The Tears of the Sun

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BOISE PROVISIONAL CAPITAL, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (FORMERLY BOISE, IDAHO) AUGUST 12, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“A re you sure, Colonel Nystrup?” Astrid asked conscientiously.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t send people on a suicide mission, Ritva knew. It was just that she wouldn’t lie to them about it first. She wanted them to know what they were getting into without a shadow of a doubt.

The warehouse belonged to a Mormon merchant who’d traded widely in alum, soda ash and other valuable minerals, and had been built by stripping out everything but the load-bearing concrete members from an office building. The trade had declined in the long destructive war between the CUT and New Deseret, and nearly halted altogether since the Battle of Wendell. He’d turned it over to other uses without a murmur, or any questions, then packed his family and portable wealth and left town in a hurry. The huge first floor stretched empty around them, dusty, smelling of chemicals, with spears of light from the high small windows.

“Lady Astrid, we are extremely sure,” Nystrup said.

He’d gotten a little thinner than she remembered him, from the time the questers passed through the CUT-occupied parts of New Deseret east of here and helped his band of partisan fighters; a leanly fit man in his thirties, fair and with a snub-nose that had been made more snubby sometime in the recent past with a blow. The sixty Mormon guerillas grouped behind him all looked as if they knew their business. Judging from the scars and what she saw in their eyes, Ritva judged that they meant what their leader said. Years spent fighting the CUT forces occupying their homeland had winnowed them with fire.

“We are not engaging in suicide,” he went on earnestly. “That is damnable sin. We are taking on a dangerous mission that we know carries a very high risk of death, for our homes and land and people, and for the Church of Latter-day Saints, and for God, and against the servants of the Adversary. This war must be won, or our families will know only death or slavery. Part of Deseret holds out yet, but more than half is occupied by the false Prophet’s troops, and our refugees here in Boise are treated more and more badly. This… this Montival is our only hope. I have met Rudi Mackenzie, and we know that he has been sent as our deliverer.”

Astrid nodded. “Come then,” she said gently. “Now is the time. Operation Luthien is a go.”

Above them a rope shook. John Hordle came sliding down it with a rattle of equipment, in Dunedain battle gear with his greatsword slung over his back along with a longbow and quiver. Eilir followed him, similarly clad but carrying the recurve of horn and sinew that most Rangers preferred.

The wind is from the north and rising, she Signed. I don’t like the taste of it, either. I’m afraid that the blimp may go faster than Major Hanks calculated.

Ritva winced slightly. If the rendezvous didn’t go as planned, they died; it was as simple as that.

Alleyne signed from the door: Street empty. Go!

The four wagons were standard US of Boise army-issue, rated to carry a ton and a half of cargo beneath their canvas tilts. Half of the guerillas were already in Boise’s uniforms and hoop-armor as well; now they put on the helmets, low-crowned affairs with a flared neck-guard and folding cheek-pieces. When they tied the cords to those beneath their chins little could be seen of their faces, and they took the shields and javelins from the vehicles and fell in with a creditable imitation of the smooth precision to be expected.

Ritva pitched in with harnessing the six-mule teams; the familiar task helped her calm herself, long slow breaths easing the knot in her belly until she felt loose and relaxed. She pulled on her close-fitting steel cap of blackened steel, climbed into the wagon and lay down, checking that all her weapons were ready once more, and that her eye was near one of the knotholes in the planks which made up its side so that she could look out. The Ponderosa pine wood was new, and she could smell the sap. It was a little thin, too, flexing where she pressed against it.

Some contractor is padding his accounts using unseasoned wood that’s not of the right grade. Tsk!

The thought almost made her laugh, but you couldn’t let your emotions loose at a time like this, even positive ones were a risk. In a way, a sudden surprise was easier than methodical waiting; you just reacted by trained reflex. She let her mind drift instead, mainly going back over the day she’d spent at the Drover’s Delight before the stretched-out arrival of the others.

Ian really is sweet, she thought happily. And smart and funny and good with his hands… in more ways than one. But I’m definitely not going to go live on a farm in northern Drumheller, ever, ever, ever. If you shout there at Yule the sound doesn’t thaw out enough to hear until Ostara! Shudder! Oh, well, the war’s likely to last a while. We’ll see.

The object of her meditation crawled into the wagon and wiggled through the other Dunedain until he was snuggled behind her; mainly symbolic, when you were wearing a mail shirt.

“Not very private,” he murmured. “In the Peace River, we have sleigh rides for courting. A nice buffalo robe can conceal a multitude of sins.”

“Shhh!” she said affectionately.

A set of sacks filled with wheat husks was tossed in to cover the layer of fighters in the bed of the wagon; unless they were examined closely they’d look just like full sacks of actual grain, but they were light enough that they could be pushed off instantly. She could smell the redcoats’ sweat, and it wasn’t just wearing a mail shirt and padding on a warm day. They weren’t simply going to a fight, they were going to a fight that was certain death unless everything went right, including actions by strangers they didn’t know beyond brief acquaintance.

Poor Ian is even worse off. He doesn’t know us, or Aunt Astrid and Uncle Alleyne or anyone but me… and we’ve only known each other a couple of months, though it’s been intense.

There was a special rankness to the sweat of fear.

She didn’t mind; courage wasn’t a matter of whether you were afraid, it was a matter of what you did. Nearly everyone was afraid before a fight if they had time to think about it, especially if they’d seen and felt and smelled the results and knew bone-deep how easily it could happen to them. Even if the surge of rage and effort burned it out during the actual face-to-face killing, the waiting was hard.

Which is why you want the waiting to be over. Sorta.

People who were never frightened were scary.

Aunt Astrid is scary, for example, Ritva thought, as the wagon creaked out of the big doors of the warehouse.

