Chapter 100 - Just Because Luck Isn't on Your Side (2)

“Do you really need to bring that longsword?”

They were just about to leave the camp that served as their base. Pin was pointing out problems with Encrid’s and Torres’s equipment. “Can’t I?”

“You’ve never climbed a city wall, have you?”

Of course he hadn’t. Scaling a city wall was hardly an everyday experience. “I’ll say it again. Travel as light as you can. Wear that thick gambeson, and you’ll be exhausted before you even start climbing.” Pin was right. Just crossing the rocky mountain was hard work. By the time they had crossed it and reached the wall, Encrid was glad he had taken her advice.

'As light as possible.'

That was the key. Keeping low, Pin made her way right up to the wall. Encrid and Torres crouched and followed. Torches blazed in the defensive towers spaced along it. 'Can we really sneak in?'

A chill ran through him. The grass underfoot barely reached his shins; it offered little hope of concealment. Nor was this a night of dim moonlight. Things might have been different if rain had obscured the view, but their surroundings were clear. Even without a torch, spotting someone moving across the broad plain seemed all too easy. His heart pounded. Forget climbing the wall—he felt he might be skewered by an arrow just approaching it. Without the heart of the beast, his legs might have been trembling. Ahead, he could see Pin’s back. She kept low and moved forward without faltering. There seemed to be no hesitation in her steps.

'Does she have something up her sleeve?'

He couldn’t tell. By the time they reached the wall, they had covered a considerable distance in a cold sweat. They could have crossed it quickly at a full run, of course, but the shadows shifting atop the towers had made that unthinkable. “Did that route keep us out of sight of the towers?”

Torres must have felt much the same. The moment they pressed themselves against the wall, he asked in a whisper. Pin’s answer was something else.

“No. I was planning to run like hell if we got caught.”

“... What?”

“We didn’t get caught, did we? That’s what matters. I noticed before that they get a little lax on bright moonlit nights. My people would never let that happen. Seriously.” It hadn’t been some extraordinary feat. She had left it to luck.

“Fucking insane,” Torres muttered.

Encrid felt much the same, but from a slightly different perspective, it did make sense.

'Run if we’re spotted.' Keeping up with a ranger on foot would take cavalry, but what sort of place was this? The Land of the Monsters and Beasts. Conditions here were as bad as they could be for cavalry. Imagine a griffin swooping down—they were said to love horse meat. Unless you were a knight, dealing with that monster required at least a platoon of trained elite soldiers. He didn’t know whether there were griffins here, but either way, cavalry was...

'Out of the question.'

That gave them their answer. Choose a night when they were unlikely to be spotted, then stride up to the wall. Arrows might come flying if they were unlucky, but what marksman could accurately hit a dim shadow in the night? It was a bold approach that exploited the enemy’s complacency on a bright moonlit night. Which meant...

“Did you spend a day waiting because you planned to climb the wall at night?”

Coming on a night like this, when both moons were up, must have been deliberate too. At Encrid’s quiet question, Pin turned her head. Moonlight lit only half her face, leaving one side dark and the other seemingly aglow with silver. She pursed her lips in an impressed exclamation before replying. “Ooh, sharp, aren’t you? They get lax on nights like this, with both moons up. You saw those shadows moving around in front of the towers? Two at most. They’ve got fewer men on watch, too.” Encrid nodded and looked away. Four defensive towers rose above the wall. Two guards in each. Not many.

'There’ll be a covered walkway up there.'

The passage along the wall probably wouldn’t be very wide. Border Guard’s and Cross Guard’s walls had been built in the same era.

'They’ll have a similar layout.' He pictured what he should do once he was up there. There was a vast difference between anticipating things before acting and simply making it up as he went along. He wasn’t the only one thinking ahead. “I’m wondering whether we’ll have any strength left by the time we get up there.”

Torres, too, was worried about what came afterward. Pin shrugged.

“We’ve come this far. Might as well go up. I’m putting my faith in your stamina and grip strength.” Encrid looked up to judge the wall’s height again. It seemed roughly three or four times his own height.

“This way.”

Pin led on again. She brought them to what could be called the outer edge of the wall, where the moon passing behind a defensive tower cast a deep shadow. Pressed close to the wall, they were surrounded by blackness. There were the torches burning atop the distant towers, and the presence of Torres and Pin beside him. HOO!

