Harvest (48 page)

One was raised on that stretch of the line and knew by sound alone which line the train would end up on.

They squatted ready to spike the line, aware of the danger of being seen and heard by the arriving Fyrd below, across in Lawley Street, straining to hear the train on the lines. Hear and feel
it.

One raised a hand, the other cocked an ear.

The spot was chosen because it was in the shadows between the lofty rail lamps

‘
Right side!
’

They moved the gear placed there earlier in the dark.

One by one they set four sticklebacks, robust wood and metal structures, in the gap between sleepers. Set in pairs, nine sleepers apart with a band made of fire hose fixed between, on which a
string of barbed spikes, two and a half feet long, is set loose and free.

The train rolls over, the spikes spring up one after another, and the poor sods travelling undercroft are stabbed and ripped open before they have even arrived.

But the work was hard and heavy and the two had less than ninety seconds to get each one in place.

Heave, grunt, ‘That’s it!’

Then heave, grunt again and the second pair of stickles was in place and the train’s lights were suddenly in sight, swaying slightly with the bend, and they were off, back down to their
mates below.

A minute later Backhaus’s group, spying the first Fyrd shadow across the road as someone peered over the wall, moved near. The idea was to wait until they were halfway over the wall, heave
them over and knife them as they came, one after another.

Four of them were chosen for that job. They were butchers and they knew their knives.

Then the first Fyrd was taken and the killing began. The Fyrd, stopped almost before they began, had not yet fired a single bolt.

Meanwhile, above their heads, the train they were meant to be covering but now couldn’t reach, had just triggered the first of the stickles and, for the Fyrd riding undercroft, a bloody
nightmare commenced . . .

. . . You’re under a train, you’re all fired up, you’ve never known defeat, you’ve only ever seen fear in another hydden’s eyes and –
thwack!
A spike
shoots into your leg, turns and bends and rips right round because the train’s moving on and the pain makes you grab and you lose your ’sac and –
thwack!
There’s
another in your back and you’re turning into your own scream in the dark and your mate grabs your hair and you feel his blood in your ear as you fall on the line and he’s pulling you
along with the other buggers all screaming and the wheels, great, grinding wheels,
Oh nah not tha
. . . and a leg rolls by as your face grinds into the track and . . . the train ground on,
its wheels squealing on blood and bone as the Fyrd were stickled one after another and ripped apart.

‘
Retreat!
’

The order was sharp, the response rehearsed, this was a ploy that the Fyrd would come to hate.

Sudden silence, the enemy gone, death and Mirror knows what all about; total, bloody, chaos.

The Brummie boys, hyped with success, did as Backhaus commanded, leaving only one of their own behind, a bolt through his head.

‘Herey go my lads! Herey down here!’

The lilting bilgesnipe voices came up to them from the watery shadows of the River Rea.

The bilgesnipe lit brief flares to light the way down and then doused them at once. A whistle, a pause to check, screams most terrible from the line above and a warm sticky rain of blood coming
down, and the boatyboys are off, skiffing their craft one after another through the dark.

‘Where to now, lads?’

‘Feld’s in charge of the next one,’ and Meyor Feld was.

They took a rest and had some grub under the old slaughterhouse off Bradford Street. Another group was already there.

Feld appeared, looking sharp, with Backhaus now at his side. He had blood on his uniform and a look like they’d not seen on his face before: murderous intent.

Feld said, ‘Right, you all know where the Worcester Wharf is – behind the Midland Depot. Yes?’

They did.

‘That’s the Fyrd collecting point for those coming in from the west: troops, arms, Mirror knows what. They’re using a building in Holliday Passage and they’re regarding
it as safe. The whole area’s secured, or will be in an hour’s time. We’re going in hard with the bilgyboys up the basin adjacent and some down the tunnels that emerge at Worcester
Wharf. Here’s how it’s going to be . . .’

The Fyrd arriving over in Snow Hill arrived in a city of the dead.

There was no one about, not even a rat toddling along.

Nothing.

No resistance at all.

Their mustering point was St Philip’s Churchyard, on the south side.

