Chapter 161 Pulling Claws and Teeth

There are some opponents who, so long as you pay them no mind, will carry themselves as strong and seamless as they please. But look at them once, properly, and you find the flaws here and the holes there — every last one of them a fine place to land a killing blow.

The Windsor house had lived so long in this age of tangled court ropes and devils dancing loose in the provinces that they had simply decided the world had always run this way.

The Odenheims had held army posts, on and off, all these years without once crossing them — so the Windsors had concluded that the Count was a rough soldier who had climbed his rung or two on his wife's noble connections, and nothing more.

Never mind his grown sons. Take his youngest daughter, Lora: one single fire-arrow, and the Windsors had been scared clean out of their wits.

The villa did indeed hold thirty-odd retainers, and under Windsor Terence's hand they were just then setting out to spring their sneak attack outside the old Minister of Rites' mansion. Hugh Kestrel carried a quiver on his back: thirty ordinary feathered arrows — and one flying arrowhead.

That one was kept for Gareth.

The fire-arrow's burst had shown him what he was up against; he had found his vantage point in an eyeblink and meant to pay the shooter on the far roof back in his own coin.

Light-footed and master of the bow, no question about it. The pity was that the man across from him had come ready — Corin, the Askar whose whole name was built on striking his mark on the dead run.

Corin went running along the roof-ridge, drew, and loosed at the man on the opposite roof — the one that might or might not be Fletcher.

The two arrows left their two strings in the same breath, and Corin flung himself headlong down the slope of the roof.

Morn and the archers already up on the wall rose all together. Hit or not hit, a dozen and more arrows went whistling after the shadow.

Joren had been shot dead under just such a storm of arrows — so: their own art, played back upon the artist.

The shadow slid down off the roof, and by then the Odenheim household troops were already pouring in through the villa gate.

As for the retainers who had been filing out just now: any man who had drawn blade or saber counted as assaulting officers of the Crown; any man who fought back counted as resisting with his back against the wall.

Out came Windsor Terence, meaning to freeze the intruders with the Windsor name — gave it two good bawls — and not a single household soldier so much as glanced at him; then Corin put an arrow through his knee, and he sat down hard on the ground.

Every torch in every hand flared up at once, and Nansen came over to make his report to Corin:

"Brigade captain: thirty-three of the thug-retainers down, dead or wounded. Six servants besides — all six of them mutes."

"Mutes? Send every last one of them to the army gaol!"

In the event, the only ones left for the gaol were Terence and six old women of the kitchen and the broom. The retainers had been forced to fight, willing or not — and were the Grey Wolf lads ever going to leave that breed breathing?

Morn walked at Corin's side and dug him with an elbow. Corin turned to look — and there in Morn's quiver sat a great feathered arrow with a flying head on it.

No mistake. The dead man was Hugh Kestrel.

When the shire court men came round later to tally the dead, one corpse was wanting — one man shot to death under the volley.

But that was daylight's business.

Because right now the sheriff's men were busy turning Curved Alley upside-down, up in the north of town.

The day the two shaven-heads took the birch, the shire court had handed out a fair pile of copper to the folk those thugs had wronged — one hundred cash for telling your own tale of injury, three hundred if you could produce the proof to back it.

In the little room commandeered at the North Market: men rolling up sleeves, stripping off shirts to show the lash-marks; folk cheated blind on pledge-papers — the letters played off against men who could not read them — till the poor devils sold their land or sold their daughters...

None of which was Felix ladling out blind charity.

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The folk who drew the copper gave statements, and pressed their thumbprints under them — and that made a joint petition of the common people, signed and sealed.

Every mischief of the shaven-headed ruffians that the people dragged out was, by itself, too small to hang a man. But little by little it piled — crime upon crime upon crime, till it passed all pardoning.

On the day he ordered the birch, Sheriff Felix had ruled:

"Lawless men, guilty of the 'head-shaving' wickedness — scorning a father and mother's kindness, scorning the King's grace — and for that wicked defiance, death by the birch." The sentence went up to Augustburg, for the King's re-review.

Capital cases tried in the provinces, out of very carefulness, went up three times for re-review — save one article: "wicked defiance."

That one needed only the single review; once the King's red tick stood against it, the execution could go forward on the instant — no waiting for the autumn scaffolds.

Tonight's sweep of the shaven-headed young wolves was launched on papers the shire court already held: the people's joint petition drawn up as a judgment, with the King's own red tick upon it.

Curved Alley took its name not from any winding of the lane itself, but from the nine branch-mouths that opened off it, fore and aft, into other ways. The thugs denned there because the first breath of trouble gave them nine roads out.

