by SM Stirling
Fred was nearly as fast, but he’d been delayed by snatching at a saber hilt that wasn’t there. Iowa was a civilized realm, where men didn’t carry swords or fighting-knives to a state dinner. Father Ignatius was on his feet, one hand wrenching the rope belt of his black robe free; from the way it whipped through the air as he sidled in front of Mathilda the knot at the end had a lead core. Artos snatched a cover off a plate and dove to his right towards the Regent of Iowa with desperate speed, thrusting it out like a buckler between her and the Cutter. The dagger there clanged against the antique silver, but that left him draped across the table and off balance.
Kate Heasleroad was as helpless as he, sprawled backward and pinned by the royal clothing, but she scrabbled and kicked furiously, and the heavy skirt took the first stab of the dagger. Artos scissored his legs and came erect in time to catch the man under the jaw with the heel of his palm. He wasn’t set for the full bone-shattering power the blow could deliver, but it jarred through his arm and shoved the smaller man back on his heels. He was vaguely conscious that Bjarni had closed with the only other assassin, taking a stab in the belly that the mail vest under his shirt turned, then grabbing him in a bear hug and squeezing, squeezing . . .
The last man was back on the balls of his feet, knife held out and point down with his thumb on the pommel, an expert’s grip that could stab or back-slash with rattlesnake speed. Artos stripped the little sgian dubh out of his knee-sock. Perhaps thirty seconds had passed since Mathilda saw the first man’s reflection in the silver before her and saved them all, and the guards were closing in at last—there weren’t as many of them in the throne room as there had been in mad Anthony Heasleroad’s day.
There was the briefest pause as the knife-man’s eyes locked on his.
“Don’t do it, man,” Artos said. “Surrender and I’ll pledge your life.”
The blue gaze narrowed, and the knife-point began to move. Artos looked into the face of desperate courage, and killed it.
Then he stepped back, and the mail-clad guards rushed in. Ignatius straightened and spoke, steady and controlled but loud:
“Everyone, please remain calm. Don’t try to leave, everyone must be questioned.”
The cool good sense cut through the room; most of the guests weren’t sure what had happened anyway, except that it was bad. Kate Heasleroad stepped forward with her eyes flashing:
“Captain Dietrich!” she snapped.
The commander of the State Patrol stepped forward in his turn; he was a young man with a clipped blond mustache. Turnover in the security corps had been rapid after last year’s change of regime, not to mention that the head of his service had died in the turmoil.
“Ma’am?” he said, standing ramrod straight and obviously wishing his vital functions would cease.
“Chancellor Heuisink is wounded. Get a physician. And take control of the surviving assassins. I want a full debriefing by no later than tomorrow. Interrogate them. Break them, do you understand me?”
And last year she was a gentle, shy, retiring girl, Artos thought, as his breathing slowed. He exchanged a glance with Mathilda, his wry smile saying, Well, you helped her hatch as plain as words, then spoke:
“I think the Sword could help with that, Lady Regent, and make the process swifter and less bloody all ’round.”
Many hours later he buried his head in the curve of Mathilda’s neck; they were alone at last. She stroked his hair, careful of the bandage over his ear.
“I’m tired of this, Matti,” he said. “It’s been years now; fighting and running, now them running and still more fighting. I’m tired of seeing brave men die; tired of killing them. I want to make us a home, and wake up beside you every day, and take our children on visits to their grandmothers. I want it to stop.”
“My poor darling—”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER
(FORMERLY PROVINCE OF ALBERTA)
JUNE 2, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“I feel like a bug on a plate,” Ritva Havelmuttered. She pushed steadily at the pedals and looked out the windows at the landscape of the big-sky country, with the rush of the wind thuttering under the rattle and whine of the wheels and gears. This railcar held three rows of three operators pumping away with their feet, but apart from the motive power it didn’t have much in common with the makeshifts the questers had cobbled together back in Norrheim. The streamlined sheath was made mostly of salvaged aluminum with some modern laminated ash in the frame, and the operators all lay back to pedal in recliner seats padded with sheepskins. Windows all around were from pre-Change automobiles, complete with the cranks for raising and lowering.
She opened one a little more, letting the warm air play over her sweaty face. It was worth the tiny bit of extra drag. The prairie wasn’t entirely flat anymore; this part had a gentle roll to it, and there was the slightest almost-seen trace of blue-white along the western horizon, just starting to hint at mountains. The grass was about calf-high and still bronze-green as spring faded towards summer, starred with pink shooting star and windflower, the blue of larkspur and beard-tongue, white fairy bells, yellow balsamroot, until parts of it were like a glowing carpet in Stardell Hall. The odd tree was usually an aspen, except where a shallow draw wound eastward and brought water closer to the surface to support cottonwoods and wolf willow. The dry thundery-ozone smell of a high-plains summer day was a clean, welcome contrast to the slightly rancid canola-oil lubricant and the inevitable sweat and metal inside the cab.
