‘My young friend,’ he said, ‘there bain’t a single solitary soul at our feast who is not honoured to have you among us, a giant-born with things to do. Raise your glasses one and all, for though this be our Bride’s day I swear by the Mirror that Master Jack has made it historical too.
‘The Deritenders shall be his loyal followers the day he returns to Brum, assuming that is what his good friends and ours – Master Brief, Mister Pike, Mister Barklice and that gennelman we all love to laugh about but admire from the bottom of our darksome hearts, Master Stort, who is not able to be among us seeing as he’s looking about some mysterious business of his own at this very minute – intend.’ He tailed off to wink meaningfully at Brief, who nodded back with a slight smile. Jack guessed they had hatched a plot to help Katherine and help them both escape the Fyrd, but what it was he had no idea. He decided to find out the moment he could. Then the old hydden raised his glass and continued, ‘So long as Master Jack is a friend of Brum, we shall be a friend of his!’
This was taken as the toast it was meant to be and the others all joined in and raised their glasses too.
‘One and all raise your glasses to the Groom that Won’t Be – yet!’
It was well done and Jack was able to leave with honour, his reputation secure and the festivity in no way dishonoured.
74
REUNION
Katherine was right, there was a small door behind the tapestry she began running for when people were diverted by the entrance of the Fyrd into the Orangery. It led to a metal spiral stairway that went both up and down. The trouble was she could see that Festoon’s equerry was now following her.
She was not the only one to flee that way, but unlike the two or three ahead of her who stopped when the steps spiralled down into darkness and decided to go up, she descended into the depths below, hoping to lose her pursuer.
Heavy steps came down after her and a voice shouted, ‘You must stop.’
The man had got a lantern from somewhere and its light helped her see the steps below. She hurried on down, taking steps two at a time, but she could not lose him.
Then: ‘Don’t go that way!’ her roared at her.
She ran on and thump! she hit some unseen projection in the dark and fell forward, rolling down what turned out to be the last few steps before reaching the bottom.
She lay stunned and disorientated in the shadows, sounds of running and disturbance all around her.
There were only two ways on. The first was a large tunnel, but she could see Fyrd and their prisoners down that way. The other was a gate into a smaller tunnel.
It was locked, and by the time she turned around her pursuer had reached the bottom of the steps, his lantern raised, and was coming straight at her. With his turban and scimitar he looked like a bandit from an Oriental tale. The light from his lantern blinded her and she could not see his face.
She turned away, towards the other tunnel, but saw that some of the Fyrd had seen them and were running their way.
The scimitar flashed, the lights of the Fyrd moved nearer, the cries of their prisoners grew louder.
‘I don’t want to go with you,’ she said, her chest painful with fear and her thumping heart; her mouth dry when she spoke, ‘but I don’t want them to catch me!’
He stood staring at her and dropped his weapon to his side.
‘Katherine,’ he said urgently. ‘Katherine, don’t you recognize me?’
She stared in astonishment as he pulled off his ridiculous turban, came slowly towards her and lowered the lantern so she could see his face properly.
‘It’s me, Katherine. It’s Arthur Foale.’
But there was no time for explanations.
He took a key from a bunch hanging on his belt, opened the gate, shoved her bodily through, slammed it shut and locked it just in time.
‘Run!’ Arthur shouted. ‘Run, or Brunte’s Fyrd will take you.’
They ran and ran, and went faster still when they heard the gate crash back open behind them and the Fyrd in pursuit.
But when they reached a wide subterranean vault where a barge was moored they saw more Fyrd and some hostages ahead.
‘Have to hide and hope for the best,’ said Arthur.
A conduit ran into the tunnel at chest level from which filthy water trickled. Katherine heaved herself up and crawled in, her horrible black wig falling off as she did so. Arthur threw it in after her and, with her help, climbed in himself.
It was only just in time, as the Fyrd arrived moments later and searched about angrily. But more Fyrd and hostages were arriving by the moment and the search was soon abandoned.
Katherine and Arthur looked out at what was happening, but not for long. Hostages were being lined up by the barge, and summarily killed with crossbow bolts and knives, or clubbed to death with staves. Then their bodies were thrown into the barge.
They lowered their heads and covered their ears from the screams of the victims and the visceral grunts and occasional laughter of their executioners.
75
MASSACRE
Dawn in the old Curzon Street tunnel of Brum is no place for the living. First light yields up sights of crumbling decay and foul blockages of fetid pools of slime in tunnels unvisited by humans for decades, of corpses brought down by rain of creatures so rotten they are barely recognizable . . and the rats, streams of them, returning from a night of scavenging through the wasteful human world above.
It was the slither of their tails and the scratch of their feet across Katherine’s bare legs that woke her.
She did not scream.
She simply sat up slowly in the tunnel, her eyes blank to the nearby shaft of light from the drain high above, her mind a place of bewildered devastation.
‘Arthur,’ she said blankly.
The rats were on him as well, or rather running over him to get to the larger tunnels from which they had climbed to escape the Fyrd the evening before. Like her, he barely reacted to them when he woke.
