Carcharoth prowled the outer reaches of the Citadel like a cliff lion ranging its territory in search of prey. The heavy flame thrower pack on his back, the dangling nozzle and trigger mechanism protruding forward over his shoulder, should have impeded his grace, reduced his walk to something heavy and lumpish. But no. He wore the clumsy weapon as if it were as much a part of him as a cliff lion's paws, a land gator's jaws.
Dagor had trouble keeping up with the Battlemaster. Unless he spoke to Carcharoth, the Cyborg paid no attention to him. Carcharoth's eyes didn't simply see—they scanned. If a sentry on the outer walls stood so much as a centimeter out of place, if a watcher's gaze wavered even a degree or two from its appointed direction, the Battlemaster gave him the rough edge of his tongue. Ever since the day when the Bandari began hammering the Citadel's outposts with their spigot mortars, Carcharoth had become as dangerous to be around as mercury fulminate. Pillars of flame-lit smoke on the southern horizon where Nûrnen lay did nothing to improve his temper.
Even Dagor hesitated now to address him. At length, though, he asked, "The jihad can't really harm us in here, can it?"
The outer walls of the fortress were thirty meters high, and the thickness was immeasurable—the Citadel was really one gigantic building, granite blocks, mass concrete and sections chiseled from the living rock of the Atlas.
Juchi's son looked down at the steep rocky slopes below and shuddered. He'd seen battle and death—who did not, on Haven? But there were wagon cartloads of bodies being dragged away from where the horde labored to throw protective ramparts around the Citadel, and more tumbled across the steep rising ground toward the fortress proper. Faint with distance even to his enhanced ears, he could hear the screams as more were driven forward to the work—Nûrnenites, from their dress, with guns to their rear and ahead as well. The line of earthworks was more than just a wall; trenches zigzagged out from it, and minor redoubts for the giant . . . spigot mortars, was the phrase Carcharoth had used . . . which hammered back at the outworks gun-bunkers.
As he watched, a huge mortar-bomb landed just short of a Gatling position among the outworks. When the smoke and dust cleared, the Gatlings opened up again; the heavy concrete and fieldstone fortifications were proof against anything but a direct hit. The protective bulwarks around the mortar jerked and stirred as hundreds of men grasped them from the inside and levered them forward; some fell as the 15mm bullets chewed at the surfaces, or ricocheted beneath. More herded forward through the trenches to take their place, and still more levered at the base of the heavy weapon. It was a battle of ants against tamerlanes, and there were more ants than the tamerlanes had paws to swat.
The plainsfolk never had a single will to drive them, he thought And never the skill to direct their hands. But they pay a heavy price already, and the Citadel itself is not touched.
"And the best of the folk are in the Inner Keep," he went on aloud. That towered up behind him, at the center of the semicircular Citadel. It was a spike hundreds of meters high, dwarfed only by the sheer vertical cliff it rested on.
The Battlemasters eyes fixed on him for a moment—and when they fixed, they held still.Dagor felt impaled by the force behind them. "Aye, we should be proof against mortar bombs here. The physical concerns me less than other things. There's treachery in the wind, lad, treachery." His nostrils flared, as if to scent it.
Dagor stared at him. Carcharoth had always been of remorselessly literal mind. To hear him speak in metaphor was as uncharacteristic, and therefore frightening, as Hammer-of-God Jackson losing his religion might have been. Dagor asked, "Has the Threat Analysis Computer warned you of the risk?"
Like any plainsman, he thought of the TAC as an oracle: Chaya, say, in electronic disguise.
"The Threat Analysis Computer?" Carcharoth threw back his head. The laughter that ripped from his throat reminded Dagor of the cry of a stobor scenting prey. "Titus sits at the TAC these days, not I; were it but a little less machine and he a little more, the two of them might be wed. He seeks to learn from it what I already know: a great burning is on the way." He stroked the nozzle of the flame thrower as if it were the tender flesh between a woman's thighs.
"A burning? Here?" Dagor looked at stone and concrete and metal all around. Of the whole of Haven, nowhere seemed less flammable.
