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Chapter Fifteen

The sky was wide as all creation. The steppe stretched endlessly under it, rolling to the horizon. The jagged teeth of mountains lifted it up and thrust it into the leer of the Cat's Eye.

Shapes moved on it, ant-small. A hawk, hanging in the thin air, would have known the gait of steppe ponies, some jogging at tether's end and two carrying the weight of riders, with burdened pack-muskylopes trotting behind. They were much too few for a caravan, much too many for an accident, and they were squabbling at a volume that took no notice of the emptiness around them.

"And I say you should have turned east at that wash, and stopped heading north!"

She was stocky, sturdy, and swathed to the eyes, but there was no mistaking the female musk in that voice, or the righteousness of its tone.

He was probably the same age as she, but he sounded younger, with a squeak in his outrage. "And I say you're the one who made us overshoot the track, out past that cliff lion's lair!"

She hauled her pony to a halt. "There hasn't been a cliff lion anywhere near here for a T-year at least, or we'd have seen the signs."

"Hasn't been a tribesman near here, either, or we'd have the whole Horde down on us by now, the way you're yelling."

"I'm yelling! And who's been yattering at me like a firewalker in heat since—"

Her teeth clicked together. His hand was up in a gesture no sane steppe-rover, ignored. His face was set, listening. She strained to hear.

Wind. Grass. A hawk's cry.

He was a throwback: Frystaat genes, Frystaat senses, almost as keen as a Sauron's. She was plain ordinary Bandari, with maybe a trace of the blood of the Founder's people, and a cull-baby or two from five or six generations back. She opened her mouth to call him on his blatant ruse to shut her up.

He slipped off his pony and dropped the reins. The pony, ground-tied, did not lower its head to graze. Its ears were pricked into the wind. Its nostrils flared. It was nomad-trained—it would not whicker.

"Karl—" she said.

And shut up. She left her own pony beside its brother and pulled out her bow. No need to waste time stringing it, though she checked it over quickly. It was a Bandari bare, carried strung, since it relied on the pulley action of the wheels at the tip of either stave. Karl had the pistol they'd liberated from clan stores: they took turns with it, day on and day off. He eased back the hammers, checked the priming in the pans, and counted the half-dozen paper cartridges in the pouch at his belt.

Without speaking they ripped open the lacings on their war bags and hauled out their armor, helping each other on with it: cuirasses made from overlapping plates of three-ply muskylope hide boiled in wax and backed with drillbit gut, snaps and buckles and edging of brass and steel. Small round bucklers edged and rimmed with iron. Helmets like rounded buckets with cutouts for their faces. Armguards . . . The ritual was familiar from the training that began in childhood—and alien. This time it was real.

Shulamit was fast, but Karl was ahead of her, armed and out by the time she got the helmet properly on. She scowled at his broad back with its line of brass-gold braid. "You're just going to run into whatever it is? Just like that? Gevalt!"

She had more to say, none of it complimentary and some of it creative, but she said it at the trot. The ponies would stay where they were. No time to hobble them, none to run a line, and Karl getting farther away with every stride he took, blast his retrograde hide. Just like him to leave her with the whole thing, packs, ponies, and all, and hare off after wild drillbits.

She cursed more luridly yet and slanted back to the ponies. She found a hollow that would more or less conceal them, and offer them enough grass to distract them. She got them hobbled. She hobbled the muskylopes from left foreleg to right rear, which was the only way to hold them. She left packs and saddles on, and wouldn't old Barak tan her hide for that if he knew. Then she took the trail over the stony ridge that Karl had chosen, and she had not even begun to exhaust her inventory of his faults, failures, foolishnesses and shortcomings.

 

Steppe only looked like a solid surface. Like the ocean Shulamit had never seen but often heard of, it was full of strange deeps and hollows; in places it dropped away altogether, falling sheer into the cleft of a valley—especially here in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, northern wall of the Shangri-La lowlands.

This valley was shallower than some she'd seen. It was long and thin and curved like a Mongol's scimitar, much deeper in the middle than at either end, with a steep wall on one side and a gentler slope on the other. Fortunately or unfortunately, she and Karl were on the gentle side. They were up above the valley, but the cliff was higher than they were, and the Three alone knew what was up there, looking down.

Karl lay flat in the grass behind a cluster of rocks. She dropped down as soon as she saw him, and crawled rapidly to his side.

"Shulamit!" he hissed. "Idiot! What about the horses?"

"Safe," she shot back, much more quietly than he, and conspicuous about it. She squirmed closer, peering between the two biggest boulders.

It looked like a caravan at first glance. A scout ran well in the lead, on foot, but with a handful of ponies and—dogs? Black-and-white animals circling the horses and running ahead. The body of the caravan was about a klick behind, concealed from the scout by the curve of the valley, and moving a touch more slowly.

