The Folly of the World (59 page)

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her bare feet, having left her shoes in the boat so she could move more quietly along the empty street. It was supposed to be empty, anyway, but then, that hardly seemed to be the biggest flaw in her plan now. She was too late, always too late, always thinking she knew better than everyone else and being dead wrong about it, always too late to help—if only she had told Sander straight away that she’d snuck out and seen Simon in this cell, together they could have busted him loose instead of fucking about with Primm that morning. They could have saved Simon, skipped town before Jan revealed himself in the alley, before they had murdered Simon…

They?
Now she really was thinking like Sander, but it seemed like he hadn’t been so mad after all. They had murdered Simon, and made it look a suicide, and now they’d murdered Sander and made it look a suicide. They hadn’t been smart about it, though—if anyone would have hanged himself, it was Sander, not Simon, this was so obviously a murder made up to look like suicide—

“Uhhhh!” said Sander, jerking upright on the bed and flapping his arms around. The movement detached the hand completely, and it flew from its wrist and slapped onto the ground in front of Jolanda. She fell back with a scream, and Sander vomited all over himself. Scrambling up, she stared in horror as he finished retching and wiped his mouth with what appeared to be a leather belt wrapped ’round his blackened stump. Only then did he take notice of her. “Jo?”

“Sander!” she said, rushing over to him. “What the neuking hell, why, what, what, Sander, what?! What’s happened?!”

“I made. Ugh. A Glory Hand,” he said, hunching over and dry-heaving. The belt on his wrist was a tourniquet, there was a blood-covered dagger on the floor between his feet, and beside that lay a flapjack pan caked with a circle of burned flesh where
he’d tried to cauterize the stump—that was probably what had knocked him out, the agony of searing his own living flesh and bone. Goddamn madman had done this to himself. She forced herself to breathe, to think, to act.

“We have to go,” she told herself as much as him, stabbing her sword into his knotted, sweat-moist blankets and tearing a wide swath of linen free. She could do this. She could. “Let me see your hand.”

Chriiiiist. It made her want to puke, that gory, half-cooked stump with its core of black and yellow bone, like a roast not properly butchered, but she made herself bind it, carefully. He jerked it away the first time she got the cloth on it, but the second time she touched it, he passed out again, which made the task a sight easier. She could do this. She would do this.

Right. No time, no time at all, the gatehouse would be surrounded by the roving militia patrols, if it wasn’t already. Time to go. The wound was as bound as it would get, and she slapped him until he shook his head like a confused dog roused from a nap, blinking at her. He let her help him up, and to her relief he seemed able to stand on his own, if only just. The only thing he said as he limped out of the cell was, “Get my hand.”

“We have to go, Sander,” she said, hating him so much for being so goddamn mad but grabbing the appendage anyway.

“Even if I die, it’ll getcha out,” he said, giving her the craziest expression yet in a friendship full of crazy, crazy expressions. “Hand of Glory, Jo. Gilles. Yes.”

“Gotcha, Hand of Glory,” she muttered as they gained the hall, wondering just how the hell she would get the canal gate raised without his help.

Returning to the main room, she saw the militiaboy unsuccessfully trying to unbolt the door with his broken hands. She scared him off it with a shout and he returned to cowering beside the table. The other two guards were laid out where she had left them, the floor puddled with oil and blood, and she picked up
one of the upended chairs and helped Sander into it. Sheathing her Tongue and retrieving her Tooth, she deposited both the dull weapon and Sander’s severed hand into his lap.

“They try anything, kill ’em,” she said for the whimpering boy’s benefit.

“Glory’s End!” Sander gasped, reverently touching the pommel of the practice sword. “You found her!”

“Christ alive,” said Jolanda, realizing she would like as not be dead before the night was out on account of his moony mind and self-mutilation. No way they were getting out of here, she thought as she scrambled up the ladder to the second story, no way she was getting the gate up by herself, no way at all. Because she neglected to bring up the lamp that hung over the table, it should have been too dark for her to see on the second floor, but through the window came light aplenty from the street below.

