"Damn, damn," Jorg Menyez said. It might have been the pain of his shoulder, dislocated when he went back down the ladder, but Raj doubted it.
"Sit still," Raj replied.
I hate the hospitals, he thought. Visiting the wounded was about the worst chore there was; and it bewildered him a little that the men liked it—seeing the author of their pain. Perhaps it gives them a focus. Something to concentrate the will on.
It was a smoky dawn in the command tent; there was still a bit of noise from the hospital pavilion across the plaza commanante, but most of the severely wounded had either died or been doped to unconsciousness by now. The burn victims were the very worst, the pain seemed to be so bad that even opium couldn't do much.
"Damn," Menyez said again.
Hadolfo Zahpata was in the hospital tent himself, with two broken legs. Clean fractures of the femur, likely to heal well, but he was in plaster casts and suddenly primary contender for commander of Crown garrison forces when the rest of the Expeditionary Force moved on.
"I lost a hundred, hundred and twenty men—and we were so close, if we'd gotten up just a little sooner—"
Raj made a chopping motion with his hand, as he stood at the head of the table looking out the opening.
"If's the most futile word in Sponglish," he said. "There was nothing wrong with the execution of the plan, Jorg—the plan was wrong, and that's my responsibility. You pulled out at the right moment; if you hadn't, you and Hadolfo would have lost your battalions."
"A broader attack—"
"—would have repeated the same failure on a larger scale." He sighed wearily. "The fact of the matter is, I was relying too much on the militia being disorganized by the town meeting. Maybe a lot of them wanted to open the gates, but they didn't want our men coming over the wall with blood in their eyes, not with their families behind it.
"And Strezman was waiting for us—a force ready to sally and another in central reserve to punch back anyone who got to the top of the walls. High bloody Colonel bloody Strezman is just too good to bamboozle easily—we've been fighting dumb barbs too long. I underestimated him."
He quirked a smile and lit two cigarettes, handing the other to Menyez. "If it's any consolation"—which it wasn't, he knew—"the force that sallied against our flank got cut up pretty badly before they made it back to cover. Good work, by the way, Gerrin."
Staenbridge shrugged; his eyes were red-rimmed by exhaustion as well. "Standard little affray," he said. "Incidentally, I was right back on Stern Isle. Their regular army is a different proposition from the landholders' retainers. A bit slow to deploy, though, too reluctant to get out of the saddle."
"As to what we do next—" Raj began.
observe, Center said.
This time the vision was of Lion City before the Fall. He hadn't known there was a city here back that far. Low colorful buildings, a few towers, streets of greenery with vehicles floating through on air cushions. More such advanced craft at the docks behind the same adamantine breakwaters as today, and others that had sails in bright primary shades and seemed to serve no purpose but pleasure. Yet there were so many of them, as if the city held hundreds of nobles wealthy enough to maintain a yacht. People strolling along the tree-shaded avenues, richly dressed in alien fashions, all healthy and well-fed and unconcerned, none bearing arms save a hunter with the head of a carnosauroid floating behind him on a robot platform. People bathing nude in the harbor itself, away from the docks, in water that was crystal clear and free of downdraggers. How could harbor water not stink and attract scavengers?
The view stabilized overhead and then flashed to a schematic of the city's hydraulic system. Water flowed in through pipes from the sea, flashed into vapor in a processing plant, flowed out through distributor pipes to every house, however humble. Even while he focused his attention on the overall view Raj marvelled at that. The lowliest peasant with hot and cold water running in any room he chose, like a great lord! With no need to send his wife to the public fountain for water or with the slops bucket to a sewer inlet—and only wealthy, civilized towns in these Fallen times had even so much. Waste water collected in a giant pipe that struck north to a mysterious factory that seemed to do nothing but sterilize the water, even though the whole ocean was nearby for dumping.
The Fall came. Most of the bright airy structures fell swiftly, to fire or hammered apart as salvage; they were uninhabitable for folk with nothing but fire to heat with, and they had been built of perishable materials. For generations only a small farming and fishing village stood on the site of Lion City. Rich land and a fine self-scouring harbor with a lighthouse brought growth. When men were numerous enough for their wastes to be a problem, a long ditch was built and connected to the storm-drains that flowed at low tide through the adamantine seawall; rainwater flushed it, now and then. A later generation covered the ditch with brick arches and built drains down individual streets connecting to it. The old sewer outlet was forgotten, deep underground. When men built the city wall, they built it over the pipe, to defend a smaller, more densely packed settlement.
A final vision: the outlet pipe ending in a gully north of the town, with a projection of Raj standing next to it.
1.5 meters in diameter, Center said.
For a moment all Raj could feel was incandescent anger. You let my men die when there was a better way? he thought. Not even the Spirit—
i am not god, Center said. the pipe may be blocked, is probably blocked where the weight of the wall rests on it. or the inlet may not connect to the surface within lion city. in any case, "supernatural" interventions such as this increase the amount of noise in the system and reduce the reliability of my predictive function. nor did i select you to be the puppet of my tactical direction.
"Raj?" Suzette said with concern.
He shook back to himself. The Companions were used to his moments of introspection, but not to one accompanied by the expression he could still feel twisting his face.
furthermore the attention of the garrison will now be firmly riveted on the walls.
Shut—up, he thought savagely. Perhaps that was reckless disrespect to an angel, but at the moment he didn't much care.
Raj looked up at the walls of Lion City. "They're really going to regret burning my men," he said softly.
Jorg Menyez was normally a mild and considerate man. At that moment his battered face resembled the surface of an upraised maul—also battered, but poised to smash anything in its path, stone and iron included. It matched his commander's expression quite closely.
"Oh, my oath, yes," Gerrin Staenbridge, almost whispering. A rustle of carnivore alertness went through the circle of commanders.
"Ehwardo," Raj began. "Move the cavalry around outside the walls—make it look as if you're setting up dispersed camps." An essential step in keeping dogs healthy over a long stay in a confined spot. "Jorg, starting at dawn, give the best imitation you can of a man starting massive siege works; parallels, the whole show."
"I gather it's a ruse, Whitehall?" Gerrin Staenbridge said.
"Correct. The rest of you are to prepare for a general assault—if and only if something I . . . have in mind succeeds. Colonel Dinnalsyn, get those damned armored cars ready, too. If you'll excuse me, Messers? And Gerrin," he went on, "send me M'lewis."
Antin M'lewis usually blessed the fate that had thrown him into Raj Whitehall's path. Since then life had never been boring, and it had been lucrative—if not beyond his wildest dreams, then beyond all reasonable expectation. Particularly after he happened to be one of the two men with Raj when he put down the botched coup attempt that used Des Poplanich as its front-man. Governor Barholm had been hysterical when he promised to make the two Companions present the richest lords in the Civil Government if they saved him. He'd remembered enough afterwards to translate one Antin M'lewis, free commoner and soldier of watch-stander rank, into the Messer class and to deed him a thousand hectares of land—and not in stony, desolate Descott County, either. Good fat riverside fields, near the capital. Yes, usually he blessed the day then-Major Raj Whitehall had hauled him up on charges for stealing a shoat.
Then again, there were times when he wished he'd let the peons keep their damned pig.
The pipe was tall enough for him to stand in if he stooped a bit. The greasy-smooth material it was made of was like nothing he'd ever seen outside a shrine, and it led downward into the earth—into the Starless Dark, the freezing hell of the orthodox. Where the Spirit of Man of the Stars cast the unregenerate souls not worthy even of lowly rebirth, dumping their core programs into chaos.
