AUGUST 12, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“Are you sure, Colonel Nystrup?” Astrid asked conscientiously.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t send people on a suicide mission, Ritva knew. It was just that she wouldn’t lie to them about it first. She wanted them to know what they were getting into without a shadow of a doubt.
The warehouse belonged to a Mormon merchant who’d traded widely in alum, soda ash and other valuable minerals, and had been built by stripping out everything but the load-bearing concrete members from an office building. The trade had declined in the long destructive war between the CUT and New Deseret, and nearly halted altogether since the Battle of Wendell. He’d turned it over to other uses without a murmur, or any questions, then packed his family and portable wealth and left town in a hurry. The huge first floor stretched empty around them, dusty, smelling of chemicals, with spears of light from the high small windows.
“Lady Astrid, we are extremely sure,” Nystrup said.
He’d gotten a little thinner than she remembered him, from the time the questers passed through the CUT-occupied parts of New Deseret east of here and helped his band of partisan fighters; a leanly fit man in his thirties, fair and with a snub-nose that had been made more snubby sometime in the recent past with a blow. The sixty Mormon guerillas grouped behind him all looked as if they knew their business. Judging from the scars and what she saw in their eyes, Ritva judged that they meant what their leader said. Years spent fighting the CUT forces occupying their homeland had winnowed them with fire.
“We are not engaging in suicide,” he went on earnestly. “That is damnable sin. We are taking on a dangerous mission that we know carries a very high risk of death, for our homes and land and people, and for the Church of Latter-day Saints, and for God, and against the servants of the Adversary. This war must be won, or our families will know only death or slavery. Part of Deseret holds out yet, but more than half is occupied by the false Prophet’s troops, and our refugees here in Boise are treated more and more badly. This . . . this Montival is our only hope. I have met Rudi Mackenzie, and we know that he has been sent as our deliverer.”
Astrid nodded. “Come then,” she said gently. “Now is the time. Operation Lúthien is a go.”
Above them a rope shook. John Hordle came sliding down it with a rattle of equipment, in Dúnedain battle gear with his greatsword slung over his back along with a longbow and quiver. Eilir followed him, similarly clad but carrying the recurve of horn and sinew that most Rangers preferred.
The wind is from the north and rising, she Signed. I don’t like the taste of it, either. I’m afraid that the blimp may go faster than Major Hanks calculated.
Ritva winced slightly. If the rendezvous didn’t go as planned, they died; it was as simple as that.
Alleyne signed from the door: Street empty. Go!
The four wagons were standard US of Boise army-issue, rated to carry a ton and a half of cargo beneath their canvas tilts. Half of the guerillas were already in Boise’s uniforms and hoop-armor as well; now they put on the helmets, low-crowned affairs with a flared neck-guard and folding cheek-pieces. When they tied the cords to those beneath their chins little could be seen of their faces, and they took the shields and javelins from the vehicles and fell in with a creditable imitation of the smooth precision to be expected.
Ritva pitched in with harnessing the six-mule teams; the familiar task helped her calm herself, long slow breaths easing the knot in her belly until she felt loose and relaxed. She pulled on her close-fitting steel cap of blackened steel, climbed into the wagon and lay down, checking that all her weapons were ready once more, and that her eye was near one of the knotholes in the planks which made up its side so that she could look out. The Ponderosa pine wood was new, and she could smell the sap. It was a little thin, too, flexing where she pressed against it.
Some contractor is padding his accounts using unseasoned wood that’s not of the right grade. Tsk!
The thought almost made her laugh, but you couldn’t let your emotions loose at a time like this, even positive ones were a risk. In a way, a sudden surprise was easier than methodical waiting; you just reacted by trained reflex. She let her mind drift instead, mainly going back over the day she’d spent at the Drover’s Delight before the stretched-out arrival of the others.
Ian really is sweet, she thought happily. And smart and funny and good with his hands . . . in more ways than one. But I’m definitely not going to go live on a farm in northern Drumheller, ever, ever, ever. If you shout there at Yule the sound doesn’t thaw out enough to hear until Ostara! Shudder! Oh, well, the war’s likely to last a while. We’ll see.