The day outside was much brighter, though there were plenty of clouds and it was well after dinnertime in the long summer evening. Her sandwich and cup of bean soup wasn’t lying too heavily on her stomach, and they’d all eaten several handfuls of dried fruit with honey for the quick energy, along with one small shot of brandy.

Aunt Astrid is scary because she doesn’t control the fear, she just doesn’t feel it. I think something must have happened to her after the Change that burned it out though she never talks about it. I don’t think she sees what the rest of us see. I love her as my kinswoman and liege, almost a second mother, but I’m afraid of her too.

This might not be the riskiest thing Ritva had ever done. Probably the flight from the Sword of the Prophet in the Sioux country last year was that, where they’d dodged behind a herd of stampeding buffalo to escape just a hair ahead of being trampled into mush, or the fight on the rooftops in Des Moines when the Seeker had made the assassins into puppets of meat with the same not-mind looking out from each pair of eyes-

Manwe! The things I do! And it always seems like a good idea at the time!

– but this was right up there with the worst things she could remember doing deliberately and in cold blood. The feeling that they were completely dependent on someone else for a chance at escape wasn’t very pleasant either.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Work the muscles, don’t get stiff, keep centered. Just do your best and let other people do theirs and afterwards you can tell stories about it.

And Martin Thurston had threatened, sincerely, to cut out his wife’s tongue. Even though she detested the woman, that…

Was exactly what you expect from Cutters. I don’t know what it is, Rudi tried to explain but I got the feeling he really didn’t understand it himself after we came out of… wherever we were on Nantucket. But whatever is doing things to the Cutters’ spirits, that whatever-it-is hates us for existing. We really, really need to do this.

Noise built; they were into the populated part of the city, and she could see narrow glimpses of horses and bicycles and pedestrians and pedicabs and wagons and a handcart full of very fresh green onions that made her eyes water for an instant until she had to bite her lip to smother a sneeze. The steel wheels of the wagons grated and rattled and banged on the pavement, and the bed of the vehicle punched at her side as it hit little ridges and dips; nobody wasted leaf springs on a mass-produced freight carrier like this. Then the traffic thinned.

“Roit,” a deep bass voice said, cheerfully. John Hordle was a bit scary too. “’ang ’ard, all. Time for the kiddies to play the fall down and bleed you evil buggers game.”

Let your mind flow. Don’t think, just be, just do.

A stretch of pavement, the gravel-and-concrete patches light even against sun-faded asphalt a generation old. A stretch of roadway, with a sheet-metal watering trough and an automatic nose-operated dispenser. Another one of those a little farther down, and an extremely fancy black carriage, with the Presidential seal on its doors, and a driver and groom watering an equally fancy set of matched black horses; she hoped with some distant corner of her mind they wouldn’t get hurt in the contentions of men. And a line of soldiers standing in a double file at parade rest against the plate-glass windows of the jewelry store.

At least I’ll have these sacks of chaff off me in a second. It’s filtering down through the burlap and it itches. And I’ll be smelling something bedsides scared excited soldier.

It would probably, almost certainly, be blood instead, and the smells you got when bodies were cut open. Until then she had more light and air than the rest of the dense-packed crowd in the wagon.

No thought. Be. Do.

Her bow was between her and the side of the wagon-box. She reached slowly over her shoulder and pulled four arrows out of her quiver; goosefletched shafts of dense Port Orford cedar with horn nocks and wicked bodkin points of hard alloy steel. At this point-blank range she could put them through plate, even, if they hit square on. A flicker of memory told her how little protection the light mail under her jerkin would be, but that faded away. She tucked the arrows between her left forefinger and the riser of the bow. Ready, ready.. .

“Platoooon… halt! Right face!”

The guerillas in Boise army gear came to a stop, crash-stamping in unison and turning to face the escort guarding the General-President’s family. A man jumped down from each wagon seat, hitting the quick-release catches in the military harness of the teams and making as if to take them to the troughs.

The Decurion in charge of the detail was wearing sunglasses as well as his helmet with its stiff upright brush of scarlet-dyed hair from a horse’s mane. They were probably for effect, given the way the day was turning overcast.

“What are you Fifteenth Battalion pukes doing here?” he asked, flourishing the swagger stick he wasn’t strictly entitled to. “This is an interdicted spot, so get your weevil-wagons and glue-bait mules and your own sorry Reservist asses out of-”

Nystrup was leading the guerillas playing escort. He didn’t waste time on talking. One hand flashed out and took the platoon-leader by the back of the neck under the flare of his helmet. The other drew and struck with his dagger, driving the point up through the gap in the jawbone and the palate and into the Boise soldier’s brain. The man toppled back

“NOW!” roared Hordle’s bull-bellow.

White fire erupted in Ritva’s mind, like glowing ice. The light sacks flew in every direction from the wagons as they spouted warriors. She came up to one knee in a smooth roll, stripping an arrow out of the bundle she held against her bow and onto the string and throwing arms and shoulders and gut into the draw. The arrow slid through the cutout in the riser as the lead kiss-ring brushed between her lips, and she let the string fall off the fingers. Less than a second and a half had passed, and the arrow drove over a snatched-up shield and into a man’s face with a solid moist crunching whack sound that might come back to her in the night sometime. Again, again, a torrent of whispering death from forty bows-

The guerillas on foot had all thrown their pila. They weren’t experts, but the distance was ten feet and there were thirty of them with strong arms and they were full of desperate hate. Some of the big javelins missed and smashed into the glass window. Others thudded into shields as the Sixth Battalion guard detail reacted with trained speed. Many found flesh.

