When Hammer-of-God Jackson woke, he expected to be face to face with his God.
Instead he gazed on slaughter through a pinkish haze. Vastly disappointed and in great pain he brought a hand up to rub at his eyes. He felt damp stickiness, and held his hand in front of his face. It was smeared with half-dry blood, beginning to go black.
"Wounded again." How many times was this? He couldn't recall.
His hand went to the side of his head. Cautiously, it traced the furrow that plowed a valley through his scalp just above his left ear. A couple of centimeters to the right and he would have been explaining to God exactly what needed doing, and why, and how.
He sat up. Concussion: just moving left him sick and weak. But he was used to making his body do what he wanted rather than what it wanted. He spat on his fingers and rubbed at his eyes, getting the blood out.
Vision cleared, at least somewhat, he looked down at himself. His tunic was soaked with blood, and so, certainly, was his face, though he couldn't see that. He had pulled away from a large puddle of gore that lay all around him. Some must have flowed from him, but by no means all. He sat up amidst a welter of dead men—Bandari, Turks, Mongols, Afghan fedaykin. They had joined together against the Citadel; now they were joined together in death.
Gunshots echoed from down a corridor: a short burst, a few single scattered rounds, another burst. It was not the sort of firing that betokened fierce combat—it sounded more like . . . hunting.
Yet another burst of rifle fire, and then, after it, a shout of triumph. It was a woman's voice, or possibly a child's. Sannie might have cried out like that, but Sannie was dead. Nearly all of the defenders had been women and children. They'd been hideously ready when the raiding party burst out; the attack had failed, had to have failed. The triumphant voice was that of an enemy.
After the wordless shout came words, in unmistakable Sauron-accented Americ: "Is that the last of them?"
"Not quite, but damn near," another woman answered. "A few of them are still holed up behind the armor doors. We don't know which ones have hostages and which ones don't, so we'll take those slow and easy. Aside from the hostages, they can't do us any harm, not where they are." Cold-blooded practicality: if she wasn't a veteran officer, she could have been.
"They've done enough to us, the bad-genes swine," the first woman answered. "These whole two top floors trashed to Hell and gone, fires down lower—I wouldn't have thought the cattle were capable of mischief on this scale."
"None of us would," the second woman, the underofficertype, said. "They've done us a favor, you know? We've gotten lazy these past years, just letting things drift along, being content as long as nothing went too bad. That needs setting to rights, you know, or how is the Race better than cattle, anyhow? Blasted worlds, this might be just the wake-up call we need."
Hammer-of-God wanted to pound his head against the floor. The jihad had failed. The Seven had intended this raid to take the queen—well, the queens—out of a nest of stingers. If this woman's sentiment was widely shared, all they'd managed to do was rile the stingers up. Christ suffering on the cross, bored, drifting Saurons were more than Haven could handle. What would come from aroused, wrathful Saurons?
He didn't want to think about that. Sleep tempted him, but he knew that if he slept he'd never get up again. If the Saurons had been through here once finishing off dead commandos, his head wound had fooled them into thinking he was already done for. But he couldn't count on that now that those around him had cooled. Those bastards could see heat—and if they saw he wasn't cold enough, they'd make sure he got that way.
The first woman said, "This is a black eye for the Council, that's certain."
"Bugger the Council," her companion answered. "That's just what these stinking cattle have done to us, too. We need somebody who knows how to do things, not just sit around and wait until things get done to us. I just hope there's somebody like that left to the Race who's a plausible candidate for high command. If there isn't—" She didn't go on, but the first woman could fill in the blank without trouble. So could Hammer-of-God.
He got to his feet. There lay his assault rifle, where he'd dropped it when he was hit. He picked it up. His blood painted the magazine and the barrel. What to do next? He wished his wits weren't so cloudy. He couldn't play dead. He might hole up here, pot a couple of Soldiers if they came through that passageway out there all unwary, take some of those cold blooded monsters with him. That was tempting. He didn't mind dying as a martyr, but it struck him as militarily wasteful. He couldn't assume any of the commandos had survived, which meant Chaya and Karl and the rest couldn't know what had happened here . . . until too late. Not unless someone told them.