Except that if this was a caravan, it had no pack animals, a bare handful of remounts, and was armed to the teeth.

One of the riders faltered. His horse went down.

Another reached out a hand and pulled him up behind. No one stopped to deal with the horse.

"Pursuit," said Karl. "And desperate, if they're killing horses."

It seemed leisurely from up here. The pursuers were barely trotting—probably had no strength left for more. The pursued seemed to be in better case. He was moving at a trot with his horses, and not as if it bothered him, or as if he had any intention of occupying the saddle one of them wore. He did not look back. Shulamit wondered for a wild moment if he even knew that he was being hunted by nomads on spent ponies.

Shulamit glanced at Karl. She knew that look of his. Tilting at windmills, Judge Chaya called it.

"That's a woman," he said. "They're chasing a woman."

There was no telling from the looks. Shulamit supposed he did it by smell. She looked harder at the running figure. What would drive a nomad woman away from her yurt, chase her out on the open steppe, get her running the way—hell, the way Karl could when he had a good tail wind?

"She's wounded," he said. "But she's left a mark or two on the hunters, too. Look! There goes another horse. They must want her bad. I wonder why—"

He would talk till the sky fell. Shulamit pulled an arrow from the clip in the quiver attached to the side of her bow. The arrow-rest in the centerline had a horn spring to hold it in place. With fingers steadier than her heart or her lungs, which were pumping fit to burst, she nocked the arrow.

She'd practiced with the bow all her life. She'd hunted for years. She had never shot at another human being.

The bottom of the valley was rough with pebbles and boulders and outwash-scree from the rare flash floods of spring, side-gullies weaving back in the rock and volcanic shale beneath their feet. If the woman made a stand, the hunters would outflank her: elementary tactics. Shulamit and Karl could force them back into the open with an ambush in the rough ground at the side of the valley.

Shulamit tapped two fingers forward. Karl nodded, made a circling motion. He would go farther down valley.

He thrust his own bow over his shoulder into the carrying loop of the quiver, tucked the pistol into its holster but kept the strings untied, and turned and squirmed backward, hanging by his fingertips from the edge of the draw. He dropped, falling with heart-stopping swiftness, landed in a crouch five meters below, and trotted off. Shulamit turned and made her own more cautious way down to the flats.

Karl thought he was a hero. Hero, myn totchkis, she thought. He wants to rescue a woman. Her mother had warned her about that. Men stopped thinking at their bar mitzvah, or when their testicles descended, whichever came first. Some woke up again at thirty or so, but others never got their brains back at all.

 

From the boulder she chose as her hiding place, she could not see the nomads, though she could see the woman they hunted, halted almost in front of her, as if waiting. She heard them, or thought she did: hoofs echoing in the cleft.

First one, then more of them appeared round the curve of the valley. Their quarry made no effort to raise weapon, although she had a saber at her side and a rifle slung behind her. She simply waited as the exhausted horses brought the hunters to within a few hundred meters.

The nomads all had plainsmen's bows, reinforced with horn and sinew. A few had muskets. An arrow or two flew at long range, one so close that Shulamit thought it had hit. But the woman was still standing, and no arrow in her.

Yet another horse went down. Then another, and another. The riders behind piled up against the ones ahead, just before they too went down. The horses shrieked as they writhed on the ground. The riders made no sound.

Caltrops, Shulamit thought with a slight wince. The riders behind were not stopping even for that. They spread into a line and kicked their horses forward, weapons glinting in the dull light of the Cat's Eye.

Now, at last, the quarry moved. She unslung her rifle with speed that made Shulamit blink, brought it to her shoulder. Shots rang out. No space between them. No telltale puff of whitish smoke.

Sauron assault rifle. Nothing else in the world made those whipshot cracks, or fired so fast. Every shot found its target, felling attackers or cutting the horses' feet from under them. Screams rose now, human screams to join the more terrible sound of horses in agony.

The rearguard of the pursuers swerved aside, trying for the tumbled rock and gully where Shulamit and Karl waited—trying to work around the terrible rifle, find cover, take the woman in the flank and rear.

Shulamit stepped out from behind the boulder and drew. The cord stretched to her ear, scritching over the bone thumb-ring. Estimate range: 120 meters. Raise the sighting-ring. Lay the pin on the target. Loose.

The string snapped the sleeve of her coat. The arrow soared out. It flew straight and keen—took a rider in the shoulder. He dropped. Another hauled him back.

