They were going to have to try something, that much was obvious. They had gambled on a strategy which depended on finesse, shrewdness, and cunning rather than on brute force, and it was too late to change tactics now.
“More of those three things is what we need to use,” came Kati’s thought. “And brass and courage. Mikal, we can do this. I know we can. We have what it takes, including a lot of people and Nature Spirits on our side. I’m going upstairs to face Gorsh. You, collect your troops, what’s available to you, and follow. Work out a plan to take him as you move.”
Llon, Nabbish and Seleni were accompanying the last of the ex-prisoners, and their young herders up the stairs. Mikal got a mental hold of Llon and Seleni, and asked them to leave their charges and come back down to the arms vault level.
They met Kati on her way up. She was nominally accompanying Kitti who was shepherding the last person Kati had healed, supporting the woman’s tentative steps.
Seleni stopped to speak to her:
“You’ve decided to be the nectar for the stinger we want to catch? My Nature Spirit tells me the gambit might work—assuming you are very careful. All the Spirits here will do their best to protect you, but understand that there is only so much that they can do. For one thing, they cannot stop blaster fire, or stunner shots, either.”
Kati nodded.
“I’m not blind to that,” she merely said.
“Also you should know that the woman they are freeing, the infamous Milla, is absolutely furious with you, and the only thing that will keep her from using a deadly weapon on you is her desire to stay, at least somewhat, in her husband’s good graces. He, Gorsh, is a killer, but he is, indeed, besotted with you, and if it comes to having to escape in his space vessel, he plans to take you along. The three hired brutes are just that, and they have lost a lot of their regard for their employer since you took away much of his power by clearing out the Citadel. Keep those facts in mind; they come directly from the Spirits.”
Kati thanked her.
“Tell Mikal those things,” she implored. “I doubt that he has had the time to commune with the Spirits much. And help him figure out a way to tighten the noose, once I’ve got Gorsh and Milla in it.”
She hurried on, after Kitti and her charge. The woman in Kitti’s care, of indeterminate age because of her ill health, and the dirt that had accumulated on her body in the dungeon room, had shocked Kati when she had approached her. She had left her until the last, because she had thought that she was close to dying, lying completely still as she had been, on the dirty straw. But when she had finally reached her, Kati had discovered a life-spark, not strong, but obstinate. The ill woman had simply refused to die, and had been hanging on stubbornly, why? Because some foreboding had told her that help would eventually come?
Then when Kati had commenced the healing, she had had another shock. The woman had been delivered of a child not too long ago, either just before, or just after she had been confined in the cellar! She had not received any post-partum care beyond someone having made a rudimentary effort to keep her somewhat clean, occasionally changing the cloths that had been soaking up blood. That was likely why she had been in one of the smaller rooms, and unshackled; for one thing, she had more need of the rudimentary latrine facility than the other captives.
The miracle was, Kati had thought, that the woman was alive, and now, climbing the stairs, if slowly, with Kitti’s kind help. Kati had poured her healing energies into her, and she had noted that Kitti was somewhat psychic, too, and had picked up a rudimentary amount of healing art, just by seeing Seleni and Kati operate. Now Kitti was using the tricks that she had absorbed to ease her charge’s climb up the stairs, and Kati could not help but believe that someday Kitti would be a powerful Healer. Oh, if she could apprentice with Master Healer Vorlund for a year or two!
Accompanying Kitti and the woman gave Kati the perfect excuse to be climbing up the stairs, at the exact moment Gorsh and his brutes emerged from the laboratory, two of them helping the stumbling Milla along.
Milla was talking, almost shrieking, about how the little sprite of a woman had nearly blinded her, Kati hadn’t given back Chrush’s knife, and even her farmers had turned against her and had helped to tie her up by donating the necessary rope. Kati was tempted to laugh at this tirade; then she realized that her little procession had stopped, and the healed woman was staring at Milla and Gorsh, her face a mask of fury.
A croak came out of her throat. She wanted to say something, but could not speak.
Kitti responded by pressing a hand to the woman’s emaciated neck; she was directing Nature Spirit energy into the vocal cords to strengthen them, and to loosen them enough for speech.
