Nodding with satisfaction, Samir glanced around. This trip had served a second purpose that he’d also hoped for: he now knew what the governor looked like and what sort of man he was and he appeared to be a reasonable man, which would be very useful shortly, when the time came to take the next step.
Smiling, he noted that a couple of ladies were standing chatting thirty feet below him. He contemplated just dropping from here, but a broken leg would seriously ruin his plans. Instead, he lowered himself slowly and carefully down the wall below the window, using the small hand- and footholds he could find until he reached the bare surface of the defensive perimeter wall. With a smile, he let go and fell the last fifteen feet, landing lightly with bent knees.
The two women turned in surprise and stared at the strange visitor that had appeared from nowhere.
“Ladies” Samir addressed them, touching his forehead respectfully and with a smile, before turning and running off into the city.
In which castles crumble
The harbour’s military quartermaster glared at the guard as the first light of the sun crested the horizon and picked out the decoration on the tip of the building’s roof.
“How the hell do you misplace stock like that?”
The soldier winced. He’d been on guard all night, from sundown til sunrise. It had been excruciatingly dull and it was understood among the naval guards stationed in M’Dahz’s port that nothing ever really happened and it was almost expected of one to drop off to sleep for a while, so that you were fresh so to speak. It just had to be the unluckiest day of his life for him to doze off without locking the door to the ammunition store. And he could hardly own up to that last part, else he’d be swinging in the wind by the end of the day.
“I just can’t account for it, sir. When I did the pre-dawn check this morning there were three items missing. I can’t vouch for the evening check, coz it was before I came on duty so maybe the previous count was wrong?”
The officer narrowed his eyes.
“If I find out that you sold stock to supplement your dice habit, I will skin you and wear you like a cloak, do you understand?”
“Sir, I didn’t do nothing!”
“Then where the hell did three fire-pots half the size of a grown man…”
The quartermaster’s voice tailed off as the air thrummed to the sound of an explosion so powerful that the very wall vibrated where he leaned on it.
Samir’s head rose from the rock behind which he had sheltered, his eyes wide. This, of course, was why all good warships had very careful and well-trained artillery masters. Novices playing around with liquid fire pots was clearly a bad idea.
He’d stolen them from the armoury in the port in the middle of the night, with considerably more ease than he’d expected, given the laxness of the guards. An hour’s journey through the dark streets had been unobserved as the cart rattled up the slope toward the west with its heavy load of explosive pots.
The donkey and cart had managed the slope well, bringing Samir and his ammunition within ten yards of the wall. Manhandling the heavy earthenware pots, however, each more than two feet in diameter and packed with deadly combustible material, from the cart to the tower was a whole different matter.
He’d originally intended to perform his miracle breakout in middle of the night, but had seriously underestimated the time it would take to get the three great pots up to the base of the tower.
On the other hand, he was forced to admit as he watched chunks of stone rain down over the port and splash into the sea, he may had overestimated the quantity of explosives he needed just a tad.
His head ringing like the inside of a bell and his ears making a horrible whining noise, Samir peered into the smoke and dust to assess the damage.
He had assumed that if he placed the pots far enough apart they would detonate in a chain, as per his fuses. What he hadn’t counted on was that the force of the first blast was enough to detonate the other two instantly. Consequently, the explosion that was supposed to be contained and sensible and to produce a hole in the tower’s lower wall large enough to climb through had, in fact, obliterated a portion of the foundations on the eastern side and blown much of the lower wall on that side out and over the bay and the port district. The exact damage was hard to assess, given the huge cloud of grey dust and the falling fragments.
His breath caught as he realised that there was more than a vague possibility that his reckless actions had actually killed Ghassan and others along with him. Probably not, though. From what his sources had told him last night, the lower levels were mostly given over to storage, the prisoners being kept in cells at the centre of the tower where there were no windows. It was possible that he’d caught one or more guards in the blast, but he was hopeful that wasn’t the case. The night shift of guards was a ‘skeleton staff’ and they would mostly be on patrol at the top.
Samir shook his head, his ears still throbbing and whining. It was no good panicking about it now.
Taking a deep breath, he tied a scarf around his lower face for protection against the dust and left his shelter as the last of the debris rolled down the slope from the ruined wall. While he climbed the scree as fast as he could manage, taking care to avoid the chunks of masonry that were still sliding down toward the town below, he peered, blinking, through the grey cloud and picked out as much detail as he could.
Relief flooded over him as he closed on the structure and the cloud began to dissipate. The damage was not as bad as he’d initially believed. The tower was still structurally sound. The hole that had produced so much falling rubble was perhaps fifteen feet in each direction. It revealed the lowest floor and a little of the one above and had done considerable damage to the interior walls on this side, but not enough to penetrate higher into the tower. Unless anyone happened to be in the ruined lower storeroom or the outer chambers of the next floor up, they would be fine. They may spend the rest of their life with whistling ears if Samir’s were anything to go by, but that could hardly be helped.
Reaching the bottom of the tower, Samir gingerly pulled at the edge of the aperture. Stone fell away under his grip, but the core was sound. Taking another deep breath, he clambered across the ruinous threshold and into the storeroom. Stopping for a moment to get his bearings, he tried to superimpose the mental map he had constructed from the information he’d gathered last night over the building around him. Nodding, he calculated both the quickest and the safest route to the prison area on the third level and weighed them for a moment before shrugging and deciding on speed over safety. It wouldn’t even be the first stupid thing he’d done this morning, he grinned.
Gritting his teeth, he grasped the ruined wall and began to climb the mangled stonework toward the open floor above. The climb was difficult and dangerous, as illustrated amply by the amount of stonework that came away in his hands and skittered off down the slope. Still, Samir was lithe and determined and, in a little more than a minute, he stepped gingerly onto the flagged floor of the second level. There was an ominous creak as he put his weight down and he quickly hurried away from the ruined edge and toward the middle of the tower.
The town walls and their towers were mostly of Pelasian construction and relatively recent, given that the original walls of M’Dahz were already ruinous when Ma’ahd invaded and had to be rebuilt for his new conquest. The Pelasians loved symmetry in everything they did and so the huge drum tower that marked the northwestern end of the town walls was five floors in height and organised like the spokes of a wheel. A central spiral stairwell opened on each floor into a circular inner corridor with rooms off it. At intervals, however, passageways led between the rooms to another outer corridor that circled at the edge and from which doors led inward to more rooms.