The survivors crowded back towards the tall worked-bronze doors of the shop; not running, but backing with their shields up and putting their bodies between the unknown enemy and their ruler’s kin, slightly crouched with their blades out ready for the stabbing stroke. Whistles trilled, calling the alarm.

More arrows punched into the heavy plywood and sheet metal, crack-crack-crack, and more men fell or dropped the shields as the points gouged through into arms. Soldiers were pushing out through the doors to join them, the other half of the guard detail, and the formation was shaken for a moment.

That instant’s gap was enough. A great high silvery shout: “Lacho calad! Drego morn!”

The Dunedain war-shout, alive again in the Fifth Age: Flame light! Flee night!

And Astrid Loring-Larsson’s voice. She was moving, long sword and dagger in hand, like a human blade of black and silver, spired helm and elfboots, a soaring leap from the wagon to the trough and then another that sent her spinning in midair in a three-quarter tumble right over a man’s head and landing with the blades already moving.

In Dunedain training a move like that was called a Jakie, for some reason, and they did a lot of them. Many involved running up trees and going across buildings and leaping from rock to rock through the hills. Eilir was half a pace behind; she hit the wall running and went straight up it and spunflipped and landed beside her anamchara.

Astrid killed the man over whose head she’d jumped before he could make himself believe what she’d done, a thrust to the back of the neck that flicked out and back like a frog’s tongue after a fly and he dropped as limp as a puppet with the strings cut, in a sprawling crash of armor.

“Lacho calad! Drego morn!” Ritva shrieked as she dropped her bow.

She leapt, landed in a crouch, spun in a circle on one heel as her sword came out, blade a silver flash as it went snicking through a booted ankle and hamstring in a drawing cut, stripped her buckler off its clip on her belt. Ian was beside her a quick breath later, saber working in a frantic X as he guarded her back with steel and round shield. The Rangers poured forward in a leaping shouting glitter of steel. The four-foot blade of John Hordle’s greatsword swung in three quarters of a circle and broke a shield and the arm under it and gouged into a face hard enough to shatter it in a spray of teeth and blood. Alleyne was beside Astrid too, lunging and cutting and striking like a big golden cat.

“Arise, ye Saints!”

The Mormons poured after them, nearly as quick. A dozen of them locked shields and smashed into the display window, where the glass had already been weakened by the punching bodkin points of the arrows and javelins. It turned into a glittering wave of fragments, and then their hobnailed boots were trampling the mannequins and sending sprays of gold and platinum, diamonds and rubies and tanzanite into the body of the store.

The Dunedain followed, on their heels and then past them with a dreadful bounding agility, accompanied by one swearing, scrambling member of the Force.

Ritva vaulted a display rack, rolled under a thrust from a pila and cut backhand and upward into a groin; the man screamed astonishingly loud and thrashed, and blood sprayed across her torso. Another was beyond him, swearing as the dying man tangled his feet and display cases on either side pinned him in place; she charged, shoulder-checking him in his shield as he staggered. That was like ramming her shoulder full tilt into a brick wall, but he went over backward and two Mormons jumped on him, their sword-arms pumping like pistons.

It was obvious where the two Mrs. Thurstons and their children were; as agreed they were clutching at pillars and cabinets and screaming at the top of their lungs as their guards tried to drag them to what they thought was safety, adding one more element of chaos to the scene. The spot they’d picked to linger was cluttered, too; big leather sofas, discreet and heavy display cases with marble bases, and the desks and counters of the shop staff.

That left no room for the soldiers who hadn’t gone to hold the door to form a shield-wall. In an open field they would have been more than able to hold the Rangers and the Mormons both until help arrived, even outnumbered; they were strong, picked men, beautifully trained and equipped. The problem was that they were trained and equipped for one type of fighting and only that, each man a part in a single many-legged machine. This brawlmelee left them in isolated ones and twos facing Dunedain whose war-style brought a malignant perfection to a tumbling slashing stabbing scramble from ambush.

The Mormons simply swarmed those facing them under, showing a reckless disregard for consequences. The Thurstons kept screaming, a needleedge of distraction, and those trying to drag them away snatched up their shields as the swarming fight staggered near. Ritva forward-rolled around her sword-hand under the thrust of a gladius and came to a knee, hammered the edge of her little steel buckler down into the man’s foot in a grisly crunch of small bones breaking, then thrust upward into his throat and killed him as he bent over in swift involuntary reflex.

A leap forward, across a tile floor already slippery with blood, and she found herself facing the last soldier of the Sixth still standing. He’d lost his helmet and was flicking his head to get the blood out of his eyes from a cut on the forehead. He was a young man, younger than she, with bristle-cut red hair and a freckled face whose skin was tight over the bones and wet with sweat and blood. The green eyes were utterly steady as he set himself to die.

A flickering long-lunge towards a foot brought the shield down; Ritva knew somewhere far from the present all-consuming moment that she was moving to ten-tenths capacity in an impossible blur of speed, almost as fast as Astrid. She turned the lunge into a feint with a skip and a beat, and drove the sharp point of her long sword into the upper part of his arm, just below the spot where the leaves of the lorica segmentata stopped. The point ripped into meat and glanced off bone, and the soldier gave a muffled cry of despair and pain as the shield dropped out of his hand; the Boise type were held by a central grip, not loops with a forearm thrust through.

Two more lunges drove him back towards the Thurston family as the point flickered in faster than thought. He still had his short sword, but the gladius was not meant for fencing. As he felt the family at his back the soldier suddenly threw the sword at her and turned, grabbing Shawonda Thurston in his arms and wrestling her around by main force, putting his back between her and the blades of the attackers he thought menaced them for one last sacrificial moment.