But Carcharoth nodded. "Aye, a great burning. The cattle of the steppes shall pass through the fire and all will be burnt—holocaust, in the ancient tongue. I shall see to it myself. Aye, they build their worthless fortified circles out there, but I, Carcharoth, I shall show myself the lord of their rings."
Because he'd been brought up away from people of his blood, Dagor lacked the skills drilled into them from their infancy: he still started in surprise, for instance, and his face gave away far more than a proper Soldier's would have. Till the crisis hit the Citadel, he'd been training with boys a third his age, learning to master the abilities printed on his genes. Most of the boys were better than he. He was done resenting that, and had buckled down to learn as much as he could. Before he came here, few had thought him worth training in anything.
Now the discipline he'd acquired paid for itself. Before he started learning how to put his body under conscious control, he surely would have drawn back a step from Carcharoth. The Battlemaster didn't sound like any other Soldier he had known. He seemed more like a shaman who'd gone out into the steppe alone, eaten a double handful of mind-blinder mushrooms, and then come back to his clan with his head fuller of visions than sense.
Not the TAC, Dagor realized. It's Carcharoth who reminds me of Chaya. Like his sister/aunt, Carcharoth had come to the place where he was seeing more with his mind's eye than with the two that looked out on the real world. Such folk had been touched by the finger of Allah; they saw visions, and sometimes the vision became truth. Exposing fear before that fiery, searching gaze would have been fatal.
And yet, merely by accepting Dagor for who he was rather than the cursed result of a sin-filled union, Carcharoth had done more to make him feel at peace with himself than anyone since the day his mother Badri slew herself and Juchi plunged the brooches again and again into his own eyes. How much did he owe the Battlemaster for that gift?
Enough to make him say, as gently as he could, "Should you not carry on the war as one fought with everything here within these walls against the armies from the steppe? Surely not even you, sir, could hope to defeat them by yourself?"
"I do. I shall." Carcharoth sounded eerily sure of himself. "I am the instrument of the Race, the goad to subdue the cattle of this freezing, stinking world. Your will is free, lad—you may aid me if you wish. Stand against me and you too shall be consumed." He stroked the nozzle of the flame thrower again.
Under the veneer of impassivity he'd labored to acquire, Dagor knew cold terror. Carcharoth seemed more like a father to him than any man he'd known since Juchi, blind and moaning, stumbled out of Tallinn Valley. No more denying it, though: the Battlemaster was not just behaving erratically any more. He had, without question, gone mad.
The impossible had begun to happen. Nûrnen had fallen.
If Sigrid had been any other Cyborg, she would have gone catatonic or run rogue. Cyborgs did not calculate the impossible. Irrelevant data, data that did not connect with anything useful, were discarded, erased, forgotten. And Nûrnen overrun by hordes of howling cattle, the Citadel manned by women and children, the strength of the Soldiery lured half around the world on a wild-drillbit chase, was so profoundly unlikely that it counted as fiction.
So was her position. She was not bound—that would have taken stronger ropes than anything the cattle had—and she was under no restraint, but there was an assault rifle trained on her and a pair of cold Bandari eyes behind it, and a grin that flickered whenever Sigrid happened to glance that way.
Sigrid had brought it on herself. She had called it biding her time. The truth of it was, she had been vegetating. She had shut down her logical faculties when they persisted in running scenarios of Nûrnen taken and the Citadel besieged. Or worse—the Citadel taken from behind, by certain ways that she knew. She did what she used to scorn in males of her breed: she excluded data that did not suit her comfort.
Some things were important, some were not. The week before had been important. Two days outside of Nûrnen, when the army camped to rest, before the assault on the Gate, her eldest mare had shown herself ready to foal. Sigrid scouted a place that would do, a slight rise and a cairn of stones uninhabited by inimical wildlife. It was defensible, just, from the army of predators and scavengers that followed the human horde. The army was breaking camp as she separated her little herd from it. She did not worry about being seen. She was known as a horsetrader, not a fighter, and she was rather publicly pregnant. No one would care that she had finally decided to go her own way before things got too interesting to get out of.