‘Dear God,’ he said and then again, shaking his head, ‘Oh dear God.’
Katherine sat motionless, lacking the will even to speak.
Arthur reached out and said, ‘I am sorry you had to see and hear what you did, I am really so sorry . . .’
What they had been silent witnesses to had already changed both their lives. Innocence had gone and Katherine seemed to have aged overnight.
They waited an hour, watching for signs of the Fyrd and straining to hear their movement, or the movement of anything. There was nothing, and when they emerged the barge had gone, with its terrible cargo.
‘We’ll go back the way we came and try to reach the place I had originally intended to take you.’
‘I want to find Jack.’
‘He’s with people who will know where we are. Once he comes we can get away and we can talk . . .’
Katherine registered little as they went.
‘I just don’t want to meet any tomters,’ she said.
‘They don’t exist,’ said Arthur.
‘Oh yes they do,’ she replied. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To somewhere very few people ever get to see, somewhere extraordinary created by a genius such as even the human world has rarely seen. There’s someone there I want you to meet.’
Katherine lost track of the tunnels they hurried through, steps they climbed, huge pipes and girders they clambered under and, eventually, derelict cellars lit by distant cobwebbed half-windows, into which they came.
Arthur led her towards what seemed an impenetrable and wide brick column, taking her arm the last part of the way.
‘Stay close,’ he said, ‘there are many pitfalls here.’
They shuffled along very cautiously over the last few feet, a drop into voids on either side.
Arthur reached towards what looked like a gate, pulled it aside and opened murky doors beyond, then led her carefully onto a floor that jolted beneath her feet.
‘Where are we?’
&nb
sp; ‘It’s a lift.’
He closed the outer and inner doors and pulled a lever. The lift began to sway and move.
‘Hold tight,’ he warned in the pitch darkness.
The lift moved quite fast, then slowed and finally stopped.
He pulled open the doors.
‘Watch yourself as you step through,’ he said. ‘The levels aren’t always the same.’
She stepped into a very large round chamber so filled with light and colour after the tunnels that she could hardly make sense of it. At its centre was a platform filled with all kinds of pulleys and cords, mirrors and lights, and reclining on a vast and sumptuous chaise longue, a recognizable figure nibbled lazily at a sweetmeat stuck on the end of a bejewelled silver cocktail stick.
‘Ah!’ he said when he saw them. ‘I’m glad you made it, Foale. I rather feared when you left the party that you might have been one of those taken by the Fyrd, but it seems you live still! My hearty congratulations!’
Then, gazing in the most benign and pleasant way at Katherine, he said with lazy good humour, ‘So . . . this is the charming girl you so wished me to meet? The future Shield Maiden?’
‘I believe she may be,’ replied Arthur Foale.
Then Katherine found herself, despite all impulses to the contrary, shaking the limp, plump hand of the beaming Lord Festoon.
76
THE MARSHAL
That same morning Igor Brunte was listening to the very latest update from one of his new subordinates on the state of things in Brum following his swift and ruthless takeover of the governance of the city the day before.
A succession of people, in a variety of states of shock, bewilderment and awe at the scale and speed of change, and the smooth and rapid assumption of power by the Sub-Quentor, were coming and going through his makeshift office off Digbeth High with the latest information, but things were now settling down.
It had been a busy twenty-four hours and he had not slept at all. But the news was all good, and with Brum under his control he was happy to be the still but potent centre of his minions’ feverish activity whilst he stood shaving his strong chin and snipping at his bushy moustache.
He had a visit to make and he was scrubbing himself up so he looked less like a revolutionary and more like the leader he now was. It was a meeting he was looking forward to. He intended to formally take power from the High Ealdor, Lord Festoon. He’d been useful for a while, but now there had to be an uncorrupted chain of command – with Brunte at its head. There was no room for a fat, useless noble who was an outdated figurehead for a system that didn’t work. He didn’t expect any trouble but decided to take along Feld and Streik just in case.
Brunte completed his ablutions with the application of a beeswax balm, scented with the musky oil of an ox’s tail which, he believed, gave him added presence and personal potency.
Thought satisfied with himself and the world, for good reason – his takeover, so meticulously planned, had gone with barely a hitch – he was not complacent. He’d asked a newly arrived aide if there were any threats to his dominion left at all and was just listening to the final part of his report.
‘. . . and finally the latest reports on the floods are excellent, sir, they are subsiding as expected . . . but . . .’
The news was indeed good, all positions secured, the blood-letting more or less over, the city his.
‘But . . . ?’
‘Ah, yes, sir. The Rea threatened for a time to back right up, but as you know the rain has eased off south and west of the city and we believe that will be sufficient . . .’
‘You meant it might back up Northfield way?’
‘Beyond, sir, as far as Waseley Hill, which is always the problem since then . . .’
‘Since then the water floods back down, an event that has not happened I have been told in fifteen hundred years.’
‘You are well informed, Sub-Quentor.’
It was meant as flattery but it brought a frown, though not because his aide had done anything wrong. But suddenly ‘Sub-Quentor’ felt like a rank too low for a leader. Possible new titles and ranks whirred away in the back of his mind as he returned to present matters.
