CHAPTER TWO

The snow was falling more heavily than ever, obscuring the shipping channel in the darkness beyond, but to Rudi’s relief the wooden jetty was illuminated by a couple of torches, hissing fitfully as the occasional snowflake drifted into the flames.

“Boats,” Hanna said, sudden hope colouring her voice.

Rudi nodded. “Let’s hope there’s someone here who can sail one for us.” He had only ridden in one of the innumerable skiffs that plied for hire along the waterways of the city a handful of times, but that was enough for him to know that the intricacies of handling the sail would be far beyond him. He could probably manage the oars well enough, but that would be time consuming, and the sky was already taking on the first flush of grey, which warned that dawn was not far off. They’d stand a far better chance of making it to the candle wharf on Luydenhoek in time with a water coachman piloting the boat for them. Most, he knew, would still be at home, but there were usually a few about in the hours of darkness. Marienburg never completely slept, and there would be coin to be earned for those willing to put up with the inconvenience and occasional danger of providing transport during the night.

“I think we’re in luck.” Hanna nudged his arm, and pointed. Beneath a sconce about halfway along the wooden walkway, a handful of men huddled around a brazier, their breath misting in the air as they talked among themselves. Their clothing and manner marked them out as watermen, and Rudi approached them briskly.

“I need passage to Luydenhoek,” he announced, as if that was a perfectly reasonable request at this hour. “I’ll pay two shillings to anyone who can get us there by dawn.”

“Two shillings?” One of the water coachmen looked at him narrowly, and noticing the suspicious expressions on the faces of the man’s companions, Rudi cursed himself quietly under his breath. That was over four times the regular fare: hardly the best way to keep a low profile.

“That’s right.” Rudi smiled, hoping to look like a late-returning reveller again, suddenly acutely conscious of the bow slung across his back, hardly a common sight in the streets of Marienburg. He indicated Hanna. “The bridge is open, and if I don’t get my girlfriend home before her father notices she’s missing, she’s going to be in real trouble.”

“I see,” the boatman said, probably more inclined to believe the two shillings than the story attached to it, if Rudi was any judge. He shrugged, smiling insincerely. “Wish I could help you, laddie, but the Caps have said no sailing until further notice, and that’s that.” He spat into the water. “Typical. Some half-wit shouts, ‘witch’ and the whole city grinds to a halt. Never mind our livelihoods.”

“Damn right,” somebody else said, and the little knot of boatmen aired their grievances among themselves for a moment, apparently forgetting their putative clients entirely.

“You have to help, please.” Hanna sounded tearful and frightened, her voice changing completely, as it had on the moors when she’d tried to bluff her way past Gerhard’s soldiers. “My father has such a temper. You’ve no idea what he’ll do if he finds I sneaked out of the house.”

“Sorry, sweetheart.” The boatman’s voice hardened. “If we got caught, I’d be fined, couple of guilders at least. I could lose the boat over a debt like that.”

“Two guilders, fine.” Rudi dug the gold coins out of his purse, suddenly conscious of the stares of the men around him. He could hear their thoughts as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud. That’s a lot of money. Wonder how much more there is in that purse. There’s only one of him, and six of us. He brushed the hilt of his sword casually as he returned the purse to his belt, and the moment passed. The boatman nodded.

“All right, but if we get caught you pay the fine, on top of this. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Rudi said. The man gestured to a nearby boat.

“That’s mine. Get in.” He watched while Rudi helped Hanna aboard, and unhitched the line securing the tiny craft to the dock. He turned to his companions. “If the Caps come back and notice I’m missing, tell them I’ve gone to Gerda’s to thaw out.”

“She can thaw me out any time,” one of the other boatmen said, to ribald laughter.

“Any time you’ve got sixpence in your purse,” the waterman said, jumping into the skiff. That provoked another round of laughter, but through it, Rudi was sure he could hear the clattering of feet on the steps leading up to the street above: the Caps. Without thinking, he glanced in that direction, catching sight of Rauke and her colleagues jogging down the wharf towards them, their outlines blurred by the flurrying snow.

“What’s up?” the boatman asked, reading his expression, and glancing in the same direction. He must have taken in the sight of the approaching Caps almost at once, because he lunged at Rudi without warning, raising his voice to a shout. “Help! They’re stealing my boat!”

