“Front door clear,” he heard Thora call.
There was a rending crash. “Now it’s really clear,” Toa said.
“Quickly!” Deor said again.
The first floor was more intact, and hence darker. After a few glimpses of the stores to either side, John was rather glad of that. The children’s toy-shop with the dolls in a lynching game titled Catch Him and Run Him Up wasn’t the worst of it by any means, or the Pallid Mask masks. Half the front façade of the building had slumped down, but Toa had heaved a load of brick and timber out of the way.
Thora looked back at it after she’d wheeled through. “Well, if you want to be crude,” she said, with a taut grin.
The street outside was half-covered by cones of collapsed buildings, some burnt-out, some still smoldering or sending flames and plumes of smoke into the lowering sky. A little farther away he could see the remains of much taller buildings, ones that reminded him of the giants that still stood in some parts of Montival. Some were on fire with flames pouring out of their endless rows of windows; others were shells of scorched girders; many had fallen into one another, like giant dominos scattered by the fist of some titanic child. You could see that the blow had landed north of here, running towards them in a wave of heat and force.
For a moment John’s memories blurred his sight; that day on the deck of the Tarshish Queen when he’d seen Reiko dancing an invocation to her Ancestress on the shore of Topanga, and the moment when her outflung arm and the Grasscutter Sword had brought down the wrath of Amaterasu-oˉmikami. He’d seen that wall of force sliding towards him, tossing aside the substance of Ocean itself and crushing Korean warships like toys made of matches under a knight’s armored boot. This must have been even worse, worse than the anger of a Goddess.
Then, flatly: “Look out.”
What Thora had warned of looked picayune by comparison, but deadly enough to a few lone strangers like them—and you couldn’t die deader than dead. The figure at the head of the crowd was dressed in a hooded robe of yellow tatters and for a heart-stopping moment . . .
“No, that’s just someone dressed like him,” John decided, going to ground behind an up-tilted block of concrete.
“Leading a mob of rotting lunatics carrying sticks with heads on them,” Pip replied. “Are they the undead, or what?”
“No, not dead,” Deor said, after he signed the air with a rune. “Not quite, not yet—and easier to deal with because of it.”
“Oh, I so do not want to understand what you just said,” John muttered.
“Dead people are usually fairly easy to deal with; you just need a shovel, or some dingoes,” Pip pointed out, articulating something John had not wanted to say because he suspected he might not like the answer. “Or the ants, if you’re patient.”
“Where we are . . . not necessarily,” Deor replied.
I was right. I don’t like that answer.
Meanwhile they’d all gone to ground. There was plenty of cover, though John had to suppress a yelp when his elbow came down on an ember hidden under the omnipresent ash. Meanwhile, the crowd was getting closer, more visible, and he profoundly wished they hadn’t. Whatever had killed the man in the corridor they’d just left had bitten these folk too. Hair had fallen out in patches, bleeding patches, and more understandable burns mixed with something that had singed them like acid and made skin hang in tatters over weeping sores. Clothes were ragged and stained with fluids and blood; one woman staggering in the front rank had eyes that had turned blood red and clutched a child obviously long-dead. Teeth showed long and dry in gaping mouths, where gums bled and fell away.
I’m glad we can’t smell anything but smoke and burning, John thought, uneasily aware that the ruins below him had plentiful bodies tumbled amid brick and metal and wood—a burnt, blackened hand protruded not far away.
Every second or third of the hundreds of walkers carried a stick or pole bearing a head—mostly human, though he saw a scattering of cats and dogs and one horse.
“And they’re heading straight for us,” Pip said. “Turn them or run, chaps, one or the other.”
“Too many to fight—” Thora began.
Crack.
The sound was loud and sharp, and one of the mob staggered and fell.
“Gunshot!” Deor said.
That was something nobody in the world had heard since the year of his father’s birth, forty-six years before. Except that this place was not in or of the world to which he’d been born.
