The Tower of Fear (41 page)

Mo’atabar summoned Aaron and tied a piece of colored cord around his left arm, at the elbow. “So you’ll be known as a friend. But don’t push your luck.”

“I’ll be back.” Aaron started walking, expecting a challenge before he got out of sight of the citadel. Though he did not run he wasted no time.

*   *   *

Yoseh watched the carpenter hurry away. He tried not to worry about Tamisa. Not his place. No reason to trouble himself. She was as far beyond his reach now as she was before he met her.

Nogah asked, “What’s he up to?”

Yoseh explained.

“Good idea. I’m starting to think our witch is as useful as udders on a bull. When’s she going to do something besides talk to herself?”

Nogah was frightened! Damn! He was sure they would not break through in time.

Yoseh saw the same fear everywhere—and in the witch most of all. The citadel had given them a lot of time. Maybe they were playing games in there. Maybe they were just letting the invaders torment themselves.

Yoseh had not been tense till he began thinking about what a deadly race this was. The pressure had begun to mount. Now he wondered why he had talked himself into coming to this mad city. Mo’atabar was right. It was the city of lead and gold. Only the gold was imaginary and lead was what became of your dreams.

Men leading a string of ten prisoners came out of the rain—not Herodian prisoners of war, as Yoseh had expected, but Qushmarrahans with the ratty look of petty criminals. Mo’atabar lined them up in a sad parody of a formation.

“What we’re doing here is trying to get into the citadel,” Mo’atabar told them. “There’s a sorcery on the gate. We have to penetrate it. I won’t tell you your part isn’t dangerous but I won’t risk you unreasonably, either. Your chances of getting through are good. And once we’ve found our way inside you’ll be released.”

Yoseh knew he would have jumped at the chance had he been stuffed into a cell waiting to be chained to an oar in a Herodian galley.

“We got a choice here?” one man asked. He looked more hardened than his fellows.

“Of course. We won’t force anyone. If you don’t want to volunteer let me know. I’ll cut your throat and the rest of us can get on with our work.”

“’Bout the way I thought it’d be.”

Mo’atabar told the sorceress, “They’re all yours. Tell me what you want to have them do.”

In the beginning Yoseh thought what the witch was doing was a lot of foolishness. She picked a prisoner, lined him up just so, had Mo’atabar tell him to take four baby steps forward. He was to remain motionless there till he received instructions otherwise. Then she had another man repeat that and take a couple of side steps, then three forward.

By the time the fifth went through his routine unharmed the others began to relax. And Yoseh realized there was something happening, after all.

That fifth man looked a little like he was behind the heat shimmer that rose off the Takes. And the sixth, once he got where he had been told to go, was only a vague discoloration except when Yoseh looked at him sort of sideways and indirectly.

The seventh man disappeared completely. There was no evidence he existed at all—except for his screams.

*   *   *

Aaron thought he was clever to move his family into Naszif’s home. With no one in the streets, with every door and window barred so no one could see trouble coming, none of Naszif’s neighbors would know who was staying inside.

He got them in unnoticed, with everything they could carry. Then Laella accompanied him to the door. There was a look in her eyes he had not seen since the day his company had left for the Seven Towers. She avoided touching the weapons he carried so clumsily. “Be careful, Aaron,” and the way she said it made it more than a parting caution. It was a prayer.

He kissed her forehead. “I will. Believe me, I will. I’m no hero.”

“Don’t say that. Yes, you are.”

He looked at each of them in turn, and Stafa the longest, then he went.

Aram had to be guiding him. Going home, down Char Street, he had run into no one, though he had been sure he would encounter Dartars who would not believe the cord around his arm. He had not. And it looked like his luck would continue now.

It did not occur to him to wonder what had become of all those horses and men who had hurried into Char Street supposedly to keep the Herodians from escaping.

“Aaron.”

He was so startled he almost drew his sword. He looked around—and there, in the mouth of an alley, was bel-Sidek. He looked around again, hastily, suspiciously, fearfully.

“I’m alone, Aaron. And unarmed.”

“What do you want?”

“I have a message for your Dartar friends.”

“What? Why?”