The object of her meditation crawled into the wagon and wiggled through the other Dúnedain until he was snuggled behind her; mainly symbolic, when you were wearing a mail shirt.
“Not very private,” he murmured. “In the Peace River, we have sleigh rides for courting. A nice buffalo robe can conceal a multitude of sins.”
“Shhh!” she said affectionately.
A set of sacks filled with wheat husks was tossed in to cover the layer of fighters in the bed of the wagon; unless they were examined closely they’d look just like full sacks of actual grain, but they were light enough that they could be pushed off instantly. She could smell the redcoats’ sweat, and it wasn’t just wearing a mail shirt and padding on a warm day. They weren’t simply going to a fight, they were going to a fight that was certain death unless everything went right, including actions by strangers they didn’t know beyond brief acquaintance.
Poor Ian is even worse off. He doesn’t know us, or Aunt Astrid and Uncle Alleyne or anyone but me . . . and we’ve only known each other a couple of months, though it’s been intense.
There was a special rankness to the sweat of fear.
She didn’t mind; courage wasn’t a matter of whether you were afraid, it was a matter of what you did. Nearly everyone was afraid before a fight if they had time to think about it, especially if they’d seen and felt and smelled the results and knew bone-deep how easily it could happen to them. Even if the surge of rage and effort burned it out during the actual face-to-face killing, the waiting was hard.
Which is why you want the waiting to be over. Sorta.
People who were never frightened were scary.
Aunt Astrid is scary, for example, Ritva thought, as the wagon creaked out of the big doors of the warehouse.
The day outside was much brighter, though there were plenty of clouds and it was well after dinnertime in the long summer evening. Her sandwich and cup of bean soup wasn’t lying too heavily on her stomach, and they’d all eaten several handfuls of dried fruit with honey for the quick energy, along with one small shot of brandy.
Aunt Astrid is scary because she doesn’t control the fear, she just doesn’t feel it. I think something must have happened to her after the Change that burned it out though she never talks about it. I don’t think she sees what the rest of us see. I love her as my kinswoman and liege, almost a second mother, but I’m afraid of her too.
This might not be the riskiest thing Ritva had ever done. Probably the flight from the Sword of the Prophet in the Sioux country last year was that, where they’d dodged behind a herd of stampeding buffalo to escape just a hair ahead of being trampled into mush, or the fight on the rooftops in Des Moines when the Seeker had made the assassins into puppets of meat with the same not-mind looking out from each pair of eyes—
Manwë! The things I do! And it always seems like a good idea at the time!
—but this was right up there with the worst things she could remember doing deliberately and in cold blood. The feeling that they were completely dependent on someone else for a chance at escape wasn’t very pleasant either.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Work the muscles, don’t get stiff, keep centered. Just do your best and let other people do theirs and afterwards you can tell stories about it.
And Martin Thurston had threatened, sincerely, to cut
out his wife’s tongue. Even though she detested the woman, that . . .
Was exactly what you expect from Cutters. I don’t know what it is, Rudi tried to explain but I got the feeling he really didn’t understand it himself after we came out of . . . wherever we were on Nantucket. But whatever is doing things to the Cutters’ spirits, that whatever-it-is hates us for existing. We really, really need to do this.
Noise built; they were into the populated part of the city, and she could see narrow glimpses of horses and bicycles and pedestrians and pedicabs and wagons and a handcart full of very fresh green onions that made her eyes water for an instant until she had to bite her lip to smother a sneeze. The steel wheels of the wagons grated and rattled and banged on the pavement, and the bed of the vehicle punched at her side as it hit little ridges and dips; nobody wasted leaf springs on a mass-produced freight carrier like this. Then the traffic thinned.
“Roit,” a deep bass voice said, cheerfully. John Hordle was a bit scary too. “’ang ’ard, all. Time for the kiddies to play the fall down and bleed you evil buggers game.”
Let your mind flow. Don’t think, just be, just do.