Ritva ducked and batted the blade aside with her buckler, a hard bang and ring of metal; a whirling two-pound Frisbee of edged metal thrown by a strong man was not something to be taken lightly. Her body was already moving forward, feet positioning for the lunge that would slam her point into the back of the soldier’s neck above the edge of his lorica. A sweet inevitability of motion, truth in bone and nerve and metal-

Shawonda Thurston’s desperate face was looking over his metal-clad shoulder, eyes enormous. She wrapped her arms around his neck in a convulsive movement, her head jammed into his shoulder.

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t! Don’t!”

Ritva’s battle-trance broke at the desperate appeal. She diverted the killing lunge upward with a wrenching effort, and her body slammed into the young man’s back and bounced off it; he was hard-braced, and the combined weight of him and his armor and the girl were twice her mass. The soldier and Shawonda stumbled backward without falling, but they were close to it.

Ritva moved again, but this time she reversed the weapon. The fishtail pommel of her long sword had an outer rim like the edge of a blunt chisel. She struck with it against the young man’s head, behind the ear. He didn’t go absolutely limp; you couldn’t hit someone in the head that hard in a combat situation and be sure you weren’t killing them. He did lose all interest in everything but lying still and hurting as the shock rattled his brain in its fluid casing. Shawonda released him and stared at his body lying at her feet.

“He’ll live,” Ritva said, and shook her with a push of buckler on shoulder. “Pull yourself together, girl!”

Shawonda did; she took a couple of sobbing breaths and then crouched to pull the wound pack from the soldier’s belt. She ripped the pad open with her teeth and strapped it against the wound in his left arm with a swiftness that showed she’d taken first-aid courses.

“He was nice,” she said, with tears tracking down her face and diluting the red spatters that flecked it. “He talked to me when his sergeant wasn’t there.”

Then she stumbled back to her mother, wiping her hands on her skirt. The older woman put an arm around her and hugged both her daughters to her body, nodding over them at the Dunedain.

Ritva spared time for one sharp nod back, then looked down at the soldier for an instant. Her lips quirked, and she dropped back into Edhellen: “You are one lucky son of a bitch. You really got a triple return tripled on chatting her up like that!”

The screams had cut off, except for young Lawrence Jr.’s, and his mother was soothing him; you could hear the sharp hoarse panting breaths of the survivors, and moaning and whimpering from the hurt. The rest of the raiding party came up. She did a quick scan; ten of the Mormons were dead, three of the Rangers, and others were having wounds dressed. The soldiers of the Sixth hadn’t gone down easily, surprise and numbers and bad ground or no.

One of the Dunedain was carried between two guerillas, and another was applying pressure to a pad. There wasn’t much point from the look of it; that deep a stab wound up under the short ribs made with enough force to penetrate mail would probably be fatal even if it hadn’t nicked a lung, and there was blood on her lips as well. It was Condis, whom Ritva had known a little and rather liked, even if she was very earnest. Now the knowledge of death was in her dark eyes, and her face was rigid with the strain of not screaming.

Astrid came over as they set her down, looked at the wound and up at the Mormon holding the bandage. He shook his head very slightly.

“Hiril,” Condis mumbled, struggling not to cough. “Lady. Send.. . me to Mandos. Please, you.”

“Are you sure, brave one?”

A nod, then a grimace and: “Nidh, naneth, nidh!”

Ritva swallowed. That was: It hurts, mother, it hurts! Sometimes there was only one last gift to give a friend.

Astrid went quickly to one knee. Her left hand cradled the girl’s head to position it, and she bent to kiss her gently on the forehead despite the spray of blood coughed into her face. The motion hid the sweep of her hand as she drew a long slender knife from her right boot, and it moved in a swift precise thrust. Then she kissed the still form’s forehead again, closed the staring eyes and stood, wiping a sleeve over her face to clear her eyes and sliding her knife and sword carefully through the crook of her elbow to clean them before she sheathed the steel. A friend laid Condis’ sword on her body and folded her hands on the hilt.

“Go in peace, Bride of Valor,” Astrid said; that was what Con and dis meant. “Wait for us, in the silent halls of the Uttermost West. It will not be long.”

Then she raised her head. Members of the raiding party were already rushing past her towards the stairs, with bundles of arrows and glass globes full of clingfire. A dull ringing sounded where a padlock was being pounded off a door by a sledge; the upper stories of this building were kept locked as storage. Immediately afterwards there was a rushing thunder of boots on metal treads.

Ritva’s eyes went up too. The flat roof above would be either the platform for escape, or the last place she would ever see.

“Tolo a nin,” Astrid said. “Gwaenc!”

Ritva translated. “Come with me. Let’s go!”

Martin Thurston looked up as he rode through Boise’s gate. The signal heliograph on the northwesternmost of the four towers was snapping, repeating a message as a request for clarification. The gathering clouds made it dim, thunderheads towering from black bases up to cream-white and then turned crimson by the westering sun. Something within him would have noticed the beauty of it once, if only in passing.

Nothing is nothing nothing now. Bits and bits that flake off and spin down and down and nothing is nothing and that is very good.

The signal was faint, not enough sunlight striking the mirrors, but then someone touched off the limelight. High above, hydrogen and oxygen and wood alcohol sprayed out of nozzles onto a stick of pure quicklime. A few seconds, and the light blinked brightly again. Martin frowned. He knew Morse as well as he read English, and the message was being sent in the clear; the identification number was a relay station well north of the city. And…

“Blimp?” someone said. “There aren’t any blimps.”

“There is the Curtis LeMay,” Martin said.

“But that flying white elephant and all its gear were decommissioned and broken up and sold for scrap after Wendell!”

“Perhaps not,” Thurston said.