Good thing me ma were a witch, he thought. This might be a real problem for a pious respectable yeoman, but everyone in the M'lewis family accounted themselves probably damned anyway and certainly hung if found out. So were the Forty Thieves, but even they looked queasy at the arguably supernatural and definitely menacing passageway into the earth.
They watched him silently as he stripped off his uniform jacket and boots; unlike most enlisted men, who preferred sleeveless vests of unbleached cotton beneath in summertime, he wore a shirt. Unlike most officers, his was dyed rusty black. Through the back of his belt he tucked a sheathed skinning knife, and tested that the wooden toggles of his garotte were ready to his hand for the quick snatch-and-toss. Then he tied a plain brown bandana over his hair and palmed mud over his cheeks.
"Yer nivver goin' t'leave yer gun, ser?" one of the men whispered.
It was the young recruit; M'lewis remembered him from the action on Stern Isle, where he'd wondered if he'd have a chance at the women in the refugee convoy.
"Son—" M'lewis began. Which was just possible; they were certainly cousins, and he'd been friendly with that branch of the family as a lad. "—whin yer sneakin', yer sneaks quiet. With t'gun, all I could do 'd be ter bring four thousand barbs down on me head. Jist noise an' temptation, onna sneak loik this."
Spirit. Then again, he'd probably have drunk and fucked himself into an early grave by now if he'd retired to rusticate on the new estate. Certainly the other Messers wouldn't accept him socially there, a stranger of common birth. His sons, probably, when he got around to having them, but not him. And it would be dull.
Raj stepped up and gripped forearms. "Careful and slow, M'lewis," he said. "Don't let them hear you."
The snaggled teeth showed in a grin, and he offered a fist to slap—a trifle familiar perhaps, but then, what could you do to a man on a suicide mission?
"Nao clumpin' barb'll hear this mither's chile, ser," he said.
His bare feet were noiseless on the plastic. The soft cold of it was like nothing he'd ever touched as he walked forward and down, crouching.
Raj Whitehall was motionless beside his dog. Less bound by need than the man, Horace shifted uneasily from foot to foot to foot, whining slightly. His hand soothed the animal automatically, gauntleted fingers scritching in the slight ruff at the back of the neck, just forward of the saddlebow. Other dogs shifted and murfled in the darkness, two kilometers from the main gates of Lion City. Fifteen thousand men waited, gripping their rifles or the ladders, wondering if the next hour would bring a ladle of burning pitch in the face, a limb lost, eyes, genitals, whatever their particular dread might be. The air was full of the smell of rank sweat and dog, men and animals both full of knowledgeable fear and suppressed eagerness.
Everyone thought it was payback time. Everyone, Spirit help them, thought Messer Raj would pull another miracle out of the hat.
It was full dark; neither moon would be up for another hour. Watchlights burned on the walls of Lion City, but experience had taught them that Skinners could shoot out any reflector-backed searchlight from a comfortable range . . . and the men manning it.
It was also long after he should have received word from Gerrin. When the dispatch rider reined in, he forced himself not to whirl.
"Ser," the man said.
Something's wrong.
"Spit it out," Raj said. Nightmares—the 5th destroyed in a trap, burning pitch and tallow pumped down on them in the tunnel while they died helpless—
"Ser," the rider said, his eyes fixed over the general's head. "Captain Suharez reports . . . beggin' yer pardon, ser . . . Cap'n reports the 5th has retreated from the tunnel."
Raj stalked over to the rider and slapped the muzzle of his dog. "Down," he said. The animal crouched obediently. That put his eyes on a level with the man's.
"From Captain Suharez?" he said, in a calm voice. The man flinched. That was the second-ranked company commander in the unit.
"Yesser. Colonel Staenbridge an', an' some members went beyond the second dip—there was 'n other, ser, ten meters beyond t'one Lieutnant M'lewis found. The rest . . . the rest turned back, ser."
Raj pivoted on his heel, ignoring the dispatch rider. "Major Bellamy," he said. Wide eyes stared at him out of darkness as he stepped over Horace's saddle. "Up, boy . . . Major Bellamy, you will accompany me with the 2nd Cruisers. Major Gruder, you're in charge of the gate. Colonel Menyez, you're in overall command. Await the signal, then proceed as planned."
He kicked heels into his mount. Horace leaped forward, and Ludwig Bellamy and the bannerman of the 2nd fell in beside him. Behind them the massed paws of the 2nd Mounted Cruisers beat a tattoo through the night.
The ravine where the old sewer outlet surfaced was packed with men; the dogs were crouched a few hundred meters further north, together with those of the ex-Squadrone soldiers Raj had brought. He could see the 5th only as a shadowy presence, a sullen mass that recoiled slightly as he walked up to them.
"You retreated without orders?" he asked the Captain.
"Yes, sir," the man said. He was braced to attention and staring ahead.
At least he isn't offering excuses, Raj thought. He was moving carefully, very carefully so that he wouldn't shatter the ice surface of control that bound him.
"Ser," a voice from the dark mass said. "Ser . . . 'tis damnation there! 'T road to t'Starless—"
"Silence in the ranks," Raj said. His voice was as clear and precise as water is when it falls over a ledge of stone, before the spray and thunder. "You," he went on to the unit bannerman. "Did you turn back?"
"No ser," the man said.
He was a grizzled veteran, a thirty-year man; carrying the battalion standard was a jealously guarded privilege, open only to men three times awarded the Gold of Valor.
"Colonel Staenbridge, he ordered t'color party to remain here. Seein's t'colors wouldn't fit, ser."
"Then you may carry the colors back to the central Star shrine in camp," Raj said. "Where they will be safe from men unworthy of them."
A low moan broke from the assembled ranks of the 5th, and the bannerman sobbed, tears running down his leathery cheeks as he turned smartly and trotted for his dog. Nor was he the only one weeping.
"Tears are for women," Raj went on in the same glass-smooth tone. "Senior Captain Suharez, take this unit and report to Major Gruder, placing yourself under his orders. For whatever tasks he judges it fit for."
Suharez' face might have been carved from dark wood. "Yes, sir." He saluted and wheeled.
Raj turned toward the tunnel mouth. Behind him there was a forward surge among the ranks of the 5th Descott. He wheeled again, flinging out his hand and pointing silently back towards the main force. An officer broke his saber over his knee, and the men fell into their ranks and trotted forward behind Suharez.
Faint starlight sheened on the eyes and teeth of the 2nd Cruisers. Ludwig Bellamy stepped forward and saluted smartly.
"I'm ready to lead my men through, sir," he said.
"No, Major," Raj said. "You'll bring up the rear. Nobody is to turn back, understood?"
He raised his voice slightly, pitching it to carry in the heavy-breathing hush. "As I have kept faith with you, so you with me. Follow; quietly, and in order."
Raj turned and stooped, entering the tunnel.
The men's hobnailed boots clattered on the surface of the pipe; the sound was dulled, as if they were walking on soft wood, but the iron left no scratches on the plastic of the Ancients. The surface beneath the fingers of his left hand might have been polished marble, except for the slight trace of greasy slickness. There was old dirt and silt in the very bottom of the circular tube, and it stank of decay; floodwater must run down from the gutters of Lion City and through this pipe when the floods were very high.
Behind him the rustle and clank of equipment sounded, panting breath, an occasional low-voiced curse in Namerique. Earth Spirit cultists didn't have the same myth of a plastic-fined tube to Hell; the center of the earth—This Earth—was their paradise. This particular tunnel was intimidating as Hell to anyone, though. Particularly to men reared in the open air, there was a touch of the claustrophobe in most dog-and-gun men. There certainly was in him, because every breath seemed more difficult than the last, an iron hoop tightening around his chest
this is not an illusion, Center said helpfully. the oxygen content of the air is dropping because airflow is inadequate in the presence of over six hundred men. this will not be a serious problem unless the force is halted for a prolonged period.
