Ash: A Secret History (97 page)

The last light from the cracked roof caught on an irregularity in the wall. She reached out, touched brick, touched darkness – touched emptiness.

With her fingertips, she traced out a long brick slot, as tall as her two hands together. She tentatively reached in. Her knuckles barked on bricks and mortar, no great distance in front of her. Frowning, she slid the flat of her hand up the wall in front of her, and her palm slipped into air, into another slot. And above that, another.

The lower edge of each slot had a lip, made of brick, perhaps two inches thick, and three inches high. Strong enough to bear a man’s grip and a man’s weight.

Gladness flooded her. She breathed in, unawares; coughed at the sweet stench, and laughed aloud, her eyes running. She slid her hands up and down the surface of the wall, to be sure there was no mistake. As high over her head as she could reach, the brickwork had slots built into it. And it was not a curving wall, not here at this junction of tunnels: the wall above her went straight up.

Ash reached up and put her hands into one slot, her foot into another, and began to climb the wall.

The first fifteen or twenty feet were easy enough. Her arms began to ache. She risked leaning back to look up. The broken part of the pipe might be fifty or sixty feet above her, still.

She reached for the next slot in the brickwork ‘ladder’ and hauled her sopping weight upwards. Distracting herself from the physical, she let her mind ramble:

I think the ‘voices’ are speaking
through
the machine, through the Stone Golem. They come into my spirit the same way. But they’re not like my voice.

Does anybody know this? Does the Faris know? How long have they been doing it? Do they tell her things, through the Golem – do they pretend to
be
the Stone Golem? Maybe nobody knows. Until now.

Suppose that the
machina rei militaris
has been in House Leofric for two centuries, suppose that these – others – have been speaking through it? Or are they a part of it? A part that Leofric doesn’t know about? But does he?

Ash resolutely kept the part of her mind that listened, quiet.

She reached up above her head, biceps aching, and hauled herself up another rung. Her thighs and calves burned. She absently glanced down and saw, past the length of her body, how far up she was.

Forty feet on to brick, or into a sewer, is high enough to kill.

She pushed herself on, upwards.

And supposing it’s these ‘voices’ that hate Burgundy? Why
Burgundy?
Why not France, Italy, the empire of the Turks? I know the Burgundian Dukes are the richest, but this isn’t about wealth; they want the land burned black and sown with salt –
why?

Ash rested, leaning her forehead against the brickwork. It felt chill. Mortar grated dustily.

She had to twist around now to see the broken part of the roof, above her and to the side. A stone lip was cutting her off from it. The steps led up – she raised her head – into a narrow roof shaft. Within it, darkness. No way of telling what might be up there.

She clung, puzzling, shivering in her wet and filthy clothes. She abruptly smiled into the darkness.

That’s
it.
Of
course. That’s
why the Visigoths have attacked Burgundy, not the Turks! The Turks are a bigger threat, but the machine’s been
telling
them that its solution is for them to attack Burgundy. That has to be it! But it isn’t the Stone Golem, it’s the voices!

Ash clenched her fingers on the rung. Her muscles jabbed at her with cramps. She dug her toe deep into the rung and flexed her leg, straightening it; reaching with her other foot for a rung higher up.

If some other
amir
’s family has created another Stone Golem … that would be known! Even Leofric never tried to keep it secret. Just secure. But if it isn’t another clay machine, what is it – what are they?

Whatever they are, they know about me.

She moved into darkness, head and shoulders and the rest of her body, as she climbed up into the shaft. If it leads nowhere I shall just have to climb down again, she thought, and then: So they know about me now. Good.
Good.

I’ve lost my people. I’ve lost Godfrey. I’ve had enough.

“You better damn well hope you know me,” Ash whispered. “Because I’m going to find out about
you.
If you’re machines, I’ll break you. If you’re human, I’ll gut you. Messing with me may just be the stupidest thing you ever did.”

She smiled in the darkness at her own bravado. Her fingers, reaching up, touched brick and metal. She stopped.