Given the choice between dying here and going back to admit failure, dying looked pretty good. He shook his head, and regretted that, but the pain helped blow away illusions. Failures of intelligence killed campaigns, killed them deader than anything he could think of. This failure was his.
My failure. And my obligation to make it right.
More guilt, but that was a comfort too, because it told him what he had to do. Painfully he sat again and pulled off his boots. The effort made his head spin again. He knotted their laces together and hung them round his neck, then painfully stood and slung the assault rifle over his shoulder. A trail of bloody footprints leading back into the tunnel would be as good a way to sign his own death sentence as any. Later, well inside, he'd put the boots back on. With the rough stone there and the climb down, he'd need them.
The thought of the trek back to the Pass terrified him more than facing the Sauron women and children. It would be so easy to turn and fire a burst, go out fighting—
My failure. And my obligation to make it right.
It was all that kept him going. And before the high country there would be the stone bridge. If he couldn't cross that—All at once, he was monstrously sleepy. He picked his way into the tunnel. Five times he heard voices, but he was lucky enough not to be found. Luck, but good or bad luck? Finally he was among the rocks. He found a niche and lay down, curled up with the assault rifle for a pillow, and fell asleep at once.
When he awoke, he felt better. No, actually he felt worse. All the pain the concussion had blurred was now there in full force. But he was used to making his body do what it had to, and his wits were clearer.
No way to gauge how long he'd slept, not in the unending darkness of the tunnel. He took little shuffling steps now, his right hand on the stone wall. Carcharoth's mound of stones had been on the right side of the tunnel. When he fetched up against that he'd know he'd reached the bridge.
He kicked something in the dark. It wasn't the stones, not yet. Slowly, painfully, he bent and groped after what he'd stumbled upon. At last he found it: a torch, discarded by the commandos as they advanced toward what they thought would be victory. He still had a lighter. Could he get the torch going? He did, and almost wished he hadn't. Light drove nails of pain into his head, but now he could see well enough to move faster.
He found another torch before the first one went out, and then another, and then another. One man didn't need nearly so many as three hundred had—no, two hundred or so, for only those who survived the encounter with Carcharoth had come this far. That should have been a warning. They just hadn't realized how good the Saurons were once roused—and now they'd gone and roused them all.
When he came to the bridge, he looked up through the rock toward the heavens. "Into Your hands I commend myself, Lord, as always," he said, and strode across. He reached the other side safe, and took that as a sign.
Walking was pain. As he trudged on, he distracted himself by thinking of what he should say. The leaders—those of them not consumed in fire and blood in the tunnel or in the Citadel—had to know the truth. But if he told that truth to the nomads—what then? He went round that question a dozen times in his battered mind, and always reached the same conclusion: the campaign against the Citadel would collapse. The fight through the pass toward the Sauron fortress had decimated them as it was, and they had been afraid of the Soldiers before that. One more bit of bad news and they would turn on those who had led them into this disaster.
"And we would deserve as much, too," he said, where there was no one to hear the admission. But some things, once started, could not be stopped, not without worse consequences. And so he would have to lie.
Another man might have reached that conclusion far sooner.
But Hammer-of-God, whatever else he was, had always been a truthtelling man. In a crazy way, that was an advantage now: when he lied, the plainsmen would believe him. Whether he would be able to live with himself afterwards was another question. "Military necessity," he muttered, there in the torchlit darkness. No doubt the Saurons had used the same comforting excuse to help themselves go to bed at night after they bombed Haven back most of the way to the Bronze Age. Maybe it had worked for them. He didn't think it would work for him.
