After that they all settled down and waited. Ingolf chewed on a couple of slices of dried apple to keep his blood sugar up, and did silent exercises to keep himself supple, setting muscle against muscle without moving. The inevitable bugs of summer woods near a river he just ignored; that went with the job, and he’d been doing it since he was seven and his father first took him out after deer.
An hour later he began to worry.
He could just see the North Star and the Dipper from here, between the leaves of two cottonwoods, and he lined them up and did the trick. Draw a line through from the North Star to the two top stars of the Dipper, treat that as the hand of a clock, add an hour for every thirty days after March 7, double the figure and subtract it from twenty-four. That gave you the time, and he made it oh three hundred hours give or take. Which was much later than the signal was supposed to come.
Something had gone wrong.
He was worried, but not very surprised. This was a big complex plan, and in his experience those never went off perfectly. You were ahead if they worked at all. The only reassuring thing about it was that if nothing happened, they could just go back the way they came and let the regular infantry and the engineers and artillerists get on with the siege while they drank a toast to the memories of Cole Salander and Alyssa Larsson.
As long as we get back before dawn, unless we want a catapult bolt up the ass on the way out. And dawn comes early this time of year.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
City of Boise
(formerly southern Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 26th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
Cole Salander knew he was going to die. He supposed it was something to do it with your sword in your hand and facing the thing that killed you, though right now he’d have settled for “in bed, asleep, at seventy-five.” Alyssa would have to look after herself, which was a damn-
“Break left!”
Cole went down on the pavement in an automatic dive, landing on his forearms with the sword laid on its flat so he wouldn’t cut himself on it, which was appallingly easy to do.
Tung-snap!
The arrowhead started to follow him, then came back up, then released to arch out into the darkness over the rooftops as a crossbow bolt sprouted in the center of the archer’s chest. Cole heard it strike very clearly, the metallic ping of the mail links breaking mingling with the hard crackle of bone as it sank to the fletching. It must have cut the spine as well, because he went over as limp as a sack of grain, thudded to the pavement and lay leaking from nose and mouth.
Two more crossbows snapped less than a second later, there was the crisp sound of steel hitting tallow-treated boiled leather, and the other Cutter horseman gave a hoarse grunt and fell. He was still sprattling and trying to choke out a shout despite having a couple of twenty-two-inch bolts crisscross through his torso; a man was surprisingly hard to kill quickly unless you got lucky. Alyssa darted in, her hand moved in the darkness, and the man gave a final jerk and lay still.
That little knife was sharp.
Cole rolled back to his feet. “Glad to see you, Captain Wellman, sir,” he said to the officer, sheathing his sword-there was a trick to doing that without looking-and standing at parade rest again.
’Cause it would sort of sound odd to say that I’m glad you didn’t trust me and followed me to see what the hell I was doing.
The camouflage jackets and pants were unmistakable Special Forces issue, plus he knew all the faces. Sergeant Halford was standing there too; he had a crossbow in his hands and his brown face was absolutely blank as he worked the cranking lever, clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-click. The half-dozen troopers behind him were also. .
Giving me the hairy eyeball. It’s pretty obvious I was fibbing just a bit in my report at this point. . lying like a rug made out of dead fish, actually. . and these are all guys who’ve been with the Captain for a long time. I noticed that when he picked them to come in.
Wellman nodded. “Maybe you’ll be glad,” he said, which was a little ominous.
Garcia and Jones had already gone for the horses, slinging their weapons and getting the animals under control with practiced gentleness.
“You know where to take them?” Wellman asked.
“Sure, sir,” Garcia said. “My uncle Larry’s butcher shop is only a couple of blocks away and he won’t ask any questions.”
I’ll bet he won’t, Cole thought.
Politics aside, civilians in Boise were already down to a ration of a quarter-pound of meat every second day per adult. The city hadn’t been properly provisioned before the Montivallan armies closed in, another symptom of the way things had broken down. And the High King’s men had carefully herded every possible Boisean and Cutter soldier into the city, to put more strain on the supplies.
