The Protectors war

Chapter Seventeen

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 13th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

"Jesus!" Mike Havel said, spraying a few crumbs from the cookie he was nibbling.

Signe thumped him on the back as he coughed. "Drink some water, darling."

"Never touch the stuff," he said, but obeyed. His mind was racing as he stared at Juniper's cat-ate-canary grin and Sam Aylward's raised eyebrow: That surprised you just a bit, dinnit?

"Where is she? Where did you put them?"

"Well: "

Barony of Molalla, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 10th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

Aoifo and Daniel Barstow knelt on either side of their brother Sanjay, their wails rising to keening shrieks and dying away again in a saw-edged rhythm as they rocked back and forth. Juniper winced at the raw grief of it, even faint with distance, and they weren't the only Mackenzies grieving a friend or loved one. She wasn't looking forward to telling Judy about Sanjay's death, either, and she'd liked the young man herself; he'd been bright and sweet-natured and brave, and there was a girl: she'd expected to see them handfasted come Lughnassadh.

But on the whole:

"Not 'alf bad, if I say so meself," Sam Aylward said, looking down from the rooftop platform of the passenger carriage. "Of course, it's easy to shine when you take the other side by surprise and outnumber them eight to one, but this sort o' ambush and guerrilla work is a lot harder than it was before the Change. Great force multipliers, explosives and automatic weapons were. Cuts down on the advantage of surprise when you have to run up to a bloke to bash 'im, and do it one head at a time."

About a hundred of the local farmers had turned out to help; twice that, with their families. The ones who were staying had already departed. They carried plundered weapons and war harness to hide carefully in hollow trees and bury under convenient rocks, along with the bowstaves and arrowheads the Mackenzies had brought and a good bit of the taxes-in-kind that had gone into the train's cargo. Practice in stolen hours and lonely places wouldn't turn them into expert archers, or men-at-arms either for that matter, but it would be a great deal better than nothing. The rest were packing loads for themselves and the captured horses from the cargo of the wagon train; that was food, mostly, in the form of double-baked hardtack biscuit, smoked sausage, jerked beef, bacon and hams, along with sacks of beans and dried fruit and desiccated vegetables. Rowan still stood near the smashed-in barrels of liquor, wine and brandy, beer and whiskey. That hadn't made him popular, but she wasn't going to add drunkenness to the difficulties of getting the unorganized locals moving in the right direction.

Some locals stacked railway ties crisscross in a long baulk of creosoted timber, ten feet high, that would serve as a funeral pyre for the Mackenzie dead, and serve the double purpose of wrecking the rails beyond repair as they softened and bent in the heat.

"Field rations," Juniper said, watching a ragged bond tenant stuff pieces of tough salty ham into his mouth as he worked; his jaws moved with the mechanical persistence of a water mill. "And headed for the Protector's main stores in Portland, where he can shift them by road or rail or water. Field rations for an army in the field."

"Right enough. Convenient for us, though," Aylward said, resting his arm on a pivot-mounted heavy crossbow the baron's men hadn't had time to use. "But what are we going to do with those two?"

He jerked a thumb at Mathilda and Chaka, where they sat with their arms around their knees, sullen amongst the surviving prisoners-a few heavily bandaged men-at-arms, a glowering priest, some clerks and personal servants. Three trios of Mackenzies guarded them, as much to protect them from the revengeful locals as to prevent escape.

"That is a question," Juniper said.

On an impulse she climbed down from the car's observation platform and walked over; there was a very convenient little folding ladder along the side. It reminded her of the private railway cars very wealthy men had had, back in the Gilded Age.

Robber barons once again – literally, this time, she thought, and went on aloud: "And what should we do with the lot of you?"

The priest had been on his knees, praying; he stood as Juniper approached. "We shall remain steady in our faith, even if you sacrifice us to Satan," he said, holding up his cross. "The Holy Father has said-"

Juniper giggled and then suppressed the guffaw that followed. Several others didn't, and the lanky man in black clericals and dog collar glared. He was young as well, with the light of fanaticism burning in his eyes.

"Padre, I'm afraid you'll not be granted opportunity for martyrdom the now," she said dryly, hoping someone wouldn't make a stupid crack about wicker men and mistletoe-it encouraged cowan superstitions.

"Ransom, of course," Mathilda said, standing herself and crossing her arms on her narrow chest; her manner was older than her face, in a way that reminded her a little of Rudi.

She was glaring too, and doing a rather better job of it than the priest. Underneath the armor and padding they'd removed-a quilted-silk gambeson of all things-she wore a black T-shirt and jeans, tucked into polished riding boots. She was slim but not skinny, with the coltish all-limbs look of preadolescence, a tomboy air and no trace of fear at all.

Perhaps she doesn't believe the bits about human sacrifices.

"My father will pay whatever you ask," she went on. "Then he'll come and take it back with the sword! And if you dare to hurt me, he'll kill you all!"

"Let me see your hand," Juniper said, extending her own.

The girl glared for a moment more. "I'm not shaking hands with you!"

"Good," Juniper said dryly. "For I wasn't offering to. Show your hand, or I'll have one of my clansfolk march you over, young lady."

The hand confirmed a guess: callus around the rim made by forefinger and thumb. "Swordsmans' hand," they called it these days. It was just starting with the youngster, but there. Which said interesting things about the girl, and possibly even more interesting things about her father and her father's attitudes and plans.

"I'm not interested in the tyrant's gold, girl," Juniper said, releasing her.

She flushed, something Juniper could sympathize with, being a redhead herself and of a more extreme type. You couldn't hide it when the blood moved under your skin.

"My father is not a tyrant!" she said. "He saved everyone from the Change!"

"And mine is a good lord," young Chaka said, glowering in his turn. "He'll pay ransom for me and all his men here."

There was muscle on his arms and shoulders already, fruit of an early start with the sword, and judging by his hands and feet he'd be a tall man himself if he lived.

"It's true that your father's not so bad as some," Juniper said to the boy. "However, think about one thing-could we have done what we've done, without their help?" She indicated the farmers with a jerk of her head. "And think about why they were ready to help us. Ask your father about it, too, when you see him next."

The boy sat again, as if someone had cut his strings; that jarred his head, and he put his hands to it. Evidently he'd taken more of a thump on the noggin than his friend.

"Aren't you going to get him a doctor?" Mathilda asked scornfully.

"Indeed we will, when our medicos have finished with the gravely hurt," Juniper said. "But you can rest easy, we don't harm children."

That got under her composure a bit, and she nearly growled. Juniper hid a smile, and waved Eilir and Astrid over.

This one's going to be trouble, she signed-with her back to the girl.

The others moved so that their fingers couldn't be seen either; no sense in taking chances.

We've got sixty civilians to move a day's march to the border and a fight if any of their cavalry patrols catch us, Eilir signed. What's the priorities, Chieftainly Mom?

Getting those people home, Juniper said. But this girl could be very important politically. Arminger has no other child, and he dotes on this one, from what we hear.

Astrid's mouth opened to reply, and then her head whipped up. "Nazgul!" she shouted, a huge, clear, bell-like sound, and reached over her shoulder for an arrow.

So did everyone else, as the slender thin-winged shape of the sailplane banked over their heads. It was a standard pre-Change sporting model, whispering silent through the air overhead, although the Protector's eye on the wings was new, as was the shark mouth painted on the teardrop-shaped nose. Counterweight-powered launching ramps on hilltops could get the gliders well into the air, and the mountain-flanked trough of the Willamette was good soaring country.

Juniper's voice tripped on Aylward's as they shouted: "Careful!" and "Ware the drop!"

Arrows went soaring up if you shot into the sky. They also came down, pointy-end first, and traveling fast.

Nobody bothered the first time the aircraft came down the line of the rail; it was at over a thousand feet, and probably moving more than sixty miles an hour. It came from the southeast and over the bridge, down to where the wreckage of the railcar lay, then banked sharply to the right over the two wooded hills where the Mackenzies' local friends had hidden. The glide turned into a soar as it struck the updraft over the hills, turning, banking, sweeping upward in a gyre like a hawk circling for height: exactly like a hawk.

"He'll see you, and report to the citadel, and my father's men-at-arms will hunt you down like rabbits," Chaka said.

"Shut up, boy," Rowan growled, eyes on the sky as he laid his ax aside and pulled his bow from the loops beside his quiver.

"He's coming back!" Aylward called. "Wants a closer look to be sure what's going on. Ready!"

The glider pivoted on a wing tip, pointed its nose on a downward slant, and came on as it traded height for speed; the pilot could do that safely now that he knew there was a source of lift in easy reach. Juniper felt her breath grow quick, and grabbed it with an effort of will. A flight of arrows went up from the Mackenzies grouped around the toppled railcar, and a groan from everyone watching except the two children, who cheered-the heads winked in the sunlight as they turned, well below the glider.

"Ready!" Aylward shouted. "Nice no-deflection shot, now. Wait for it!"

Juniper didn't bother to set an arrow to her bow; she just didn't draw a heavy enough stave to be useful at extreme ranges. Aylward kept his bow on his back, hands working deftly on the big crossbow instead, moving screws and sighting rings. The bow was a complete set of leaf springs from a truck; it needed a complex crank mechanism to pull the string back against two thousand pounds of resistance, and Sam would get only one shot:

Tunggg-whack!

The three-foot bolt of forged steel disappeared northward, its curved vanes twirling it like a rifle bullet. It moved far too fast to see more than an elongated blur, but Aylward's shout of satisfaction echoed the heavy flat plinking sound of the missile striking the light fiberglass of the glider. There was a reason he was known throughout the Willamette country as the archer.

"Shoot!" he bellowed.

The scout glider staggered in the air when the bolt hit, but it recovered quickly-apparently neither the pilot killed nor anything vital in the controls destroyed. It did lose a crucial three hundred feet of altitude.

Forty bowstrings snapped against the leather and metal of bracers. They would have only one shot as well; the aircraft was doing better than ninety miles an hour, skimming less than a hundred feet up. None of them was used to shooting at targets moving that fast, either.

All but two of them missed; Eilir, Astrid and Rowan would argue for the rest of their lives over whose shots hit. The glider nosed up, up and up until its climb passed the stall point, and then it fell like a fluttering leaf as the wings lost lift.