Then Karl appeared on top of a hill. He hefted a boulder as big as Oom Yigal's armchair, hurled it a jaw-dropping distance to bounce and splinter among the riders. One of them knelt and fired back with a musket—waste of time with a smoothbore, but Shulamit's stomach seemed to leap into her mouth. Karl snatched the pistol out of its holster and aimed. The bam-bam of the two barrels was far and faint. The bullets missed their target by a klick and ricocheted off a rock. One of the ponies shied from the shrapnel, but the others barely noticed. He thrust the useless thing into his belt and scrambled for his bow.

Shulamit came to herself with a start. Half a dozen of the, well, enemy, she supposed, were working their way toward her. She nocked, aimed, loosed. The arrowhead gouged into the soft volcanic rock of a boulder, just as a nomad dove behind it.

Again. Again. Snap of bowstring, whistle of shafts. A few return shots, arching high, no danger—these weren't bare, they didn't have the range. Bless you, Kosti Gimbutas for inventing the bare, she thought in some small corner of her mind.

The nomads turned back for one last, desperate, straight-on charge at their quarry. Shulamit nocked and shot, nocked and shot, till her quiver was empty. She couldn't stop herself. Under the heat of battle she was cold and sick. She hated them, these nameless riders, these strangers who for no sane reason had become her enemies.

Something tugged at her sleeve. She whipped her head around to snap at Karl for distracting her. He was far out of reach, bow at his feet, sighting with an empty pistol. His lips moved; she couldn't hear him through the rifle's roar. She looked down with numb surprise at the tear in her coat. Bullet. Arrows were falling, but thinly now. The riders were nearly all down. Three only were still mounted and shooting. As Shulamit stared, one of them thrust rifle into saddle-holster and flung up empty hands. The other two lowered their bows. Their ponies stumbled to a halt.

The Sauron rifle held steady, but it did not fire. For an endless, terrible moment the impasse held. Deliberately, defiantly, the bowmen slung their bows behind them. The rifle was silent. The riders pulled their ponies about and kicked them into a lurching trot.

Very slowly the woman lowered the rifle. There was no sound in the valley but the ponies' retreat and a thin, high keening—whether animal or human, Shulamit did not know, or want to. With blurring swiftness the rifle whipped about. It spat.

The keening stopped. The silence was appalling.

Shulamit's throat was raw. The world kept going in and out of focus. She would be sick, maybe. Eventually.

Karl was gone. She still had the box of shells for the pistol. She had never thought to give it to him.

He loomed in front of her, doubled. The new half of him was taller than he was by half a head, and half as wide. Shulamit looked into a face as white as shock and eyes the color of glacier ice. "Where in the world," Shulamit asked, "did you get a Sauron rifle?"

"Won it." Low voice, almost sexless, but indefinably female. Like the face. No beauty, with those long bones and that cruel arc of a nose, but it did not matter in the least. The accent was vaguely Edenite, and Edenite was what Shulamit thought, reckoning up height, pallor and mad cold gaze. What else she might have thought, she was not admitting to.

"I suppose you think you saved my life," the woman said.

Karl grinned like an idiot. "Of course not," he said. "But we did provide enough of a diversion to slow them down. They're done for, now."

"Three of them live," the woman said. "They'll go back to the tribe and raise the whole of it. There was blood debt. Now there is full feud."

Cold fish, Shulamit thought. It bothered her, that was clear, but not enough to crack the ice in her eyes.

"I'll take care of them," Karl said. "They won't make it back. You'll be safe."

"And what would you do," the woman inquired, "if you caught them? Invite them to tea?"

"Kill them!" he cried.

Shulamit's glance crossed the woman's. There was a gleam under the frost. "Surely," the woman said. She shrugged painfully: wounded, Shulamit remembered, but not anywhere that was obvious. "Let them go. I'll be long gone by the time they come back." She turned. She was half a dozen strides away before either of the others realized what she was doing. Karl scrambled after her. Shulamit, muttering, jogged in his wake.

 

The universe was not logical. Sigrid had come to that conclusion Haven-years since. Humans were not logical, either, unless they were Cyborg; and then that cold logic, imposed on the irrational, betrayed them as often as not.

She was Cyborg. She was, by definition, logical: an organic tactical computer, and a perfect fighting machine. She was also, unfortunately, human.

The few of Katlinsfolk who had followed her so for were dead or fled. The blood-debt that had sent them after her would swell now into feud. Which was nothing at all new for a Soldier of the Citadel against the nomads of Haven's steppe.

Her trap would have taken them in any case. Her fault for delaying it so long out of nothing more or less than weakness—hoping that they would give up, accept the loss of their shaman and their horses, and go back to their hidden valley. Illogical, and inefficient. And plain bloody stupid. They would know what she was doing and where she went. Betraying them to the Soldiers whose notice they had escaped so long. Carrying their death, less swift but far more sure than the rifle she carried at her back.

Katlinsfolk had made her one of them. She would have been chieftain of a new and powerful clan, with all their knowledge at her disposal. In return she had given them theft, murder, betrayal. She was Soldier first and always. She could defy the Breedmaster, but not the Race. It was bred in the bone.

