In the distance, Senior Assault Leader Bogdar's ears were filled with a roar that reminded him of an avalanche he'd once heard while on duty in the Devil's Heater. Individual crashes and bangs hurtled out of the ear-splitting roar much as boulders had bounced around the edge of the avalanche. Only this was no tumbling wall of stone and rock; this was a wave of living, dying human and animal flesh. With only one thought: to kill every Sauron it could find, including himself. More dangerous by far than any river of mere rock.
If the cattle rumors were to be believed, this horde was a divine wall of steel and flesh sent to scour the Saurons from this world. Now that he heard its scream it was hard to remain as aloof as he had been two days ago in the barracks room when he'd been given his new assignment.
The Karakul Pass twisted its way through the Atlas Mountains, like a giant seam. It was the result of an ancient earthquake that made even this disaster seem infinitesimal. The Pass itself twisted its way through the Atlas Mountains for over twenty kilometers, in some places as wide as half a kilometer, in others only eighty to a hundred meters wide.
Scratch's Elbow, as this kink in the Pass was called, was a giant overhang that almost crossed the entire width of the divide. Bogdar's orders were to stop the nomad army dead in its tracks. Their bunker straddled the trail between the Elbow and a sheer granite cliff that stretched farther to the sky than even magnified Sauron eyes could see.
The bunker was a ferro-concrete box with firing slits for four Gatlings and dozens of assault rifles. This morning two of the Gatlings had been replaced by what Cyborg Rank Bonn had called machine guns, ancient weapons from the stars that had arrived with the Dol Guldur, and still smelled of the muskylope lard they'd been preserved in. A third had been emplaced behind a hastily erected wall on top of the bunker. According to Cyborg Bonn, the range of the 30mm machine guns was on the order of two kilometers, almost two thirds of the way to the next turn in the Pass.
Using the high-powered optical telescope left for him by Cyborg Bonn, Bogdar was able to see ahead to the next bend, where the pass was almost a quarter of a kilometer wide, and where a hundred-man Sauron company made a thin gray line.
A line that had better hold; otherwise, Bogdar's bunker was the last defense of the Pass between the nomad horde and the city of Nûrnen. A peaceful trading city with no fortifications, other than some hastily dug earthworks that were still in the early stages of construction. Most of those working on the Nûrnen defense were cadets or retired veterans.
Not that Bogdar's platoon didn't have support, four Soldiers crouched in emplacements carved out of living stone along the eastern slope about 15 meters above the Pass. These man-sized notches had been there since CoDominium times, so legends said, built by the Valley Lords to keep the nomads out of the Shangri-La, Haven's one and only treasure.
Each of the four Soldiers were armed with flame throwers, another of the weapons brought out of the ancient vaults. They'd been held in reserve for the return of the Empire or a major uprising. Bogdar laughed, remembering Battlemaster Carcharoth's predictions. This was major enough . . .
If the First Council and the Battlemaster had listened to Assault Group Leader Sharku, the blood of the cattle horde would be flooding the steppes in a river of red, while the Soldiers pleasured themselves their women.
Instead, all five of the Citadel's regiments were down in the southern Valley, thousands of kilometers from where they were needed. Only two half strength battalions had been left behind to face the greatest threat to Sauron hegemony since the Succession Wars. And in command of the Citadel was the very Battlemaster who sent the strength of the Race far to the south.
Most of the junior officers Bogdar knew agreed that it was time the full Council did something, even if they had to restrict Carcharoth to permanent breeding duty and put the old geldings on the First Council out to pasture.
Still, it would not have been such a disaster had the Battlemaster not ignored the field reports and gone to the ancient vaults earlier. No, his pride and blind faith in the Threat Analysis Computer had led him to ignore all contrary evidence, send away the only Soldier who did see the big picture, and any other commander that threatened his command. It was only when the dreaded Bandari mortars destroyed half the pill boxes guarding the Citadel's flanks that Carcharoth began to treat this invasion as a serious threat to the Sauron Unified State.
Only then had the Battlemaster sent the guardians into the Vaults where indeed they had found some marvelous weapons, but also found too little time and too few techs to do more than assemble a few of them. Nor had there been time to establish more than a patchwork defense for the Pass. Nor enough petroleum, as it was called, to fuel more than a dozen of the flame throwers. Four of them guarding the passage to his bunker.
