Saber and Shadow

by S. M. Stirling

  She had awe for the sheer daunting effect that reduced the people at its foot to less than ants, and the ages of worship, living, dying, and pain that soaked every stone in its construction. It made her homesick for the agelessness of the Goddess’s steppe and mountains; as old as the world and scoured by wind and rain, not by priests. In them was no twistedness. And a small voice in the back of her mind snidely asked what all that gilding would bring. Her eyes and all her senses were fixed on the dome, and she paid little attention to the fact that they had alighted. To build such a thing, its roots must reach back into centuries of belief in their God.

  “Gods!”

  Shkai’ra nodded. “I didn’t speak for half a day, the first time I saw it.” She looked around. The crowd was dense, with little swirls of tension erupting around a fight, or a speaker, as the mass swirled to pack itself around the broad steps of the building. “Let’s get a good vantage point.”

  A pickpurse laid a hand on her pouch. Without turning she grabbed his wrist, locked it, and wrenched the shoulder out of its socket with a twist. Looking up, she saw clouds piled over the city, hot gold towering up into the sky.

  “In fact, something tells me that it would be better off this pavement,” she said, with a slight tone of worry. “Let’s move, kh’eeredo—I want some height.” She slanted off toward a building that formed one corner of the square, making liberal use of her elbows and knees and the hilt of her sheathed saber. Megan moved in her wake, partly in the space she cleared, partly using the vicious minor tricks one of her size had perforce to learn. She looked up at Shkai’ra’s back with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.

  They turned into a sidestreet, edged toward a wall where it was easier to push against the squareward current, then climbed three flights of stairs past terracotta moldings to a wineshop set in the third story of the office building. Megan darted ahead, to be met by a majordomo with arrogantly raised brows.

  He looked down on her in every sense of the word, then up to Shkai’ra. She stood with her head slightly to one side, regarding him with detached curiosity. Both women were obvious outlanders, and their tunics no more than modestly rich. There was dust on their feet; he was conscious of the sweat that plastered the thin linen to the tall one’s breasts, and the smell of her, like a horse that had been pulling a cart in the sun.

  “This shop is full,” he said, in an affected upper-class Fehinnan, using forms new to Megan’s recently acquired knowledge of the dialect. “Doubtless there are those who will welcome your custom, down by the docks.”

  Megan bristled. Shkai’ra smiled. At least, her lips came back from her teeth as she stretched an arm over the other woman and laid a hand on the head servant’s shoulder. The long fingers dug in, putting pressure on the nerve bundles; the muscles stood out in her forearm and shoulder and the thick pad around her wrist that told of daily saber drill for most of her twenty-eight years.

  “My arm!” he gasped.

  “Not for long,” Shkai’ra said cheerfully. With her other hand she dug a piece of silver tradewire out of her pouch. “Now, about the table? The corner one, next the window?”

  The mugs of the thick, rather lumpy corn beer of Fehinna arrived quite quickly. The crowd around them were mostly robed and shaven-pated; in the white of the lay bureaucracy, or the orange of the temple. Ostentatiously, they ignored the intruders in their midst; they would have been offended to discover that these heeded them not at all.

  “I really dislike people like that,” Shkai’ra said, looking back at the door. “Something tells me ... ah!” Shkai’ra went on, shading her eyes against the glare and staring across the vastness of the square to the knot of figures who had appeared on the temple steps. Even at this distance, the burnished steelplate armor of one was obvious. “General-Commander Smyna Caaituh’s-kin, wearing the price of a thousand acres on her back. And see the ones in cloth-of-gold? Priests and high-ranking acolytes. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a riot, with the announcement they’re going to make. They must want to break a few heads, chase the shaaid back to Low Town.”

  Out in the square the crowd was gathering, clotting into a brownish-grey mass before the steps and the main entrance. A thin line of guards knelt and faced the crowd, their spear points a string of order across the front of its chaos, separating them from the building and the lords. The sound of feet and voices was a surf throb across the stone-paved expanse. Here and there a voice raised to call on the name of the current Avatar of the God.