Oh, thank you, Raj thought.
Even then, he felt a grim satisfaction at what Army discipline had made of last year's barbarian horde. Vicious children, he thought. Vicious grown-up children whose ancestors had shattered civilization over half a continent—not so much in malice as out of simple inability to imagine doing anything different. Throwing the pretty baubles into the air and clapping their hands to see them smash, heedless of the generations of labor and effort that went into their making. Thirteen-year-olds with adults' bodies . . . but they can learn. They can learn.
The roof knocked on the top of his helmet. "Halto," he called quietly. The column rustled to a halt behind him.
A quick flick of the lens-lid on his bullseye lantern showed the first change in the perfect regularity of the tunnel. Ahead of him the roof bent down and the sides out, precisely like a drinking straw pinched between a man's fingers.
you are under the outer edge of the town wall on the north side, Center said. .63 of a kilometer from the entrance.
M'lewis had come this far on his scout; he'd checked that the tunnel opened out again beyond this point, and then returned. Raj had agreed with the decision, since maximum priority was to avoid giving the entrance away. And the little Scout had been right, air was flowing toward him, he could feel the slightly cooler touch on his sweating face.
Of course, the air might be coming through a hole the size of a man's fist.
"Crawl through," he said to the man behind him, clicking off the light. "Turn on your backs and crawl through. There's another pinch in the tunnel beyond. Pass it down."
He dropped to the slimy mud in the bottom of the tunnel and began working his way further in. The plastic dipped down toward his face, touched the brim of his helmet. Still smooth, still untorn. The weight of the city wall was on it here, had been for five hundred years. Mud squished beneath his shoulderblades, running easily on the low-friction surface of the pipe. The weight of a wall fifteen meters high and ten thick at the base, two courses of three-by-three meter stones on either side, flanking a rubble-concrete core.
Do not tell me how much it weighs, he thought/said to Center.
Now he was past the lowest point, and suddenly conscious of his own panting. Something bumped his boots; the head of the man following. One man following, at least. At least two or three more, from the noise behind. No way of telling what was further back, how many were still coming, whether the last five hundred or five hundred and fifty had turned and trampled Ludwig in a terror-filled rush out of this deathtrap, this anteroom to hell. The plastic drank sound, leaving even his breath muffled. Sweat dripped down his forehead, running into his eyes as he came to hands and knees. He clicked the bullseye open for a look when the surface began to twist beneath his feet. Another ten meters of normal pipe, and then—
Spirit, he thought What could have produced this?
the pipe crosses under the wall at an angle of forty degrees from the perpendicular, this section is under the edge of a tower, Center said with dispassionate accuracy.
The towers were much heavier than the walls. The sideways thrust of one tower's foundations had shoved the pipe a little sideways . . . and squeezed it down so that only a triangular hole in the lower right-hand corner remained. This time the fabric had ruptured, a long narrow split to the upper left. Dirt had come through, hard lumpy yellow clay, and someone recent had dug it out with hands and knife and spread it backwards.
Raj waited until the man following him came up behind. "No problem," he said, while the eyes in the bearded face were still blinking at the impossible hole. "Come through one at a time; take off your rifle, helmet and webbing belt, then have the man behind you hand them through. Pass it on."
He kept moving, because if he didn't, he might not start again. One man panicking here and the whole column would be stalled all night.
He took off the helmet and his swordbelt, snapped the strap down over the butt of his revolver and dropped the bundle to the floor.
"Keep the lantern on," he said to the soldier behind him.
Right arm forward. Turn sideways. Down and forward, the sides gripping him like the clamps of a grab used to lift heavy shells. Light vanishing beyond his feet; they kicked without purchase, and then the broad hands of the trooper were under them, giving him something to push against. Bronze jacket buttons digging into his ribs hard enough to leave bruises. Breathe in, push. Buried in hell, buried in hell . . .
His right hand came free. It groped about, there was little leverage on the smooth flaring sides of the pipe, but his shoulders came out, and that was the broadest part of him.
For an instant he lay panting, then turned. "Through," he called softly. "Pass my gear, soldier." A fading echo down the pipe, as the man turned and murmured the news to the one behind him.
It had only been a little more than his body length. Difficult, but not as difficult as concrete would have been, or cast iron, anything that gripped at skin and clothing. The light cast a glow around the slightly curved path of the narrow passage.
Again he waited until the first man had followed, grabbing his jacket between the shoulderblades and hauling him free.
"Second birth," he said.
The Squadrone trooper shook his head. "The first was tighter, lord," he said. His face was corpse-pallid in the faint light, but he managed a grin. Then he turned and called softly down the narrow way:
"Min gonne, Herman."
Not much further, Raj thought, looking ahead. Darkness lay on his eyes like thick velvet.
.21 kilometers.
"I'll have them decimated," Gerrin Staenbridge hissed.
Raj didn't doubt that the other man meant exactly what he said; that he'd line up his battalion and have one man in ten taken out of the ranks and the others forced to beat him to death with rods. It was the traditional penalty for mass cowardice in the face of the enemy.
"I don't think that will be necessary," he said, his voice remote.
Gerrin turned and began a motion that would have slammed his fist into the concrete wall.
"Neither will that," Raj said, catching the thick wrist. "We have a job to do, Major."
"Yes, sir," Staenbridge said, straightening and running a hand under the neck-guard of his helmet. His hand kneaded brutally at the muscles at the base of his skull. "We've improvised, as you can see."
There were a little over a hundred men of the 5th Descott in the huge underground chamber, most of Company A and the twenty men of the Scouts who'd gone in first. It was large enough that they didn't crowd it, even with more and more of the 2nd Cruisers coming out of the pipe, jumping down the two-meter drop to the floor or lowering themselves by their hands. Not quite jet-black, the risk of a covered lantern was worth the lessened noise when men could see what they were doing.
The chamber was nearly twenty meters across and about three high. Originally it had been domed, but the roof had buckled at some unknown time. Bent and twisted rods of metal protruded from the concrete, and the huge writhing shape of a large tree's taproot. Staenbridge had been busy; the men must have made a human pyramid to lift one up, and he had hitched a rope made from buckling rifle slings together to one of the steel rods. Beyond that a darkness gaped.
"That connects to an old storm drain," the Major said, pointing. "Beyond that, an exit onto a street. M'lewis is there with a couple of his scouts, keeping it warm. Fairly deserted."
"It should be, it's past midnight," Raj said.
He walked over to the dangling slings; they were of tough sauroid hide, supple and very strong—the Armory tested them by hanging a hundred-kilo weight to one end and rejecting any that stretched or cracked.
"Send everyone on up, and then follow," he said.
He bent his legs and jumped, his sword-hand clamping down on a buckle hard enough to bend it. Arm over arm, he pulled himself smoothly upward toward the light.
The streets of Lion City had been laid out by cows. Quite literally, back in the days when it had been a little farming village where the odd ship called. When stone buildings went up, they stood by the sides of laneways worn by herdsmen driving their beasts back to their paddocks at night, and once the pattern was set it was too difficult to change. Too difficult for the people who'd run Lion City; back in the Civil Government a town this size would have had at least some semblance of a gridwork imposed at one time or another. If nothing else, a spiderweb of narrow streets flanked by three to five-story buildings was simply too easy for rioters to hold against troops, throwing up barricades and dropping roof-tiles down on stalled columns.