It was easier going now, downhill, and he could go faster because he no longer cared what happened to him. He'd taken rations and a canteen from one of the dead commandos, and he couldn't even remember the man's name, an afghan warrior who'd come with him across the steppes and stood with him to the last, and now—
The canteen had been empty for hours, when, at last, hardly believing it, he saw light ahead, light that didn't come from the torch. He could hardly believe he'd dragged his battered body this far. If he could just make the descent, he could . . . tell his lies and damn himself to all eternity. Letting go and falling would be easier, but he had never believed in the easy way.
Down below, men saw him coming. They gathered at the base of the mountain. He could hear them calling up to him, though he was not such a fool as to look down. He was operating on the very dregs of his strength now, and knew it.
Then, at last, strong hands grabbed him, steadied him, helped him the last couple of meters to flat ground. "What news?" men cried in half a dozen languages. "What news?"
"Rejoice," he said. "We conquer." Then he collapsed.
Sieglinde led her troop of women and children and one half-educated wild Soldier against the latest of several barricades. The ones behind them were spattered with blood and brains, littered with the bodies of invaders and, here and there, a defender or two.
Here, she thought. Right here. In the Citadel. It was hideous. If she had been a Cyborg she would have erased it clean out of her database. But she was a Soldier woman, a mother of Soldiers. Her elder son was somewhere, sent away by the Breedmaster. To safety? Or somewhere worse than this? Her younger sons, one still nursing, one not quite old enough to begin training, were under guard and please-Diettinger-and-Althene safe in the room some of them called the Core, deep in the heart of the Keep.
This barricade was even more fiercely defended than the ones before it. It was a dead end, and the cattle apparently knew it. They'd boxed themselves in, with a door behind them, leading to a room with no other exit. It was mated Soldiers' quarters, empty since its male occupant marched to deal with rebellion in the Valley. The woman who had been assigned to him had elected to go back to the unassigned women's quarters. She was somewhere among the defenders, Sieglinde recalled—keeping the newer or more recalcitrant tribute women from breaking out and joining the attackers.
All this flashed through her mind as she zigzagged, ducked, and fired, zigzagged, ducked, and fired. The wild Soldier, whatever his name was, Damon, Iago, Dagor, ran at her back, clumsy but reasonably effective considering. When she hit the barricade, he was half a step behind her, yelling something in Turki. Silly. Yelling was inefficient.
It got him up and over the piled-up bedsteads, chairs, and table. He put a bullet in the eye of the last defender, just before Sieglinde blew the man's head off.
His death had been of some use, in the short run at least. The door at the end of the corridor was fast shut. Sieglinde was reasonably sure that it was bolted.
She halted so abruptly that Dagor nearly fell trying not to crash into her. The others—just a handful now, what with all the fighting they'd had to do to get this far—came up more neatly, forming a land of rank in the passageway. Soltar, son of Sofia and Regiment Leader Lagduf had a white, wild look around the eyes, though he kept a Soldier's stern expression. He was too young for this, really. His friend, the one with the freckles, was limping but still grinning as he leaned on Soltar's shoulder.
"Cover me," she said abruptly. She did not waste time in looking to see if any of them obeyed, but sprang toward the locked and bolted door.
Doors in the Citadel were built to last, but even they were hardly proof against a Soldier woman who really, honestly needed to get this nonsense over with before Rhun woke from his nap and started screaming for his supper. Her breasts were aching already.
She slung her assault rifle and walked briskly up to the door, and slid the panel beside it. The keypad was intact. She shook her head. Cattle. No sense at all, and no more technological couth than a pack of stobor. She punched the code that Breedmaster Titus had assigned for this cycle.
The door hesitated, clicked, sighed, and slid open. Her rifle was in her hands again, clip loaded. She sprang into the room.
And stopped cold.
There were still a few cattle left alive and standing. They'd used up all the furniture in building the barrier outside; the room was empty of anything that might have provided a shield.
Except for one thing. One person. A graying Mongol poised on the broad sill of a window that looked on the Citadel below, clasping him to his chest. His head lolled, but he was breathing.