"We'd best move, Lady," Sam was saying before the sound of the rending crash and the shrill cheers of the Mackenzies died. "He won't be reporting back"-they could see the pilot hanging limp in the broken canopy, and that was splashed red on the inside-"but when he doesn't come back on time, someone with his flight plan will have someplace to look."

Juniper nodded, feeling oddly depressed for an instant at the sight of the broken glider, despite all the other fears and griefs of the day. It had been so long since she saw manmade wings in flight, and it was like a glimpse of the lost world.

She turned to the two children. "Is Chaka here your friend?" she said.

Mathilda stood proudly. "Yes!" she said. "I won't let you hurt him-and he's the son of my father's handfast man."

Juniper hid a quirk of her lips. That was another word that the younger generation could use without the feeling of playacting she suspected even Arminger felt.

"He doesn't look well, and a hit on the head is always chancy," she said. "It would be best for him to rest quietly, not be thrown over a saddle hog-tied. Will you give your oath not to escape or try to escape or give away our position, if I let him go? Leave him here for his father's men to find, that is."

The girl's eyes narrowed. Even at her age, a lifetime being brought up at Arminger's court would have bred wariness. "Why don't you let me go too?"

"You're not a fool, my girl. Neither am I. Make up your mind and do it fast."

"Father said you were a tricky one, too," she said, surprising Juniper. Then she turned: "Father Rodriquez! Bring your Bible, quickly."

Eilir, Astrid, she signed, while the swift ceremony was done. You'll each take ten archers, the wounded, and all the horses we've got, and half these refugees each. Get over the border as fast as you can; they'll be on our trail and we'll be loud and conspicuous. Eilir, you take the girl, and I wouldn 't be expecting perfect trust from her just yet, promise or no. Questions? No? Then move!

Sam Aylward already had the main column forming up. Juniper swung into the saddle, and waved to acknowledge their cheer as a shout ran down their ranks, marked by bows tossed into the air and caught with flourishes. Someone struck up the pipes, which was safe enough just now, and the rest began to sing as they swung out. Sam cocked an ironic eye at her as the old Jacobite song-highly modified-roared out.

Well, people need songs, she thought defensively. And it's a great tune!

Their clansfolk were happy with their victory, and some of the locals looked positively uplifted as the chorus sounded:

"Wha wouldna fight for Juney?

Wha wouldna draw the sword?

Wha wouldna up and rally At the sacred Lady's word!

See the gathered Clan advancin'

Witchblood hearts as true as steel-"

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 13th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

": and the rest of us headed west, dodging when we could and fighting when we couldn't," Juniper finished. "Eilir and Astrid both got their groups over the border to Mt. Angel -the good baron pulled out the usual patrols to look for us, you see. I suspect he wasn't looking forward to telling Arminger why his dear little Chaka was set free, while Princess Mathilda was taken prisoner."

"That messenger, back when we were arranging for Crusher Bailey's last barn dance?" Havel said.

Juniper nodded. "Little Miss Arminger is now safely ensconced in Dun Juniper, with a good many watchful eyes on her. And leading everyone a merry chase, from the report. Now we have to figure out what to do with her."

"That was really quite clever," Signe said. "Making her swear an oath like that-not that Daddy would care, mind you."

Juniper nodded respectfully. "A game you grow up playing and play all your days isn't a game. It's your life," she said.

"Will he care we've got his kid?" Havel said. "Much, I mean. He'll know we're not going to pull out her toenails or anything like that."

"He'll know that, but I doubt he'll believe it, down in his gut," Juniper said shrewdly. "Since he wouldn't be so: squeamish: himself. And she's his only legitimate child. He's invested a very great deal of himself in being the founder of a dynasty and all that foolishness."

Arvand Sarian had not given Lord Bear and his lady the same cramped room they'd shared with Kendricks the night before. Havel didn't know or care if this was actually Sarian's own bedroom; it was fairly spacious, looked on an interior courtyard of the ramshackle building, and had a good clean king-sized bed.

Which is sort of ironic, when you think about it, he mused, leaning back against the pillows with his hands behind his head, unconsciously checking that the belt with his dagger and backsword hung just far enough away for an easy draw.

The room also had an armoire with a good tilting mirror. Signe Havel sat at it, brushing out her long hair and looking thoughtful as the lavender-scented candle flickered beside her.

"I wonder if it would be worth the trouble of dyeing it back to my natural color?" she mused, then glanced at him expectantly in the looking glass.

"By the way," Havel said. "I'm very, very sorry. I screwed up. I'll never do anything like that again. Our kids are my sole heirs and I'll announce it whenever you want: that's eight hundred and seventy-two."

Signe smiled at him over her shoulder. "I'm holding out for one thousand even, but you're only a couple of months short of it," she said. Then, thoughtfully: "I wish we were the ones holding Princess Mathilda."

She used the title with less irony than he could have, but the thought was worth considering. He gave it a full fifteen seconds before he replied: "By Jesus, I don't! Worrying about Arminger's special-ops people swinging down the chimney every goddamned night with knives between their teeth isn't my idea of a quiet life. Yeah, it's an advantage having her on the whole, but the Mackenzies did the raid and we didn't, so they earned it. I don't think we could have done it."

Signe smiled again; this time there was a twinkle of mischief in her bright blue eyes, if it wasn't just the candlelight.

"My darling, you are very intelligent, but there are times I doubt how far you look ahead. Let's put it this way. How old is Mathilda Arminger?"

Havel frowned. "Born late in Change Year One, wasn't she? Come to think of it, Sandra Arminger must have been pregnant when I met them that-what was it-April."

Which had been just before he met Juniper Mackenzie and fathered young Rudi. He winced slightly as Signe let him know she remembered with a glance.

"Mathilda's going on nine; it was unplanned and delivery was by C-section, as you'd know if you'd just read those briefing papers I do at such vast expense of time and trouble. Now, who has a nine-year-old son that we know?"

He stared at her, then snorted laughter. "Maybe I am an idiot, but I can't see Juney doing anything like: well, shit, you know her, alskling. The strongest argument in favor of the Old Religion I can think of is that someone that lacking in personal ambition ended up ruling a quarter of the

Willamette -the gods must have been giving her a boost on the QV."

Signe hesitated, and then nodded reluctantly: "Yeah, honey, I admit she might not think of it. But a fair number of other people might. Arminger or his wife, for example. I suspect that's why his little bitch was over where she was. Molalla is one of his strongest supporters-or was, before this. A get-the-kids-acquainted visit, I'd guess." A moment of thoughtful silence, then: "Why do you think Arminger hasn't come right out and called himself King Norman the First?"

"Ummm: because it would sound so fucking stupid?" Havel said, chuckling. "I mean, unless he wanted people making Elvis jokes behind his back. The Protector is: in the building! Same reason I didn't call myself the Boss and get the Springsteen snickers. Not all his backers were those Society weirdos who like that sort of thing; a lot of them couldn't stomach him. Plenty of others already think all that pseudomedieval crap he goes in for is evidence of his not being the most stable chair at the table as it is."

"Grimy arse, cried the kettle to the pot, my sweet Lord Bear."

"Hey, that was Astrid!"

"But Mike, there aren't that many people around who were even adults when the Change hit-and people over forty were a lot less likely to make it through alive. If you ask people the same age as my demented little sister, or the ones who're younger, most of them have never heard of Elvis or Springsteen. They have heard of the Lord Protector, and sweetie, they don't think he's funny at all. Hell, darling, most of them don't even think Astrid is funny, which is funny itself and scary too. By the time Mathilda Arminger and Rudi Mackenzie and the twins are our ages: much less Mike Junior: "

"Ehhhh." Havel tried to follow the thought.

And I think that was a polite way of telling me I'm a middle-aged fuddy-duddy. stuck in a pre-Change mental rut. Aloud, he went on: "Look, Arminger would never put up with Rudi Mackenzie as king of Portland after him-or even, what did they call it, prince consort."

"Yes," Signe said patiently. "But let's look at the alternatives here. Let's say we do really, really well in the war we all know is coming-I mean, God, we're fighting it now, more or less, whenever the Protector feels like it, because if we don't win we'll be too dead to care-so, if we win as big as we can possibly do, are we going to flatten the Protectorate?"

"Not unless they break up hopelessly from the inside," Havel said ruefully. "Too many men-at-arms and too many castles. If we could knock off Arminger in the process, though, or make them turn on him-"

"Then they'd need a figurehead," Signe said. "Depends when and how it happens, of course, but: so whoever gets the hand of the little princess might well pick up a big chunk of Arminger's power with it. If it were Rudi, that would make better than half the Valley. Not real comfortable for the Outfit, eh?"

Havel nodded. "But, alskling, to get to that point we have to beat the Lord Protector first," he said reasonably. "And we're a long, long way from there right now. Long-term alternatives are all well and good, but you've gotta prioritize. If you don't make it through the next six months, six years is sort of moot."

She sighed, nodded, and came to join him. A long moment later: "Ouch! That's a bruise!"

"Sorry," he said. "That's the problem with making out when we've both been in a sword fight. Too much like rubbing wounds on wounds: ouch! Hey, you did that on purpose."

"Damn right I did, darling. Now let's think about this: "

"I'm dreaming, aren't I?" Juniper Mackenzie asked.

"Of course you are, darlin' girl," her mother said. "There! Isn't it just ready, now?"

The plain suburban kitchen was just as she remembered it, down to the chipped white enamel of the old Maytag four-burner gas stove and the crayon drawings she'd made in sixth grade clipped onto the refrigerator with magnets, and the mixing bowls soaking in the sink. Her father's galoshes were by the screen door; it was spring, from the look of the lilac bush outside the window, but a gray, rainy, western Oregon day whose raw chill wind swung the seats of the swing in the middle of the little backyard.

She knew this house, the white frame Victorian in the Hackleman District on Elsworth and Seventh. A modest two-bedroom, not quite shabby, the water damage in the upper rear corner of the ceiling from the windstorm back in October of '62 neatly repaired by her father's own clever hands-it hadn't been when her parents bought the house in 1968, the year of her birth, which had cut the price to something they could afford. It even smelled the same: waxed linoleum and a sachet of dried lavender and the peculiar smell of the mutton-based shepherd's pie her mother made, overlaid with the good scent of the raisin-studded soda bread she was lifting out with her oven mitts. The same print of a Madonna and Child taken from a Church calender in 1982, the same checked tablecloth:

Mary Mackenzie was in her late thirties, as she'd looked a year or two before the accident, wearing an apron over a plain housedress, the first gray strands in her fiery molten-copper hair:

Just like mine, Juniper thought, looking down at herself.