I've got something of the same problem, Raj thought. Maxiluna was up, but it was still dark in the alleyway; Lion City didn't run to gaslights, either, and even in East Residence a neighborhood like this wouldn't have been lit. Dark and very quiet, only the squall of an alley-cat breaking the silence. With the militia standing watch-and-watch on the walls and their families laboring to carry them food and water and do whatever else a city under siege needed, most folk would be well and truly asleep when they could find the time. Probably a few eyes were peering at him from behind shuttered windows, but men—and women—see what they expect. It would take a while for anyone to realize that this was not another unit of Brigade troops going out to relieve a section of wall.
He had just that long, and enough more for the damnably alert High Colonel Strezman to receive the report and get his garrison moving. If that happened before he was where he had to be, then he and everyone with him was dead.
Center's street-map of Lion City was eleven hundred years out of date, but the machine intelligence had seen everything he had. With his own eyes, and through reports—Muzzaf's, Abdullah's, the Ministry's. A glowing hologram opened before his private vision, and a green thread showed him the closest route to the gates. Not so good, they had to jink around the easternmost tip of the harbor.
"Gerrin, Ludwig," he said.
The two men were at his side; one dark, one fair, but otherwise much of a size.
"We're going to form up in column of fours—" all that could get through many of these streets, with the sleeves of the outer men brushing the brick and half-timber buildings on either side "—and head straight for the main gates at a run; I'll lead."
The two battalion commanders glanced at each other. How anyone could lead through this blacked-out maze was a question, but they'd learned that this man didn't claim what he could not do.
"Gerrin, you take the right-hand tower complex. Ludwig, give me your Company A; I'll take the left. You deploy in the main plaza just inside the gates and keep the reaction force off our backs—because they will hit, soon and hard. Understood?"
Two sharp nods, and they turned away to pass the orders to their subordinates.
Raj raised his voice slightly. "Keep it quiet, men, and keep it fast, and don't stop for anything at all."
Pavement racketed beneath their feet, echoing as they pounded into a run. Raj held his saber-sheath in his left hand to keep it from slapping him as he loped. This wasn't all that subtle a way to manage the movement, but at present subtle mattered a lot less than quick; seven hundred foreign soldiers were a big conspicuous object in any town, much less one under siege. Streets went by, narrowing or widening, cobbles or brick or occasionally hard-pounded dirt underfoot. Now and then a ragged beggar woke in a doorway and fled squalling; the normal Watch would be on the walls with everyone else. Buildings looming on either side, mostly dark, once a yellow blaze as a window was thrown open above. He caught a moment's glimpse of a woman holding a candlestick in one hand, catching her nightgown at the throat with the other, her face a study in shocked surprise.
"Faster!" he called.
He was breathing deeply; it had been a long hard day already, but a run of a klick or so didn't bother a man in good condition. It had better not bother any of his troopers, dog-soldiers or no.
"Halt!"
A bit of jostling as some of the rear didn't get the word. The plaza stretched ahead of him, the wooden platform still around the fountain; that was dry, with the city's outside water supply cut. For a moment he wondered what had happened to the Syndic of the Sailmakers, the man who'd wanted to open the gates. Only a single street of houses on the other side before the cleared space that ringed the wall, and a broad street through them from plaza to gates.
"At a quick walk," he said to Staenbridge. "Try out your Namerique, Gerrin. Captain Hortez—" one of the Descotter officers he'd posted to the 2nd Cruisers as company commanders "—tell the men to fix bayonets, load and shoulder arms. Sling their helmets." That would show their barbarian haircuts and coloring. "Follow me."
The towers bulked ahead, squat pairs on either side of the gate joined by a bridge over the arch itself, making the gateway into a huge block of masonry twenty meters high. There were lights there, one above the gate itself, another over each tower door on the rear. Not many lights inside, because the troops would be peering out at the encircling army and wouldn't want to destroy their night vision. The door to each tower was half a story up, with a staircase leading to an arched door wide enough for two men. Those were open, with soldiers lounging on the stairs.
Gerrin's company peeled off to the right. Ignore them, Raj told himself. Nothing he could do, and if he couldn't count on Gerrin Staenbridge he didn't have a single competent man with him and might as well die anyway. . . .
Closer. The soldiers were in General's Dragoon uniforms. Damn. He'd been hoping for city militia, but High Colonel Strezman had done the sensible thing. Certainly what Raj would have done, were he holding a city whose leaders had publicly considered surrender. He was willing to bet the other three gates were in the hands of Brigaderos regulars as well.
His mouth was dry with the running. He worked it to moisten it, concentrating on marching. Not stiff, just a company of soldiers going where they were told to, with the easy swing of men who'd done the same thing a thousand times before and would again. Really not much light, only a single kerosene lamp over the doorway, far too little to see details. The civic militia wore dozens of different outfits or their street-clothes according to whim and the depth of their pockets, so the distinctive Civil Government uniform might pass, would pass until it was too late.
"Whir dere ko?" a man challenged in Namerique. Who goes there? A young man's voice, probably a noncom. Strezman would be stretched thin, watching his putative allies along kilometers of city wall and keeping a big enough reaction force ready as a reserve.
The men at the gate scooped up their dice and stood, buttoning their jackets. They reached for their weapons, not concerned, just veterans' reflexes.
"Captain of Guards Willi Kirkin," Raj said.
His Namerique had something of a Squadron accent, and he let the harsh syllables roll across his tongue. There were quite a few Squadron refugees serving as mercenaries among the household troops of the magnates of Lion City.
The other man's reply sounded nervous, which was to be expected after the riot of the previous evening.
"What're you doing here, then, southron? Halt. Halt, I said!"
"Ni futz, greunt," Raj went on in a bored voice. Don't get upset, trooper. "The Colonel thinks the grisuh may try something tonight, and we've been sent to reinforce the gate. Better us than those chicken-hearted civvies."
Raj was at the foot of the stairs. He pulled a piece of folded paper from his pocket. Time slowed as the corporal reached for the note, then got his first good look at Raj's face. His beardless, brown-tanned Descotter face, with the cold gray eyes like slitted ice under the brim of the bowl helmet.
The young Brigadero had only a ginger fuzz on his own cheeks. His eyes were green and very wide. They bulged as Hortenz' pistol bullet took him under the angle of the jaw and snapped him around like the kick of a plow-ox.
"Go!" Raj screamed.
His shoulder hit the door to the tower as his hand came clear of the holster with his revolver. Raj was no gunman, no pistol-artist, just a fair to middling shot. The sword had always been his personal weapon of choice, and with that he was very good.
There was a ready room beyond the door, with five men in it—three sitting around a plank table playing cards, another two lying on benches. A grid flashed over Raj's vision, and the outline of one man glowed. The man with the pistols already nearly out of the holsters strapped to his thighs as he surged backward from the table. The one good enough to fill the doorway with bodies while his comrades rushed to swing the iron-strapped teak closed again.
A green dot settled on the man's chest as Raj swung the pistol toward him. The weapon bucked and roared, and the gunman's chest blossomed with a red flower exactly where the dot had rested. Dust puffed from the grey-green cloth around the impact point, the man was falling and Raj wheeled. The dot slid across a face. Crack, echoing within the stone walls. An eye erupted. On a neck. Crack. Arterial blood spouted against the whitewashed wall and ceiling as the brigadero spun. Against ribs. Crack. Another man had rolled behind a bench, fumbling with the hammer of his rifle. Crack through his pelvis.
The hammer clicked twice more by reflex. Raj staggered for a moment, wheezing in the fetid air through his mouth: he had ample strength and speed for that three-second burst of gunplay, but the skill was as much beyond him as a circus juggler's talents. The first kill's body was still twitching in a great pool of spreading blood. The men on his heels hesitated for a second, awe on their faces.