Gorsh’s procession stopped to stare at this odd sight.
Then the sick woman found her voice.
“You monsters!” she cried, clearly if with a heavy rasp. “Milla and Judd Gorsh! You took my baby! You took my tiny girl while her cord was still attached to the placenta! You gave her to that worse monster, that old man, and he killed her! I know that he did! I could sense her death, her soul leaving her body, and leaving me!
“And when you took me down to the dungeon, thinking to have me die there, I swore that I would not! I would live to see revenge! And I will be avenged!”
Kati realized that she was shaking. Kitti, beside her, was trembling, too. So all that horrid stuff in Chrush’s libris was true. No wonder Lank had been nauseous after absorbing its contents into his brain!
The woman between them crumpled into a sobbing heap, and Kati and Kitti had to focus on her. Kitti, for all her youth, was a sturdy girl, and she took the weight of the woman on herself.
“I’ll see to her, Kati,” she said. “You do what you need to do. I’ll get her up.”
“Only there’s no way I can do what I came to do, now,” Kati said numbly. “I couldn’t play the vixen for Judd Gorsh if my life—all our lives—depended on it. As they well might.”
She brushed her face with her hands, then stared at the five standing outside the laboratory door. The three brutes had moved away from Gorsh and Milla, and were staring at them in aghast. One of them was trembling.
“That’s Kath,” he said suddenly, his voice sounding very strange. “That’s my beloved Kath. You told me that she had died in childbirth while I was off-planet working for you.”
“Milla, let’s go!” Gorsh said, grabbing hold of his wife’s arm.
He barged by the three women on the landing, half-dragging Milla with him. Kati looked at his face as he went by, and saw him give her a glance, and to her amazement saw profound regret in his eyes. So she had reached him in some way, after all.
The brute who had spoken looked less brutish in Kati’s eyes as he came to the landing, and picked up the ragged woman from Kitti’s shoulder into his arms, lifting her up gently. He had tears in his eyes. He was gazing into her filthy face.
“Oh, Kath, my beloved Kath, I thought you were dead and gone. I thought I had lost you forever. But I recognize you even like this, needing a good meal and a wash.”
“Lex, is it you, truly?” Kath said in a weak voice.
She scrutinized his face and wet eyes.
“Now I have a reason to live again,” she whispered. “A better reason than revenge.”
“Take her to the ground level, Lex,” Kati said. “Some of your colleagues are supposed to be bringing flyers around to take away more of the sick. You two get on one of those.”
Mikal came bounding up the stairs.
“Everybody get the hell out of here, as far away as they can,” He shouted. “Once Gorsh, Milla, and Chrush get far enough away, this place is going to explode! I sent Xoraya to fetch Lank and Xanthus; I have no idea what the explosion would do to an astral form, but I do know what it’ll do to Lank, and it’ll take him longer to get out than for Xoraya or Xanthus. Seleni, Nabbish and Llon are hurrying up behind me.”
He rounded on Morg.
“Where do you think that your
Boss will head to, from here?” he asked.
Morg seemed surprised to have been consulted. He swallowed before answering.
“Space,” he said. “He’ll take a ship, pilot it himself, if he can’t get anyone to go with him to do so. Which means that he’ll have to take the smaller ship, the one he stole from the guy on Tarangay.”
“Shit. Some of us will have to chase him, and our ship is still no doubt in Strone. And we’ll have to finish the evacuation, pronto, because once Gorsh is high enough he’ll press the boom-boom button, and Lank and I didn’t get nearly all of the little echo chips in the vault turned off.”
“Xanthus will have to travel astrally to the Team members going to Strone,” said Xoraya. “He’ll have to do his navigation thing to get them to The Spacebird, and then here, in time. No-one else can do that.”
Suddenly Xanthus was there, beside her.
“Lank’s coming up,” he said. “Move, people, let’s get out of here.”
They all hurried on behind Lex and Kath, who had already disappeared up the next set of stairs. The sound of Seleni, Nabbish and Llon climbing came from below, and Lank was securing the arms vault door the best he could, when Kati checked on him with her psi-sense.
