Age of Iron (46 page)

“All clear,” came a woman’s nasal voice.

“Can you have a look in the ditch?”

A pause. Lowa hung motionless. It felt as if the guard’s eyes were boring into her back. Below her the big hunting dog barked and scrabbled at the wall. She pressed into the chalk. Stillness. Stillness meant invisibility. A beetle, spider or some other many-legged beast crawled onto her cheek and over her nose. She closed her eyes.

“I can just about make out the dog jumping about, but it’s darker down there than Felix’s heart. Could be an army of dragons hiding down there. But the dog’s probably just found a squirrel or something. He’s got form, that one. I climbed down once when he was barking and fell from halfway. I don’t know how I missed the stakes. And what had he found? A dead robin. Trust me. It’s probably nothing.”

“Yeah, probably,” said the man, “but last time I ignored a ‘probably nothing’ I was a hair’s breadth from a bout in the arena. I’ll lob a torch down. Lean right over and have a good look.”

“All right.”

Buggerfucktwats
. Lowa pressed herself closer to the wall, willing herself to melt into it.

She felt the torch’s heat flash past her shoulder. A yelp was followed by angry barking. Laughter came from both walls.

“You hit the fucking dog!”

“I know! Stupid bloody dog. It watched the torch fall! Why didn’t it move? Is it alight?”

“Ha ha! He’s barking at the torch now.”

“And no armies down there?”

“Hang on…”

Lowa held her breath.

“No, just a deeply stupid dog!.”

Lowa waited. Below her the dog yipped at the sputtering torch. Slowly, she began to climb again.

She reached the moonlit section. Up close it was so bright she was certain that if she went any further she’d be seen by one of the guards on the outer wall. She’d have to find another way.

A hundred paces away was a narrow wooden bridge. Like all the bridges linking Maidun’s walls it had two barrels of oil at its inner end. In the unlikely event of an attacker capturing the outer wall, these barrels would be emptied onto the bridge and the oil set alight. Her plan had discounted crossing bridges because each one had a permanent guard. However, below this bridge the wall was in shadow. She’d be able to climb unseen underneath it.

Even as she’d been deliberating, the glare from the rising moon had crept closer.

It was too far for her to traverse along the wall so she decided to go back down, walk along the ditch and head up under the bridge. She’d just have to dodge the dog and avoid or silence the bridge guard. She was wondering why she hadn’t got to the bottom yet when there was a growl and a whoosh of air. Something clamped round her foot and pulled her from the wall. She landed on her back between two stakes. The dog leaped for her throat.

I
n an inn in Forkton, Dug was interrupted. “Oi. What you looking at?” something said.

“Noverymush,” he managed.

“What?”

Dug screwed up his face in an attempt to drag his eyes back from where they’d been spinning on the sides of his head. That was better, but still skew. He placed both hands on the table to find a horizontal horizon. That accomplished, he looked over to the next table.

There were four of them. The man who’d said “what” looked unhappy about something. He probably always looked unhappy, Dug mused. His round head, sprouting necklessly from fat shoulders, looked like a lump of meat that had been cut from the side of a massively fat sow, had most of the hair boiled off, then the nose, eyes and mouth gouged out by the thumbs of an apathetic and cack-handed workman as the third to last job of a busy day. Gold earrings the size of knuckles and a chunky bronze necklace showed that he’d had some success with something and thought it important that people should know.

His three companions were cut, thought Dug, from much the same sow. They were two men and a woman. The woman’s anger-twisted, watery red, alcohol-melted face was topped by an incongruously fine and well brushed sweep of red hair.

“Garnish on a turd,” muttered Dug.

“What?” said the man again, louder.

“I said—” Dug cricked his neck from side to side, then shook his head “—that I’m not looking at very much. I was listening to you lot earlier. What a lot of banal crap you spout.” He put on his best southern accent: “
Don’t you hate Mearholders? Yeah, they’re lucky to be sent away as slaves; it’s a better life for them. Don’t you hate Dumnonians? Don’t they all smell? Did you see the sport in the arena? Yeah, I did. Wasn’t it good? Blah blah blah blah.
”

The four of them were staring at him, mouths agape.