He could feel things moving in his mind. Like fish under water, or worms in earth. Some part of him was astonished at the detached curiosity of the other part as it considered the sensation.

“Things were confused just then. Paperwork could have been misfiled by traitors within our ranks. Message, maximum priority, all weapons emplacements on wall and citadel. Fire on the blimp. Incendiary rounds authorized. Category A mission rules of engagement, execute immediately.”

Another man grunted. Category A meant ignore collateral damage.

A panting messenger approached, letting his bicycle fall. A Natpol, wheezing and red faced. Shields blocked his way as he bent over, holding himself and gasping.

“Sir!” he shouted, over the ten yards. “Sir, we have a situation!”

“Let him through,” Martin said.

They did, though two pila -points touched the back of his neck. By then he had his breath back, a little.

“Mr. President, there’s an incident at Aladdin’s Emporium. Sir, your wife was… is there, with your son and mother and sisters. Sir, it’s enemy specops forces and Mormon terrorists. They appear to have hostages, sir. Your family.”

Part of the sweat on the man’s face was sheer terror. Martin could feel the rage that would have flowed through him, even taste it, something like sucking on rusty iron. But the emotion chased itself around in a circle, like a hamster on a wheel at the other end of a reversed telescope. There if he needed it, but not really part of him.

“Nothing,” he said.

Everyone was looking at him. He could use the responses that mighthave-been.

“Nothing can be gained by panic,” he went on; it was what he would have said.

“Centurion Leiston, another maximum priority message. Launch gliders from all fields within reach.”

The man was in his late twenties, one of Martin’s inner circle; he looked up at the weather, calculated the risks, and nodded brusquely before dictating quickly to messengers who dashed off at the run. The ruler of Boise went on: “That blimp is not to escape under any circumstances. Category A rules of engagement. Do it. ”

He turned his head. “Legate Koburg. The first auxilia of light infantry, I want some missile troops. And the rest of the Sixth.”

Martin drew his saber. “Sixth Battalion. Follow me! ”

The men had heard the Natpol’s news. They roared their anger as they swung in behind his horse and began to double-time down the pavement in a slamming unison. Thunder flickered across the northern horizon, no louder than their feet.

“We’ll hold them as long as we can,” Nystrup said. “They can’t get at us more than two or three at a time in the stairwells. As man is, God was; as God is, so we shall be. Get going! Use what we’ve done. Make it count.”

Astrid raised her sword into a salute, and turned. The Rangers followed her, each giving an instant to the same gesture. Ritva leaned against the stairwell wall for a moment after they had trotted upward for a while, wheezing. Even the light armor of her mail-lined jerkin felt like iron bands around her chest for a moment. There was nothing on Arda that drained you like fighting. Not practice, not the hardest labor, nothing. After the clear madness was past you paid for what you’d done to yourself.

“You OK?” Ian asked in a throaty rasp, the sort of voice you got when you’d been screaming war cries for a while.

His had been: Maintain the Right!

“Sure,” she said, taking another deep breath. “Just reaction. I’ve got my friends with me, what more do I need?”

They pushed up the last stretch of stairwell and out onto the flat roof with its rusted ventilators. The air was colder than she’d expected on an August evening, cold and with a feeling of chill beneath that. Black clouds were piling up above. Dunedain ohtar had lit green smoke flares at each corner of the roof and then those of them still hale knelt behind the low coping at the edge, bundles of arrows at hand. Ritva and Ian did likewise; he looked down and murmured: “High enough.”

They looked at each other gravely; that meant high enough for a final leap, if worse came to worst. Then motion caught her eye.

“Troops here!” she shouted, and it was echoed moments later from all four sides of the building.

The Boise soldiers were moderate-sized dolls from four tall stories up; she could hear voices and make out words when someone shouted. They seemed to be crossbowmen in mail shirts mostly, arriving first on bicycles and then stacking them and taking up firing positions; then regular infantry, hundreds of them, tramping at the double. That drowned out the voices, until they came to a halt with an earthquake stamp.

An officer stood forth, and raised a speaking-trumpet to his mouth. “Terrorists!” the amplified voice blared. “You are surrounded by overwhelming force! There is no escape! Surrender!”

Ritva grinned. Ian chuckled. “There’s a flaw in his logic,” the man from Drumheller said.

She raised her face and shouted back to point it out: “If you’re so overwhelming, yrch, come up and make us surrender!”

From the stir and growl along the serried ranks of eagle-and-thunderbolt shields, they wanted to do just that. Astrid came up behind the pair, with the Thurstons. The growl grew louder.

“There’s blood on the face of the President’s sister!” the officer shouted, and there was genuine rage in his voice. “We demand she be given medical attention immediately, or you’ll be a week dying!”

Astrid had a speaking-trumpet of her own; it had been a good bet that they’d need one at some point in this mission.

“It isn’t her blood, good sir,” she said, loud but not shouting. “Fighting is messy.”

She handed her canteen to Cecile Thurston, who poured water on a handkerchief and wiped her daughter’s face; that had the added virtue of getting rid of the drying tear-tracks.

“I’m fine, see?” the girl called. “We’re all OK, Mom and Janie and little Lawrence. And Juliet,” she added as an afterthought.

Ritva and Ian grinned at each other; there wasn’t much love lost there. The girl looked as if she would go on, but Astrid murmured softly to her: “No, not yet. Too risky.”

Ritva felt a chill. That was the measure of Martin Thurston’s damnation; he’d staged his coup to make his son heir to power, and now there was a real risk he would order his family silenced to protect that power.

And there was Martin Thurston himself, standing impassively with his red-white-and-blue crested helmet under one arm and his strong handsome dark face turned upward. Ritva’s string-fingers itched; it was so tempting to try to pick him off… win half the war at a stroke…

No. The Cutters have their luck too. Those men by him could put their shields over him in half a second.