Another fusillade of the cracks, and another that was like an endless series of the same sound jammed together. It was coming from the right on the street that joined the one they and the crowd shared, at a T-junction less than a hundred long paces ahead. Dozens fell, then scores and more. A vehicle jolted into view, with men—it was all men—in the same uniform they wore—firing rifles and a machine gun from its bed. The last survivors of the crowd broke and fled, shambling away and being gunned down from behind.
Tense silence gripped John and his comrades. He squinted through the fire-shot gloom, and saw that the troops were only a little less tattered than the mob they’d slaughtered. They jumped down from the truck and advanced on the bodies and the wounded, clipping long knives below the barrels of their guns. An officer led them, staggering and laughing and weeping and shrieking incoherently as he emptied his revolver into the bodies. His men stabbed and hacked. . . .
“I think they’re cutting out the hearts and eating them,” Thora said.
Others dropped their pants and threw themselves on the twitching bodies. The Boisean made a retching noise from beside him and raised his rifle.
“Wait—” John began, then cursed and brought his rifle to his shoulder.
Crack.
It punched back into his shoulder with a hard solidity. He was a fair archer and very good with a crossbow; evidently whatever had translated him here translated that as well, for him and the others. He worked the bolt again and again, letting the muzzle fall back down and the sights settle. Toa was firing his heavier weapon too, short bursts of braaaap . . . braaaap . . . braaapp. In the firelit darkness the weapons spat blade-shaped tongues of yellow flame from their muzzles as they shot.
John let his fingers reload the weapon, pulling the bolt back and pressing clips of cartridges from the pouches at his belt into the magazine well. His senses were stretched in alertness, but some part of his mind that had been listening to all those grizzled veterans was appalled by the firepower this little group had spat out. Things he’d read in pre-Change books made more sense now, how soldiers in the ancient world had spent so much time hiding. He was used to a world where when men fought they usually did it in masses and blocks, and at arm’s length after charging through a shower of missiles that might or might not wound and kill you through your armor and shield if they chanced to hit.
“We must travel some miles from here,” Deor said, when the enemy were all dead. “It will be better if we take that . . . horseless vehicle.”
John mentally cursed himself. They all knew the concept of horseless carriages and wagons, and he’d seen refurbished pre-Change vehicles running on big windup springs used as a rich man’s plaything. Usually only a few elders who’d been grown before the Change were interested in that sort of thing, of course. One mill-owning magnate in the city-state of Corvallis had shown off just such a toy to the Royal family on a visit when he was fourteen, and had let him drive it sedately around a blocked-off street. There had been a tear running down the man’s seamed, white-bearded cheek as they climbed out, and a four-horse hitch of Percherons had come back to tow it home.
It was just that you didn’t think of them in terms of anything practical, like going somewhere important fast. For that you used horses, one way or another, or sails on water.
“Well, it won’t come here by itself,” John sighed, and led the way, rifle at half-port.
> None of them were squeamish, but they all looked away from the mutual massacre around the motor-truck; except for Toa, who stopped to administer an elephantine kick.
“That ’un was trying to reach for his gun,” he explained. “Somehow I don’t fancy lying wounded in the street around here if I can avoid it.”
The truck had a towing-hitch at the rear, seats in an open body, and 44th Battery stenciled on its side, over the sigil of the Yellow Sign; he presumed it had been designed to pull some explosive equivalent of field catapults. The motor under the hood at the front was making a steady ticking sound, which was a relief.
They stopped and looked at each other as John climbed in the open side.
“You know how to use one of these, Johnnie?” Pip asked curiously.
“Not really, but—” He explained about the spring-driven replica. “That’s as close as anyone around today, I think . . . anyone under seventy years old, that is. Órlaith was bored, but I thought it was interesting.”
Deor and Pip climbed in beside him as he slid behind the wheel; Thora and Toa and the Boisean went in the open space behind, where they had a broader field of view and could cover the sides with their weapons.