"Go, go," Raj ordered, over the moaning of a dying Brigadero.
His hands clicked open the revolver, dumped the spent brass, reloaded. Hortenz dashed by, through the ground-level door to secure the first floor of the towers and the exterior gunslits. Another squad of 2nd Cruiser riflemen went past to the staircase in a bristle of bayonets, behind a lieutenant. Raj tossed his revolver into his left hand and drew his sword with his right. One part of his mind was still shuddering with the icy feeling of . . . otherness, of being a weapon, pointed like a rifle by a directing hand. He'd use the trick again if he had to, as he'd use anything that came to hand. That didn't mean he had to like it.
The stairs were a narrow spiral, almost pitch-black. Iron hobnails and heel-plates gritted and clanged on the stone, from the squad ahead and the men following close behind. It would be a great pity if he slipped and toppled back onto their bayonets. The thought twitched at the set grin that rippled his lips back from his teeth. Gunfire crashed ahead of him, red muzzle flashes blinding in the dimness. Men shouted; he kept going past the door, past the tumbled bodies of Brigaderos and a trooper of the 2nd. All the enemy bodies had multiple bayonet wounds; the 2nd had learned to make very sure of things.
"Get those charges up here," he shouted down.
Men came back into the stairs, their rifles slung and their arms full of linen powder-bags for the light swivel guns on the second level of the tower; one of them had a coil of matchcord around his neck. Remember that face. That's a sergeant, if he lives. More gunfire slapped at his ears, echoes bouncing through the narrow corridors, screams, shrieks of fury and fear and raw killing-lust.
"GITTEM, GITTEM!" That was his ex-Squadrones forgetting themselves, giving the Admiral's war shout.
The stair gave out at the third-story landing. Only a ladder led above to the top of the tower; he snapshot, and a man tumbled down it and halted halfway, his legs tangled in the rungs. Blood spattered across Raj's face. He stepped aside, swearing mildly to himself, and let the next dozen or so behind him take the ladder without pausing, ripping the corpse free and bursting out onto the tower roof. More followed, including an officer; he could hear orders up there, and then a staccato volley.
"Quick," he said to the man with the charges.
The door opening right into the rooms above the arch of the gateway was barred. Raj thrust his pistol into the eyeslot and pulled the trigger; there was a scream, and somebody slammed an iron plate across it. The cloth bundles of gunpowder tumbled at his feet.
"Good man," Raj said "Now, pack them along the foot of the door, in between the stone sill and the door. Cut them with your knife and stick the matchcord—right." He raised his voice; more men were crowding up the stairs, some to take the ladder and others filling the space about him. "Everyone down the corridor, around the corner here. Now!"
The quick-witted trooper and he and another lieutenant—Wate Samzon, a Squadrone himself—played out the cord and plastered themselves to the wall just around from the door. The matchcord sputtered as it took the flame. Raj put his hand before his eyes. White noise, too loud for sound. He tensed to drive back around to the door—
—and strong arms seized him, body and legs and arms.
"Ni, ni," a deep rumbling voice said in his ear. "You are our lord, by steel and salt. Our blood for yours."
Lieutenant Samzon led the charge. A second later he was flung back, hands clapped to the bleeding ruin of his face, stumbled into the wall and fell flat. The men who followed him fired into the ruins of the door and thrust after the bullets, bayonets against swords, as their comrades reloaded and fired past their bodies close enough for the blasts to scorch their uniforms. When they forced through the shattered planks the men holding Raj released him and followed them, with only their broad backs to hold him behind them.
The only Brigaderos left in the big rectangular room were dead, but the troopers of the 2nd Cruisers were still looking terrified—of the winches and gear-trains that filled the chamber. A year ago, anything more complicated than a windmill had seemed like sorcery to them, and some had screamed with fear at their first sight of a steam engine. They'd gotten over that, but they had to do something with these machines, these complex toothed shapes of black iron and brass.
Raj knew fortifications and their ancillary equipment from years of study. "You, you, you," he said crisply. "Take that maul and knock those wedges loose. Pull those lockbars out—those long iron rods through the wheels with the loops on the end. The rest of your squad, grab that crank and get ready to put your backs into it. Those winches too."
The inner gates were not held by a bar across the leaves. Instead, thick iron posts ran down from this chamber through loops on their inner surfaces into deep sockets set in the stone beneath, covered with wooden plugs when the gates were open. Toothed gearwheels raised and lowered the massive posts, driving on notches cut into their sides. Metal clanked and groaned as the troopers heaved at the crank-handles. Winches running iron chains lifted the portcullis into a slot just in from the channels for the bars. The chain clacked over the drums, making a dull ringing as the great iron gridwork rose over the tunnel way.
"Ser!" A panting trooper with the 5th's shoulder flashes. "Colonel says they've got the outer gateway."
Which was controlled from the right-hand towers, as this inner one was from the left. Raj nodded curtly and stepped out of the chamber, calling up the ladder to the top of the tower:
"Two white rockets!"
General assault, all around the circuit of the walls. Back inside the lifting room, gunfire blasted, needles of pain in the ears in such a confined space. A duller explosion followed.
"Shot through the door," the sergeant of the platoon said, as Raj returned. "It started to open."
He nodded to the door at the outer side of the room; that would give to the middle section of the arch over the gate, a series of rooms above the roadway where the murder-holes gave onto the space below. It was wood and iron; there were lead splashes on the planks and frame where the soft hollowpoint bullets had struck—they had terrible wounding power but no penetration. The brass-tipped hardpoints had punched through, and then an explosion from the other side had buckled the whole portal.
"Thought they was goin' to chuck a handbomb through," the sergeant said. A few of his men were down, wounded by ricochets from their own weapons. "Must've gone off in their hands," he went on with satisfaction.
Raj nodded. "Get those prybars and open the door," he said. "Quickly, now."
They'd have to clear out the men there, or the troops coming through the tunnel would get a nasty surprise. Gerrin would be working his way in as the men under Raj's command worked out through the line of rooms over the tunnel.
And it was time he checked on Ludwig. Now that the focus of concentration was relaxing a little, he could hear a slamming firefight going on out in the plaza. No point to the whole thing if the Brigaderos broke through to the towers before his men got here.
"Prepare to receive cavalry!"
The company commander was down with a sucking chest wound, and Ludwig Bellamy was doing his job as well as trying to oversee the battle.
The Brigaderos cavalry were charging again, straight down the street. It was wide, by Lion City standards, which meant they were coming in six abreast and three ranks deep. The front rank of 2nd Cruisers knelt with their rifles braced against the cobbles and the points of their long bayonets at chest height. Two more ranks stood behind them with rifles levelled. It seemed a frail thing to oppose to the big men on tall dogs that raced toward them, the shouting and the long swords gleaming in the pale moonlight—but the pile in front of the position gave the lie to that: dead men and dogs lying across one another in a slithering heap.
Once Ludwig Bellamy had believed that nothing on foot could stand before brave men charging with steel in hand. Messer Raj had disabused him of that notion, him and what was left of the Squadron.
The charge slowed at the last instant. War-dogs were willing to face steel, but their instincts told them to crouch and leap, not impale themselves in a straight gallop.
"Fire!"
The sound crashed out, like one giant shot impossibly long and loud. The muzzle flashes lit the dim street with a light as bright as a red day for an instant. It lit the edges of the Brigaderos swords and the fangs of their dogs like light flickering from hell. A hundred heavy 11mm bullets drove into the leading rank of the charge. All of the first mounts were struck, most of them several times, and the muscular grace of the wardogs turned to flailing chaos in a fraction of an instant. Half-ton bodies cartwheeled into the barricade of flesh, or dove head-first into it if they had been brainshot, as several had. The sounds of impact were loud but muffled. Few of the men had been shot, but they parted from their tumbling animals, arcing to the pavement or disappearing under thousands of pounds of writhing flesh.