The homespun saffron shirt and patterned kilt should have looked out of place; with the curious logic of dreams somehow they didn't, not even the dirk with its carved bone hilt and the sgian dubh in her boot top. Neither did Nigel Loring sitting across from her, smiling as he dropped the little perforated silver ball full of tea leaves into the pot on the end of its chain.

"Never could abide those tea-bag things, Mrs. Mackenzie," he said.

"Inventions of the devil," Mary said, shaking the triangles onto a plate. "A nice cuppa to welcome you to America, Sir Nigel-and sweet soda bread with raisins, if you like it."

"I'm very fond of it," he said, breaking one open and applying the butter and homemade strawberry jam. "My wife and I took our honeymoon in a little place in Donegal, and the good lady there made something very like this at teatime. Just the thing after a long walk in the wet."

Juniper took a piece as well and bit into it; the scent and the rich sweet taste were like a flood that stung her eyes with tears and broke down the gates of memory. Helping Mom with the dishes, standing on a little wooden footstool so she could reach the counter. Judy Lefkowitz and she bicycling on the banks of the Willamette and singing Beatles tunes together at the tops of their lungs. Dad coming in from his beat and her running out to meet him, and he put his cap on her head and hoisted her on his shoulders as he walked up the driveway:

"You'll be looking for a place here, then?" Mary asked Nigel. When he nodded, she went on: "Then you'd best be remembering is folamh fuar e teach gan bean. A house without a woman is empty and cold."

He smiled, a charming expression in his normally impassive face, one that made him look younger despite the laughter lines beside his faded blue eyes; then the smile died. "Well, perhaps if I could find one like you, Mrs. Mackenzie: or my Maude."

She touched him on the shoulder. "Grief is the tribute we pay the dead," she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. "But they don't ask more than we can afford to give. They've never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they're part of our story, and we of theirs."

Just then the door blew open. Eilir was there, and Nigel's son Alleyne, and Astrid, and the great slab-shouldered form of John Hordle. The youngsters' cheeks were flushed with wind and exercise; there was a minute of laughter and jostling and dripping cloaks before they were seated around the table and fresh plates of the soda bread set down, and tea poured.

Juniper gripped her cup in both hands as she sipped, then set it down.

"Mom?" she said, murmuring under the buzz of conversation. The infinitely familiar face leaned down by her. "Are you: are you really my mother?" Her eyes flicked to the blue-robed mother and god-child in the print.

Soft lips touched her brow. "To be sure I am, my heart, my treasure! For aren't all mothers one, in the end?" Her eyes went to Eilir, laughing silently as Astrid showed the two men how to shape the sign for wet. "And don't we all return what we're given?"

"Oh, Mom, I've missed you! I hated it when you went away!"

She pressed her face into the apron, flung her arms around her mother's body and felt the infinitely familiar soft warmth and scent. A hand stroked her hair. "Shhh, mo chroi. It was only for a little while I left you: "

Suddenly she was sitting up in bed, in the comfortable darkness of the Crossing Tavern's room. With Eilir and Astrid and herself they were near to filling even the big king-sized; the place was too crowded for the luxury of a private room. The girls were asleep, dark head and fair on two pillows, with a tavern moggy curled up at the foot of the bed and only a little starlight and moonlight shining in through the cracks around the shuttered windows.

What a dream! she thought, waiting while her quickened heartbeat slowed. What a dream!

She was smiling as she laid her head down once more. When in doubt, ask the Mother.

"This is getting to be entirely too much like the Decameron," Juniper Mackenzie grumbled as the leaders sat down to breakfast, with the Lorings present as well.

They were eating al fresco, as much for privacy's sake as for the bright spring sunlight. The stretch of courtyard was still pleasant, with a peach orchard beyond-pink blossom above, and sheep cropping amid grass below starred with yellow penstemon. The cold sweet scent of the peach blossom mixed with cooking, horses and woodsmoke.

"Ah, you like Boccaccio too?" Sir Nigel said. "Chaucer as well?"

"Indeed," she replied. She'd requested soda bread for breakfast, and Crossing Tavern's staff included someone who made a very passable batch. "I do that, professionally and personally."

"You were a musician before the Change?"

"Mostly," she said. And he seems genuinely interested. It's a rare man who's a good listener on first acquaintance.

"Celtic and folk. Which meant you were a stage performer as much as a singer, and a tale-teller nearly so."

"And now you're a ruler," he said.

"By some yardsticks," she replied, and they both laughed. "Immeasurably so."

Mike Havel cleared his throat, obviously anxious to get down to business. It's a grim sort you are at times, Mike, she thought. And besides that, it's a terrible habit, putting mustard on bacon like that.

The sausages were very good; a little spicier than the cooks at Dun Juniper made them. She waited as Sir Nigel sipped his semitea and smoothed down his white-streaked yellow mustache.

"Well," he said, clearing his throat. "It didn't take long to learn what it was that the Protector wanted. The problem was that Captain Nobbes was rather more taken in than I'd have liked: "

Portland Protectorate, Willamette Valley, Oregon

April 6th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

The dinner ended with apples and a cheese board; both were excellent. But then, so had been the fresh oysters, the lobster bisque, the crusted stuffed pork loin, the fresh baguettes-and the coffee, a gift from Captain Nobbes's dwindling store.

"So you see," Norman Arminger said, leaning back and turning the stem of his wineglass in his long fingers, "I'm sympathetic to your mission. Certainly I've no desire to see nerve agents brought back into common use! A pity the Change couldn't have taken care of those as well."

The crackling fire on the hearth behind him left his face in shadow, despite the candles on the table-only a half dozen of those had been lit. Nigel suspected that was calculated, to let him see his guests' faces clearly without revealing all of his own. His wife was smilingly inscrutable in her wimple and cotte hardi.

"Dear, I suppose even God has to let some chemical functions go on unaltered," Sandra Arminger said, taking a precise nibble of sliced apple and then a bite of blue-veined cheese on a rye cracker. "Or at least that's what Pope Leo says, at great length sometimes."

"There's no danger of their being brought into common use," Nigel Loring said. "The industrial processes needed to mass-produce the organophosphates are impossible post-Change. You could make tiny amounts on a laboratory scale, I fear, but nothing beyond that: and that would be quite hideously dangerous, don't you know. And they can be destroyed; dropping them into a large quantity of water will do nicely. The sea, or a large river."

"That's a relief," Arminger said. "The storage facility at Umatilla is uncomfortably close, and the area's chronically unstable, currently having a civil war. It wouldn't do to have the gas fall into the wrong hands. You're an expert, Sir Nigel?"

Before he could demur, Nobbes cut in: "S'truth! Couldn't have done half what we've done without this bloke."

"I had some experience with them before the Change," Nigel said. "I wasn't a chemical-warfare specialist, though. More from the other side, if anything, poking around the Middle East and Eastern Europe looking for them."

"As close to an expert as anyone's going to get," Nobbes said with annoying enthusiasm.

"Surely most of it wouldn't be operational anyway," Arminger said.

Loring sighed mentally and cut in. Nobbes would blabber if he didn't, and the information wasn't exactly secret anyway: "Well, most of the artillery and rocket-delivered ones wouldn't be usable," he said. "They're generally binary agents that can't be mixed except by firing the shell or warhead-which is scarcely practicable in our time, eh? The mustard gas is corrosive and I'd be surprised if any is left that hasn't eaten its way through the containers, without preventative maintenance."

"And according to my intelligence, the staff at Umatilla poured gasoline into the storage bunkers and set them on fire before leaving," Arminger said.

His hands clenched on the arms of his chair in anger at the thought. I don't think we were supposed to see that,

Nigel thought. And our good host probably didn't think of checking for some time after the Change.

"Well, then," Nigel began, a sentence that would end with: Not much point in poking about there, eh?

"We'd still have to check," Nobbes said. "We've got protective gear on the Pride, right enough. The spray dispensers for the nerve gas might still be functional, eh? Isn't that what you said, Sir Nigel?"

Nigel Loring sighed aloud this time. "Yes, I'm afraid that's a distinct possibility," he said.

"Well, then," Arminger said. "We can't have that. I'll give you all the assistance I can."

Half an hour later, the lord of Portland grinned as he sat alone with his wife in the darkened dining room, cracking walnuts in his fist.

"Just what we needed," he said, tossing a few of the nut-meats into his mouth. "We may even be able to win without a war, after a few demonstrations. I'll even offer the idiots in the south Valley fairly easy terms. Subject to subsequent modifications, of course."

A maid came in with a fresh pot of tea; she wore a black-and-white uniform of gown, t-tunic and tabard. "Thank you, Isabelle," Sandra Arminger said, and poured for them both as the girl left.

"I'm glad you got over that fetish period and agreed to have the staff properly clothed," she said. "Body hairs in the soup: God, how embarrassing. One lump or two?"

Arminger snorted. "Two: I know you, my love. You've got something unpleasant to say. You always bring up an over-and-done-with quarrel before starting a new one."

"Only ones I won," she said tranquilly. "And face it, the skimpily clad maiden thing lost its thrill fairly fast, didn't it? Both the looking and the touching."

"To an extent," Arminger admitted.

"That's why I didn't say anything at the time," she said, with a gracious smile that grew wider when he gritted his teeth. "I knew you'd get over it. I must admit it was fun to watch you have your wicked way with them, occasionally, all the screaming and thrashing. Very occasionally."

"Always room for three," Arminger pointed out.

Sandra smiled again, and drew a line through the air with one finger, as if tracing the edge of a draftsman's set-square used to draw straight lines. "Sorry, dear. Raw oysters never did appeal."

"The point, dearest wife? Besides the fact that being Supreme Overlord turns out to be more like being a bu-reaucraft than I anticipated?"

"That you tend to confuse fantasy and reality sometimes, my lord Protector, and not just the way you pander to those old Society geeks' taste for romantic terminology. You've: nobbled Captain Nobbes, the Aussie extrovert. But Sir Nigel is quite another kettle of fish. Much more subtle under that bluff hearty Squire Western exterior. I think he's seen through you-us, for that matter."