“Good-oh you know how to drive these things, Johnnie dearest,” Pip said cheerfully.
“Ah—yes,” John said, smiling brightly and remembering his father and mother telling him to look confident for others even when he wasn’t.
I remember how I made the wind-up toy move, he thought. And those controls were rigged up to make it work just like a pre-Change automobile, so that rich old bastard could relive his childhood with a stick-shift. The problem is that this thing doesn’t have the same controls except for the wheel. All right, there are three pedals on the floor, so one should be the clutch, one should be the accelerator, and one should be the brake . . . I think I can figure this out, but by the Saints we’re sort of pressed for time!
As if to punctuate the thought there was a shot from the bed of the truck, and the clink-clack sound of Thora working the bolt of her rifle. A tentative tap at the leftmost pedal made the engine roar; that must be the accelerator. He crossed himself, pulled out his crucifix and kissed it—whenever you thought yourself the uniquely unfortunate victim of circumstances, a brief glance at the Man of Sorrows was a good idea for putting things in perspective—took a deep breath, and worked the lever by his side with the knob on it.
“You got him, mate!” Toa cried enthusiastically, as the truck lurched backward and hit something with a grisly crunch.
“Well, you meant to do that, eh?” Pip murmured.
“Of course!” John said as he stamped on the brake—it was the brake, thank God—and shoved the lever back where it had been before.
Logically, if it had gone backward when he pushed it this way, the forward gears must be the other way. From the worn and battered and faded indicators, there were three. Hopefully the nearest meant ahead slow.
There was a bestial howling from behind them, from many throats. Toa’s weapon chattered, shatteringly loud, and Thora shouted:
“Now would be a good time, Johnnie!”
Squeezed beside him Pip twisted and looked back through the open space and into the body of the truck, and presumably at whatever was behind it. She blanched, which made John want to gibber in panic; Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie wasn’t the sort who blanched on small provocation.
A deep breath, and he stepped on the clutch and pushed the lever forward, then transferred his foot to the accelerator. Yells followed as the vehicle lurched forward with a grinding, clanging clash of machinery from under the hood, seeming to stagger as it built up speed. Some force pushed him back against the hard rest behind him, like going over the crest of a rise in a fairground roller-coaster. The wheels lurched and banged over bits of rubble in the roadway, tossing everyone from side to side—the cramped quarters in the front were an advantage now, though Deor cursed in Old English as he was nearly thrown out.
John eased off on the accelerator and wrenched at the wheel to avoid a head-high pile of bricks, then back again to dodge a smoldering tree-trunk, then up onto the sidewalk and a clanging contact with some cast-iron something.
“Left! Left here!” Deor shouted.
Crack.
Pip fired her rifle at something he hadn’t seen as he dragged at the wheel to turn them left down a broader road and then frantically right to avoid another cone of slumped wreckage. The left wheels of the truck rode high, and John yelped as he felt the vehicle beginning to tip. Behind him Toa bellowed and leapt to the left side, a thud he could feel through the steel fabric beneath him, and the truck slammed down on all four wheels again as it came to a—relatively—uncluttered stretch of roadway.
Then a figure crashed into the bumper of the truck and vaulted over it, lying full-length along it and beginning to crawl towards him. The face was mostly red eyes and gray teeth, the skin around them scorched black and weeping red from a network of cracks. The knife clenched between the broken teeth was long and crusted brown.
“Bugger!” Pip said crisply, as John gave a wordless yell.
Pip and Deor fired simultaneously, she bracing her rifle on the top of the dashboard and Deor extending his pistol. John couldn’t tell if one hit or both, but the man grinning around the stained steel of the knife jerked upright as half his head splashed away, then fell over backward. The wheels thumped over him, and John concentrated on driving—that and coughing up black phlegm, stained from the rain of ash all around them.
“I wonder what’s in this damned ash,” Pip said.
