The Scourge of God c-2

by S. M. Stirling

  "Well, Colonel, you know we… my Villains and I… got sent East, heading for Boston, going on four years ago now."

  The magnate nodded. "Waste of resources, but young Tony was set on it. Not that I grudged you the contract, though that offer of a job is still open."

  "Yah, but I had my people to think of. And he sent Kuttner along with us. Well, Kuttner had-said he had-secret orders from the Bossman that we pay a visit to Nantucket…"

  Heuisink sat quietly while the story spun out, and fireflies glittered like captive stars in the gardens outside, and some sort of cricket shrilled. The others began theirs when Ingolf left off with his arrival in Sutterdown…

  By Ogma the Honey-tongued, that was more than a year ago! Rudi thought.

  When they'd finished, a long silence fell.

  "Well," the master of Victrix said at last. "If I didn't know you were a reliable man, Ingolf Vogeler, I'd toss you all out on your keesters right now. Even so, I'm dubious."

  "It's a wild tale," Rudi agreed. "But our enemies seem to believe it, so."

  "Yeah, and that's one more reason to take it seriously… most of it, at least. This cult out West has ambassadors in Des Moines now. At court," Heuisink added, using the term wryly for some reason.

  "Oh, court intrigue is something we're used to," Mathilda said helpfully.

  The others nodded. Abel Heuisink looked at them and sighed.

  "Sometimes I think I've lived too long."

  TheScourgeofGod

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Oath-sworn band were sundered

  Held in bonds of adamant and iron

  Hostage to compel Artos, high-hearted lord

  Would he save companions dear

  Or would revenge be his arval-gift to them?

  From: The Song of Bear and Raven

  Attributed to Fiorbhinn Mackenzie, 1st century CY

  DES MOINES, CAPITAL, PROVISIONAL REPUBLIC OF IOWA

  AUGUST 6, CY24/2022 AD

  "Well, Victrix Farm may not have a wall," Rudi said softly. "But Des Moines most certainly does, the awe and wonder of the world, to be sure!"

  The Heuisink family had traveled openly to the capital in their private railcar, pedaled by men of their own household and faster than a mount could gallop; Rudi and his party were coming in discreet anonymity on one of the plain horse-drawn trains that plodded along the steel way. That gave them plenty of time to watch it approach. They'd seen the skyscrapers first, of course, but those were farther away on the west bank of the Des Moines River, and fewer and smaller than those of Portland or dead Seattle. Those grew from dots on the horizon to stark height as they passed through the last ring of truck-farms and villas, where only the marks of roadways showed where suburbs had been before the Change.

  Finally they could see the raggedness of the great ruined outlines, where some had burned and half collapsed in the chaos after the Change, and others had been mined for metal, disassembled from the top down. Then the golden dome of the state capitol caught a gleam of the afternoon sunlight on this side of the river, and the city walls approached across the flat open ground kept bare for defense.

  There was a twenty-foot-tall outwork with towers every hundred yards, then a wet moat half bowshot broad and flowing like a slow river, and rearing above it on the inner side a wall twice the height of the first. Its towers were sixty feet high or more and staggered so that they covered the gaps between those on the outer wall. Many of them bore tall windmills, creaking and groaning as their metal vanes turned.

  Probably pumping up reservoirs for hydraulic cocking systems, Rudi thought, as an observation balloon tethered to one tower was winched down. Whoever built this didn't miss a trick.

  The construction itself was concrete and steel, though faced with salvaged stone; he suspected a welded web of construction girders inside poured mass-concrete. The ramparts had crenellations overhanging it so that murder-holes could be opened to drop things straight down, and they were topped by an outward-sloping metal roof that was definitely not thin sheet.

  More I beams, welded into a solid mass. Like the gates of Larsdalen. And the wall around Mt. Angel is taller, and built into the side of a hill four hundred feet high. But the size of this!

  The wall stretched out of sight, curving away to the northeast and southwest towards the river. As he watched gaslights flared up along it, a long ripple like a wave across a lake; that showed the thick steel shutters of the firing ports in wall and tower.

  "That is… a large city," he said mildly.