Suddenly the burp of a hundred assault rifles and a dozen Gatlings resounded through the stone walls of the pass, for a moment stilling the roar of the horde.
He could smell the sweat of his squad in the dusty air and now a new odor, the coppery tang of freshly spilled blood. The bend in front kept the horde out of sight, but he could hear the roar of the horde grow, now drowning out even the burping Gatlings.
"Check your loads," Bogdar needlessly reminded his snipers. They were armed with scoped, single-shot rifles accurate up to three and a half kilometers, far more accurate than were needed here. "Remember, shoot khans and Bandari warriors only. Leave the grass eaters for the machine guns. Once they realize our position they will bring up the mortars; I want you to kill as many of their techs as possible."
"Yes, sir," an elderly Assault Leader replied dryly. This was Soldier work, work they'd been bred for and trained for a lifetime. Let the dung burners come and learn why the Saurons had held this pass for over three hundred and fifty years.
Then the wall of living, multicolored flesh came into sight. At three kilometers it appeared as though it were spraying a red froth. Estimates this morning had put the number of nomad effective at 320,000, not counting camp followers. Using his enhanced telescope, Bogdar could see that the froth was a spray of blood and tissue that was coloring both sides of the pass. It was hard to discern one warrior from another in that press of bodies; it appeared that most of the bullets were ripping a half dead mass of tangled bodies.
When the wall reached the barricade, it appeared to halt, and, for a few moments, to turn in on itself; then, suddenly, the barricade and one hundred Soldiers were gone.
Part of the wall itself.
For the first time Bogdar felt anxious; sweat beaded on his forehead, his stomach knotted, his knees began to tremble. Is this fear? How strange to feel a new emotion. Is this what cattle felt when they saw death before them? Surely his command would die, like the company ahead, unless the machine guns could tip the balance. The magic of Old Sauron against the nomads' gods.
"Fire Gatlings," Bogdar ordered. In this alley of death, the Gatling effective range was far greater than in the field, since many of the shells would bounce off the sides of the Pass and find the enemy in such a target-rich environment. The machine guns, with their far greater range, were to be held in reserve.
Now he could make out individual horde members, a Cossack in shiny mail and a Bandari in articulated boiled-leather armor. He heard a loud report and the Bandari catapulted off his horse and against the stone cliff. The two Gatlings tore red ribbons through the front of the horde but didn't appear to slow it at all. Horses and men ran down or over the fallen like natural obstacles.
The death cries, screams, yells, gunshots, had all blended themselves into a single noise and Bogdar wondered if he would ever hear individual sounds again.
At the one-kilometer mark painted on the wall, a single black line painted on the side of the cliff, he ordered the assault rifles to fire. The additional twenty guns stitched a line of red across the front of the wall but didn't slow its momentum for a second. He had planned to wait until the horde reached the half kilometer mark before ordering the machine guns to fire, but decided by then it might be too late and gave the order now.
The machine guns with their heavier bullets ripped into the front of the horde, chewing it up into fist-sized hunks of flesh and leather. Then the flame throwers sent out huge tongues of fire. For a time, the wall appeared to come to a complete halt. The odor of burnt flesh was now added to the almost overwhelming smell of cordite inside the bunker, and black powder coming from the horde.
But the nomads with their Bandari weapons were taking a toll on his command, too. The trooper next to him spun backwards, with the back half of his skull removed. He used the respite to count casualties, three dead, one with a sucking chest wound, and four more with injuries that might put a human norm out of commission but not a Soldier.
The wall appeared to writhe again, and he put down his assault rifle and picked up the telescope. By Diettinger, the cattle were building a wall of boulders and dead horses and men to hide from the rain of 30mm shells. They had stopped the horde!
Bogdar ordered the machine guns to stop firing; there hadn't been time to produce more than fifty thousand rounds per gun, almost half of which they'd already fired. The Gatlings kept up their rain of fire, as the impromptu barricade grew, shooting rounds off the cliff side to ricochet into the cattle farther down the Pass. The writhing of the cattle as they died showed it was having an effect. Maybe they could stop the horde right in its tracks?