“Occasionally even our enemies do something we favor. We—my faction among the Living—have no desire for Nakar’s return. I’ve told Fa’tad I’d accept the looting of the citadel if that’s his price for leaving Qushmarrah.”

“So what’s the message?” Aaron did not believe a word the man said, but neither did he disbelieve. The captains of the factions all created their own truths. Parts of some might actually dovetail with reality.

“It’s direct and basic, Aaron. They’re trying to get into the citadel through the wrong door. The sorcery protecting the main gate is a fake and a decoy. The real entrance is a postern around to the south. The pattern guarding it has been in place two centuries, which is why no one knows about it. It leaves the wall looking unbroken. I’m told there are alarms built into the pattern. You won’t surprise anyone.”

“They know what we’re doing. They’ve been watching all morning.”

“Ah? Pass that along, then. Quickly. They’ve had too much time already.” Bel-Sidek glanced up and down the street, retreated into his alley.

Aaron looked around, too. He saw nothing but frowning buildings and falling rain. He shrugged and hurried uphill.

The Dartars seemed surprised to see him. He went straight to Mo’atabar with his story.

Mo’atabar seemed disinclined to credit it but Nogah butted in. “Let the witch decide. She’s the one who knows this stuff. And she sure isn’t getting anywhere going at it the way she is.”

Yoseh told Aaron, “She’s hit a dead end. She’s lost three prisoners in there and still can’t find the way.”

Mo’atabar scowled. He did not like being taught to suck eggs by his grandchildren. But he relayed the message, anyway.

The Herodian woman brightened. She began chattering more fervently than she had earlier. She dropped what she was doing and hastened around to the south face of the citadel. After a few back-and-forths she froze and stared. Her chatter became vehement.

Mo’atabar said, “You were right, carpenter. She’s cussing herself out for not having seen it. And answering herself, saying she missed it because it was so cunningly hidden.”

“She’s arguing with herself?”

“All Herodians are mad,” Mo’atabar declared.

*   *   *

Reyha had nothing to do and teetered at the brink of terror, so Naszif had her accompany him on his endless rounds of the barricades. He found her chores to occupy her hands and mind. She went along because she needed the distraction desperately.

Naszif himself was, in a sense, pleased to be caught in a desperate siege. Fending off those Dartar traitors left him no time to brood about Zouki.

The fending had grown easier. They no longer seemed interested in conquering Government House, only in keeping him confined, out of touch.

He cursed his inability to discover what was happening elsewhere. He cursed the rain. In better weather the siege would not have cut communications. The whole sprawl of Qushmarrah could be seen from the heights of Government House. Information could come and go via signal lights or semaphore.

Reason said Herodian arms had suffered a disaster. Else the nomads would have been driven from the acropolis by now.

That
idiot
Sullo!

An ensign came running. He was little more than a child and did not belong here where his story might be cut short before it began. “Sir, the physician said to tell you Colonel Bruda is coming around and it looks like he’ll be in control of his faculties.”

“Very well. I’ll be along in a minute.” He checked one more post, stalling while he composed himself. He told Reyha, “So ends Naszif bar bel-Abek’s day of glory, with nothing accomplished.”

Reyha did not reply. She did not speak unless he made that necessary. Her last voluntary statement had been a generalized expression of gratitude for the help given Raheb Sayed.

Bruda had, indeed, made a dramatic recovery. He was sitting up, working on a heavy breakfast, when Naszif arrived. “It as bad as they’re telling me?” he asked through a mouth full of apricot.

“Probably worse. I don’t know. We’re cut off. I expect they control the city. No one has tried to relieve us or even to reach us. I’ve had all I can do just to hold on.”

“Did a good job, too, for only having kids and superannuated veterans. Might as well tell me everything. Don’t worry about repeating something these kids might have told me. They probably got it wrong.”

Naszif told it as he knew it.

“That’s Fa’tad al-Akla. Pick the moment to perfection, then strike like lightning. Having Sullo take over must have been a sweet that made him drool.”

“What should we do?”

“What we can do and what those old farts in Herod will tell us we should have done, in retrospect, are two different things. If
any
of us get out of here they’ll want to know why we didn’t fight to the last man. You and your wife light somewhere, have something to eat while I give this a think.”