Her pursuers' deaths she had expected. She had planned them. These children who fancied that they had assisted her were the universe's contribution. The girl was sturdy enough for tribute stock, but nothing to marvel at. The boy was another matter altogether.

She knew the type. No Breedmaster's pupil could have missed it: Frystaat, and nearly pure. The computer in her brain clicked over the liabilities. Heavy-G-adapted, cardiac problems inevitable, death by fifty T-years probability verging on certainty. High metabolism, with tendency toward inefficiency—he would need to eat often and in quantity, and he needed every scrap of linen, wool, leather and metal he was wrapped in, to prevent hypothermia. But the assets . . .

With frequent need for fuel and susceptibility to cold came exceptional resistance to heat and thirst. Muscular strength well within Soldier norms. Stamina likewise. Night-sight excellent by cattle standards though insufficient for a Soldier. Other senses on the high end of unaugmented norm. He might not know why he followed her so closely, but his nose was wiser than he.

He was also, and incidentally, highly decorative to look at. Dark skin set off brass-bright hair and green eyes. By Soldier standards he was excessively thick-boned and muscle-heavy, although for a Frystaater he was a slender adolescent. He was as agile as a boy of a third his bulk, even dragging reluctantly behind as she dealt with the dead. She found herself making an effort to conceal her strength as she dug the grave with knife and hands and pitched the bodies in. Wise, logic told her. Neither of her self-appointed rescuers had named her Soldier. Let them reckon her less.

The girl stood apart and glowered. The boy hovered while Sigrid searched the bodies for anything of use. Clearly he was above such things. But when she began to dig, he labored beside her with set face and swallowed bile. None of the dead was his kill. The girl had, maybe, wounded one, and that one had escaped. Still, he acted as if he had seen his first honest bloodshed. When he leaned over the pit's edge and gagged up his breakfast, Sigrid said nothing, merely handed him a packet He took it in a hand that tried not to shake. "What . . . ?"

His Americ, she had noticed already, was heavily accented. As the last fallen Katlinsdaughter dropped gracelessly into the grave, data, clicking together, yielded a name.

Eden Valley.

And what were Edenites doing on the high steppe?

And what was an Edenite doing showing nearly pure Frystaat traits?

Her glance flicked to the lumpish figure of the girl. Sullen eyes—blue, and that was surprising, but at this distance they seemed almost black. Rat's nest of rough black hair under the bucket helmet. Leather armor faced and studded with metal. Two knives, saber, unusual and highly efficient bow still strung and clenched in her fist. She was a picture from a Soldier's manual, marked and labeled. Bandari.

Sigrid nearly, perilously, laughed aloud. Good genes and Soldier instincts be thanked that she had feigned less strength than she had. Even at that, the boy was eyeing her in admiration and the girl in distaste, because she was so evidently capable of doing her own digging and hauling.

The boy's cheeks were ruddy mahogany. He looked away from her, into the open grave. And, bless his innocence, discovered only now what should have been obvious from the first. "These fighters—they're all women!"

"So they are," Sigrid said. Ah well, she thought. Her pheromones would overpower anything the Katlinsfolk could emit, and those who were whole enough for their sex to be discerned were well wrapped in leather and furs. She had not tried to lay them tidily—they were dead, they could not care—but some impulse had made her cast them in so their faces were turned to the sky. Tough weathered faces most of them, even the young ones, but none had ever known a beard.

He scrubbed his free hand against his trousers, again and again. The other clutched Sigrid's packet of field rations in a deathgrip. His throat worked. "Women. We killed women."

"I killed them," Sigrid said, flat and cold. "They hunted me. They would have taken my life had I not taken theirs."

"But," he said. "How—"

"That is a tale for a camp and a fire and a place safe from marauding enemies. Not for an open grave in a valley vulnerable to ambush."

He had discipline. He pulled himself together. They closed the grave in silence, and piled it with stones against predators. Sigrid topped it with a bow that had escaped intact. Ribbons fluttered from it, painfully bright in that bleak place.

For the ponies she could do little except slit the throats of the wounded and strip them of usable gear. The Bandari boy had no qualms about robbing animals. He went about it with a bandit's thoroughness and a honey dragon's glee, turning up treasures she would not have thought worth noticing.

Some of them he laid in front of her, with a look in his eyes that made her think of the he-dog that had attached itself to her. This cattle-child was all but wagging his tail, exclaiming over this trinket and that rarity. He kept more than a little for himself, she noticed, with an air that reckoned it only proper.

"This isn't a tribe I ever saw before," he said.