  Ingolf snorted. "Sixty square miles within the circuit of the walls, more or less. A hundred and twenty thousand people, not counting transients. I wandered around bumping into things like some Rover from the Hi-Line the first time I came here."

  Edain cursed softly. That was nearly twice as many people as the whole of Clan Mackenzie-about as many as the Mackenzies and Bearkillers put together, and this was only Iowa's capital city.

  "Tarnation," Virginia Kane said; she'd never seen a city at all, until she came to Iowa. Then, quietly: "Fuck!"

  Fred Thurston chuckled. "You said it."

  They all nodded; cities in the old days had been much larger, of course, but those were the distant times of wonder that none of them had seen. This was now, in the ordinary, prosaic world of the Change.

  A sharp rank smell grew stronger as they approached; not anything organic, but a chemical tang Rudi had never experienced before. It made his eyes water a little, as well, like smoke from an invisible fire.

  "Coal smoke," Ingolf said. "Coal and coke. They bring it in by rail, and by barge on the river from places like Carbondale."

  They'd been talking in low tones; now they fell silent as the train clattered over the bridge that spanned the moat, a slow click. .. clack… sounding beneath the steady pound of the hooves. The gate in the wall ahead was just large enough to pass the two tracks of the railway; within was deep shadow for the length of the passage through the wall, but looking up Rudi could just make out the teeth of multiple slabs of metal that could slide down to close it and lock into girders driven deep into the ground below.

  "Now, that's a mite excessive," Rudi said mildly. "One alone would make the gate stronger than the wall."

  Somebody in charge of this realm wanted a very strong redoubt. The cost, even for Iowa!

  Rudi blinked as the train pulled through the thickness of the wall and into the open ground beyond. The streets were brightly lit by the incandescent mantles of the gaslamps spaced along the streets, and more inside the buildings. Northward he could see the high gilded dome again, but with a suggestion of more walls around it-the Bossman's palace, no doubt.

  Palaces and forts he'd seen before. The buildings on either side of the railway line were something else again. Corvallis had a few water-powered factories, and so did Portland; even Sutterdown had mills for sawing lumber and breaking flax.

  Here there were solid miles of them-tall brick chimneys trailing black smoke, a hot glare of molten metal and trails of sparks as a great cupola furnace was tapped into the molds, glimpses through huge but grimy glass windows into stretches of whirling overhead shafts and belting driving machines and figures attending them-here if people wore overalls the garments were filthy, soiled, covered much more of the body, and were entirely practical linen canvas, not expensive cotton symbols of gentility. The noise was shattering, snorts and grunts like gigantic pigs as mechanisms gulped air, blurring roars from furnaces and drafts, the tooth-hurting squeal of metal on metal, stamping and grinding.

  Roads and railway sidings wove among the factories; oxen and horses and men pulled and pushed loads of ingots and coal and timber in, shaped metal out. Rudi recognized some of the products-cloth he supposed came from power looms…

  He snapped his fingers. " That's what was bothering me. Back at Victrix Farm, you never heard any looms thumping! I suppose everyone in Iowa buys from here?"

  "Everyone near Des Moines," Ingolf said. "If I were a Farmer or Sheriff her
e, it'd make me nervous having to buy in everyday stuff like that, but you have to get out near the frontiers to find much home-weaving, here."

  Several of the others nodded thoughtfully. "I wonder why we don't do that," Ritva said. "We have spinning mills, or at least they do in Corvallis. Granted most people weave when they don't have anything else to do, but it's still pretty tedious."

  "It only pays if you've got a lot of people close together and with cheap transport so they can buy the stuff, and a lot of water power," Fred Thurston said. "Dad tried to set up something like that, but it had to be subsidized with tax money all the time, so he shut it down-something for later, he said."

  "It's a matter of market size, to be technical," Father Ignatius said.

  Rudi kept an eye on the factories. More goods poured out, turned cylinders and pistons for hydraulic machinery, gears, crankshafts, chains, cast-iron pipe. Others were entirely mysterious…

  "Tarnation," Virginia said again softly. "It's like something out of an old story. Like magic."