He stretched out a hand and the officer put the speaking-trumpet into it. The sky was mostly overcast now; Ritva smelled damp dust, and felt a single cold drop flick her cheekbone. That made her suddenly aware of her own thirst. While she was drinking the tepid but infinitely delicious water from her own canteen, Eilir came up and Signed, cautiously turning her back so that nobody below could see. ASL was fairly common among Mackenzies and all Dunedain knew it, but that wasn’t to say someone down there might not have some knowledge of the visual language.

The blimp should have launched some time ago. We have forty-five minutes until rendezvous, but that was the conservative still-air estimate, before the wind picked up so much. It’ll be earlier, now. No way of knowing exactly how much.

Astrid nodded and turned her eyes back to the street. Martin Thurston spoke; there was something about his voice that put Ritva’s teeth on edge, unless that was just her own knowledge of the man coloring perception.

“What do you demand for the return of my family unharmed?” he said, iron in his tone.

“Nothing!” Astrid called back, joy bubbling in hers but sternly controlled.

Yup, this is definitely a high point for Aunt Astrid. She really lives for this stuff. It is scary, I mean, I’m getting a rush about it now and then but I’m only doing it because it really needs to be done and you might as well enjoy an adventure if you’re going to do it anyway, being glum doesn’t help anything. Hunting’s as much rush as I really want, or riding a fast horse, or a glider or a sailboat, or sparring, or sex and wine and listening to poetry. But with Auntie, it’s like she’s reading it in the Histories at the same time that she’s doing it and we’re Luthien going into Angbad to rescue Beren. She’ll make a really cranky old lady someday.

Astrid went on: “We are here to rescue these ladies and their children, not to harm them. We will not threaten or hurt them, nor shield behind them, under any circumstances whatsoever, though it cost our lives.”

Ritva shivered. There was a mad splendor to Astrid Loring-Larsson at that moment, as wisps of her pale hair floated around her blood-spattered face and her moon-shot eyes looked at something beyond the world of common day. Something that frightened you and made you long for it at the same time. It was the feeling you got when the sun went down and for a moment the clouds turned into a golden unknown archipelago of islands in the sky, along a glittering sea road to the infinite.

“How do you intend to keep them, then?” Martin asked.

“By our swords, our courage, and our luck,” Astrid said. “Artos and Montival!”

The General-President handed the trumpet back to his retainer, turned on his heel and walked towards the building. Men followed him, and then Ritva couldn’t see them at all.

Martin looked around the sidewalk, shattered glass crunching under his boots, then walked into the room. Someone had put up a couple of bright lanterns, and the light flickered over bodies and blood and jewels; the air was rank with the coppery stink that happened when men bled out. The darker dung heap stinks weren’t as strong; when armored men fought you didn’t often get cut-open bellies. The killing wounds were usually to the head and neck and limbs, or deep narrow stabs. He looked at the arrows scattered around or standing in the dead; men were loading the fallen and a few living wounded onto stretchers.

“About sixty of the enemy, give or take half a dozen,” he said, an intent look on his brown face. “And they’re down about a quarter of that, counting the badly wounded they’ll have.”

The Natpol on the scene shot him a glance of respect for the quick analysis.

“Yes, Mr. President, that’s my estimate. We caught one of the staff-the others are scattered, we’re contacting them as we can-and she said dozens and dozens. You know how civilians are, I thought she might be exaggerating.”

He nodded his head to a sobbing older woman who was sitting in a chair, talking and wiping at her eyes and nose with a handkerchief while two of the police took notes.

Martin went on absently: “Sixty or so from the wagons, and the size of the escort of fake infantry that others mentioned, and the way they overran eighty men of the Sixth so quickly, even with the advantage of surprise. Having surprise is a force multiplier but there are limits.”

“I’ve got the men who tried to rush the staircase, sir. It, ah, didn’t turn out well.”

Another stretcher; the Natpol on it had an arrow in one shoulder, and a bandage around it. The bleeding wasn’t very bad, and it made more sense to get him to a hospital here in the city than to try to extract it in the field. The policeman stopped cursing the enemy and the pain when he saw who was standing over him.

“Report,” Martin said.

“Sir, as soon as they evacuated the ground floor my patrol tried to push up the stairs. It’s a stairwell built around a solid rectangular core and they’re barricading the stairs two times per flight, at least. They’ve got bows and lots of arrows and pila as well. You have to go uphill at them… sir, we tried.”

“Carry on,” Martin said to the stretcher-bearers.

The Natpol officer began an apology. Martin cut off the useless blather with a motion of his hand.

“Your men are lightly equipped and mostly past prime fighting age,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. Now, you got at least one of the staff, that woman there, and she was here all through the attack, correct?”

“Yes sir. But she’s not very coherent. Shock, I think.”

Martin walked over to the witness. “Ma’am,” he said.

Something crept into his voice. Her tears stopped, and she stared at him with her mouth a little open, the pupils of her eyes expanding as they met his.

“How many staircases?” he asked.

“One, Mr. President. There was another one but it was salvaged and the floors sealed. The one we use, it’s over there.”

She pointed. He nodded and went on: “The elevator shaft?”

Another pointing gesture. “It was sealed off.”

“You think there were how many of the terrorists?”

“It seemed like a lot but”-her face went blank for a moment, as if her brain was accessing information without the personality getting in the way-“fifty or sixty or a few more.”

“Some of them were Mormons?”

“Most of them, sir. I think. The ones in American uniforms. They were shouting Arise, ye Saints, I know Mormons do that. It was… it was all so fast, and there was so much noise and then the blood, blood everywhere, and the ladies were screaming and I didn’t know what to do-”

“Thank you.”

