Like a glider!
She had traveled in military gliders, two-seaters, a few times. That let her mind grasp the experience enough to realize that she was in an automobile. Not for the first time, but this was no rusting, moldering relic, and it was moving. Even the air was strange, full of scents for which she had no names save that they were metallic and acrid. Strange lights glowed from the dashboard, and twin beams split the gloaming ahead.
Of themselves her hands shot to the front and side to brace herself; some part of her noticed that she was in a kimono of pale blue with designs in gray and silver, not the night-fighting gear her waking body wore. The impression of rushing speed was greater than flight, save perhaps for when the glider came down to land again. She blinked and her eyes adjusted, and she could make out that she was on a steep winding road in forested mountains, in a moving automobile. Somewhere in the north of Honshu, at a guess. And this was a car of the type that the Change had left stranded by the millions on the roads of Japan, and which her folk had been mining ever since, sleeker and more rounded than the boxy machines of the years of the Pacific War.
Slowly her head turned to see the driver. It was a woman—Japanese, she was sure, though in a Western dress—with her hands clenched tight on the wheel, a frown on her face. No more than a few years older than Reiko.
She is preoccupied. She is not paying attention to that which she does!
The machine was traveling far faster than a galloping horse, and through darkness and steep curves. What would happen if it ran off the road or struck a tree didn’t bear thought. Reiko’s teeth were bared as it took one of those curves, though the woman seemed to be handling it with some skill.
“Slow!” burst from her. “You must slow down!”
The woman started slightly, and the vehicle began to drift. With a gasp she worked the wheels and pedals and the automobile jerked to a stop by the side of the road. Hot metal pinged and clicked. Yet the pressure on Reiko felt greater, if anything. A crushing weight, shuddering with horror, like a great shape falling from forever over her head.
The Change! It is coming, and with it terrible death for all but one in a thousand of our people. This cannot be more than a few scant years before, no more than ten at most. The monstrous thing presses me like an insect beneath a mountain of glass.
Grimly she forced herself to see. The woman looked entirely ordinary; an intelligent face, pretty, forceful normally but a bit frightened now, breathing quickly. Her eyes hunted through the space Reiko occupied, where she saw and smelt and felt the touch of cushions and metal and felt her own presence. But there was something . . .
A nexus of lines of light? Reiko thought. She shines with it.
As if she was permeated by possibility. Suddenly Reiko understood.
“You . . . must . . . be . . . careful,” she said distinctly, and the woman started violently. “You must!”
“Who is there?” the driver said. “Please, is someone there?”
The Nihongo she spoke was entirely clear, but of a form Reiko had heard only from a few elderly people; an educated Tokyo dweller’s version of the old Standard Japanese. The woman’s eyes grew very wide as she seemed to see something. If not Reiko absolutely, at least some sort of outline or presence. Despite that awe and fright her voice was nearly steady.
“Are you . . . a kami?” She shook her head. “Amazing! Are the old stories true, then?”
“A kami? I am . . . yes and no,” Reiko said.
She felt sweat break out on her brow with the effort to resist the weight, the force that tried to exclude her from this moment, to make her impossible.
“But the kami are very real, Princess,” she said. “And that is why you must be careful. Because of she who you bear.”
The other’s hand went down to lie on her stomach. “She? A daughter? And how do you know? I haven’t even told Fumihito yet! Oh . . . either I am hallucinating, or . . . why?”
A tremulous smile. “Would a hallucination speak with that very odd dialect? Like someone from Sado acting in an old Kurosawa historical!”
“You were in danger,” Reiko said. “It is . . . it is essential that you live. For she who you bear is of the seed of Amaterasu-omikami, and she will . . .”
Even under the stress of that moment, Reiko hesitated: how to tell truth without cruelty?
“. . . she will be the instrument that saves our people in a time of . . . terrible crisis yet to come.”
Reiko could feel herself start to fade, as if she was toppling backward, very slowly, over an infinite cliff.
“Don’t go!” the other woman said, reaching out to her. “You can’t just say that and leave—I have so many questions!”
“I cannot stay,” Reiko said, with wrenching effort. “Listen, please! Just this. When all seems lost, do not despair. Trust Egawa Katashi, trust him with your child’s life. This will seem as a dream, but remember that.”
The woman nodded, already seeming a little more distant. Reiko forced out one more sentence before she was altogether gone:
“Farewell . . . great-grandmother.”
• • •
She came instantly alert at a hand on her foot, then relaxed with the tessen halfway out of her sash.
Please, let that be the last of these visions!
She drew a deep breath and put it out of her mind. That was Egawa. He held his wrist near her face and held back the cover for an instant so that she could see the dim remnant illuminated hands on the watch-dial.
She rolled on one side behind the ruined wall so that she could look back to the south and used her monocular. The fire on the hilltop was still clearly visible. When she used the glass it sprang close. A figure passed in front of it—but this time it was a figure carrying something, something through which the fire passed in a diffuse red glow. She nodded and restarted the light, and a young samurai crept close to keep the pump operating. This time she locked the thumb-piece down—the light would be a beacon now.