They were making a steady twenty miles an hour for hour after hour, and could have done better save for the limitations of the main party plodding along behind them at the pace horses on a treadmill could achieve, which was quicker than they could do with their hooves on the ground but less than humans pushing pedals. Even at that almost supernatural speed, well over a hundred miles each and every day, the endless grasslands seemed to crawl by.
“I’m a bug on a plate and soon the fork’s going to come down on me,” she went on, quoting her half brother.
It was even worse coming east on horseback, of course; that didn’t just seem to take forever, it nearly did. Months and months. And I miss the way Mary and I did everything together before she got married. I miss all of them, being off on my own like this. I even miss Hrolf. Was I stupid to break up with him? No, that was the right thing to do. Spending my life with him . . . the thought just didn’t appeal, and he wanted that, but it’s getting . . . Oh, by Manwë, I’m not even twenty-three yet! Plenty of time, provided I don’t get killed. I’m just envious of Mary for getting a good one.
“Fork, or flyswatter,” she added.
Her escorts were native plainsmen and had grown up in places more or less like this; she could sense their incomprehension at her feeling of being lost in all this space. The trooper beside her did say:
“Yeah, I get the same feeling sometimes. I’m from up north near Rycroft in the Peace River country, myself. Way north, right up to our frontier with the Dene tribes. It’s hills and woods there as well as prairies, and there’s the river and lakes, and then there’s the forests on the border that go north forever. But it’s not so fine and warm as this, eh?”
Constable Ian Kovalevsky seemed to be a nice enough young man, around her age but seeming a little younger. His intentions were obvious; but then men were like that, and occasionally it was pleasant or only mildly irritating. And he looked quite dashing in his mail-lined red serge jacket, midnight blue breeches with yellow stripes down the seams and high brown boots; he had close-cropped ash-blond hair, slightly tilted gray eyes and a snub nose.
“You redcoats seem to do most of the same things here we Dúnedain do in Montival,” she said.
The Dúnedain didn’t have much contact with the Dominions. The only route that didn’t go through the PPA territories—where memories of the War of the Eye ensured that Rangers were grudgingly tolerated at best—went through the United States of Boise. Which hadn’t been friendly even be
fore the war; and farther east was Corwin. She’d been mildly surprised to find that though Minnedosa, Moose Jaw and Drumheller were all independent they also all helped support this autonomous warrior band whose mark was the red serge coat, and let it operate throughout their lands.
Well, that’s one of the great things about traveling—you see strange lands and their ways and customs. Otherwise we’ d have stayed in Larsdalen and gotten on the A-list and married other A-listers and grown roots like turnips. A trip to Corvallis for some shopping would be a big deal we’ d hash over for weeks. Shudder!
He nodded. “Well, we keep the peace, help out isolated settlements, track down robbers. And fight when we have to. It’s worthwhile work. And it gets you out of the hoose—”
He pronounced the word as if it rhymed with moose.
“—oot and aboot, all over, and people are mostly glad to see you. And the Force has its own ranches to raise our horses, and salvage operations and workshops to make our gear, so we do some of that work too.”
A snort came from behind her, where the corporal in charge of the detachment sat at his own pedals. The common troopers were called constables, which sounded a bit odd to a Montivallan ear. That was a title of rank in the Association territories, and a rather exalted one; the commander of the PPA’s armies was a Grand Constable.
“And you don’t have to spend the summers pushing a plow on your daddy’s farm and the winters freezing your ass off and worrying about the Dene, Kovalevsky,” the noncom said.
“I ran a trapline in winter,” the constable said mildly, and added: “Corporal.”
A thought occurred to her. “This land here is warm?”
It certainly was right now, but she remembered winters in the high plains around Bend, east of the Cascades. This was much farther north and a lot farther from the moderating influence of the ocean . . .
“Well, it’s warmer than the Peace River! In winter, particularly. They get these Chinook winds and it can melt all the snow even in February; it’s lousy country for cross-country skiing here. Anyway, things get a lot less flat just a little way west. We’re nearly into the foothills. That’s very pretty country.”
“It’ll be a change,” she said. “I like mountains to look at but they’re a bit of a pain when you’re in a hurry.”
More miles flowed by, with only an occasional rough patch to rattle their teeth; once a pack of wolves, or mostly-wolves from the floppy ears and parti-colored coats of a few, looked up from their feast on something that might have been alpaca or antelope. Then they dipped their heads again to rip at the carcass. The Drumhellers had kept up their rail net, more or less, at least to the point of patching and filling now and then, but—
“Not much through traffic?” she asked.
“We cleared the line a while ago,” the corporal said. “Emergency Powers Act. Usually there’s a fair bit on this stretch—coal from Lethbridge or Crowsnest, wool going north, timber and flax and salvage goods coming south and east, that sort of thing. All horse-drawn except for the mails, and some passengers who can afford pedal-carts.”
An hour later they slowed to let a herd of buffalo cross ahead of them, several thousand head with the light brown calves running among their massive, darkly shaggy elders, and a little after that a herd of mustangs paced the car for a while, their manes and tails flying. Very occasionally they passed herds of cattle or beefalo, sheep or llamas, with a party of mounted cowboys riding guard and a chuck wagon following along behind each band.