  “Quite a few shaaid,” Megan said.

  Shkai’ra thought, looked at her outstretched fingers and glanced down at her toes in her sandals. “Perhaps ... five tens of thousands,” she said. It was an impressive number; there were not that many adults in the whole Kommanz of Granfor, but even so the crowd did not fill the whole of Temple Square. A broad, vaguely wedge-shaped blot spread out from the main entrance to end crowded against the fringing buildings at their feet, but to the left and right the mass thinned into individuals.

  The glittering figures on the upper tier of steps were addressing the crowd below; a barrel-chested herald with a megaphone relayed the speech to the mob, who were not taking it well, from the stirring and buzzing that rippled across the sea of heads.

  Megan frowned.

  Shkai’ra shrugged, sighing into the sweet beer. This was one thing she had never learned to like about Fehinna: her own people brewed their beer from barley, and imported hops. “Who knows why they’re doing it exactly this way. Politicians and priests are no less prone to making mistakes than other folk.” She finished the mug, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and signaled for another; it had been a hot day. “New taxes, that means a new project. War, perhaps. There were rumors of it to the south, as I worked my way up from the Kahab Sea. But then, there always are; the neighbor states have been staring at Fehinna like rabbits at a weasel since the Penza stopped being a power, when the Maleficent died.”

  She propped her chin on one hand. “Expensive, if they mean it. Of course, the merchant princes would have to pay for most of it, which the landowners wouldn’t mind, and they dominate the Righteous Sword. Smyna’s poisonous as a whipsnake, but no fool: I found that out when I was an officer in the irregulars. Not like her to let a crowd of city rabble get this big or ugly ... ssssssa!”

  The priests and generals had finished their address, and the crowd made its response, an animal noise that raised the hackles on Shkai’ra’s neck with an odd, atavistic thrilling. Starvation itself makes humans passive. They creep away to die, quite quietly; once the initial hunger is done there is only an increasing lassitude. But the fear of famine, among those who have lived on its edge all their lives, is another matter. The crowd became a mob. Shkai’ra had seen single shaaids clubbed to death with hardly an effort to escape. But the mob poured up the steps, reaching for its tormentors with a hundred thousand arms.

  “Now,” Megan said calmly, closing her eyes for a long moment, “there will be a great killing. Of who depends on how clever those priests were.” Her hands tightened on the cup and she looked away, unable to close her ears. She saw Shkai’ra watching, fascinated, as if it were a puppet play, and forced her eyes back to the square. She did not want to appear weak to the other woman.

  Shkai’ra sensed the tension in her. This was altogether more serious than she had anticipated. There was no personal danger, but ...

  Around the curve of the temple came a thunder of drums, and even against the roaring of voices it rolled irresistibly. The grandees and their guards filed backward into the temple, and the doors swung shut with soundless power as counterweights levered. The two women could see the crowd recoil from the direction of the sound, or try to. Above their heads appeared a line of bright oblongs, sun-flared: pikepoints, a block five hundred pikes long and six deep, in perfect geometrical alignment.

  “This will be a massacre,” Megan whispered, eyes locked on the shining steel, a memory of a riot echoing in her head, wondering how many parents ha
d brought their children to the square that day.

  Shkai’ra nodded. “Not much doubt of who, either,” she said, and grimaced slightly. “Wasteful. Watch. About ... now.” Her curiosity was detached; unlike most Kommanza, she cared for those close to her, but empathy on a larger scale was not a quality one of her breed could easily learn.

  Across the square came a megaphone-amplified voice. The phalanx had pivoted on the great building, the outermost ranks double-timing. Now it faced the mob like a solid bar, motionless.

  “PIKEPOINTS—DOWN!”

  A long smooth ripple, as the first four ranks of eighteen-foot polearms came down and halted, staggered to present a row of points. From either side of the rigid columns of the pikes, men and women in light armor ran forward to kneel in ranks of their own, under the sharp-honed protection.

