The door through the thickness of the wall opened into a wide space, the walls bare concrete with square beams inset and the ceiling twelve feet up. The walls held racks for spears where they weren’t staircases, the throwing pilae that Boise’s infantry used, and between them the big curved oval shields. Wellman was shaking his hand and cursing; Betjeman had his own blade out and was backing away with a group of half a dozen around him. Fred’s soldiers continued their controlled rush up into the interior of the fortress, moving like a single multi-legged iron centipede to seize the key points—the gate hydraulics, the napalm system, the heliograph station on the tallest tower, and the interior doors that could cut the fort off from the walls on either side.
Formal discipline was a wonderful thing; they were all doing the job they’d been detailed to do, and leaving anything else to the people who were presumably tasked with it. It was an attitude that made them like a single weapon moving to its commander’s will on a battlefield. Sometimes there were drawbacks.
“Sergeant Dawkins, fall out three files!” Fred barked. “Envelop!”
The noncom pivoted as if the command had played directly on his nervous system. Twenty-four men followed him, their shields snapping up until they were held just below the eyes. The files slid past each other like sheets of oiled steel in a machine, one facing the little knot of men directly, the two on the flanks angling forward slightly to flank them.
“Pilae—ready!”
Two dozen heavy man-high ironshod javelins cocked back on brawny arms, moving like the bristling feathers on the crest of a bird. They weren’t long distance weapons, but they didn’t have to be here. It was a big room, but only a room. Rudi cast a glance backward. The eyes visible over the shield-rims differed—shades of blue, mostly, or hazel or black—but they were each as impersonal as a stamping-mill or the long narrow pyramid-points of the spears themselves, waiting for the word of command. It was as frightening as any physical threat he’d ever seen, in a short but eventful life.
Betjeman glared defiance. Rudi drew the Sword. Cool fire flooded him, as it always did when he wielded the gift of the Powers in battle; as if he were a God himself, some thing that commanded sky and sea and the flicker of the lightning and strode laughing through the storm.
“Leave this to me,” he said, stepping forward, drawing his dirk with his right hand, the one he used for his shield at other times.
The Boisean officer glared at him. Then something changed in his face. First dawning recognition, a silent movement of the lips in a holy shit. Then the pupils of his eyes flared wide, until the greenish iris shrank to a thread hardly dividing black and white. The man vanished, leaving an alien and incarnate Purpose. He gave a guttural roar, a shocking sound, and charged.
Rudi pivoted as he did. The Sword licked out, and the point touched the side of the man’s leg just above the knee. The wound was trifling, and so cleanly cut that it took an instant before the blood welled. The man went down as if poleaxed; then he curled around himself and buried his face in his hands, weeping. After a moment he raised his face.
“I don’t . . . I don’t remember . . . where am I?” His eyes darted around, his own now but bewildered. “This is West Gate Main . . . what day is it?”
“He’s been keeping bad company, whether he knew it or not,” Rudi said grimly to Fred.
Then to the subordinates still clustered with their weapons up: “Throw down! Throw down, and I promise you your lives. Tend to this man, he’s had a bit of a shock.”
Steel clattered on the concrete pavement, and the three files moved forward. There was no unnecessary roughness in the way they disarmed the men and put them under guard; they were countrymen and essentially in the same army, with accidents of location mostly determining who was on what side. He saw relief on their faces, the expression of men who’d been prepared to die for honor’s sake but realized they didn’t need to.
One of Betjeman’s men went down to a knee beside him, taking him gently by the shoulder: “Sir? Sir, do you recognize me?”
“Of course I bloody—what’s going on?”
Edain and the High King’s Archers poured into the room as the last of the Boiseans climbed upward; he was sweating and swearing under his breath at being separated from his charge. Most of the Dúnedain followed.
“Let’s be about it,” Rudi said.
Alleyne Loring nodded. “I’ll go for the emergency trip controls.”
The gates were usually opened by high-geared winches, and that took a modest number of hands but a fair amount of time. They could be opened or slammed shut much more quickly by a system of hydraulic cylinders and dropping weights, though resetting them was a long process.
Hordle jerked a thumb at a device of levers and springs two of his followers were carrying by the handles set into its square base, with a finned dart the length of a man’s forearm standing up from its center.
“I’ll get this to a parapet.” A beaming grin. “Won’t they be gobsmacked when it goes off from the gate’ouse!”
The dart contained a color-coded flare and a spring-deployed parachute; it would loft up several hundred feet and signal where they’d achieved a foothold. They’d expected to take a stretch of wall, drop climbing ropes, and hold long enough for storming parties to get through the killing ground and come up to reinforce them. This was much better. . . .
If it works, Rudi thought.
Aloud: “And I’ll go for the High Seeker, who’s their last hope of stopping us now.”
• • •
They found him twenty minutes later, on the crest of a high rampart, just as the dawn-light cleared the mountains to the east and spilled across the world in a tide of fresh wind and clarity. The flare floated in a speck of eye-hurting brightness, trailing smoke red and white as it sank towards the river.
