03 - Death's Legacy Read Online Free

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