The snipers were still firing at will and Bogdar directed their fire to a group drawing a giant six-wheeled wagon through the Pass. Maybe he wouldn't need to use their surprise after all?
The Bandari wagon came to a halt, about two kilometers away; just out of effective Gatling range. Now they were assembling one of their deadly—what had Cyborg Bonn called it—spigot mortars, yes, that was it. Now it was time to show them what the machine guns could really do!
"Machine gunners, target the Bandari mortar. Destroy it and its crew." The guns began to chatter, cutting a swathe through the barricade and the living wall of flesh.
The nomads at the barricade actually tried to turn and run, but there was nowhere to go. The Pass turned into a killing floor. The bullets tore into the log abatis the Bandari had placed before the wagon, sending the Bandari engineers scattering, only to fall from sniper fire. The strange, bullet-shaped device they'd been raising suddenly toppled and exploded, and at least a thousand nomads died in the explosion. More would have died, but for the wall of once living human and horse flesh that absorbed most of the blast.
Bogdar had never seen such killing, and doubted this world had since the landing of the Dol Giddur.
For the first time, the horde actually pulled back, drawing past the barricade where a hundred Soldiers had given their lives. "Cease fire."
"We've broken them!" a Soldier shouted.
The dead were heaped across the Pass in piles as high as the bunker itself. Bogdar estimated the casualties at well over twenty thousand men with easily as many horses and muskylopes. If they could stop this horde, their names would live on as heroes as long as the last Sauron heart beat.
The sudden silence was almost as oppressive as the noise had been. The Senior Assault Leader would have liked to believe they were retreating, but the wall had only pulled back, not broken. What are they doing behind that curve of rock?
The machine guns were both down to less than fifteen thousand rounds each. They'd have to conserve their firepower. The Gatlings and assault rifles had all the ammunition they would ever need. Looking at his watch, Bogdar was surprised to learn that over a half hour had passed since the horde had first overrun the barricade.
He shifted uneasily in his seat, trying not to think about the dead-man switch he had now activated. This next attack would see either victory, or a blazing death. Either way, Bogdar promised to send many thousands of nomads to the Wind.
There was a sudden spume of dust from around the curve, and then an explosion that almost threw him off his seat as the eastern half of the bunker collapsed. Smoke and debris filled the room; his ears were ringing and he touched them only to find his fingers dripping blood. A quick survey revealed that the mortar round had taken out one of the machine guns, probably the one on top of the bunker as well, a Gatling gun, and half his platoon. He wasn't surprised when he looked through the aperture to see the nomad horde less than half a klick away.
His dazed Soldiers began to pick up their weapons and resume firing. The rate of fire was sporadic and not at all effective until the remaining machine gun splattered its rain of death. The single gun was not enough to do more than slow the horde down. The nomads were now in range and slugs and arrows were beginning to pierce the firing slits, taking casualties. One of the flame throwers sent out a roaring finger of flame until a sharpshooter took him out with a well-aimed shot, sending the still burning flame thrower tumbling into the horde.
Then the machine gun, its ammunition expended, stopped firing. The remaining Gatling continued until the horde was upon the bunker, lances and spears thrusting through the firing slits. Two more Soldiers went down, and suddenly the horde was over, around, and coming into the bunker.
Bogdar felt something slam into his chest like a hammer, and looked down to see an arrow buried half-way into his chest. He willed his capillaries to staunch the flow of blood that threatened to fill his right lung. A slug tore through his shoulder like a red-hot poker, as three Bandari emerged from the rubble of the eastern bunker. He took two out with his assault rifle and another with his bare hands, pulling the Bandari like a child into a fatal embrace with the arrow half-buried in his chest. Bogdar's head was beginning to grow light.
It's time, he thought, as two more Bandari emerged with half a dozen nomads. The horde was over him, by him and now with him. He fell off the dead-man's switch and waited for the explosion that would send the entire Elbow tumbling down on the vanguard of the nomad horde.
