'Don't count on it,' Kalam said. 'This has the look of vendetta – someone or ones took out a whole lot of anger on these poor bastards.
I don't think it has anything to do with us. As you said, the Claw is a compromised organization.'
'Have they turned on themselves?'
'Certainly looks that way.'
'Still in our favour, Kalam.'
'Well,' he muttered after a moment, 'that's not as important as the revelation that taking the long way round was anticipated. We've real trouble ahead, Adjunct.'
'There are sounds,' T'amber said, 'from the top of the well, I think.
Hands. Two.'
'Fast,' said Kalam, baring his teeth. 'They want to flush us forward.
To Hood with that. Stay here, you two.' He set off back into the tunnel. Top of the well. Meaning you've got to come down… one at a time. You were impatient, fools. And now it's going to cost you.
Reaching the cistern, he saw the first set of moccasined feet appear, dangling from the hole in the ceiling. Kalam moved closer.
The Claw dropped, landed lightly, and died with a knife-blade through an eye socket. Kalam tugged his weapon free and pulled the slumping corpse to one side. Looking up, he waited for the next one.
Then he heard, echoing down, a voice.
****
Gathered round the well, the two Hands hesitated, looking down into the darkness. 'Lieutenant said he'd call up,' one of them hissed. 'I don't hear a thing down there.'
The assassins relaxed. 'Was checking out the entrance, I guess – Kalam must have got past the ambush in the orchard.'
'They say he's the meanest Claw there ever was. Not even Dancer wanted to mess with him.'
'Enough of that. Go on, Sturtho, get down there and give the lieutenant company and be sure to wipe up the puddle around his feet while you're at it – wouldn't want any of us to slip.'
The one named Sturtho clambered onto the well.
****
A short time later, Kalam emerged from the tunnel mouth. T'amber, sitting with her back to a tree, looked up, then nodded and began to rise. Blood had pooled in her lap and now streaked down onto her thighs.
'Which way ahead?' the Adjunct asked Kalam.
'We follow the old orchard wall, west, until we hit Raven Hill Road, then straight south to the hill itself – it's a wide track, with plenty of barred or barricaded alleys. We'll skirt the hill on the east side, along the Old City Wall, and then across Admiral Bridge.'
Kalam hesitated, then said, 'We've got to move fast, at a run, never straight but never stopping either. Now, there's mobs out there, thugs looking for trouble – we need to avoid getting snagged up by those. So when I say we move fast and keep moving that's exactly what I mean. T' amber-'
'I can keep up.'
'Listen-'
'I said I can keep up.'
'You shouldn't even be conscious, damn you!'
She hefted her sword. 'Let's go find the next ambush, shall we?'
****
Tears glistened beneath Stormy's eyes as the sorrow-filled music born of strings filled the small room, and names and faces slowly resolved, one after another, in the minds of the four soldiers as the candles guttered down. Muted, from the streets of the city outside, there rose and fell the sounds of fighting, of dying, a chorus like the accumulated voices of history, of human failure and its echoes reaching them from every place in this world. Fiddler's struggle to evade the grim monotony of a dirge forced hesitation into the music, a seeking of hope and faith and the solid meaning of friendship – not just with those who had fallen, but with the three other men in the room – but it was a struggle he knew he was losing.
It seemed so easy for so many people to divide war from peace, to confine their definitions to the unambivalent. Marching soldiers, pitched battles and slaughter. Locked armouries, treaties, fetes and city gates opened wide. But Fiddler knew that suffering thrived in both realms of existence – he'd witnessed too many faces of the poor, ancient crones and babes in a mother's arms, figures lying motionless on the roadside or in the gutters of streets – where the sewage flowed unceasing like rivers gathering their spent souls. And he had come to a conviction, lodged like an iron nail in his heart, and with its burning, searing realization, he could no longer look upon things the way he used to, he could no longer walk and see what he saw with a neatly partitioned mind, replete with its host of judgements – that critical act of moral relativity – this is less, that is more. The truth in his heart was this: he no longer believed in peace.