The mare knew her business. Sigrid had to do little but keep an eye out for prowling predators.
The foal was born quickly, as if it were eager to have a look at its cold new world. It was wrapped in a silvery caul and followed immediately by the mass of the afterbirth; before Sigrid could move to help, it had kicked its way free and wobbled to its feet, diving blindly for its mother's teat.
Young horses were quick to find their feet, but Sigrid had never seen one as quick as this. It attacked the teat like a hungry tamerlane. Its mother investigated it calmly and began to lick it dry. It was a bay like its sisters, with a thin blaze and a white forefoot.
Sigrid moved in carefully. The mare's ears went back, but she offered no further threat. Sigrid ran hands over the foal's forequarters, taking care not to touch the rump and trigger the kick reflex. It was a colt, well made, no perceptible defects. In a day or two, she would be able to judge more conclusively, but she thought that it would be taller than its sisters, and more finely built.
The thin air of the steppe gave it no trouble, nor did its mother begin at once to hemorrhage. Again, time would tell. But Sigrid was nine parts certain that the mutation had bred true. If the colt could pass it to his get, then she had a priceless resource: a herd of horses that could breed on the open steppe.
This was joy, this thing that made her heart beat so uncommonly hard. She was grinning like a Bandari. She suppressed a completely preposterous urge to whoop.
"So that's your secret," said a deceptively quiet voice. She looked up from the colt into the face of Barak bar Heber. There were other faces behind him, including one that struck her as inevitable. More to the point, there were rifles, trained on her. Joy congealed into cold stillness.
"They can all foal on the steppe?" Barak asked. His rifle was slung behind him. Sigrid's was in Bandari hands. She had laid it with her pack when the mare began to foal—stupidity beyond belief, and worth every moment of misery she suffered for it.
She could still fight her way out. It would not be easy. She would almost certainly take a bullet, probably more than one.
That danger would have been negligible. Except.
She straightened slowly. Her hands were on her belly. Advertising it. Protecting it.
Barak's brows quirked. He understood. She shifted her feet infinitesimally, drew an unobtrusive breath.
A rifle-barrel jabbed her in the gut. "Go ahead, Sauron," said Shulamit. The rifle was aimed, by design or by accident, at the baby's head. Her finger twitched on the trigger.
Sigrid calculated options at panic speed.
"Put that thing down," said Barak. He was smiling his easy Bandari smile, but his voice had the crack of command. Shulamit snarled and obeyed.
Sigrid stood still. If she moved, she would rip Shulamit's head off. And that would get her killed, and the baby with her.
"Yes," she answered Barak's question of a minute or an age ago. "My mares can foal outside of valleys."
"And you," he said. "Can you . . . ?"
"My system prefers a higher air pressure than can be found here," said Sigrid.
He noticed what she was not saying. "Such as that in certain sealed rooms of the Citadel?" he asked.
"You know of such?" she inquired.
Shulamit spat. "Stop your lollygagging and spill it. You're a Sauron. I know a man who names you Cyborg Sigrid of the Citadel and calls you the Breedmaster's daughter. What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Is she incapable of speaking in anything but ancient cliches?" Sigrid asked Barak.
Barak aimed a look at Shulamit. It did not cow her, but it shut her up. "I hadn't heard that there were Cyborg women. Even Sauron women are reckoned by some to be a myth."
"Or a legend," said Sigrid. "Like your mother."
He stiffened. The smile wiped itself from his face. He looked every inch the Soldier for a moment, before he remembered again to be Bandari. "How do you know—" He stopped himself before Sigrid could. "Of course. You'd know the bloodlines, wouldn't you, if you were the Breedmaster's daughter."
"I know yours," she said. She lowered her voice almost to subvocal. Maybe to protect his secret until a better moment presented itself. Maybe simply to thwart the Bandari bitch. "I can tell you your father's name."
"My father's name was Heber," said Barak, but in the same register—below the range of human hearing.
"I postulate that he was a Soldier named Gorbag. He disappeared at the proper time, and you carry certain of his gene-markers. His was a good bloodline. Not a great one, not command quality. But better than some."
