by Kate Ormand
“Don’t be foolish. We’re attacking them. Going to remind them who’s who around here.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m going to miss it.” His sense of ill-usage returned, souring him. “You thought your friends might be coming, did you? Coming to get you?”
It was exactly the hope that had flitted across her mind. “No, I—”
“They wouldn’t, and they couldn’t, and even if they did, why d’you think I’m here? To serve you food and wipe your face afterward? No, I’m here so that if you try anything—or anyone else does on your behalf—I can execute justice then and there. Like this.”
He worked a lever on the block-and-tackle mechanism, and the cage dropped a few feet. Essa fell onto the hard metal bars, clutching the tray. She felt the cage rising up again and her heart pounding against it.
“Still got them?” the Pacifier called. “Don’t drop them now!” He laughed.
It seemed to Kean the initial journey took very little time. In the swirling darkness, blasted by the winds, one moment ran into the next and was lost in a dark medley of identical moments while he hauled at the wagon and tried to get it to slide in a straight course over the mud. Getting the wagon to move was encouragingly easy; getting it to go where you wanted it to was another matter entirely with the gale beating at your back, and your feet slipping at every step. Up ahead, Hawkerman was their guide, a vague shape that might have been part of the tempest itself; behind them, forty Cruisers slopped along, grousing about their wet feet.
It could be worse. It would be worse at some point in the Season.
The shape that was Hawkerman came to a stop and extended itself. He was holding up a hand. The attack team leaned back into the wind to be still, and abruptly Kean lost his footing and found himself lying on his back in the mud.
Hawkerman came back to them. “We’re there,” he bellowed. “Get up, Kean.”
Kean rose muddily to his feet, helped by Cancher, who called, “What is it?”
“We’re there,” Hawkerman shouted.
“How can you tell?”
“Lights.”
The rest of the Cruisers struggled up to them, and they all stared into the wet, rolling night. There was a barely defined glow of light visible, although at what distance, it was impossible to calculate.
She was tempted. The apprehension was growing in her, and she felt close to tears all the time. Now she wished she didn’t know when the awful event would be staged. Wouldn’t it be better to take the drug and float away from the fear? Except that then she would not be herself, she would be a stranger who smiled vacantly as the waters took her under. It was all she had wanted, to be herself, not a creature of Arcone, an automaton. Suddenly, an idea came to her—another use for the pills. Just maybe, if her warder was drugged, there’d be a chance of getting away. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was something she could do.
The guard was not watching her. He had gone halfway down the steps to talk to one of his compatriots. They were listening to a sound Essa could hear, too: the rolling of heavy wheels, a whine of electricity coming from somewhere close to the cavern.
The only way to break up a pill safely was to bite it. It was bitter, and she was quick to take the crumbled pieces from her mouth and begin the task of disguising them in the portion of protein. Make it look as though she had eaten at least some of the food, and then it wouldn’t matter too much if it didn’t look perfect. If only the first guard was still with her. He’d gobble it up all right. While she was engaged in doing something, she felt better. Disguising the pills was a work of art, in its way—if, probably, her last.
She felt better still when the man ate the scraps. He did it without enjoyment—it was something to do while his mind was elsewhere. Things of great import were going on, and no news was reaching him.
The medication he had ingested had no effect on him at all.
The waiting was long. With no communication with the other groups, it was hard to keep faith in the plan that had been so swiftly conceived at the Lakes. Frumitch’s team might have lost their bearings, might have been subject to attack from a Bleacher party, and without the diversion, the little strike force stood no chance.
All along Hawkerman had said they would know when to make the run. They did.
Despite the buffeting of the wind, Kean was beginning to doze, keeling over in the mud, when the night sky began to light up around the Pyramid in a spectacular way. The diversionary force had arrived, attacking the windmills just as the armed might of Arcone streamed out from the main gate. First there were sparks of light and the sounds of shouting men off to the right—much closer than Kean had thought possible—and almost at the same moment, the great gates of the city lifted, and a highway of light swept down the fields, picking out the marauders among the windmills. Emerging from the Pyramid came long, tubular troop carriers, with belt tracks turned by their many wheels.