An eyebrow went up on the Protector's knob-cheeked face. "You think so?"

"I know he knows you're after that nerve gas for your catapults."

"Gliders too," Arminger said absently. "A very little VX apparently goes a very long way. It might make some of our more independent-minded vassals think twice about pulling their drawbridges up on me as well if I could spray them like bugs from the air."

"Raid as opposed to raids," Sandra said with a chuckle.

He grinned at her. "Insecticide for people. I like it."

"Then strike while the iron's hot, my dear. Before he can talk Captain Nobbes into withdrawing his protective gear and trained team: I gather it's not practical without them?"

"I have better uses for the limited supply of people who'll walk into a contaminated poison-gas facility just because I tell them to," Arminger said, picking up an apple and peeling it with a small sharp knife, taking the whole skin in a single long circular strip.

Interesting to know you can peel a human being the same way, he thought, and went on aloud: "It's not really something you can get men to do with a threat of docking a week's pay. But there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream."

"You're really a very wicked man," she said with a smile, after he explained. "Dreadful. A monster."

"Part of my charm, darling."

"Why do you think I married you?"

"You mean it wasn't the professor's salary and the faculty cocktail parties? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you."

He put his arm around her waist; they laughed together as they walked out the door and into the corridor.

Nigel Loring had seen many rivers, from the homely little streams of England to the Rhine and the Zambezi; before the Change he'd kayaked down the Amazon, and paddled his way up the Sepik in New Guinea-Sam Aylward had been with him, and insisted on calling it the "Septic" River, for good reason. The mile-wide Columbia Gorge was impressive even so. The water was bright blue this April day, with a wind out of the west beating the surface to white-caps in the morning, dying away to a glassy calm as the day wore on. Black basalt cliffs closed in on either side, broken by the silver threads of waterfalls and bright-green ferns on the southern shore, then gave way to tall hills forested in somber firs and pines, towering thousands of feet above. When the galley's course brought it close to shore he could see sheets of purple lupin and bright yellow flowers he didn't recognize. And there were glimpses of Mt. Hood 's perfect white cone to the south.

"Striking," he said. "A land for giants."

Norman Arminger nodded, apparently taking that as a personal compliment; there was pride in his eyes as he watched the landscape inch past. Some of the small settlements on the shore were abandoned; more were shrunken, but there was a lively traffic of fishing boats and sailing barges and the odd oared craft.

They all gave way as the Lord Protector's fleet went by, the galley Long Serpent in the lead, with thirty oars to a side, rowing a scaloccio with three men to each of the great shafts. Catapults squatted on turntables on the low planked-in forecastle and quarterdeck; the middle of the ship was open save for a catwalk down the center. The long looms rose and fell, rose and fell, every blade striking the water at a precise angle and breaking free in a trail of spray, to the slow boom: boom: boom: of the hor-tator's mallets on the drumset under the forepeak. The rowers were big brawny men, hugely muscled, wearing only short leather pants, their torsos and shaven heads gleaming with sweat, silent save for the explosive huuuuff! of breath as they rose and fell, rose and fell with the rhythm of their work. Half a dozen boys went back and forth with canvas water bottles, directing a squirt into open mouths when they were called. The smell of the rowers was rank and somehow surprisingly dry, like oxen who'd been working in the sun. A score squatted on the forecastle, waiting to relieve the next section due for a rest.

"Row well, and live," Loring murmured under his breath.

Classical reference, he thought-though in fact the film had been wrong about that. Greek and Roman rowers were free men; galley slaves were a medieval and Renaissance invention. To his surprise, Norman Arminger caught the quote.

"No slaves," the Protector said dryly, pausing as several attendants armed him. "That isn't really practical for war-craft, I've found."

Nigel nodded; he'd seen the swords and axes and bucklers clipped to the bulwarks between the benches on the trip up from Portland. From the sewer smell, less fancy tow boats pulling barges loaded with troops and horses and supplies did have crews chained to their benches. They'd passed other arrangements, one where bicycle pedals drove a propeller, and one where a big windmill whirling amidships did the same. Probably they were too complex and failure-prone to be practical just yet. Or the Lord Protector just thought galleys made a good show.

"And now if you'll excuse me: unless you'd care to spar yourself?"

"Not just now, thank you," Sir Nigel said.

Normally he tried to get in at least a little practice every day, usually with his son-who'd taught him the sword, after all-but Alleyne wasn't there. Wasn't with the flotilla, at all, although John Hordle was leaning on the railing not far away, left hand tapping idly on the long hilt of his sword. Loring didn't intend to let a potential enemy get a close-up look at his personal style with a blade. Or perhaps not so potential an enemy, either.

Nobody called Alleyne a hostage, Nigel thought, with fury that didn't reach his face. Not quite.

Arminger pulled the practice helm with its protective face screen over his head and nodded to the commander of his troop, a squat muscular man with cold blue eyes peering out of a face ugly with thick white scar tissue; that and the shaved head made it difficult to tell his age, but Loring estimated it at about forty.

"Salazar! Johnson!" Conrad Renfrew barked. Then to Arminger: "The usual reward, my lord?"

Arminger nodded again, taking up a practice sword-a yard of oak with an iron core, probably rather heavier than the two pounds or so of the real thing. The two young guardsmen did likewise. One was a little below six feet, the other a trifle above, one fair and one dark, but otherwise they were similar; in their early twenties, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, moving with deft ease in their throat-to-ankle armor despite the light pitch and roll of the deck.

"Let's see if either of you can win that horse," the ruler of Portland said. "Salazar first."

The man raised his shield and advanced; Arminger pivoted on his right heel as they circled, sword over his head with the hilt forward and blade back, the rounded top of the big kite-shaped shield up under his eyes. Then the younger man sprang. The thump and clatter of the match made good cover for a private conversation, especially when you added in the chuckle of water and the hoarse mass breathing of the rowers and the dull boom of the drum; and they both knew how to talk softly without obviously whispering. Loring leaned on the rail beside Hordle, his mild eyes blinking at the sun-sparkles off the water.

"Notice we're not on the same boat as Nobbes's folk," Hordle said. "Keeping us separate on shore too, like, as much as he can without being too obvious about it."

"He's no fool," Loring said.

"Thinks highly of himself, though, just a bit," Hordle said.

"I hope we can make something of that," Loring replied.

"Think he'll scrag us, sir? If we get the VX for 'im."

"I wouldn't put it past him," Loring replied. "But I think he'll try to enlist us first."

"But with Mau-Mau conditions."

"Quite."

That terrorist movement in Kenya had made its recruits break their own culture's taboos, acts so obscene and horrible that they felt cut off from everything but their new allegiance. They weren't the only ones who used that trick, either; it had the dual merit of securing loyalty and weeding out those with inconvenient scruples. Cannibal bands had done the same during the terrible period right after the Change.

I'm almost glad Maude didn't live this long. Things would be very awkward if she were here.

"Still, there's opportunities," Hordle said.

His eyes took in the countryside. And we've heard something about Mr. Arminger's enemies, they both thought. Anyone who disliked the Lord Protector had to have something to be said for them, and it would be strange if men with their skills couldn't make an escape. Which is why Alleyne is somewhere they can keep an eye on him.

Hordle sighed. They both knew that, too. His wide frog-like slit of a mouth quirked at Sir Nigel. He and I rescued you – now you and I will have to rescue him!

They looked up at the mountains to the south. A heliograph blinked from the top of one, a code but not Morse: blink: blinkblink… blink-blink-blink:

They looked casually down at the water sweeping by. "That's quick. Six knots."

And the heliographs would be quite quick enough to report our absence and order Alleyne killed. Their eyes met. We're going to have to be very careful about this.

"I'm sure the Lord Protector will have nothing to complain about for some time."

The white water of the Columbia broke over the snagged ruins of Bonneville Dam with a toning roar that shook the world, the bright noon sun making the froth shine like cataracts of lace fringed with diamonds as it surged between the remaining fangs of ferroconcrete. Nigel Loring shaped a silent whistle; there was no doubt at all that things were simply bigger in this part of the world, starting with the mile-wide expanse of river. The dam itself spanned that breadth across an island; the central portion with the sluicegates was the core of the ruined portion. It wasn't hard to see why, either; the rusted wreck of a big river tug rested halfway through, prow high in the air. The huge barges it had been pushing lay tumbled before it at the base of the dam's low wall, except for one tilted against its side and showing the gravel that had been its cargo; the combined weight must have been thousands of tons, and traveling fast on the crest of a flood wave from the looks of it. What the steel-and-stone battering ram of the barges had begun, the wild water of eight years had continued, until the rapids were not much worse than they'd been before the river was tamed.

"Goddamned inconvenient," Norman Arminger said from not far away, using the point of his wooden sword to indicate the broken dam and then lowering it to the deck. "For transport, that is."

The two young men-at-arms he'd been sparring with stepped back as Arminger pulled off the practice helmet with its facial mask. Below it his flushed countenance ran with sweat, and he was breathing hard; he'd just spent a goodish while sparring in relays with two men who were at least twenty years his junior, trained to a hair, and obviously not holding anything back. Nigel Loring was moderately impressed; he wouldn't have lasted quite so long before tiring dangerously himself, but then he was in his fifties rather than the Protector's midforties. The standard of swordsmanship had been high as well, though the style was different from the one the royal forces used in England, rather more edge and less point, and more use of the bigger shield.

He looked at Hordle, and the big man nodded, seconding his impression: Quite good, but not quite of the very first rank.

Arminger tossed his gear to an attendant and pointed to their left, towards the south bank and the locks. A swarm of men and animals and cranes labored around it; their shouts and the clatter of gears came faintly through the distance, until the unearthly scream of a water-powered saw grinding rock cut through the blurring thunder.

"Repairing and adapting the locks is taking years. It was a domino effect-dams started breaking up on the Snake in the first Change Year, and when one let go the flood would go downstream, picking things up as it went. But I've got the locks at the Cascades back in operation; those were easier, built in the nineteenth century. At least it's improving the salmon catch. That's been noticeable the last couple of years."