Sieglinde did not need to search her mind for his name. "Gimilzor!" That was Soltar, coming up behind her, and stopping himself before he said anything more.
"Yes," said the Mongol in heavily accented Americ. "This Gim'zor. I Gasim, khan of Golden Tamerlane. Daughter, mine. Son, hers. Grandson, not mine." He spat past the child's head. "Not mine! Not!"
"Technically," said Sieglinde in fluent Turki—she had had to learn it, the Breedmaster insisted, and it did make matters easier with the cattle women—"and genetically, he is your grandson. You're being very silly. You're also being very reckless. It's quite a bit more than a hundred meters down."
The Mongol khan gaped at her. She had taken him aback. But not enough. He stooped suddenly and heaved. Gimilzor was solid Soldier stock on his father's side, stocky Mongol on his mother's, but he was only a child, and Gasim was as blockily strong as a muskylope bull. Gimilzor hung limply by the ankles from his grasp. Between his fragile skull and the rock of the lower Citadel was only air.
Even the invaders stood frozen. Sieglinde thought she saw horror in the faces of one or two—but fierce glee in too many, and avid anticipation. "Yes," said one of the raw-boned palehaired ones who looked a bit like Soldiers. "Yes, drop the spawn of Satan. Drop him now!"
The Mongol ignored him, ignored everything but the weight suspended from his stiffened arms, and the words he spoke. "The rest of these fedaykin will go free, or the child dies."
"You won't kill your own blood," said Sieglinde, not believing it.
Gimilzor was beginning to come to a little. His face was still waxy, his eyes sunk as if in bruises. He struggled weakly. His grandfather shook him, nearly sending them both toppling over into space. He stilled. Was it deeper unconsciousness? Or dawning awareness?
Gasim's lips drew back from his teeth. "This is no blood of mine. This is the spawn of Eblis. Let my people go, or he falls."
Sieglinde's eyes darted toward Gimilzor's face. Blood had rushed to it, purpling it. His eyes were open, but they were blank. His mouth was shut. His hands hung down, slack, seeming relaxed. She would have thought him dead, but she saw his chest heave. "He's hurt," she said. "You're making him worse. Put him down."
"Only if you let us go," Gasim said.
The decision was not as difficult as the Mongol might think. She had been counting invaders and reckoning that this must be the last of them—no more than a dozen all told. If they went out and told their tale of defeat, and let the horde of cattle know how strong even children of the Soldiers were, it would serve the Citadel well.
What slowed her down was fear that Gimilzor was so still, and his grandfather might think him already dead, and drop him simply to be rid of his weight.
He was stirring again, gasping for breath. Sieglinde spoke quickly. "Yes, go. Go tell what happens to cattle when they come to us. Only give us the child. He's none of yours, you say. Let us have him."
Gasim's arms had begun to tremble. His strength had limits, it seemed, and he was finally forced to admit it. "I stay up here till I see my people go out the gate. That's how far I trust you, Sauron. That's how long you'll have to wait before this demon's spawn is safe."
"Very well," said Sieglinde. Her voice, she was pleased to note, was as serene as ever. "Soltar, escort these . . . people out. Make sure they don't try anything. Dagor, stay with me."
That command hadn't been needed. Dagor stood rooted in horror as he watched the drama unfolding. An outcast himself, now watching the ultimate, a khan casting out his own grandchild. "Accursed," Dagor muttered.
Soltar indicated the door. "This way," he said, full Soldierly contempt for these cattle evident in his voice and his posture. "Come."
All of them came, all but the khan standing in the tall window, dangling his grandson over empty space. People had gathered below—women, children, noncombatants of the outer Citadel.
"Who's there?" someone shouted from below.
Gasim shouted down at them, a great bull's roar. "Lay a hand on my people and he falls!"
A voice rang up from below. It was deep, and cold as only a Cyborg's voice could be. "We understand."
