Within an hour the drugged wine had felled all but three-the new men, who’d only feigned drinking. These with swords dispatched the others, walked quickly to the last cell, whispered with their minds to the Northman and took the chains from his ankles. At sword point they led him down the passage. The prisoners who saw felt brief pity, or dread, or nothing, as he passed.
They paused at the guard room long enough to free his wrists, had him don a tunic and black cape, and pulled the hood over his skull, shadowing his face. At the head of the three long flights of stairs, one turned the lock in the entry door and opened it. The guard outside was bored and thinking of other things; he did not expect danger from below, and the telepathic rebels screened well. Although a telepath himself, he was pulled through the door and dead in seconds. One of the three stood in his place to give the others time.
The remaining two walked briskly down the corridor with Nils, in step, orc boots clopping, and soon turned through a plain inset door. Narrow stairs angled sharply upward to a passage whose stone walls were moist with condensation. Occasional oil lamps bracketed on the walls flickered sluggishly in the stale air, and twice they passed manholes dogged into a wall, each with a massive lock. After some two hundred meters they pulled open a trapdoor and lowered themselves on metal rungs into another passage. Here the air was fouler, the lamps so low and far apart it was like night. His guides took off their boots, slung them over their shoulders, and led him quietly through the darkness. At length they climbed upward into an unlit room, re-donned their boots, and exited beneath stars. Alert for the sound or sense of a possible soft-shod night patrol, they entered a nearby alley. One straddled a manhole, gripped the stone cover by a ring with both hands, and removed it with a grunt. He lowered himself and disappeared.
“Now you,” the other whispered to Nils. “I must stay up here to replace the cover.”
Nils lowered himself, hung by his fingers for a second, then dropped into blackness. His tortured knees buckled at the bottom, sprawling him onto rough stone paving. Carefully he rose, and heard the manhole cover being lowered into place.
His remaining escort whispered to him in Anglic. “I’m taking you to a storm sewer that you can follow to the canal. They have gratings across them at intervals that a man can’t crawl through; this joins one of them below the last grate. If half that is said of you is true, once you cross the canal you should be able to get away without any trouble.”
Psychically Nils nodded. The man was barefoot again, and they padded through the narrow tunnel in utter darkness, his guide with a sense of knowing the way. Before long they came to an end, a door, and the Northman sensed the other feeling for a latch, finding it. It would not move. He grasped it with both hands, still couldn’t budge it, and fear surged through him. Nils nudged him aside, explored with his fingers, closed powerful fists on it and pulled, then jerked. Then he pushed, finally lunging against it with a heavy shoulder. The orc took out his sword and pried, carefully at first, then desperately so that the point snapped.
His fear dulled to despondency. “We’re trapped,” he said with his mind. “This route’s been blocked. And we can’t get back out the way we came; it’s too high.”
Nils’s mind questioned.
“No, the other way is a dead end just beyond the shaft we came down.”
Reaching up, Nils found he could touch the overhead. “Let’s go back to the shaft,” he thought. “There’s something I want to try.”
Mentally the man shrugged. Nils led, one hand following the wall, the fingers of the other brushing along the overhead until they found the emptiness of the shaft down which they’d dropped. It was perhaps a meter and a half wide, and round, impossible to climb. He dropped to one knee, hands against the damp wall. “Squat on my shoulders,” he instructed. “When I get up, put your hands on the side of the shaft and stand. See if you can reach the cover.”
Slowly Nils stood with his burden, and carefully the orc rose to his feet; with the return of hope had come fear again.
“I can’t reach it.”
“Stand on my hands and I’ll lift you.”
The man raised his left foot, put it on one of Nils’s palms, then repeated with the other, steadying himself shakily with his hands against the wall. Nils grasped both feet firmly, and slowly raised him to arm’s length overhead. He sensed the orc reaching upward almost hesitantly, touching pavement above, lingers feeling for the edges that defined the cover, finding them. Nils braced his legs, the thick muscles of his arms and shoulders swelling as the man pushed upward against the heavy disk. It gave a little, a centimeter, then the man’s arms were fully extended and could lift no higher. Nils raised up slowly on the balls of his feet, and for just a moment they gained a little more. Then the orc fell backward, striking his head against the side of the shaft before landing heavily on the stones below. There was a stab of pain in his left elbow.
Nils knelt beside him. The orc radiated hopelessness. “I couldn’t raise it,” he whispered. “Not enough. It must be eight centimeters thick.”
Nils’s mind acknowledged. “Now what?” he asked.
“We stay here until they come for us.”
“Come for us?”
“They have dogs. For tracking, a dog’s nose is better than telepathy. When they find what happened in the dungeon they’ll track us down.”
Nils sensed the man fumbling through a belt pouch, hunting for death. He pressed an object like a pebble into Nils’s palm. “Swallow it,” he instructed. “You’ll go to sleep and there will be no wakening. If they take us alive, after what happened… When they have done with us, even dying would bring no peace. The agony would follow beyond death itself.”
Nils regarded him calmly, and after a moment the other mind shrugged. The man put the pill in his dry mouth, far back on his tongue, swallowed, shuddered, then breathed deeply and relaxed. Nils sat beside him. Presently the orc slumped against him and Nils cradled his head and shoulders. The mind was drifting, fading, the breathing shallow. Before long Nils was alone.
XIX
Orcs still filed into the arena, into sections reserved for each legion, subsections for each cohort. The sunny side was empty; there were now no horse barbarians to fill it. After the battle of the burning prairie and the death of Kazi, almost a year earlier and so far away, their hordes had deserted the orcs. They’d careened into central Europe a disorganized mob, been decisively beaten by the united Germanic knights, and broken into scores of marauding bands. So said the reports.
There were more Asian tribes, thought Kamal the Grim, eastward on the desert steppes and plateaus and barren mountains, but there was no longer a Kazi to gather them. He turned and scanned the shady side, which in summer was the orc side. Even here many upper rows would be empty, reflecting the bleaching bones scattered in the northern Ukraine.
The command box was already filled, with chiefs of cohorts and legions circulating, conversing, shadowed by their bodyguards. They’d associated freely while the Master still lived, when future and conquest had seemed assured and factionalism remained embryonic. Some had served together in old campaigns. Now those of opposing factions saw one another almost only at the games. At any other time it would suggest dangerous disloyalty to their consul.
The situation aggravated Kamal. Reduced as they were, and without allies, they were still easily the strongest military force in the known world. They’d suffered a defeat, a severe setback, but they still had the power to conquer. Their present ineffectiveness, he told himself, was their own doing. Paralyzed by factionalism, they couldn’t even sally out in force to scatter the Northmen on their fringe. For that required, if not union, at least the forbearance of one faction while the other did the job.