I think the Protector is a lonely man, Nigel mused, with cold appraisal. Doesn't have many people he can talk to. And he probably thinks it's safe to talk to me, the simple straightforward soldier.

He'd been a soldier, yes. But a soldier of a particular sort; the SAS was supposed to operate behind enemy lines, and in contact with foreigners. You had to be a good judge of men, and not just of your own countrymen or the sort you'd invite to the Club.

Big Chinook salmon were thick in the water below the dam, their fins cutting through the smoother water below. Dozens leapt at the white torrents every second, falling back to rest and try once more or making it through the froth and into the solid surge above. Birds hovered and struck, ospreys and bald eagles and types he couldn't identify. A half-dozen substantial fishing boats were dipping nets slung out on booms, hauling up mounds of struggling silver.

They paused as the Protectorate's fleet came into view: sailing barges full of troops, horses, supplies; and more pulled against the current by rowing-tugs with fifteen oars a side. The Lord Protector's Long Serpent was something different, a real warship, long and low slung.

He looked around; the northern bank was hilly but fairly low, closer than most places on this enormous river; the south was steeper, rising to low mountains-or what the

Yanks might call big hills, somewhere around two thousand feet or a little less-sparsely forested in pine. One about a quarter of a mile from the water held the turreted concrete-gray bulk of a castle on a shoulder spur. Banners flew from the turrets, and the drawbridge over the dry moat was down. Lances twinkled as toy-tiny figures trotted down towards the small town that lay beside the locks. You could cover the whole area to the other bank from there, with heavy trebuchets, and most of it with dart-throwers.

The town had a wall under construction-timber forms for the concrete, and he could see wheelbarrows of head-sized rock fill going up board ramps.

"Transportation chokepoint," he said to Arminger. "But you must have a threat nearby?" The castle would have been expensive.

"The Free Cities of Yakima," Arminger said. "North of here. They survived the Change annoyingly well, all that irrigated land, and they've been even more annoyingly independent since."

Nigel nodded. Which leaves the Columbia as a long, thin corridor of your territory between hostile forces to the north and south.

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 14th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

"Not exactly," Mike Havel said judiciously, methodically demolishing another fried egg and loading more hash-browns on his plate. "He holds the Hood River Valley and the Mount Hood country. It's Renfrew's fief-he's Count of Odell, as well as grand constable of the Association."

Juniper pursed her lips. "Even so, he's not going to send many men much farther east than that, not for long, not while we're at his backs. The Yakima towns are safe as long as we stand-not that they've ever helped us, the creatures."

"Don't know how long the Pendleton folks can hold him off, now that they're fightin' amongst themselves," Hutton observed.

"Or he could be relying on those castles," Havel said. "Sorry, Sir Nigel. Old strategic discussion." Loring nodded. "We saw that-"

Near Boardman, Columbia Valley, Oregon

April 12th, 2007-Change Year Nine

The small earthwork fort had been in a strong position, near the crest of a low hill, with a canal between it and the Columbia, and a stretch of irrigated farmland dark-green against the lighter olive of the higher land southward. The hilltop position hadn't helped it, or the people living in the little town near it. Bodies lay tumbled between the burnt-out snags of frame houses and double-wide trailers, or in the empty corrals. The corpses had been here for several days and that made unsightly tumbled death worse; despite the coolish weather the meat-gone-off stink was fairly bad, sweet and musky and foul at the same time, like having rancid spoiled soup spilled down the back of your throat. Nigel Loring had been fairly case-hardened even before the Change, and he had watched the death of a world after it. He still let his eyes slide slightly out of focus, which was easy for him and one of the few advantages of advancing years and the rock dust in that wadi long ago. From the look of things, by no means all of the people had died fighting, or quickly. Many still bore the broken-off stubs of arrows, or lay near the black fan of blood left when sword or ax struck. Some of them had been clumsily scalped-the whole of the hair removed, rather than the proper coin-sized patch, the work of someone who'd heard about scalping but never seen the real thing done in the old style. Some of the bodies were very small. Flies buzzed in clouds, also not as bad as they would have been in high summer, but bad enough.

The local man cursed at the sight; his horse shifted uneasily under him. They were well outside the Portland Protective Association's territory now, and they'd picked up local auxiliaries from one of the several warring parties ripping up northeastern Oregon . Sheriff Bauer had sixty riders with him, a wild-looking crew and mostly younger than his thirty-odd. Like him they wore crude helmets of hammered sheet metal, small shields-most of them with metal covers cut from old traffic signs-and breastplates of leather boiled in wax or tallow and picked out with riveted straps of metal on the more vulnerable points. Their weapons were horn-and-sinew recurve bows, knives, and heavy-bladed sabers that looked like scaled-up machetes slung from their belts or over their shoulders.

"It's them murdering redskin devils," Bauer said; the remarks from his followers tended more to scatology. Then he looked up sharply as Arminger snorted, and barked: "You think that's funny, mister?"

"No, no, not at all, Sheriff Bauer," Arminger said, rather obviously fighting down a smile, and holding up a hand when his guards bristled at the local leader's tone. "It's just: that I've never actually heard anyone say 'murdering redskin devils' before. Not: not in real life, that is."

The leader of the horsemen visibly restrained himself. Arminger can't resist taunting, Loring thought. Bad tactics, Lord Protector. You need this man.

The sheriffs restraint was hard won, but it was there. The Protector's personal guard probably helped, twenty knights in their black mail, mounted on big glossy-coated horses. The little army of four hundred men marching along the graveled road up the slope behind helped even more, their spears neatly aligned and glittering in the spring sunshine, the ripple of lance points, slung crossbows swaying, the beat of booted feet and ironshod hooves. Light carts followed behind, some carrying supplies; a few bore dart-throwers on two-wheeled carriages. The roadway was gullied in spots where flash floods had struck or culverts blocked, and some of the bridges were down, but it was still passable for wheeled traffic if you weren't in a tearing hurry.

"I suggest you go look for the, ah, murdering redskins, Sheriff," Arminger said. "Take some of my scouts with you."

The sheriff did; the scouts were on range-stock quarter horses, lightly armed with horn bow and sword and dagger, wearing only mesh-mail vests and open-faced helmets beside their wool-and-leather uniforms. They spread out in a broad web and trotted off; Bauer's riders shook themselves out into clumps and bands and straggled away after them over the rolling country eastward, some of them whooping and showing off with riding tricks, standing in the saddle for a moment, or running along beside their trotting horses and leaping back up.

"What are they fighting about?" Loring asked, as the Protector and his men fell in at the head of the column, heading eastward and a little south of the river.

"Who's to rule, essentially," the lord of Portland said. "This is harder country to make a living off than the Willamette, particularly without powered farming machinery or pumps or hybrid seed or fertilizers. And there were more survivors here initially, so the rare good bits like this irrigated land are precious. It's just sinking in that the only way to avoid a lifetime of very, very hard work is to skim off somebody else's hard work and nobody wants to volunteer to be skimmed. That's it when you boil it down and subtract the personal feuds and the slogans." He smiled. "I've acquired quite a few valuable followers from around here in the past year or so."

One of the Protectorate scouts rode up: a small, wiry young man on a light, fast horse; the binoculars at his saddlebow marked him as an officer.

"About three miles that way, my lord, and coming fast when they don't get in each other's way," he said. "Four hundred strong, give or take fifty. The locals are mixing it in with them, but not doing too well."

He pointed eastward and offered a folded map with his thumb marking a place. The Protector's guard captain grunted and glanced a question; the Protector gave a slight jerk of his head, and a volley of orders and trumpet calls followed. The force from the west shook itself out from column into a line that straddled the road-blocks of spearmen alternating with crossbows, with the lancers on the right where the ground was more open. The men's faces were mostly blankly impassive under the helms, sweat cutting runnels through the road dirt; a few grinned eagerness or the semblance of it, and a few others looked tightly nervous.

Arminger smiled and reached for the helmet slung at his saddlebow. "And I think you might want to suit up, Sir Nigel."

And I don't like the looks he's been giving me, Loring thought. I think that his lady wife may have been giving him advice before we left.

He swung down from the saddle while John Hordle acted as squire and helped him into his suit of plate. He'd been wearing only the back-and-breast for the road, which was one advantage it had over the chain hauberks the Port-landers used; you could shed part of it without taking everything off. As the big young man helped strap the bevoir-the chin protector-to the breastplate, he whispered in the older Loring's ear-he had to lean far down to do it, anyway: "I don't feel right about fighting for this git, sir."

Nigel nodded as he lowered the sallet helm over his head, tested that his scalp fitted snugly in the padding, fastened the chinstrap and flicked the visor down and then up again.

"Think of it as fighting against the people who did that, Hordle," he said, inclining his head back in the direction of the village and the little fort.

"Ah. That's so, sir."

Loring had had a month to get used to the horse, and vice versa, and it had been well-trained for years before. It knew what the clank of armor meant, and even more what Hordle's deft fingers portended when they fitted the pey-tral to the leather straps on its breast and the chamfron to its face. The big yellow gelding tossed its head and mouthed the bit, lips blowing out over the great square teeth, a puff of dust coming up from the road as it stamped its foot, along with a dry earthy smell under the hard, musky, horse sweat and oiled leather and the sharp scent of metal. Medieval men-at-arms had ridden entire stallions, but that was taking machismo to absurd lengths and Pommers had plenty of aggression. Loring settled himself in the massive war saddle with its high cantle and cradling saddlebow, steel-shod feet braced in the long stirrups. Hordle handed the reins of his own stout cob to a helper who led it to the rear and strung his long bow with a wrench and a twist and a push of his hip.

"The real old-fashioned way," he said, reaching over his right shoulder to flip the cover off the top of his quiver. "Always makes me feel me English roots, as King Charlie says."

"Not really," Loring said, grinning down at the calm, round red face by the poleyn that covered his right knee. "Victorian roots, at best. They didn't use back quivers at all when the longbow was in flower. In flower the first time, I should say. They used arrow bags, or pushed them through the belt."

"Sodding fools, then," Hordle grunted. "I mean, where's your bloody right hand, when you've loosed the string? Over your right shoulder, in course."

Then he began to whistle to himself, softly and cheerfully. Nigel recognized the tune, a jaunty little ditty with a chorus that went:

We'll run the course

From Stonehenge up to Uffington

On a white chalk horse we'll ride.