And very probably he did. Gasim had not been talking quietly, and Cyborg ears were keen. Very, very keen. "You have the word of the Cyborg Rank Bonn that your companions will be let out unharmed."
Sieglinde wondered if the Mongol noticed what the Cyborg had not said. Probably not. If he thought that far, which was not at all a sure thing, he would be figuring to see his people out, then use the child as a shield again, and let him go only after they had both passed the gate.
Then, of course, rifles on the walls would dispose of him. Killing in combat was a right and proper thing. If Gimilzor had died in that fashion, it would have been unfortunate, but he was a Soldier. But there was no honor in dying as the cattle did.
Gasim stood unmoving in the window. The trembling in his arms had increased perceptibly. Sweat ran down his face. When Gasim looked out the window, Dagor moved closer.
Sieglinde moved carefully, gliding toward the room's second window. Gasim's narrow eyes slid toward her, but he said nothing. She looked down. The people below looked up, a massing of faces, some dark, some pale, but all washed with the same gray horror. Some of the women were weeping. Silly things. What good did tears ever do? And Dagor has moved closer still. Whose side will that pathetic turncoat take? A pet, preserved by a Battlemaster gone mad. Whose side will he be on?
She saw the little knot of invaders come out from the lower gate of the Keep and cross the courtyard, then disappear into the second ringwall of the fortress. After an endless, breathless time they reappeared in the outer courtyard, still safe, still intact, still shepherded by the tall figure and the small one.
They zagged from level to level and from gate to gate. They kept better order than most cattle would, though it was feeble enough by Soldier standards. Probably they thought themselves proud in their retreat, walking with heads as high as they could manage, shoulders back, the wounded limping as little as they might.
They were nearly to the outer battlements above the final gate. It was still shut, the sentries standing above, rifles trained on the invaders as they advanced.
Down in the Citadel as in the room high above it, tension ebbed. One of Sieglinde's Soldiers ventured to draw a breath.
But Sieglinde kept her eyes on Gasim. He had not moved. He still held Gimilzor over the edge, still glared at Soldiers round about him and Soldiers below, fierce with the consciousness of his shame. Defeat. Defeat and a Sauron grandson, and his daughter gone over to the enemy.
Sieglinde had heard the footsteps coming, stumbling, staggering, but grimly persistent. So: one of the bodies in the corridor had been alive after all.
Chichek's voice rang behind her, shrill with fury. "Father! Let him go! He is your grandson!"
"He is not," Gasim said.
"Father!"
And Dagor sprang. They had forgotten him, the pathetic wild Sauron, but Sauron he still was. His right hand took Gasim by the throat, and for a moment he held the weight of both the old man and the boy. Then his left hand darted through the window to seize Gimilzor's ankle.
"No!" Chichek shouted.
Dagor drew Gimilzor into the room with his left hand. With his right he hurled Gasim out, down to the stones below. Then, with exaggerated care, he knelt before Chichek and laid the injured boy in his mother's arms.
He looked up at Sieglinde. "At your command, my lady."
Sieglinde acknowledged him with a salute, as to a Soldier. Then she turned to the window, "Bonn. You may see to your duty. Sharku's heir is safe."
There was a moment's silence from below, then shouted orders. In the distance rifles cracked at Bonn's command. No commandos would escape now to tell the tale of Soldier wrath, and Soldier vengeance.
Sieglinde turned to the still kneeling Dagor. "Get up," she said. "Soldiers don't kneel to anyone."
The commandos were gone up the Citadel's cloaca. The army settled to wait. Rags and tatters had torn loose to raid in the Valley, but the bulk of it sat at Nûrnen. And waited.
Sigrid waited with them. This, for her, was a different kind of waiting than before, a state of constant, almost subliminal alertness. The moment, the very moment, she found an avenue of escape, she would take it. Even if it meant fighting her way through the rota of guards that had been doubled and trebled around her since the commandos left—subtly, they might think, hanging around, keeping weapons just within view, never letting her out of sight.
