Chapter 4 #3
I caught up with her when she ran into a dead end we’d already visited, though the last time we’d come at it from the other direction. “Shit,” she said. “By my calculations, this ought to be the stable yard.”
I was panting so much I could barely speak. She was fresh as a daisy. “What the hell,” I managed to say, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “They’re only goons. Goons don’t count.”
I tried to grab her arm. She moved it away.
“Sherden goons,” she said. “Oh, don’t pull faces. Why have you got to be so miserable all the time?”
“We need to go left,” I said.
“What?”
“Back the way we came, then left. Should bring us out at the stairwell.”
She shook her head. “We already tried that, and it doesn’t. Oh, balls, here they are again.”
Only three this time, but word had got out: watch out for the nun, she’s a killer.
When she ran at them, they levelled their spears, like proper soldiers in a battle.
Svangerd carried on running, then at the last moment she threw herself on the ground and skidded on one knee and one hand, neatly under the levelled spears.
When she stood up she had leverage on her side, and they were too cramped together to do anything useful.
She killed all three of them in under five seconds.
She had the hanger in her right hand. The blade was bent. You have to hit really, really hard to do that. “We’ll go right,” she said.
“That’ll take us back to the library.”
“What we need,” she said, “is a diversion.”
“What we need,” I yelled after her as she scampered away ahead of me, “is the stairs down to the kitchens.” Maybe she didn’t hear me. Unlikely: she’s got ears like a bat.
Down a passageway we hadn’t visited before.
There was rush matting on the floor, and lamps in niches in the wall.
Somebody important lived in one of the rooms behind one of the doors.
Such a room would almost certainly have a window, with a view.
If we could look out of a window we could figure out where we were.
I chose a door at random and lifted the latch.
“No time for that,” she snapped at me, but I ignored her. “I’ll catch you up,” I said.
I was right. The room was nicely furnished, if you like unspeakably vulgar, and there was a big window, with the shutters helpfully drawn back. Through the window I could see the sea.
There are moments when everything drops neatly into place, and you’re left wondering how you could’ve been so stupid.
I leaned out of the window as far as I dared.
We were on the east wall, four storeys up, and directly below us was the side gate.
Naturally, Aviragus and his nearest and dearest would have their apartments on the seaward side, because if there was a siege the landward side would be a target for catapults and trebuchets.
The sea, on the other hand, had been Sherden property practically since the Fall.
Wonderful. I took five seconds to review what I’d learned about the floor plan.
There had been a turning we hadn’t taken, because there were soldiers coming up it.
That turning must inevitably lead to the back stairs, and the stairs would take us to the gate.
We could be out of there in under a minute.
I went back into the corridor. I couldn’t see Svangerd, but the double doors to the library were wide open. I heard the sound of breaking crockery: once, twice, three times, as though someone were throwing jugs or plates at a wall.
What we need is a diversion. No, I thought. No, she couldn’t.
I sprinted to the library doors. Svangerd was in the middle of the room. She was hugging an armful of lit lamps. With the other arm, she was throwing them at the bookshelves.
If I’d had a bow and arrow I’d have taken the shot. But it was already too late. Burning lamp oil was dripping down the walls like fiery curtains. I think I may have yelled something. She went on throwing lamps till she had none left. “That ought to do it,” I heard her say. “Right, come on.”
I swung at her. She sidestepped, caught my arm and twisted it behind my back. I felt the ball start to lift out of the socket. “Pull yourself together,” she said. “This is exactly what we need.”
She let go, and I knew I wasn’t going to try and hit her again.
No point. The damage had been done. The fire was in full blossom, uncomfortably hot on my face and hands.
And in a sense she was right. Nobody was going to be interested in us at that moment.
They’d be too busy trying to evacuate the citadel before it turned into an incinerator.
“This way,” she said briskly, and headed straight for the turning which I knew led to the stairs.
We just managed to keep ahead of the smoke, and then we were in the fresh air.
As I’d thought, less than a minute. After that, all we had to do was keep out of the way of the men and women with buckets.
