LITMIR.BIZ

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flushed. ‘Well, maybe I’m thinking I’d be better off if somebody else introduced me. Your name’s too well known, for a certainty’

      ‘By all means,’ the Mad Prophet mocked. ‘You can try. But without my credentials, I’ll tell you now, you won’t pass the gate to the inner citadel.’

      ‘And you can?’ Fionn Areth marched onwards. ‘Show me a marvel I can believe, like a chick from an egg-hatching donkey!’

      ‘I’m the apprentice spellbinder to a Sorcerer. Charter law answers to crown justice, and, grass-lands idiot, no offence to your ignorance, crown justice upholds the compact as granted by the grace of the Fellowship of Seven.’ Smug as a swindler, Dakar sidled into an alley with a steep, twisting stair, without pause to see if his mark followed. ‘The s’Brydion will not only receive me, they’ll provide board and bed, and a bath with a willing maidservant.’

      Fionn Areth raised his eyebrows, prepared to retort. But Dakar’s wheezing seemed cruelty enough, as the ascent robbed him of breath for dignified speech.

      At the top, disgorged on a road like a cliff-rim, they passed through another wall, and another gate, this one more heavily guarded. Here, a plank-bridge spanned a vertical ditch, with keep towers on either side. The streets beyond snaked up the promontory, overhung by slotted-wood hidings. These had murder holes also. The unwary traffic moved underneath, drowned in a blue gulf of shade. Footmen and carriages, horsemen and drays breasted the seething press. Squeezed into the slot of another close, Fionn Areth realized the craft shops and houses were built chock-a-block, their fortified facings pierced with notches for bowmen.

      ‘S’Brydion don’t like besiegers,’ Dakar agreed, puffing to recoup his wind where a matron’s herb pots soaked up a thin slice of sun.

      Upwards again, they passed the rock-springs and the cisterns; then the chopped turf of the tilt-yards; another barracks and armoury, attached to a smithy. The heat wafted through the crossbuck door smelled of charcoal, and the clangour of hammers was deafening. Fionn Areth stepped, crackling, over curled shavings, whisked on the breeze from the cooper’s shacks; dodged a boy rolling rims to the wheelwright’s. Higher, three muddy children tugged a squealing pig on a string, past a fat woman who scolded. Pigeons flew in flurries of slate wings, and gulls perched, white, on the cornices. They passed the brickmaker’s kilns, and the steaming vats where the renderers stirred fat to make yellow soap, and a sweating girl boiling fish-glue. Dakar puffed a complaint that his chest would split, and asked for a stop at a wine-shop.

      ‘Only one glass,’ he promised. ‘It’s our chance to take in the gossip.’

      Fionn Areth sat in a dimmed corner, his hat-brim pulled low, while a man who made rivets flirted with the barmaid, and others with sword scars shot dice. In the streets, he had noticed that most men bore the marks of campaigns; or else the s’Brydion sergeants taught their recruits with sharpened weapons.

      ‘This whole town’s a war camp,’ he murmured to Dakar, as they paid up to leave.

      The comment earned him a moon-calf glance. ‘It’s a wasp’s nest,’ Dakar amended, then belched into his hand. ‘I thought you would feel quite at home here?’

      They climbed again, past dormered houses, then another deep ditch, and a wall notched with razor-toothed barbicans. The gatehouse held embrasures for ballistas, and a sand arena contained the full-scale array of a field camp. Horsemen were at practice, and other men, stripped, were perfecting the aim on a trebuchet.

      ‘You will notice, there’s been no standing timber for five leagues,’ said Dakar. ‘If an attacking host wishes to assault with siege weapons, it must import the timber, then cross that naked valley by ox carriage. Plenty of time for that monster, there, to hammer such toys into match-sticks.’ He finished with wine-scented gravity. ‘You don’t want the s’Brydion clan for your enemies.’

