by John Dalmas
"What?" he demanded.
Words in Hrummean rushed from Jonkka.
"Again!" bellowed Sleekit, the demand barely recognizable even to another sellsu.
Jonkka stopped, not having caught the word but realizing what was wanted. He took a breath and repeated in sullsit, was aware that he'd been understood when the sellsu let go the platform and disappeared beneath the surface.
Sleekit dove under the Schooner, flukes driving, his sonar sensing the hull shape, the long shallow keel. The guardsman's sullsit had hardly been intelligible, but there was no doubt of what he'd said: A man had killed Juliassa and jumped over the far rail.
He sensed the movement ahead, and closed on it. There, within reach! Great clawed hand open, his arm thrust straight.
* * *
Tirros was perhaps two hundred feet from the schooner and had seen no sign of pursuit. There'd been no splash of anyone jumping overboard, no sound of anyone lowering a boat. Inwardly he grinned, almost crowing out loud. A hundred yards more to the island. He'd done it, reached Djez Gorrbul and avenged himself.
Suddenly something terrible grabbed his calf, claws biting deeply, and without thought he screamed. What flashed into his mind was sarrka. In mid-scream he was jerked under, swallowing water, choking. The grip released, and arms flailing, he surfaced wild-eyed, strangling. A hand, rough and terrible, grasped his neck then, held his head up. The wet black sword was almost in his face. He tried to kick, to push free with his feet. They found slick, wet fur, smooth sides; the grip tightened. He grabbed the forearm with both hands, but the strength he struggled against was adequate to much greater enemies than he.
Two black eyes bore into him. Tirros stopped struggling, stared, found no mercy. Only, perhaps, recognition.
Suddenly the hand let go, and for just an instant he thought he'd been freed. But even as it released, the head disappeared beneath the water, and the sword thrust through his guts, driving out his back below the ribs. He was driven down into watery blackness, rushing backward, a hard, thick-boned forehead against his chest. He opened his mouth to scream again, spasming, and water rushed in.
Sixty-Nine
Shouts awakened Kryger. His first reaction was that men were cheering overhead; they must have gotten word that the fortress was taken, or the king. Whatever.
He rolled out of bed and was pulling on his drawers beneath his nightshirt when he heard the shouts again. They were not cheers. He had his nightshirt off and was putting on his shirt when he heard an enormous explosion, as if nearby some ship's powder store had blown.
Werlingus pounded on the cabin door. "Lord Kryger!" he shouted. "Lord Kryger! Something is happening!"
"Go! I'll be out in a minute!"
Kryger grimaced as he pulled on his trousers and buttoned them. "Fool! Of course something's happening," he muttered, then heard another explosion, this one small, and muffled as if under water, then another muffled but large, close, and the ship twitched beneath his feet. The shouting loudened, became urgent. Quickly he shrugged into his jacket, pulled on shoes, hurried into and along the passageway. Climbing the companionway, he was aware of commotion on deck, and what sounded like two more muffled explosions.
Emerging under the cloudy night sky, he paused. There was a deckhouse amidships; vaguely he saw sailors disappearing into it, down into the vacant troop hold. Nearby, to port, some debris was burning on the water. Kryger started aft toward the quarterdeck, concerned, confused. He couldn't imagine what was happening. Muffled explosions continued singly and by twos and threes, some seeming nearby, some at the edge of hearing.
The captain wasn't there, but the admiral and the commander-in-chief were. Neither was talking. Faces carven, eyes narrowed, they were staring shoreward, where now the guns were all but silent.
"What is it?" Kryger asked. "What's going on?"
It was the admiral who answered. "Something's causing explosions in the ships."
As if to punctuate his statement, demonstrating it, there was a string of the dull thudding explosions, half a dozen within two or three seconds.
"But—What could be causing them?"
"Shut up and look!" It was the CIC who spoke, his voice irritated, his arm pointing. Kryger looked. Slowly a nearby ship was heeling, her masts silhouetted against fire-ruddied cloud. They canted at ten degrees, twelve . . . elsewhere were two more dull explosions, another, another, but his eyes stayed fixed on the leaning ship. Thud! Then thud! again, louder, nearer, another farther off, two more almost simultaneous. The masts he watched leaned farther, farther. At about forty degrees they accelerated from their own weight, and he heard them snap. The vessel rolled slowly onto her side; water spilled into her broken stack, and her boilers exploded with a roar, blowing her stern apart.
As he watched her sink, there was another explosion in the flagship, almost under his feet. The deck beneath him had been tilting gradually forward. Now there was an abrupt lurch. Her captain came out of the midships deckhouse and shouted to abandon ship, then came over and ordered Kryger and the two ranking officers to a lifeboat.
While they moved to it, down the roadstead another ship blew apart as her powder stores exploded.
Seventy
Juliassa Hanorissia did not want to leave the stage. And she was more than strong-willed. Polarized though she was and sometimes headstrong, with all the consequent can't know, as a schoolgirl she'd been one of the best in her class in meditation, had even perceived, on occasion, her Kirsan and Nasrik, though they'd never merged or even touched.