Under any other circumstances, the sheer effrontery of it would probably have taken Rudi completely by surprise, but after everything he’d already been through that night, he was ready for any eventuality. He blocked the man’s clumsy rush without thinking, not even bothering to evade it, and punched him hard in the face. The boat rocked alarmingly. Hanna cried out and clung to the gunwales as freezing water slopped over the side, and Rudi sat down hard on the seat facing the stern.

The boatman wasn’t so lucky. With an inarticulate cry, he lost his footing and pitched backwards over the side. A gout of foetid canal water broke over the boat, drenching the fugitives with its freezing spray, and the man surfaced, spluttering.

“Get them!” Rauke shouted, and the two gunners with her dropped to one knee, bringing their clumsy weapons up to fire. Clearly perceiving the danger he was in, the boatman struck out for the jetty, and the reaching arms of his friends, protesting loudly as he did so.

“Oi! That’s my living! Don’t you dare go blowing holes in it!”

Rudi cringed. He’d seen a blunderbuss discharged once before, during a raid on a weirdroot den. The cone of shot had blasted a thick wooden door off its hinges, and taken down the three would-be ambushers waiting behind it. Wallowing out here in the water, he and Hanna were sitting ducks. There was no way the watchmen could miss at this range.

“Who are they?” Rauke asked as the boatman floundered up onto the wharf, hauled to safety by his friends. Then her eyes nailed Rudi’s. An expression of loathing and anger boiled up in them, following the spark of recognition. “It’s the witches!” she yelled. “Fire!”

“Grab the oars,” Hanna said, her voice surprisingly calm. Rudi complied, although he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. He dug the blades into the water, heaving with all his strength, trying to get the tiny craft moving. If he could just throw the gunners’ aim off, and by some miracle they both missed, it would take them at least half a minute to reload, perhaps longer with cold-numbed fingers. By that time, he and Hanna would be well underway, obscured by the darkness and the flurrying snow, and the short-ranged weapons might not get time for another shot.

None of which actually mattered, of course, because the hail of hot metal would have shredded them both by then.

Rudi flinched at the sound of a double report from the wharf side, which echoed across the water in a curiously flat fashion, anticipating the agony of a dozen miniature musket balls ripping their way through his body, but the searing pain never came. He heaved at the oars, astonished at their good fortune.

Despite the urgency of their predicament, he was unable to resist glancing back at the wharf, trying to gauge how long they had left before the men reloaded, and almost froze with astonishment. Both gunners were down, thrashing about on the snow-covered planks like landed fish. Bright blood leaked through charred and blackened flesh, vivid against the backdrop of flurrying white.

“Keep rowing!” Hanna snapped.

Rudi did so, opening up the distance from the dock, heedless of the drama playing out behind them. Rauke was kneeling beside one of the downed gunners, apparently directing the boatmen to assist her fallen colleagues. She glanced in the fugitives’ direction and shouted something, which perhaps fortunately was lost in the muffling snow, before returning her attention to the wounded.

“What happened?” Rudi asked. Hanna shrugged.

“They were carrying powder flasks. I’m a pyromancer, remember?” Rudi nodded grimly, recalling the way the oil lamps at the coaching inn on the Altdorf road had suddenly burst into flame while they were trying to escape the landlord who’d threatened to turn them over to the Roadwardens. It seemed that his companion was still able to use her abilities after all.

“How did you manage that?” he asked. “I thought you were all in?”

Hanna shrugged. “So did I,” she said, pulling the skaven’s stone out from beneath her bodice. As Rudi had half expected, it was still glowing faintly. “This seems to be helping me somehow.”

“Good.” Rudi hauled on the oars until he felt his back would break with the effort. “Right now, we need all the help we can get.”

At least one of the gods must have been keeping an eye on them, Rudi thought, because they made it across the shipping channel without drowning or being swept out to sea. The tide was just on the turn, the water slack, and the realisation lent him renewed vigour. Shenk would want to make use of the surge of incoming seawater to help counteract the current of the Reik, making the going easier as the Reikmaiden began her long journey. The riverboat would be casting off any time now, just as soon as the water level in the canals began to rise.

Despite the surge of adrenaline the thought gave him, he began to slow down again after only a handful of minutes. Since waking around noon the previous day, he’d fought for his life more times than he could remember, become a fugitive again, and walked or run across what felt like half the city. Even the unusual reserves of strength he was somehow able to call on in times of stress weren’t limitless. He was exhausted, and hard as he tried to force his body to do what was necessary with the clumsy oars, he misjudged his stroke several times, doing nothing more than flick a spray of freezing water into the boat. Each time he did it they wallowed, losing their way and the prow of their tiny craft veered alarmingly.

