Bloodforged Read Online Free PDF

use their influence and position to get what they wanted. Hermione wouldn’t hunt her. She would ask the authorities to do it. Suddenly Ulrika felt the walls of Nuln closing in on her. She had to get out before Hermione blocked off her routes of escape, and she had wasted too much time already, running around like a headless goblin.
    She stopped and looked around, getting her bearings. She was in the Temple Quarter, with the towering spires and battlements of the temples of Sigmar, Shallya and Myrmidia looming all around her. Fool! She had run almost to the Garden of Morr – completely the wrong direction. She turned and started south, moving this time at a swift but measured pace, and praying to the gods who would no longer hear her that she was not too late.
    A few minutes later, she came to a stop near the High Gate, the main portal through the wall which divided the rich Altestadt quarter from the common commercial vulgarity of the Neuestadt. She had climbed the wall once before, coming the other way, and had almost been caught. She was loath to try it again.
    And perhaps she didn’t have to. She had climbed before because she had looked like a scruffy and disreputable foreigner whom the guards would have been unlikely to let into the Noble Quarter in the middle of the night. Looking down at herself now, in her handsome black doublet and expensive boots, she wondered if she might risk the direct approach. She looked like a noble now, and she was only going into the Neuestadt, and the guards didn’t care so much about that.
    She looked ahead. All was quiet at the gate. The guards in their black uniforms and breastplates trudged through their duty as if half-asleep. It was now or never. She strode forwards, chin high. As she approached, the guards looked up, peering at her, then straightened and grounded their spears when they saw the cut of her clothes.
    She nodded coolly to them and they pushed open the pedestrian door beside the larger gates.
    ‘Evening, mein herr,’ said the bearded gate captain, saluting.
    ‘Evening,’ said Ulrika, stepping into the narrow tunnel that passed through the wall.
    Out of the corner of her eye she saw the captain do a double-take. Either her face or voice had told him she was a woman. She kept going, forcing herself not to increase her pace. She could feel his eyes boring into her back, but he said nothing as she stepped out of the other side of the little passage into the Neuestadt. One gate down. One more to go.
    But just as she let out a sigh of relief and began to stride away, there came a clatter of hooves behind her. She looked back and saw four horsemen ride up on the Altestadt side of the gate, calling for the captain to open it. Ulrika froze. She recognised the men. They were all Hermione’s dandies. She stepped into the mouth of an alley and listened.
    ‘We’re looking for a thief,’ one of them was saying. ‘A woman disguised as a gentleman. She stole my lady’s jewellery.’
    The captain gaped. ‘We just let her through, seconds ago!’ He turned and shouted to his men. ‘Open up! Open up!’ then peered through the bars of the opening gate. ‘She’s just – why. she’s gone! Where could she have got to!’
    ‘We’ll find her, captain,’ said the first horseman, and plunged through the gap with the others behind. ‘Bergen, Standt!’ he cried. ‘Warn the other gates! Folstad and I will search here.’
    ‘Aye, m’lord!’ called the men, and thundered off into the Altestadt as the leader and the other went more slowly, looking into every doorway and alley.
    Ulrika shrank deeper into the shadows and watched them pass by, groaning to herself. She was fast, but not so fast as a horse. They would reach the gates long before she could, and then she would be trapped. Was there another way? Could she climb out? She had climbed the Altestadt wall, but the exterior walls were another thing entirely - heavily patrolled, and much higher. The drop to the ground