“None of you think about what you’re saying. You don’t know if any of it’s right. You’re just repeating bullshit you’ve heard other people say. You might as well be sheep. The ability to speak is wasted on cunts like you lot.”

Dug shook his head sadly and took a swig of cider. The man who’d spoken took a step forward. The other three stood.

Dug smiled and reached down for his hammer.

It wasn’t there.

Big round badgers’ nipples
, he thought.

L
owa drove the iron climbing spikes into the leaping dog’s temples. It fell on her, dead. She heaved and squirmed out from under it.

If she left it, come sunrise the dog’s body would be a beacon announcing her infiltration. She intended to spend at least a day hiding out in the fort. If the dog was found, they’d search all the sort of places that she intended hiding in. The ditches were kept clean of course, so there was no debris to cover the corpse. She decided to heft it onto a stake to make its death look like an accident. A totally freak, difficult to believe accident, but it would have to do, and surely no harder to believe than someone scaling the wall and killing it? They already thought the dog was stupid. She straddled it, squatted, thrust her hands under its shoulders and pulled with her whole body. It hardly budged.
Fuck it,
she thought. She was just going to have to find a good hiding place up on Maidun.

Feeling her way between the spikes, testing each step to avoid noisy surprises, head forward, peering into the darkness, Lowa crept along the ditch towards the bridge. Every little noise drifting out of the night sounded like a pack of dogs. An age later she was under the bridge. She climbed. Her arms were wobbling with strain by the top. That did not bode well for the third, even higher wall, she thought as she stood underneath the bridge on a supporting beam, panting silently.

Footsteps approached. They stopped above her.

“How’s it going there, all right?” said the owner of the feet.

“Yeah, all good,” said another voice from the outer wall, presumably the bridge guard.

“Did you hear about the dog?”

“Yeah. Stupid dog!”

“Yeah. See you later.”

“Yeah.”

Before the footsteps had fully faded, Lowa gripped the edge of the bridge and pulled herself up until her eyes were level with the walkway. A guard was standing on the outer wall, facing away from her. She twisted her head around. She couldn’t see anybody else. She pulled herself quietly onto the bridge and lay flat. No sound from the other end. She crawled on her elbows across the walkway of the middle wall and slithered over its edge into the second ditch.

And gasped in horror. She jammed her spikes in to stop herself sliding and stared down, eyes wide.
What, for the love of Camulos, was this?
All along the chasm between the inner and middle walls, dotted between the forest of stakes, were small fires. Chained between the fires, every ten paces or so, were hunting dogs. Above them, lining the top of the inner wall every five paces were guards, all looking out, spears in hand.

Lowa had never seen the like. What had happened? Were they expecting an attack? Were they expecting her? Spring had said Drustan had betrayed them, but Lowa had dismissed that as the ranting of an angry child. But he could have done, and he knew the plan. For this level of defence, they must have known that
someone
was going to attempt to break in and they must have given a massive fuck about it. And, typically evil, Zadar had kept security light on the outer wall and allowed her to get this far, purely for the joy of building her hopes then crushing them.

She’d never get past this lot. If she climbed more than a couple of paces down the wall, even in the shadow of the bridge, a dog would see her and she’d be target practice for slingers. If she tried to cross the bridge, half a hundred guards would spot her. But there was one way, if not into the fort, then very nearly into it. Maybe she could cross the ditch underneath the bridge, over the heads of the dogs, hanging from the walkway.

Lowa reached up, stuck her fingers through a gap between two planks and gripped. She lifted one foot, then the other, so all her weight was hanging from her fingers. It was sore but bearable. She reached for the next gap. It was narrower, but her fingers slotted through. After some experimentation she found that going backwards put less strain on her fingers. She turned, reached up and hung, legs dangling. She pulled out one hand and reached back … and realised the flaw in her plan. A few more planks along, and the guards on the inner wall would see her flailing legs.

Nothing, she thought, was ever easy. But maybe …

She flexed her arms, swung her legs up and jammed her toes into a gap between two planks, then hung for a moment in her upside-down crawl position. She felt ridiculous. Was she really going to do this?

