by Kate Elliott
“Skeptical?” Jones grinned. “But I am just an actor? No, it’s all right. I was in prison before I studied acting, and—well, let’s just say I’ve learned a few things that might be of use. Consider me a recruit for the cause.”
“Rajiv, do you have the modeler with you?” Tess asked. Rajiv nodded. “Then go on in, but you’ll have to use the inner chamber. If you can rig a perimeter alert and track it for—well, you’ll know what to do. I’ve one more duty to perform, and then I’ll come in.” Thus dismissed, they disappeared inside the tent.
The camp was empty of soldiers now except for a single circle of guards around the Orzhekov encampment and a series of guards and scouts around the main camp itself, stretching out into the countryside so that no force might come upon camp or army unaware.
Under the awning of Sonia’s tent stood a young woman, a child, and two adolescents, one girl, one boy. The young woman chatted easily with Josef Raevsky, seeming unembarrassed by his disfigurement, and Tess liked her for that at once. The dawn wind stilled. A thin streak of clouds paled the western horizon, but Tess could not be sure yet if they were true clouds, or smoke. Faintly, far off, she heard the steady thunk of the artillery, firing on Karkand.
Tess rubbed her arms across her breasts, they ached so badly, and then regretted it immediately, because it made the milk let down. She swore under her breath and just stood there for a while, pressing hard against the nipples with her forearms. Tears brimmed in her eyes and spilled down. The leakage stopped quickly; already it had diminished, and soon it would dry up altogether.
“Oh, God,” she said on a long sigh, wiping her face yet again. She gathered together her self-possession and went to meet the woman whom Sonia had chosen for Aleksi to marry.
Aleksi passed by the Veselov jahar riding out, Anton Veselov in the lead, his cousin Vera leading the archers at the back. Ambassador’s row was quiet as its tenants waited for the outcome of the battle. In the Company encampment, no one stirred, although he saw the woman, the playwright, sitting under the awning of her tent, writing furiously. She did not even look up as he rode past and crossed a trampled margin and came into the encampment belonging to the Prince of Jeds.
Charles Soerensen waited for him, outfitted this day in a light cuirass of leather, with a smooth round khaja helmet strapped onto his head. Marco Burckhardt stood beside him, wearing a felt coat instead of a cuirass. Seeing Aleksi, they mounted the fine Arabian mares that Bakhtiian had given them.
“You’ll escort us to Bakhtiian?” Charles asked.
Aleksi nodded. “But we’ll have to hurry if we want to catch up with him”
“Hold on,” said Marco curtly. He blinked three times and tilted his head. “Incoming,” he said at the same time as Soerensen abruptly dismounted and threw the reins to Marco before darting inside his tent.
Ten heartbeats later he stuck his head out. “Aleksi. I need you.”
Like Bakhtiian, Soerensen did not give orders unless he meant them to be obeyed instantly. Aleksi gave his horse over to Marco and, with only the briefest hesitation at the threshold, went into the prince’s tent.
A woman he had never seen before sat at the table. She had black hair and pale brown skin set off by the shimmering blue shirt she wore: Aleksi stopped and gaped. She had no body below the waist. She only seemed to be sitting at the table. The prince stood bent over the table, marking words on a piece of paper.
“Repeat that charge for me,” he said.
The woman spoke, and Aleksi realized all at once that she was not there any more than the lantern illuminating Dr. Hierakis’s tent was there. She was an illusion. She did not exist. Yet the prince acted as though she did. “The Protocol Office has detained Hon Echido and other representatives from the Keinaba house for breaking the interdiction of Rhui on four charges: the lesser charges of trespass and of impersonating Rhuian natives and the greater charges of taking with them a female and the actual act of violating the Interdiction order of their own overlord.”
“Where the hell—?” muttered the prince. “And who instigated this, do you have any idea?”
The woman moved her eyes and to Aleksi’s horror he realized that she was looking at him. “Who is this?” she asked.
It was like being under the scrutiny of the gods. Maybe she was one of the gods, manifesting from the heavens to oversee her children on the earth.