Then she turned back towards the enemy, stretching as she did so without movement—pitting muscle against muscle on her bones to make them limber and quick.
That continuous light was the signal for launch. If nobody happened to see it first, and it wasn’t that easy to spot. Egawa had started his stopwatch when she locked the light down, the ancient hands still very faintly glowing.
It had taken hours for the Japanese and the others to steal through the evening in this great wilderness of brush and ruined buildings. Sometimes they had evaded inhabited places more by the scent of smoke and sheep-pens and chicken-coops than by sight or sound. Several times they’d hidden from goatherds moving their stinking beasts about to graze on the thorny, spiny vegetation that sank its roots into the rubble. Now and then there was the incongruous scent of roses from feral plants that had survived the decades and the fires.
Nobody had been caught. And now the next wave would be coming.
She smiled the way a hawk might, if it could. Some of them were much more likely to run into local fighters than those who had infiltrated down the slopes. Others were much less so . . .
• • •
Thora Garwood clenched her thighs and leaned forward slightly, keeping the reins slightly slack as she moved through the Gate and down the winding switchbacks to the north.
The well-trained Dúnedain horse responded perfectly, walking forward into the darkness beneath a sky spectacularly frosted with the diamond band of the Milky Way and lit by a three-quarter waxing moon low on the horizon. The air had gone from hot to merely warm when the sun went down, here where the mountains blocked the sea-breeze; warm and spicy and dusty, with a hint of smoke somewhere. It didn’t even smell strange, not after so many different lands.
Fortunately the Rangers used the same signals to school their horses, she supposed taken from the same rodeo-natural-riding-and-dressage m�
�lange the Bearkillers had drawn from. Astrid Larsson had been the Bear Lord’s sister-in-law originally, after all, and Morfind and Faramir were right behind her, his grandchildren. They’d been trained by the Luanne Hutton who’d married Eric Steelfist Larsson; she’d been the Outfit’s original horsemistress.
The sun had painted the mountains ahead a salmon-pink when it went down; she’d rested under a pepper tree and watched it, before Deor helped her suit up. She was in her own battered and well-used armor, what the Outfit called cataphract harness; it was a bit lighter than knight’s plate, with more mail, and a bit less complete, and they used a round shield a yard across rather than the big kite types. Fortunately, all that made her gear look a lot like what the Chatsworth Lancers were supposed to wear. More so because she’d had bits and pieces patched or replaced here and there around the world whenever they’d run into armorers . . . or just plain blacksmiths . . . who were up to the job.
Not very much like the Chatsworth version, of course; from the captured examples the real thing was much more elementary, and they didn’t even try to make metal-to-metal joints, using leather where flexibility was essential. They also used a doubled-edged chopper style of sword that was, if the examples shown her were any indication, badly balanced and a bit too heavy for skilled swordplay—she’d just kept her backsword and belted on a sash whose knot and tag-ends covered the hilt.
Plus reportedly either none of them were women or they were few enough for their faces all to be known, so she’d left her helmet on despite the different profile. People saw what they expected to see, so in half-light and, more important, when they wouldn’t expect anyone in armor on a horse to be anything but one of their own, it might well do. Or it wouldn’t and the whole mission would be fucked but she’d be too dead to be embarrassed. She’d have laughed at that, except that it would be out of character.
“On the whole I’d rather be back in Hraefnbeorg, picking the site for the house,” she said quietly.
Deor had a tunic over his mail shirt and rode a little behind her. Luckily Topangans and Valley men wore them baggy and shapeless.
“Now that you mention it, oath-sister, so would I,” he said.
The Topangans had supplied her with a Chatsworth-style lance, about twelve feet long including the head, and made of aluminum pipe counterbalanced with lead in the butt. The metal was ridged, and had a grip of rawhide wound around it, and overall was about as practical as the ashwood shafts she’d grown up with though much harder to replace if damaged. She carried it easily, steadying it with her right hand and the butt braced against a ring welded to her stirrup-iron.
Been too long since I used a lance or spent much time in the saddle. Hope I don’t have to do anything fancy, she thought. Then again, picking tent-pegs out of the ground probably won’t be on the program, it’s not a Gunpowder Day festival at Larsdalen, after all.
A sudden slight sadness came over her. It would be nice to see the Bear Gate once more before the end, and my folks and the sibs and their kids. She had three brothers, all handfasted, and ten nieces and nephews who hardly knew her except by reputation. Then she narrowed her consciousness down to a single point of focus.
The road dipped downward, weaving in switchbacks and then straightening out to the north; the foothills beyond the Gate were no-man’s-land, used only for rough pasture and hunting. The land grew much smoother and a bit drier as the road became a straight highway. That was part of a grid in the low flat valley, and there were more ruins—many of them things you couldn’t see from above, like concrete overgrown with vines. A pike pivoting between two poles marked the official border, and a low patched-up building with the letters ST TE ARM fastened to its façade stood nearby. Smoke came from a rusty sheet-metal chimney through the ancient flat asphalt roof, and light leaked out of the windows.