  "How the Cutters would hate this!" Mathilda said, grinning. "They get upset when they see a clock, and there's a hell of a lot more than gear turning gear turning something here!"

  "How I hate this!" Edain said, and coughed. "The stink's worse than it was outside the walls. Sure and it's like being trapped inside a chimney!"

  "You're right about that," Rudi said; his sinuses and throat already felt a little raw, as if he were coming down with a cold. "It's sweating hot, as well. How a man could work next to a furnace in this, only the Gods know. Why don't they put it outside the walls, the way most places do a tannery or soap-boiling?"

  "Because the Bossman and his cronies all have shares in these, and they don't want them risked outside the defenses… and it's easier to control things in here, too?" Odard said.

  Ingolf gave him a wry look. "Right on both counts."

  Odard is clever, Rudi thought. But sometimes he lets you see the way his mind works.

  "There's power here, though," Fred Thurston said. "Dad tried to get as many factories going in Idaho as he could. Said the old Americans won a lot of wars because they could produce weapons cheap, fast and plenty."

  As if to illustrate the point a load of armor was pushed out of one of the factories on carts with little wheels, breastplates and tassets stacked in bundles according to size and tied securely together. The train they rode slid onto a siding, behind one loaded with bundles of raw flax. The team pulling it stood with their heads down, utterly spent; grooms bustled over to lead them away. Rudi frowned a little. Horses weren't machinery, and Epona-the goddess his horse was named for-didn't like it if you treated them as such. He hoped they'd get a good rest and some mash, and have their hooves seen to; the roadbed of the railway would be hard on them.

  A squad of armed men waited when the passengers disembarked, most clutching their bundles of belongings.

  "State Police," Ingolf said quietly. "Don't get them riled. They're the Bossman's own sworn men."

  The squad looked more like soldiers to Rudi. They were in light horseman's armor, mail-shirts and helms over blue-gray uniforms, and they carried shetes and glaives and crossbows with an ingenious crank mechanism built into the butt rather than the forestock lever used in Oregon. They also looked tougher and more alert than the border garrison the travelers had seen outside Hawarden weeks ago, and a little older.

  Their commander had officer's insignia on his sleeve, and he was a pug-faced man in his forties with cropped blond hair and a face that looked like it had been forged in one of the factories.

  "All right, you miserable vakis," he said, after the passengers had jumped down on the crushed rock of the roadbed.

  Sure, and that's a safe enough assumption, Rudi thought.

  The other passengers were dressed in the same sort of clothes Rudi and his friends had been given; shapeless coarse-woven linen and linsey-woolsey. Most of them were fairly young, more than half were men, and they all looked as if they'd grown up doing hard labor of one sort or another, and not getting all that much for it. All their possessions were in the shapeless bundles they carried, and those were mostly small.

  The Bossman's retainer went on:

  "I am Captain Edgar Denson of the Iowa State Police, Department of Public Safety, and I am going to tell you the rules. You want to live here, you have to work and pay your way, and this is a damned expensive place to live; no matter what Mom and Dad told you, the streets aren't paved with gold-just horseshit, like anywhere else. You don't have a Farmer to pick you up and kiss it better if you stub a toe. You can get rich here-or you can end up starving. It's up to you. Begging is forbidden within city limits. Vagrancy is punished by six months at hard labor. Theft is punished by six years ' hard labor. Armed robbery and murder are punished by life at really hard labor-but life's only a couple of years, in the mines. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir!" the would-be townsmen chorused raggedly.

  "Now get going. That building over there is the hiring hall-you can pick up some day-labor there. Move! Not you lot," he added.

  Rudi sighed. He hadn't expected to slip in entirely unnoticed. You could dress like a local, but that was far easier than looking like one, to anyone who saw past appearances.

  "You're foreigners from out of state, right?" Captain Denson said.

  "Yes, sir," Ingolf replied; they'd agreed that he'd be the one to speak, having both more experience and a less conspicuous accent.

  "And those are weapons, right?" the state trooper said, jerking his helmeted head at their suspiciously elongated bundles.

  "Yes, sir. Nobody told us they were illegal."

  Denson grinned, an expression with a little too much tooth to be pure enjoyment.