Sigrid shrugged. No one had, who would admit to it—until a drunken Mongol boasted to a Soldier in a tavern in Nûrnen town. Memory files yielded his name. Temujin. He had thought her a man. She had taken too much pleasure in enlightening him. Good stock there, for cattle, but never as good as this boy who bent over a pony's carcass, rifling its saddlebags.

"You should know," Sigrid said after some consideration, "that these were not my only pursuit."

He straightened with quickness that was startling, as if his bulk were an illusion.

"We were a procession," she said. "These warriors tracked me far, and crossed out of any lands they had kin-right or clan-right to. They had to dispose of a band that rode against them. That band's kin . . ."

Behind Sigrid, breath hissed. The girl spat something in what must have been Bandarit: not a tongue Sigrid had seen any profit in learning. The boy answered in Americ. "So we move. Here, Shulamit. Bundle this up. We'll lend her one of our remounts, and make for—"

The girl—Shulamit—snapped back in Americ that had no air of courtesy to a stranger. "Shai lo kablos addad—She had horses. What happened to them?"

"Safe," Sigrid said, "and by now, hidden." Best you go, she was going to say, and sever yourself from me. This is my war.

But the boy was as quick of tongue as of body. "Good! We'll round them all up and ride. What tribe is it that's after you? We have connections with some up this way. If we can find one of their encampments, we'll be safe for a while at least. And if they have feud with the ones who are following you . . ."

His genes, his beautiful genes, cast Sigrid's logic down and trampled on it. He would eat like a starving cliff lion, and freeze if the temperature dropped. And his companion was cattle. It did not matter. The imperative was as strong as that which forced her back to the Citadel.

One sleeptime, two, three—no more than it took to take what she wanted, and then she would let him go. The tribesmen were a quarter cycle behind, maybe more. She had set a trap for them already, one that failed through Katlinsfolk's interference, but it had lamed horses and wounded men. Then Katlinsfolk had had to fight them, and had lost none of their own, but taken one life that Sigrid was sure of. She had left them fighting and fled with all the speed her herd could manage. Katlinsfolk were hardy and their hate was hot. They had driven themselves to the utmost to catch her, and so they died.

She took a moment to savor the irony—Soldier allied with Bandari against the Soldier's enemies. She would not be quick to share it with these children.

They went in search of their herds. Hers was five horses strong, fine stock and valuable enough to look at, but it took more than eyes to see how truly precious that mare and her daughters were. The mare could foal on the high steppe outside the safety of a valley—and she had passed that trait to her offspring. It was the rarest of mutations: one that not only benefited its possessor but bred true. Sigrid had paid in blood for that prize. She would bring it to the Citadel, or die trying.

The Bandari mounts were larger than most steppe ponies, to accommodate Karl's mass, but otherwise unexceptional. They were all together, hers and theirs, with the dogs standing guard, looking highly pleased with themselves. The she-dog, as always, kept her distance. The he-dog eyed the strangers with narrow mistrust but grinned at Sigrid, circling from her to the horses and back again. The muskylopes stood in their usual resentful clump, blowing complaint through hairy nostrils and occasionally taking a half-hearted lurch against their hobbles.

"Yes," she said, "you did well." She had stopped caring that it was inefficient to talk to a dog. The beast understood tone if not words. And, like a young Soldier, he needed praise on occasion, to keep up his morale.

He leaped a clear meter in the air and somersaulted, which was his whoop of exuberance, and came down lashing at the nose of a pony that ventured to stray.

"Wonderful," said the boy, who still lacked a name.

She would remedy that. "Sigrid," she said.

He blinked, caught off guard.

"My name," she said, "is Sigrid."

"Oh," he said. Then: "Karl. Karl bar Yigal"—and in a rush of pride: "fan Reenan."

Her head bent a fraction. Her eyes, controlled, forbore to widen. No wonder, then, his quality. He had it direct from the source: Piet van Reenan himself. Soldiers hated the man who had killed so many of them and defied them to the end, but they accorded him full respect. He had been a worthy enemy.

"And this," said Karl, "is Shulamit bat Miriam fan Gimbutas."

Shulamit did not look at all pleased to be introduced. Sigrid favored her with a flat stare and a flatter, "Honored."

The girl muttered something. "Gayamske shiks nefkeh." It was in Bandarit; it did not sound friendly. Sigrid ignored it.

 

"I don't care what it looks like!" gritted Shulamit. "I don't like that bitch and I don't want to travel with her."

They were speaking Bandarit while the stranger—Sigrid—did something with her horses. They were out of armor, which was chillier but more comfortable. Camp was made in a spot a few klicks east of the scimitar-shaped valley, and the trail to it concealed as best they knew how. Sigrid was good at trailcraft. Karl had not expected her to be anything else, but watching her work was a pleasure. She never wasted a move or a word, and she made no mistakes.