“He sells hamburgers as a sideline,” Garcia went on.
“Can he handle the bodies, too? That won’t cause questions?”
“Sure thing, sir. They’re really terrible hamburgers even when the city’s not cut off, so I don’t think anyone will notice.”
Halford made a grinding noise, and Garcia went on hastily:
“Sorry, sir. Yes, he can hide them under his manure heap. That was my job before I got called up-it was why I reenlisted for the Special Forces instead of going home. Believe me, nobody looks there until the compost guy comes with his wagon.”
“Which with the city under siege isn’t going to happen soon. See to it and rendezvous at the safe house soonest.”
The squad extracted the bolts and found Cole’s where it had stuck in a wall-that was essential because they were easy to identify. The two men detailed to the job took the blanket rolls strapped behind the saddles, wrapped the corpses so they wouldn’t leak-cursing mildly when the wool cloth proved to be most certainly hopping with fleas and probably lousy-and heaved them over the horses’ backs, and walked off looking official. Two other men had taken the dead Cutters’ canteens, and emptied them to dilute the stains.
“I take it you’re not actually named Maria Hernandez, or from Corvallis?” Wellman said to Alyssa while the cleanup went on.
“No, Captain, I’m not,” she said coolly.
She’d wiped the holdout knife on the dead man’s pants and slid it back into the leather sheath sewn into her collar, but there was a splash of blood down her right forearm. She was rubbing her left in the elastic bandage and flat splints.
“You OK?” Cole asked.
“No compound fracture. Yet,” she said.
“Follow,” Wellman said.
The rest of the squad grouped around Cole and Alyssa; he noted that they were bracketing the two without being obvious about it, and from the way she flicked her eyes so did she.
“Ah, sir, it’s a long story but I have something time-critical to do-” Cole said.
“When we’re out of view, corporal,” Wellman said. “You can give me the condensed version of why you’re trying to let someone else’s army into Boise.”
Well, that explains the maybe you’ll be glad to see me part, Cole thought. On the other hand, he’s obviously not just following orders himself, what with killing those two Cutters who were about to do us.
He was sweating a little when they reached the safe house-which was a bunch of substantial three-story pre-Change buildings that had been knocked together, plus a former parking lot now surrounded by a twelve-foot wall of salvaged brick with broken glass cemented to the top, and sheet-metal gates. Part of it was a dwelling-place for the owner, and a little lamplight leaked out through shuttered windows. Wellman let them into the courtyard through a smaller door in the larger gates, using a key; the men relaxed-very slightly-when it closed behind them.
And a little more when they turned away from the dwelling-house into another section of the U-shaped complex. Inside they made sure the shutters were closed before Halford raised the glass chimney of a lantern, lit the wick from his l
ighter and turned the knob down. The yellow light showed shadowy glimpses of big open rooms with treadle-worked sewing machines and piles of cloth, in bolts or laid out over patterns on long cutting tables, and racks of spools of thread and sacks of buttons and pine boxes of finished product. From the olive-gray color and the shapes and the familiar slightly musky lanolin smell of coarse linsey-woolsey he guessed that in daytime they would be busy with seamstresses making uniforms on government contract.
Yeah, I heard the Captain’s older brother lives in Boise and is something big in cloth, Cole recalled.
Buying raw materials from people who grew flax or kept flocks, spinning it all in a water-powered mill in some convenient location, supplying looms to folks on credit, then buying back the bolts from the weavers and dyeing and finishing the product at his home-place, the usual system. You could make a lot of money that way, certainly a hell of a lot more than a Captain’s pay. Though he didn’t know anyone except their kin who actually liked putting-out merchant clothiers. Well, except by contrast with bankers. And even their blood relatives. .
There was supposed to be some sort of quarrel between them, but family is family and kinfolk stick together at a pinch.