“Back, back . . . oh, Goddammit!” Fred shouted as they pounded up the last flight of stairs and rounded the crouching shape of a turntable-mounted catapult.
A man sprawled dead over a pyramid-shaped pile of cast-steel round shot. Knots of combat sprawled over the top of the square tower, Boisean scutum and short sword against the long curved shetes of a few remaining easterners. That fight was ending quickly.
But two of his troopers had thrown their pilae and then rushed the man in the red robe, uncovered as the last of his followers fell. He flicked the weapons out of the air with two slapping motions of his hands. One of the Boiseans came in crouched, shield up and blade lunging in the economical gutting upstroke. The red-robe’s hand slapped down and bone broke in the man’s wrist with a crackle audible ten feet away. His shriek of unbelieving pain mingled with his partner’s bark of:
“USA! USA!”
The point of the gladius crunched into the High Seeker’s ribs. The skull-like shaven head pivoted to stare into the soldier’s eyes. For a moment the two stood immobile, and then the Boisean threw aside shield and blade and turned, screaming as he ran over the edge of the ramparts. The scream trailed away all the way down and cut off abruptly.
Bows snapped behind Rudi, and the High Seeker’s body staggered under the impacts of the longbow shafts. Some passed completely through him in double splashes of red; others hammered into bone. The red-robe flexed and recovered and advanced, grinning as strings of blood and spittle drooled down from his lips.
“No farther,” Rudi said quietly, advancing with the Sword of the Lady poised. “You end here.”
The man—or the thing that had once been a man—tittered. One soldier dropped his weapons and started hitting himself on the ears, trying to block the sound of it.
“Oh, hardly a beginning,” it wheezed. “Not this plan, bungled into wreck . . . by fools . . . only a beginning of eternity . . .”
Behind him, someone was retching, and others clapped their hands to their ears and whimpered. The Sword of the Lady protected him, but he could feel that shielding flexing like steel armor under the pressure of heavy blows.
Finish it, he thought. Let
the man who was at least die free of that.
“I . . . see . . . you . . . forever,” the thing said, and turned and leapt from the parapet before his lunge could begin.
The sleeves of the red robe fluttered all the way to the earth beneath, where he sprawled to lie beside his victim with his brains leaking out of his burst skull.
There was a rumbling that made the stone quiver beneath his feet. The great steel gates were sliding into their grooves, opening the way. Below on the banks of the river barges were being shoved into the water and lashed together, and moments later the first century of troops marched across at the double-quick, shields overhead and to the sides to make a tortoise. A few catapult bolts flicked out from the walls to either side, but the assault party was fanning out on them, and the column was an endless stream with a standard at its head—a starry flag topped with a wreathed eagle.
Roaring, the soldiers of the Republic crashed through the gates and into their city.
• • •
Well, there’s a good deal to be said for Boisean discipline, Rudi thought at the end of the day.
He looked down at the hollow; the smell was fairly strong, with that many men crowded together. They glared back at him, some afraid, more defiant, most simply blankly impassive. He was in full plate now and mounted; Edain had insisted, and it was a useful touch as well. Gentler means would come later; right now he had to talk to them in the language they’d been taught to respect.
Several thousand of the Prophet’s riders had survived the day, though many of them had improvised bandages. The folk of the city had gone for them with a concentrated rage that meant torn to pieces was far more than a metaphor. Fred’s men had used the butts of their spears and their shield-bosses to protect those who surrendered, and they’d been ready to use the points too—which was why they hadn’t had to. The fact that they hated these men just as much as the civilians did hadn’t mattered a damn, nor the fact that some of the civilians were their own families. So far as he could tell, not one unit had lingered accidentally-on-purpose or gotten “lost” to arrive too late when a knot of easterners was in danger of being mobbed.
Old General Thurston built well, and Martin didn’t have enough time to wreck it. There’s a strength here in Boise that will strengthen us all.
“You men have served the enemies of humankind,” he said, pitching his voice to carry—a trick his mother had taught him. “But that’s mostly an accident of where you were born. Since you’ve asked for quarter, you will have it. You’ll be kept under guard until this war is over; you’ll have food enough, if no more—we’re short ourselves, thanks to your ravaging—and no more work than is needful to earn your keep. When the Prophet and all his works are gone, you can return to your families and your herds and your steadings and take up your lives, provided you give oath to live in peace . . . and believe me when I say that I can tell a man false to his word, for I can. Or you can go elsewhere in Montival, to any community that will take you in.”
One of them shouted: “The Prophet will never fall! The Ascended Masters will bear him up!”
Rudi grinned, a hard expression though not cruel. “Then you’ll be in a prisoner-of-war camp a very long time,” he said.
A couple of the men’s neighbors nudged him; from the way he staggered and cursed booted feet had been in use as well. One snatched off his fur cap and beat him on the head with it by way of encouraging tact. Their captor suppressed a grin.
These are men too. It wasn’t their fault that they’ve been corrupted by the world’s enemy.