“Time to go! Haul up the sails!” Hawkerman called out.
The next minute Kean and Cancher were scudding along like two boys lying face-to-face in a bathtub. In the stern, Cancher reclined on his back wrestling with the sail lines, which had already scored raw passages in his hands. Bracing himself against the sides of the flimsy metal vehicle, Kean sat in the front. From there he was able to see the first casualty. The wagons were racing along in an uneven wedge formation, Kean and Cancher leading. The tub nearest theirs bounced into the whirling air and somersaulted. It had hit a rock exposed by the tearing winds. The high-speed motion of its demise made Kean gag with horror. It was lost in the darkness before he could blink. Maybe the Cruisers following on foot would pick up the team on their way to support the strike force.
There were eerie moments of quiet as the wind shifted. The roaring in his ears would stop, and he would hear the cries of fighting men. Then the sail would billow with a crack, and the ski wagon would accelerate, sliding left or right till Cancher had it aligned again. You didn’t steer these things: you aimed them.
Kean had not thought to ask how they would navigate the ditch that marked the limits of Arcone, and was startled when their sheer speed shot them straight over it into the wind-battered corn stubble. A glance behind and he saw another of the wagons slewing sharply into the ditch, one of its skis flying free. He gripped the pacifor and squirmed around to face front.
At once there was a dark mass to his left—the first of the windmills. Their superstrong vanes were spinning angrily, and slits at the top showered down light—and arrows. Over to the right, the fighting raged between the Wanderers and the Bleachers, a bloody bedlam more like a riot than a battle. The Bleacher transport vehicles had ground to a halt, surrounded by struggling men and women, and Pacifiers were streaming from the Pyramid to join the fray.
SEVENTEEN
With no clear target to aim at, there didn’t seem any point in firing the pacifor. Cancher was trying to navigate between the windmills, and the corn stubble was slowing them considerably. Behind them another wagon was gone, Hawkerman’s tub; it had lost the wind and skidded to a halt. It was quickly surrounded by field workers from the adjacent windmill.
They carried long scythes.
The winds strengthened in one of those hurricane squalls so typical of the time of year. Their ski wagon shot forward at a vastly increased rate. Then the darkened corner of the Pyramid was looming up in front of them. Cancher leaned back and hauled, and the wagon spun out of control. From behind them, there was a white-hot explosion, followed swiftly by an even greater and brighter detonation. Suddenly another shape careened out of the darkness and rammed them: the other surviving attack wagon. Kean hit his face on the aluminum of his own wagon and tasted blood. The next thing he knew, Cancher was wrestling him out of the overturned tub.
“The bombs—where?” Cancher was screaming, wild with adrenaline in the tempestuous winds.
They scrabbled in the mud under the wagon. Cancher bent his back and lifted it, and Kean had his hand on one of the bombs, a soli
d mass of leather and metal. There was a tag on it, which you had to tear off to let air mix with a chemical compound. Cancher snatched the bomb from Kean and was ripping at the tag even as he staggered to the sloping wall of the Pyramid.
“No—no!” Kean bawled, his hand already on the second of the two explosive devices. They had to be detonated at the same time, to be sure of penetrative effect.
The two men from the other team were mauled by the wind as they prepared their own charges and careered toward the Pyramid. Another white explosion, and when Kean looked around, Cancher had vanished, and the wall still stood, undamaged. One of the members of the other team was down, lying still, while his companion was kneeling, with his hands holding his belly as if he were trying to make sure that nothing spilled out.
A ghost shrieked, “Take them, Kean—behind me!”
Hawkerman was being blown toward him, a reeling figure spattered with mud and blood, and pursued by a score of field workers, whose long weapons were uncontrollable in the hurricane-force winds. There was no sign of the Cruisers who were supposed to charge in when the walls were pierced.
