‘Twenty-five thousand!’ said Lysle. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No, and when she blew . . .’ He sat back against the wall. ‘I can’t describe it. Just imagine a tower of fire that reached the heavens, and you’ll have some idea. The noise. I was nearly deaf from it. My ears rang for a week.’
A knock sounded on the door and men drew weapons. It was repeated in the expected pattern, and the single lamp was shuttered while a patrol was admitted.
A half-dozen soldiers were quickly inside, followed by three civilians. ‘Found them wandering around down here,’ said the leader of the patrol.
Rigger looked them over and said, ‘They’re mine.’
‘And who are you?’ asked one of the three men.
James laughed. ‘Anonymity has its drawbacks.’ To the three thieves he said, ‘He’s your boss. This is the Upright Man.’
The three looked at one another and one of them said, ‘And you’re the Duke of Krondor, no doubt.’
Everyone in the room laughed, except the three men. A young woman, one of Lysle’s thieves, came and explained how things were. When it was clear she wasn’t joking, and when one of the heavily armed soldiers also said it was true, the three men fell quiet. The Duke and the leader of the Thieves’ Guild might be sitting in a basement connected to the sewer, but they were still the two most powerful men in the city.
At regular intervals, scouting parties went out and returned, bringing news of the fighting in the streets above. The defenders were making the invaders pay for every street and house, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
After having been cooped up for days, Lysle said, ‘If the battle’s lost, why not order your lads out of the city?’
‘No way to get the orders to them, sorry to say,’ said James, and his expression was one of genuine regret. ‘And for our plan to work, the invaders must think we’ve spent our entire army here.’
‘Gad, you’re a bloody one,’ said Lysle. ‘I don’t know if I could order that many lads to their death.’
‘Of course you could,’ said James matter-of-factly. ‘If your job was to preserve the Kingdom, you’d trade a city, even the Prince’s.’
‘What’s the plan, then?’
James said, ‘I’ve got a few thousand barrels of Quegan fire oil down here, and they’re rigged to pour into the sewers. Sooner or later those bastards above us are going to figure out some of the populace is hiding down in the sewers, and when they do, I’ve got a surprise for them.’
‘A few thousand?’ Rigger whistled in appreciation. ‘That’s nasty stuff. The fire will burn right on top of the water.’
‘More,’ said James. He pointed to a chain, relatively new from the look of it, that hung near one wall. A soldier had been stationed to guard it at all times.
‘I’d been wondering about that.’
‘It’s something I picked up from old Guy du Bas-Tyra when we fled Armengar. Pull that chain and you’ll release a light spray of naphtha into the tunnels. There’s a series of small, closed-off drains, pipes, and culverts -’
‘I know those. The old city’s first sewers. They were closed off when the deeper sewers were built a hundred years ago.’
‘Well, they’re reopened.’ He sat back against the wall. ‘There are advantages to having every plan ever made for every building and public improvement in the city. When those culverts are filled with naphtha gas, they’ll bleed the fumes into the larger sewer tunnels. There they’ll combine with the existing sewer gas, the Quegan oil floating on the surface of the muck, and whatever barrels of oil we can cut loose up here, and the fires hit them, the entire city is going to blow.’
‘Blow?’
‘Explode,’ said James. ‘There won’t be two stones in Krondor resting one atop the other when the dust settles.’
‘Damn me,’ said Rigger.
James said, ‘This is the only home I’ve known, sewers or palace, thieves or nobles. Krondor is where I was born.’
‘Well, if you’re planning on dying here, would you allow me the opportunity to get a little distance away before you pull that chain?’
James laughed. ‘Certainly. Once we pull that chain we’ve got about an hour, unless there’s already a fire at this end of the sewers.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know how much time we’ll have then.’ He pointed to a door in the easternmost wall of the basement. ‘There’s a tunnel there that leads out to a building in the foulburg. As I said, this was Trevor Hull’s and the Mockers’ best route for smuggling into and out of Krondor.’
‘So you’ll send everyone ahead, and pull the chain, then run like hell?’
James grinned. ‘Something like that.’