“I’ll do my best to contain the blasts,” the Cellar Spirit told her.
With Lank and Xanthus out of the vault, it was doing its best to revert to a semblance of the Cellar Creature as it had been, filling the room with what looked like mist to Kati’s psychic sight. The Lady of the Lake was helping it, feeding it energy to thicken the mist. Kati crossed her fingers in a gesture from a childhood far away and long ago; she smiled at herself when she realized what she had done.
“Who is picking up the Team’s ship?” Xanthus asked as he floated beside Mikal, to Kitti’s delight.
“Max, Ciela and Shyla. Ciela is piloting the flit, and will be piloting the ship. And Shyla has the jini number one with her.”
“Good. I’ll recognize Shyla, Ciela and the jini, no problem. Max is...?”
“...a middle-aged Waywardian. He’ll be able to grease the wheels at the Strone Space Port, if any wheels need greasing.”
“All right. I’ll have The Spacebird Two here within minutes. Xoraya, look in on Murra and tell him to keep me under for another round, as a precaution. I don’t want to awaken before the job is finished.”
Both he and his wife disappeared.
“Where did the wraiths go?” Kitti asked, surprised.
“To work,” Kati answered. “As will the rest of us, as soon as we get back into the open air.”
*****
“If you don’t give me back my knife, woman, I’m going to start shooting people,” Chrush said to Chrysalia near the Citadel steps.
“You don’t know that I have the knife,” Chrysalia snapped back. “Does it look like I have it? Besides, you never paid for the lace crystal, so it isn’t your knife anyway.”
Chrush aimed his blaster tube at Jaqui’s head.
“Who but you would take charge of it?” he asked. “I’ll start with this girl.”
“All right, all right then,” Chrysalia snarled. “But you’ll have to wait until the flyer that I stashed it in, gets back to pick up another load of the sick. And don’t bother shooting anyone in the meantime. I can’t hand over what’s in the flyer, and if you kill someone, someone else is bound to decide to pay you back in kind. We’re not all Federation Agents who have taken an oath to preserve sentient life.”
“Lady, do you want me to stun that piece of work?” asked the burly fellow who was helping her fill up the flyer he was going to be piloting, with the ailing from the dungeons.
Chrysalia looked at him in surprise; she smiled and shook her head.
“No. Let’s just get these people off to the Healing Centre,” she said. “Believe it or not, I can handle that ‘piece of work’. He’s not half as threatening as he thinks he is, and if he does kill someone with that nasty tube he carries, I will end his life for him, and in a way that will hurt. And he knows that I can do it.”
“You will give me that knife,” Chrush snapped.
“I said that I would. As soon as I have it in my hands. And then you will go away, right, you disgusting ‘piece of work’?”
Jaqui continued helping with the job of filling the flyers, ignoring the crazy old man threatening her. She was pretty sure that Chrysalia would not allow him to blast her to smithereens, but it was obvious that Rosa did not share her confidence. She tried to keep herself between the girl and Chrush as much as possible while she worked.
And then all the sick and maimed were in the flyers, and there were even a handful of empty seats left.
“Are there any more coming from the cellar? Jaqui called to people standing on the steps, where the door had been propped ajar.
Kitti had been among those helping the ex-prisoners upstairs, but now Jaqui could not see her. Was she still escorting someone up? If so, it would have been one of those in really bad shape, those that had needed healing.
“No,” someone shouted. Then:
“Wait! Oh shit! Out of the way everybody!”
People scattered off the steps as the door burst wide open and Gorsh rushed out, dragging Milla along with him, hanging onto her by an upper arm in a manner which must have been very uncomfortable for his wife. He took one look at what was going on at the front of the building, and started running towards the hangar.
“Hey, Judd Gorsh! Where you going?” shouted Chrush, forgetting to keep his blaster aimed.
“The hell away from here!” Gorsh shouted as he ran.
“You can’t leave me to be killed by these people!”
Crush started to run after him and Milla.