Sergeant Halford set the lantern down on a table and stood at Wellman’s right with his hand on his swordhilt as the officer seated himself.
“Henson, Malurski, Jens, you’re on perimeter,” he said.
Captain Wellman leaned back and looked at the two quasi-prisoners, sighing and rubbing a hand over his balding head; he was around forty, about Cole’s height but whip-thin and wiry, with tired-looking green eyes. The other two Special Forces troopers weren’t exactly pointing loaded crossbows at Cole and Alyssa. But then again they weren’t exactly not pointing them, either.
“OK, let’s hear it, corporal,” he said. “As you said, time’s a-wasting.”
Cole exchanged a quick look with Alyssa and gave him the real story.
Well, no need to go into all the details just yet, he thought, skipping over the bit where the Mackenzie fiosaiche had sent him to sleep and simply saying they’d caught him.
There was no way around the part about his being turned into an involuntary assassin, though: his tongue stumbled at that, simply because words weren’t adequate, and he still struggled with a flux of involuntary rage when he thought of it. Not to mention a deep-in-the-belly cold wash of fear. Halford made a skeptical sound, and Wellman stopped him with a gesture.
“Remember the one we. . sent on, sergeant? That Seeker?”
From the noncom’s grimace, he did, and not fondly.
“Yes, sir. I’ve seen a lot of men die but nobody that slowly when they should have been gone already.”
“Had to hold him below the surface of that latrine with a pole for what was it, five God-damned minutes, as I recall.”
“Seemed longer, sir. Particularly considering how hard I hit him to begin with.”
“It eroded my natural skepticism a little. Not as much as seeing what Corporal Salander says he saw would, but a bit.”
Wellman turned those tired, sharp eyes on Cole again.
“So you’re going to let the enemy into the city?” he said a few minutes later, his face flatly unreadable.
“Captain, the Cutters are the enemy, and they’re already in the city. And three-quarters of the army around Boise are our own people. The rest are Mackenzies and Bearkillers, mostly,” he went on. “They’re disciplined troops, they’re not going to sack the place.”
“Bearkillers are very well disciplined,” Alyssa said. “That’s what I am, by the way. There aren’t any Associates within a day’s march of Boise right now-Rudi. . His Majesty. . is keeping them out of the picture because he knows they’re unpopular. Not that the Grand Constable would let them get out of hand. Basically Frederick Thurston is running the siege.”
Cole went on: “I’ve met Fred Thurston, sir, and I trust him to keep his word, and he’s promising strict order and a general amnesty except for specific crimes, and a free election.”
“And what does King Artos say to that?”
There was an official poster not far away, showing a bad artist’s conception of Rudi Mackenzie in plate armor, flogging emaciated serfs pulling a wagon. The way things had been since the old general died and Martin Thurston took over, you were well-advised to buy the latest and stick them up. You never knew if someone was reporting to the NatPols. .
“Well, he says that’s exactly what he wants too, sir, and he’s said it publicly. It’s his policy that every member of the High Kingdom gets full internal autonomy. Boise won’t be part of Montival unless we decide that on our own in a plebiscite, and we’re to be completely self-governing with our own laws within our borders as of the old general’s death if we vote yes. And I believe him too, sir. He’s. . well, he’s. . quite impressive. Sir.”
Unexpectedly, Wellman smiled slightly. “That’s what the old general said, too, about Rudi Mackenzie,” he said. “He met the young man a couple of years ago, just before he died himself at the battle of Wendell. I wasn’t there for that. Maybe if I’d been at Wendell I could have saved. . never mind. Go ahead.”