“Don’t know if you noticed,” she was saying, “but there’s a stair over that way somewhere that leads directly to the dock. Bet you anything you like there’s at least one small, fast yacht, so Aviragus can make a quick getaway if things go wrong.”
“I can’t sail a boat. Neither can you.”
“Don’t be stupid. We take the yacht, it’ll be hours before anyone notices it’s gone, and by then they won’t know which direction we’ve taken. With a following wind—”
Behind me, the smoke from the citadel was rising straight up in the air.
No wind of any sort. Besides, neither of us knew the first thing about driving boats.
“You’re mad,” I said, making a grab for her sleeve.
She avoided my hand, caught it and twisted it behind my back. Getting to be a habit, that.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I can take you with me or I can leave you behind. I don’t need you. Your choice.”
“You bloody lunatic, we’ll drown.”
She tightened the pressure, and I screamed. She let go. “Come on,” she said. “Time’s a-wasting.”
I was doing sums in my head; calculations of probability.
Callimachus of Schonstark turned figuring the odds into a precise science twelve hundred years ago, and wrote down his findings in a book.
Unfortunately the book was lost in the Great Fire of Scona, but a garbled and unviable precis survives in Urmtotha’s Geometry, which I once had a chance to read, in a Sashan translation.
If I gave her the slip, did I stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off Angkola on my own?
Answer: yes. If I went with her, on a stolen yacht, would I survive? No. Would she? No.
She’d let go of me. She’d found the stair and was disappearing down it. I followed her.
Sure enough, there was a boat. I know absolutely nothing about boats, but this one was a sloop, a real beauty, fore and aft rigged with a single jib, at a rough guess maybe fifteen to twenty tons, built for speed rather than endurance.
Two people could probably sail it, if they knew exactly what they were doing. “That one,” she said. “Come on.”
Everyone on the dock was running the other way, towards the fire.
The column of smoke made the citadel look like a volcano.
Essentially, the citadel was one enormous chimney, inadvertently designed to draw air up into its centre of mass, which happened to be the library.
Even so, I was amazed at how quickly the fire had taken hold.
In a timber-frame building maybe, but the citadel was stone and brick. Mind you, so’s a furnace.
There were six soldiers standing in front of the sloop.
Their eyes were glued to the fire, but they weren’t moving.
I deduced that their orders were not to leave their post, no matter what.
I’d already figured out the gist of what we were going to say – we’re commandeering this boat to fetch help from the other side of the island, there’s a special water pump there, our orders are to get it and bring it back – when Svangerd attacked.
She took out one man by throwing an anchor at his head.
The other five she smashed up with a boathook.
She killed them all. I’ve seen a lot of violence in my life, but never anything like that.
“Don’t just stand there, you idiot,” she yelled at me. She was already aboard the sloop. “Cast off the line and get in here.”
There was a bit of rope, wrapped round a post, tying the boat to the dock.
“Come on,” she howled. I looked at her. I was reminded of when we dehorned the bullocks, back home.
It was my job to get them inside the barn, where my father and brothers were waiting for them with ropes, a saw and a red-hot iron.
The more I yelled at the bullocks, the less they wanted to go inside.
I really didn’t want to get on that boat, not with her.
You shift a bullock against its will by grabbing the root of its tail with your right hand and prodding it in the ribs with a sharp stick in your left.
Nine times out of ten, this works, if you have confidence in yourself.
The tenth time, the bullock barges you into the pen rails and breaks two of your ribs.
You need to get yourself on that boat, said a little voice in my head.
Otherwise she’ll sail it into the middle of the sea, and it’ll capsize, and she’ll drown.
I wanted to barge that voice against the wall of my skull, but it was lifting my tail and twisting it, and stabbing me with the goad.
That’s Svangerd, the voice was saying, you love her, you can’t stand by and watch her die.
It occurred to me that if that was true, I wouldn’t need my tail twisting.
But I grabbed the rope and teased out the knot and let it fall into the water.
“Come on,” she shrieked at me, and I scrambled onto the boat.