  "They aren't. Wearing them in the streets is illegal. Using them except in self-defense is illegal. And remember we don't have capital punishment here. Being dead doesn't hurt. You planning on hiring out for guards in salvage companies? That's mostly in Dubuque and Keokuk."

  "We've been out West. We do have enough money to keep us for a while."

  "Spend it wisely."

  "Here's the money," Tancredo said. "See, not a penny missing." He pushed a ledger across the table to Ingolf.

  "You have the most interesting friends, sweetie," Mary observed, as he studied it.

  Ingolf winced slightly and bent more closely over the paper. Rudi hid a quick smile. On the one hand, his half sister and the man from Wisconsin seemed genuinely fond of each other. But…

  But if we didn't have the same blood-father, I still wouldn't want her or Ritva for a lover. The Maiden knows they're fair women, and smart and funny and good loyal friends in their fashion. But.

  The man who called himself Tancredo shrugged and spread his hands.

  "I've thought of it as more of a business relationship," he said dryly.

  Ingolf picked up his pipe and puffed a cloud, possibly as camouflage. That habit was much more popular here than in the Far West, and about a quarter of the people in this riverside dive were puffing away at pipes, or cigarettes, or rather vile little twisted black stogies; a blue haze hung under the rafters, and the sparse gaslights glowed through it as through fog. From the smell, not all of it was tobacco by any means. The harsh smoke and spilled beer and-from the alley out back-stale piss were the predominant odors, with frying food a close competitor. The plates of catfish in corn batter and fried chicken and fried potatoes had been surprisingly edible.

  Ingolf's…

  Acquaintance, Rudi thought

  … had brown skin, about the same shade as Fred Thurston; that and the tight curls of their black hair were the only things they had in common. Tancredo was in his early thirties, shortish, slender, with an easy smile that seldom reached the upper part of his face, and restless hands that tended to make short abortive moves towards his knives, of which Rudi had spotted three, besides the one worn openly on a belt covered in steel plates. He wore a crisp cotton shirt and a sleeveless leather jerkin, and denim pants an
d good boots; he also had a gold ring in one ear, and several more on his fingers.

  "Ingolf was big in the salvage trade for a while," Tancredo said. "A salvager needs… unofficial contacts… if all the profits aren't going to go on 'fees' and graft. I'm as unofficial as it gets. Hell, my daddy was unofficial too-didn't think it was a good idea to get shipped out of town after the Change and spend the rest of his life hoeing corn for some hick and stealing watermelons and eating fried chicken, sho' 'nuff."

  "You don't like fried chicken?" Fred said curiously; he had a plate of bones in front of him.

  "Classical reference," the man replied. "Anyway, Ingolf, old buddy, what you want?"

  Ingolf flicked his eyes to Rudi. The Mackenzie spoke:

  "We're heading for the East Coast; indeed we've an urgent errand there, which has waited too long."

  The image of the Sword floated before the eyes of his mind, like an itch he could not scratch.

  More haste, less speed, he told himself. Impatience makes mistakes. His voice was calm and friendly as he went on:

  "The fastest way to do it would be by water, up the Ohio. Something big enough to handle ten people and their horses, but no more, as far as the head of navigation."

  Tancredo nodded, elaborately unimpressed by the fact that they were heading so deep into the death zones.

  "You want that done officially? Or unofficially? Because that," he added, "would be very expensive."

  "We hope it can be done officially," Rudi said. "We have friends at court, and they're trying to get us permission, or at least an audience."

  Tancredo smiled, and this time it reached his eyes. "Ingolf didn't get a great fat wonderful hairy deal from his official friends the last time. Anyone relies on the Bossman deserves what he gets."

  "It wasn't the Bossman who finked on me," Ingolf said quietly. "It was Kuttner. And Kuttner wasn't working for Anthony Heasleroad, whatever Tony thought."

  "But we agree with your basic point," Rudi said. "I'd be saying that this was insurance, so to speak. If we get the official permissions we wish, then you've gained a legitimate, official profit as a respectable businessman. And if we don't, sure, and you'll be getting a much bigger unofficial one."