Marek looked up at him. “You all right?” he said.
Chris couldn’t answer.
He couldn’t say anything at all.
And then the bell in the village church began to ring.
:
Through the window, Chris saw flames licking up from two farmhouses at the far edge of the town, near the circling town wall. Men were running in the streets toward it.
“There’s a fire,” Chris said.
“I doubt it,” Marek said, still sitting by the bed.
“No, there is,” Chris said. “Look.”
In the town, horsemen were galloping through the streets; they were dressed as merchants or traders, but they rode like fighters.
“This is a typical diversion,” Marek said, “to start an attack.”
“An attack?”
“The Archpriest is attacking Castelgard.”
“So soon?”
“This is just an advance party, perhaps a hundred soldiers or so. They’ll try to create confusion, disruption. The main body is probably still on the other side of the river. But the attack has begun.”
Apparently others thought so, too. In the courtyard below, courtiers were streaming out of the great hall and hurrying toward the drawbridge, leaving the castle, the party abruptly ended. A company of armored knights galloped out, scattering the courtiers, thundered across the drawbridge, and raced down through the streets of the town.
Kate stuck her head in the door, panting. “Guys? Let’s go. We have to find the Professor before it’s too late.”
28:57:32
There was pandemonium in the great hall. The musicians fled, the guests rushed out the doors, dogs barked and plates of food clattered to the floor. Knights were running to join the battle, shouting orders to their squires. From the high table, Lord Oliver came quickly down, grabbed the Professor by the arm, and said to Sir Guy, “We go to La Roque. See to the Lady Claire. And bring the assistants!”
Robert de Kere burst breathlessly into the room. “My Lord, the assistants are dead! Killed while trying to escape!”
“Escape? They tried to escape? Even if that risked their master’s life? Come with me, Magister,” Lord Oliver said darkly. Oliver led him to a side door that opened directly to the courtyard.
:
Kate scrambled down the circular staircase, with Marek and Chris close behind. At the second floor, they had to slow for a group descending ahead of them. Around the curve, Kate glimpsed ladies in waiting, and the red robes of an elderly, shuffling man. Behind her, Chris yelled, “What’s the problem?” and Kate held up a warning hand. It was another minute before they burst through into the courtyard.
It was a chaotic scene. Knights on horseback whipped the throng of panicked revelers to force them aside. She heard the cries of the crowd, the whinny of horses, the shouts of soldiers on the battlements above. “This way,” Kate said, and she led Marek and Chris forward, staying close to the castle wall, going around the chapel, then laterally into the outer courtyard, which they could see was equally crowded.
They saw Oliver on horseback, the Professor at his side and a company of armored knights. Oliver shouted something, and all moved forward toward the drawbridge.
Kate left Marek and Chris to chase them alone, and she just managed to catch sight of them at the end of the drawbridge. Oliver turned to the left, riding away from the town. Guards opened a door in the east wall, and he and his company rode through into the afternoon sunlight. The door was shut hastily behind them.
Marek caught up with her. “Where?” he said.
She pointed to the gate. Thirty knights guarded it. More stood on the wall above.
“We’ll never get out that way,” he said. Just behind them, a cluster of soldiers threw off brown tunics, revealing green-and-black surcoats; they began fighting their way into the castle. The drawbridge chains began to clank. “Come on.”
They ran down the drawbridge, hearing the wood creak, feeling it begin to rise under their feet. The drawbridge was three feet in the air when they reached the far end and jumped, landing on the ground of the open field.
“Now what?” Chris said, picking himself up. He still carried his bloody sword in his hand.
“This way,” Marek said, and he ran straight into the center of the town.
:
They headed toward the church, then away from the narrow main street, where intense fighting had already begun: Oliver’s soldiers in maroon and gray, and Arnaut’s in green and black. Marek led them to the left through the market, now deserted, the wares packed up and the merchants gone. They had to step quickly aside as a company of Arnaut’s knights on horseback galloped past, heading toward the castle. One of them swung at Marek with his broadsword and shouted something as he passed. Marek watched them go, then went on.
