A leap forward, across a tile floor already slippery with blood, and she found herself facing the last soldier of the Sixth still standing. He’d lost his helmet and was flicking his head to get the blood out of his eyes from a cut on the forehead. He was a young man, younger than she, with bristle-cut red hair and a freckled face whose skin was tight over the bones and wet with sweat and blood. The green eyes were utterly steady as he set himself to die.
A flickering long-lunge towards a foot brought the shield down; Ritva knew somewhere far from the present all-consuming moment that she was moving to ten-tenths capacity in an impossible blur of speed, almost as fast as Astrid. She turned the lunge into a feint with a skip and a beat, and drove the sharp point of her long sword into the upper part of his arm, just below the spot where the leaves of the lorica segmentata stopped. The point ripped into meat and glanced off bone, and the soldier gave a muffled cry of despair and pain as the shield dropped out of his hand; the Boise type were held by a central grip, not loops with a forearm thrust through.
Two more lunges drove him back towards the Thurston family as the point flickered in faster than thought. He still had his short sword, but the gladius was not meant for fencing. As he felt the family at his back the soldier suddenly threw the sword at her and turned, grabbing Shawonda Thurston in his arms and wrestling her around by main force, putting his back between her and the blades of the attackers he thought menaced them for one last sacrificial moment.
Ritva ducked and batted the blade aside with her buckler, a hard bang and ring of metal; a whirling two-pound Frisbee of edged metal thrown by a strong man was not something to be taken lightly. Her body was already moving forward, feet positioning for the lunge that would slam her point into the back of the soldier’s neck above the edge of his lorica. A sweet inevitability of motion, truth in bone and nerve and metal—
Shawonda Thurston’s desperate face was looking over his metal-clad shoulder, eyes enormous. She wrapped her arms around his neck in a convulsive movement, her head jammed into his shoulder.
“No!” she screamed. “Don’t! Don’t!”
Ritva’s battle-trance broke at the desperate appeal. She diverted the killing lunge upward with a wrenching effort, and her body slammed into the young man’s back and bounced off it; he was hard-braced, and the combined weight of him and his armor and the girl were twice her mass. The soldier and Shawonda stumbled backward without falling, but they were close to it.
Ritva moved again, but this time she reversed the weapon. The fishtail pommel of her long sword had an outer rim like the edge of a blunt chisel. She struck with it against the young man’s head, behind the ear. He didn’t go absolutely limp; you couldn’t hit someone in the head that hard in a combat situation and be sure you weren’t killing them. He did lose all interest in everything but lying still and hurting as the shock rattled his brain in its fluid casing. Shawonda released him and stared at his body lying at her feet.
“He’ll live,” Ritva said, and shook her with a push of buckler on shoulder. “Pull yourself together, girl!”
Shawonda did; she took a couple of sobbing breaths and then crouched to pull the wound pack from the soldier’s belt. She ripped the pad open with her teeth and strapped it against the wound in his left arm with a swiftness that showed she’d taken first-aid courses.
“He was nice,” she said, with tears tracking down her face and diluting the red spatters that flecked it. “He talked to me when his sergeant wasn’t there.”
Then she stumbled back to her mother, wiping her hands on her skirt. The older woman put an arm around her and hugged both her daughters to her body, nodding over them at the Dúnedain.
Ritva spared time for one sharp nod back, then looked down at the soldier for an instant. Her lips quirked, and she dropped back into Edhellen: “You are one lucky son of a bitch. You really got a triple return tripled on chatting her up like that!”
The screams had cut off, except for young Lawrence Jr.’s, and his mother was soothing him; you could hear the sharp hoarse panting breaths of the survivors, and moaning and whimpering from the hurt. The rest of the raiding party came up. She did a quick scan; ten of the Mormons were dead, three of the Rangers, and others were having wounds dressed. The soldiers of the Sixth hadn’t gone down easily, surprise and numbers and bad ground or no.
