There were reed-beds here at the riverside, filled with old rubbish and stinking with the effluent of the sewers. He crept along in them as quietly as he could, and then stopped. Something was crashing about in front of him. A man.
“Lord God,” a voice whispered. “Oh, Lord-”
“Albrec!”
“Corfe?”
He moved forward again. The monk was caught in thigh-deep mud and looked like some glistening swamp denizen. Corfe hauled him out and then they lay there in the reeds for a while, utterly spent. Above them the clear sky was ablaze with stars from one horizon to the next.
“Come,” Corfe said at last. “We have to get away. We’ll die here else.”
Wordlessly, Albrec staggered to his feet and the two of them lurched off together like a pair of mud-daubed drunks.
“Where are we going?” the monk asked.
“To the only man of importance I think Fournier will have left alone. Your master, Macrobius.”
“What about the army?”
“Fournier will have it under control somehow. And he’ll have neutralised all my officers. Maybe the Queen too. I have to get these damned manacles off before my hands die. How much shooting did you hear when you were in there?”
“A lot of volleys. But they lasted a few minutes, not more.”
“There’s been no major battle then. They must have my men bottled up. The Merduks are probably on the march already. Hurry, Albrec! We don’t have time to waste.”
NINETEEN
As the ladies-in-waiting quaked, terrified, the Queen twitched and snarled in her chair, the whites of her eyes flickering under closed lids. She had been like this for almost two hours, and they longed to cry out to someone for help, a doctor or apothecary to be sent. But ancient Grania, who had been at the palace longer than any of the rest and whose dark eyes were unclouded by any vestige of senility, told them to hush their useless mouths and pretend nothing untowards was happening, else the guards posted outside might take it into their heads to come in. So the little flock of ladies embroidered and knitted with absent fervour, stabbing fingertips with monotonous regularity while brimming over with hiccuping little sobs for the predicament they had found themselves in: and Grania glanced towards heaven and helped herself to the wine.
None of them noticed when the black furred shape with ruby eyes crept back into the chamber through the smoke hood and took up its accustomed place in the centre of a huge web that quivered sootily in the shadows of the rafters. The Queen sighed, and sagged in her chair. Then she rubbed her eyes and stood up, putting a hand to the hollow of her back. For several seconds she looked what she was: a tyred woman in her sixth decade. As the ladies-in-waiting chattered around her she took the goblet of wine that the silent Grania offered and drained it at a draught.
“I am getting too old for this sort of thing,” she said to the aged woman who had once been her wet nurse.
“We all are,” the crone retorted drily. And to the brightly plumaged chatterers about her she snapped: “Oh shut up, all of you.”
“No,” Odelia said, “Keep talking. That is an order. Let the guards hear us gossiping away. Were we too silent, they would be the more suspicious.”
“How bad is it?” Grania asked the Queen as the surrounding women talked desperately of the weather, the price of silk, all the while trying to spare an ear for the Queen’s words.
“Bad enough. They have massacred many of his Cathedrallers. The poor fools charged massed arquebusiers with nothing more than sabres.”
“And his Fimbrians?”
“Strangely supine. But something tells me that their commander, Formio, is not letting the grass grow under his feet. The rest of the city is under curfew. Fournier has installed himself in the East Wing. So sure of himself is he that he has only fifty or sixty men around him. The rest patrol the city. There are fires down by the dockyards, but I don’t know what they signify. Arach’s vision is limited, and sometimes hard to decipher.”
“Sit, lady. You are exhausted.”
“How can I sit?” Odelia exploded. “I do not even know if he is alive or dead!” She passed a hand over her face. “Pardon me. I am tyred. I was blind: I should have foreseen this.”
“No-one else did,” Grania said bluntly. “Do not torment yourself because you are no soothsayer.”
The Queen sank back down upon her chair. “He cannot be dead, Grania. He must not be dead.” And she buried her face in her hands and wept.
It was a long, weary way from the waterfront to the Pontifical palace, and it took Corfe and Albrec most of the remainder of the night to traverse it. Fournier’s patrols were easy to dodge. They spent as much time gawking at the wonders of the great city as they did keeping an eye out for curfew-breakers. They were, when it came down to it, untutored men of the country awed by the size and sprawl of the capital. Eavesdropping on their conversations as they trooped past, Corfe realised that some of them did not even know why they were here, except that it was some kind of emergency engendered by the Merduk war.
Halted at the gates of the abbey by watchful Knights Militant, Corfe and Albrec were eyed with astonished disbelief when they demanded to see Macrobius. They were still fettered, and liberally plastered with mud and sewer filth. But something in Corfe’s eye made one of the gate guards dash off at once to fetch Monsignor Alembord. The portly Inceptine looked none too pleased to be dragged out of his bed, but there was no denying that he recognised the bedraggled pair straight away. They were ushered inside the gates amid much whispering and brought to a little reception chamber where Corfe demanded a blacksmith or armourer to cut off their manacles. Alembord waddled away, looking thoroughly confused. He was almost entirely unaware of the coup that had taken place: Fournier’s men had left the abbey alone, as Corfe had suspected they would.
The yawning armourer arrived soon after with a wooden box full of the tools of his trade. The fetters were cut from the two prisoners’ wrists, and Corfe had to clench his teeth against the agony of returning circulation in his hands. They were swollen to twice their normal size and where the iron had encircled his wrists, deep slices had been carved out of the puffed flesh. He let them bleed freely, hoping it would wash some of the filth out of them.
Basins of clean, hot water, and fresh clothes were found for the two men. The clothes turned out to be spare Inceptine habits, and thus it was dressed as a monk that Corfe finally found himself ushered into Macrobius’s private suite. It still wanted an hour until dawn.
Private though the suite might nominally be, it was crowded with anxious clerics and alarmed Knights Militant. They and Macrobius listened in grim silence as Corfe related the events of the past thirty-six hours, Albrec narrating his own part in the storey. As he and Corfe had agreed, however, no mention was made of the spy at the Merduk court.
When they had finished, Macrobius, who had listened without a word, said simply: “What would you have me do?”
“How many armed men can the abbey muster?” Corfe asked.
“Monsignor Alembord?”
“Some sixty to seventy, Holiness.”
“Good,” Corfe said. “Then you must sally out at dawn with all of them, and go to City Square. Call a meeting, raise the rooftops-create a commotion that will get people out on to the streets. Fournier does not have enough men to clamp down on the entire city, and he will not be able to cow the population if they can be raised against him. Get the people on to the streets, Holiness.”
“And you, Corfe, what will you do?”
“I’m going to try and get through to my men. If you can make enough of a commotion, Fournier will have to take troops away from their containment and then there will be a good chance I can break them out. After that, he will be defeated, I promise you.”