“I don’t,” Deor said bluntly. “And we would die of it if we had to stay here long.”
John kept his attention on the half-buried street, and was thankful of it as Pip made disgusted noises and Deor grew more and more silent; Toa was swearing in half a dozen languages, and Thora the same, though in different ones.
This city died of more than a blow from the sky, John thought. That may have been a cleansing.
The sky grew darker, and tendrils of mist rose. Before long it was a clinging mist that hid everything, growing closer and closer to his face. At last he braked the truck and stuck the lever back into the middle position.
“I can’t drive this thing any farther,” he said.
“You are right,” Deor said. “More than you know. We must pass through this. To . . . another place.”
Pip grimaced in the dimness. “Back to where we went into the fog?” she said.
“Yes,” Deor said.
Oh. She told me that, John thought. I thought she must be exaggerating. Now I’m horribly afraid she wasn’t.
They piled out of the truck and began walking behind Deor into the mist. John couldn’t see anything beyond six paces away, which was just enough to make all of them visible. He coughed again, and noticed that the snow-like fall of black ash had stopped, and that less of it was crusted over the pavement under his feet. Then it wasn’t pavement anymore. . . .
John opened his mouth to ask Deor what was happening, hesitating to interrupt the chanting he could hear the scop murmuring under his breath. Then something went through him like a flash of white fire. And there were voices screaming . . .
He stumbled to a halt, bracing himself instinctively on the point of his kite shield. . . .
Wait a minute. I’m in full plate! he thought.
It was so infinitely familiar that he hadn’t noticed. And his lungs felt free of the poison he’d been breathing for hours. He took a deep breath, noting that the visor of his sallet was up, and looked at the others. Pip was back in her white shorts and singlet and round black hat, twirling her double-headed cane in relief, and Toa had his huge spear and fiber loincloth-belt. Deor was in his own folk’s dress, with the mail and round shield, and Thora in a Bearkiller A-lister’s cataphract armor. The man he’d been imprisoned with was in the full fig of a Boisean l
ight cavalryman, with captain’s bars on the collar of his mail shirt.
“I think I just had a vision of . . . Hell,” John said.
“Close enough, as you Christians conceive of it,” Deor said grimly, glancing around himself.
John looked at the Boisean: “You’re probably wearing an ID tag, if that uniform’s any guide, friend. Take a look.”
The man did, pulling out a leather thong from beneath the mail and the quilted gambeson beneath it.
“Alan!” he said, tilting it to read it by the light of moon and stars . . . which were suddenly overhead. “Alan Thurston!”
He was no fool, and noticed how the others froze; specifically, how Deor and John and Thora did. Pip and Toa looked almost as puzzled as he.
“Do you know me?” the man—Alan—said.
Deor said cautiously: “The ruling House of the United States of Boise is named Thurston,” he said. “And . . . you could be of that kin.”
John looked at him and mentally stepped back to analyze. He could be, by his looks, he decided.
Back in the ancient world, those who were visibly descended from the folk of Africa below the Sahara had been called black. Old Lawrence Thurston, the first General-President of Boise, had been one such, as well as an officer in the old American army; so had the first Count of Molalla, whose grandson Sir Droyn was a liege knight of Órlaith’s and a good sort, though a bit of a prig in John’s opinion.
Lawrence Thurston’s wife, though, had been of a stock mostly European in blood, and so had the wives of his sons Martin and Frederick; the distinctions of the old world meant little in modern times, as opposed to more realistic and well-grounded concerns like your faith, clan, tribe, city-state, family allegiances or ties of lordship. John had known Frederick Thurston’s children all his life—they were much of an age with him, and their father was a close friend and comrade-in-arms of his parents from the Quest of the Lady’s Sword, as well as ruler of a major member-realm of the High Kingdom.
Alan Thurston, on the other hand, he knew only by his name and that of his mother, Juliet, widow of the dead traitor Martin.
The Sea Peoples Page 28