One of the Dúnedain was carried between two guerillas, and another was applying pressure to a pad. There wasn’t much point from the look of it; that deep a stab wound up under the short ribs made with enough force to penetrate mail would probably be fatal even if it hadn’t nicked a lung, and there was blood on her lips as well. It was Condis, whom Ritva had known a little and rather liked, even if she was very earnest. Now the knowledge of death was in her dark eyes, and her face was rigid with the strain of not screaming.
Astrid came over as they set her down, looked at the wound and up at the Mormon holding the bandage. He shook his head very slightly.
“Hiril,” Condis mumbled, struggling not to cough. “Lady. Send . . . me to Mandos. Please, you.”
“Are you sure, brave one?”
A nod, then a grimace and: “Nîdh, naneth, nîdh!”
Ritva swallowed. That was: It hurts, mother, it hurts! Sometimes there was only one last gift to give a friend.
Astrid went quickly to one knee. Her left hand cradled the girl’s head to position it, and she bent to kiss her gently on the forehead despite the spray of blood coughed into her face. The motion hid the sweep of her hand as she drew a long slender knife from her right boot, and it moved in a swift precise thrust. Then she kissed the still form’s forehead again, closed the staring eyes and stood, wiping a sleeve over her face to clear her eyes and sliding her knife and sword carefully through the crook of her elbow to clean them before she sheathed the steel. A friend laid Condis’ sword on her body and folded her hands on the hilt.
“Go in peace, Bride of Valor,” Astrid said; that was what Con and dis meant. “Wait for us, in the silent halls of the Uttermost West. It will not be long.”
Then she raised her head. Members of the raiding party were already rushing past her towards the stairs, with bundles of arrows and glass globes full of clingfire. A dull ringing sounded where a padlock was being pounded off a door by a sledge; the upper stories of this building were kept locked as storage. Immediately afterwards there was a rushing thunder of boots on metal treads.
Ritva’s eyes went up too. The flat roof above would be either the platform for escape, or the last place she would ever see.
“Tolo a nin,” Astrid said. “Gwaenc!”
Ritva translated. “Come with me. Let’s go!”
Martin Thurston looked up as he rode through Boise’s gate. The signal heliograph on the northwesternmost of the four towers was snapping, repeating a message as a request for clarification. The gathering clouds made it dim, thunderheads towering from black bases up to cream-white and then turned crimson by the westering sun. Something within him would have noticed the beauty of it once, if only in passing.
Nothing is nothing nothing now. Bits and bits that flake off and spin down and down and nothing is nothing and that is very good.
The signal was faint, not enough sunlight striking the mirrors, but then someone touched off the limelight. High above, hydrogen and oxygen and wood alcohol sprayed out of nozzles onto a stick of pure quicklime. A few seconds, and the light blinked brightly again. Martin frowned. He knew Morse as well as he read English, and the message was being sent in the clear; the identification number was a relay station well north of the city. And . . .
“Blimp?” someone said. “There aren’t any blimps.”
“There is the Curtis LeMay,” Martin said.
“But that flying white elephant and all its gear were decommissioned and broken up and sold for scrap after Wendell!”
“Perhaps not,” Thurston said.
He could feel things moving in his mind. Like fish under water, or worms in earth. Some part of him was astonished at the de
tached curiosity of the other part as it considered the sensation.
“Things were confused just then. Paperwork could have been misfiled by traitors within our ranks. Message, maximum priority, all weapons emplacements on wall and citadel. Fire on the blimp. Incendiary rounds authorized. Category A mission rules of engagement, execute immediately.”
Another man grunted. Category A meant ignore collateral damage.
A panting messenger approached, letting his bicycle fall. A Natpol, wheezing and red faced. Shields blocked his way as he bent over, holding himself and gasping.
“Sir!” he shouted, over the ten yards. “Sir, we have a situation!”
“Let him through,” Martin said.
They did, though two pila-points touched the back of his neck. By then he had his breath back, a little.
“Mr. President, there’s an incident at Aladdin’s Emporium. Sir, your wife was . . . is there, with your son and mother and sisters. Sir, it’s enemy specops forces and Mormon terrorists. They appear to have hostages, sir. Your family.”