Three men came out as the sound of hooves approached; the first held a lantern in one hand and a spear in the other, and two had strung bows. None of them was wearing armor or looked very remarkable, and doubtless they had families or someone who would miss them. That was their wyrd; all human kind ever born lived until the moment they died, and not a minute longer. If you carried a spear you had no cause to complain if you died on one.
“Look, you hippie freaks know the road’s closed at sundown for . . . Sir!”
The peevish note died as the man detected the lance and armor. “Sir, we’re under orders to keep the road closed at night!”
“This is a secret mission,” Deor snapped as she stared straight ahead—he didn’t have quite the local accent, but at least the voice was male, and a scop could imitate anything on short acquaintance. “Raise the barrier, clear the way, and don’t say a word to anyone.”
The tone of authority overrode the fact that the words made no sense at all long enough for Thora and the riders behind her to come close enough. It also focused their attention on her, and not on the frankly foreign appearance of the others or any slight noises from the night around them . . . the sort men infiltrating to surround the building would make.
Squinting against the light of the lantern—it was an antique originally designed to burn kerosene—his eyes suddenly went wide and his hand clenched on the spear-shaft.
Perception and action flowed through her with no pause between one and the other. The lance tossed up, her hand slapped home on the balance-point in the reversed overarm grip, and as the blade came down to the right angle she stabbed with the vicious precision of a rattlesnake striking.
The honed steel rammed into the base of the man’s throat, just above where the collarbones met, with a familiar feeling—soft and heavy, with crisp undertones as the steel parted the cartilage of the windpipe. The man had no time for more than the expression of surprise and alarm that had already begun before blood poured into his mouth and lungs from the clutch of big arteries that ran through that spot. The lantern landed with a clink of metal and a tinkling of shattered glass and the oil in the reservoir caught with a huff and pool of dancing blue flame.
She dropped the lance as he fell and her backsword hissed out, even as she threw a leg over the neck of her mount and slid to the ground with her shield up and her back to the beast.
Three horse-bows snapped right behind her, and the chunking smack of impact in meat and bone followed so quickly that it merged with the sound of the strings. Neither the Topangans nor their neighbors practiced mounted archery for some reason, but there was nothing wrong with Faramir or Morfind when it came to the art, and allowing for her size and the limits it put on her draw-weight, Susan Mika was about the best Thora had ever encountered, her own very considerable talent not excepted.
At about ten feet range, not even the pale fickle wash of starlight and moonlight and the guttering remains of the lantern and what leaked around the shutters made any difference. One of the bowmen actually managed to begin raising his weapon before a set of fletchings bloomed against the dull undyed linen of his tunic in a way that meant his breastbone had been split and the point lodged in his spine. He went down thrashing, but only with his arms and only for a moment. The other fell instantly limp, a shaft in the left side of his chest and another—someone showing off—standing four inches deep in his right eyesocket.
Thora charged right after her feet hit the ground, and before the Valley militiaman shot in the spine stopped thrashing, with Deor beside her. They had ten yards to cover before they reached the door of the border post. They kept their shields up and ran straight, with Deor a pace behind and on her right hand, the way they had often before—they didn’t go looking for fights but a fair number had come their way. Nobody shot at them, but arrows went by overhead from the road, and something grunted and then screamed once up on the flat roof, the sound dying down to a whimper.
According to the Topangan reports, tinder and dry pinewood was piled there in an iron basket. Evidently someone had tried to light it, which was bravely done even if it was
reflex, and they’d met knife-sharp steel traveling at two hundred feet a second.
Two other men burst out of a side door and tried to run north. They took a few paces and then just silently fell over, face-planting on the cracked concrete. A lot of Topangans used blowguns; they didn’t have anything like the range or armor-penetrating power of bows, but you could use them lying down behind a bush and they were even quieter than arrows, and accurate within their limits if you knew what to do with them. The fleeing men had each just had four or five tenpenny nails driven into various parts of their bodies, sent by the locals who’d swung wide behind the station while all attention was on the road.
By that time the door of the station was opening, inward. Whoever was inside was coming out—sensible enough, since there were two big windows and the place was indefensible even for the briefest moment, with no way to prevent people standing outside, breaking the windows and shooting arrows or bolts or even blowgun darts at him. This was a customs post, not a fort.
He had a shortsword in his hand, but his eyes were still dazzled by the light of the wall-mounted lanterns inside. And obviously had no idea of what was going on, save that it was something very bad.
Thora tucked her shoulder into her shield and hit him full-tilt. The impact made her grunt and put the taste of iron in her head, and a passing thump on the doorframe as they both went back through it made her glad she was wearing her helmet. You could get permanently punchdrunk in this business if you weren’t careful. Or permanently dead even if you were.
She staggered into the room, skip-stepping to get back into stance, and he flew back until he hit a wooden table and knocked it skidding back across the faded uneven tiles, spilling a jug of something on the floor to splash dark liquid and wine-scent. The man snarled and crouched and managed to get back upright, and he’d kept hold of his blade. He didn’t have a shield, though.
The Desert and the Blade Page 54