The Protector's force halted just behind the crest of a low rise; the dust their hobnailed boots had raised drifted on ahead of them, spreading and falling in a khaki-colored mist. It was a bit nostalgic for Nigel Loring, given the amount of time he'd spent in dry dusty places before the Change. The command group and their guests came forward a few more paces, enough to put their heads over the ridge and reveal the slopes beyond. Other plumes of dust covered the expanse of scrubby grass tufts and sagebrush ahead of them, where knots of men fought, with only an abandoned farmhouse and trees that had died when the pumps failed to break the monotony. Men and horses were insect-small at a thousand yards or better, vanishing into little hollows and then appearing again, the clatter of weapons like faint memory, a twinkle of edged metal throwing sun-bright blinks through the curtain of powdery soil hammered up by the hooves. Arrows arched between galloping clumps and saddles were emptied, or horses went down thrashing and shrieking; then bared steel crashed on steel, thudded on shields or armor, smacked home in flesh.

The chaotic swirling suddenly took form: Sheriff Bauer's force was riding pell-mell for the ridge, dropping the odd wounded man or injured horse behind; the pursuers clumped together more tightly as they followed, their whoops and screeches loud even over the thunder of hooves. Fewer arrows slanted out from either force; their quivers were mostly empty, and neither had the organization for resupply.

Loring leveled his own binoculars. His brows rose behind them. Bauer's men had looked wild enough; those they fought were: Well, painted savages, perhaps, he thought. Feathers in the braided hair or feather bonnets, fringed beaded leathers, face paint. Weapons and gear looked very similar to those of Bauer's men under the ornamentation, though some were bare to the waist:

Hmm. Not all really Indians, unless that one's bleaching his hair. Including his chest hair.

The sheriffs men managed to put some distance between themselves and their pursuers, spurring their horses ruthlessly.

The Indians probably think they're heading for that little fort, Loring mused, as the defeated men dashed by, some clutching wounds, some fleeing mad-eyed and heedless, but most reining in and turning their horses a hundred yards behind the Protector's force. The medics with the baggage train saw to their wounds; servants brought canvas water bags and bundles of arrows. Bauer himself paused only for a drink and to let the water run over his upturned face, then cantered back to Arminger's side.

"I hope this works," he grated; there was a cut on one cheek, dripping blood into the short brown beard that covered his jaw. "I lost better'n a dozen good men."

"Cost of doing business, Sheriff," Arminger said. Then he chuckled: "And now: what a disappointment this is going to be for our Native American brethren. Yet another bitter blow of fate; how tragic."

He waved his sword around his head, and then pointed it forward. A bugle sounded. The entire force broke into a trot forward, pouring over the hillcrest in a line six hundred yards long, spears bristling out, giving a long wordless shout as they halted again. The black banner with the lid-less eye reared upright beside Norman Arminger, streaming backward from its crossbar.

The whooping of the Indian war band turned to screams, but even their light horses took a moment to halt when the whole hundreds-strong mass was in full gallop. A few arrows flickered out at the Protectorate troops, but an instant later the front rank of crossbowmen knelt to a barked command and their stubby weapons came up to the shoulder.

Tunggggg!

The short, heavy, pile-headed bolts flashed over the hundred yards in a multiple blurred streak. When they hit they hammered home until only their vanes showed, slamming through cloth and light armor alike.

"Reload! Second rank, take aim! Fire!"

Tunnnggg!

The kneeling crossbowmen of the first rank dropped the hooks of their spanners over the strings of their weapons and spun the cranks as the second fired over their heads. The war party ahead was in chaos, some trying to turn their mounts and get through the press to their rear, others charging, more struggling to control their bucking mounts, and then the standing rank of crossbows shot.

Tunnnggg!

"Reload! First rank, take aim!"

Tunnnggg!

Arminger grinned like something that came hungry out of a forest deep in winter, raised his sword again and made a gesture. Over on the right of the line the men-at-arms stirred as a bugle rang, bringing their shields up and around to rest under their eyes. Their horses came forward in a line, walk-trot-canter; then the lances came down with a long falling ripple and the riders booted their mounts up into a hand gallop, keeping their dressing to present a line of points. He could hear their hooves drumming on the hard ground, and their deep uniform shout: "Haro! Portland! Haro for the Lord Protector!"

Their long legs made the big horses fast once they got going, despite the weight of man and gear they carried. There was no crash of impact when they struck the war party's milling chaos-you always expected one, but two parties of horsemen weren't baulks of timber or metal. Instead there was a multiple thudding, massive dull sounds as the eleven-foot lances slammed home, lifting men out of the saddle, many of the ashwood shafts breaking under the strain. A few of the armored men went down as horses tripped or staggered. Many more of the Indians fell, spitted on the lance points or thrown as their lighter mounts were bowled over by the destriers. And the warhorses were trained to stamp on fallen men:

Then the Protector's lancers were through the loose formation of the war party, turning, dropping lances and pulling out their longswords or swinging maces with serrated-steel heads.

I do hope the Indians have the sense to run away quickly, Nigel thought. Lightly equipped, they had no chance at all against full-armored men-at-arms and their tall mounts. Though if they could get them to chase too far, and scatter, they might give them all the trouble they wanted.

Hordle grunted agreement to the unspoken thought, then shouted: "Look out!"

Another knot of Indians was there, a dozen men seeming to boil up out of the ground-out of a little hollow that ran southeast towards the river, but startling enough all the same. The man leading them had a classic twin-tail feather bonnet fastened over a steel cap, and red-and-white chevrons painted on his face and leather breastplate. Loring slapped his visor down by reflex, and the bright day turned dark except for the long narrow horizontal line of the vision slit. He began turning his head side-to-side automatically, the only way to keep from being blindsided in a melee.

"Guard the Protector!" the commander of his guard shouted.

Shields snapped up around the lord of Portland. Which was commendable discipline and focus, but it left the rest of the party uncomfortably exposed. Hordle drew and shot in one smooth motion; a warrior went back over the crupper of his saddle with an English clothyard shaft through his chest. Then he threw down the yew bow and swept out his longsword, turning the draw into a two-handed swing that chopped through a foreleg and sent the horse tumbling and the rider falling to die screaming at his feet. Two men in leather and paint came in on either side of Loring. There was no time to feel fear, or do anything but let his body respond with drilled reflex; a hatchet bounced off his shield, and the heavy machete saber of the other was still upraised when the wielder ran onto the point of the baronet's sword. Teeth broke, and then the thin bone of the brainpan; he let the falling man's weight pull the weapon free and then cut to the left over his shield with a savage overarm stroke that laid flesh bare to the bone. Another attacker came at him on foot with a light spear in both hands, but Pommers reared and lashed out with his forefeet. The heavy click that he felt between his eyes was the destrier's ironshod hooves smashing bone like match-sticks under a hammer.

Sheriff Bauer and the Indian leader in the feathered bonnet circled, steel beating on steel and cracking on hard leather, then Bauer head-butted his opponent when their swords locked at the guards, and the two men fell to the ground in each other's arms-their horses very sensibly bolted out of the press, away from the sound of pain and the stink of blood. The men rolled beneath the hooves of the melee, each with the other's dagger-wrist locked in his hand; dust hid them, and there was a sound like a dog worrying at a bone, a shriek of pain and Bauer came out on top, snarling in triumph with the lower half of his face wet red with blood. He spat something aside and stamped the heel of his boot down half a dozen times, howling with glee and waving his bowie knife overhead.

The sounds of battle died in midscream; nothing was left of the Indian war party but a few fugitives spurring their horses eastward, pursued by crossbow bolts and Bauer's men, their horses rested and their quivers filled. The Protector's lancers regrouped and cantered back to their place on the right of the line, while stretcher-bearers went forward to pick up the wounded men.

Or at least the Protector's wounded men, Loring amended with distaste as he wiped his sword clean and sheathed it, flicking his visor up.

Spearmen were attending to the wounded Indians.

"That was just dangerous enough to be good sport," Arminger said; his own sword was out, and red. To Loring: "It isn't beating these range-country rabble that's the problem, it's catching them. Damned hard to make them stand and fight if they don't want to-it's big country out here."

That disconcerting grin showed again. "I'm not the first overlord of farmers to have that problem, either. It'll get worse, when we get tribes of real nomads who follow their herds and live in tents-but that'll take a generation or so."

No, it wouldn't do to underestimate this man. I wish I knew more about his enemies, because I suspect we're not going to Tasmania after all. Not via a ship docked in a city the Lord Protector controls, at least.

"Much obliged," Bauer said to Arminger, casually wiping at his mouth with one hand and spitting to clear it of blood, then picking at something stuck in his teeth. "You killed off better'n half of that bastard's 'chete-swingers. We can beat the rest. I owe you one there: Lord Protector."

"Think nothing of it," Arminger said, wiping his sword. "And now," he went on, "it's time to go look at some nerve gas."

John Hordle swore with soft, venomous fluency as he looked at the strips of treated paper and watched the reagents change color. The green chemical suit covered him from toe to the pig-snouted, goggled mask; the longsword slung over his back jarred horribly with the high-tech survivals.

"There's enough still here in the soil to kill a regiment of rhinos, slow and nasty," he said after a moment, his voice muffled. "And it's leaking out as vapor all the time. The bastards must have spilled and burnt everything! This land won't be safe for: bugger me blind if I know when it will be."

"Twenty or thirty years," Nigel Loring said, watching the disposal crew from the Pride moving from one bunker to the next, the view dim with the moisture that was fogging the inside of his suit's eyepieces. "Longer if there's a drought and I wouldn't really fancy being a fish close downstream when it does rain at last."

The landscape they moved through must have been bleak enough at the best of times, a stretch of rolling sagebrush prairie. The bunkers were sunk into the dry, gritty, brown-gray soil, with more dirt heaped over the Quonset hut-shaped roofs; most of them had black scorch marks around their doors, where gasoline had been poured inside and set on fire. Those and the tire tracks on unsurfaced roads were the only marks of man, and there wasn't even the odd bird or jackrabbit to enliven the scene. He could see why this area had been picked as a war-gas depository. Sweat rolled down his body in greasy trickles under the stifling cover of the protective suit; it was worse than a full suit of plate armor, which didn't have to be air-tight.