The Sheriff's saber-carrying constables numbered fewer than a hundred, and to bottle up a leaky sieve like Curved Alley with those — no easy thing.

Tonight, though, the Lohenheim garrison had lent the shire court three hundred men. Roland led them in person, setting his pockets at every branch-mouth — pockets built to hold exactly one article: a fleeing shaven head.

"Officers of the Crown on business! Every soul into the courtyard — resisters die!"

Jonan Carey put his boot through the door. They had had the place staked out a good long while: the shaven head with the tattooed arms lived right here — the same man who used to go meet Windsor Yves.

A few men came shambling out of the house, took one look — only Carey and two of the sheriff's men — and the boss of the shaven-heads set his fingers to his mouth and whistled for the door. A runner waiting outside swept his legs, and the boss went face-first into the dirt like a dog after a bone.

"Owww!"

"Owww, is it? You'll have a deal more owww where that came from, never fear. On your feet — you're coming with us!"

"What grounds have you got to haul me in? I slept the whole day through — never set foot out the door. However you carry me off now, you'll be carrying me back the same way before long."

The boss of the shaven-heads was good and worked up.

They knew the one bottom line of the city ruffian's trade: never kill.

Few crimes under the Empire's law carried death. Their sort — gone wrong from the cradle, bold in doing harm — needed no great skill of their own; all they needed was numbers, hard hearts, and no shame at all.

Latch onto some great house, and the gaol became that house's back yard — a place to drop in on now and again, no harm done.

The real killing for the Windsor house was never done by them — it was the retainers who did that.

The boss bagged, the crossings began turning up their own flowery lunatics.

"Who goes there? Off with that hat!"

"A wig? You thieving dog — done up in a woman's bun! Do you take me for blind?"

"Dead dog of a slave! Soot smeared on the scalp — made your daddy's hand black as pitch! Lads — take him round behind the woodpile and tap him gently."

The shaven-heads who had strutted their polished scalps about town — so proud of shining different, so far above the law — would have given anything in that moment to sprout hair on the spot.

Everyone was wrestling with the bald-head problem. But the second-in-command had the wit to think of changing clothes.

That time they had raided an abbey and he had come home in a monk's robe as a joke — well, the joke had waited for its hour, and its hour had come.

Out came the robe; he was into it in two shakes. He palmed the little thugs off to block the gate, and went over the wall of the little yard himself.

"Who's that? Running wild in the dead of night."

"Mercy on us — I am a man of the cloth."

"A man of the cloth, are you?" The household soldier took him by the back of the collar, pulled — and the tattoo came out into the torchlight. He laughed: "Well, a monk we have here, and no mistake... The Commander's word was: a tattooed man of the cloth goes back to the gaol for questioning same as any other."

By the time the whole crop reached the shire court, the sheer variety of bald-head camouflage had Felix laughing even through his fury.

Years they had sheltered under the Windsor umbrella — no blood directly on their own hands, but they had hounded families into ruin, scattered wives from husbands, trampled the small and the weak: their wickedness ran over the brim.

The people had never dared bring them in, for the plain reason that one charge at a time could never kill them.

With the government-sealed joint petition of the people, Felix sent the nine ringleaders of the shaven-heads up onto the whipping platform rigged in haste at the North Market.

The few dozen small fry, whose crimes fell short of death, drew this winter's river-dredging — corvée labor set against their sentence — and no release until their hair could be tied into a knot again.

The day the nine ringleaders were beaten to death, the crowd ringed the North Market platform three rings deep and three rings out.

The common folk had never once believed those hooligans could truly be sentenced to die.

And the boss in particular — "These fists thrash the Fairfaxs" inked down one arm, "these feet kick the Odenheims" down the other, all to put a little brave fearlessness on show — well, this was his luck now: he was set first in the order, to take his execution alone.

Beaten to death before the crowd — a slower business than the headsman's, and the heart-rending shrieks it tore out were worse to hear by half.

To every small-time prowler in Lohenheim, it stood as one great lesson.

In the course of a single night, every claw the Windsor house kept in Lohenheim was dragged out by the roots — and they could not so much as yelp about it in public.

The Lohenheim shire's war on the wicked was in Augustburg's ears within days.

The official world passed it mouth to mouth: the Grand Princess of Selwood's eldest son — the one whose mother had wrung him out a vice-presidency of the Royal Exchequer — turns out, now that the campaign has run, to carry a few thunderbolts of his own.

The day Felix and Alvin left Lohenheim drew nearer and nearer.