“Move over.” Hanna reached out and took the oars briskly. Too numbed to protest, Rudi acquiesced, changing places with her, so that he was now facing forwards, towards the far bank. At least there was no chance of getting lost in the darkness, he thought. Despite the obscuring snow, still enclosing them in a pocket of chilling anonymity, the lights of Luydenhoek were clearly visible in the distance.

He fought down the memory of their frantic swim for the banks of the Reik, after Shenk had realised they were fugitives and became determined to collect whatever reward they were worth. Then they’d only made it to safety by luck, or so it had seemed at the time, the pitch darkness surrounding them and the chilling water robbing them of any sense of direction. Now they were trusting their lives to the riverboat captain again, a prospect he hardly relished, but at least this time he’d be on guard for any treachery, he thought. That, at least, was a lesson he’d learned well since leaving Kohlstadt. No one could really be trusted, however benign they seemed to be.

“Can you manage?” he asked, although Hanna seemed to be rowing the boat with no difficulty at all, the strange energy imparted by the skaven’s stone still evidently suffusing her body. He tried not to think about that either. Magic, he knew, always exacted a price for its use, and he hoped his friend wouldn’t pay too dearly for the assistance she was getting.

“I’m fine,” Hanna assured him, her strokes deft and fluid, propelling the tiny craft faster and more efficiently across the water than he had. She grinned, with the closest thing to good humour he’d seen on her face for some time. “I could do with the exercise. Helps warm me up.” Knowing that one of her talents was regulating the temperature of the air around her, Rudi doubted that, but tried to smile in response.

“I think there are some steps over there,” he said, craning his neck to see past her shoulder. Hanna turned the boat in the direction he’d suggested, as expertly as if she’d been on the water all her life, and made for the jetty he’d indicated. After a moment the wooden hull grated against stone, and he scrambled out, his feet slipping slightly on the weed-grown surface beneath his boot soles. Hanna followed nimbly, and turned to push the boat off again with her foot as soon as she’d gained the sanctuary of the steps. “Why did you do that?”

“You told the boatman we were heading for Luydenhoek,” Hanna pointed out. “Your little friend with the unbecoming hat will have had the bridge closed again as soon as she reported in, and messages sent to every watch house this side of the water.”

Rudi nodded. He knew enough of how the watch worked to know that this was true. If anything, the Suiddock Caps would have been relieved at the news that they’d stolen a boat. Closing the Draainbrug wouldn’t be popular, and the last thing the watch needed was a large and restive crowd getting more angry and frustrated by the minute. Time was money in Marienburg, more literally than anywhere else in the known world, and they’d be under pressure from the mercantile guilds to get the lifeblood of commerce flowing again as soon as possible. “No point making it obvious where we’ve come ashore.”

“Good point,” Rudi said, suspecting he ought to feel a little more sympathy for the boatman whose livelihood was beginning to drift slowly upstream with the swelling tide, but unable to summon any. Someone would probably find it and sell it back to him anyway. That was how things were in Marienburg. The abandoned craft was moving surprisingly quickly, and only a handful of the steps above them bore a thin coating of weeds and mud, indicating that they were still below the high water mark.

As he turned his head to watch the drifting boat he could see the first flush of red marking the sky beyond the rooftops of the Rijkspoort, the easternmost ward of the city, where the mighty river entered its precincts. The sight galvanised him: they had even less time to reach safety than he’d feared. “We’d better get moving.”

“Right,” Hanna agreed. Cautiously, they made their way to the top of the steps, finding a row of warehouses facing the waterfront. Even at this hour several of them appeared to be busy, but none of the carters or stevedores spared them so much as a glance, engrossed as they were in their own concerns. “Which way?”

“East,” Rudi said, as decisively as he could. His only previous trip to the candle wharf, where the Reikmaiden was berthed, had been the previous afternoon to arrange passage with Shenk, but he remembered enough about the layout of Luydenhoek to know that they were still too far to the west. Once they got closer, with any luck, he’d be able to recognise a landmark. He was still a skilled tracker, he reminded himself, even in an urban environment so different from the forest he’d grown up in, and his old instincts hadn’t let him down yet.