Part of the sweat on the man’s face was sheer terror. Martin could feel the rage that would have flowed through him, even taste it, something like sucking on rusty iron. But the emotion chased itself around in a circle, like a hamster on a wheel at the other end of a reversed telescope. There if he needed it, but not really part of him.
“Nothing,” he said.
Everyone was looking at him. He could use the responses that mighthave-been.
“Nothing can be gained by panic,” he went on; it was what he would have said.
“Centurion Leiston, another maximum priority message. Launch gliders from all fields within reach.”
The man was in his late twenties, one of Martin’s inner circle; he looked up at the weather, calculated the risks, and nodded brusquely before dictating quickly to messengers who dashed off at the run. The ruler of Boise went on: “That blimp is not to escape under any circumstances. Category A rules of engagement. Do it.”
He turned his head. “Legate Koburg. The first auxilia of light infantry, I want some missile troops. And the rest of the Sixth.”
Martin drew his saber. “Sixth Battalion. Follow me!”
The men had heard the Natpol’s news. They roared their anger as they swung in behind his horse and began to double-time down the pavement in a slamming unison. Thunder flickered across the northern horizon, no louder than their feet.
“We’ll hold them as long as we can,” Nystrup said. “They can’t get at us more than two or three at a time in the stairwells. As man is, God was; as God is, so we shall be. Get going! Use what we’ve done. Make it count.”
Astrid raised her sword into a salute, and turned. The Rangers followed her, each giving an instant to the same gesture. Ritva leaned against the stairwell wall for a moment after they had trotted upward for a while, wheezing. Even the light armor of her mail-lined jerkin felt like iron bands around her chest for a moment. There was nothing on Arda that drained you like fighting. Not practice, not the hardest labor, nothing. After the clear madness was past you paid for what you’d done to yourself.
“You OK?” Ian asked in a throaty rasp, the sort of voice you got when you’d been screaming war cries for a while.
His had been: Maintain the Right!
“Sure,” she said, taking another deep breath. “Just reaction. I’ve got my friends with me, what more do I need?”
They pushed up the last stretch of stairwell and out onto the flat roof with its rusted ventilators. The air was colder than she’d expected on an August evening, cold and with a feeling of chill beneath that. Black clouds were piling up above. Dúnedain ohtar had lit green smoke flares at each corner of the roof and then those of them still hale knelt behind the low coping at the edge, bundles of arrows at hand. Ritva and Ian did likewise; he looked down and murmured: “High enough.”
They looked at each other gravely; that meant high enough for a final leap, if worse came to worst. Then motion caught her eye.
“Troops here!” she shouted, and it was echoed moments later from all four sides of the building.
The Boise soldiers were moderate-sized dolls from four tall stories up; she could hear voices and make out words when someone shouted. They seemed to be crossbowmen in mail shirts mostly, arriving first on bicycles and then stacking them and taking up firing positions; then regular infantry, hundreds of them, tramping at the double. That drowned out the voices, until they came to a halt with an earthquake stamp.
An officer stood forth, and raised a speaking-trumpet to his mouth. “Terrorists!” the amplified voice blared. “You are surrounded by overwhelming force! There is no escape! Surrender!”
Ritva grinned. Ian chuckled. “There’s a flaw in his logic,” the man from Drumheller said.
She raised her face and shouted back to point it out: “If you’re so overwhelming, yrch, come up and make us surrender!”
From the stir and growl along the serried ranks of eagle-and-thunderbolt shields, they wanted to do just that. Astrid came up behind the pair, with the Thurstons. The growl grew louder.
“There’s blood on the face of the President’s sister!” the officer shouted, and there was genuine rage in his voice. “We demand she be given medical attention immediately, or you’ll be a week dying!”
Astrid had a speaking-trumpet of her own; it had been a good bet that they’d need one at some point in this mission.
“It isn’t her blood, good sir,” she said, loud but not shouting. “Fighting is messy.”