She reached her left hand back past her head, felt for the next gap, poked her fingers through it and gripped. She lowered her right foot, scraped her toenail along the underside of the plank towards her until it found the next gap and slotted her toes into it. She moved her right hand to the next gap. Then the next foot. Not so tricky. She was a whole plank closer to Maidun’s interior. Now she only had to do that a hundred or so more times and she’d be across, with just the matter of fifty or so guards and the inner palisade to overcome.

A couple of times the gap wasn’t wide enough for her fingers, and she had to traverse two planks in one go. When her arms began to shake with the effort, she rested. While resting, she realised how much her feet hurt. Blood trickled from her toes to her shins. She hoped it wouldn’t drip. A dog barked. She hung still. Silence. She carried on, three paces, then a hanging rest, then three paces more. She turned her head when she thought it must have been nearly over. She was less than halfway. A ripple of fear shivered through her. Her shoulders were burning with effort. Her arms wouldn’t take much more. Her inner thighs were horribly tight and felt like they might cramp any moment.

Lowa closed her eyes again and pulled a hand out. Her arm shook as she moved it to the next gap. She tried to focus on the feel of the wood, the smell of the air, anything to take her mind off the pain in her legs and arms. This had been a very stupid idea. She almost laughed.

She stopped. She couldn’t go on. She hung, arms straight, legs as straight as they’d go. Her head twitched as her neck muscles jiggled involuntarily. She was totally fucked. She giggled quietly. Danu’s tits, what an idiot she was. Left hand out, she reached for the next gap, but her muscles failed and her whole arm danced in flapping spasm then fell, useless. She held on, one hand and two feet jammed between the planks, panting. Cramp zapped into the arch of her left foot. She splayed her toes to ease the contraction, but that meant more effort from her leg to keep the foot jammed into the gap. Pain shocked across her lower back. She gritted her teeth and tried to ignore her many agonies.

She couldn’t hold on. She was going to fall and land on a stake or a dog.

She pictured Aithne, looking at her, blood gushing from the gash in her neck. She pictured Zadar and Felix. She pictured Dug. She took a deep breath and heaved at her dangling arm. Slowly it rose. The strain was enormous. The tendons in her neck felt like they were about to snap. Tears rolled down her cheeks, dropping no doubt onto the dogs below.

Fuck. The. DOGS!
she thought and with that last word jammed her fingers into the gap above. She toiled past the next plank, then the next.

She felt the footsteps on the bridge before she heard them. Surely they’d see her white digits poking up? She held her breath as they approached, then almost screamed when the walker kicked her big toe. Her foot slipped out of the gap. The walker stumbled … then carried on. Her left leg was dangling. She strained to lift it, but to no avail. She pictured Aithne. Still no good. She simply did not have the strength to raise her foot back to the underside of the bridge.

She looked around. Nearly there! She let both legs swing down, clenched her teeth and made a final effort hand over hand.

And she was there, past the prints where the support beams met the bridge. All she had to do was swing onto one and she could rest, thank Kornonos. She swung to her left, aimed her feet, missed and fell.

R
agnall sat in the corner of the tavern outdoor corral. He was sure Spring hadn’t seen him.

For as long as he’d been at the inn the girl had been driving the conversation that had the punters rapt. All the men and women there – gnarl-faced toughs who each looked like they could have beaten twenty Ragnalls in a fight, weasel-eyed shifters who might sell their children for whore money, morose mopers who looked like they’d failed in life and blamed everybody else for it – all had broken off their conversations to listen to little Spring. They sat, many with mouths moronically open, entranced by her sing-song proclamations.

It was something about Zadar and Romans, and how a real ruler would topple the former and defeat the latter. Ragnall would have marvelled more about how she’d gone from runaway child to some sort of super bard had he not been so consumed by his own misery. He’d heard that it was harder to dump somebody than be dumped. What an absolute crock of crap that was.

He felt angry, sad and, worst of all, worthless. She didn’t want him so, one had to conclude, he didn’t offer enough. Extrapolating the point, because her means of measurement had to be comparative, there must be men who offered more. Who were better than him. She wanted someone better than him and she was glad to be rid of him. Ragnall was not good enough for her. So he was worthless. When he remembered how she’d looked at him above the whorepits, pity on her face but a smile of relief in her eyes, it made him want to weep.