Then, miraculously, they were at the arch. Beyond it, stairs led down onto the wall, thirty feet below the level of the rooftop. In a matter of seconds they were through; it was over. Pazel released a huge breath, one he had held unconsciously since that first ticklish feeling in his throat. Swift and Saroo looked giddy with relief.
Ott beckoned them on another hundred yards or so. Then he turned and smiled.
'At your ease, and well done! Even you, Maggot Ness: I thought for a moment we would have to throttle you to stop those tears.'
'It didn't even try to harm us!' said Saroo. 'It just watched us go by.'
'Don't be too proud to learn something, Doctor,' said Ott. 'In my experience it is always better to understand a predator than to fear it.'
'I'm with you there,' said Chadfallow darkly, looking back at the archway.
Drellarek shrugged. 'The creature had a full belly, perhaps.'
'No,' said Pazel, 'it's hungry.'
They looked at him, speechless. 'Is that what your Gift made of the thing's one little bark?' asked Swift.
'Little bark?' said Pazel.
Saroo screwed up his face and made a brief, clipped noise, somewhere between a roar and a burp. Swift and Drellarek laughed. But Pazel was dumbfounded. 'It was talking,' he said. 'It went on and on.'
'You have something in common with the Ness family,' said Ott. 'Madness, in a word. Come, gentlemen! We have gained the highway; now we must ride like highwaymen. Thirty miles lie ahead of us, and we must cover them by nightfall, or take our chances in the dark.'
If a more spectacular thirty miles of riding were possible in Alifros, Pazel could not have imagined where. Like a great tawny serpent, the wall climbed peak after rolling peak, and they thundered over them with the steaming valleys arrayed below and a sky full of bright sun and racing clouds overhead. Flocks of bowerbirds and finches and emerald macaws swept before them; the white monkeys scattered and hid; and once they stampeded a herd of pink-snouted peccaries, rooting by the hundreds along the wall's southern flank. Twice they passed through watchtowers, where countless grey bats slept under the darkened roofs, reminding Pazel of the stowed hammocks on the Chathrand.
There were more furious downpours, and moments when the wind grew very fierce; at such times they walked the horses and kept far from the edges of the wall. But for the most part the wall served exactly as Ott had claimed it would: as a swift, straight road above the jungle.
Several hours passed. The sun sank low over the western mountains. Then at last came a moment when Ott said, 'Here we are,' and pointed away to the south. Pazel turned and saw the coast in the distance: a deep unquiet blue, scratched with the white lines of breakers. Gazing farther, he saw a wide delta, where rocks and sand and threads of some great river all mingled with the surf.
'The sea route is closed indeed,' Drellarek admitted. 'You'd tear a boat to pieces in all that. But surely there are calmer days?'
'Not more than one in twenty,' said Sandor Ott. 'Many weeks my men have had to wait in the Black Shoulders, with a hold full of arms or mail or medicines, listening for a break in the wind. The work is hazardous and slow — and now it will be slower still, for we must abandon the land route until-'
'Right,' Drellarek finished for him, nodding grimly.
Ott won't even consider fighting the eguar, thought Pazel, not with all his men. He knows how deadly that creature is.
Another mile, and Pazel could see the river itself, a dark, twisting waterway that burrowed into Bramian, and quickly vanished there. The river looked placid enough, but it had clearly proved mightier than the will of the Amber Kings, for just above the valley the wall came to its end. There was a last tower, and no more: beyond the river the jungle stretched unbroken over the rounded mountaintops.
They rode forwards into the tower. It was larger than the others, with many dark and chilly rooms. Ott announced that they were spending the night. For a few minutes they busied themselves with the horses, who were both famished and thirsty. Then Ott unbuckled one of the large saddlebags and drew out four sacks tied with rawhide.
'You will want to see this,' he told them all. Placing one of the sacks before him, he loosened the cord and tugged it open.
Green jewels blazed in the evening sun. 'Emeralds,' said Sandor Ott. He sank his hand to the wrist, raised it, let a shower of the precious stones fall back into the mound. Pazel could scarcely breathe. All the gold he had ever seen changing hands would not buy the contents of that sack.
Ott touched another. 'Blue Sollochi pearls,' he said. 'And the last two hold bloodstone — choice eastern rubies, cut by nunekkam jewellers.'
'They're all for me, aren't they?' asked Erthalon Ness, rubbing his hands together in delight.
Sandor Ott laughed. 'In a sense, Maggot. Others will guard them on your behalf — and spend them, at need.'
'Spend them?' asked Saroo. 'Where? You could leave them untended for a year in this place.'
'No you couldn't,' said Ott. He glanced at the Shaggat's son, then pointed back out the door of the tower, along the wall. 'Take our friend to see the monkeys, Saroo. He overlooked them when we entered, I think.'
'I didn't see any monkeys, Mr Ott.'
'Do as I say, lad.'
Bewildered, Saroo led a happy Erthalon Ness through the eastern archway. Ott beckoned the others to follow. He walked in the opposite direction, through several dismal rooms, and at last into a chamber with a broad window facing west. Reaching it, he gazed down with satisfaction on whatever lay below.
Chadfallow reached the window next, and visibly recoiled from what he saw. 'By the gods,' he huffed, leaning heavily on the stone.
Pazel came up beside him. Far below the tower, the river made an especially sharp bend, almost an ox-bow. The teardrop of land within its curve was about the size of the city of Ormael. It was teeming with life. Men, cattle, chickens, dogs. There were barracks and stockades, wooden halls, tents of sewn hide, grain silos, mills where water-wheels slowly revolved.
'Our allies,' said Sandor Ott.
Where the river bent closest to itself, a stout wall of timber leaped from shore to shore, with a pair of mighty wooden doors at the centre. A lesser wall ran the whole length of the riverbank, broken only by the mills and some sort of massive lumber operation at the farthest point from the observers. Towers rose at intervals, each with a stout guard compliment. The fort was protected by water, wood, and men-at-arms.
'What are they building, Ott?' asked Drellarek.
'Ships,' said Pazel.
The sergeant blinked at him. 'You need glasses, if you can't see that much,' said Pazel. 'Those are framing timbers. And cutwaters. And keels.'
'Right you are, Pathkendle. Fifty ships, to be precise. There is no shortage of wood on Bramian. And we have no shortage of funds to pay for what they cannot manufacture here — sailcloth, cannon, the finer metalwork. Here they sit in the wilderness, gentlemen, unknown to anyone in the world but us, and a few dozen of my men. And yet thousands across Alifros have laboured unwittingly on their behalf. Flikkermen tracked down and kidnapped shipwrights. The slave-school on Nurth provides the wives. And Volpeks, those exquisitely useful outlaws, bring everything to the hidden anchorage at Sandplume, where my men meet them on a flagless ship. The Volpeks have no idea who their customers are, or where in Alifros their shipments go next. Bramian itself would be the last place to cross their minds! No one trades with these savages. We had the devil's own job building that wall, with their arrows raining down on us day and night.'
'But who's the wall protecting?' asked Swift. 'Who's down there, Mr Ott?'
A note of pride entered the spymaster's voice. 'They were castaways when we found them: war refugees, hiding in mangroves in the Baerrids, a few inches above sea level, surviving on gulls' eggs and rats. The Black Rags were unforgivably careless not to have killed them. Every year those men spent tortured by insect and typhoon, sleeping in burrows that filled with seawater, dying of scurvy or light wounds turned gangrenous, added to their hatred of the Mzithrin. They had spent a decade that way, since the Shaggat's rebellion was crushed at the end of the war.'
Chadfallow turned to the spymaster. His face was ashen. 'They're… his people?'
