely even he was capable of coming to his
senses eventually?

She threw her head back and closed her eyes tighter.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Lukas. His eyes were pleading to her.

Her guts rolled over. Her skin grew cold. She shuddered. She jerked her feet
from the icy water.

What she had done had been wrong. Oh, he’d certainly proved himself to be a
cossetted, bleating, feckless twit. But no matter who he was, she had no right
to steal his freedom from him. All the others around him, from his father to his
brothers to the prince of the Castello, had been ready to do it without a qualm.
Angelika considered herself different from such men. She stood apart from the
world, with its manifold lies and villainies. Or so she’d always told herself.
Yet, because she’d allowed the boy to annoy her, she’d sold him, like she would
a dog or a mule. Even though she knew he didn’t know better.

She could only admit it. She’d made herself a hypocrite. No better than
Gelfrat, or Toby.

Mournfully, she let the last drops of water dry on her feet, and then she put
her boots back on. She refilled her water-skin and returned to the patch of
ground where the gold lay buried. Standing above it, she considered whether she
ought to dig it up, and refund Elennath his blood money. It would be consistent;
she’d left Benno’s purse behind, when she’d decided to reclaim Lukas the first
time.

She left the coins in their place of hibernation. Righteousness, she decided,
was a thing best doled out in small doses.

As Angelika walked north through the pass toward the Castello, a hubbub of
shouting voices and anxious cries arose. Rounding the foot of a hill, she saw a
throng of men, women and children issuing from the rock cut that led to the
Castello. Their distressed and dirty clothing identified them as townspeople.
Wives sobbed in the arms of husbands; men pushed and elbowed at one another, as
if to discharge their anger. Angelika noted that no one seemed to carry a pack
on his back, or to lead a horse or mule.

She ran to reach the fringes of the mob. She seized the sleeve of the nearest
man, a plump old fellow with a sandy-coloured, triangular beard, to ask what had
happened.

“Siege!” he cried, widening reddened eyes. “They marched in through the
hills!” He spoke these words peevishly, as if all of the armies of the Old World
had signed agreements not to march in through the hills. He made to stagger off;
Angelika yanked again on the cuff of his ratty coat.

“Who? Who besieges you?” she demanded.

“The black and yellows!” he said, pulling himself free of her and melting into
the crowd.

Arms crooked outward, she threw herself into the mob, surging against it,
pushing her way toward the rock cut and the Castello. The cut was choked with
people. A boy fell onto the rocky trail; a flabby arm pulled him up before he
could be trampled. Angelika clambered up on the rocks surrounding the cut and
began to climb from one outcropping to the next. Beside the pounding of blood in
her ears, she could hear the sounds of a besieging regiment: the rolling cracks
of drumsticks on kettledrums; the groaning of wagon wheels against their axles;
whips cracking as auxiliary crews urged their lowing oxen onward, creaking
artillery pieces after them. Above it all there was the low, flat buzz of
excited male voices, readying themselves for the kill, and praying not to die.

After several minutes of sweat and strain, she reached a lookout point above
the basin, from which she could see the Castello and its besiegers. The Castello
itself had not yet been affected; its main gate was open just enough for a
stream of people to squeeze out of the town. Its weathered, uneven plank walls
still stood; the heads of guardsmen bobbed in its towers and on its rickety
battlements.

As for the besiegers, they hadn’t yet assumed formation: soldiers either ran
about like heedless insects, or milled about at ease, waiting for their orders
to ring out above the uproar. They were indeed Averlanders: black and yellow
banners, their colours matching the soldier’s uniforms, snapped in the wind,
held aloft on poles of filigreed brass.