Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  He followed Pels through the trap, went down a steeply slanting ladder to a dusty littered storeroom. Its door was locked, but a quick jab of the autopick took care of that. The EYEs Kumari had run through here reported that there were three sleeping cells, four slaves in one, three in each of the others, ten in all. Seven of them were on his list. If Luck had been a trifle kinder the targets would have been in one room waiting for him, but this was her night to be a bitch.

  While Pels stood guard, he slashed through the bolt and pulled the first door open. “Listen,” he said, “You want out of here? Right. Is there one here…” he looked around; no jajes so he didn’t bother reading those names, “called Roereirein Lyhyt or Ikas Babut se Vroly or Touw se Vroly?”

  “I am Touw se Vroly. Ikas Babut is my mate, he sleeps the next cell over.” She was an attenuated figure with a grace even weariness and the wear of servitude had not yet taken from her. He heard a faint clash as she pushed a pair of armbands up past her elbow, by the pallor of the metal they were silver or platinum. She looked around, caught up a shawl and draped it over her shoulders. “What of the others here?” Her arm bands clashed again as she made a wide curving gesture that took in the other two females in the cell, a Froska and a small shadowy figure with more hair than features.

  He crossed to her, set the pick working on her collar lock. “What I’ll do, I’ll unlock the collars and the other two can stay here or leave by the street door, whichever they prefer. If they want they can give me their names and homeworlds and the names of kin I should notify, or you can do that later if you know them. I can’t take all of you, the skip just won’t hold that many.”

  Next cell. “Ikas Babut se Vroly, Roereirein Lyhyt?” The third in the cell was a Miesashch tetrapod with the jitters, his split hooves tick-tacking aggressively against the floorplanks. “I’ll unlock the collars on all of you. You, despois,” he told the Miesashch, “can stay here or leave by the street door whichever you prefer. If you want you can give me your name and homeworld and the names of kin I should notify. I can’t take more than those on my list, the skip just won’t hold that many.”

  Next cell. “Weggorss Jaje, Otivarty Jaje, Krathyky Jaje, Imagy Jaje? Good. The Bialy Vitr think highly of the Bond Jaje, they have offered one thousand gelders for the return of each lobe of the Bond, there are four Jajes in my camp already, eight thousand in my hands when I set you all down on Helvetia’s pavements. Be assured I shall take very good care of you.”

  There was a spate of whispering among the Jajes, they were using their highest register; the fugitive sounds tickled his ears and gave him the beginnings of a headache. The boldest of the four moved a step toward him, a velvety black female invisible in the twilight inside the cell. “This one is Otivarty Jaje. What is the calling of the Presence who speaks us?”

  “Swardheld Quale, ship Slancy Orza out of Telffer.”

  More whispering. Otivarty stepped away from her Bond again. “The calling is known, the word is acceptable, we will come.”

  Quale started for the storeroom and the ladder, his seven hustling along behind him, anxious to be out of there. Equally anxious, the extra three hurried the shorter distance to the street exit; the Froska had Quale’s cutter, she sliced through the lock tongue and began lifting the bar.

  Pels was in the storeroom already and on his way up the ladder. Quale shooed his herd of ex-slaves through the door and was about to follow when he heard a rumbling mutter, then an exclamation of shock and fear from the Froska as the door was wrenched from her hand and sent crashing against the wall.

  Blankfaced, muttering Hordar came stomping in, hands like claws reaching for the outsiders, mouths open, lips fluted to produce a whistling growl, eyes wide with no one home behind the shine. The extras took one look at them and ran the other way. Quale waved them past him, played his stunner across the front rank of the mob. Five Hordar fell. The Hordar behind them marched over them, stomping heedlessly on them, crushing them.

  “Shit,” he said. “Oh shit.” He slammed the door, reached for a bar that wasn’t there. The door quivered as the Surge crashed against it. He went up the ladder faster than he’d come down it, slammed the trap and yelled at the ex-slaves to help him shove bales on it.

  They got the first bale in place as the trap shuddered and started to rise, rolled another over beside it, then a third. The bales quivered as the Hordar below pounded and shoved at the trap, but they had to stand on the ladder to reach it and couldn’t get enough leverage to shift the weight piled on it. The barrier held.