Behind them, toward the site of the one-sided battle, a chorus of whooping cries rose. Too low-pitched for stobor: a pride of tamerlanes had found the bodies of the horses. Perhaps the other bodies as well. Like their smaller cousins, tamerlanes had almost prehensile paws, adapted for climbing. They worked well on shifting medium-sized objects such as the rocks in a cairn.

Karl flinched a bit at the sound, then looked at Shulamit and sighed. "You don't have to like her to admit that there's safety in numbers. We've seen how she can fight."

"Yes," snapped Shulamit, "and we've seen what kind of trouble she'll draw down on us, too. She's got half the tribes raised against her—and I'll bet a rifle to a grass-stem that she's not telling us everything she's done to stir them up."

"Then she needs us all the more, to help her get away from them."

Shulamit spat just to windward of his foot. "Where do you keep your brains, fan Reenan? In your pants?"

He was not going to get angry, no matter how much his fists ached with clenching. "Look," he said with all the patience he could muster. "Did you know where we were before we found her?"

"Yes!" she shot back. "We were north of Eden Valley, and heading eastward along the Atlas foothills."

"But where were we?" he pressed. She set her jaw and said nothing. "We were lost, Shulamit. We took a wrong turning somewhere—all right, maybe it was at that wash—and we were going exactly nowhere. We need her to help us get back on the track."

"And do we tell her why?" Shulamit demanded. Trust her not to thank him for admitting a mistake.

As for telling Sigrid . . . "I think we ought to," Karl said. "If she doesn't already know that the whole steppe is rising, she'd better learn it soon. She might want to join us. She's good in a fight. And," he said, clinching it, "she's got a Sauron assault rifle."

Shulamit was born stubborn. "So she has. How did she get it? Maybe she's one of them herself."

Karl struggled for patience. "Saurons don't breed females. You know that. That's why they need tribute maidens. She's tribe-bred, I'll bet money on it. There were a couple just like her in the tribe that was chasing her."

Shulamit set her jaw and looked more mulish than ever.

"I'm travelling with her," Karl said. "And I'm telling her where I'm going. You can do what you like."

That hit the mark. For a moment, he thought she might cry. That was so shocking, he almost gave way.

Then she said nastily, "All right. Let's be a caravan. We'll live together and die together, with a mob of happy nomads dancing on our bones."

He should have felt more triumphant than he did. Fighting with Shulamit was normal—a day wasn't a day without a good squabble. But this made him uneasy. It had new edges, edges that cut.

Fights always ended with one of them grabbing for the other, and then a good long tumble in the grass or whatever was handy. This time neither made the move. Shulamit turned on her heel and stalked off to poke at the campfire. Karl watched for a while. Then he angled toward the horses.

Sigrid was checking feet. Steppe ponies seldom went shod, and their feet were tough enough to handle anything. But Karl could see that these had come far over tough country.

"I have some blanks," he said, "if you want to put on shoes." Sigrid did not start or turn. She reminded him somehow of Chaya. She had the same unflappability, the same air of containment that could seem, in most lights, like coldness. "I may do that," she said, "in a day or two. They're good for a while longer."

He ran his hand along the back of the oldest mare. "Good stock," he said.

Sigrid dearly did not do small talk. Having finished with feet she turned to stomachs, measuring out a handful of grain for each. Her dogs watched with interest. She rummaged in a saddlebag for strips of dried meat. The male snapped his out of the air. The female let hers fall to the ground precisely between her forepaws, and sniffed it carefully before gnawing on it.

Karl's own stomach growled. He'd eaten the ration packet when he remembered he had it, but that barely whetted his appetite. Sigrid's glance was, he thought, sardonic. His cheeks burned. Chaya would have said something about growing boys. Sigrid, if she thought it, kept her mouth shut.

She had a predator's stride, long and smooth. It was easy to mistake her for a man, with her body flattened to anonymity in nomad leather and furs, and that long blade-boned face. But there was nothing male about her. When she squatted by her packs and took her hat off and ran fingers through hacked-short, flax-fair hair, his innards wound up in a knot.

Food helped a little: bread baked in the ashes of their fire, dried fruit, cured meat. Sigrid had a healthy appetite. Karl found himself outclassed, for once. Shulamit, whose stocky frame needed next to nothing to keep it going, watched them with bemusement verging on scorn. When she had eaten she spread her blanket conspicuously on the other side of the fire, and turned her back on it and them.

Karl felt obligated to apologize for her. "She's not usually like this," he said. "We got lost, you see, and that put her out of temper. And she never killed anybody before."

"Nor did she this time," said Sigrid.

Karl didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. "I didn't either, did I? We weren't much help."

"No," Sigrid said.

"You never pretty things up, do you?"

"Should I?"

