“We’ll search the other rooms,” Murad said. “Mensurado, see to it. It may be that the imp is lost somewhere upstairs or nearby. And that Kersik woman may still be around.”
Mensurado led a trio of soldiers upstairs.
“I don’t like it,” Hawkwood said. “Why leave us unguarded? They must have guessed we were capable of breaking down the door.”
“They are magicians and sorcerers, every one,” Murad said. “Who knows how their minds work?”
They heard the boots of Mensurado and his comrades clumping above their heads, then snatches of talk, and finally a cry, not of fear, more of surprise.
Hawkwood and Murad glanced at one another. There was a flurry of voices above, the thumping of feet and heavy things scraping across the floor.
Mensurado came running down the stairs. “Sir—take a look at this.” He was holding a handful of coins.
Normannic gold crowns. On one side was a depiction of the spires of burnt Carcasson, on the other a crude, stylized map of the continent. Bank-minted money belonging to no kingdom in particular, but used in the great transactions between kings and governments. Coins such as this bribed princes, bought mercenaries, forged cannons.
“There are chests and chests of the damned stuff up there, sir,” Mensurado was saying. “A king’s ransom, the hoard of a dozen lifetimes.”
Murad bit into one of the coins. “Real, by God. There’s chests of the stuff you say, Sergeant?”
“Hundredweights, sir. I’ve never seen anything like it. The treasury of a kingdom could not hold more.”
Murad threw aside the coin; it fell with a sweet kiss of metal on stone. “Everyone upstairs. Leave Gerrera and the mage here for the moment. I want every pouch and pocket filled. You shall each have your share, never fear.”
He and Mensurado had a glitter in their eyes that Hawkwood had not seen before. As they left the room Hawkwood bent down beside the motionless Bardolin and shook him.
“Bardolin, for God’s sake wake up. Where are you?”
No answer. The old mage’s eyes remained wide open, his face as immobile as that of a corpse.
It sounded as though cascades of coins were being poured over the floor upstairs. Sharp blows as someone attacked a chest, splintering wood. Hawkwood felt no urge to join in the greedy festival. He loved gold as much as the next man, but there was a time and a place for it. As Mihal left his side to chance his luck upstairs, Hawkwood curtly ordered him back. Both Mihal and Masudi looked at him imploringly, but he shook his head.
“You’ll see, lads. Nothing good will come of this gold. Me, I’ll be happy to get out of here with my skin intact. That’s riches enough.”
Masudi grinned ruefully. “You can’t run with your pockets full of gold, I’ll warrant.”
“Nor eat it, neither,” Mihal added, resigned.
The soldiers began staggering downstairs, pockets bulging. They had even stuffed coins down the front of their shirts, giving themselves rattling paunches. Four of them were bearing two wooden chests between them. Murad descended last, holding up a lamp and seeming a little dazed.
“We’ll come back,” he was saying in a low voice. “We’ll come back with a dozen tercios one day.”
“I’d rather we had the tercios now,” Hawkwood rasped. “If you want to leave this place, we’d best be going at once. There’s no telling when that Gosa and his creatures will be back.”
“I am not unaware of the need for urgency, Captain,” Murad snapped. “What we carry away with us here could outfit an entire flotilla of ships, and can you imagine the backing I could call on when it became known that the Western Continent was stuffed with gold? We could bring an army here, and extirpate these monsters and sorcerers from the land for good.”
“It’s gold, yes, but minted in the form of Normannic crowns, Murad,” Hawkwood said. “Did you think of that? What are they using it for, if not to spend in the Old World? We know nothing about what is going on in this land, or how it affects the Ramusian states at home.”
“We’ll find out another time,” the nobleman said. “For now, all I want is to get clear of this place. Mensurado, the door. You men, pick up Gerrera.”
Lumbering, rattling and clinking, the soldiers gathered themselves and prepared to leave.
But the door opened before Mensurado got to it. A black-skinned figure dressed in white stood there. The old man, Faku. His mouth opened.
A shot, amazingly loud in the confined space. Faku was hurled back out of the doorway.
“One less sorcerer,” Mensurado snarled, and reloaded his arquebus with practised speed.
“We must move quickly,” Murad said. “That shot will rouse the city. Out! Bring the chests.”
What with the chests and the limp forms of Bardolin and Gerrera, only Mensurado and two other soldiers had their hands free. The company filed out into the hot night, stepping over Faku’s body as though it were a pothole in the road. Hawkwood closed the old man’s eyes, cursing under his breath.
“This way. Quickly,” Murad said, leading off. The company followed him at a jog-trot, sweating and gasping ere they had gone a hundred yards. Coins slipped out of the soldiers’ pockets to clink at the roadside.
The city seemed deserted. Not a light to be seen anywhere, not a living soul on the streets. But Hawkwood was continually aware of movement, like a flickering at the corner of his eye. The place was so dark that it was impossible to be certain. He looked up to see a disc of star-filled sky above the crater-rim, and was almost sure he saw things moving in that sky, wheeling darknesses which stood out against the stars. He had the uncomfortable notion that the city was not quiet and empty at all, but teeming with invisible, capering life.
The company paused to rest in a narrow side street, the soldiers who carried the heavy chests massaging their bloodless hands. They had come half a mile maybe from the house in which they had been imprisoned, and there was still no sign of a pursuit. Even Murad seemed uneasy.
“I thought the entire city would have been about our ears by now,” he said to Hawkwood.
“I know,” the mariner replied. “Everything is wrong, strange. What happened to Bardolin’s imp, and to Bardolin himself? Why can’t he come back to us? Are we being allowed to escape because—”
“Because what?”
“Perhaps because they have what they want.”
Murad was silent for a long minute. At last he said: “It is a pity about the mage, but if you are right then we may yet get away unscathed. And after all, we bear him with us. His mind may yet return.” He would not meet Hawkwood’s eye, but scanned the massiveness of the buildings, the trees which were beginning to rear up in their midst; they were not far from the crater wall, and the narrow gorge which was their only exit.
“Time to move on.”
The soldiers shouldered their burdens once more, and the company staggered onwards. The attack came so suddenly that they were surrounded before they had seen their assailants. The night was sprinkled with raging eyes, and huge forms charged them. The quiet was broken by roars and screams and wails from a hundred bestial throats. The men at the rear died before they could even drop the chests that weighed them down.
A T the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.
Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-night of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable—it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe—but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.
“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.
Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.