He turned to Koburn, the legate of the Sixth, as she began to sob again.

“Get the elevator shaft open.”

“Sir, the cables will be gone, it’ll be bare.”

Wire cable was prime salvage, with a dozen high-priority uses. It was absolutely certain that they would have been stripped from a building inside the city wall decades ago.

“And it would be a deathtrap if they caught on.”

“It might be useful anyway, if they don’t think of it or don’t have enough men to guard against low-probability risks. The stairs are going to be a deathtrap for sure. Do it, the auxiliaries have the gear needed. Fall the men in.”

More and more files of the Sixth had been coming in behind him. Some of them had been roughly shoving things out of the way to clear space, including the bodies of the enemy. Martin walked over to one, a woman, young and dark, and slighter than he’d have thought passable for rough work. The pommel of her sword rested at the base of her throat, with her hands crossed on the hilt and the blade point-down along her body, like the sculpted image of a Crusader on an ancient tomb. The outfit was all matte black, except for the silver tree and stars and crown on the front of a leather jerkin whose rivets showed it was lined with mail; they’d evidently switched to full uniform for this, bravado or some sense of the rules or both. The wound in her side would have killed her, but someone had hurried the process along. Someone with a good eye, a strong wrist and a knowledge of anatomy.

“Dunedain, definitely,” he said, using a toe to point to the symbol.

“The woot-woots who think they’re elves?”

“They think they’re Numenoreans, in fact. Friends of the elves.”

“Ah, the Arrowshirt son of Arrowroot bunch with the invisible companions. Totally fucking insane.”

“It makes as much sense as most myths and they don’t have to come up with an explanation of why they’re not immortal. And consider what they just pulled off right under our noses.”

He turned to the ranked mass filling the great room. “Men of the Sixth Battalion!” he called.

They braced to attention; there was a thunder-crack sound as they all rammed the butts of their pila down on the stone floor.

“My family’s held hostage on the roof, and we can’t assault the roof directly because we can’t use fire support. The only other way up is the staircase and it’s held by fanatical terrorists. Clearing it’s going to be ugly, and I can’t lead you in person, that would be dereliction of duty. I won’t order anyone to go where I’m not going. All volunteers, take a step forward.”

There was a second for men to sense the comrades on either side, and the entire unit paced to the front and snapped to a halt again. Again emotion stirred; it would have been an iron pride, a few months ago. Now it flopped somewhere in the emptiness of his skull, nothing in nothing in nothing, like a dying fish in the vacuum of the Moon.

“And I wish I could come with you.”

That was even true; some part of him wanted very much to die. That was out of the question just now if it could be avoided.

“Attack by files. Rotate every five minutes; the enemy can’t face relays of fresh men. Legate, lead your troops!”

“We’re going to make it,” Ian said.

“I mean, probably! If nothing goes wrong!” he added frantically, as Ritva and several Dunedain spat or made the sign of the Horns or other gestures against ill luck.

The rattle-bang-thump sound of combat was continuous from the doors of the stairwell; they’d barricaded the exit with everything they could find, but the sound of sword-blades and the flat snap of bowstrings sound, the battle cries and the screams of pain… they were all getting closer. Ritva didn’t like to think of what it must be like in there, fighting in the near dark.

And out of the north, a long orca-shape was coming. Still a tiny dot, but unmistakable; in this Fifth Age of the world, what else flew like that?

Well, Windlords and dragons. But we don’t have those. At least not yet, I suppose anything’s possible. I wouldn’t have believed the Sword of the Lady if I hadn’t seen it or what happened on Nantucket if I hadn’t been there.

She pulled a monocular out of its case on her belt and looked. The ship of the air was just as she remembered it, three hundred feet of blunt-pointed teardrop with cruciform stabilizer fins, and an aluminum-truss keel along the bottom anchoring a spiderweb net of light cables that distributed its weight over the great gasbag. The gondola was slung beneath like a stylized Viking longboat sans dragon’s head; it was taut fabric over an aluminum frame as well, with the captain’s post and wheel at the front and a propeller and rudder at the rear. You couldn’t see it from here, but the slender hull held twelve units made from recliner cycles on each side of the central walkway to power the propeller shaft.

That was the power source. Unfortunately it was a rather feeble one, and the stiff wind was far more than it could handle. That was why Lawrence Thurston hadn’t built more of them. Curtis LeMay was extremely useful in a dead calm, and nearly helpless as an ordinary balloon in anything else. Gliders had far lower payload and endurance, but you really could steer them in most weathers.

“One pass,” she said. “And that’s it. They can’t turn back against the wind, just steer a little across it… yes, they’ve spotted our smoke flares.”

The great shape became more nearly circular as the nose turned towards this building.

“Why are they coming in so low?” Ian asked.

“Something… about conserving ballast and gas, Hanks said,” Ritva said; she wasn’t sure what those meant. “I didn’t follow it but evidently if they go up and down they eventually run out and wouldn’t be able to go up and down anymore… oh, trastad!”

The towers on the northern wall were shooting at the blimp. Smoke and yellow flame trailed from some of the catapults; globes of napalm wrapped in burning cord fuse. One struck… and then bounced away from the soft resilient surface of the gasbag, to trail down into the city and splash into a spot of scarlet. She thought she saw someone crawling up the netting and spraying something; then the airship pitched sideways for a moment and headed back towards them.

“Eyes on the streets!” John Hordle shouted in his Hampshire-yokel version of Sindarin, as everyone turned to look. “You dim thick gits want a scaling ladder up yor bum?”