And hauling each breath through the filter added an extra touch of torment, to go with the subliminal fear that the neutralizing chemicals had gone off and you were corroding your lungs out from the inside. Or that the day would suddenly grow dark as a tiny droplet of nerve agent touched your skin. They had syringes of nerve-gas antidote, and it wasn't even a toxin itself like the earlier versions, but:

"At least we're not finding much in the way of intact material," Loring said.

Hordle grunted. "We're finding a good deal of bloody nothing, with a scoop of sod-all on the side."

At that moment a series of muffled shouts went up from the squad of crewfolk they'd trained, and green-covered arms waved. Hordle and Loring exchanged glances and then headed over, the sound of their own panting loud in their ears inside the head-covering hoods.

"These look like the spray tanks you told us about, but they're empty," the bosun's mate of the Pride said.

"Let me take a look," Loring said.

The sheet-metal dispensers were upside down and empty, thank God-but one of the small drums nearby wasn't. Loring rocked it with a foot while he wracked his memory. Yes, VX, without a doubt. Not much of it; the container was only about a liter in size.

He froze for a moment, then turned and pointed. "Get a couple of those shells over here, bosun," he said casually. "I recognize the type; it's loaded with VX, sure enough. Use the dollies. We'll decant the nerve agent into these spray tanks; much easier to move it half a mile in these."

The Tasmanian gave him a dubious look, but obeyed; he'd had six months to establish his authority. Hordle bent until their heads were nearly level.

"That's not going to do the Lord Protector much good," he said, nodding towards the shells. "That's a binary mix and you need the shell to-"

"No, it won't do him much good," Loring said. The muffling hoods and distance would keep the conversation quiet. "But he won't know that until he tries to use it, will he, now? In fact, even our assistants here don't have a clue."

"And he'll have that one carboy of real VX to test, too," Hordle said. His tone suggested an admiring grin. "You're a cunning old colonel, sir, if you don't mind me saying so. I'll go help move shells."

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 14th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

Mike Havel paused with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to his mouth. After a long moment he set it down, and began to laugh. After a moment, the others at the table joined him.

When silence had fallen, Havel looked around at the other leaders; all of them good security risks, but:

"We'll have to be careful about this," he said. "That has to stay secret."

If true. Hmmm. How to check on it? Aylward vouches for Sir Nigel, which is a powerful argument, but I save perfect trust for God, and He's not eating breakfast with me. The Change: changed people, often enough. By Jesus, it changed me!

Juniper nodded. "And Mike: we were worried enough about the Protector when all we knew he had was his men-at-arms and castles. That hasn't changed."

He nodded. "But he's going to use them differently now that he thinks he has an ace up his sleeve. The way I read him he's the type who thinks of victory as something you get by some smart trick like a secret weapon."

Loring gave him a quick glance at that, and a slow respectful nod.

"Yes. The problem with that, of course, was that we couldn't tell anyone whatsoever about what we'd done."

Willamette Valley, Near Portland

May 10th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

"No," Captain Nobbes said.

"No, what?" Arminger replied.

"No, you can't keep it," Nobbes said stubbornly. "You promised we'd dispose of it, and sport, that's just what you must do, like it or not."

The Protector flung up one hand. The column halted, the clatter of hooves on asphalt or crunching on gravel slowly dying. The road ran westward, through farmland and then a patch of woods; the mountains of the Coast Range stood blue at the edge of sight, and in the middle distance the towers of a castle squatted on a hilltop. The column had shrunk with every fort and post they passed as they came westward; Loring guessed that Arminger was anxious to have the precious cargo that rested in the two mule carts under lock, key and guard as soon as possible, and in an out-of-the-way place at that.

Probably he'll spend some time biting his fingernails over whether the most trustworthy guards are really all that trustworthy, Loring thought. Such a fuss:

Arminger turned in his saddle to stare at the Tasmanian. "You're either a very innocent soul, or very, very foolish," he said, his voice flat and metallic. "To paraphrase Elizabeth. 'Must is not a word to use to princes.' "

Nobbes went pale. Loring almost winced in sympathy; the man hadn't developed the right reflexes, and it was suddenly coming home to him that the safe, democratic rule-of-law Commonwealth of Tasmania was very much the exception this ninth year of the Change-and that unlike King Charles, the Lord Protector didn't give a tinker's damn about diplomatic immunity.

I wish I could have warned him: but that's why we've been kept separated:

The moment stretched. Nigel cleared his throat. "I'm sure Captain Nobbes will come to see the necessities of your position as the guarantor against anarchy in this area, Lord Protector," he said heartily. "Certainly the material's yours, and I for one would be happy to show your men how to use the"- entirely useless -"weapons properly. They aren't anything for the untrained to get their hands on, eh, what?"

Am I putting it on a trifle thick? Loring asked himself.

Arminger was evidently wondering the same thing; he shot Loring a considering look. Alleyne was smiling broadly too, and Hordle laughed coarsely.

"Looks like the job prospects is better 'ere than Tasmania, Cap'n. Sorry."

Nobbes began to sputter incoherently, going pale and then flushing red; Arminger smiled at the sight. He had just begun to laugh when a shout from the east brought all heads around. Hooves pounded in the gravel by the side of the road, the tirrup-tirrup-tirrup of a gallop; the shoulder was a safer place to ride, if you were pushing a horse fast for any distance.

The rider had a sword and dagger at his belt, but he was unarmored otherwise and his horse had a good deal of Thoroughbred in it. Foam streaked its sides, and sweat soaked the khaki jacket the horseman wore, the smell of both rank as he reined in. Loring recognized the uniform of Arminger's court couriers, an elite corps used only for the most urgent messages. Arminger did too, and he kneed his own mount aside, over the roadside ditch and into the field so that the courier and he could talk unheard. The messenger's mount stood with its head down, panting like a bellows. That helped cover the sound of the men's voices.

At least until Arminger stood in the stirrups and shouted: "Who? They lost who? I'll have that bastard's head, baron or not-"

Then he sank back, shuddering, and visibly took a moment to master himself. After an instant he turned back and called to the commander of his guard; they spoke for a moment in low tones, and then orders rang out. Three-quarters of the escort turned and brought their horses up to a trot eastward, with Arminger at their head. The commander turned to the troop leader of the remainder before he followed: "There's been a raid out east; those devil-worshipping rebels and bandits, they're over the frontier. Get this stuff and the foreigners to the castle. Fast."

"But, my lord-"

"Shut up and do it! The Englishman knows how to handle the: special material." Even now, he used the code name, which was commendable attention to security, as he pointed at the elder Loring. "Get it and them to Castle Tonquin, now, and get it all there safe."

"Yessir!"

The guard commander's horse gave a squeal of protest as he wrenched its head around and spurred into a gallop after Arminger. Loring waited until the man was a safe hundred yards distant, then spoke calmly: "Well, Sergeant, it shouldn't be too difficult to get the: special materials where they belong. But with the escort whittled down like this, we should show extra care. The Lord Protector would be very upset if anything happened to it."

The troop sergeant was a man in his midtwenties, broad-faced and muscular, with a short-cropped yellow beard. He looked tough enough, and from what Loring had observed in the past fortnight, disciplined to a fault-and near to panic at the Protector's sudden rage and even more sudden disappearance. The sound of an authoritative voice from a man who'd been close to the ruler and visibly treated with respect made him give an audible sigh of relief.

That'll teach Arminger to discourage initiative among his noncommissioned officers, Loring thought, as he dismounted. God knows what I'd do if someone like Sam Ayl-ward were in charge. Die, most likely: of course, that could still happen, so put your shoulder to the wheel, old boy.

Alleyne and he were in their suits of plate within a few minutes. Nobbes was staring at him, blinking, then nodding slowly.

About time, Loring thought, keeping his face relaxed and nodding back. Don't be so bloody thick, man!

"Keep your eyes on the woods, Sergeant," Loring said. "I don't like the look of them. It seems like natural ambush country for rebels or bandits to me." He used the same phrase as the man's commander with malice aforethought and the noncom jerked slightly, probably thinking precisely what would happen to him if anyone took the cargo in the two mule carts. "In fact: why don't you hand out their cutlasses to these men?"

The Tasmanians' arms were in one of the mule wagons, along with the protective suits. Only a half-dozen of the Pride's crew accompanied them, but every little bit helped. Nobbes helped hand out the blades, and had a chance to murmur a few words as he did. Arminger's man was conscientious; he scanned the wooded area ahead carefully, and kept his men spaced correctly along each edge of the road, while the sailors marched closer to the carts. The shade of the trees closed over the narrow two-lane road, and for a moment there was peace, green-tinted, alive with birdsong, white oxeye daisies and blue-sailors blossoming by the roadside. The overhanging branches would make the lances awkward:

I almost hate to do this, Loring thought.

"Sergeant," he said.

"Sir?" the man said, turning; then his eyes started to go wide.

The dagger in Nigel's left hand darted upward, taking him under the angle of the jaw; he toppled backward with a thin shriek through clenched teeth, dead before he struck the ground in a clash and clatter of mail. Loring reached across him even as he fell, wrenching the man's lance out of its saddle scabbard as the horse leapt aside in panic and broke into a gallop over the fields. He whirled it overhead in the same movement, stopping the long pole with a wrenching effort and thrusting overarm with desperate speed. It struck between the shoulder blades of another of the escort; he screamed in surprise as the point broke through the mail links and cracked his spine.

Two, he thought.

His right hand swept to his sword hilt and the left twitched the shield down from his back and his forearm went through the loops. He left the visor up for the moment; the visibility was more important than protection in this sort of fight. An arrow from Hordle's longbow went by Pommers's nose with a whhhfft of cloven air and struck a man's leg with a hard nasty crack. At point-blank range it punched through the hauberk, through the man's thigh and the saddle beneath and went deep into the barrel of the horse beneath. The animal went wild, bucking and bugling as the rider screamed, then slipping on the asphalt and going over with a crash.

Three.

Alleyne's sword flashed, a glittering horizontal blur, first silver and then red as the point slashed beneath the splayed nasal of one Norman helmet. The man-at-arms dropped his sword and screamed, clapping his hands to his face.