* * *
The southern edge of the vast cloud blanket roofing Haipoor l'Djezzer lay a hundred miles north of Theedalit. Thus Panni and Tassi sat under visible stars in the cooling, early-autumn night. Their backs were straight, even Tassi's, but not at all rigid, and their open eyes were unfocused. Both were smiling, though not widely.
Both had felt the call for help, but they did not effort to change what had happened. It had happened, and that was all right. Nonetheless, at a subliminal level, they were touching the intelligent psyches over all the planet, psyches marine and terrestrial, getting approvals, weaving a fabric of agreement, very lightly and without the least insistence. And with a very few exceptions, mostly among the Vrronnkiess, none would remember, on this side of reality, any of it at all.
When they roused from their trances, the two sages wouldn't remember it clearly either. At least Panni wouldn't. But he'd remember vaguely, as in a dream dimly recalled.
* * *
The masters, the more advanced initiates, and a few others, at the monastery at Theedalit and every other monastery in Hrumma, had wakened independently and gone at once to the chamber of meditation. In its clean-scrubbed darkness their "Hrums" resonated in the night.
* * *
As the scene was finalized, the knife had sliced deeply across her neck muscles on the right side, glanced off her jaw and across cheek and nose. The captain, alarmed by her scream and oriented by Jonkka's roar, had dropped through the hatchway, found the body, and controlled the bleeding by the pressure of his thumbs. She was weak and in shock, and the cut would leave a deep scar, but the role and body of Juliassa Hanorissia would continue.
Seventy-One
A small pleasure barge rocked gently at the amirr's private dock on the Firth of Theed. Wavelets lapped and chuckled against her sides, while in the cabin, Elver Brokols dreamed unknowing. A large triangular head, a long muscular neck, rose smoothly from the water, and dripping, peered under the awning.
"Elver Brokols!"
A Vrronnkiess cannot whisper, can't even speak in undertones—not and form words. The sound jerked Brokols out of sleep, and he sat up, heart thudding. He'd been sleeping in the barge because tonight was to be the night of truth, and K'sthuump was his communicator.
"I have news for you."
He gaped, all traces of sleep blasted, and sucked air, wide eyes staring. "What?"
"The big ssips, your enemies, all are sunk! All of them! The sullsi did no
t miss one. And all our ssips are safe, coming home now."
Brokols felt suspended, as if he'd been away from his body and hadn't gotten back into it yet. As if in contact with it from outside. Mentally he stared at K'sthuump's words, examining them for meaning. All sunk. Our ships are headed home.
His mouth opened again, formed an O. The orderly assigned to him had wakened too, was staring from another couch, understanding none of it. K'sthuump continued.
"But the big-ssip people, a great number of them, have been fighting in the city. There are fires. [She used the Hrummean word.] The noises of fighting have all but stopped. I think they possess the city now."
Brokols swung both good leg and bad off the bed. "Thank you, K'sthuump," he said in his own version of sullsit. He'd slept in his clothes. Now he found his left shoe and pulled it on. The orderly had his crutches ready.
K'sthuump withdrew her fearsome head, and the two men ducked out of the cabin. Brokols' shay was still tied to a piling, its kaabor looking at them, munching the last of the grain in her nosebag. The orderly went to her, removed the bag and fastened the bit in her mouth, then boosted Brokols into the shay.
"Thank you, K'sthuump," Brokols called back. "I'll see you in the morning. Love you!"
"Love you, Elver Brokols!" she answered.
Then Brokols told his orderly to start, and they set off up the street, going home, where he had things to do now.
K'sthuump hadn't told him all she'd learned from Tssissfu. It would be soon enough when the schooners arrived back at Theedalit.
* * *
Brokols went directly to his wireless room and jotted a message in Djezian, then sent an "on-the-air" signal to the wireless wagon at the Gorrbian headquarters in Kammnalit. In his mind's eye he visualized a Gorrbian officer on a cot, or maybe a noncom, wakening to the raucous buzzer, muttering, swearing perhaps, wiping sleep from his eyes and sitting down at the sender.
Brokols' receiver burped the man's acknowledgement. Tense and at the same time calm, Brokols waited, giving the Gorballi time to grab pencil and pad. Then he began to send.
"Imperial Almaeic Army has landed here in Haipoor from His Imperial Majesty's fleet, and has taken the city. Your king has been executed. His Majesty the Emperor now rules Djez Gorrbul. He orders you to leave Makklan, return to Haipoor, and surrender to me. Did you receive me? Acknowledge. Kryger."
There was a lag, as if the duty man at the wireless in Kammnalit was rereading the message, trying to grasp what had happened. Then Brokols' sounder began to tap.
* * *
ACKD AS FOLLOWS STOP IMPERIAL ALMAEIC ARMY HAS LANDED IN HAIPOOR STOP HAS CAPTURED CITY STOP EMPEROR ORDERS US RETURN TO HAIPOOR AND SURRENDER STOP GRAND ARMY INTEL END COMM
* * *
Brokols leaned back sweating, and his hand trembled slightly. He wondered why. It seemed to him they'd surely pull out of Hrumma now, back across the isthmus, probably after requesting a cease-fire from the Hrummean field command. And probably they'd head for Haipoor. After that—Hopefully they'd fight the Almaeic army. It was hard to picture them turning themselves over to the Almites. And it had been the wireless man who'd ended communication, cutting "Kryger" off, so to speak.