For a moment she knew, hoped, that he would lunge. But he had better control than that. His eyes were flat. He had learned to hate her, then.
She shook her head with sadness only part feigned. Aloud, so that the cattle could hear, she said, "You have me, I grant you that. Do you plan to assign a platoon to guard me? Can you spare that many?"
"I could put you in chains," he said.
She shrugged. "It would take me a while, but I would get out of them."
"Even if those chains are forged of honor and not of steel?" She looked at him. He did not seem to have gone mad. "Give me your word," he said, "that you will do nothing to hinder our assault on the Citadel."
"I may be the Breedmaster's Cyborg daughter," said Sigrid, "but I can hardly prevent three hundred thousand fighters from doing whatever they have a mind to do."
"Three hundred and fifty, actually," Barak said. "With the pass open we've almost made up the nomad losses. But I had in mind something a little more subtle. Such as sneaking into the Citadel and alerting your kin."
So had she. She should have expected him to know it. "Did you? And I thought you might be plotting something even more subtle—such as using me to open the gate."
"So I had," he said affably. "I don't suppose you're that easily corruptible?"
She was silent.
He smiled wryly. "And if that isn't acceptable, would you consider giving us a fighting chance? Such as putting us onto a back way?"
Still, silence.
He seemed not to have expected anything else. "Of course not," he answered for her. "I could threaten your baby, I suppose, but believe it or not, we Bandari stop short of open atrocity. We'll do it the hard way. Unless . . . ?"
"No," said Sigrid.
"Give me your word, then. No treachery for one T-month."
By then they'll have the Citadel or starve. And what is a promise to cattle? But he didn't think of himself that way. She smiled, remembering words once written by the Lady Althene, who would no more have kept a dangerous promise to cattle than she would explain her actions to the family cat. He blinked, dazzled, which made her smile the wider. "And no chains?"
"No chains," said Barak. "But you'll be watched. You'll pardon the insult, but . . . necessity . . ."
"Necessity," she said without irony. "Yes. One T-month."
"We'll have to take your weapons, I'm afraid. And your horses. We'll take good care of them."
"What do I keep?" she asked.
"Your life, Sauron," said Shulamit.
Barak shot her another look. "Your life, yes, and your belongings that are not weapons. Your dog, too. I don't think he'd let us separate you."
"You ask a great deal," said Sigrid, "and leave me very little."
He shrugged and spread his hands in an eloquent Bandari gesture. "Can you blame us? If you're a spy, you've seen enough to condemn you a hundred times over. If you're not, it's no more than common sense to keep you out of it while we win our war."
"If you win it," said Sigrid.
"We will," he said, then paused. "Well?"
She did not need to take as much time as she did. She had processed all the data. Some of it was actively painful. But even if the worst scenario played itself out, she would be alive. She had full knowledge of this army, its leaders and its strategies, thanks to her perambulations through every camp and along the march. She was of little value to the Citadel now. Later . . .
"I give you my word," she said.
"A Sauron's word," sneered Shulamit.
"A Soldier's word," said Sigrid. "Take it or leave it."
"I take it," said Barak. They clasped hands on it: the clasp that tests strength. His eyes widened. Her own smiled. He looked a little less cocksure when she let go, but he still had the upper hand, and he knew it. She granted him that. For the moment, she accepted it.
And Nûrnen fell. Sigrid was kept out of the battle, but no one tried to stop her once the city was taken; not even the countless women who keened along the way, beside the tumbled nomad dead.
They have lost more in one cycle than we have killed in ten lifetimes, she estimated clinically as she walked down the road through the pass. From the sounds to her right, they were losing more still—but the earthworks were already over man-height, good enough protection from the battered outerworks. In Nûrnen, the initial enthusiasm of the sack had faded under the combined influence of exhaustion, satiation, and hard Bandari discipline. There were still too many revelers to deal with all at once. They had set fire to the Soldiers' Quarter—no wonder they were bitter, judging from the degree of damage. It looked as if heavy weapons, doubtless another Bandari surprise, had been brought up to shatter the buildings when each became a fortress. Now citizens who looked too much like Soldiers were as likely to be raped and killed as to be rounded up and questioned.
