He dropped down onto his belly to lower his profile, listened to the silence. He watched the smoke drift from the city, noted that everything that had stood outside the walls last time had been cleared away, leaving nothing but a flat white surround. Uneasily for a moment, he surveyed the horizons, feeling almost as if distant groves were the massed helmets and spears of legions waiting in tight array.
His companions crowded up behind him. They waited till the speck that was the Limper vanished against the dark loom of the city's walls. Then they all moved forward, marching toward doom or destiny in a gradually widening line abreast.
LXX
Smeds sat in the icy shadows shivering, unable to stop. His stomach felt hollow. It ached. He was scared. He hoped it was the cold and hunger but was afraid it was the first bite of cholera.
The air was filled with smoke and the stench of bodies being burned. Death had reaped a rich harvest during the night. Few who were not soldiers had eaten well in days. Disease made easy headway in bodies already weakened.
He watched the bridge up the ditch and wondered if Fish would ever come, and what he would do if Fish didn't. Then he sat there and gradually convinced himself that he was the last of the four of them, possessed of the greatest treasure in the world and so poor he was forced to live in a sewer like a rat.
He scavenged through his pack for the dozenth time, looking for some scrap of food that might have gotten into it somehow. Again he found nothing but the gold and silver he had brought out of the Barrowland. A fortune, and he would have given it all for a good meal, a warm bed, and confidence that the great terrors of the world had forgotten his name.
He started. Daydreaming, he had not noticed the two men come onto the bridge. One looked like Fish. He made the signal he was supposed to make before he walked away from the other, who stayed where he was.
Smeds shoved his pack into a gap in the culvert wall, where some of the building stone had fallen away and high water had washed out some of the earth behind. Then he ran toward the light at the nether end, a hundred yards away.
Midway he stumbled over a corpse that the rats had been at for a while. He had become so inured to horror that he just went on, giving it hardly a thought.
He rushed out the other end, floundered through drifted snow, and hurried around to where he was supposed to meet Fish, masked from the man on the bridge by a hump of earth six feet high. Fish was carrying a sizable blue canvas bag. "Is it safe?" Smeds croaked.
"Looks like they'll play square. This is the first third, along with some food and clothes and blankets and stuff I thought you could use."
Smeds's mouth watered. But he asked, "What now?"
"You go out on the bridge, get the second third, tell him where to find the spike. I watch from cover. He messes with you, I hunt him down and kill him. Go on. Let's get it done."
Smeds looked at the old man a moment, shrugged, went off to meet the man on the bridge. He was calmer than he had expected to be. Maybe he was getting used to the pressure. He was still pleased with himself for not having bent for a moment while the Rebels had him.
The man on the bridge leaned on the rail, staring at nothing. He glanced at Smeds incuriously as he approached. Another blue bag leaned against his leg. Smeds sidled up and planted his forearms on the rail on the other side of the bag.
The man was younger than Smeds had expected and of a race he'd never before seen. Easy to see why he had taken the name Exile.
"Smeds Stahl?"
"Yes. How come you're playing this square?"
"I've found honesty and fair play productive over the long term. The second third is in the bag. Do you have something for me?"
"In the city wall. One hundred eighty-two paces east of the North Gate, below the twenty-sixth archer's embrasure, in the mortar behind the block recessed to take the support brace of a timber hording."
"Understood. Thank you. Good day."
Smeds hoisted the bag and got the hell out of there.
"Go all right?" Fish asked.
"Yeah. Now what?"
"Now I join up with him to go see if you'told the truth. If you did he gives me the final third. If not he kills me and comes looking for you."
"Shit. Why not head out now? What we got ought to be enough."
"He's played straight. I figure it would be smart to play it that way with him. We aren't going to get out of Oar for a while. Be nice to know there was somebody who wasn't out to get us. You go back wherever you was hiding. I'll come back to the bridge."
"Right."
Smeds was just about to drop back into the ditch when alarm horns began blowing all over the city.
The Limper had come.
LXXI
Raven got him a wild hair. He'd go snag the spike and that would be a big foot in the door with Darling. The guy's head was getting a little bent. He didn't tell nobody but Brother Bear Torque, who he conned into going along with him.
He started out lucky. They hit no gray patrols. As they got into the heart of the city, here came Exile and an older guy just like they had timed it for Raven's benefit. They followed the two.
Exile and his companion ended up leaning on the rail of a footbridge over a big drainage ditch. Raven and Torque watched from a distance. The area around the ditch was clear. They couldn't get as close as Raven wanted.
"What the hell are they doing?" Torque asked.
"Waiting, looks like."
The older man resumed moving, went on, and vanished among tenements beyond the ditch. Five minutes later another man came out to the bridge, talked to Exile a little, walked away with a bag.
"That tears it," Torque said. "Time to bend over and kiss our asses good-bye."
"He hasn't got hold of it yet," Raven growled. "We stick and see what turns up. Look here." The older man was coming out to rejoin Exile.
They just stood there.
"Look!" Raven pointed.
The covert from which they watched was about ten feet higher than the bridge. Just enough of an elevation to reveal the head and shoulders of a man crossing the snow north of the bridge, behind a mound that would mask him from the men on the bridge. He carried two blue.bags.
Alarm horns tore the guts out of the quiet.
The men on the bridge took off.
Torque said, "We better get back.…"
"Wait!" There was a nasty gleam in Raven's eyes. "Exile will be busy with the Limper. We get that man to tell us where the spike is, maybe we can get to it first."
LXXII
Smeds had gotten back to his starting point. He put the two bags into hiding with his pack, except for a couple of army blankets, a heavy coat, a knife, food, and a bottle of brandy. He stuffed, warmed his veins, listened to the horns. They were going berserk up there.
A noise from down the culvert shocked him. He listened closely, figured it had come from about where the corpse lay, and had been made by something a lot bigger than a rat.
He rose carefully, filled his coat pockets with food, laid his blankets in atop the treasure—and froze.
A man stood silhouetted in the nearer end of the culvert. One of those Rebels. Fish had been right. The bastards just wouldn't let up.
The man was coming in.
Smeds lifted himself into the hole with his plunder. It was a tight fit and a pathetic attempt at concealment but he was counting on the man's vision needing a long while to adjust from the brightness outside.
Absolutely.
The man was still moving tentatively when he came abreast of Smeds. Smeds reached out and cut his throat.