  The crowd surged forward, then back, eddying along the row of foot-long metal points; the four edges of each pile-shaped pikehead blinked, blinding bright. Suddenly there was a flurry; a ragged figure rushed in to chop at the heft of a pike with an ax.

  The next four pikes jabbed forward and back in vicious darts, quick as a trout’s snap at a fly, drawing free dark and wet. Megan, taking a pull at the sweet frothy beer, gagged at the ruthless efficiency of that; too familiar, like the full impaling poles in the Great Market at home. The spitted body rose, passed backward over the soldiers from row to row on the polearms, limp and dangling twenty feet above the pavement. The troopers stood motionless under the spatter of blood and fluids from the grisly bundle, and even from here she could sense the unchanging mask of their expressions. Like the Dragon’s Guard, or Arkan Mahid; all mad. All with dead eyes. She looked down, away from the square.

  “Are they fanatics?” she asked, finally.

  “Nearly,” Shkai’ra replied. “Those are lifetime regulars. The Bounding Marshcats Advancing Fearless Against the Foe, Protected by the Glorious Light. Or the Bouncing Kitties, as the other regiments call them, behind their backs.”

  The amplified voice boomed from the square.

  “DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. TO YOUR KENNELS, SHAAIDS!” The tone was bored, the accent a peculiar lisping drawl that the mob recognized: Gaaimun speech, the dialect of the aristocracy.

  The crowd snarled, a chilling basso growl. They ran forward, or the rear of the huge mass did, pushing those in front toward the line of steel, the front trying to push backward or just hold their ground. For a moment the pikes stabbed, flicking like knitting needles. The bolt-gunners knelt, stock-still.

  “AIM!”

  The weapons came to shoulders.

  “READY!”

  A thousandfold click.

  “LOOSE!”

  Repeating bolt-guns: they would fire as often as the triggers were pulled, with six-round magazines; those would penetrate two naked bodies before lodging in a third, or even the best armor at close range. Six thousand bolts were fired in thirty seconds, and the endless twanging of the strings was matched by a multifold thumping, like wet hands slapping fresh liver.

  “ADVANCE!”

  The drums spoke, the pikes moved forward. The killing machine of Fehinna walked, and nothing was left behind it but the dead. Megan’s eyes flickered to Shkai’ra. The Kommanza was frowning. She swallowed and forced herself to lean back, casually.

  The missile troops paused to crank the springs of their bolt-guns and collect bolts. Below, the limestone pavement was awash with red, thick trickles of it running from the long windrow of bodies where the bolts had struck, smaller streams from the thick scattering of shaaids piked as the phalanx advanced across the square. Some of those were still stirring. Under the monotonous thunder of the drums, the sound of the mob had changed. It was higher pitched now, more like the monstrous wailing of a giant child.

  Around them the clerks were pasty-faced, their gaze fixed on the horror in the square. This had been unexpected, and few of them were as used to the raw salt latrine-and-blood stink of a battlefield as Megan or Shkai’ra.

  The edges of the crowd below frayed as people ran for the exits to the square, pulling wounded kin with them, or trying to run carrying an inert body. Megan looked away again imagining she could see tears on those distant faces.

  Over the milling slaughteryard below a trumpet spoke, high and sweet. With it came the sound of hooves. Behind the first line of pikes another row of steel points appeared, these still bright, many trailing brightly colored ribbons.

  “Wasteful. But then with so many, lives are counted cheaply,” Shkai’ra said. The ranks of the pikes swung open, ponderous and smooth, like some gigantic door moving on greased bearings. The lancer company sat their horses as if carved, until the order rang out.

  “READY!”

  The lance butts came out of their buckets and came down as the riders locked them under armpits. The remains of the mob, trapped in the open area of the square, milled and screamed and clawed the locked portals of the temple itself. They spread away from the death facing them, running. In the center of the square, a child looked up and ceased pulling at one of the bodies lying like a bundle of rags in the blood.

  “Perhaps we should pay and get out of here?” Megan said quietly, holding down her gorge.

  “CHARGE!”