Feeling carefully, she touched dusty stone, directly above her head, and a rim of cold iron. Within the rim, more metal – a circular iron plate, about a yard across.

Ash settled her feet as far as they would go into the brick rungs she stood on. She gripped a rung with her left hand. With her right hand flat against the metal, she pushed up.

She expected resistance, was thinking
shit I need to get my back under this and I can’t
and it took her by surprise as the metal cover flew up and back and off. A bolt of cold air hit her in the face. Greek Fire blazed, dazzling her. She fell forward, mashing her face against the brick ladder, almost losing her hold.

“Son of a bitch!”

She shoved her body up two more steps and groped outside, for something to haul herself out by. Nothing. Her fingertips scraped stone. The port was too wide for her to brace herself across it.

In one movement, she got both feet up to a higher rung, let go with her left hand, straightened her legs and pushed herself up, and dived heavily forward.

Momentum carried her: she sprawled out across a road, her thighs and the rest of her legs dangling over the abyss but her body safe. She put her palms down flat, and wriggled her body forward, and rolled, jack-knifing; not stopping the roll until she was a good ten feet away from the open sewer-port.

In a narrow alley between windowless buildings.

One glass of Greek Fire burned, twenty yards away. The others, closer to her, were smashed. A few yards down the alley, the paving stones ominously sagged.

Her night-adjusted eyes ran with water. She shook her head, getting up on to her hands and feet; the wet wool of her hose and doublet clinging to her, rapidly freezing in the black air.

I’m still in the Citadel: where—?

The wind changed direction. She rose, straining her ears.

A confused noise of shouting and screams came to her. Rumbling cartwheels. Metal striking metal. A fight, a chaos; but nothing to tell her where, within the Citadel or outside the walls in Carthage itself – the wind blew at her back again, and she lost the sounds.

But I’m out!

Ash drew a deep breath, choked at her own stench, and looked around herself. Bare stone walls confronted her, either side of the narrow street. They went up high enough that she had no chance of seeing a landmark, no guess at which way might be the dome, which way the walls. She sniffed. The smell of the harbour, yes, but something else…

Smoke.

A smell of burning drifted across the narrow street. Ash looked up and down: cross-streets at either end. The subsidence to her left should be avoided. She moved off to the right.

A pang went through her, of sorrow and revulsion. Something lay ahead on the cobbles, at the edge of the pool of light cast by the remaining lamp.

A man’s body, slumped – with the same stillness that Godfrey has, dead.

She put grief out of her mind quite deliberately. “It’ll keep.”

She strode up the alley, moving quickly to keep warm. Her sandals left smears of filth on the cobbles. She went towards the prone body that lay up against the featureless wall.
Rob it of money if a civilian; or weapons, if a soldier
—

The light was not good. The Greek Fire above her dimmed in its glass bowl. Ash knelt, reaching out to roll the prone body over on to its back. In quick succession she noted, as her hands hauled at his cold dead weight, that it was a man, wearing hose, and livery tabard, and steel sallet; his belt already gone, his sword looted, his dagger missing—

“Sweet Christ,”

Ash slid down into a sitting position, her knees given way. She leaned forward and threw the dead man’s arms back, exposing his chest. All his throat and shoulders were a mass of coagulated blood. A bright livery tabard was tied on over his mail shirt, ties knotted at his waist, and some dark device on the cloth—

She unbuckled the strap of the man’s sallet, hauling it off his head, her hands coming away bloody from the crossbow bolt that stood up out of his throat. A sallet, with a visor, and an articulated tail: not a Visigoth helmet.
Made in
Augsburg, in the Germanies – home!

Ash jammed the padded helmet on her head, buckled the strap, reached for the man’s ankles, and dragged him bodily over the cobbles, under the dimming light.

He sprawled with his arms above his head, his head turned to one side. A young man, fifteen or sixteen, with light hair and the beginnings of a beard; she has seen him somewhere, knows him, knows the dead face if not his name—

Under the light, she stares down at his livery, clearly visible now.

A gold livery tabard.

On the breast, in blue, a lion.

The livery of the Lion Azure. Her company livery.