“Well, hurry on then, we’re going into space with the smaller ship! Everybody’s gone mad here! We’ll destroy it all, and start again somewhere else!”
“He is going to blow everything to bits!” cried Rosa, looking aghast. “We have to try to get everyone safe!”
“Mikal better have a Plan B handy, and it better include plucking those miserable rodents out of space,” Chrysalia said grimly, watching the three of them go. “Oh, wait. Lank has a plan for disabling space ships—only our ship is still hours from arriving here.”
There was another flurry at the door which had banged shut behind Gorsh and Milla. It opened, much more slowly this time, to let out one of Gorsh’s men, carrying an emaciated woman whose head was leaning against his neck.
“Is there room in the flyers?” he asked plaintively. “My Kath needs care pretty badly. The healers in the dungeons worked on her but....”
“Kath? Your wife, Lex?”
The man who was to fly the last flyer, stared at the two of them. “I thought Kath was dead. I thought that she died in childbirth while we were on Tarangay.”
“So did I,” said Lex. “Gorsh lied.”
“Take her into the flyer, Lex, right now,” ordered Jaqui. “You go with her. And there’s Kitti.”
She turned to the people who were now pouring out on the steps:
“Kitti, is Lex’s wife the last one?”
“Yes, she is, Jaqui. Kati healed her enough that we could get her upstairs.”
“Okay. You get in that flyer, too, Kitti, and Rosa. That’ll fill it up.”
It looked like Rosa was ready to protest, although Kitti obeyed mildly enough. Kati, watching, was certain that the girl was already planning how she could help with the patients at the Healing Centre.
“Rosa, I said, get in.” Jaqui snapped. “There’s no time to argue. The rest of us have to arrange for everyone else to get as far from here as we possibly can. And we don’t have transport; we’re going to be running. So get in, and let Lanne fly this thing away.”
The other flyers were already lifting off. Rosa scurried into the last half-seat left open, Lanne closed the hatch, and Jaqui took a deep breath.
“Jaqui, we probably have a tiny bit of time,” Mikal said to her, having appeared at her side, Kati
slightly behind him. “We’ll have to go through the buildings that haven’t been emptied yet, and try to make sure that no-one is left behind. Will you help? You know the layout.”
Morg was suddenly there, too.
“The troops and the guards will help with that,” he said. “We can do it really fast if we have lots of bodies. Where do you want people to go?”
“Just shoo everyone in a southerly direction,” Mikal said. Tell them that they’ll be perfectly safe if they can make it across the river; if not, the farther away they get, the better.”
“Nabbish, will you help me get people to go knocking on doors of the neighbouring houses,” said Seleni. “I don’t know if the folk around here will respond; they have been pretty demoralized for a long time, but we will have to try.”
“Certainly, Wise Woman. Just let me check with my communicator as to Kortone’s and Gerr’s locations. I think that I better warn them to not come back here, after all.”
“Tell them to be ready to help with the aftermath of the explosion, however it goes,” suggested Mikal.
Then two things happened at once. One, a battered-looking, smallish ship lofted up through the roof hatch of the large hangar which was a couple of blocks away. Two, another space ship, smaller yet, but looking good, appeared above the Citadel, nobody was quite sure from where. The first ship climbed rapidly into the sky, while the second one came down on to the ground in the very area which had moments ago been occupied by the four flyers.
“Lank!” Chrysalia shouted. “You’re our top-notch pilot. You and I will give chase to Chrush, Gorsh and Milla. That way everyone else can help finish up the evacuation as fast as they can.”
“I’m ready,” Lank called from where he had appeared on the steps.
“Chrysalia,” Mikal said, “maybe it’s better if....”
“Don’t interfere with this, Mikal r’ma Trodden,” Chrysalia interrupted fiercely. “Llon can come along, if he wants to, and the three aboard can stay.”
Mikal and Chrysalia stared at one another for a few seconds. Then Mikal sighed, even as Lank and Llon headed for The Spacebird. He had seen Chrysalia’s hands, crossed in front of her, plain for him to see. Her talons—all eight of them—were flicking out, and in, just a bit. He knew a threat when he saw one.
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