Their screams were lost in the sounds of the wounded dogs. One came over the bodies, its hind legs limp and with an empty saddle, dragging itself up to the soldiers. It was still snarling when two bayonets punched through its throat.
"Reload!"
The Brigaderos in rear ranks had managed to halt their dogs in time. They tried to come forward at a walk, levelling their revolvers. Men fell in the front rank of the Cruiser line as the pistols spat. Behind him a shout rose, and rockets soared from the gate towers.
"Fire!"
The Brigaderos turned and spurred their dogs, turning aside into alleys as soon as they could. Behind them was a solid block of dismounted dragoons, filling the roadway from side to side and coming on at the quickstep. The 2nd Cruiser lieutenants shouted:
"Prone, kneeling, standing ranks." The first line of men propped their rifles over dead Brigaderos and dead wardogs. "By platoon sections, volley fire, fire."
BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.
The enemy raised a shout and charged, rifles at the port, leaning forward as if against rain. Men from the rear ranks pushed forward to fill the gaps each volley blasted, and they came on. Not pausing to fire until they were close, not when they loaded so much more slowly.
"This is it, boys—they're going to run over us or die trying. Make it count, aim low. Fire!"
BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.
Bellamy skipped back to view the rest of the action. Holding the roadways into the plaza wasn't too much trouble, no—but it tied down too many of his men. Even with all five hundred, minus Company A, he wouldn't have enough to hold the whole perimeter of the plaza, and Strezman was sending in everything he had. More than three thousand men, coming through the houses and mansions around the square, firing from windows and rooftops. Ignoring everything else to retake the main gate before the assault force reached the wall.
Just what Messer Raj told me he'd do.
Any second now he'd have to pull back to prevent his men being overrun in detail. How long a battalion line would last in the open against five times its numbers the Spirit alone knew.
They'd last as long as they lived.
"Damnation to Darkness," Raj swore softly.
Cannon were going off all along the walls of Lion City, shaking the stone beneath his boots. But raggedly, and fewer than he would have thought. A lot of them could see the open gates, and more could see the glare of fire shining from the gate-tower windows, or hear the firing from within the walls.
The room with the winching material was full of smoke; powder-smoke, and from the barricade of burning furniture the holdouts were defending one room in. Wounded men were coming out of the door, and more troopers of the 2nd Cruisers forced their way toward the action. His eyes watered and he coughed as he leaned out the slit window, but the breath of air on his sweat-sodden skin was like a shock of cold. So was what he could see. The bulk of the 2nd Cruisers were withdrawing across the plaza toward him, backing three steps and volley-firing, backing again; the stuttering crash of their rifles carried even over the cannonade from the walls. Their line had bent back into a C-shape as Brigaderos swarmed after them, thrown into confusion by their passage through house and alley, but attacking relentlessly despite gruesome casualties.
The light was bad and his eyes were watering, but he could see the battalion flag of the 2nd Cruisers in the center of the bowing line. The enemy were pressing in, a reckless close-range exchange of slamming volleys that no troops could stand for long. The ex-Squadrones' rate of fire was much higher, but there were so many of the enemy. Their firepower was diffuse, but it was enormous in relation to the target, and they were swarming around the flanks. In minutes the 2nd would be forced to form square, and hundreds of enemy troops would pour past them to hold the gate. And the gatehouse was still not clear.
A solid pulse of noise bounced through the gate towers: men and dogs howling. Raj stiffened, gripping the stone sill and craning to see. He could just make out the opened inner gate. Red flashes came through it, and then a sudden sullen wash of fire—handbombs and burning pitch being poured into the roadway. Not as much as there would have been if the gate towers were fully manned, but too much, too much. Some of the first men through were reeling with wounds, and others rode dogs with burning fur that streaked off across the plaza or rolled whether their riders jumped free in time or not.
Yet the troops were in hand, not panicking. Those hale enough spilled through and then formed on either side of the gate in three-deep lines, then trotted-cantered-galloped into the plaza in response to trumpet calls. Split into two rectangles of men and dogs and bright swords, and charged for the flanks of the 2nd Cruisers, where the Brigaderos lapped around them like waves eroding sand at high tide. The enemy were unformed, focused on the single task of driving toward the gates. They had no chance of forming to receive a mounted charge; and when they saw the line of saber-points and snarling wardogs coming out of the darkness and firelight their will broke. Screaming, they turned and ran back for the shelter of the buildings, running across the hundreds of their dead.
"The 5th, by the Spirit," Raj said softly. His voice was hoarse from the smoke. Mostly from the smoke.
More men were riding through the gate-mouth, in pulses like water pouring through a hole in the hull of a sinking ship. They dismounted, the dogs peeling off as the handlers led them, the men fixing bayonets. Trumpet calls and shouted orders sent them forward at the double, with a long ripple down their line as the files closed around the places of absent men. An armored car followed with a mechanical pig-grunt from its engines that racketed back off the stone; a splatgun jutted from the bow, in place of the usual light cannon. The brass hubs of the tall wire-spoked wheels shone as it rattled off across the uneven pavement in the gap between two companies of the 5th Descott. Seconds later the rolling crash of a full battalion's platoon volley-firing echoed back from the plaza, and the savage braaaaaaap of the new weapon. The cannonade from the walls had stopped. A moment later an explosion somewhere deep in the gate towers punished his eardrums and made the stonework shudder under his feet. The flash of handbombs from the murder holes stopped; to either side of the towers, he could see pennants waving as the assault force gained the walls, and some were already sliding down ropes to the inner side. A column of men on foot broke out of the gate below him, and then a pair of guns rumbling along behind their dog-teams.
The firing was dying away, but lights were going on all across the town amid a bee-hum of civilian panic; down by the harbor, ships were casting loose from the docks to try their chances with the steam rams outside the breakwater—they must have been ready and waiting for the signs. With a roar like heavy surf collapsing a breakwater in a storm, the army of the Civil Government broke over the walls and flowed in to the helpless city behind.
"This's as far as it's safe," Gruder said.
All the other towers had surrendered quickly enough, when Civil Government troops came calling at the back entrance with field guns for doorknockers. Some of them were empty even before the soldiers arrived, their militia defenders tearing off their uniforms and running back towards their homes. All except those here on the northeast quadrant, where the men holding them had hauled down the Lion City banner of a rampant cat and left their own flag of white crescent on a green field flying defiantly.
"Hate to waste men on the rag-heads," Gruder said, scratching at a half-formed scab on his neck.
Raj's smile was bleak as the dawn still six hours away. "I don't think that will be necessary," he said quietly. "I've sent—ah."
Juluk rode up, his pipe between his teeth. His men ambled behind him, their dogs wuffing with interest at the smells on the night air.
"Hey, sojer-man, you do wheetigo trick, fly over walls, eh?"
"I didn't want to stay home scratching my fleas with you sluggards," Raj replied. Horace and the Skinner chief's dog eyed each other.
He pointed at the towers ahead. "Know who's there?" he said.
Juluk stretched and belched, knocking the dottle out of his pipe against one bare horn-calloused heel. "Wear-breechclout-on-heads," he replied.
The Skinners' home range touched on the Colony's northeast border. That was their name for the Arabs; they called the people of the Civil Government the sneaks, and the western barbarians long-hairs. Or they just used their generic term of contempt, farmer.