Not a pigeon in a tree, not a sign of anything except humans, a few, stinking of drink and talking to gravestones and trying to thump a holly bush.

But hydden?

Not a single bloody one.

While Feld was busy on the west side of Brum, the Fyrd on the north side decided to move on at once eastward to St Bartholomew’s Graveyard and from there into Park Street Gardens.

More human drunks.

A small gathering of human travellers roasting chestnuts on a brazier in the park, playing a mouth harp of the kind that hurts a hydden’s ears, talking in registers too low for hydden to
interpret, except for the sibilants, which make them sound like a group of snakes silhouetted against orange flames in the night.

But hydden?

None.

But there were!

Mister Pike and his stavermen, eighteen of them, were sitting twelve feet down in the old catacombs under the ‘V’ formed by Park Street and the Viaduct.

‘They’re here, right on cue.’

‘How many?’

‘More than a hundred.’

‘They move quietly.’

‘They’re Fyrd. Move like stoats.’

‘When do we go in?’

‘Dawn, so we can see to get away fast.’

Someone chuckled.

‘Haven’t done this since a boy.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be much laughter in Brum in two days’ time,’ said Pike. ‘This is the good time, when we’re the ones with surprise on our side.
The bad times will come.’

They were coming already.

Feld’s mission had gone awry.

The tunnel was already secured so there were killers waiting for them in Holliday Passage and Feld’s killers got killed themselves.

Eight dead before the retreat.

The plan was not wrong, just not fully right. But they had a fallback.

Half of the Backhaus boys were in craft in the St Thomas Ward basin and the Fyrd, thinking they’d beaten the unexpected attack, were relaxing and getting their second wind.

Backhaus whispered, ‘We go on very quietly, very quick, and we come out faster still. Five minutes and I whistle you out. Understood? All of you?’

So in they went again, in the south end of the passage, staves poised ready for the Fyrd laughing over the eight dead lads.

Thump

Thump

Thump
and on . . .

A crossbow was drawn, a train slid by, the stars above were still bright though dawn was showing.

Thump
and a dirk went into a gut and one of Backhaus’s boys squirmed down into coal dust.

Thwunk!
And an iron clad crushed his head.

Backhaus whistled them out and they came. But moments later he himself was dead from the bolt that followed them as they escaped.

‘Herey go lads, down here boys!’ and an oily flame by a bilgy smile showed them the way down off the dock.

‘We’re away!’

Still, they’d caused disruption and damage and killed more than they lost.

Mister Pike, the best staverman of his generation by far, had an instinct for timing a strike.

Too soon and the blow’s weak and leaves the opponent with a strong counter-attack. Too late and you’re on the ground spitting teeth and puking bile.

So they trusted him as the Fyrd in Park Street Gardens above had their grub, rested, bided their time, told a few jokes, consolidated their supply line back to Snow Hill Station, saw the first
dawn, began to get cold and, well past four in the morning, got bored and restive and slow and didn’t know the catacombs were right below filled chock-a-block with corpses and skulls and as
sparky a group of stavermen as ever was.

‘Right, lads,’ said Pike, ‘sup up, clear up and limber your fingers on your staves and ready your dirks. The Brunty boys are good but we’re going to be a mite better and
a mite faster. Peace and cooperation’s good but I’ve said all along that a little rivalry never hurt anybody. So I’ll slap any of you bastards who don’t do better than his
best. We’re eighteen, they’re one hundred and eight at the latest count.

‘You know the layout of this dank place ’cos you were raised here like me. Here’s how it’s going to be. First, put this gear on . . .’

He opened a bag he had been carrying and pulled out eighteen light shifts, black as coal but for the white luminescent bones of skeletons and skulls.

They put them on, got them right so they didn’t obscure vision or movement; standing there, some wanted to laugh themselves silly.

‘Right, my lads, we’re going to rise from the ground like bodies come to life, using each of the eight exits. Me? I’m taking the exit right in their midst. We move on my
whistle, short and sharp, and we move like lightning. In, bash, stab, thrice times but then out, out like bats from a tunnel at dusk, all so fast they don’t have time to react.
Right?’