Chris was looking for signs of murdered women and eviscerated babies, and he did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved that he saw none. In fact, he saw no women or children at all. “They’ve all run away or gone into hiding,” Marek said. “There’s been war for a long time here. People know what to do.”
“Which way?” Kate said. She was in the front.
“Left, toward the main gate.”
They turned left, going down a narrower street, and suddenly heard a shout behind them. They looked back, to see running soldiers coming toward them. Chris couldn’t tell if the soldiers were chasing them or just running. But there was no point in waiting to find out.
Marek broke into a run; they all ran now, and after a while Chris glanced back to see the soldiers falling behind, and he felt a moment of odd pride; they were putting distance between them.
But Marek was taking no chances. Abruptly, he turned into a side street which had a strong and unpleasant odor. The shops here were all closed up, but narrow alleyways ran between them. Marek ran down one, which brought them to a fenced courtyard behind a shop. Within the courtyard stood huge wooden vats, and wooden racks beneath a shed. Here the stench was almost overpowering: a mixture of rotting flesh and feces.
It was a tannery.
“Quickly,” Marek said, and they climbed over the fence, crouched down behind the reeking vats.
“Oof!” Kate said, holding her nose. “What is that smell?”
“They soak the skins in chicken shit,” Chris whispered. “The nitrogen in the feces softens the leather.”
“Great,” she said.
“Dog shit, too.”
“Great.”
Chris looked back and saw more vats, and hides hanging on the racks. Here and there, stinking piles of cheesy yellow material lay heaped on the ground—fat scraped from the inside of the skins.
Kate said, “My eyes burn.”
Chris pointed to the white crust on the vats around them. These were lime vats, a harsh alkali solution that removed all the hair and remaining flesh after the skins were scraped. And it was the lime fumes that burned their eyes.
Then his attention was drawn to the alleyway, where he heard running feet and the clatter of armor. Through the fence he saw Robert de Kere with seven soldiers. The soldiers were looking in every direction as they ran—searching for them.
Why? Chris wondered, peering around the vat. Why were they still being pursued? What was so important about them that de Kere would ignore an enemy attack and try instead to kill them?
Apparently the searchers liked the smell in the alley no better than Chris did, because soon de Kere barked an order and they all ran back up the alley, toward the street.
“What was that about?” Chris whispered finally.
Marek just shook his head.
And then they heard men shouting, and again they heard the soldiers running back down the street. Chris frowned. How could they have overheard? He looked at Marek, who seemed troubled, too. From outside the courtyard, they heard de Kere shout: “Ici! Ici!” Probably, de Kere had left a man behind. That must be it, Chris thought. Because he hadn’t whispered loudly enough to be heard. Mare
k started forward, then hesitated. Already de Kere and his men were climbing over the fence—eight men altogether; they could not fight them all.
“André,” Chris said, pointing to the vat. “It’s lye.”
Marek grinned. “Then let’s do it,” he said, and he leaned against the vat.
They all put their shoulders against the wood and, with effort, managed to push the vat over. Frothing alkali solution sloshed onto the ground and flowed toward the soldiers. The odor was acrid. The soldiers instantly recognized what it was—any contact with that liquid would burn flesh—and they scrambled back up the fence, getting their feet off the ground. The fence posts began to sizzle and hiss when the lye touched them. The fence wobbled with the weight of all the men; they shouted and scrambled back into the alley.
“Now,” Marek said. He led them deeper into the tanning yard, up over a shed, and then out into another alley.
:
It was now late afternoon, and the light was beginning to fade; ahead they saw the burning farmhouses, which cast hard flickering shadows on the ground. Earlier, there had been attempts to put out the fires, but they were now abandoned; the thatch burned freely, crackling as burning strands rose into the air.