“That,” said the prince, not looking up, “is Tess’s brother Aleksi.”
“Oh,” said the woman. “Hello, Aleksi. I’m Suzanne. Pleased to meet you.” Then she grinned, betraying her humanity. Aleksi did not think that gods introduced themselves.
“Well met,” he said reflexively, and was rewarded by a second smile before her attention moved back to the prince.
“The Protocol Office can, of course, act on the emperor’s behest or even its own behest, but in this case it seems to have been the officers stationed on Earth who moved against Keinaba, in which case—”
“In which case,” interrupted Soerensen, “it was Naroshi who put them up to it.”
The woman shrugged. “He did say he would keep an eye on you.”
The prince smiled suddenly, an ironic quirk of the lips. “So I can’t say that he didn’t warn me? This is all very well, but I’m going to have to come back now.”
“Yes,” Suzanne agreed, looking quite serious. “You must. You’re the only one who can extricate them.”
“And the information Echido alone holds, not to mention that ke, is far, far too valuable to fall into Naroshi’s hands, since we don’t know how much he knows, or how much he learned when his agents were at Moraya, or whether they even got hold of a cylinder like Tess did. Suzanne, think of the consequences!”
“I’m thinking,” she said gravely.
“This could destroy everything we’ve started to build. Aleksi.” He straightened up. He looked, to Aleksi, somehow brighter and more vital than he had before this strange communication, as if the challenge animated him. As if this sort of challenge was what he lived for. “I have two notes here, one for Cara and one for Tess. Find a courier, someone trustworthy, to take the messages to them—there should still be actors in the Company camp, if need be. I’ll need you back at once, because we have to leave now. Suzanne, how will you pick me up?”
“Already arranged from this end,” said Suzanne briskly. “The question is how you can make the rendezvous.”
The prince looked again at Aleksi, and Aleksi hurriedly retreated outside.
“Well?” demanded Marco.
Aleksi hesitated. “Suzanne. Is she one of your kind? From the heavens?”
Marco raised an eyebrow. “Suzanne called? Goddess, it must be urgent.”
Aleksi ran over to the Company camp. There he found the playwright. She was so engrossed in her work that she did not even look up when he stopped beside her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
She glanced up. “Oh. Hello. Aleksi, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon,” he repeated, “but the prince has asked that I give these messages to you to send on to his sister and to the doctor. He’s leaving.”
“He’s leaving?” asked the playwright. “Oh, my.” Aleksi was afraid she would ask him to explain, but she merely took the notes and marched off in the direction of her tent. He jogged back to Soerensen’s tent to find that the prince had already mounted and was waiting for him.
“Now,” said Soerensen before Aleksi had settled into the saddle, “we must ride at first toward the battle, as if we’re headed in, so people will think that’s where we’ve gone. But then we have to somehow leave without being seen and make our way out to these coordinates—we’ll be headed north-northeast, into the near hills, to meet the shuttle.”
“What is a shuttle?” asked Aleksi.
“It’s a kind of a ship. Can you manage it?”
“Yes,” said Aleksi. “I can manage it. But why must we go so secretly?”
Soerensen looked out at the camp. “Dam
n it,” he said to no one in particular. “But it has to be done.”
“What has to be done?” asked Marco mildly.
Soerensen urged his horse forward, and Aleksi and Marco came up on either side of him. “Today, the Prince of Jeds has to die.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
DAWN CAME. DAVID WATCHED as the siege engines fired, and fired again. Clay pots filled with naphtha were launched into the city, and smoke began to rise up from within the walls into the heavens. He wiped sweat from his brow and helped a limping man back away from the engine, and sent another to take his place.
The rumble of the towers rolling into place reached his ears, and the higher sound of metal on metal, the clash of arms. He had no good view of the walls. He did not want one. Already wounded men—khaja laborers all—struggled back from the front lines, those that could. David knew well enough that others lay alive but wounded under the killing rain of arrows, helpless to get themselves free. If they were lucky, once the battle moved beyond the walls, they could be rescued. Cara had laid down the law firmly enough for Bakhtiian: All persons in the jaran army received care or none did. David wondered what would happen when Cara got hold of the first wounded enemy soldiers, assuming that any lived long enough to get so far.