The Bandari were busy; she saw wagon after wagon packed tight and leaving on the long trail back to the Pale. They were generous to their barbarian allies with coined silver and other goods. The wagons were full of things much more valuable than money—machine parts, alloys, books. What they could not steal, they destroyed with methodical efficiency, unless it was likely to be immediately useful. What was useful, they prepared for destruction.
Shulamit was watching Sigrid. She had not drawn that duty as often as no doubt she wanted, having had plenty to do in the battle and the aftermath, but she had managed an hour here and there, spelling the rota of guard dogs whom Barak had set on watch.
Her rifle's safety was off. Sigrid could have taken her a dozen times over; cattle concentration was weak compared to a Cyborg's, and the little bitch was starting to show the effects of too many hours without sleep. But Sigrid had given her word. Oaths sworn to cattle were worthless.
The city, as a city, meant little to Sigrid. As the chief tribute center of Sauron domination on Haven, it meant much, and its sack twisted her stomach into a cold knot of rage.
The savages were raping it. Orders were out that there was to be no wanton vandalism, but drunken Mongols cared nothing for orders. She saw one draped in a lace shawl with a copper cookpot on his head, swilling something out of a jug and bawling a Turkic love lament. His brother, or one like enough to him to be his close kin, was raping a girl to the beat of the song. Shulamit looked as if she would have loved to bash his head in; but if she did, she would lose sight of Sigrid.
Sigrid did the honors for her with a single swift kick. The man's head burst like a melon. His brother stopped singing to gape down at him. Sigrid drove his nose into his skull.
It was small, that pleasure, but it sufficed. Sigrid stepped over the body of the would-be singer and went on. Although it was truenight, the sky was afire. Manmade fire. Sigrid's eyes suffered almost as much from it as from the full light of day. Still, she could not keep from looking at it. Her feet and her enhanced senses negotiated the maze of streets, choosing a path that avoided the worst of the sack and the scattered fires. The best loot was taken long since. The men who wandered in and out of broken doors brandished lesser treasures: a woman's gown, a hat with a ridiculous length of plume, a child's hobbyhorse. One villainous-looking Turk, wearing enough beads and gauds and bones of his own to mark him a chieftain, ran along a rooftree balancing an enormous, still ticking clock. "Is this honorable?" he howled to the street, the roof, the blazing sky. "What honor is there in this? I will have honorable loot!"
He fell from the roof still howling, landed on his feet like a cat, and ran off without abatement of his litany. And also, Sigrid noticed, without losing his grip on the clock.
She paused where he had landed. The few looters in the street had gone off after their chieftain. There were people barricaded in the houses, but they were not about to investigate the sudden quiet. The air stank of smoke, sweat, gunpowder, blood.
This street ran almost straight for a distance. Beyond it, beyond roofs and walls and several klicks of no-man's-land, loomed the black rock that was the Citadel. No lights shone there. There would be guards on the walls—old men or boys, or women. Sigrid would have been there if she had not defied the Breedmaster's orders and gone questing like a man, searching for something honorable to mark her passage into adulthood.
Her lip curled. Honorable loot, honorable accomplishment. Was there any difference between them?
The treasure that she had found was taken, held in Bandari custody. The treasure that she carried in her body was bound with her to this captivity.
She glanced at her watchbitch. Shulamit stared back, near blind in that light, but not near enough.
The baby drummed a tattoo on the dome of her belly. She quieted him with a hand. Soon, she promised him. Soon.
"Got a gayam who claims to have something valuable for you, Hammer old chaver," Tameetha said.
It was still dark, the beginning of dimday. Hammer-of-God blinked eyes that felt as if they were lubricated with ground glass and glared at the Bandari woman.