His last thought was that no Soldier had taken so many enemies with him into the darkness since the Final War. Maybe they would remember him after—
"Wha's that?" Strong Sven said, letting go of Raisa's waist. He had felt the room rock and heard a bone-rattling crash. The Sozzled Stobor was warm and close tonight; a quarter of mutton sizzled over the fire, and smoky lanterns threw more warm yellow glow over the taproom. Sven felt a little dizzy as he got up. He had been spending every evening here for the last couple of days, two T-weeks, drinking as much as he could afford and cursing the Soldier blood that made it so expensive to get drunk. A Soldier could guzzle popskull 'till it came out of his ears and not take enough to forget. Strong Sven was not quite so resistant, but it was close. His work sweated it out of him—he was a stonecutter and miner, like his father and grandfather before him—but for the first time in his life Sven welcomed the work. You could drown fear in sweat, almost as easily as in vodka or clownfruit brandy, and much more cheaply.
The low roar of conversation died, fading away under the smoky rafters. Sven walked carefully to the door, and threw it open. Despite the truenight chill and the spatter of late-summer rain falling on Nûrnen, the street was crowded, a circling mass lit ruddy by the torches some carried. They seemed to be mobbing around a man who shouted incoherendy, babbling something about Jews and doom and Soldiers. Strong Sven peered closer; his night-sight was good. Mischa Jenkins, he thought. A laborer, one of the ones the Soldiers had taken to build fieldworks. The conscripts had gone willingly enough, since they were helping to defend Nûrnen as much as the Citadel.
Sven felt something grasp under his breastbone and squeeze. Recklessly he jumped down into the crowd, barely conscious that some of his tavern cronies had followed. Men scattered back from his shoulders, or his fists if that did not suffice; he grabbed Mischa by the scruff of his jacket and half-dragged, half-carried him back toward the tavern. At the top of the steps he paused, since the doors had been flung open and a bright puddle of yellow light spilled out, across the veranda and the upraised faces and the cobbled street beyond. Mischa was dead-pale and sweating heavily, eyes darting in his whiskery face. Sven snatched the bottle off the tray Raisa still carried and handed it to the other man. He jammed it into his mouth with shaking hands and drank convulsively, Adam's apple bobbing.
"Shut up!" Sven bellowed at the crowd. "Let him speak!"
Then he snatched the brandy away from Mischa. Roughly, he shook the smaller man and asked, "Where are the Soldiers? Did they let you go?"
"Dead. All dead," Mischa said hoarsely.
"Talk sense and stop babbling, man," Sven barked.
Mischa seemed to pause, took a deep breath and licked his lips. "Give me the bottle," he said. After another swallow he spoke loudly, half-turning to the crowd.
"They took us into the hills. We dug, built pits, hauled rock. Then the enemy came."
"The horde?"
Mischa shook his head. "They were behind. We could hear them—kilometers away, we could hear them. One of the Soldier scouts came back and said they were so many, he could not count them—they covered the plain beyond his sight. They built a road through the foothills as they came."
A sigh went through the crowd, like wind through trees. Their eyeballs shone in the lamplight, and the sound of their breathing was heavy. Doors and windows had opened, all up and down the street.
"Then the fight started. The Jews, it was the Jews—the Soldier in command, the Senior Assault Group Leader, he said haBandari. They had rifles that struck as far as the Soldiers—and captured Soldier rifles, I could tell by the sound. They killed the Leader. Then—then—" He stopped for a moment and stuttered. "Then the mountain fell. The mountain fell. The blast threw us to the ground, we were half a kilometer away—the cloud rose up, the mushroom cloud—the Jews have the Hellfire bombs, Star bombs like the old ones told us when were children, they're real, and the Jews have them, the Jews have Hellfire!"
Mischa was shrieking, clawing at his own face, the blood mingling with tears. "The Saurons ran away, back to the Citadel, all that were left alive. I ran—I hid among the rocks from their scouts—I ran here—the Jews have Hellfire bombs, and the horde is coming. Right on my heels. The horde is coming. They are coming now! They are coming now! "
Thunder banged and rattled from the south, as Mischa tore out of Sven's grip and ran down the street, howling like a stobor. The crowd dissolved in a rush, running—running anywhere and nowhere, and their shouts carried the news across the sleeping city. Screams broke around Strong Sven, as he stood motionless. Some were in his ear, Raisa's voice:
"Sven, Sven—what shall we do, what shall we do?"