  Quale scowled at the faces turned hopefully toward him. These Vrolys were both slender, the four Jajes added together wouldn’t make one of him. Lyhyt was vaguely vegetative like Kinok, though not Sikkul Paem; he was broad and tall, but maybe not as massive as he looked. The Froska female wouldn’t take much space and would suffer in silence for pride’s sake, but the Miesashch could be a problem if he panicked. The third from Touw’s cell was a fragile nocturnal whose species Quale didn’t recognize, but she at least looked fairly calm. “Listen,” he said, “I’ll take a chance I can lift off with all of you. It’s a wild gamble, you might be safer finding a place to hide up here where you can ride that mess out…” He broke off, looked up as he heard the tinny clatter of a yizzy.

  A fireball came straight at him. He dived away, rolled over, dived again, rolled behind a stack of crates.

  The second fireball missed him by the width of a hope, splashed on the roof and started it smoldering. The others had scattered almost as quickly, hunting cover, but the inklin didn’t waste more fire on them. The yizzy swept past, went soaring up to the mooring tower; the rider began working on the airships. More yizzies converged on the towers. The airships were as fire safe as chemistry could make them, but with a dozen firethrowers heating them up, even the heavily sized yosscloth was beginning to smoke. Before long the heat would kindle the hydrogen in the ballonets and the conflagration that followed would melt more than the tower.

  While Pels was helping the ten pack themselves into the skip, Quale risked another look over the parapet.

  The street was packed with Hordar moving and breathing as if they were limbs of a single beast. The whole city was coming to press against the Fekkri, the Hordar flowing like a river of ants over the few Tassalgan guards stupid enough to try stopping them. The Surge tore them apart, tore off arms, legs, heads, anything one of the many beasthands could get a grip on. He saw a pair of guards trapped in a doorway trying to shoot themselves clear; pellet guns on automatic, they emptied clips one after another at the mob, the pellets scything across the front ranks, knocking down dozens of men and women. The Surge ignored them, came on without noticing the dead and injured, cast them aside like sloughed skin cells. The guards panicked, tried breaking into the House behind them. They couldn’t get away. The Surge threw off a tendril which flowed after them and pulled them back to the street; it hurled them against a wall, knocked them again and again into the stone, rocked them back and forth under casual undirected blows, it kicked them off their feet and stomped them into stewmeat. The chatter of the guns, the yells of the guards, their final screams were lost in the SOUND coming from the Surge, a hooming howl/growl without words, only a rage so tangible that the hair stood up on Quale’s arms and rose along his spine. He backed away and ran for the skip.

  Pels had got the weight of the passengers distributed as well as he could, but the machine was still dangerously overloaded. Quale eased into the pilot’s seat and punched on the liftfield, cycling it gradually higher as the drives warmed and tried to take hold. They whined and shuddered; after a tense moment when he was sure they weren’t going to bite, the skip lumbered clumsily into the air. He held her an arm’s length off the roof while he tested her handling. She was sluggish and crank, the slightest misjudgment on his part might flip her or send her into a slip and that would be that for all of them. He eased her higher, a hand span at a time, until she was finally high enough to clear the parapet.

&nbs
p; Two yizzies backed away from the siege on the airships and came swooping at them. Quale turned the skip through a wide gentle arc, gradually accelerating, cursing under his breath at the impossibility of losing the inklins fast enough. Pels slid over Touw se Vroly’s lap so he could snap loose Quale’s stunner, which had a longer reach to it than his own. One of the inklins squirted fire at them, but a gust of wind carried it wide. Back in his cubby, Pels bared his tearing teeth, hissed with satisfaction and put that inklin out; he got the second inklin before she could release more fire. The two collapsed in their saddles; strapped in so they didn’t fall, they went drifting off, ignored by guards on the ground and their fellows in the air.

  Quale relaxed and nursed the laboring skip through the city, picking a circuitous route that avoided the taller buildings, the speakers’ minarets, mooring towers, and the like. Below them the Surge went on, spreading from precinct to precinct, leaving death and destruction behind it as it moved.