  It began as a clattering. It built to an endless roar of hooves as the sound echoed and reechoed on stone. The dead and wounded were pulped under the stony avalanche; only one or two of the war-trained destriers balking at the uncertain footing. The lancers swept through the bulk of the mob, then the shafts were broken, or left jammed in bone, and the swords came out, bright and long.

  “That’s a good idea, I think. This is getting completely out of hand.” The Kommanza turned and waved for the waiter, who ignored her, eyes on the square, knuckles white as he clutched the edge of the screen where he stood.

  “You know? The priests will grind the bodies up and feed them to the gaspits,” Shkai’ra said. “Not that I’m surprised the shaaids were ready to riot. Death so casually handed down by decree was too much—stupid of them to riot here, rather than in their own quarter; all it did was attract more attention.” She paused, a thought spurred by one of Harriso’s comments. “Unless, of course, that was the idea.”

  Megan stared at her. They’re people. She pushed herself away from the table and the other woman. How can you not care?

  From below, over the desperate roar of the crowd, there was a sudden thudding boom.

  Shkai’ra started up. “Baiwun Thunderer hammer me flat for a fool, there’s a door from here out onto the square!”

  “We go up, then.” Megan glanced out the window. The wall was smooth stucco with no ornamentation. “Where are the stairs?” She headed for the door. Her way was blocked by a mob of bureaucrats dropping their napkins and forks and fleeing toward the door, jamming it solidly.

  “Out the door, down to the end of the corridor. The stairwell goes right out to the roof. We can—sheepshit!”

  From below there was a rending crash as the doors gave way, and a long baying roar as the mob poured in, trying to escape the soldiers behind. The wineshop was three stories up, and there was a broad open stairway from the lobby.

  Press of numbers will slow them, Shkai’ra thought. Even more so, now that they’re fleeing in panic rather than attacking. There was a chance, provided they gained the roof quickly; if they stayed here, none. They’d be trampled or taken by the soldiery as shaaid in the confusion.

  She tried to force her way forward, using boots, elbows, butting head. It was useless, and even the edge of her saber failed. She slashed one man’s face, broke another’s collarbone with the hilt, and their neighbors hardly noticed. To the respectable of Illizbuah, an uprising of the shaaid was an ever-present nightmare from childhood, and even the bright metal before their eyes was less terribly.

  Chapter VI

  The doorkeeper was nervous but determined. In Illizbuah, keeper-of-portals was a responsible post, and this was not the first confidential mission she had made. “My master
, Milampo Terhan’s-kin the Enterprising, awaits your reply,” she said.

  The old man bent again over the flowerbed. The yellow of the rhododendrons flared against the creamy white linen of his robe, and a single bee paused to alight on his finger. He brought it close to his eyes and studied the intricate veining of its wings for an instant. “Beautiful,” he murmured. He turned to the messenger.

  “Even now, people of this city are dying at the hands of the Sun-on-Earth’s soldiers, because your master and his kin-in-wealth aroused them to fruitless anger. This would have been a ... disharmonious deed even if the purpose behind it had succeeded. As it is, the position of your master’s enemies is even more secure. Can unwisdom ever be righteous?”

  Around them the courtyard garden spread in sunlit graciousness; not at all what the servant had expected of a notorious sorcerer. Birds fluted in the rich green ivy that covered the brick walls and archways; within, flower-beds, potted trees, and herbs made coolness and shade in the heat of lowland summer. The mage himself might have been any elderly patrician of scholarly bent.

  She straightened her back, courteous and firm. “I am not empowered to negotiate, Honored Wisdom.” She hesitated, then dropped the “Effulgent with the Sun’s Light”; that might not be tactful, in the house of one the temple declared abomination. “However, my master anticipated your reply. He instructed me to point out that many more fives will be lost if the war which is planned comes to pass; directly, and by the famine and pestilence which follow the armies. Also, that the temple will not be satisfied to fleece either the city or the neighbor realms; souls, not gold, are what the Reflection desires.”

  Her voice dropped a register, unconsciously, as she began to quote: “‘With greed I and my kinmates and colleagues can deal. For fanaticism, we require aid.’”