Four:

And then the Tasmanians poured into the melee, their cutlasses flashing. Nigel held one man-at-arms off with his shield and another with his sword; a blade thumped painfully into the plate coulter over his elbow, but the man's horse went down with a scream an instant later. A moment's chaos, and the Protector's men were down as well-except for one pair who wrenched their mounts around and spurred them westward.

"Hordle!" Loring shouted. "Those two!"

The big man dropped his sword and snatched up his bow again. Both the riders had their long kite-shaped shields over their backs; the first arrow sank into one of them with a sharp crack. The man galloped on, then slowly slid left and toppled out of the saddle; one foot turned in the stirrup and the body bounced along behind the horse for a dozen yards before the animal stopped, turning its head to push at the dangling weight. The other man-at-arms bent low over his horse's neck and hammered his spurs home; an arrow stuck at an angle into the shield on his back, and it might have wounded him as well but he seemed none the worse for it. Hordle swore mildly, raising his bow for a dropping shot; it struck a branch and spun off, sparkling as the shaft pinwheeled into a patch of sunlight. An instant later the rider was out of sight around a curve, the drumbeat of hooves fading in the distance.

"That's torn it," Alleyne Loring said. "Get those horses! We'd-"

He stopped, astonished, as the Tasmanians collected their dead and wounded, loaded them on the carts and started off westward at a trot.

He looked at his father. Nigel shrugged, and took a pair of the reins that Hordle handed to him. "For some reason, Captain Nobbes doesn't seem to trust us anymore," he said. "I suggest we head directly south, and quickly!"

Crossing Tavern, Willamette Valley, Oregon

May 14th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

"And that's how you ended up outside that porno store just when Crusher Bailey's men were about to overrun us," Mike Havel said.

Then he wiped his lips with a napkin and threw the linen cloth down on the table. "Juney, you'd better sign me up," he said. When she looked a question at him: "You must be right. There aren't any coincidences. Or entirely too many. Your Lord and Lady must be running the show. You realize what that message to Arminger must have been, right?"

She looked back at him and began to laugh. One by one, the others around the table joined in; even Signe grinned like a she-wolf.

"Only hearing you'd captured his darling daughter would have made him go apeshit like that," she said, inclining her head in tribute. "We couldn't have coordinated anything like that in a thousand years."

"Jolly good show!" Nigel Loring said, with the slightest tinge of irony in his tone. "You'll forgive me, ladies, gentlemen: but at the present, I'm somewhat concerned with my personal future, and my son's, and Sergeant Hordle's."

Mike made an expansive gesture. "After tweaking Arminger's nose like that, you've got a bunk with the Bearkillers as long as you want," he said. "And we can always use a good fighting man; one who's a trained officer can write his own ticket, within reason. Certainly land if you want it."

Sam Aylward cleared his throat. "You might want to come visit us before deciding on what you want, sir," he said. "I'd like you to meet the missus, at least."

"Indeed, Sir Nigel," Juniper said. "There's room at my Hall, sure. And you know: I seriously don't believe in coincidences." She grinned happily at the three Englishmen. "I don't think you came here by accident: and I don't think you've played out the game, yet."

Nigel Loring's mouth quirked a little; he wasn't used to being beamed at in quite that open a way. Then his smile grew, almost involuntarily.

"It's a tempting offer," he said.

Signe Havel tapped her fork on her plate. "Unless you're still thinking of sailing away," she added.

Nigel Loring's smile died. "No, indeed," he said. "I'd have done my best to get him out if they hadn't gone off on their own, but I'm afraid Captain Nobbes isn't in a position to offer asylum to anyone. Not anymore."

Castle Morgul, near Portland, Willamette Valley

May 14th, 2007-Change Year Nine

Nobbes's scream was high and shrill; Norman Arminger would have called it inhuman, if the past decade hadn't taught him the remarkable range of the human voice. The Tasmanian captain was on the vertical rack, limbs stretched out in an X in padded clamps that allowed the maximum tension to be applied without tearing off a wrist or ankle too soon.

The Lord Protector lounged back in the padded chair, his boots up-it was a leather-covered recliner, salvaged from an expensive home in the western suburbs of Portland where some information-company executive had used it to enjoy the movies on his brand-new DVD player.

I wonder if they really would have replaced videotape? Arminger thought.

The recliner did look a little out of place in the dungeon, but then the dungeon itself was a bit of a compromise between his mental image of the Platonic ideal of underground prisons and what was practical, which had its limits even in the Changed world.

A castle required strong foundations, even one made from cast ferroconcrete, and that meant cellars and underground storage were easy to arrange. Small tables on either side of the chair held a bottle of white wine, a glass, and a selection of small pastries made with honey and nuts. He had considered lighting with torches, but they were just too flickery and smoky; the standard alcohol lanterns hanging from the groined archwork of the ceiling cast a suitably low blue glow. The walls were plain gray concrete, but held plenty of racks for tools and instruments; the floor led to a grating-covered drain. There were air ducts at the corners, carefully made just too small for a human being to crawl through. The concrete was slightly damp with condensation, but several glowing charcoal braziers kept it comfortably warm; bits of pine resin covered the scents of sweat and fear and old blood. Filthy straw infested with bugs and rats was lacking even in the corridors of cells about, but then experience had proven typhus was no respecter of persons. Nakedness on cold wet stone was an adequate substitute for keeping his prisoners in the right state of mind.

The attendants were thoroughly traditional, though, besides the two men-at-arms by the door: stocky men bare to the waist, wearing black leather hoods with eyeholes, and pants of the same material. Sandra wasn't here today; she knew his mood was dangerously taut right now with worry.

The scream died away to a mumbling whimper, and then silence.

"Give him another quarter turn," Arminger said, sipping at the wine.

"He's fainted, my lord," one of the technicians said.

"Well, revive him, then!" Arminger snapped.

The technicians slacked the tension slightly, and followed that up with several buckets of cold water. Nobbes came awake enough to try and catch some of that in his mouth, licking up the drops and then screaming again when he sucked a little into his lungs and had to cough and racked himself. Arminger waited until something approaching consciousness returned to the haunted eyes.

"I swear I don't know anything about anyone kidnapping your daughter, oh, God, I don't know! Water, please, water."

Arminger nodded reluctantly. "All right, let's move on to my nerve gas. You didn't have time to destroy it, so you must have hidden it somewhere. I'll find it eventually, but I want it now, and not just that lousy little bottle I tested. So tell me."

After a moment's silence, the lord of Portland went on: "Look at the wall."

Nobbes did, when one of the technicians knotted his fingers in the Tasmanian sailor's hair and wrenched his head around.

"There are a number of interesting little tools there. Some are sharp. Some are heavy. Some can be made red-hot. And some can be heavy and hot and sharp. So: " He turned his eyes to the technician. "A dose of the hook, I think. Not the barbed one, and just the inner thigh, this time."

When the screams had died down to sobbing, he went on: "Now, tell me where my nerve gas is."

"Buh: buh: "

Arminger made a gesture with one finger, and a sponge soaked in water and vinegar was held to the prisoner's lips. When he was coherent again he raised his head.

"But if I tell you, you'll just kill me, you bastard!"

Arminger smiled and nodded. "Yes, I will, after checking to be sure you're not fibbing. And when you realize that's the upside of the bargain for you, you'll talk. Another quarter turn there."

Several hours later Arminger walked out of the interrogation room and down a corridor with a long row of cells on either side-he'd found that keeping the prisoners within hearing distance of the interrogations was useful for softening-up, and besides, there was a certain aesthetic balance to it. Hands gripped the bars and eyes glared, but he was safely beyond reach, and a brace of guards followed. Captain Nobbes had gone before, on a gurney with a doctor and nurses in attendance. It wouldn't do for him to die prematurely, after all.

"What about us, you bastard?" one of the crewmen of the Pride of St. Helens called.

"Shut up, fuckface!" the guard snarled, lashing at his fingers.

"No, no, that's a legitimate question," Arminger said, as the prisoner staggered back from the bars, clutching at his injured hand. "I think: yes, I think that when my daughter returns, I'll hold a tournament. We'll have jousts, and a melee, and bear-baiting, and then something new. You're all going to volunteer to fight a pair of tigers, with knives. Knives for you, not the tigers, that is. I think twenty-to-one is fair odds. If any of you survive, I'll even let you live. The salvage and construction gangs can always use new hands. Simple food, an outdoor life, and healthy manual labor."

More curses followed; the prisoners probably thought they had nothing to lose. They were wrong about that, and the ones who wept, or lay curled up and hugging themselves were wiser. What he'd probably do to them all if his daughter didn't return soon would make fighting a four-hundred-pound Bengal starved and tortured into madness seem quite desirable.

The one who'd asked first was a brave man. "What if we refuse?" he said.

One of Arminger's brows rose. "Refuse to fight?" he said.

"Of course! Why should we give you a free show, you manky pervo?"

"Well, if you don't fight, the audience will be disappointed." He smiled slowly. "But I don't think the tigers will mind at all."

The local baron had vacated the great hall-he spent most of his time at a nearby pre-Change mansion anyway-and Sandra Arminger waited, pacing nervously back and forth in front of the hearth. Guardsmen stood like iron statues down the wall, their spears glinting dully in the gloom.

"Well?" she said sharply, after waving her attendants out of earshot;

"Nothing about Mathilda," he said. "I didn't expect there'd been any conspiracy there, anyway. It looks like serendipity; she and Molalla's son just happened to be where the Mackenzies were raiding-they'd decided to come home that day on the spur of the moment, no way to anticipate it. And the Mackenzies won't hurt her, you know that."

"They won't hurt her body. I want her back, Norman!"

He made a soothing gesture. "So do I, my love. So do I; very badly indeed. But we'll have to be extremely careful. A botched attempt could result in her being hurt. At the least, we'll have to wait for them to drop their guard and relax a bit."

She bit her lip, eyes troubled, then nodded sharply; less in agreement than recognition there was nothing immediate they could do. That knowledge made him swallow a bubble of acid-tasting anger, but there wasn't. Not yet.

But when the time comes: he thought, and saw her perfect agreement.

"What about the VX?" she said, forcing herself to attend to business.

Arminger smiled sourly: "We'll still have to confirm the location he gave us, but I finally managed to persuade him."

She raised an eyebrow and he went on: "You might say I made him an offer he couldn't survive."