He put his hand across her face and pushed, turning away. I must hide, he thought numbly. His mind was becoming clear, very clear. Where could Strong Sven hide, he who persecuted Juchi? The horde is coming. They would turn him over to the nomad women; he would be T-months dying. Wait. Wait. The Jews were with them; he could bargain with the Jews, everyone knew the Jews would bargain. What his father had told him, the old workings—from his grandfather's father, back in the old days. It had never seemed anything valuable, just an old family legend. Dangerous, even, if the Soldiers found out, so he'd never spoken of it to anyone. Yes. If he could hide long enough to find the Jews—
Strong Sven began to run.
Nûrnen screamed.
That was always how Shulamit would remember the Sack: people screaming. In rage, or fear, or pain; people screaming, darkness shot with flame, smells of blood and roasting meat and the nasty stinks of things that should not burn. The main streets were packed with the first spray of nomads, only the forerunners, but already thousands of them rioting through on foot or horseback. Smashing glass for the sheer luxury of it, dragging out armfuls of plunder and then throwing it in the dirt to dart away for more, dragging out women, too. Riding down fleeing Nûrnenites, hooting with laughter as they shot or stabbed with their lances or swung shamsirs at the townsfolk who ran, or cowered, or tried to fight with household tools or sticks. The solid wedge of haBandari cleaved through the shaggy steppe-people like the prow of a ship through water, shouting for way or lashing out with riding-whips and bowstaves and the iron-shod hooves of their horses.
She stood in the stirrups and looked back. The way up to the pass was lit with fire; from burning bunkers, from burning flesh and clothing, with the muzzle-flashes of thousands of firearms. That was beginning in Saurontown, in the high part of Nûrnen nearest to the Citadel, as well. I'm glad we're not up there, she thought. That was mainly retired Saurons, but . . .
"Istrafugallah!" A nomad chief on foot limped up to Tameetha bat Irene and grabbed at her bridle. "Brother, your help; these other pigs have no order and think only of plunder. The sons of Eblis hold the street down from here; in the name of the Beneficent, the Lovingkind, aid us."
"Saurons?" she said sharply.
The man looked up at the sound of her voice and hesitated. Tameetha bat Irene fan Tellerman was in her late thirties, with a dark, weathered face and no curves that showed through her armor—an old associate of Hammer-of-God's in the Sayerets, the Scouts, and an officer of caravan guards by trade when she wasn't working officially with the army of the Pale. But her voice was a woman's. The nomad went on:
"No, ah, khatun. Nûrnenites, but a Sauron leads them. There."
He pointed as they came around a corner. It was dark—any city was, in truenight—but there was enough firelight to see a rude barricade across the avenue. Farm carts, piled cobblestones, the gaudy travelling coach of some merchant, its yellow-painted wheels spinning as it lay on its side. Bodies lay in the street before it, and more mounted nomads milled around just out of arrow range. As they watched, a rifle spat from behind the wagons, the distinctive sharp crack of an assault rifle on semiauto. The nomads broke backward in a medley of curses and neighs, leaving more men and beasts kicking on the slimed cobbles.
Tameetha nodded as they edged their horses backwards. She looked up at the house to their right; it was big and fronted on both streets. Her hand indicated the second story, moved in precise signs every Bandari child learned. Windows. Shoot on command. Simultaneous.
"Shulamit, Kostas, Schalk, Jakoba, Coenraad. You—"
"Barachuk Khan."
"Barachuk, get your people ready."
Shulamit swung down and dashed up onto the porch. Then she hesitated for a second. There were panels of glass in the door of the house at the corner—colored glass in the shape of flowers and beasts. It was beautiful work, as good as anything in the Pale, but strange. Beside her Coenraad bar Johannes snarled impatience and raised his boot. Before he could kick, Shulamit reached out and clicked the latch. The door swung open, and she felt an irrational lightening of the spirit as they crowded in and went up the stairs. Everything was quietly rich and disturbingly alien, ceilings too high, far too much woodwork, the adobe brick of the walls covered in smooth plaster and printed wallpaper.
Silent hand-signals sent them to windows overlooking the barricade. Nobody raised their head, not yet, not with a Yeweh-damned Sauron down there. Coenraad raised one finger. Two. Three.