Suddenly, a man shouted a warning and two riders escorting David shoved him down. There was a crash. Splinters flew through the air. A man screamed out in pain. Debris peppered David’s helmet, and dust coated his vision.
He scrambled up and ran forward. A lucky hit for the Karkand engineers: They had hit a siege engine far enough back from the lines that no one had thought it within range. Four men lay tangled in the wreckage, bleeding, moaning; one was silent and twisted at a horrific angle.
David coughed through the dust. “I need men to carry these wounded out!” Laborers had scattered back from the hit, terrified. Now, heartened by his presence, they hurried forward to aid him. David tested the mechanism, but it had been thoroughly smashed.
“We’ll give this one up,” he shouted. “Here, move that one back ten paces, and I want screens over the men there.”
Riders and khaja laborers ran to do his bidding. He had a sudden flash, watching them work together, that this was why he had come out here today to help kill poor innocents on the other side of the wall: so that in time, all of them could learn to work together. It was a poor excuse for a rationalization, but it helped him live with himself.
The other engines fired on with renewed vigor. David took himself back and sat down to try and figure out the trajectory of the rock, to see if they could target the enemy’s artillery.
Ursula el Kawakami braced herself as the tower shuddered forward toward the wall. Inside, it was dark and stuffy; she felt the others pressed around her, about half of them Farisa auxiliaries and half jaran riders—unmounted now, of course—who had volunteered for the first assault, mostly young men from granddaughter tribes and servant families, hoping to win a name for themselves and a greater share of the loot. From outside, she heard the steady hammering of arrows against the wooden tower and she smelled burning pitch: They were trying to set the tower on fire, but it was covered with leather soaked in water and a lotion called firebane, and she doubted it would catch.
What did it matter, anyway? For all of her life, Ursula had wanted nothing more than to fight in battle. Not for her the martial arts craze that had swept through League space, offering aggressive young men and women an outlet. War was an ugly, primitive business, and an unacceptable means for resolving conflict. Everyone knew that.
Ursula supposed it might even be true, but she hadn’t cared. From childhood on she had closeted herself in the net and immersed herself in accounts of Salamanca and Crecy, Cannae and Tyre, the bloody trenches of Verdun and the battle of the Pelennor Fields.
A thud shook the tower, slamming her into the side. She tucked and took the impact on her shoulder, and her armor absorbed much of it. The men were really packed too close here to fall down. Above her, she heard the sing of arrows from the covered platform at the top of the tower: the archers, spraying fire down onto the wall. From below, she heard shrieks and cries from the men rolling the great tower forward as stones rained down on them from the walls. Still, the tower advanced.
With a jolt, the wheels met the base of the wall. At once, Ursula sprang into action. She shouted and two auxiliaries cranked out the door, and as if by magic the plank reached and reached—not quite there—and then slapped down onto the parapet of the great wall of Karkand, making a bridge. Early morning light streamed in on them.
With two men on either side of her, Ursula led the charge. She howled. They took up her call and ran, to hit the Habakar defenders before they could foray out onto the bridge. The wood jounced under her feet, and she felt men behind, pounding after them. Arrows showered over them, toward the wall, and a spray of arrows peppered them from the defenders, but their armor was strong. And Ursula had drilled these units, in any case, in the use of shields and swords and spears in close formation.
Three Habakar soldiers scrambled up onto the bridge, but Ursula and the jaran man next to her hit them hard and simply shoved them back. They fell over the side, falling hard on the ramp. Men scattered away from them. Ursula jumped down, landing hard, and set about herself with her sword. She hacked through the first rank, pushing them back. Shields rose in front of her and she shoved and pounded at them, cut at faces and arms and exposed chests. An arrow stuck in her shield; another stuck in the armor covering her right thigh, and then the arrow fire ceased to bother her.