She looked as if she had found a chance to rest, and like the tamerlane who swallowed the prize sheep besides. He had known and worked with her for years, without any liking—Tameetha had her reasons for spending most of her time outside the Pale—but with a good deal of respect. He decided that she was unlikely to interrupt this nightmare without serious reason, and she had secured the target he assigned her. He wished all the others had; there were only so many Bandari troops to hand, and few others who could be trusted to guard a grain storehouse or a waterworks while the nomads made merchants dance on coals until they told where the gold was buried. In Nûrnen, there was likely to be a good deal of gold . . . .
"Who is it?" he growled, pouring himself another tea. Jehovah and His Son and the Spirit of Harmony, but he could use a drink. Impossible; he'd been up too long. The last thing he needed was to relax, if he did they wouldn't wake him the next cycle even if they used one of Sapper's Ariksas. Most of Saurontown was still holding out, and the outworks of the Citadel were being a bloody—in every sense of the word—impediment to the huge labor teams working on the circumvallation. It'll keep our logistical problems down, he thought bluntly. "And it had better be important."
They were talking in the meeting room of what had been Nûrnen's mayoral palace, quite tasty, even by the high standards of the Pale. Lots of carved wood—always a luxury on this dry planet—a marble fireplace, paneled walls with paintings, good rugs—and all intact. Hammer had come straight here to establish his headquarters, and the mayor had been quite cooperative to protect his family from the savages rampaging outside. Quite cooperative, it hadn't been necessary to make him dance on coals to produce spectacular results. Bind not the mouths of the oxen who tread out the grain, Hammer quoted to himself, then forced his aching mind back to business.
"Name of Strong Sven," she said, and laughed at his start.
"Yes, you'd better keep Aisha from hearing the name—the one who tried to slap Juchi around and got a broken arm for his pains. Found him hiding in a cellar at the machine shop, of all places, after I woke up. Had, hmm, a witness to confirm some of his story. He claims to know something but won't tell anyone but a high-up."
Hammer nodded; it was his only hope for a reward, or for pardon or whatever he wanted to ask for. It would have to be spectacular information to save Strong Sven's life, in this army.
"Bring him in," he said, levering himself erect with both hands on the table. Sitting was almost as bad as walking, on his leg, and it let him know with a blaze of pain that made him grind his teeth.
Strong Sven was a big man, as tall as the commander and much thicker through the shoulders, with only the faint beginnings of a beer gut. There was no arrogance in him now as he bowed low between two of Tameetha's troopers, Shulamit and that sklem Karl; a local girl of some sort was hovering in the background, wrapped in a Pale-made military cloak. She stepped quickly over to Tameetha's side, staring at Sven with what Hammer judged to be a mixture of fear and spite.
People are complicated, he sighed. "Talk, Sauron's arselicker," he said ominously. "Every man should confess his sins before he dies."
He had judged correctly; this was a man fear would always rule. "Lord—please, lord, I can tell you what you need to know. I've always hated the Soldi—the Saurons, they've oppressed us without mercy, please, let me tell you what I know!"
Hammer nodded, rubbing his jaw to hide a grimace of distaste.
The whistling, nasal dialect of Americ the Nurnmenites spoke was unpleasantly reminiscent of the Sauron accent, but that was not the reason for his displeasure. Got to use a pitchfork to shovel cowshit, he thought.
"Everyone knows the Jews are God's Chosen People, I know you'll give me justice—" Sven babbled on, bowing toward the banner of the Pale that stood against the wall: six-pointed star over the leaping springbok, flanked by burning swords.
"Then it's a pity you're talking to a Christian, isn't it?" the commander replied, kicking the man as much to shut off the sound as to inflict pain. Strong Sven whimpered and closed up around his bruised stomach.
"Judge Chaya bat Dvora leads us, and Aisha bat Badri, and the rest of the Seven—but I'm not going to break their sleep for some Sauron bumboy's prattle. I'm General Jackson, and they call me the Hammer-of-God, dog. Now speak!"
Sven straightened up. "For your ear only, General." Unwillingly, Hammer stooped. Then his face went rigid at the hurried whisper, and he rose, wheeling.
"Put this man under close arrest. Nobody is to talk to him until I return. You—summon the Judge and the Seven. Now, man, now!"