The Seven made no great secret of their strategy. That their Edenite General and their Judge's son were gone, no one tried to deny. Easy enough to surmise where, and why. Either they were too arrogant to care about spies, or they did not think that it mattered if the Citadel, or the Soldiers storming back up the Valley, knew what they planned: goose the Citadel from behind, storm it from the front.
And then what?
No one was talking about that. The nomads figured to loot, grab, and get out. The Bandari wanted their revenge. They did not particularly care what they had to do to get it.
There was a remote possibility that they would try to kill Sigrid before she could make a break for it. She doubted that anyone but Shulamit seriously entertained the notion. She was pregnant with a fan Reenan, bastard or not—and Bandari were fully as obsessed with good genes as Soldiers were, however much they might profess the opposite. They would keep her until she gave birth, if the war lasted that long. Then—who knew?
She was free to walk in Nûrnen, if she wished—always with plenty of company, but it never got in her way. She was not to attempt to signal the Citadel—she had been told that by every new guard who came on duty, till she could recite the lines with the actors—but she was allowed to look at the frown of the walls, and to note the continued quiet there. The place might have been deserted, for all the notice the inhabitants seemed to be taking of the army that had overrun Nûrnen.
Sigrid had a room in the house appropriated by her Bandari guardswomen, with a lock on the door that was strictly for appearance's sake, and everyone knew it. She was even allowed to see that her horses were looked after, though not to go near enough to touch. The she-dog was still with them, she noticed.
The he-dog was never farther from Sigrid than the length of a nomad's spear. He was an effective early-warning system, even without her enhanced senses.
Four T-days after the commandos went out, Sigrid was lying on her bed, which she had stripped of its too-soft mattress and replaced with a soldier's pallet. She was neither asleep nor pretending to be, although her guards were free to think either or both. The baby, having danced a hora on her spine, as the Bandari would say, had stopped to rest.
They were dancing in the streets, too, singing and shouting. The intensity of the uproar had increased in the past hour or two. Sigrid had deliberately not gone out to investigate. Her guards were distracted—when she looked out, the phalanx was visibly thinner. A little longer and there might be few enough of them left to be worth breaking through.
The dog barked once, sharply. Sigrid had already heard the footsteps. She did not trouble to rise or to greet Shulamit. The Bandari had her rifle in hand, but something—maybe the dog's low growl—kept her from jabbing Sigrid with it. She was grinning from ear to ear, doing a little joy-dance made neither more nor less graceful by the rifle she kept trained on her prisoner. "We've taken your bloody Citadel. We've thrown mud right in the Saurons' eyes—and it stuck."
Sigrid kept her mouth shut, her face calm. Cyborg training was worth that much. So was Soldier pride.
The Bandari bitch was not going to spare her a moment of it. "Hammer-of-God came back," she said, "and he said, 'Rejoice. We are victorious.' Our death commandos, the holy warriors of Yahweh have done the impossible. The Citadel is ours."
"And what condition," asked Sigrid coolly, "was Hammer-of-God in, that he should have been quoting that line at your people?"
Shulamit's eyes flickered. She kept her bold face, but her voice was a fraction softer. Just a fraction—but enough. "He's got a wound or two. Scratches."
"Scratches? How many others survived?"
"Don't know. Hammer's still out. But he'll be all right. His head is hard—Saurons put up a good fight." That was grudging, but it was honest respect. "We'll be watching you now, Sauron. You can't even take a piss without one of us there to count every drop."
"Oh?" asked Sigrid. "Is there something you don't want me to know?"
"There's something we don't want you to do—like get loose and ride to anybody's rescue."
"Which means," said Sigrid, "that there are still Soldiers left to be rescued. I thank you for that information."
Shulamit jerked as if she had been struck. Her face went crimson. She spat—missing Sigrid, whether deliberately or not—and got out.