If I had three veterans, this would be easy, Andreas sighed. They’d walk in the front door, just a bunch of armed men—unemployed mercenaries hoping to find a source of coin in this urban wilderness. Then one man to watch the door, one man for each bodyguard, and Andreas to deal with the Grandmaster. It’d be all over before anyone knew what was happening, and if they were lucky, none of the Livonians would be dead. A quick chat with the head of the order, and they’d depart, vanishing into the chaos of the Eagle Quarter before the men outside even knew their master had been ambushed.
Quick and bloodless. And none of the witnesses would really know what had just happened, he thought, but they’d tell the story to anyone who would listen. By the end of the day, the entire city would be talking about the incident, and not in a way that would be flattering to the Livonians.
But with just these three, he wasn’t sure they could overwhelm the bodyguards on their own. If he had three more men, he’d be more confident, but singly, it was too risky. Especially against men who were tasked with being ready for any sort of surprise attack. It would be very difficult to catch them unaware.
Andreas watched the Livonian Grandmaster slouch in his chair and brood. The man wasn’t in any rush to leave. He’d stay and drink until his mood changed. If he stayed long enough, maybe his bodyguards would tire and their attention would wander.
He sat back on his haunches and laughed quietly. “The men outside,” he explained to the others, “they’re already bored. We don’t have to wait.” He swept his hand across the ground, clearing away the loose rock and grit. Drawing his knife, he started marking a crude map in the dirt. “This is The Frogs. We’re here; the Livonians are here...”
7
A Knife in the Dark
WHEN PERCIVAL, VERA, Roger, and Raphael understood that men-at-arms were moving through the caverns near them, their shared instinct was to think of how they might defend themselves. This was not a reflection upon their courage or their martial spirit; they simply assumed, at first, that the Livonians—for these were almost certainly the Livonian Brothers of the Sword—must be coming for them.
On a moment’s reflection, however, they all understood the same thing at once, which was that these interlopers must have been intending to take the Shield-Maidens’ fortress from within by erupting from the cellars and overwhelming the surprised defenders.
Directly on the heels of that came the realization that the invaders had no idea that Percival, Vera, Roger, and Raphael were down here.
They all moved toward the chamber’s exit at the same moment. Percival happened to be closest, but Roger was quickest, shouldering his way rudely past the larger knight and getting into the passage before anyone else. “Begging your pardon,” he muttered over his shoulder, “but what is about to come is not shaping up to be a swords from horseback kind of fight. It is going to be daggers in the dark.”
Raphael—bringing up the rear—could see Percival’s chest expand as he drew breath to lodge some objection. But then the breath went out of him without a word being spoken. No one could question Roger’s command of close-quarters fighting. His knowledge of grips, locks, and throws was almost Talmudic, and all who had sparred with him knew better than to try to resist once he had laid a hand on one’s wrist or gripped a fistful of garment.
They had left most of their weapons and all of their armor above, as it seemed foolish to go clad in heavy maille, carrying a three-foot-long sword, when creeping through a cellar to look at an old saint’s bones. The men were all carrying rondel daggers, and Vera had a single-edged knife in her belt. Thus armed, they would go into combat against knights. Aboveground, in the light of day, it would make for long odds. At close quarters in the dark, however, the Livonians would be hindered by the length of their swords. And piercing maille was precisely what rondel daggers were made for.
Still, it was a desperate venture, and during the helter-skelter rush through damp and darkness that followed, Raphael had time to understand that the fight that was about to take place in the tunnels beneath Kiev would be marked down, in the annals of the Shield-Brethren, as a suicidal last stand—supposing any news of it ever reached the surface. Just the sort of fight, in other words, that they had all been trained to undertake at a moment’s notice without hesitation. Raphael was not certain that he was equal to it. The quest to find and slay the Great Khan was at least as hopeless, but the nature of that undertaking gave him much more time to prepare himself for the fate waiting at its end. This, though, had been sprung upon him and promised to be much more ignominious.
And so he was thankful in a way when he tripped over something heavy and soft on the tunnel floor, fell down full-length, and realized that he was lying on top of a dead Livonian knight. Roger had taken him from behind and shoved his rondel into some part of the man’s anatomy that had brought about instantaneous death.