Then Rudi went on, bleakly: “Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well. If you try to escape or fight or injure my folk further, my men will hunt you down like rabbits, and there will be no mercy then. For mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
He drew the Sword and held it high. The setting sun gleamed on it, a fire in the crystal pommel, and the prisoners swayed back; a moan ran through them.
“You’ve been given another chance at life, and to live as men should. Don’t waste it. Do some thinking, for you’ll have time for it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
High King’s Host
Near Ashton
Liberated New Deseret
(Formerly eastern Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
The map had originally been from a publication called National Geographic, often a source of useful knowledge. The older collections particularly were eagerly sought after. Rudi’s cartographers—a mixture of Boiseans, Corvallans and obscure clerks from the PPA’s Chancellery—had done up an excellent large-scale transcription of one covering the core territories of the Church Universal and Triumphant and its marchlands, pyrographed on bleached deerhide, with a few modern additions like puff-cheeked faces blowing from the four quarters.
Now it was tacked to a piece of ancient plywood, itself set on an easel for easy reference. Rudi stood beside it, waiting with his left hand tucked through his sword belt and his right resting on the pommel of the Sword. The wall of the tent was rolled up, to delay the necessity of lighting the lamps. It wasn’t very hot even at the tail end of a summer’s day, since the easternmost part of the Snake River plain here was a mile above sea level, but the High King thought the view of the smoking ruins of the town were instructive as well for the assembled contingent commanders and their aides. The CUT’s forces were retreating, but doing as much damage as they could—not that this area hadn’t been badly wrecked anyway, in the long CUT-Deseret war that had been going on for most of the last decade before the greater struggle started.
In a way it’s weirdly comforting that they’re doing it, so. The Powers behind the CUT are trying to weaken Montival in every way they can, which means we’re a threat to them in the long term. At least I think so; I’m dealing with beings I cannot understand, any more than a coyote can understand a man. But try as they might, even with the tools of the ancients, men have never been able to kill all the coyotes . . . and we have Those who help us as well as those who hunt us, that we do.
The air held a fair bit of dust as well as the smell of the camp and the reek of things not meant to burn, but this area got more rain than most of the Snake River valley, which was one reason he was pausing to regroup here. The grazing was better, which helped when you had so many horses to feed. The more he spread out, though, the more he was vulnerable to the swift slashing counterattacks the enemy specialized in. They were retreating, but they weren’t going willingly and they weren’t running witless.
More’s the pity; I want this war over, he thought, and began:
“As usual, it’s the logistics that are the problem—the more so as we’re far from home,” he said when everyone had settled and the orderlies had handed around cups of chicory to those who wished it.
“We aren’t, Your Majesty,” Donald Nystrup said.
He was technically a Brigadier in the army of New Deseret, and in fact had been the leader of the guerillas who’d been making the CUT’s occupation of the eastern Snake River country less than a delightful experience. The riders who’d been under his command were still trickling in from their hidden lairs in canyon and side-valley and badland, in groups from companies to little handfuls of men and women as desperate and lethal as so many starved wolves. Rudi had met their leader going east on the Quest, and he looked much older now than those few years would account for, with streaks of gray in his cropped brown beard and new scars, and hammered-out dents and nicks in his breastplate. He also looked like a man who’d had a pile of rocks taken off his back recently; relief mingled with an awareness of pain long suppressed and harder to bear for that.
“Yes, Brigadier,” Rudi said gently. “This is your home, and now truly yours again.”
What was that word Ingolf used, in his ancestors’ tongue? he thought. Heimat, yes. This is Nystrup’s heimat, his little homeland of the heart, what som
e call the patria chica. Where his ancestors are buried, a landscape rich and alive with their woven memories and stories, where his blood and sweat and theirs have watered and made sacred the soil that fed them. As the dùthchas of the Clan is to me. And it’s badly hurt. He must bleed with its wounds. Best be careful of his pride.
He met the eyes of the soldier of Deseret, his hand on the pommel of the Sword. There was an odd inner flash as he did, of something that was there but not to the unaided eyes of the flesh.
As if another man stood behind the seated Nystrup, slender work-battered hands resting on his shoulders. A big man in a blue uniform, high-collared and fancifully ornate with gold braid and buttons and epaulettes in the manner of the middle nineteenth century. The figure had a shock of unruly fair hair and bright humorous blue eyes shaded by long thick lashes, and a smile showing a chipped front tooth. It was a Yankee farmboy’s face, oval and long-nosed. At first glance a yokel out of an original America long generations gone even at the Change, save for a sense of a glowing golden charm that could bring the birds out of the trees. Full of shrewdness and good nature . . . and yet a touch of something other about it, a power and a wisdom and a deep sadness.
He blinked the moment aside. Nystrup looked startled for just an instant, then squared his shoulders as if new power had flowed into him from a familiar reservoir.
Rudi went on: “But it’s a badly ravaged part of your home. Can you provide much in the way of fodder and provender?”
“Well . . . not until we get the rail line to the south repaired, from down by the old Utah border. Our farmlands there are still productive, but . . . and we’ve lost a lot of our working stock.”
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