A night bird called far away. Apart from that, there was only the bright moonlight bathing the ground some ten paces to the side, in stark contrast to the darkness around them. He could see Pin’s eyes in the pitch-black darkness. By day they had a brown tint, but now all he could make out was a glint. “They don’t guard the walls as closely as you’d think. Especially against climbers—hardly anyone watches for those. We just have to stay out of sight of the patrols.”

“You don’t know their patrol times? Haven’t bribed anyone?”

“You think I have?”

“Leaving it to luck again.” Pin and Torres whispered back and forth. Encrid didn’t think the plan necessarily relied on luck.

'The moonlight.'

Complacency. They just had to get over the wall and immediately hide in the city. “The slums are on the other side here. All we have to do is hide well.”

The patrols would come through here far less often than elsewhere. Why wouldn’t they? It was the same in Border Guard. What soldier would enjoy walking through foul smells and people begging at every turn? In the dead of night, a half-mad vagrant might even attack them. So even if every move hadn’t been calculated, this infiltration was informed by experience.

“You’ve done this before.”

“You really are sharp.” Who would readily imagine scaling the wall in the first place? That was precisely why security was lax. Especially with a Tunnel already dug beneath it. Very few people would choose to climb the wall to enter Cross Guard. That made it the safest option. Hardship came with it, of course. From crossing the rocky mountain to preparing for this climb, nothing had been easy. “Ptoo.”

Pin spat into her hands and rubbed them together, then adjusted a leather pouch at an angle on her waist. It was full of powdered stone. She sprinkled some onto her hands, rubbed it in, and began to climb. Finding a gap, she hooked her fingers into it, pushed off the ground, and clung to the wall. No matter how evenly it had been built, there were plenty of gaps between its stones. As she climbed, she took pegs from her belt and slotted them into the gaps at intervals, angling them diagonally downward. She looped ropes over the pegs and let them hang, then continued climbing unaided. “Think you could do that?”

“Me? No chance.”

Hidden in the wall’s moon-cast shadow, Encrid and Torres talked with their heads tilted back. Pin climbed like a monkey, or a nimble squirrel. She went about her work, letting ropes hang behind her. Then Encrid and Torres took hold of the ropes and began climbing. The angled pegs creaked and shed stone dust, but none came loose. They weren’t relying on the ropes alone. Wherever they spotted a gap between the unevenly fitted stones, they wedged in a toe or hung by their fingertips. They, too, had coated their hands thickly with the stone powder they had brought. Sometimes they gripped the ropes, sometimes they wedged fingers and feet into cracks, catching their breath whenever they found secure purchase. Looking up from below, Encrid had thought they would be up in no time.

'This is going to fucking kill me.' It was harder than he had expected. Even with his body conditioned through the Isolation Technique, the muscles in his arms and legs ached. His forearms stung in particular, despite all the training they received from gripping and swinging a sword every day. [“Different movements use different muscles.”]

Audin’s words came to mind unbidden. Viewed that way, climbing walls would also be a good way to practice the Isolation Technique. Looking up, he saw Pin making steady progress. Still, everything that began had an end. After struggling up the wall, some three or four times a grown man’s height, Encrid carefully hooked his hands and feet over the top, hauled his body onto it, and climbed over. As he set his feet down, he thought there was no one nearby. His intuition and Sixth Sense told him so, letting him relax a little.

“You’ve gone to quite some trouble, climbing up in the middle of the night.”

The voice came as though its owner had been waiting. A woman’s voice, clear and melodious. Then came a sharp snap.

FWOOSH!

Three or four more torches flared to life in the moonlit space between the torch stands. He didn’t know how she had done it, but she had lit them with a snap of her fingers. Impressive. A trick you might see at a circus. But was being impressed any reason to stop moving?

“Hah.”

The instant the torchlight stung his eyes, Encrid, still breathless from the climb, drew another breath and flicked his hand. His hand swept past his waist, caught a dagger, and sent it flying. A plain throwing knife—the sound of a whistle dagger would have been a liability. Still, his throw was every bit as sharp as he had been taught. THUD-THUD!