She bobbed up and braced the forestock of her rifle against the windowsill. Full automatic; she hosed the entire magazine down into the crowd behind the tumbled vehicles and furniture. Beside her, the Pale rifles spoke their deeper boom, and the smell of burnt sulphur drifted on the cold draft from the street.
"Yip-yip-yip-yip—" Barachuk Khan's Uighurs poured down the street, setting their horses at the barricade in a flourish of curved swords and stabbing lanceheads. For a moment there was a boil of motion around it, then all was still.
Shulamit swallowed, reloading her weapon and slinging it.
"Here." Jakoba bat Katarina called to her. "Look at this."
A box of scarves spilled across the bed; for the first time, Shulamit realized this must be a bedroom. It was a bit odd to think of Nûrnenites with bedrooms . . . which was silly when you thought about it, but she'd always pictured them flogging slaves, or bowing and scraping before the Saurons, or whatever. The scarves were beautiful work, fine linen embroidered with a flamebird, picked out with gold and silver thread. This must be a woman's room, Shulamit thought. There was a crucifix on one wall, and an opened closet with dresses; it looked as if they'd left in a hurry.
Tameetha's voice called from below. Jakoba tossed half a dozen of the scarves toward her; feeling a little guilty, she stuffed them into her pockets and up under the edge of her cuirass and knotted one around her neck. Actual plunder, she thought. I am growing up.
Nobody was left alive behind the barricade. The tumbled dead didn't look like soldiers, just dead people—all ages, though, thank Yeweh, no children. A few were women, in clumsy-looking dresses, a little like what Edenite women wore back in the Pale. Tameetha gestured them back and drew a double-barreled flintlock pistol from her saddlebow, aimed carefully and fired at one figure—the one in Soldier gray, although he was already covered in swordcuts and had half a dozen bullet wounds to boot. His head was bald and fringed with a few white hairs; it burst like a dropped melon when the heavy lead balls struck it. Shulamit looked away, concentrating on getting her boot into the stirrup as she remounted. Behind them were yelps and smashing sounds as a spray of nomads found the house she'd fought from. Her horse snorted and sidled, and she ran a hand down its neck.
"Hotnots got his rifle, Yewehdammit," the Bandari commander said, looking down at the dead Sauron. He must have organized this defense himself. The Uighurs had vanished into the crowd; the street was filling rapidly.
She bit open cartridges, rammed them home, primed the pans of the massive pistol with a flask from her waist and reholstered it.
"Now—" She took out a map. "Should be—"
They turned into a side street for a moment, quieter than the main avenue—the looters hadn't had time to spread out much, yet—but darker than Gehenna. It was truenight, not even a sister moon up, and smoke-palls hid what stars there were; they came out into a larger avenue, then back into the shadows and narrow ways. The leader kicked her horse closer to one building that had faint light coming from its windows.
"Aluf," Schalk bar Yoachim complained. He was a young man, with a gingery beard. "What is this place we're looking for?"
"Machine shop, the Ras Aluf said," she replied absently, pushing back her helmet a little to peer at the tilted paper. "Bliddy big, this Nûrnen."
Shulamit felt herself nodding, peering around at the buildings—most of them three or even five stories tall, though this neighborhood was shoddy. All that she had seen of Nûrnen was dirty and unplanned by the standards of the Eden Valley, but it was huge. There must be a hundred thousand people living here. Were living here, she reminded herself, swallowing. That was as much as the capital, Strang, and the other big Pale towns put together several times over.
A fat man in an apron was sprawled in the street with blood and gray matter still leaking from a split skull.
The young Bandari trooper shifted reins and rifle. "Ah, aluf—the hotnots will get all the good stuff and the fun!" he complained, his voice jagged with excitement.
Tameetha folded the paper away. "Got it," she muttered, then grinned and cuffed the trooper across the ear; his helmet rang.
" 'Good stuff?' " she said, chuckling.
It was an unpleasant sound, and her teeth shone wet under the brim of her helm; Shulamit felt an urge to look away. Tameetha was a fine commander, cared well for her squadron, had experience and all that . . . but there were times when she strongly suspected that Tameetha bat Irene fan Tellerman was not really a very nice person by her parents' standards. Besides being, she was pretty sure, bent.
The officer held out a clenched fist with the pinkie extended, tapping Coenraad on the nose. "Boy, when your mother's milk is dry on your lips, you can tell Tameetha how to loot—or tell Hammer-of-God Jackson." Her arm chopped out toward the roar from the nearby streets.
