Ten minutes later, Macurdy was out in the night again, with Melody and a rebel named Verder. Macurdy carried twenty-five feet of slender, knotted rope wrapped around his waist, concealed by a tunic the canny Tossi had bought for the purpose. He carried the grapnel in his hand for lack of a better place. At the first corner, not a hundred feet away, they turned down an alley, moving at an easy jog.

It took a minute for the sound to register on Macurdy, but when it did, he stopped. The night, the town, held a diffuse droning. Melody and Verder were listening, too.

"What is it?" Verder asked.

"People," Melody said in a hushed voice. "People off south."

Then it struck Macurdy. He knew as if he'd been there and heard it happen! Striding to a shutter, he banged on it with the grapnel, shouting: "Have you heard?! The guards were killed in the square, and the prisoners cut free!"

Melody and the rebel stared shocked. "Macurdy!" she hissed. "What-"

"The people you hear," he answered. "They know! It must have been Jeremid. He must have run through the streets yelling what happened, and people are coming out. They don't like their rulers here; that's why there's a curfew. And if enough people come out, it'll keep the street patrols tied up." He turned and trotted off, still shouting, pausing now and then to bang on shutters. Melody and the rebel trotted after him, both of them shouting too. Voices answered from indoors, some questioning, some angry. When the alley opened onto a street, they turned east on it and trotted three more blocks shouting, before they saw five youths run into the street ahead of them from an alley. They were shouting too.

"The guards in the square are killed!" Macurdy yelled again. "The prisoners are freed!" Just ahead was a broken fence enclosing a weedy garden, and abruptly he stopped to yank staves loose from it. The youths watched, uncertain but alert. Melody realized at once what he was up to, and began piling the staves in the middle of the street. Verder helped, and now the youths, catching on, kicked and shoved on the supports of a rickety porch till the roof fell. Macurdy ignited the pile of fence staves, then ran on. They'd gone hardly more than a block before they heard shouts of "Fire! Fire!" behind them.

He shouted no more, nor stopped again till panting, they reached the perimeter street. The half moon was low in the west, but by its pale light, Macurdy could make out guards in and by the watch shelters. The sound of people was growing. To the guards it must seem dangerous, threatening.

"Let's go for it," Macurdy said. "If they see us, they still might stay where they are. If necessary, we'll run across the street again."

"What about the others?" Verder asked.

"I'll lower you two from the wall and go back for them. Melody knows where to take you."

The perimeter street was bare dirt, very wide by Rude Lands standards, about forty feet, but in dense moon shadow all the way to the palisade. Macurdy had opened his tunic while he'd talked, and unwound the rope. Now he dashed across, twirling the grapnel, and flung it up to the archery walk midway between watch shelters. It caught, and he started climbing, wishing the rope was thicker and gave a better grip. Thank God for the knots, he thought. After a moment's pause to look, he pulled himself onto the walk. There was a tug at the rope, and he hauled the rebel up, then repeated the performance with Melody. Still no one seemed to notice them. In another minute he'd lowered first Melody, then Verder down the outside.

Only then did he turn and look over the town. He wasn't the only one who'd set fires, and some hadn't taken care to light them in the middle of the street; south of the square, part of the town was burning. He rehooked the grapnel on the planking and lowered himself to the street, then with a few flips of the rope, dislodged it.

For a moment he considered leaving it there, finding it again when he came back. But afraid of losing it, he wrapped it around himself again, buttoned his tunic, and ran back up the street. It was starting to fill with people, and more porches were burning.

When he arrived at the dwarves' apartment, Jeremid was there, grinning excitedly. In a hurried conference, it was decided the dwarves should leave too. Their ponies were lodged at a stable on the main street, near the north gate, and it seemed likely that considering the fires, the gate guards would let them out. They were dwarves, after all, and had a letter of retainer from the reeve.

They'd take Jeremid with them, posing as their servant, to help them handle their personal gear. The smithing gear they'd leave behind. They'd gotten it on credit anyway, using the reeve's letter of authorization

Macurdy left with the five remaining rebels, taking alleys to bypass fires, and in minutes they'd reached the stockade. It was burning too, though not vigorously; the guards had abandoned their posts, and fires had been lit in some of the watch shelters. Moments later, Macurdy and his five charges were on the outside. Leaving the rope and grapnel hanging, he led his rebels north past the town.

23: The Rebel Commander

When he'd left the northeast corner of the stockade behind, Macurdy took his little band through a field of some spring-seeded small grain-whether oats or barley, he couldn't tell in the dark. It was heavily loaded with dew that had already soaked his boots.

Well before he reached the road, his rebels were getting strung out, too weak to keep up. "We'll stop here," he said, and at once, three of them sank to the ground despite the cold dew. Southward, the sky above town was ruddied by fires, with here and there flames tall enough to be seen above the town walls. Macurdy felt a certain guilt at his role in the burning. But the townsmen, he told himself, had been ready to rise up, to riot, and the fires had been inevitable.

Rebellion, he told himself, was the easy part. The hard parts would be winning, and replacing their government with something better. But that was up to them. What he needed to do was work this to somehow help him rescue Varia.

Meanwhile he had allies now, or so it seemed. He looked them over. All but one had what Arbel had taught him to recognize as warrior auras. The other had an artisan aura; he'd be good at making things, and maybe at coming up with ideas. "I guess you know my name's Macurdy," Macurdy said. "What are yours?"

They told him, stepping on one another's lines. It turned out they were from two different districts. Three were from north, up the road not many hours' ride; the others were from three day's ride northeast.

"Anyone here injured?" he asked.

They'd all been beaten after their capture, and the two from the northeastern band hadn't eaten for four days, except what the dwarves had fed them. Macurdy realized that he was pretty hungry himself. "All right. We're going north another quarter mile or so. There's an inn there. I'll hide you near it and go see about horses."

One of the rebels spoke then-one of the northeastern group-a rangy, tough-looking man who'd given his name as Wolf. "Where are you from?" he asked. "You don't sound like Tekalos, neither hillsman nor flatlander."

"From off west," Macurdy said, "the other side of the Great Muddy. A country called Oz; I was a soldier there. Two of us were, and the woman's father was a commander. She's one of a caste of warrior women, weapons-trained all her life. She's killed two men since we left there."

"How'd you get mixed up in our trouble?"

Macurdy laughed wryly. "We didn't get along with our troll's spawn of a commander. So one morning about daybreak I tromped the seeds out of him and three of his bully boys. Then we grabbed some horses and took off. Kept ahead of them long enough to cross the Muddy."