timeâ¦.
âThatâs the window,â Alleyne said, pointing.
âJust like the drawings, sir,â Hordle said.
The abbey was built like a giant uneven H, with the short arms and the Corinthian facade in the middle of the connecting arm facing west, and the longer east-facing ones enclosing a court open in that direction. The rooms faced west, and the candlelit window was sixty feet up and a hundred distant from where the storming party halted.
Hordle took a blunt-headed arrow from his quiver; it had a small slip of paper fastened to it with a bit of elastic. He drew carefully, well under full extension, and shot. The arrow hissed away, and an instant later he was rewarded with a tinkle of breaking glass.
Â
The arrow smashed the windowpane and flicked across the room to dent the plaster. Nigel Loring winced slightly at how narrowly it had missed a painting by Nebot; his wife was already unfastening the message.
ââStand clear and pick up the string from the next,ââ she read. âBut dear, we canât climb down even if they do have a rope attached. The barsâ¦â
Whhhptt.
The first shot hit the bars and bounced back. The second landed in the room trailing a thin cord, and Maude Loring began to haul it in hand over hand, a pile of it growing at her feet.
âSir Nigel!â a voice called from the hall outside their suite. âPlease to open the door, immediately!â
He didnât bother to reply. Seconds later the first ax hit the outside door of their suite.
âKeep going!â he barked to his wife, and went to stand beside the doorway.
Through the piled furniture he could see the panels begin to splinter; a two-handed war ax made short work of anything not built to military specifications. The dry splintery scent of old wood filled the air, followed by the glug-glug-glug sound of Icelandicâin this case panting curses between grunts of effort. Loring flipped the knife down into his hand and into a thumb-on-pommel gripâgood for a short-range stabâthen risked a glance over his shoulder.
The heavy rope had come up at the end of Maudeâs cordâtwo of them, in fact, both woven-wire cable. One was the top of a Jacobâs ladder, and she was a little red-faced with effort before she clipped that to the bar nearest the left side of the window. The other had a ring clip swagged onto the end. She fastened it to the center bar, made sure that the thin cord that prevented it from falling back was still tied to a chair, and stepped back.
âEncourage them to hurry, my dear,â he called, and turned back to his own taskâmaking sure the Varangians didnât break through too soon.
âYou chaps! Do hurryâweâre in a spot of bother here!â
He heard her voice crying out into the darkness, and then the first axhead came all the way through the panels of the door. It withdrew, and took a yard-wide chunk of the battered wood with it. A gauntleted hand groped through to feel for the knob and lock. Sir Nigel had anticipated that, and left a pathway he could use; he slid forward and stabbed backhanded, his arm moving with the flicking precision of a praying mantis. Stainless steel stabbed through buff leather and flesh and bone, and he barely managed to withdraw it in time as the guardsman wrenched his arm back with a scream.
One, he thought. Out of this fight, if not crippled .
There was no great army of men here; less than thirty. The entire Special Icelandic Detachment numbered only three hundred, and it was a quarter of the ration strength of the British army as of Change Year Eightâand the troops all spent the majority of their time laboring on public works or doing police duties or working to feed themselves. More wasnât necessary when the whole of mainland Britain held only six hundred thousand dwellers.
Immigrants included, he thought, poised, as the axes thundered again. Well, theyâre just