She went to the wall and peered out rather than stepping up to it all easy-like. Someone still caught sight of her shadow, though, and a bolt sailed up and through the open window, embedding itself in the rafters above her. It had come from the large crowd advancing along the canal toward the gatehouse. At least four or five of the militiamen who’d been keeping order downtown led the mob, with maybe thirty figures behind who were probably curious, drink-emboldened citizens. God’s fucking wounds. Jolanda ducked past the window to where a great wooden disk protruded from the wall, like an oversized spinning wheel. She pulled one of its raised knobs with all her strength, but it didn’t budge.

Well. This was to be expected—it must take at least two men to move it, which was why she’d only seen the old man when she’d visited Simon, the other two being stationed up here. She tried pushing the wheel the other direction, even though she knew nothing would come of it… and it shifted, rope or chain on the other side of the wall groaning. Well.

Jolanda laid into it, digging her bare toes into the splintery
wooden floor, and though it made her bruising shoulder howl, she fought the wheel into turning, a ratcheting noise rewarding her labors. Trading off from one knob to the next as she pushed was the hardest part, and then, just as she thought she had it, her big toe slipped and skewed itself on a sliver of floorboard. She released the wheel, the splinter snapping off in the wound as she hopped about in agony. Thank all the whores in Sodom, the wheel didn’t fall back near so far as she’d expected, and bracing herself on her good foot, she returned to her trial. Finally she’d pushed it as far as it would turn, and though no real time at all could have passed, she was drenched in sweat.

She didn’t risk the window, knowing full well what she would see, and as she went down the ladder, she heard them banging at the door. She peered around as she descended, keeping her splinter-spitted toe off the rungs, and saw that Sander had almost reached the door. Stupid goddamn shitbird.

“Sander!” she shouted, and he paused, looking at her in confusion. The practice sword was in his left hand, and his right was held between his teeth. Jesus. “Get away from there!”

He tried to answer and his hand fell out of his mouth, which distracted him from whatever nonsense he was trying to spout. The crow and the cheese, that one. The banging was growing louder, waves of shouts breaking against the door, but Jolanda’s attention was captured by the room’s only other exit: a small wooden door set in an alcove beside the table. It must open onto the small dock where those entering the city might pause their vessel long enough to bribe the militiamen rather than dealing with the harbor’s excisemen. An idea took hold like a polecat on a rat, and as she dropped off the ladder and sat heavily on the ground to remove the splinter from her toe, a smile spread across her charcoal-blackened face like a wedge of moon breaking through a midnight cloudbank.

T
he girl, Jo, had come for him, but Sander couldn’t really figure out why. He’d always been a shit to her. He tried to tell her that, tell her she shouldn’t have come, tried to give her his hand so she could make the Hand of Glory, get herself out, at least, before Jan and his Belgians broke down the door. She wasn’t having any of it, shoving the bloody hand into the waist of his hose and slapping him hard across the mouth. He grinned at her little love tap, but then she slapped him three more times, shouting something, and each blow brought him a little closer to the surface.

“—to listen!” she was saying.

“Been listening,” he said, or tried to say. His tongue felt numb as his hand. The one he’d sawed off with Hobbe’s dull knife—would’ve been better using the spoon. “Belgians, Jo, out there. You need—”

“Please, Sander,” she said, her voice cracking. Her face was all black, he saw, except where it had dripped off in stripes under her eyes. Was she some devil, too, was that why she was all blacked up? Of course not, the Belgians were out there, and she’d stopped him from opening the door, hadn’t she? She was on his side. Why was she crying? “
Please.
”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, unsure what he was agreeing to. “Sure.”

“Sure what?” she said, not crying after all. Who was crying? He looked around—there were a couple of cunts he must have put down lying there, cuntlike, and a third, who was curled up under a table—he was the crier. The Hand of Glory was working like the charm it was, keeping these ball-washers in dreamtown.
Where was he? In a dream? Was it Belgium? Was Belgium hell? Probably all of that, sure.

“Sure,” he said, then hung his head, caught in a lie. “I don’t know, Jo. Whatever you said.”