They were following a narrow path that ran among pigsties. The pigs snorted and squealed, distressed by the fires that burned nearby.
Marek skirted the fires, heading toward the south gate, where they had first come in. But even from a distance, they could see that the gate was the scene of heavy fighting; the entrance was nearly blocked by the bodies of dead horses; Arnaut’s soldiers had to scramble over the corpses to reach the defenders inside, who fought bitterly with axes and swords.
Marek turned away, doubling back through the farm area.
“Where are we going?” Chris said.
“Not sure,” Marek said. He was looking up at the curtain wall around the town. Soldiers ran along it, heading toward the south gate to join in the fight. “I want to get up on that wall.”
“Up on the wall?”
“There.” He pointed to a narrow, dark opening in the wall, with steps going up. They emerged on top of the town wall. From their high vantage point, they could see that more of the town was being engulfed in flames; fires were closer to the shops. Soon all Castelgard would be burning. Marek looked over the wall at the fields beyond. The ground was twenty feet below. There were some bushes about five feet high, which looked soft enough to break their impact. But it was getting hard to see.
“Stay loose,” he said. “Keep your body relaxed.”
“Loose?” Chris said.
But already Kate had swung her body over and was hanging from the wall. She released her grip, and fell the rest of the way, landing on her feet like a cat. She looked up at them and beckoned.
“It’s pretty far down,” Chris said. “I don’t want to break a leg. . ..”
From the right, they heard shouts. Three soldiers ran along the wall, their swords raised.
“Then don’t,” Marek said, and jumped. Chris jumped after him in the twilight, landed on the ground, grunting and rolling. He got slowly to his feet. Nothing broken.
He was feeling relieved and rather pleased with himself, when the first of the arrows whined past his ear and thunked into the ground between his feet. Soldiers were shooting at them from the wall above. Marek grabbed his arm and ran to dense undergrowth ten yards away. They dropped down and waited.
Almost immediately, more arrows whistled overhead, but this time they came from outside the castle walls. In the growing darkness, Chris could barely make out soldiers in green-and-black surcoats on the hill below.
“Those’re Arnaut’s men!” Chris said. “Why are they shooting at us?”
Marek didn’t answer; he was crawling away, his belly flat to the ground. Kate crawled after him. An arrow hissed past Chris, so close that the shaft tore his doublet at the shoulder, and he felt a brief streak of pain.
He threw himself flat on the ground and followed them.
28:12:39
“There’s good news and bad news,” Diane Kramer said, walking into Doniger’s office just before nine in the morning. Doniger was at his computer, pecking at the keyboard with one hand while he held a can of Coke in the other.
“Give me the bad news,” Doniger said.
“Our injured people were taken to University Hospital. When they got there last night, guess who was on duty? The same doctor who treated Traub in Gallup. A woman named Tsosie.”
“The same doctor works both hospitals?”
“Yes. She’s mostly at UH, but she does two days a week at Gallup.”
“Shit,” Doniger said. “Is that legal?”
“Sure. Anyway, Dr. Tsosie went over our techs with a fine-tooth comb. She even put three of them through an MRI. She reserved the scanner specially, as soon as she heard it was an accident involving ITC.”
“An MRI?” Doniger frowned. “That means she must have known that Traub was split.”
“Yes,” Kramer said. “Because apparently they put Traub through an MRI. So she was definitely looking for something. Physical defects. Body misalignments.”
“Shit,” Doniger said.
“She also made a big deal about her quest, getting everybody at the hospital huffy and paranoid, and she called that cop Wauneka in Gallup. It seems they’re friends.”
Doniger groaned. “I need this,” he said, “like I need another asshole.”
“Now you want the good news?”
“I’m ready.”