  Quale brought the skip down slowly, carefully, landing her in a grassy swale between two groves, one a collection of nut-bearers, the other ancient hardwoods. There was a small, stream wandering vaguely westward across the middle of the swale and a tumbledown shelter tucked away under a lightning-split cettem tree still alive and heavy with green nuts. He left Pels and four of the ex-slaves there to wait for his return and took the others to Base.

  He started back at once, reached gul Ukseme shortly before dawn; he circled over the city to see how the Surge had developed. It was very dark, both moons were down and the storm that had threatened at dusk was on the verge of breaking. No yizzies. The streets were empty. The Fekkri was a burnt-out husk. There were bodies everywhere, trampled into rags on the paving stones, men and women, impossible to say which body was which; dead children who were recognizable as children only because they were littler than the others. He was too high to smell, the stench, but it was thick in his nostrils despite that; he’d seen more wars than he cared to count, he’d seen his own body, the one he was born in, flung down in a ragged sprawl, he knew that smell, he knew the look of bodies thrown away, flattened, empty. He’d never gotten used to the smell or the look of the violently dead. Grim and angry at the futility of it all, he swung the skip around and got out of there; fifteen minutes later, with wind hammering at him and rain in cold gusts drenching him, he picked up Pels and the Jajes and went back to Base where life was marginally saner and the folk living there full of juice and hope.

  XII

  1. 30 days after the meeting on Gerbek.

  The muster in the Chel, semi-arid land between the Inci Mountains and the southern edge of the grasslands.

  The chill gray hour just after dawn.

  Knots of talk as the muster is getting organized:

  “Any time now. Soon as you’re ready to load.” Quale looked round at the untidy ferment scattered over half a kilometer of scrub. “Adelaar’s got a clawhold on the shipBrain through the tap; she’s routing the scanners away from this sector, but I don’t want to lean too hard on that, it’s complicated working blind like she is with two sets of alarms to avoid. The sooner you can get this lot…” he waved his hand at the noisy congeries about them, “sorted out, the better for all of us.”

  Elmas Ofka looked past him at the tug. “The systemships have lifts; how do we get into that thing?”

  “Right.” He lifted the com. “Pels, open her up.”

  2

  Karrel Goza threaded through the clumps of rebels, forces from every part of Kuzeywhiyk brought together for this thing no one had believed possible before Elmas Ofka put it together; he knew most of them because he’d given most of them a lift at one time or another when the bitbits were hot after them; he waved a greeting to those who yelled his name but didn’t stop until he reached one of the knots near the outside, seven quiet men who were sitting on their packs or squatting beside them, ready to go when the word came. He dropped to a squat beside them. “Not long now,” he said.

  Jamber Fausse snapped a twig in half, began peeling the stringy bark from the dry white wood. “Mm.” He scratched at a patch of rot. “I know you, Kar, you want something.”

  “Elli.”

  “So?”

  “We need her.”

  “Yeh. So?”

  “She’s got three sets of outsiders watching each other, she thinks that’ll be enough to keep them from knifing her.”

  “Probably right. Usually is.”

  “Uh-huh. Safe is better’n sorry. She’s got her isyas scattered to keep the squads on track.”

  “Kar…” there was a weary patience in Jamber Fausse’s rough voice, “we been going through the motions the past ten days. Why you keep telling me what I already know?”

  “Just laying foundation, Jamo. You’re scheduled for the drive chambers. Kanlan Gercik’s willing to trade. I want you and them…” he jerked his thumb in a nervous half circle taking in the others who were listening without comment, without expression, waiting with the patience of monks for the talking to be over, “next to her. Kan’s all right, he’s good in a pinch, but you’ve been dealing with Huvved since before you could walk, you can smell a trap before it hatches.”

  “Mm.” Jamber Fausse broke the length of denuded twig into smaller and smaller bits then threw them at a patch of dried grass and brushed the debris off his callused palms. “All right.”