Another dagger hissed through the air behind Encrid’s. Neither had struck a shield, yet with a sound like sticks beating a poorly made drum, the daggers ricocheted in midair. Both of them. “Well, isn’t this just our fucking luck,” Torres said at the sight, his tone dismayed.

“Why?”

Without looking back, Encrid quietly slipped another dagger into each hand.

“A mage.” A mage? A mage, here? Those were the first thoughts through Encrid’s mind. Only then did he properly see the figure standing between the torches: a woman amid the mingled moonlight and firelight, with long, wavy hair and eyes with vertical, snakelike pupils. She was barely ten paces away. There seemed to be fewer than ten soldiers surrounding them. And all ten had crossbows trained on them.

'This isn’t good.'

An obvious thought. Just as the mage opened her mouth to say more, Pin’s voice rang out.

“Move.”

Encrid instinctively ducked and pressed himself against the wall of the narrow passage. Then...

WHOOSH!

Something heavy tore through the air behind him, passing his face. He felt the displaced air distinctly against his cheek.

'She threw her axe.' He grasped the situation at once and looked ahead. Only now did he notice the transparent barrier reflecting the moonlight. Look closely, and it was just visible. CRACK!

The spinning axe slammed viciously into the barrier. The sound was different from when it had stopped the daggers, and hairline cracks appeared across it. The axe hung motionless in the air, as though embedded in the barrier. “Jump!”

Pin shouted again. Still suspended in midair, the axe was abruptly crushed.

CRUNCH!

Its blade shattered and its handle crumpled, then split, sending pieces tumbling to the ground.

CLINK-CLINK, CLATTER! The mage who had dismantled the axe in midair lifted one corner of her mouth. An unmistakable sneer. It also looked like an invitation to try whatever they pleased. Torres was the first to jump at Pin’s shout. He moved quickest, snatching the rope fastened to the outside of the wall and using it to slow his descent. Pin followed, leaping out beyond the wall as though flying, without a rope. Land properly, and she might avoid breaking her legs. But this was roughly the height of a building five stories tall or more. A bad landing would kill her. Even so, she didn’t hesitate. As for Encrid...

'If we have to get away anyway... '

He judged that putting a blade into the mage would work to their advantage. He lowered his stance and gathered strength in his thighs, recalling the squire’s technique he had tried to imitate after seeing it once, but had never managed to make his own. CRUNCH, THUMP!

He kicked off the ground. Closing the distance in an instant, he reached for the mage’s throat. In his hand was a broad-bladed guard sword. If an axe could crack that barrier...

'Break through with brute force.'

Then split her head. How had he killed the mage he had faced before? Get close and cut. Dodge the unseen spells by feel. His confidence came from having fought a mage before. There were still the quarrels to worry about, but those could wait. As Encrid closed in, he saw the mage’s eyes. Those long vertical slits. The instant their gazes met, his limbs almost went slack against his will.

THUMP!

The heart of the beast lent him strength, holding his muscles firm. At the same instant, he thought:

'Got you.' But certainty could sometimes be poison.

[“Some can deceive your Sixth Sense. You need to be wary of them. Mages, for instance.”]

Jaxon’s words came back to him. SHUNK.

The sound of flesh being pierced. Then the pain. “You idiot!”

Pin’s voice shouted up at him. Apparently the fall hadn’t killed her.

“Cough!”

His senses, sharpening further on the brink of death, caught Torres’s cough. When Jaxon had spoken about mages, Encrid had already killed one. He had already dodged spells using his Sixth Sense. So he had let the words wash over him instead of truly listening.

'That was stupid of me.' Were all soldiers equally skilled? Were all knights? Then what about mages? They were all different. Encrid looked at the thorn-covered vine that had coiled around his arm and ultimately pierced his throat. The instant he had thought he had overcome the mage’s gaze, something had risen from the ground and wrapped around his arm. A thorny vine. “I am Retsha of the Rose Vines.”

With the mage’s words, Encrid closed his eyes. His second today had ended. When his third today began, he conditioned his body and swung his sword as before. After practicing Torres’s hidden knife technique, he replaced the thin stone he had been using. It was a way to remember this third today. Then...

“Did you say we could disguise ourselves as a trading company at dawn?”

He asked about the third way past the walls.