A spear thrust. She flinched away and felt the spear impact her companion. He fell, screaming, and she shouted: “Close up ranks! Close up!” And stepped over the fallen man and kept pressing forward. Another shieldman came forward next to her, and a man on the other side, and they took step by slow step forward, pushing, catching blows and turning them aside, striking—there!—and a man crumpled before them. She took a great stride, to get over his body, and moved forward.
Behind, she heard shouts. “Move up! There! Fire a volley!” Swords battered on shields. Men yelled. Feet thudded on the stone ramparts, and smoke and dust rose from the city, clinging to the walls and throwing the acrid scent of burning into her face. A roar of sound swelled up from the city itself, the blare of trumpets, the ringing of bells, the bellowing of pack animals, the neighing of horses, shouts and sobs and the clatter of wagons and troops of horsemen all soaring on the wind and blending with the din of battle.
Distantly, she heard: “They’re coming up the other side. Krukov is falling back!” But the enemy line before her wavered and she pressed forward.
“Fall back! Fall back!” The words came closer here, just behind her.
She risked a glance behind. By the bridge, fighting swirled and, on the bridge itself, men stood still, staring, stuck out there while arrow fire blurred over them, shattered into them. The archers atop the platform fired in sheets, but it wasn’t enough.
“Open up that bridge!” she shouted, but they could not hear her. “Close ranks!” she cried, and stepped back, letting another man come forward in her place as she pushed back through her own line.
Beyond, on the other side of the bridge, Habakar soldiers in blue and white shoved steadily into the jaran incursion, pushing them back. Ursula felt a cold rage descend on her. How dare they ruin her perfect tactics? A rush onto the parapet, down the ramps, and open the great gates; like Godfrey at Jerusalem, letting the Crusader hordes in to sack the city.
“Move forward! Let those men down! Advance, you fools!” What was it von Clausewitz said? ‘There is nothing in War which is of greater importance than obedience.’ “Advance!”
A spear thrust. She ducked instinctively away from it, and it took her two entire heartbeats to register the point that penetrated her back. The Habakar had broken through behind. She staggered. Another blow hit her hard, and she spun full into their charge across the scattered bodies of her own men.
Pain blossome
d, hazing the world to white. In one instant, she realized an arrow had pierced her cheek. In the next—
When the men battling their way over the collapsed section of Karkand’s wall saw the golden banner heralding Bakhtiian’s arrival, they roared and shoved forward into the breach. Nadine watched them. Ahead, the golden banner of the jaran and the blue lion of Habakar rode high together over the ranks of Bakhtiian’s jahar. A commander rode up and delivered his report and rode away. Bakhtiian went on.
Nadine was getting bored. Evidently Bakhtiian had decided to circle the city with his jahar, so that at every point his own men, and the Habakar defenders, would be aware of his presence, and of the death of the Habakar prince. But as part of his entourage, Nadine did not find the circuit amusing. The morning was half gone already. She was bored and she was angry and she was beginning to get a headache from the noise and the dust and the agony of waiting for action. She looked back over her shoulder and could just see Anatoly Sakhalin in the ranks behind, eating the dust kicked up by her jahar’s horses. Surely he was enduring this honor no better than she was.
In front of the great gates, the Veselov jahar waited on the flats just out of catapult range. Two siege towers flanked the gates. One had caught fire, though men still battled over the bridge, and the other was too obscured by arrow fire and smoke for Nadine to see. Leaving Mitya on the height, Bakhtiian rode down with one hundred men to where Anton Veselov and his riders and archers waited.
As if they had only been waiting for him to appear, the small gate within the great gates swung open and Habakar soldiers streamed out; first a few on foot, and then armored cavalry, charging straight for the gold banner.
“Forward!” shouted Nadine. She urged her horse down the slope. A swarm of Habakar soldiers smashed into Veselov’s jahar, beating their way toward the gold banner. But instead of heading for the conflagration itself, she whipped her mount for the gates. Her riders followed her. They broke through the line of Habakar infantry fanned out from the gate and pressed forward.