  3

  Aslan stood in the shadows and watched the fighters file past; she had the Ridaar running, flaking them as they came up the lift and into the hold. These male guerrilla bands and female fighting isyas were unlike the outcast, outlawed and rebel Hordar she knew from the Mines. They were harder, angrier, fined down by hunger, fear and pain; these Hordar had lived on the run for decades, no sanctuary for them, never enough food, never enough anything but ammunition for their guns, living with the knowledge that their capture alive or dead meant death or exile for their families; to the Huvved, blood was blood, corrupt in one set of veins, corrupt in all. She watched their faces and thought she wouldn’t much like living on a world that these men and women had a hand in running. She didn’t understand why Elmas Ofka had such a powerful hold on them, but she was glad of it, she liked the Hordar and wished them well. She watched the fighters and ached for them though they’d be furious if they knew it; in a few hours their rationale for living and doing what it took to stay alive, that rationale would be taken from them. If not in a few hours, certainly in a few days. Worlds have no place for fighters once the war is won. What were they going to do with the rest of their lives?

  “Eh, Lan!” Xalloor danced over to her. “Why the long face? You’re as melancholy as a poet with a prize.” Behind her, Churri snorted; he leaned against the lock and said nothing.

  Aslan pulled Xalloor closer so she could talk without shouting. “What in the world are you two doing here?”

  “More insurance. We’re supposed to keep an eye on you and your mum. And the rest of ’em. Churri’s a poet which makes him respectable and I’m nothing much, someone she knows, someone too feeble to be a danger to her, just barely bright enough to watch-hound.”

  “I see about her, what about you? This isn’t a stage, you could get killed.”

  Xalloor grinned. “Dearie dai, you are a romantic. Stage… The word turned into a giggle. “Once upon a time about a hundred years ago, didn’t I say you’ve led a sheltered life?”

  XIII

  1. 30 days after the meeting on Gerbek.

  Lift-Off.

  On the bridge, her hands alternately at rest and working with a swift sureness across several sensor pads, Adelaar sat half-lost in a recapitulation of her Listening Station, part environment, part sculpture, part haphazard stack of blackbox units, playing her sup-withthe-devil-games with target and tie-line, blocking approach alarms, feeding in false readings, singing the ancient shipBrain to sleep.

  Quale was taking the tug up on a long gentle arc, moving west to chase the night, the ar-grav blending so smoothly with the drives that the
only sense of movement the passengers had, on the bridge or in the hold, came through the screens that showed Tairanna curving more and more beneath them.

  Elmas Ofka stood beside Quale, watching the screens, her hands closed into fists, her body stiff. She’d had it with strangeness, her own world was complicated and difficult enough, she needed all her skills, her intellect and energy to deal with the disintegration of the society she’d been horn into. This extra element of confusion threatened to wrench control from her and destroy any possibility of a return to order. At least, to the sort of order she remembered. If she could have expunged these aliens from the Horgul system, closed it away from the Outside as Adelaar planned to encyst an area of the shipBrain, she’d have done it without a second thought. Too intelligent to linger mournfully on impossible dreams, she forced herself to concentrate on limiting the damage the aliens could do. She could feel the one called Aslan watching her. The most dangerous of all of them, if Parnalee wasn’t lying to her. Aslan knew too much. She was capable of too subtle a twisting; the play-maker Parnalee showed her how Aslan had turned the Prophet’s Life on the lathe of her knowledge and imagination and used Pradix to rouse the Hordar out there watching, innocent victims of the woman’s will to power. Ruthless, he said, you can never trust her because she can manipulate you without you knowing a thing about what was happening to you. She gazed at the back of Quale’s head, cold dislike washing over her though she knew that was foolish. Thing. Bought thing. Cat on a leash, dancing for whoever pulls it. With regret and resentment she thought of the pouch of prime rosepearls she’d handed over once her fighters were loaded in the tug. No threat voiced, no threat in his posture, but he didn’t need to make explicit what was implied by his control of the machine. No, she had no choice; the rosepearls bought her this standing space, bought her a chance at the Warmaster, a chance at liberation for all Hordar. Divers did what they must to stay intact. Discipline was life. She disciplined her fears and forebodings and watched the screens, watched the Warmaster swimming smoothly toward them.