“Back! All of you back!” Pritchard Hood howled. “You, men-keep them back.”
A pick swung round and bit into the side of a thief who had come too close, one of the pickpockets who’d been in the guild longer than Malden. The man screamed. A mallet came around and cracked the skull of a blind beggar.
The crowd screamed with him. It screamed for blood.
It took another step inward.
“Break it! Break it now!” Hood shouted. A watchman lifted his mallet to smash the Godstone And a thrown knife entered his throat, dropping him to choke on his own blood. The crowd roared like the ocean in storm and surged toward the stone, grabbing the watchmen and the bailiff even as picks crushed in heads and mallets bashed the sides of old men and lepers.
The crowd could not be stopped. It fell on Hood and his men like the vengeance of the Bloodgod Himself.
“Hold them down!” Malden shouted, but he could barely hear his own voice over the tumult. “Don’t let them fight back-don’t let them kill you!”
The crowd needed no goading, and would heed no advice. Screaming, foaming at the mouth like an enraged bull, it seethed as one creature, unified in bloodlust. A watchman was torn limb from limb as Malden watched in horror, his blood slicking the cobbles underfoot so that many in the crowd slipped and were trampled by the feet of others, trying to get in closer, trying to tear and rend.
The watchmen fought desperately with their tools. The death count was horrible among the poor and the old-it was a massacre, plain and simple-but the watch couldn’t hold out very long. Malden couldn’t see Pritchard Hood under the piling crowd but he shouted anyway, “Seize Hood-we’ll run him out of town on a hurdle!”
Hood might already have been dead before the words escaped Malden’s lips. The bailiff was most certainly dead a moment later, when his broken body was hauled up on the shoulders of a group of whores and carried out of the square. No man could survive with his head barely attached to his body like that, or with his chest caved in at so many places. Blood slicked the bailiff’s unmoving mouth and pooled in an empty eye socket. Malden had to turn away rather than see more.
The crowd wasn’t satisfied, though. It screamed for more. More blood. More vengeance. All the tension of the last few weeks, as Ness waited to be sacked and pillaged by the barbarian horde, was being released in an orgy of rage.
Malden stayed atop the Godstone-trying to climb down would have been suicide-and shouted for order, for reason, for calm. He shouted for civility, for peace, for true justice. His words were completely lost in the din.
When the crowd swept out of the square, headed in the direction of Castle Hill, tears ran down his cheeks. What had he done? What had he set loose? He half expected the mob to burn the city in its rage. To slaughter every man and woman and child it could find, regardless of their guilt or innocence. When the square cleared out enough to make it safe, he slipped down the side of the stone and landed hard on his ankle. His own blood was singing, though with fear rather than anger.
Bodies littered the square. Bodies of the poor, the crippled, of thieves. The crowd had taken the bodies of the watchmen with them, for what purpose Malden did not like to contemplate.
“Lad! Over fucking here!” Slag called. The dwarf had taken shelter in a doorway across the square. “Do you know how fucking dangerous it is to be this fucking short when the fucking world goes mad?” Slag demanded, his face wracked with terror.
“I–I didn’t know they would-”
Slag shook his head. “Listen, Malden. There’s nothing you can do now. Get somewhere safe-wait out this night.” The dwarf peered around the edge of the doorway. “Fuck. Never mind.”
Malden stared at him, deeply confused. Then he leaned out himself and took a look.
Coruth the witch was walking across the square toward them, taking care as she stepped over all the bodies.
“Malden,” the old woman said. “Come with me.”
Chapter Sixty
Coruth did not wait to hear if he would follow. She walked across the square and turned herself into a bird.
He’d seen that trick before, but it still made him uneasy. She did not flap her arms, or say a spell, or even shrink in size that he could see. It was like she walked into a shadow and walked out of it with wings and a beak. Then she stretched her new wings and shot up onto the roofbeam of a house, and there waited for him to follow.
Malden climbed the house easily. The shingles of the roof were painted with moonlight and a tinge of red. He didn’t know where that light came from. Coruth didn’t say a word. She just fluttered across the street to the house across the way and sat on a roof there, pecking at her side with her beak as if digging out a mite.
Malden shook his head. He had to follow her, of course. He’d learned enough about witchcraft to know it was unwise to disobey a witch. He ran across the roof, flat-footed to keep his balance, and leapt to the next house. Just in time to see Coruth take to the air and fly on.
He followed her like that halfway across the city. The roofs in this part of the Stink were steeply pitched but all of roughly the same height. It was nothing he had not done a thousand times before to move quickly and silently across that elevated sea of shingles and waterspouts. He swung along the gargoyles of a church. Leapt from a chimney pot to catch a balcony with his hands, and in one easy motion swung himself up to the second floor of a bakery. Eventually Coruth ran out of perches when they came to the Woolcarder’s Bridge. Malden dropped to street level and crossed the bridge even before Coruth could leap into the air again. He knew now where she was leading him.
The Stink gave way to the Golden Slope, the district of mansions once held by the rich merchants of Ness. From the rooftops there was little to mark the change of neighborhood, except that the shingles in the Slope tended not to shift or crack when he landed on them with his full weight. Up ahead, though, lay the Spires, where all the buildings were made of stone, and many had lead-lined roofs to keep out the rain. Still Malden followed, clambering across the many-gabled dome of the counting house until he came to where he could look down on Market Square- and beyond, the wall of Castle Hill.
Now he saw the source of the reddish light. The square was full of firebrands, held aloft by a screaming mob. The crowd had lost none of its rage. The gate leading into Castle Hill was sealed shut, but men who had never lifted a hand in anger before in their entire lives were rushing forward to pile firewood against the gate. Others cracked open casks of lamp oil and splashed it on the wood, on the gate, much of it on themselves.
Clearly the mob intended to burn down the gate and storm the palace.
Up on the wall, a handful of watchmen attempted to repel the invaders. They had bows and were firing recklessly into the crowd, perhaps too afraid to even pick proper targets. Every time an old woman or a one-legged beggar was pierced, the crowd’s howling grew in volume and intensity. The halfhearted defense served only to further incite the crowd.
Malden had never seen anything like it. Always in his experience the people of Ness backed down at the slightest show of force. There had never been a time when the people truly loved the Burgrave, but always they had respected his authority-authority backed up with the point of a sword, or a line of halberdiers wearing cloaks-of- eyes. He had seen plenty of riots in Ness-plenty of moments when the people started picking up cobblestones to throw at their betters. Always before, a man with a sword and a plume on his helmet had taken control of the situation and calmed everything down. Always before, the unrest had been quelled before it could really get started.
This was different. This was outright rebellion.
“You see the power of belief,” Coruth said. She sat atop the dome in her human form again, as if she had climbed down out of the sky in search of a comfortable seat. “Perhaps you made a mistake, Malden, when you took sides with a god.”
“Pritchard Hood used religion against me-I thought only to fight back with the same weapon.”