II

Ash unknotted the ties with wet, frozen fingers, and hauled the livery tabard off the boy’s body. The neck of the garment was made wide enough to accommodate a helmet: she threw it on over her head. Tying its cords at her waist, she stared down at him. “Michael? Matthew?”

He had stopped bleeding. His body did not feel rigid. Cold in this outdoor city, but not stiff. No rigor, yet.

She smoothed the dyed linen cloth down over her unprotected belly. No way to get a mail shirt off a casualty alone, mail is hard enough to get off when you’re living: the linked metal sucks on to the body. She tugged the mail mittens from his hands – too large, but she can live with that – and the boots from his feet.

Stripped, he seemed pathetic; with the long bones and fat face of young manhood. She hauled his boots on.

“
Mark.
Mark Tydder,” she said aloud. She reached across, drawing a cross on his cold brow. “You’re – you were one of Euen’s lance, weren’t you?”

You’re not here on your own.

How many more people are going to die because somebody brought me to Carthage?

Ash stood up and stared around her at the cold dark street. I can’t waste time wondering
if there’s one, are there more; who’s alive, who’s dead?
I just have to find them and get on with it.

She bent and kissed the soiled, dead body of Mark Tydder on the forehead, and folded his arms across his chest.

“I’ll send someone back for you if I can.”

The Greek Fire above her guttered and gave out. She waited a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dark. The shapes of windowless walls rose above her, and, in the gap between roofs, unrecognisable constellations of stars in the icy, windy sky –
an hour or less before sunset
her mind automatically calculated.

She moved off down the alley. Here, no damage could be seen from the quake. At the first cross-street, she turned left; and at the next, right.

Buildings spilled rubble across the road. She slowed, picking her way. Above her head, splintered beams jutted out. The further down the alley she went, the more she was picking her way over high piles of dressed stone, fractured mosaics, broken furniture – a dead horse—

No dead people. No wounded. Someone has been through this area after the quake – or it was deserted, everyone up at the palace?

Climbing over a fallen pillar, boots skidding on frost-slick stone, she came to what had been another road junction. Buildings on the far side still stood. Immense cracks, taller than she was, spiderwebbed their walls. She halted, lifting up her helmet and listening intently.

There was a deafening
boom!
A sound loud enough to burst her eardrums blasted the air. Rubble shifted and slid.

“
Shit!
” Ash grinned, ferociously, her head ringing. She swung around to her left. With no hesitation, she scrambled down and trotted as fast as she could in the dark, in the direction of the noise. “That’s guns!”

A swivel gun or a hook gun. Light cannon?
She skidded across split cobbles, scrambling down the dark narrow street.
Not Goths! That’s us!

Clouds slid over the sky. The faint starlight dimmed to nothing, leaving her between windowless houses cracked from foundations to roof. She saw little rubble here. Heedless, in almost complete blackness, she loped on down the alley, arms stretched out in front of her to hit obstacles first.

Boom!

“Got you.” Ash halted. The slick soles of the boots let her feel the contours of the cobblestones under her feet: the ground sloping slightly down now. She stared into the absolute darkness. Air blew into her face. An open square? An area where the quake has demolished every house? Trailing leaves brushed her face – she flinched – some kind of creeper?

Lanterns.

The yellow light might have been just flecks in her vision, but a sharp angle cut across it: a wall. She made out that she was standing off-set from an alley leading out of this square, the buildings on the left-hand side of it collapsed in on themselves, but on the right-hand side, still standing. Towards the far end of the alley, someone was holding a lantern.

The dry, acrid, infinitely familiar smell of powder hit her nostrils.

Ash did not know that her teeth were bared, grinning fiercely into the dark. One hand closed, by itself, seeking the hilt of a sword which did not hang from her belt.

She filled her lungs with the cold, gunpowder-air:

“Hey! ASSHOLES! DON’T SHOOT!”

The lantern jerked. An explosive
spang!
blew fragments of clay facing down on her head. A crossbow bolt: shot high and wide, hitting the right-hand wall somewhere above her.