Bruda pondered for fifteen minutes. Then, “Our problem is that we don’t know what’s happening. Take a white flag and go find out what al-Akla has in mind.”

Naszif’s heart tripped. “Yes sir.”

Colonel Bruda had spoken in Herodian. Reyha did not understand till Naszif told her.

*   *   *

The labyrinth could have passed for one of the hells that awaited those who rejected Herod’s nameless god. Terror and madness were the twin regents of the subterranean dark. The crazies from down deep continued their insane push toward the surface, attacking anyone they encountered. In turn, the Herodian troops had taken to attacking anyone who approached them.

The flooding continued to worsen.

Nonetheless, General Cado had gained a measure of control in his own vicinity. He guessed that as many as two thousand of his men had been killed, wounded, or drowned already.

He forbore swearing a mighty oath of vengeance only because the passion might rule him when he broke free at last and the effort to requite Fa’tad might prove suicidal. Who knew what disasters had transpired in the rest of the city?

Had the Living come out of hiding?

Had Nakar returned to grind everyone beneath his iron boot?

He would know in a few hours, he hoped. His tribunes thought they had found a way out through one of the drains carrying runoff water down from the third level. But it would take a lot of work yet to widen the passage enough using only weapons for tools, the soldiers wedging themselves into the drain with their bodies, working blind, under a continuous fall of water.

An officer came to report, “They’ve found Governor Sullo, sir.”

“Yes?”

“He’s dead. Murdered by his own bodyguards.”

Cado grunted. Another political complication. “Stupidity is one capital crime for which there’s never a pardon.”

Would he, too, be found guilty and have to pay the supreme penalty?

*   *   *

Aaron had grown so accustomed to the rain that his only accommodation to it was to keep his head bowed so the drops would not hit him in the eyes. Yoseh muttered, “We’ll all catch our death of cold.”

Aaron agreed. “At least she seems more optimistic on this side.” In two hours of probing, the witch had not lost another prisoner and only twice had her explorers encountered any obvious danger.

His stomach wound ever tighter. The sorceress had whispered a long time. Now Mo’atabar had Faruk aside for instruction …

Mo’atabar slapped Faruk on the behind. He scooted off around the citadel. Aaron shaded his eyes and studied the place, sensing its awareness of their presence, feeling something more, something like a great dread, or a great storm, slowly wakening. He thought he recognized that feeling Qushmarrah had lived with all the time till six years ago.

He looked at Yoseh. The boy felt it, too. They all did.

His heart plummeted. But he refused to believe that anything had happened to Arif. His son was all right. He had to be.

Yoseh’s brother Medjhah came trotting around the side of the citadel. “Company coming, Mo’atabar. Ferrenghi officer with a white flag.”

A moment later Naszif and Reyha appeared. Naszif was decked out as a Herodian. He exchanged looks with Aaron, sneering mildly at the company Aaron was keeping. He asked, “Who’s in charge?”

Aaron indicated Mo’atabar.

Naszif approached the Dartar, who looked at him curiously, surprised to encounter a Herodian officer who had his hair and looked Qushmarrahan.

Reyha stayed a step from Aaron, staring at the wet pavement. She glanced up, then down again quickly. Softly, Aaron told her, “We’re going in there pretty soon. We’ve found the way. We’re just waiting for reinforcements.”

“Oh.” No more than a whisper. She peered at the citadel.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” In a voice like a mouse, defeated and embarrassed.

“It’s all right, Reyha. Nobody blames you for anything. It’s not your fault.”

She just shook her head, stared at the pavement. After a moment, she said, “I want to stay here, Aaron. I want to get Zouki when you go in there.”

He wanted to say that was impossible, that there was no place for a woman among men storming a fortress, but said instead, “It’ll be dangerous.” He knew her desperation for her son better than he knew the few men he called his friends.

“I know. But I want to be there. And if he’s not all right … If something’s happened … Then the danger won’t matter.”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking, Reyha.”

“Zouki is the only thing I have to live for, Aaron.” She had scary stuff going on in her head, barely edging her words.