Right.

Pike’s stavermen rose from the dead at dawn, eighteen skeletons to one hundred and eight.

Oh friggin’ hell
, was the look on the faces of the Fyrd.
Friggin’ friggin’ hell. What the . . . !?

Eighteen in, seventeen out on their legs unhurt and one dragged by Pike ’cos the bugger sprained his ankle in a rabbit hole.

The Fyrd?

Thirty-seven dead, nineteen maimed beyond fighting again in that campaign, thirteen wounded and the rest so scared that some never recovered confidence.

And Pike and his boys were gone in the night, in different directions, except towards Snow Hill Station. Leave
that
well alone!

‘
Thirty-seven dead from the Snow Hill contingent and the sun’s barely up!
’ roared Quatremayne, in his HQ in Coventry, when the message came through.
‘How the
hell
is that possible!?’

‘General . . .’

‘I’m going to Brum now.’

‘Sir, they’re using sticklebacks. It won’t be safe undercroft.’

‘And where did they get sticklebacks? And who are “they” if they’re not a few grubby townsfolk? And how did they
know
. . . ?’

The day was not going well for Quatremayne and it had barely started.

The force at Lawley Street signalled distress and disarray and total failure of their mission to support the bigger group who arrived a short while later.

That force failed to signal arrival in due time and when they finally did, two out of three commanders were dead, a third had lost a limb, and Mirror knows how many of the best of the best were
dead, maimed, injured or dying.

The New Street contingent had better and clearer news, except they too had losses to report.

‘
Eight?!
’ thundered Quatremayne. ‘In a fully secured supply depot?!
How?
’

‘We don’t know, General. But we killed one of their officers.’

But Quatremayne was beginning to think he did know. That made him more angry still.

No city, especially a layabout place like Brum, could respond like that without two things: perfect intelligence and organization and spirit far beyond the normal.

He had been informed that Blut was dead in the bunker. Though the reports were second-hand they seemed conclusive. The entrance doors were blown up and immovable, all other entrances sealed.

As for the guards, something had gone badly wrong and the bunker exuded the smell of death and putrefaction.

‘I want a team to get into the bunker and check every corpse they find and confirm Blut’s dead. Because I have a feeling . . .’

‘Who shall I send, sir?’

Quatremayne was so angry he might have killed any one of his senior staff on the spot. Instead he said, ‘You go, and you and
you
.
Personally.
Do it and report
back.’

‘But, General . . .’

‘Do it,’ said Quatremayne coldly, ‘while I sort out the mess you’ve got us into in Brum. First, we’re going to have to fall back on all those fronts, regroup and
find out what the hell is going on in that city.’

‘Sir?’

‘Yes, for Mirror’s sake.’

‘The signals are all down.’

Incandescent is a light that shines very bright. Quatremayne’s rage then might have lit up the whole of Coventry.

A
s the sun rose on the High Ealdor’s Residence, news that all the Fyrd divisions had retreated to regroup was confirmed. Marshal
Brunte’s commanders immediately wanted to do what so many want who are victorious early on: go in hard after the enemy while the going is good.

But the Marshal had a cooler head and did not intend to depart from the strategy agreed with Blut and the Council of War. Early success by Brum had been expected; later defeat was
inevitable.

Festoon said he had no useful view.

Brunte turned to Blut, who was sitting at the table now in a purely advisory capacity, and asked formally, ‘Emperor, do you still think we should retreat?’

Blut took off his spectacles for the umpteenth time, cleaned them, but hadn’t even put them back on before he said, ‘I do.’

In fact, the retreat had already begun, Pike’s boys showing Brunte’s forces the best ways out, the bilgesnipe boaties doing their bit by way of transport across the whole of
Brum.

They had won a signal early victory and bought valuable time to complete the evacuation. They had shaken the confidence of the Fyrd. No need to gild the lily. Time for them all to go.

Arthur had slept throughout at the Residence and woken feeling bright. He attended the Council of War but played no part in it. The day was a fine one, perhaps one of the last before October
ended and the dark months of Samhain began.