“I mean, hell, I intend to vote for Fred Thurston, and to vote for joining Montival,” Cole said bluntly. “Assuming I live that long. The old general wanted to reunite the country, but he couldn’t. Montival, the High Kingdom. . well, it’s not the way he wanted to do it, but it’s going to be a great big chunk reunited, with some of the same stuff he was for. No more fighting our neighbors, for starters. Freedom of religion, and I sure as s. . shoot know the Cutters don’t have that in mind. And no slavery allowed-”
He jerked his head at the poster. “I mean, that’s complete bullshit, sir. Everyone in Montival can move if they want to-it’s one of the few laws that they have that applies everywhere. Which is also something the Cutters don’t have in mind, they don’t even call their slaves something different like they do in some places, they just outright call ’em slaves. Apart from all that thing about how half the human race are Spawn of the Nephilim stuff and it’s abomination if women wear pants and who knows what else.”
Wellman closed his eyes for a moment. “You know,” he went on quietly, “I stayed in the Army because of Lawrence Thurston. I never did trust Martin or the men around him, but I didn’t want to believe his own son would. .”
“Captain Wellman, I talked to the First Lady. . I mean the old General’s wife. . hell, I talked to Martin’s wife. They agreed that Martin killed the old general in the confusion at Wendell to cover up his coup; and that he was. . changed, somehow. After he met Sethaz, the Prophet. He went from being an ordinary evil son-of-a-bitch to. . something else.”
“Yeah, I noticed that,” Wellman said dryly. Then he shook his head: “Witches, spells, prophecies, red-headed kings with magic swords. . Christ. What’s next, dragons? And I never even liked playing D amp;D.”
Silence fell for about three minutes while Cole searched his memory for the obscure ancient reference to distract himself from the way the time stretched out. Then Wellman sighed again and looked at Sergeant Halford.
“Jack?” he said, startling everyone by using the man’s first name.
That seemed to be some sort of signal; Halford’s face lost its military stiffness for a moment.
“Kid’s right,” he said. “Time to get it over with.”
“You’ve got a point,” Wellman said, turning back to Cole. “There’s only one way this war is going to end, anyway; let’s get it done before the country gets ripped up any worse than it has. Where is this place?”
Cole exchanged another look with Alyssa, and she nodded slightly. They weren’t supposed to tell anyone, but it was the only way to pull this off.
He gave the directions. Wellman grinned, this time a mirthless carnivore expression.
“Just in case you hadn’t noticed, corporal, there’s a Cutter observation post on the roof of that building.”
Cole gulped; he hadn’t.
/> Wellman went on: “But hey, sneaking around is supposed to be what Special Forces do, right? Let’s go do it.”
• • •
Mary got within six paces of Ingolf before he realized she was there. He didn’t start, which must have disappointed her, but she silently touched his forearm and moved her fingers in front of his eyes:
Come.
He followed, slowly-there just wasn’t any other way to move quietly in woods at night, especially unfamiliar woods. He did start when something the size of a medium dog scurried away noisily through the underbrush with a crackling and rustling; probably a raccoon. It didn’t have to do anything but run like hell, a desire which he viewed with profound sympathy. Up from the edge of the river the trees were smaller and scrubby, grown up since the Change except for a few that had been planted in the old days for shade and ornament. The only thing left of buildings was a few snags of wall. .
And the Dúnedain leaders were grouped around one of those, unmistakable from the sketches at the briefing. Ingolf came up and went down on one knee; the others were too, or making like snakes on their bellies-this was only a hundred yards from the wall, although when you looked back you saw that there was artfully arranged dead ground most of the way to the river. Cole Salander was there, and Alyssa Larsson, neither of whom he’d expected to see alive again, deep down. And a man he didn’t recognize, in Boise’s Special Forces summer camouflage uniform. That wasn’t part of the plan; the two were supposed to guide the assault force in by themselves.
As he came close he heard Alleyne Loring say something in Sindarin, his mellifluous aristo-English accent obvious even through the alien syllables. The only other one like it Ingolf had ever heard was Alleyne’s elderly father, and it had made some old books he’d read make more sense. Alyssa answered abruptly and in English:
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 18
