Up they went towards the circle of light in the ceiling. It looked very far away, but it also grew very quickly. Nearing the top, Narza freed her leg from the rope and climbed the last few lengths using just her hands, one of her bone knives clutched between her teeth. Joron took his cue from her and pulled his own knife, biting down on it and thanking the Hag as he had been sure his teeth were about to start chattering from fear. He glanced down – so far to fall. Farys, below him, also held a knife in her mouth. Her eyes gleamed, and the meagre light gave her burned face an inhuman look.
Narza vanished over the rim of the hole and Joron paused. Heard no sounds coming from above, though that did not mean there was no one there. Narza had proved how silently she could kill. Then he was at the hole, pulling himself up more slowly than Narza, keeping one leg entwined in the rope in case he should slip. Swinging himself from the rope to the lip of the floor, pulling himself over.
A cellar just as Coughlin had said. No one here. Boxes of food lined the walls. Joron could smell the slightly rank smell of dried fish that the damp had got into. Farys appeared, then Namd, Old Briaret and Karring. There was no door to the room; only a ladder which led up to a trapdoor.
“Narza,” he said and pointed at the trapdoor. Now he felt his fear differently: no longer paralysing, instead it filled him with energy.
What had been terror at what was to come was subsumed by an inevitability that had not been there in the caves. There was no going back now. He could have found excuses up until this point. Not now. They were committed. Now they would fight and die or fight and live.
“Are you ready, my girls and boys?” he said.
They nodded, and he was amazed that they seemed to feel no fear, though maybe they did. Maybe they wondered that he felt no fear for his voice did not waver, and his mouth was bent into a grin that he did not understand, that he knew was a mask.
“Then we will show no mercy. We have no friends in the tower above us. We have only one task, to open the doors and keep them open.” Narza was already at the trapdoor. “Kanvey is up there,” he said quietly, but making sure he was heard. “He betrayed us, rowed away at Corfynhulme and left us to die. Threw a spear at the shipwife. Let us show him what happens to those who betray Tide Child, ey?”
A chorus of “Eys” and he was on the ladder behind Narza. Ready. Scared. Breath coming quickly.
“Open it,” he said. “Open it now.”
And she did.
Narza’s feet vanished above Joron. He followed closely. Where the tower basement had been full of the same damp as the caves, above the air was close and hot, trapped within the tower, mud bricks baking under the scrutiny of Skearith’s Eye and turning the room into an oven. It was not a particularly big room, maybe twenty paces to each wall. To seaward was a staircase, to landward the doors. Joron barely had time to count the people in it – not many, ten, maybe? – before they were fighting.
Narza had fallen on them, her bone knives out, rising and falling, her teeth bared. She killed in utter silence. A group of raiders were standing at a table, shocked, apparently unable to understand where this sudden terror had come from. Joron pulled the curnow from the hook on his belt, fumbled the movement Meas had tried to teach him – Don’t give yourself time to think – ran at them, bringing the blade down on the woman nearest him. It cut into her collarbone. She slumped to the floor, staring at Joron as if to ask, “Why did you do this to me?”
Then he was fighting. There was no great skill to it – there was not with a curnow. He slashed about himself with it as the remaining raiders drew their weapons.
Out of the corner of his eye Joron saw Farys raise her club.
“Farys!” he shouted. “Ignore them! Get the doors open!” She ran for the doors as a man came at Joron. He held a hammer, but before he could bring it down Old Briaret was at him, her short wyrmpike in his guts, and the man’s scream of fury turned to one of agony. Behind the man was another, who lunged at Old Briaret with a rusty curnow. Karring slapped the blow away with his hand, letting Old Briaret’s spear dart out again, rupturing another gut and sending another body to the floor, where it curled around its own pain.
“It is open!” shouted Farys.
A sharp pain in Joron’s shoulder. He swung round, bringing his curnow with him, and it bit into the side of the man who had just cut him with a knife. It was not a killing blow, so Narza finished him, thrusting one of her knives into his ear.
“Back!” shouted Joron. “We must hold the door.” Five raiders remained but they were wary, hanging back while one shouted up the stairs for help. “Namd, with me!” shouted Joron. “The table!” The two ran forward. Three defenders ran to meet them, but two shied away when the one in the lead was felled by a hammer thrown by Karring. Joron and Namd grabbed the table. Dragging it over to the doors when more women and men came streaming down the stairs. Among them was Kanvey. Much larger than the rest, he swayed rather than walked down the stairs.
“Bows!” Kanvey shouted. “Get some bows and bring them down! And anyone that comes through the door behind them!”
Joron glanced behind him, looking out through the doorway. Against the colourful riot of the forest he could see Meas leading her crew in a sprint across the clearing, dodging from side to side to avoid the arrows coming from the top of the tower.
“We need the bows up top,” shouted a voice from above.
“Nay,” Kanvey shouted back as Joron and Namd wrestled the heavy varisk table up in front of them like a shield. “They’ll get in now, but so we must kill them down here.” For the first time Kanvey looked at the women and men crouched before the open door to the tower. “Joron Twiner,” he said. He seemed in good spirits. “Well, I confess I did not expect to see you again, and definitely not still wearing the onetail.” Raiders with bows began to take positions on the stairs around Kanvey. “Try not to kill Twiner,” he said. “He has a dainty turn of leg. I would have some fun with him.”
The first arrows came in. A hail of them, biting into the table. Namd let out a yelp and swore: “Hag’s tits.” An arrow had passed through the flesh of his bicep. Without word or pause Narza leaned forward, grabbed the shaft of the arrow in both hands and snapped the feathered end off. Before Namd could even cry out, she had pulled the arrow out. Namd let out a low, angry moan, bent over and lost in his own pain for a moment, then he straightened as much as he could in the shelter of the table.
“I’ll pay some stonebound back for that, I will.”
Joron heard bodies hit the door and Meas poked her head through the doorway, low down. Another round of arrows bit into the table.
“Good of you to arrange a little shelter, Deckkeeper.”
“Ey, but how we get from here to those stairs I do not know.”
“Well we must; the keyshan approaches. Give me a moment.” Her head vanished and then reappeared. “I do believe I gave you a couple of crossbows?”
He stared at her for a second, then felt his eyes widen.
“Ey, you did.”
He pulled at the crossbows attached to his jacket as Meas passed through another with some bolts and a couple of bows with arrows. “See if you can make them duck so we can get in without taking an arrow,” she said.