Karl looked at her. She added a cake of dung to the fire. No frills to her. Nothing but the clean cold self.

"We did what we could," he said. He wanted it to sound dignified. It came out with another whining didn't we? on the end.

"Why?"

Her question rocked him back on his tailbone. "Why? But why not? You were all alone, and there were a whole tribe of them."

"Two dozen," she said, "on half-dead horses."

"Twenty-four against one. We couldn't ride away and leave you to it."

"I could be your worst enemy," she said.

Something in her tone made him shiver. He shook his head hard. "You're not our enemy. Our enemy is in the Citadel."

Did she go stiff?

No. A spark had escaped from the fire and landed in a clump of dry grass. She beat it out with her hat.

She settled back on her heels. Her hat was in her hands; she did not put it back on. Without it she looked younger. With a small, not at all unpleasant shock, Karl thought that she might not be much older than he was.

She had given him his opening. "We're going there," he said. "To the Citadel."

One brow went up. "Have the Bandari consented to pay tribute at last?"

Karl was on his feet. It was nothing he thought to do; his muscles did it for him. "Don't—by the Three, don't—"

She was not in the least intimidated by his bulk. She looked up calmly, ice-eyes, stone-face, with a hint, the barest hint, of a smile. "Why else would any of your race want to go to the Citadel?"

"To conquer it!"

She laughed. It sounded like water under ice. "A mighty army of two?"

"Hundreds," he said. "Thousands strong."

She looked around. Cat's Eye, setting, cast long shadows. Wind chittered through the dried grass. "Do I see them?" she asked.

"Oh, stop it!" he said as if she had been Shulamit; then blushed. But he was too angry to stay embarrassed. "Of course you can't see them! They're mustering klicks away from here. Shulamit and I were heading up around the beaten tracks, in case anybody came after us—figuring to cut back west and catch the army before it marches."

"Tell me about this army," said Sigrid.

He did not like the way she said that.

She must have sensed it. "I, too," she said, "have enemies."

Heat ran through him. "Who on Haven doesn't, while the Saurons keep us under the yoke?" He was tired of hulking over her. He squatted back down and leaned forward. "That's what the army is about. You, up with your tribe—did you ever hear of Juchi?"

Sigrid's breath hissed. "Juchi? Juchi the Accursed?"

"The very one—the nomad khan who took Angband. He's dead. Saurons killed him. Cut him to pieces and hung his head on a spike."

"He killed a Cyborg," said Sigrid as if to herself. "Him and his daughter between them. Oh, that Breedmaster was a fool, who set him out for the stobor."

"That's what everyone says," Karl said with a shiver. "Me, I'm glad the old bastard did it. Juchi the Sauron would have been a monster to end all monsters. Juchi the nomad was the best chance we've had for freedom since Dol Guldur landed. He couldn't finish what he started, he had too much tsouris on him for that. But when the Saurons killed him, they finished themselves off."

"How?" Sigrid asked. Her voice was so cold it burned. "He's dead. What can he do?"

"Be a symbol," Karl shot back. "Cry for vengeance from his spike in Nûrnen. His daughter by his mother—she's still alive. She's found allies. They're the Seven. The Seven against Nûrnen."

"Who?"

"Aisha," said Karl, "bat Badri"—giving her the Bandari matronymic. "Chaya who was Judge in the Pale. Her son Barak, the one they call Young Lightning. Sannie his lover. Karl bar Edgar fan Haller—I'm his namesake. And two Turks from the tribes: Kemal and Ihsan, princes of Tarik's clan and grand-nephews of Dede Korkut. They all owe the Citadel a blood-debt a thousand times over. They're raising Haven against the Saurons."

His heart was beating hard. He wanted to reach out, grab hold, as if his hands could transmit to her what he felt But that, he knew in his gut, would not be wise. "It's war," he said. "War for the world. They tried to stop us at home. Told us we were too young, shut us up like children when we argued. Juchi wasn't any older than we are when he killed his father. Aisha when she followed her father/brother into the wilderness—she wasn't even that old. We're grown, we're weapons-trained, we've ridden caravans. We decided to go in spite of everybody. We took what we needed and got out. If anybody's after us, he'll have to find us with the army."

"And where is that?"

"Coming at the Citadel," Karl said, "from the west."

Informative, Sigrid thought. Half of the continent was west of the Citadel.

"But that's not all we've got. There's supposed to be a diversion in the Shangri-La Valley, too. A big one—as big as the whole valley. Riot, insurrection, civil war. They'll have to drain the Citadel to take care of that. And we'll take the Citadel."

Sigrid sat on her heels in the dying Eyelight. Her face was blank.

All at once she got up. Karl snatched, but she was too quick. He half-rose to follow, sank down again. Shulamit's eyes were on him across the fading fire.