Ritva was supposed to be looking north, but she did a quick check to make sure that no storming parties were forming up. The enemy couldn’t shoot up at them; that would endanger their leader’s family. And if the Dunedain were alert, they could shoot down and throw globes of fire. But the other side might think it worthwhile, if they were pushed.

“They’re a little west of where they should be,” Ian said quietly.

The shark shape of the Curtis LeMay grew closer; probably they were only pedaling to keep steerage on her. Suddenly a dozen cords dropped down, whipping in the wind.

“Rhaich,” Ritva said dully.

Will anyone remember our heroic last stand? Or will we be just a footnote in a report on terrorist attacks?

The airship came on, rushing, suddenly huge. It would recede just as quickly, and just a bit too far to the westward despite the rudder and the frantic pedaling that drove the propeller. The wind was blowing harder…

John Hordle was up and across, running with a speed astonishing in a man seven inches over six feet and broad enough to seem squat. One of the tethering ropes was blowing beyond the northwest corner of the building, just out of reach. John reached the corner and leapt out into space.

He disappeared bellowing beyond the edge of the roof. Ritva felt her mouth drop open and her eyes go wide; Ian was goggling too, and a couple of other people looked just the same. The huge bulk of the airship bobbled in flight, its tail starting to pivot inward a little; it made you realize how light and fragile it was, not the solid sky-filling thing it seemed-

“Rhaaaaich!” she screamed.

What John Hordle was trying to do suddenly flashed into her mind, not a chain of logic but something you saw in an instant blaze of light. And what she had to do was equally obvious.

It involved jumping off a four-story building.

She was up and running before Ian’s question had time to get started. The thought of dropping her sword belt or quiver was rejected as she went, building speed; the heavier she was for this the better and there was not a fractional second to spare.

Unless a couple of extra pounds makes me miss and go crunch! Rhaich! Rhaich! Tulkas the Mighty, give John strength! Nessa, Dancer of Stars, give my feet wings! Dulu! Help, help! Mom!

Her feet hit the coping and she was soaring out over emptiness, only the thin-thread line ahead of her. Her gloved hands reached, grabbed for knotted rope, touched, slipped, she was scrabbling downward, falling…

An ape-long arm snagged at her and caught in her sword belt for an instant. That gave her time to clamp on with arms and legs, and a crazed memory of scrambling up his form as a child and swinging on his arms as if they were the tree limbs they resembled went through the memory that remained in muscle and nerve. A ham-broad hand boosted her up, and she stood on his shoulders and clamped her hands on the rough surface of the rope. A shock went through it, and she looked up to see Astrid clinging above her, legs neatly wrapped around the cable and one hand waving back at the roof.

“Show-off!” Ritva screamed. “Sometimes I just hate you, Auntie!”

The nose of the Curtis LeMay was down at a thirty-degree angle. It was still moving southward at a brisk clip, but it was also pivoting around the weight attached to the prow of the gondola, and the gondola was under the forward quarter of the gasbag. A three-hundred-foot length covered a lot of ground when it pivoted; the dangling lines swept across the roof, and frantic hands made them fast to old rusted stanchions and framework even as they were dragged across the gravel and crumbling asphalt. The blimp heeled far over as its broadside caught the wind, but the line to which Ritva clung swung back towards the building.

“-innocent!” Martin heard, in his mother’s voice. “Frederick is innocent! Martin killed his father to seize power! Frederick sent these people to rescue us, and we’re going willingly. Martin is a traitor who betrayed America and killed my husband. Cast him off, cast him down!”

The scaling ladders up the inside of the elevator shaft had chain sides and light metal batons for rungs. They’d fastened them to whatever projected, or in a couple of instances driven pitons into the concrete; the light infantry unit had mountaineering equipment in their packs. They’d simply ignored his attempts to lead them up the dark vertical rectangle.

Now he ignored them, kicking free of a clutching hand to swing across and clamp a hand on the ledge of the uppermost opening, then two, then chin himself and climb up. The first troops through had pried the rustbound elevator doors open with swords and boots; a broken gladius rested there. He pushed his way through the little antechamber, and out on the roof where a double file of crossbowmen waited, kneeling and standing with their weapons leveled.

The Curtis LeMay was tethered at nose and tail to the eastern side of the building, shuddering in the wind. The gusts of rain made a tattoo on its fabric, unfortunately not enough to drown the speaking-trumpet from the gondola.

“It’s true!”

That was his wife’s voice. Rage flowed through him, cold as treacle, like living clouds drifting in a universe without stars.

“I heard him confess it. He threatened to kill me if I talked!”

The shouts were directed down at the street, but they were perfectly audible on the rooftop as well. The men were listening. And they were intimidated by the huge bulk that towered over them, paralyzed into a perfectly receptive frame of mind. Calculations of the least-bad course of action flowed through him, pinning inevitability.

“Shoot,” he said, loud but not forced. “Both ranks, fire at the gondola. Now! ”

Silence stretched for a moment. Heads turned to look at him, eyes wide with horror under the rims of their helmets.

A centurion spoke, his voice shaking: “Sir, it’s your family. Your son is on board there!”

“I said shoot! I’ll have anyone who refuses executed for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”

He grabbed a crossbow and backhanded the man away when he tried to cling to it. Snuggle the weapon into his shoulder, breath in, breath out, hold it halfway and squeeze at the trigger, with the shouting face and the blowing blond hair in the aperture of the sights-

Tung.

The butt punched at him and the bolt whipped out. Even as it did, something covered Juliet, taking her out of the sights. Instants later the cables were released. Weights fell from the keel of the gondola, the emergency ballast, plummeting down into the street. The airship jerked upward as if wrenched by an invisible hand, dwindling southward under a sky dark with thunder. A few bolts fell back, and Martin stood impassive, with the rain sluicing down his face like tears.