The Almites! His people! He thought it to himself deliberately, alert for any feeling of guilt or dishonor. And found none at all.
Seventy-Two
As they walked up to it from the west, Kryger was impressed at the amount of damage to the fortress's wall. It looked as if two or three batteries had fired at it independently at first, not concentrating their fire. Seen from outside the walls, the palace towers, however, looked relatively undamaged.
Gate sentries in imperial green snapped to present arms as the commander-in-chief approached with his aides and the ex-ambassador. But the CIC, instead of entering through the open gate, elected to continue along the square to a breach his artillery had pounded through the wall a hundred feet beyond. It would have been easier to blast through the gate, but the officer in charge had decided to do it this way.
Good judgement, Kryger thought. Get inside and open the gate, and you have a paved ingress not buried in rubble.
Some civilians, dirty, haggard, and guarded by Almaeic troops, were throwing rubble out of the breach. One of the guards shouted at them in Almaeic to stop, and remarkably they did, as if reacting to the tone and situation. They stared at the richly uniformed officers. And at Kryger in mufti; they probably recognized him. The CIC led his party over the rubble and inside, in the process roughing his beautiful, glass-bright knee boots. ["Wellingtons" in another place and time.]
Seen from inside, the compound looked larger than from out. The palace stood near the west wall, and the appearance of its towers had been misleading. Parts of the magnificent building were heavily damaged. The wing where Kryger had been quartered had been gutted by fire.
The bodies had already been removed. Which was more than one could say for most of the city. Their enlisted driver had repeatedly steered his team around rubble and bodies. Then the CIC had gotten out, and they with him, to walk the last quarter mile, apparently to get a more intimate look at the aftermath of battle. Most of the bodies were droids of course, but corpses in imperial uniform were common enough. They'd poked around in a couple of buildings and seen the bodies of several women and girls who'd been raped and killed. Presumably in that order, Kryger thought wryly. He'd half expected the CIC to say something, tell an aide to see about identifying the troops who'd done it, but nothing was said. Of course, he thought. They're droids. And the men who did it were commoners.
He'd gotten so used to the Gorballis, he tended to think of them as people.
A colonel came hurrying up with his own aides, and saluted sharply before the CIC. "Colonel Gralbeg, sir, at your service! I'm in charge of the fortress!"
The CIC's eyes drilled through the man's forehead, and he imprinted the name for future reference. "Gralbeg. I am told the king here is dead."
"Yes, sir. We have not moved his body, sir. I assumed you'd want to see it where it fell."
"Take me to it."
"At once, Marshal Dersfolt!"
He led them to the palace and up the wide semicircular stairs to its grand entrance. In more than thirty years as a soldier, Kryger had never seen war before. It looked to him as if someone had poured buckets of blood on the stairs and on the landing at the top.
Inside, the great entrance hall was, if anything, worse. The splendid marble pillars were chipped and bullet-pocked, the marble floor gouged and pitted from grenades. Apparently the royal guard had tried to make a stand there and been slaughtered.
Considering they'd been engineered for pleasure, Kryger thought wryly, the droids were a hardnosed bunch of bastards.
The colonel led the command party down the central hall to the throne room. Remarkably there was little blood in the hall, as if Gamaliiu had insisted on making his personal stand alone. For whatever reasons. The body lay twenty feet inside the throne room door. The CIC went to it, his retinue following, and he knelt to examine what had been king there. Gamaliiu had been wearing ceremonial armor: gold cuirass and greaves and plumed gold helmet. The helmet lay several feet away, holed and bloody. His royal sword lay beside him.
"He was shot in the face," said the CIC, then looked up. "Between the eyes, and the bullet exited high in back."
He stood, and his eyes found the colonel. "Who was in charge of the unit that took the fortress?"
The colonel paled to near white. "I was, sir."
"Who was in direct charge of the unit that stormed the palace?"
Kryger looked at the colonel and felt a touch of pity for him. The CIC's tone said as plainly as words that someone's career was going to be destroyed.
"Captain Feelans, sir," the colonel answered. "Commanding Officer, Company Four."
"And who, personally, killed this king?"
"I don't know, sir."
The CIC looked long and hard at the regimental commander. "Colonel, all commanding
officers down to company level were at my final briefing. Is that not correct?"
"Yes sir, to the best of my knowledge."
The cold eyes drilled him. "And did I not plainly stress the importance of taking the king alive if at all possible?"
"Yes sir, you did."
"I want you to identify the person who shot him. Probably someone vain of their marksmanship. The weapon was obviously fired from the waist, which suggests a sidearm. So does the exit hole. Only officers are issued sidearms."
Of course. Kryger thought. Gamaliiu had been tall, even by Gorrbian standards, more than six feet four. But even so, for the bullet to take the line it had . . .