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"Then they used part of it for illegal businesses, and then for tourists before the Change," Murdoch went on. "It's all shut up now, too dark and stuffy to be useful. Officially I just have some storage chambers down here… but your people have been going over the plans and… ah, here we are!"
He came to a stout door and knocked three times quickly and three times slowly before opening it, letting out light and warmer air and a pleasant smell of burning pinewood. The chamber was brightly lit, by lamps and by a small hearth built into-or dug out of-one wall; Hordle blew out his lips in an expression of relief at the score of figures seated within around a long plank table, with the remains of a meal scattered about.
The burble of Sindarin conversation died away as the door opened, though several waved to BD as to an old friend. BD understood the Elven-tongue well enough, since she'd been hiring Dunedain Rangers for caravan security for years, and it was the language they usually spoke among themselves. She'd been working with them as long as they'd existed, in fact, though to listen to some of them you'd think their grandparents had stepped off the boat from Numenor, having quietly skipped the Fourth Age somehow.
Sometimes she shuddered to think what the generation born in steads like Stardell Hall in Mithrilwood would be like, raised by crazed Changelings with their heads full of stories they believed.
And they make me feel old, she thought.
Hordle and Alleyne Loring were the eldest of them all at forty. Astrid Larsson and Eilir Mackenzie were thirty-six; and they'd been the founders of the Dunedain. The rest of the party were in their late teens or their twenties. All of them were in Dunedain working gear-black leather and wool, mostly, and soft-soled elf-boots, but with the tree-stars-and-crown blazon on their chests done in dark gray, rather than silver-white. One of the nearest was a striking woman in her thirties with bowl-cut hair that was naturally the color that dye had given Hordle's own brown curls, and leaf-green eyes the same color as her mother, Juniper's.
Hello, luv, Hordle Signed to the black-haired woman; she looked up with a smile from a litter of maps.
And aloud, since the three bright lanterns hung from the rocky ceiling and the firelight gave ample light for Eilir's lip-reading skills:
"Well, dear, I'm 'ome."
No, you're in a cave under an enemy city full of thousands of people who'd like to kill us all, Eilir replied; she was still smiling, but there was a bit of a bite in the gestured speech. Our children are back home in Stardell wondering where the hell we are and when we'll be back.
Hordle winced.
"No problem with the weapons, John?" Alleyne Loring said, mercifully changing the subject.
He spoke English for Murdoch's sake, in an accent as British as Hordle's, but of the manor-and-public-school variety, and smoothed his close-trimmed yellow mustache with a finger.
"Dead easy." A deep chuckle. "No better way to smuggle weapons than in wagonloads of… weapons! No problem getting our lot in?"
"You're the last, old chap. They've tightened up their security, but they're still not stopping harmless unarmed wanderers in ones and twos."
"You'd better get the gear unloaded and get ready," Murdoch warned. "I don't think the Bossman will send his people over for his weapons tonight, but I'm not absolutely sure he won't… and there are more men in town than you expected."
"Cutters. And Boise regulars," John Hordle said, repeating the details that Sandra Arminger's spy had given him. "Seems the Bossman got an attack of the nerves and decided 'e needed some friends."
"Tsk," Alleyne Loring said. "He forgot the origins of England."
Murdoch and BD looked at him, and there was a grim smile on his handsome fine-boned face as he went on:
"The first English in England-two outlaw chiefs from Jutland named Hengist and Horsa and their merry, hairy band of pirate cutthroats-"
"Sound like lads after me own heart," Hordle observed.
"-were invited in by a chief of the Britons named Vortigern. The Romans had withdrawn, and Vortigern had a problem with the Picts kicking up their heels. He decided that the obvious thing to do was hire some Saxons to fight the Picts for him rather than go to the dreadful bore and bother of doing it himself."
"What happened then?" Murdoch asked.
The smile turned wolfish; for a moment it was easy to imagine Alleyne in a bearskin tunic, leaping out of a Dark Age war-boat with a seax in his fist.
"Shortly thereafter the Jutes and their Saxon and Anglian relatives had England, and the Britons had… Wales. Despite all King Arthur could do. And Vortigern made that mistake despite a late-Roman definition of rapacity: He could teach piracy to a Saxon. "
A tall woman who'd been sitting with her legs crossed and her hands resting on her thighs opened her eyes and swung her legs down from their lotus position. Her head came up, crowned with white-blond hair in a tight-woven fighting braid, and she met Murdoch's eyes. The Association spy shivered a little in that pale gaze, the hyacinth-blue pupils rimmed and shot with silver threads. She stared silently for a few seconds, and the man who Pendleton knew as an importer squirmed.
BD sympathized; people meeting the Hiril Dunedain for the first few times often had that reaction. She'd known the girl… woman. .. since she was fourteen, and still felt that way sometimes herself.
"We aren't expected at the Bossman's feast," Astrid Larsson said. "But I do think we'll drop in anyway."
Alleyne smiled. " Crashing the party, rather like thirteen dwarves coming by unexpectedly for tea."
"But even less welcome and more troublesome," his wife said. "And if there are emissaries from our ultimate enemies there… so much the better. We'll spend tomorrow going over the details, but with luck and a little effort we can skip the war and go straight to the victory, which is always the best part anyway."
Hordle rapped his knuckles on the wooden table. Murdoch muttered and retreated, banging the door behind him.
Alleyne made a tsk sound and dropped back into the Elven-tongue. "You shouldn't spook him, my love, just because he works for Sandra Arminger. He's on our side now. The whole Portland Protective Association is. And he's been quite cooperative."
"We're fighting the same enemy at the moment, bar melindo," she said. "That isn't exactly the same thing as being friends, darling."
A dozen of the Rangers filed past and trotted up the stairs to fetch the gear. BD stepped aside as they left and nodded to the four leaders, then stepped over to look at the documents on the table. One was the blueprints of the Bossman's house. The other was a map that showed Pendleton, the modern town, in considerable detail. Across it-underneath it-lay a network of dotted red lines…
"Well, that's imaginative at least," she said, as the details of the plan leapt out at her. "It's going to be tricky, though. Particularly the 'getting away alive' part."
And I'm glad I sent my people out of town!
Eilir nodded and replied in Sign: Don't worry. Murdoch has really done a very creditable job with these tu
"Just like Sandra Arminger to have a literal mole here, burrowing away for the past twelve years," Astrid said dryly, and they chuckled. "She isn't called the Spider for nothing."
A clatter of footsteps, and the Dunedain returned with boxes and crates and barrels carried on their shoulders, or slung between them by the rope handles. A little brisk hammering opened them, and men and women crowded around.
"Ah!" John Hordle said, seizing his four-foot bastard longsword and ru