‘The Bilgesnipe diverted the waters north, though not without misgivings as it meant flooding some of their own people . . . but the Seal necessitated that procedure.’
Brunte told himself that Old Mallarkhi, their not-to-be-underestimated leader, would need acknowledgement of some kind. It had been a mistake by successive regimes of Fyrd commanders to undervalue Bilgesnipe support.
Brunte’s eye was caught by a sudden glimmer at the dirty, broken windows of his temporary headquarters which occupied a corner of a derelict warehouse off Digbeth High. The choice had been a clever and prudent one, in case his plans had gone awry and his opponents had regained control and come in search of him. Here in the Upperworld of humans they would have found it hard to track him down and even harder to attack him.
The location had another advantage.
He had arranged for a fire to be set to one of the larger of the human tower blocks to the east of the city, which had diverted human attention from the floods and made the Bilgesnipe’s task, and his own people’s dispositions of their murderous work, a great deal easier.
‘Nearly time to leave this place I think,’ he said, sitting finally at the rough human-sized office table which, with its legs sawn off, the legs of his matching chairs likewise, they had utilized for the purpose of viewing the papers and maps used in their operation.
‘They’ consisted of Brunte and his chief of operations, who, for the past twenty minutes while his commander shaved, had said nothing. He still said nothing while Brunte mused further on a variety of issues and ordered the clerks to be ready to move at a moment’s notice to a location better placed for continuing command of New Brum.
The distant fire had been fierce in spite of the rain but was now easing. He nodded towards it with a smile.
‘Humans call it arson,’ he said to his silent colleague, ‘but the Fyrd call it tactics, as do I. Now, I had intended to visit Festoon at once, but on second thoughts I think it wise we attend to this matter of the River Rea backing up all the way to Waseley Hill . . . and . . .’
‘We should wait to see who returns to occupy the third seat at this table, sir,’ said Hrap Dowty, breaking his silence.
His voice was cool and matter-of-fact, as it had been throughout the long hours past, ever since Brunte had so suddenly elevated him to his position as Chief of Operations.
‘Dowty, you’re not inclined to bets or wagers I take it?’ said Brunte.
Hrap Dowty thought about this, assumed that his new master was making a joke, and offered a half-smile by way of acknowledgement, though he thought it unfunny and finally shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not.’
Brunte actually liked Dowty. He did his job perfectly, he had no personal ambition beyond it, and he feared no one. He was reliable and not a threat. He would have been boring but for one thing, his obsession with time, on which subject, and that alone, he could talk endlessly, and fascinate those around him.
Dowty would never be one to go whoring with, or drink with, or joke with, or do anything much with at all.
But in an insurrection of the kind that Brunte had led, and the campaigns against the Fyrd still to come, and anything else requiring meticulous organization and timing, he was the perfect partner.
‘Were you a gambler, Dowty, which I guess you are not, I would have a wager with you as to how long it would be before the third seat at our table is reoccupied.’
‘Ah!’ said Dowty without interest. ‘Is it important?’
‘Not particularly,’ agreed Brunte, ‘but it gives me pleasure to forecast things.’
‘Too many unknown variables in this instance, sir, to make a forecast with any accuracy.’
The two were talking about the return of Doam, Brunte’s dependable clerk and number two. He had sent him earlier
to the late General Elon’s quarters, ostensibly to see how Lieutenant Backhaus had got on. He it was who had been left to sort out things after Brunte himself eliminated Elon, it being better that Backhaus did that, since he was trusted by the survivors in the household. But it was not entirely desirable that Backhaus lived afterwards, seeing that he was witness to Elon’s murder, though Brunte could see arguments in his favour. He was bright and clever, and like Brunte himself had long deserved the promotions that the hierarchy led by Elon routinely blocked.
Doam was less bright perhaps, but he commanded loyalty among those under him and Brunte could trust him. But it might be that his time of usefulness was over. Brunte debated the issue with himself and finally decided that there would be trouble between them if both survived the insurrection. He’d made his doubts about Backhaus known to Doam and suggested it would do no harm if he, too, were eliminated. How was up to Doam. Sometimes it was best for a leader to take a back seat where those beneath him are concerned and let them sort things out for themselves.
He guessed only that if Backhaus was half the Fyrd he thought he was he would expect and be prepared for the worst from Doam’s visit. Which would leave him several options. Bow to the inevitable? Flee? Argue with Doam? Kill him.
Brunte and Dowty now awaited Doam’s return to learn the outcome.
The truth was that Brunte was glad he did not have to make a bet, because he actually had no idea what the outcome of Doam’s murderous quest would be. Nor did he much care.
Footsteps below, guards’ voices, someone admitted down there. Then, steps up the stairs to the floor they were on.
The door opened and Backhaus entered alone.
A surprise.
‘Where is Doam?’ asked Brunte, very curious. The lieutenant’s self-assurance was impressive, the obvious respect for Brunte very welcome, his nod towards Dowty a prudent courtesy.
His first words were perfection. They did not waste time in tedious explanation and they made very clear who Backhaus acknowledged was in charge.