She handed her canteen to Cecile Thurston, who poured water on a handkerchief and wiped her daughter’s face; that had the added virtue of getting rid of the drying tear-tracks.
“I’m fine, see?” the girl called. “We’re all OK, Mom and Janie and little Lawrence. And Juliet,” she added as an afterthought.
Ritva and Ian grinned at each other; there wasn’t much love lost there. The girl looked as if she would go on, but Astrid murmured softly to her: “No, not yet. Too risky.”
Ritva felt a chill. That was the measure of Martin Thurston’s damnation; he’d staged his coup to make his son heir to power, and now there was a real risk he would order his family silenced to protect that power.
And there was Martin Thurston himself, standing impassively with his red-white-and-blue crested helmet under one arm and his strong handsome dark face turned upward. Ritva’s string-fingers itched; it was so tempting to try to pick him off . . . win half the war at a stroke . . .
No. The Cutters have their luck too. Those men by him could put their shields over him in half a second.
He stretched out a hand and the officer put the speaking-trumpet into it. The sky was mostly overcast now; Ritva smelled damp dust, and felt a single cold drop flick her cheekbone. That made her suddenly aware of her own thirst. While she was drinking the tepid but infinitely delicious water from her own canteen, Eilir came up and Signed, cautiously turning her back so that nobody below could see. ASL was fairly common among Mackenzies and all Dúnedain knew it, but that wasn’t to say someone down there might not have some knowledge of the visual language.
The blimp should have launched some time ago. We have forty-five minutes until rendezvous, but that was the conservative still-air estimate, before the wind picked up so much. It’ll be earlier, now. No way of knowing exactly how much.
Astrid nodded and turned her eyes back to the street. Martin Thurston spoke; there was something about his voice that put Ritva’s teeth on edge, unless that was just her own knowledge of the man coloring perception.
“What do you demand for the return of my family unharmed?” he said, iron in his tone.
“Nothing!” Astrid called back, joy bubbling in hers but sternly controlled.
Yup, this is definitely a high point for Aunt Astrid. She really lives for this stuff. It is scary, I mean, I’m getting a rush about it now and then but I’m only doing it because it really needs to be done and you might as well enjoy an adventure if you’re g
oing to do it anyway, being glum doesn’t help anything. Hunting’s as much rush as I really want, or riding a fast horse, or a glider or a sailboat, or sparring, or sex and wine and listening to poetry. But with Auntie, it’s like she’s reading it in the Histories at the same time that she’s doing it and we’re Lúthien going into Angbad to rescue Beren. She’ll make a really cranky old lady someday.
Astrid went on: “We are here to rescue these ladies and their children, not to harm them. We will not threaten or hurt them, nor shield behind them, under any circumstances whatsoever, though it cost our lives.”
Ritva shivered. There was a mad splendor to Astrid Loring-Larsson at that moment, as wisps of her pale hair floated around her blood-spattered face and her moon-shot eyes looked at something beyond the world of common day. Something that frightened you and made you long for it at the same time. It was the feeling you got when the sun went down and for a moment the clouds turned into a golden unknown archipelago of islands in the sky, along a glittering sea road to the infinite.
“How do you intend to keep them, then?” Martin asked.
“By our swords, our courage, and our luck,” Astrid said. “Artos and Montival!”
The General-President handed the trumpet back to his retainer, turned on his heel and walked towards the building. Men followed him, and then Ritva couldn’t see them at all.
Martin looked around the sidewalk, shattered glass crunching under his boots, then walked into the room. Someone had put up a couple of bright lanterns, and the light flickered over bodies and blood and jewels; the air was rank with the coppery stink that happened when men bled out. The darker dung heap stinks weren’t as strong; when armored men fought you didn’t often get cut-open bellies. The killing wounds were usually to the head and neck and limbs, or deep narrow stabs. He looked at the arrows scattered around or standing in the dead; men were loading the fallen and a few living wounded onto stretchers.
“About sixty of the enemy, give or take half a dozen,” he said, an intent look on his brown face. “And they’re down about a quarter of that, counting the badly wounded they’ll have.”
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 39