A stretch of pavement, the gravel-and-concrete patches light even against sun-faded asphalt a generation old. A stretch of roadway, with a sheet-metal watering trough and an automatic nose-operated dispenser. Another one of those a little farther down, and an extremely fancy black carriage, with the Presidential seal on its doors, and a driver and groom watering an equally fancy set of matched black horses; she hoped with some distant corner of her mind they wouldn’t get hurt in the contentions of men. And a line of soldiers standing in a double file at parade rest against the plate-glass windows of the jewelry store.
At least I’ll have these sacks of chaff off me in a second. It’s filtering down through the burlap and it itches. And I’ll be smelling something bedsides scared excited soldier.
It would probably, almost certainly, be blood instead, and the smells you got when bodies were cut open. Until then she had more light and air than the rest of the dense-packed crowd in the wagon.
No thought. Be. Do.
Her bow was between her and the side of the wagon-box. She reached slowly over her shoulder and pulled four arrows out of her quiver; goosefletched shafts of dense Port Orford cedar with horn nocks and wicked bodkin points of hard alloy steel. At this point-blank range she could put them through plate, even, if they hit square on. A flicker of memory told her how little protection the light mail under her jerkin would be, but that faded away. She tucked the arrows between her left forefinger and the riser of the bow. Ready, ready . . .
“Platoooon . . . halt! Right face!”
The guerillas in Boise army gear came to a stop, crash-stamping in unison and turning to face the escort guarding the General-President’s family. A man jumped down from each wagon seat, hitting the quick-release catches in the military harness of the teams and making as if to take them to the troughs.
The Decurion in charge of the detail was wearing sunglasses as well as his helmet with its stiff upright brush of scarlet-dyed hair from a horse’s mane. They were probably for effect, given the way the day was turning overcast.
“What are you Fifteenth Battalion pukes doing here?” he asked, flourishing the swagger stick he wasn’t strictly entitled to. “This is an interdicted spot, so get your weevil-wagons and glue-bait mules and your own sorry Reservist asses out of—”
Nystrup was leading the guerillas playing escort. He didn’t waste time on talking. One hand flashed out and took the platoon-leader by the back of the neck under the flare of his helmet. The other drew and struck with his dagger, driving the point up through the gap in the jawbone and the palate and into the Boise soldier’s brain. The man toppled back
“NOW!” roared Hordle’s bull-bellow.
White fire erupted in Ritva’s mind, like glowing ice. The light sacks flew in every direction from the wagons as they spouted warriors. She came up to one knee in a smooth roll, stripping an arrow out of the bundle she held against her bow and onto the string and throwing arms and shoulders and gut into the draw. The arrow slid through the cutout in the riser as the lead kiss-ring brushed between her lips, and she let the string fall off the fingers. Less than a second and a half had passed, and the arrow drove over a snatched-up shield and into a man’s face with a solid moist crunching whack sound that might come back to her in the night sometime. Again, again, a torrent of whispering death from forty bows—
The guerillas on foot had all thrown their pila. They weren’t experts, but the distance was ten feet and there were thirty of them with strong arms and they were full of desperate hate. Some of the big javelins missed and smashed into the glass window. Others thudded into shields as the Sixth Battalion guard detail reacted with trained speed. Many found flesh.
The survivors crowded back towards the tall worked-bronze doors of the shop; not running, but backing with their shields up and putting their bodies between the unknown enemy and their ruler’s kin, slightly crouched with their blades out ready for the stabbing stroke. Whistles trilled, calling the alarm.
More arrows punched into the heavy plywood and sheet metal, crack-crack-crack , and more men fell or dropped the shields as the points gouged through into arms. Soldiers were pushing out through the doors to join them, the other half of the guard detail, and the formation was shaken for a moment.
That instant’s gap was enough. A great high silvery shout: “Lacho calad! Drego morn!”
The Dúnedain war-shout, alive again in the Fifth Age: Flame light! Flee night!