“Wauneka calls the Albuquerque Police. The chief goes down to the hospital himself. Couple of reporters. Everybody sitting around waiting for the big news. They’re expecting radioactive. They’re expecting glow in the dark. Instead—big embarrassment. All the injuries are pretty minor. Mostly, it’s flying glass. Even the shrapnel wounds are superficial; the metal’s just embedded in the skin layer.”
“Water shields must have slowed the fragments down,” Doniger said.
“I think so, yes. But people are pretty disappointed. And then the final event—the MRI—the coup de grâce—is a bust three times running. None of our people has any transcription errors. Because, of course, they’re just techs. Albuquerque chief is pissed. Hospital administrator is pissed. Reporters leave to cover a burning apartment building. Meanwhile some guy with kidney stones almost dies because they can’t do an MRI, because Dr. Tsosie’s tied up the machine. Suddenly, she’s worried about her job. Wauneka’s disgraced. They both run for cover.”
“Perfect,” Doniger said, pounding the table. He grinned. “Those dipshits deserve it.”
“And to top it all off,” Kramer said triumphantly, “the French reporter, Louise Delvert, has agreed to come tour our facility.”
“Finally! When?”
“Next week. We’ll give her the usual bullshit tour.”
“This is starting to be an ultragood day,” Doniger said. “You know, we might actually get this thing back in the bottle. Is that it?”
“The media people are coming at noon.”
“That belongs under bad news,” Doniger said.
“And Stern has found the old prototype machine. He wants to go back. Gordon said absolutely not, but Stern wants you to confirm that he can’t go.”
Doniger paused. “I say let him go.”
“Bob. . ..”
“Why shouldn’t he go?” Doniger said.
“Because it’s unsafe as hell. That machine has minimal shielding. It hasn’t been used in years, and it’s got a history of causing big transcription errors on the people who did use it. He might not even come back at all.”
“I know that.” Doniger waved his hand. “None of that’s core.”
“What’s core?” she said, confused.
“Baretto.”
“Baretto?”
“Do I hear an echo? Diane, think, for Christ’s sake.”
Kramer frowned, shook her head.
“Put it together. Baretto died in the first min
ute or two of the trip back. Isn’t that right? Someone shot him full of arrows, right at the beginning of the trip.”
“Yes. . ..”
“The first few minutes,” Doniger said, “is the time when everybody is still standing around the machines, together, as a group. Right? So what reason do we have to think that Baretto got killed but nobody else?”
Kramer said nothing.
“What’s reasonable is that whoever killed Baretto probably killed them all. Killed the whole bunch.”
“Okay. . ..”
“That means they probably aren’t coming back. The Professor isn’t coming back. The whole group is gone. Now, it’s unfortunate, but we can handle a group of missing people: a tragic lab accident where all the bodies were incinerated, or a plane crash, nobody would really be the wiser. . ..”
There was a pause.
“Except there’s Stern,” Kramer said. “He knows the whole story.”
“That’s right.”
“So you want to send him back, too. Get rid of him as well. Clean sweep.”
“Not at all,” Doniger said promptly. “Hey, I’m opposed to it. But the guy’s volunteering. He wants to help his friends. It’d be wrong for me to stand in the way.”
“Bob,” she said, “there are times when you are a real asshole.”
Doniger suddenly started to laugh. He had a high-pitched, whooping, hysterical laugh, like a little kid. It was the way a lot of the scientists laughed, but it always reminded Kramer of a hyena.
“If you allow Stern to go back, I quit.”
This made Doniger laugh even harder. Sitting in his chair, he threw back his head. It made her angry.
“I mean it, Bob.”
He finally stopped giggling, wiped the tears from his eyes. “Diane, come on,” he said. “I’m kidding. Of course Stern can’t go back. Where’s your sense of humor?”
Kramer turned to go. “I’ll tell Stern that he can’t go back,” she said. “But you weren’t kidding.”
Doniger started laughing all over again. Hyena giggles filled the room. Kramer slammed the door angrily as she left.
Timeline Page 30