"They think they're heroes," Raj said. "I say that if any of them are alive when the sun comes up, your women will laugh you out of the camps when you go home. They'll offer you skirts and birthing-stools."
Juluk's giggle broke into a hoot. He turned to his followers: "L'gran wheetigo konai nus! Eel doni l'bun mut!"
The big devil knows us! He's given us the good word!
"And that," Raj said as the nomad mercenaries pounded by, screeching like powered saws in stone, "takes care of that."
"Further resistance is hopeless," Raj called up toward the second-story window. "Colonel Strezman, don't sacrifice brave men without need." Not least because the Civil Government can use them, he thought. Whatever happened here in the west, there would be war with the Colony again within two years.
His skin prickled. He was quiet sure High Colonel Strezman wouldn't order him shot down under a flag of truce. He wasn't at all sure that one of his men might not do it anyway.
The last of the Brigaderos regulars had holed up in several mansions not far from the plaza. Like most rich men's homes throughout the Midworld basin they were courtyard-centered dwellings with few openings out to the world; their lives were bent inward, away from noise, dust, thieves and tax-assessors. Their thick stone walls would turn rifle bullets, and the iron grills over the windows might make them forts in time of riot. How little they resembled real forts was shown by the smashed courtyard gate and the rubble beside it, where a single shell from the field-gun back down the road had landed. Most of the windows were dark, but there was enough moonlight for the riflemen crouching there to see the street quite well; also a building was burning not too far away.
A long silence followed. The street-door of the central house creaked open, and Strezman walked out surrounded by a knot of his senior officers.
"My congratulations on a brilliant ruse of war," he called, stopping ten meters away. "Your reputation proceeded you, Messer Whitehall, and now I see that it is justified."
He spoke loudly, a little more loudly than the distance called for. There was blood on the armor covering his right arm, and on the blade of his single-edged broadsword. He wore no helmet, and his long white hair fluttered around an eagle's face in the hot wind from the fire. Torchlight painted it red, despite his pallor.
"My congratulations, High Colonel, on a most skillful and resolute defense," Raj said sincerely.
Given the cards he was dealt, Strezman had played them about as well as he could—as well as anyone could without Center whispering in their ear.
"Will you surrender your remaining men?" Raj asked formally. "Your wounded will be cared for, and the troopers and junior officers given honorable terms of enlistment in the Civil Government forces on another front. Senior officers will be detained pending the conclusion of the war, but in a manner fitting to their rank and breeding."
Strezman swallowed, and spoke again. Still louder, as if for a larger audience.
"My orders from His Mightiness are to resist to the last man," he declaimed. "Therefore I must decline your gracious offer, Messer Whitehall, although no further military purpose is served by resistance. To honor the truce, I hereby warn you of my intention to attack."
Their eyes met. The hostages, Raj knew. The lives of these mens' families were forfeit, if they surrendered . . . or if they were known to have surrendered. Even though a stand to the death here accomplished nothing, not even much delay.
The officers with Strezman drew their swords and threw away the scabbards. They raised the blades and began to walk forward, heads up and eyes staring over the massed rifles facing them.
Raj chopped his hand down. Smoke covered the scene for an instant as a hundred rifles barked; when it cleared every man in the Brigaderos party was down, hit half a dozen times. The High Colonel was on his knees; blood pulsed through teeth clenched in a rictus of effort and he collapsed forward. The tip of his sword struck sparks as it left his hand and spun on the cobbles, a red and silver circle on the stones.
Raj flung up his hand to halt the fire. In a voice as loud as the Brigadero colonel's a moment before, he called:
"Let the bodies of High Colonel Strezman and his officers be returned to their households—" the servants who followed their masters to war "—to be delivered to their prince, in recognition of how their men—how all their men—died with them in obedience to General Forker's orders."
The vicious little sod, he added silently. He hoped the Brigade didn't depose Forker any time soon; the man was worth five battalions of cavalry to the Civil Government all by himself. If shame didn't keep him from harming the garrison's families, fear of his other commanders probably would, after Strezman's final gesture. Although if there was any justice in this Fallen world, the Brigade would chop him, and soon.
"Gerrin," he went on in a normal voice. The other man's torso was bound with bandages over ribs that might only be cracked, but he was still mobile.
"Get the rest of them out; there must be eight hundred or so. Down to the docks before daylight, suitable guards, and onto those two merchantmen Grammeck commandeered. Have someone reliable, Bartin say, handle it. The ships can pick up pilots and a deck officer apiece from the rams, they've come into the harbor. I want them sailing east by dawn, understood?"
No need for a decimation, Raj thought grimly. The 5th Descott had lost more than that, running the gauntlet of the murder-holes of the gatehouse and in the headlong charge that cleared the plaza for the men behind them.
He looked down once more from the podium around the fountain; only a day and a night since the town meeting gathered here . . . now the square was filled with soldiers. The 5th and the 2nd Cruisers still in neat ranks before him; many of the others mixed by the surge over the walls and the brief street-fighting that followed. Many missing, already off among the houses. The only firing came from the sector of wall still held by the Colonial merchants, the burbling of their repeater carbines and jezails as an undertone to the savage hammering of Skinner long rifles. He didn't think that would take long; he could see one of the towers from here, and squat figures made stick-tiny by distance capered and danced on its summit, firing their monstrous weapons into the air.
Every once and a while, a figure in Colonist robes would be launched off the parapet to flutter in a brief arc through the air. Some of the screams were audible this far away.
"Fellow soldiers," Raj said. "Well done." A cheer rippled across the plaza, tired but good-natured. "A donative of six months' pay will be issued." The next cheer had plenty of energy. "I won't keep you, lads; just remember we need this place standing tomorrow, not burnt to the ground. You've done your jobs, now the city—and all in it—is yours until an hour past dawn. All units dismissed!"
Behind them the gate-tower he'd stormed was fully involved, a pillar of flame within the round stone chimney of the building. With luck it wouldn't go beyond that . . .
The 5th Descott still stood in ranks before him, immobile as stone. Certain things had to be done by the forms. He nodded, and spoke again:
"Colonel Staenbridge."
"Sir."
"I have need of trustworthy men to guard key locations and apprehend certain persons tonight."
Thus missing the sack, one of the rare pleasures of a common soldiers' hard, meagre and usually boring life. Most of the troopers would think of it as a far worse punishment than being the lead element through the gate—which Kaltin Gruder had assigned the 5th on the unanimous insistence of officers and men.
"Are the 5th Descott Guards ready to undertake this duty?"
"Mi heneral, the 5th is always ready to do its duty." The sound that came from the ranks was not a cheer; more like a short crashing bark.
"Excellent, Colonel." He paused. "I see that the 5th's banner is absent. Please see that it is returned to its proper place immediately."
"Mi heneral!"
Mitchi sat and held up the hand-mirror and preened, throwing a hand behind her tousled mass of red hair and arching her back. The necklace of gold and emeralds glittered in the lamplight between her full pink-tipped breasts. The tent was a warm cave in the night, light strong panels of tanned and dyed titanosauroid gut on a framework of skeelwood and bronze. All the furniture was similar, including the bed she and Kaltin Gruder shared, expensive and tough and very portable.
"You're vain as a cat," Gruder said, running a hand up her back. He was lying with one arm beneath his head. She shivered slightly at the calloused, rock-hard touch. "Aren't you ever going to take the damned thing off?" There were red pressure-marks beneath it.
"I may be vain, but you stink of dog and gunpowder, Kaltin," she said tartly. "Mmmmm." He began kneading the base of her slender neck between thumb and forefinger.
"Well," he said reasonably, "I fought a murthering great assault action last night, did some hard looting, then worked my arse off all day keeping the city from burning down and getting the men back in hand. A busy man doesn't smell like a rose."