And Astrid Loring-Larsson’s voice. She was moving, long sword and dagger in hand, like a human blade of black and silver, spired helm and elfboots, a soaring leap from the wagon to the trough and then another that sent her spinning in midair in a three-quarter tumble right over a man’s head and landing with the blades already moving.
In Dúnedain training a move like that was called a Jakie, for some reason, and they did a lot of them. Many involved running up trees and going across buildings and leaping from rock to rock through the hills. Eilir was half a pace behind; she hit the wall running and went straight up it and spunflipped and landed beside her anamchara.
Astrid killed the man over whose head she’d jumped before he could make himself believe what she’d done, a thrust to the back of the neck that flicked out and back like a frog’s tongue after a fly and he dropped as limp as a puppet with the strings cut, in a sprawling crash of armor.
“Lacho calad! Drego morn!” Ritva shrieked as she dropped her bow.
She leapt, landed in a crouch, spun in a circle on one heel as her sword came out, blade a silver flash as it went snicking through a booted ankle and hamstring in a drawing cut, stripped her buckler off its clip on her belt. Ian was beside her a quick breath later, saber working in a frantic X as he guarded her back with steel and round shield. The Rangers poured forward in a leaping shouting glitter of steel. The four-foot blade of John Hordle’s greatsword swung in three quarters of a circle and broke a shield and the arm under it and gouged into a face hard enough to shatter it in a spray of teeth and blood. Alleyne was beside Astrid too, lunging and cutting and striking like a big golden cat.
“Arise, ye Saints!”
The Mormons poured after them, nearly as quick. A dozen of them locked shields and smashed into the display window, where the glass had already been weakened by the punching bodkin points of the arrows and javelins. It turned into a glittering wave of fragments, and then their hobnailed boots were trampling the mannequins and sending sprays of gold and platinum, diamonds and rubies and tanzanite into the body of the store.
The Dúnedain followed, on their heels and then past them with a dreadful bounding agility, accompanied by one swearing, scrambling member of the Force.
Ritva vaulted a display rack, rolled under a thrust from a pila and cut backhand and upward into a groin; the man screamed astonishingly loud and thrashed, and blood sprayed across her torso. Another w
as beyond him, swearing as the dying man tangled his feet and display cases on either side pinned him in place; she charged, shoulder-checking him in his shield as he staggered. That was like ramming her shoulder full tilt into a brick wall, but he went over backward and two Mormons jumped on him, their sword-arms pumping like pistons.
It was obvious where the two Mrs. Thurstons and their children were; as agreed they were clutching at pillars and cabinets and screaming at the top of their lungs as their guards tried to drag them to what they thought was safety, adding one more element of chaos to the scene. The spot they’d picked to linger was cluttered, too; big leather sofas, discreet and heavy display cases with marble bases, and the desks and counters of the shop staff.
That left no room for the soldiers who hadn’t gone to hold the door to form a shield-wall. In an open field they would have been more than able to hold the Rangers and the Mormons both until help arrived, even outnumbered; they were strong, picked men, beautifully trained and equipped. The problem was that they were trained and equipped for one type of fighting and only that, each man a part in a single many-legged machine. This brawlmêlée left them in isolated ones and twos facing Dúnedain whose war-style brought a malignant perfection to a tumbling slashing stabbing scramble from ambush.
The Mormons simply swarmed those facing them under, showing a reckless disregard for consequences. The Thurstons kept screaming, a needleedge of distraction, and those trying to drag them away snatched up their shields as the swarming fight staggered near. Ritva forward-rolled around her sword-hand under the thrust of a gladius and came to a knee, hammered the edge of her little steel buckler down into the man’s foot in a grisly crunch of small bones breaking, then thrust upward into his throat and killed him as he bent over in swift involuntary reflex.
A leap forward, across a tile floor already slippery with blood, and she found herself facing the last soldier of the Sixth still standing. He’d lost his helmet and was flicking his head to get the blood out of his eyes from a cut on the forehead. He was a young man, younger than she, with bristle-cut red hair and a freckled face whose skin was tight over the bones and wet with sweat and blood. The green eyes were utterly steady as he set himself to die.
The Tears of the Sun Page 38