"Let the hotnots do the dying; not all the Saurons or Sauron lovers in this town are dead yet. And then—these gayam—what are they stealing? Gauds and trash, sequined underwear from whores. All they're going to get, boy, is junk—and sore stomachs and aching heads, hangovers and the galloping clap. What do you think Kumpanie Gimbutas will pay for Sauron metalworking lathes, even fourth-hand ones the Citadel sold to Nûrnen? The Hammer is sending us out for the real loot—only The People and their friends are going to do well out of this. That's why all our regiments are out posting guard while the gayam riot."
Her grin grew wider and she chucked him under the chin. "You stay with Tameetha and obey orders, boy, and she'll make you rich. Then you can buy all the fun you want."
Another scream, this one from above their heads. Shulamit's head whipped up, looking up past the sign that showed a stobor lying on its back with a stein in one fist. A woman had climbed out the short ledge by the second-story window. Her long flaxen hair streamed in the hot wind from the fires, and her dress had been ripped down the front to her waist. She screamed again as a figure appeared in the window, a troll-blocky man in felt and furs, his face a mass of tribal scars beneath a peaked sheepskin cap. He shouted at the woman in a Turkic dialect Shulamit could barely follow, shouting again in wordless rage as she edged further away and cowered with her eyes screwed shut. When his hand came out of the window his shamsir was in it, and he leaned far out for a cut that would slice her in half at the waist.
Shulamit's rifle was slung; no reason to waste precious ammunition outside serious combat. Her bow was ready. She drew and loosed in a single fluid movement; the meaty impact of the broadhead was clearly audible, pounding home over the leaning man's collarbone and sinking to the feathers as the point sliced through lungs, heart, and liver. He dropped out the window and slid down the slanted shingle roof over the veranda to drop across the horse trough outside the inn. Shulamit sat with her bow still up, not quite believing she had just killed a man—an ally—so quickly. I didn't even decide to do it, she thought.
"Oh, shaysse," Tameetha swore, drawing the pistol again. She cocked it by bracing the hammers on her thigh and pushing down, then shot both barrels into the window as other figures appeared there. Arrows followed the buckshot as the rest of the squad reacted, and another Turk flopped out to lie bent across the windowsill. A third came bursting out of the ground-floor doors with saber in hand, and stopped dead as an arrow cracked into the boiled leather of his breastplate, angling down through the lower gut. He was close enough for Shulamit to see his face clearly, much younger than the first and with fewer of the ritual scars. Slowly he slid down the doorpost and sat, touching the fletching. Behind him the four blades of the arrowhead sparkled, wiped clean of blood by their passage through padding and armor on the way out.
The woman on the ledge had her eyes open again, darting from the Turks to the shadowed figures whose horses stamped below.
"Pajalsta!" she called, her voice quavering. Mercy, in Russki. "Pajalsta!"
Tameetha swore again in the same mild tone and hung her helmet from the saddlebow, transferring her pistol to her left hand along with the reins. Shulamit saw her blink at the girl, purse her lips and nod, then nudge her horse into a walk until it halted underneath the fugitive. She called up in the same language:
"You want to come along, shisk, or take your chances there? Look lively, I haven't got all truenight." Her gauntleted hand reached up.
The woman—girl, Shulamit saw, a little older than herself—seemed to pause for a moment, met Tameetha's eyes, then nodded in her turn. She gathered her skirt in one hand and groped cautiously down the shingles, sat on their edge and reached out to grip the offered glove and swing down to ride pillion behind the commander.
"It's an ill wind blows nobody good," Tameetha remarked to Shulamit in a conversational tone, shifting the Nûrnenite girl's hands to a more comfortable grip around her waist. "You might think before you get me into a fire-fight, next time, though. Now, we've got a job of work to do before we rest."
The rescued girl turned enormous haunted eyes on Shulamit for a moment, before she buried her face against the armored shoulders in front of her and clung as if to squeeze out what she had seen.
"Right, you stainless heroes," the commander shouted. "Down there, two lefts and a right—follow me!"
Behind them the young Turk wept slowly into his lap, the arrow jerking with each sob.