Kean fired the pacifor. The bolt cut a bending blue streak through the violent air, skewed by the onrushing gale, and passed over the heads of the men with their scythes. The use of a Bleacher weapon confused them. They fell back.
Hawkerman had gathered the two bombs from the Wanderers who had fallen near Cancher and was blundering to the Pyramid. The field workers started forward once more. Kean fired again, and again they fell back.
When Kean turned to the city wall, Hawkerman was already struggling back toward him in slow motion, empty-handed, making dream-like progress against the windstorm. Kean snatched up the last bomb and hurled it high, letting the winds take it toward the Pyramid. The action threw him forward on the wind, and then in a starburst of light, he was slammed back again by a final tremendous triple explosion, which punched him to the ground with such a thrust that he imagined his back had been broken.
The bomb he had thrown so helplessly had been detonated by the others set by Hawkerman. Kean could not see what effect they had had. His eyesight was blurred, and he had bitten his tongue. He tasted blood. Dazed, he fumbled for the pacifor in the mud and tried to stand upright. The wind carried him like a scrap of cloth, bundling him toward the Pyramid. Hawkerman was crouched, waiting for him.
“What now?” Kean called as Hawkerman gripped his arm.
“Only one way to go!” the older man screamed back.
They let the wind take them and rush them toward a dark ragged perforation that had appeared in the Pyramid’s hitherto impervious walls.
Mighty Arcone was breached.
They were carried into a chamber which held giant grain silos. The gloom was not total; the ceiling was lined with phosphor strips. Two Bleachers lay dead against the far wall, where they had been thrown by the explosion. In here the wind sounded like a wild beast in pain as it howled around them.
“Not enough damage!” Hawkerman shouted in despair, unhitching his compressed-air gun from his back. Kean grabbed him and pulled him to the far wall. Taking out his knife, he stabbed at the wall; the knife slid downward and slit it open like the belly of a greenback. They tumbled into a second chamber with the wind as their eager companion. This was a distribution area for the grain, with a profusion of carts, tubs, and scales.
“See how it’s done?” Kean shouted. “It’s easy!”
Hawkerman raised his gun and fired. Behind Kean, a Pacifier fell dead in an open doorway with a steel dart through his chest. It was Hawkerman saving him from the charjaws all over again. This time he felt the shock of seeing sudden, violent human death.
Now Hawkerman yelled, “You’ll be safer without me!”
It took Kean a moment to comprehend what he meant. Dirty though he was, his appearance was still that of a Bleacher.
“What about the Cruisers?” he yelled back.
“They’ll be here! Go! Do what you can!”
In another instant Kean understood what he needed to do. He ran to the doorway, feeling footsteps thumping along somewhere above him. Voices were calling. He turned back. Hawkerman was already stabbing at an inner wall with savage concentration, and the farther the wind entered, the more it grew in intensity. The torn material of the plastic wall flapped with a hysterical rippling sound. Kean forced his way back across the chamber. Grain containers were rolling everywhere, propelled by the wind. He caught hold of a barrel-size tub and dragged it to Hawkerman.
“Get in. Wait!” he called fiercely.
He could see that Hawkerman did not like the idea of hiding, and added at the top of his voice, “It’s the wise move!”
As Hawkerman began to lower himself into the container, Kean sprinted back to the doorway he’d come from, and the winds shoved him headlong into a wide corridor. Led by a single Pacifier, a band of citizens was running toward him.
Essa had felt the force of the explosion when it came. The chain holding the cage trembled, and the vibration continued in the metal bars for some seconds.
It did not cause much commotion in the big reservoir, since it was by now all but empty of human life. The assembled Pacifiers had been joined by another force and, ducking their heads as they passed through it, had marched away through a low portal that led underground—to the world outside, she suspected. It seemed that the Pyramid was indeed under attack. The dismal atmosphere of the cavern had been enlivened by a charge of manic excitement; soon her guard had been met by some others, and together they had ushered the rest of the prisoners down from the cells and out of the reservoir.