      Higher, they climbed, past stables and commons, while the swooping rooks wheeled in the salty gusts whisked off the channel inlet. They sheltered in a doorway as an armed troop clattered by drilled to a cutting-edge of obedience. The captain who led them had eyes like his steel, sharpened and ruthlessly wary.

      ‘There, just ahead.’ The Mad Prophet panted. His wave encompassed two high towers, and a slit in between, which glowered down over a cleft like a quarry. The gulf was spanned by a thin, swaying bridge suspended on cables and forged chain. ‘That’s the Wyntock Gate to the inner citadel. Here’s where the war host that sacked the royal seat at Tirans was broken, then crushed, in the uprising over five hundred years ago. They say the ditch, there, ran knee deep in blood at low tide, with the heaped fallen seething with ravens and vultures.’ Overhead, there were such birds, now, circling high on the air-currents. Dakar mopped back his screwed hair and shoved off toward the bridge. ‘They bring up dray teams and supply wagons by winch from the sea-gate, and now, the defences get serious.’

      The approach took them through another set of twinned keeps, pierced by a narrow, cobble-stone ramp, pitched too steep for a cart. Planks had been laid, ribbed with nailed strips. The wood had been gouged into slivers by horses shod with screwed caulks.

      ‘In war, they will unshackle the span of the bridge, then take up the planks and sluice down this causeway with grease,’ Dakar said. ‘Foot-troops can’t pass then. See those embrasures? That’s where the archers lie back and slaughter each wave of attackers at leisure.’

      ‘They don’t advance under frameworks and hides?’ Fionn Areth asked, breathless.

      ‘They try, and they burn like a torch.’ Dakar added grimly, ‘Look up.’

      Overhead lay a spider-work track of forged metal, where an iron cart bearing boiling oil, or pitch-soaked batts could be dumped to scorch any force pressed against the meshed gate.

      At the top, stopped by hard men with bared steel, Dakar gave his name. ‘He’s with me.’ A jerk of his chin set the sentries’ cold glance sweeping over Fionn Areth. ‘My surety,’ the Mad Prophet informed them, then said, ‘We’re expected. If you don’t wish to trouble the duke or his brothers, Vhandon or Talvish can speak for us.’

      The man in charge grinned, his helm polished over the scratches of veteran service. ‘Brave man, you say my lord’s family knows you? Better pray, if they don’t. The two captains you mentioned will vouchsafe your identity, or else you’ll soon be greeting the rooks who clip the dead eyes from your carcass.’ He surveyed them again, lingering over Fionn Areth’s plain sword and blunt hands. ‘Go across. Since I don’t know your faces, expect that you’re going to be challenged.’

      The watch-officer stepped back. High overhead, someone yelled, ‘It’s a maybe?’

      The sentry nodded. Another man must have dispatched a signal, for torchlight winked in smart reply from a mirror in the far keep.

      Past the narrows of the Wyntock Gate, goatherd and prophet stepped onto the bridge, whose gouged planks heaved under their load like sea-rollers. The steel links of the chain pinched a swatch of snagged tail hair.

      ‘They can’t cross a horse here!’ Fionn Areth protested, clenched sick by the irregular, bucking sway and the creak of taut cordage beneath him.

      ‘They do,’ Dakar rebutted. ‘Hand-picked light cavalry and stronghold couriers, the animals are ridden or led over one at a time.’ He paused, queasy, as a raven soared down the ribbon of shade cast by the span underneath them. ‘The animals are trained as sucklings beside their dams. Legend holds the original mares were hand-picked, starved for water, then lured over to drink under a blindfold. You don’t,’ he finished, ‘presume the impossible with s’Brydion. Foes who have tend to rue the experience.’

      Several dizzy steps later, clued by the lack of disparaging comment, the Mad Prophet appended, ‘If you’re going to be sick, don’t try running back. They’ll have a spanned cross-bow sighting you from behind, and an archer apiece, stationed in the towers ahead of us. Long-bow men ready to skewer your heart, and mine, if the first marksman happens to miss.’

      Fionn

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