“Here,” she said, leading him to a door. It made him dizzy to look at the whorls in the wood. He didn’t like it. Led somewhere nasty, somewhere dark. Somewhere Belgian. The girl was unbolting the door, and he would have stopped her if he didn’t think the effort would make him fall, and he really didn’t want to fall, not here, where he might not find the surface again. “See the water?”

“Ugh,” said Sander, the crack she had opened in the door revealing a small dock surrounded by black liquid, lights from somewhere beyond shining on wet wood, wet water. Last place he wanted to go, that. She poked her head out, looked around, and jerked back inside as several bolts whizzed down and stuck in the dock.

“Good, they can’t get to it from the street. I’m going out front,” she told him, leading him away from the door onto the water and past the rattling shutters of the barred window, toward the other door, where the Belgians thudded the wood with their flat paddle tails, ululating beyond it for Christian blood. Why the fuck would she go out there? They’d rip her to pieces. “I’m going for the boat. You have to bolt the door after me, Sander, do you understand?
You have to bolt the door.
”

Well, obviously. “Uh-huh.”

“Good,” she said, and he was relieved to see her smile. She was cute when she smiled, girlish in a way she’d maybe never truly been, at least as long as he’d known her. “Then you go to the canal door, and look out until I come along with the boat. Then you jump in and we float away, understand?”

That didn’t sound so good at all. He frowned, tried to tell her it was a bad idea, and found he was crying after all. Jesus, Sander, buck up!

“You have to, Sander,” she said, taking off the black blanket she
was wearing over her like a cloak. Or was it a cloak? A big one, yeah. She kept talking as she began to unfasten the armor he had given her, taking it off because she was going to die. She paused, her brigandine half-undone, and snapped her fingers in his face, like she was goddamn Hobbe or something, the little bitch. The flash of anger brought him back up for air, and she came into clarity as he blinked away the tears. Why the hell was she stripping? He’d thought by now it was well understood he didn’t go in for cunt.

“Of course you don’t,” she said, smiling again, and he wondered what other thoughts he might’ve unintentionally voiced. She was somehow getting her fingers into his pants from across the room, but then he saw his own bloody stump jutting up from his waistband and felt his heart stop. What in all the heresies of the pagans had he done?

Well, sure, he’d chopped his hand off. Christ’s weeping eyes, was that wise? Would he bleed out? Had he already, was he dead in his cell and this was all a death dream, like had happened the last time he’d died?

No. He hadn’t died, ever, and he wouldn’t here. The girl was still talking at him as she got her doublet the rest of the way off and started working on the buckles fixing her knee plates on. She meant to go out, past the… whoever was out there, to a boat. That made sense. Boats were how you got away from Dordt these days. Fine. But if the… whoever was out there, banging on the door, if they tried to stop her, how could she hope to reach the vessel?

He’d have to go instead. His fist tightened around Glory’s End, felt her familiar throb. This
was
a dream, then. Relief warmed him like a pair of freshly pissed pants on a cold night in an alley, and he took a step for the door when Jo put herself between him and it, all naked and spooky-looking.

“I’m going for the boat,” he said.

“No, I am.”

“All right,” he said, relieved. Dream or no, he was exhausted and wanted to fall back under.

“You lock up behind me, aye? And wait by the other door. With this.” She offered him a bulging satchel. No, it was her blanket, cloak, whatever, with all her armor bound up in it. He reached for it with his stump. Frowned. Offered her Glory’s End.

“She’s seen me through every hell,” he said solemnly. “Now she’s yours.”

The brat rolled her eyes, and he had half a mind to split her head, but she took the sword before he could decide if that was warranted or not. He accepted her bundle. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. Why in Christ’s name was she shaking so bad as she turned to the door? Awe at the weapon he’d given her, no doubt. She weren’t so foolish as he’d thought, then, bony-assed chit.

She was motioning him over against the wall next to the main door, and he followed her lead. She slid the top bolt out of the lock, quiet as she could, then knelt and did the bottom one. Only the middle bolt kept the beasts at bay, but rather than springing it she reached over and pulled open the portal of the tiny peep-window set in the door. Soon as she did, the crew out there quieted down, the silence spreading backward from the door like a dropped mug of wine soaking across a rug.