By Fire Above by Robyn Bennis

Author:Robyn Bennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

11

BERNAT HAD DARED to believe he was past spending the night atop piles of garbage, but the needs of Durum’s resistance compelled him to take up the habit again. At least, he consoled himself, it was very old and very dry garbage which had lost most of its smell over the years.

He was inside one of Durum’s many trash houses. They were buildings left abandoned—some over a century ago—then used as convenient neighborhood refuse dumps until they were filled to the rafters.

Until this night, he hadn’t believed they existed, despite Josette’s insistence. Now that he could hardly deny the proof, he decided that their presence reflected no shame on Durum, but rather a resourceful ingenuity.

He only wished that Durum’s ingenuity was less lumpy, and that it didn’t still smell faintly of rotten cabbage. There were less-lumpy patches here and there, and of course one could always lie on the house’s exposed rafters rather than directly on the trash, but the choices were limited by the surprisingly good condition of the roof. There were only a few places, here and there, where a gap in the beams and shingles provided a space wide enough to shoot a rifle through, and even fewer that pointed along the street they were interested in.

Elise was the only one of them who got to lie on a rafter beam, at the mutual insistence of Josette and himself. He had further insisted that Josette take the least lumpy, least aromatic patch of garbage to make her sharpshooter’s nest in, even though she assured him that he’d come to regret it.

“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she’d whispered, and even in the pitch dark, he could tell she was staring off into space and remembering another time. “You’ll be fidgeting all night, and moaning about the discomfort within an hour.”

He had insisted, nevertheless, and was proud to have proved her wrong, for the pagoda’s bell had rung out the hour twice before he started to moan about his discomfort.

“Hush,” Josette said, from the darkness to his left. “The Vin patrol’s coming around again.”

It was a few minutes before he could see them from his vantage point, through an inch-wide vertical crack in the roof which offered little visibility to the sides and could only let him look directly up and down the avenue ahead. They were the same four patrolmen he’d seen twice already, softly illuminated by lantern light as they made their circuit through the southwest quarter of town. He sighted along the barrel of his rifle, keeping it dutifully aimed at the rightmost man and ready to bring him down at a moment’s notice, though the ambush wouldn’t be sprung for a while yet, unless something went very wrong.

If, on the other hand, everything went to plan, the patrol would go off-duty about half an hour before daybreak. According to Heny, who had the information from watchers about town, the men on this patrol route always stopped to clear their muskets by firing into the soft earth by the side of the street.

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