"You told her," she said. "Nobody knows about the second half. We wouldn't either, if we hadn't listened in the right places. If she goes running to the Citadel—"

"She'll have to ride through the army to get there," Karl said with more confidence than he felt. "And her horses can't take much more of this pace. It's a lot of news, that's all. She needs to chew it over."

 

Sigrid heard them. They spoke Americ, whether automatically out of the rest of the conversation or so that Sigrid could hear, she did not know. She would put little past Shulamit. Cattle, that one, and a bitch, but clever. Clever cattle were dangerous.

She dismissed Shulamit abruptly and completely. The story Karl had told, the names he had named—had the TAC foreseen? Did the Citadel know what was coming against it? Everything Intelligence learned went into the TAC, but even its power to extrapolate was not unlimited.

Juchi was a Breedmaster's mistake. So—and this was not common knowledge east of the Pale—was his twin, Chaya. If Juchi had ever known of his sister, Sigrid had not heard. But the Citadel knew. Breedmaster Titus had run the data once when Sigrid was there to see it, data culled from intelligence reports and collated by the TAC. Presumably the Bandari knew their precious Judge was a Sauron—but then, they were curiously flexible for a people who made so much of their Law. Perhaps they considered acculturation more important than genetics.

Seven against Nûrnen. Sigrid had read in the archives. Citadel-bound, denied many of the liberties granted her male counterparts, she had had time to assimilate odd quantities of data. So these cattle reckoned themselves great heroes, and gathered to pull down the Citadel.

It was possible—remote, but possible—that they might succeed. If the Citadel fell for the diversion and sent the bulk of its troops south and west, it would be vulnerable to attack from the steppe; in theory, even a scratch garrison should be able to hold the walls, but life did not always run as it should in theory.

Sigrid was in no great awe of Battlemaster Carcharoth. He was capable, but he was Cyborg, and she who was of his breed knew its chief shortcoming: data not reckoned germane were immediately forgotten.

Cattle uprisings had grown common since the fall of Angband. None had been of significant size. If this one was as large as the boy believed, the Battlemaster would conclude it was a Priority One emergency, resolution required immediately and with all due force. He would not expect it to be a diversion. And he would not expect an attack on the Citadel. Angband had fallen, but Angband was a mere Base. The Citadel was the heart of Sauron on Haven. Its primacy made it invulnerable.

Weak logic, worse strategy. Sigrid called it arrogance. She had enough of it herself, but Katlinsfolk had taught her to recognize the danger in it. Even before she came to them she had been an anomaly. She did not erase data when she excluded it. She subfiled it, cross-referenced for retrieval. She suspected that that might always have been a trait of female Cyborgs, those few who had ever been permitted to survive to adulthood. Full bicamerality was a characteristic of the female mind.

She knew her duty. That was to reach the Citadel with all speed, and alert the Battlemaster to the doubled danger. But her horses, with their priceless genetic inheritance, could not keep the pace she would have to set. She could divert them to a Base, if any was manned in the crisis, and if anyone there had sufficient expertise in either genetics or horsemanship.

Or . . .

She was Cyborg. Cyborgs made decisions independently, without reference to Command. She looked enough like certain cattle—Edenites, Katlinsfolk, smaller enclaves of Norameric and other Caucasoid types—to pass. And when cattle thought Soldier, they did not think woman. Soldiers were male, so desperate for females that they took tribute in women's flesh and bred their sons on cattle. Soldier women rarely went outside Base walls to correct the impression.

What she had done in Katlinsvale, she could do among the Seven. Join them. Fight for them. Betray them to the Citadel.

Luck had provided her with a contact: these Bandari children, the one so trustful, the other so wisely suspicious. Messages could be sent to the Citadel. Sigrid would infiltrate the army. They would trust a woman, especially a woman vouched for by one of their own.

She glanced back toward the fire. Karl was on the other side of it, stooping over the hump of blankets that was Shulamit. After a moment the blankets flurried; he vanished underneath.

Her ears were quite keen enough to hear what they did there. She felt her lips stretch in a thin, humorless smile. Young flesh, hot blood. Karl was not thinking entirely, maybe, of his squat little Bandari. Shulamit was binding him in the best way she knew how. She should know a young male's fidelity was only as strong as his female's pheromones. And Sigrid could control hers.

She would take one more gift back to the Citadel when she had saved it. It would be a son, she thought, and he would live to be a Soldier. Barring lethal recessives—but the Citadel held technology for that.

She went to her blanket in as much content as a near-renegade Cyborg could know. Sleep would heal the hurts of the long pursuit. And when she woke, she had her duty, clearer than it had been since she left Nûrnen. If she dreamed—if the dreams were nightmares—then so be it. One paid a price for what one was. That, like illogic, was universal law.

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Framed