He led the way through the bustling streets, trying not to worry about the way the crowds were thickening all the time, and how the thin grey light was growing brighter. It was hard to be sure beneath the snow clouds, but he had an uneasy feeling deep in his gut that the sun had risen already, and that the riverboat would be under way by now. He forced the thought away irritably. The last thing they needed was to be sapping their confidence with unfounded speculation.

“Down here.” With a thrill of relief, he recognised a tavern, the Mermaid, where he’d bargained with Shenk the previous afternoon. The wharf he sought was only a few streets away, and he hurried them along as best he could, trying not to slip on the freezing slush beneath their feet.

As they made their way through the growing press of bodies, packages, and barrows flowing into the streets, Rudi kept turning his head, looking out for the distinctive headgear of the Caps, but luck, or one of the gods, was still with them. The thoroughfares were almost as crowded as they were during the day, and the growing throng afforded them greater concealment than ever before. Despite his apprehension, he saw no sign of a floppy black hat, and no shouted challenge echoed from the walls around him.

They rounded the final corner onto the wharf itself, and he narrowed his eyes against a sudden flurry of wind-driven snow. He blinked his vision clear.

“She’s still there!” He pointed. The familiar silhouette of the Reikmaiden was clearly visible between two other vessels about hallway along the wharf. Hanna nodded grimly.

“Not for long,” she said. With a thrill of horror, Rudi realised she was right. Pieter, the deckhand who’d befriended him the first time they’d sought refuge aboard, was loosening the hawser securing the riverboat to the dock. A moment later the thick rope splashed into the water, and Pieter began hauling it in, apparently heedless of the chill the icy water had imparted to it. Maybe his hands were numb already. The gangplank Rudi had boarded the boat by, the previous afternoon, was missing too, and even as he watched, the gap between the riverboat’s hull and the wharf widened perceptibly.

“Hey! Wait!” Rudi called, breaking into a run, Hanna pacing him easily as he did so. Pieter’s head came up, and he shouted something. A moment later, Shenk appeared at his shoulder, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the approaching fugitives. As they got closer, Rudi could see the captain shrug. Clearly, returning to the wharf would be impossible, even if the Reikmaiden’s master felt so inclined, and he seriously doubted that.

“Jump for it,” Hanna said, accelerating past him at a pace that left Rudi gaping, her cloak flapping like a banner in the wind from the river. Rudi ran as hard as he could, forcing his weary muscles into one final effort, ignoring the burning sensation in his chest as the freezing air gouged its way deep into his lungs. Hanna flung herself into the air, seeming to hang suspended for a moment above the chill grey water, and then crashed to the deck of the riverboat, where she lay unmoving. Almost before he realised it, Rudi’s foot was thrusting against the edge of the dock, and he followed, willing himself to make it across the widening gap.

Time seemed to slow, as it had done the day before when he’d made his desperate leap from the jetty behind the lawyer’s office to escape Theo and Bruno. With a strange sense of déjà vu, he took in Shenk’s startled expression, uncannily similar to the one on the face of the bargee whose vessel he’d bounded across on his way to safety. Then, the breath was driven from his lungs as the rail of the Reikmaiden slammed into his midriff. He clutched at the worn wood, finding himself slipping on the powdering of snow that crested it, and began to topple backwards into the river.

“Welcome aboard.” To his surprise Shenk grabbed him just as his grip was about to fail, and yanked him over the rail. Rudi slithered onto the deck, retching and gasping. “I see you decided to come this morning after all.” The captain’s voice was mildly curious, but nothing more. When they’d spoken the previous day, Rudi had asked about passage the next time the boat put in at Marienburg, almost a month away.

“Things got complicated,” Rudi gasped, turning to look at Hanna. She was unconscious, her face pale, and a trickle of blood was running from her nose. To his relief, and complete lack of surprise, the chip of stone around her neck was no longer glowing, apparently as inert as the rock it resembled.

“Hmm.” Shenk nodded. “I guessed that.” He turned to Pieter. “Better get her below before she freezes.” He turned back to Rudi. “You too. I’ve fished healthier-looking corpses out of this river, in my time.”

Too numbed to argue, Rudi simply nodded, but remained on his guard nevertheless. Shenk had seemed solicitous enough the last time he and Hanna had been aboard his boat, but he’d been ready to betray them at the first opportunity. Keeping his hand close to the hilt of his sword, he followed the deckhand down into the warmth of the hold.