"Not too busy to find this," she said, turning and lying on his chest. She propped her chin on her elbows, and the jewels swung between them. "Or that little dog you found for Jaine."
"Or a good deal else," he agreed, chuckling. "Professional soldier's instincts. She'll need a riding dog on the march . . . How's she settling?"
"Jaine? Very well; she's got neat hands with my hair and clothes, she's clean and biddable. Sweet little thing, too, everyone likes her." She moved a leg over his hips and giggled. "You're not settled at all. I'd have thought you'd be worn out on the town matrons."
"I like my women smiling and running toward me, not screaming and running away," he said, putting his hands around her narrow waist and lifting her astride him. Her breath caught as she sank back on her heels and began to move.
"Besides," he went on, running his hands up and gripping her breasts, "as the wog saying goes: Stolen goods are never sold at a loss. Hard loot looked like a better way to spend the time, with fifteen thousand men inside the walls and running loose. Lineups."
Mitchi gave a complex shudder and threw back her head, stroking the hands that caressed her. "What's that sound?" she asked.
"That?" Gruder said.
A roar like angry surf was coming from Lion City. Louder than the town meeting had been, since all the gates were open. "That's a rarity, wench—some people getting what they deserve. Now shut up."
Syndic Placeedo Anarenz looked as if he was going to survive the wound the throwing-axe had put in his back, although the left arm might never be as strong again. Right now it was strapped to his chest by the Army priest-doctor's bandages. He stood as straight as that allowed, meeting Raj's eyes. The general's face might have been a Base Area idol rough-carved out of old wood, his eyes rimmed and red with fatigue.
"Your tame prince certainly predicted our fate accurately, heneralissimo supremo," Anarenz said bitterly.
Raj rubbed his chin; sword-callous rasped on blue-black stubble. "I don't think many infants were tossed on bayonets," he said mildly.
Or that many silver-haired elders got their brains beaten out, he thought. Not unless they were foolish enough to get between a soldier and something he fancied.
Lion City was orderly now, with infantry in guardia armbands on every corner seeing that their comrades went nowhere but to authorized taverns and knocking shops. Little remained from the previous night of rape, pillage and slaughter but the occasional gutted building, and not many of those. Guards had kept the major warehouses from damage, and the shipyards and other critical facilities; the rest of the town was missing most of its liquid wealth and small valuables, and several hundred young women smuggled out to the camp. They would probably be sold in a few days, at knock-down prices along with the households of the Colonial merchants and the magnates he'd put under proscription.
"Also," he went on, "I saw how your own guild reacted to my warning."
Placeedo Anarenz started slightly, and stared for a moment. "You," he breathed. "You were one of the guards?"
Raj nodded. "This—" he indicated the podium and the plaza "—is something of a reunion. Even the syndics are here."
They were standing under guard in front of the assembled citizens. It was a larger crowd than the town meeting, most of the adult population of Lion City. Much quieter as well, ringed with troops holding their bayoneted rifles as barricades; battered-looking men, many in remnants of militia uniform. Equally battered-looking women, in ripped and stained clothing hastily repaired or still gaping. Torches on poles lit their upturned faces, staring at him with dread.
Another building-block in the reputation of Raj Whitehall, he thought bitterly.
"I was a syndic," Anarez said. "Why aren't I down there with them?"
"Because you argued for opening the gates," Raj pointed out. "Also you're the next Mayor."
Anarenz grunted in shock, staggering until the two burly sailmakers at his side steadied him. Pain-sweat glistened on his forehead from the jostling that gave his wound.
"Why me?" he said. "I thought you'd have some bureaucrat ready . . . or one of our local arse-lickers who'd buy his way into your favor the way he did with the Brigade. De Roors is good at that."
Anarenz was a brave man. He still shivered slightly at Raj's smile.
"You actually care about the welfare of the citizens," the general said. "That makes you more predictable; men like de Roors don't stay bought. I'm going to need stability here. I'll be leaving plenty of the Administrative Service to oversee you, don't worry. Messer Historiomo to begin with, but he'll be taking over all occupied territory, and I've advised him to consult you."
Raj turned to face the wounded man. "There's a saying, Goodman—Messer Alcalle—Anarenz, back in the east. That the Governor's Chair rests on four pillars of support: a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of priests, and a creeping army of informers. It's a settled way of doing things, and it functions . . . but here I need the active support of the people I'm liberating from the Brigade."
He nodded to the huddle of Syndics below the podium. "After this, I don't think the magnates of other cities will try to sit things out."
Aloud, he went on: "Citizens of Lion City!"
A signal, and the soldiers ripped the rich clothing from the former oligarchs of the town, leaving a group of potbellied or scrawny older men edging away from the bright levelled menace of the bayonets, and a few others trying hard to look brave—a difficult task, naked and helpless. There were a hundred or so of them, all the adult males of the ruling families.
"Here are the men," Raj went on, pointing, "who are the true authors of your misfortunes. Here are the men who refused to open the gates peacefully and exposed your city to storm and sack."
An animal noise rose from the crowd. Oligarchs were not popular anywhere, and right now the commons of Lion City needed a target for their fear and fury, a target that wasn't armed. De Roors turned and knelt toward the podium, bawling a plea for mercy that was lost in the gathering mob-snarl. A rock hit the back of his head and he slumped forward. The old Syndic who'd had his guard try to assassinate Anarenz spat at the mob, lashing out with his fists as work-hardened hands cuffed him into the thick of it. A knot of women closed around him, pried-up cobblestones flailing in two-handed grips. The others disappeared in a surge of bodies and stamping feet, dying and pulping and spreading as greasy stains on the plaza pavement.
"Spirit of Man," Anarenz shouted, pushing forward. "Stop this, you butcher! Hang them if you want to, that'll terrify the syndics of the other cities."
"No," Raj replied.
His voice cut through the noise much better than the sailmaker's did, and the mob were recoiling now—from themselves, as much as from what remained of the city's former rulers.
"No, doing it this way is better. The magnates elsewhere will know I've a much more terrible weapon to use against them than my army." He nodded to the crowd. "And they will know there's no going back; if the Brigade wins, it'll make an example of Lion City."
Anarenz looked at him with an expression more suitable for a man who'd stumbled across a pack of carnosauroids devouring an infant.
"For the Spirit's sake, is there anything you won't do to win your bloody war?" he shouted. "Anything?"
Raj's head turned like a cannon moving with a hand on its aiming-wheel. "No, Messer Alcalle," he said. "There's nothing I won't do to unite civilization on Bellevue, and end things like this forever. For the Spirit's sake."
Suzette sank down beside Raj and leaned her head against his shoulder. "You did what you had to do, my love," she said softly.
His hands knotted on the table, and the empty bottle of slyowtz rolled away. The spray of plumb-blossom on the label curled about a stylized H; it was the Hillchapel proprietary brand. How long was it since he'd been home?
"Only what you had to do."
Raj's arms groped blindly for his wife. She drew his head down to rest on her bosom, rocking it in her arms.
lady whitehall is correct, Center said. observe—
I know! Raj cut in. Lion City rising behind him, other cities closing their gates. Costing him men, costing him time, neither of which he had to spare.
"I know," he said aloud.
"Shhhh, my love." The commandeered room was quiet, only the light hissing of the lantern breaking the silence. "You're with me now. No need to be the General. Peace, my love. Peace."
For a moment the hard brilliance of another image gleamed before Raj: the Old Residence seen in the near distance, its wall towers and walls silent but threatening simply for their enormous extent.
The vision faded, yes, said Center. peace, for now.