Essa watched and let hope grow larger within her.
If it was a battle, it was going badly for the Arconians. A small contingent of battered Pacifiers returned through the underground tunnel and left at once by the doors that led up into the main structure of the Pyramid. Within a minute, some of them were back in the reservoir, swept along in the rapid arrival of the Prime Conscience, accompanied by an elite guard made up of the largest Pacifiers. Among them were the giant who had been the first prisoner to be freed, and her own personal guard. Way beneath her, Maxamar issued orders.
Some of his men reentered the tunnel. Now Maxamar gazed up at Essa in the cage and spoke to the guard. It was too far away to have any idea of what he was saying, but in her condition of readiness, Essa knew, with perfect clarity, that the moment had come. Maxamar had killed her parents, and now he would kill her.
Slowly her guard began to ascend the rocky steps. It seemed to take a lot out of him. Were the drugs at last having some effect?
Kean did not have to act scared; he was scared as, pretending to be a resident of Arcone, he babbled to its citizens and the Pacifier about the devastating explosion. His six-fingered hand he held hidden in the other as, for good measure, he added the lie that he had seen fighting in the fields just beyond the gaping rent in the outer wall. It was the kind of panic situation the group had expected, and he was immediately forgotten as they argued about how best to seal off the grain chambers. A human wall was, he had time to gather, an unpopular option.
He ran on, his purpose set in his mind. He would see what he could do for the girl. Finding her was not the only problem. Any Arconians who were not already fighting were preparing to do so, setting up barricades of beds and household furniture, either outside the many individual doors or across the corridors themselves. At every such obstacle, he was asked for news; the confusion was total. Children cried and were comforted too urgently by their mothers. A young boy of about ten was looking for his parents. For his safety, Kean directed him to the last barricade he had passed—and confessed to being lost himself, on his way to the reservoir. With simple innocence, the boy gave him the directions he needed.
An ominous groaning noise echoed around the reservoir as the guard made his way up the uneven stairway. Between her feet, Essa could see the water eddying, moving as if disturbed. Her guard came on, quite obviously not as clear-headed or quick a
s he wished to be. Once he paused to shake his head. It was a creeping nightmare watching him get ever nearer, laborious step by laborious step. The other man remained below on the bottom step; some kind of security. Otherwise the reservoir was deserted until a figure arrived through the main doors, a fast-moving person in a filthy tunic. A messenger, she supposed. Hope had died. She watched dully. Her guard was halfway up the stairs. The dirty civilian Arconian had come to the big Pacifier.
Far beneath her, Kean said, “I must pass!”
“No one passes!” the warrior snarled, suspicious. He was lifting his pacifor.
Kean brought up his own shorter weapon and shot the man in the foot. The blue bolt was weak: the pacifor’s reserves were drained. Nevertheless, it had the effect of breaking a bone or two. The man howled and hopped, and Kean smashed the barrel of the gun against his adversary’s arm, causing him to drop his electric weapon, which bounced once on a stone step and spiraled down into the reservoir. Kean bashed at the man again, and then went after the other man at a run.
Essa saw the young man pause to fire the short-barreled pacifor again, aiming at the guard above him. The gun emitted no more than a faint blue light, and the young man dropped it and chased after the guard. It couldn’t be … could it? She saw his pale hair. She still wouldn’t let herself believe it. He was gaining on the half-doped guard. It was him.
Lower down, the huge Pacifier yelled out a warning, limping up the stairway. The guard turned, and his astonishment at seeing his pursuer revived him. He scrambled up the last steps any old way, like a drunk in a hurry.
Kean was leaping up the stairs as fast as he could, but the guard was there before him, fumbling with the workings of the block and tackle. Essa felt the cage lurch. With no time for ceremony, the guard disengaged the chain completely, and in an instant, Essa was falling, banging from bar to bar as the cage dropped toward the swirling water. There was not a thought in her mind, only a tumult of horror.