Then the evidence of men grew stronger; a brace of canvas-tilt wagons and a party of horsemen rattling down a dirt track and waving their Stetsons in greeting, a quartet of mowing machines cutting wild hay, watering-points with their tall windmills spinning to pump from the well beneath. Then a small dam across a stream, and a long narrow stretch of irrigated land planted to wheat and alfalfa, truck and orchards, with trees around the little lake that watered it. A ruined, burnt-out house and barns stood near the shore, long abandoned and stripped of anything useful down to the chimney bricks, though the extensive corrals were still in use. Much closer to the tracks and just north of them was a complex of modern rammed-earth buildings on a low rise—
A low rise being the only type of rise they have around here, she thought sardonically.
It was big for a village but too small for a town, and surrounded by a wall, not very high but thick and of the same hard material, topped with a timber fighting platform and with towers at its corners and beside the south-facing gate. The blocky rammed-earth structures were two stories high on fieldstone footings, and the whitewash that covered them glowed in the sun against the red-brown tile of their low-pitched roofs. Smoke rose from the chimneys there, and a bell began to ring as the railcar came into sight; a flashing glint from the gatehouse was probably a mounted telescope. Outside the wall and south of the gatehouse was a long low warehouse right by the rails.
She recognized the bulky angular look of the pisé de terre construction, damp earth hammered down in layers between temporary timber forms that were then moved on to let the mixture cure to a consistency like coarse friable rock. It was popular in the drier interior parts of Montival too, cheap and easy to make since it didn’t need expensive materials or much skilled labor, fireproof, lasting forever if well maintained, and excellent insulation against the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the arrows of neighbors. Also familiar was a flag flying from a staff on one corner tower; not the actual design but the practice of using the cattle brand as a house banner in ranching country, rather the way nobles of the Association used their coats of arms.
“That’s the Anchor Bar Seven ranch headquarters,” the corporal said. “We’ve been on their land for three hours now. The flag’s not at half-mast, either; Old Man McGillvery must still be hanging on.”
Evidently headquarters was the local term for homeplace; she’d noticed that the dialect here was crisper and more formal-sounding than the ranchland speech of eastern Montival, more like what they spoke in Corvallis but with a subtly odd elongation of the vowels and occasional strange bits of vocabulary. A rustling of paper from behind her showed he was consulting a map.
“The ranch-house there got burned out not long after the Change—people from Calgary—but they drove some of ’em off and set the rest to rebuilding it the way you see.”
“It looks like they expected more trouble. That’s more protection than most ranchers’ homeplaces have in Montival.”
She could hear his shrug before he continued: “Those were hard times, ma’am. We had a couple of big cities, too big to survive, and no mountains between them and the rest of us.”
And he’s old enough to remember some of it—nearly forty but not quite, I’d say, about Aunt Astrid’s age give or take. He’d have been in his early teens. Things weren’t nearly as bad here as in some places, but bad enough.
“We’re not all that far from the old U.S. border with Montana here either,” he continued. “There’s been a trickle of refugees from the Cutters for nearly twenty years; some good people, but some not, and some just desperate. And we’ve had some pretty big skirmishes with the Prophet’s loonies. Not real war before now, but there’ve been raids.”
“And the odd bunch of horse-thieves from the Sioux territories,” Ian observed.
“Nothing serious; they just think stealing horses is a fun rough sport, like we do hockey.”
“Serious enough if they lift your hair while they’re lifting your stock, Corporal.”
“And that’s why we hang them by the neck if we catch them at it, Kovalevsky.”
“Hell, Corporal, you’ve got a really hard-nosed attitude to a roughing penalty.”
Everyone laughed, and the corporal went on to her: “Do you want to stop here for the day, ma’am?”
Ritva sighed and looked upward in thought, tempted. The ranch was a major one, and the homeplace would have a lot of free space kept for riders who slept out with the herds except in the cold season. It would p
robably be a chance to eat decent food and sleep in a bed, and certainly one to do minor repairs and have a bath or at least a shower.
And to get my sore butt out of these seats.
Riding hurt too eventually—there was an old joke about a book entitled Twenty Years in the Saddle, by Major Assburns—but she was used to that, having ridden at least a little nearly every day since she was four. They’d come over a thousand miles in a week and it was beginning to feel as if she’d bounced all that way with her coccyx dragging on the deteriorating roadbed of the railroads of three bossmandoms and as many Dominions. The temptation didn’t last long. From the sun it was about an hour past noon, and the letters from home piled up at the railhead had all sounded anxious in the extreme, if you knew how to read between the lines. Mathilda’s had made her go white, when she decoded them.
Far too early to stop and no time to waste now that we don’t have to coddle the horses as much, she thought. Granted when you’re going across a continent you have to remember more haste less speed, but we can’t dawdle even one day. She went on aloud:
“Just for a few minutes to exchange news. We should get in at least another three or four hours today and that’s sixty or seventy miles.”
“You’re the boss-lady,” the corporal said; his superiors were cooperating nicely and the redcoat Force evidently had splendid discipline. “Pity. They do some really good ribs with red sauce here. Squad . . . rest easy!”
