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Chapter Twenty-Six

Chaya's voice rose to a hawk's scream as she swept forward. The hill had been incorporated into the great inner ring facing the Citadel, and her augmented voice was powerful enough to reach two score thousand of the warriors crowded below. Their waiting was patient, but tense, leashed eagerness crackling in the dim chill air. They had sweated and dug until their palms were flayed meat, moved in unaccustomed obedience to the orders of the Seven with a discipline only the strongest of their own khans could command. Now they scented the purpose for which they had gathered from half a planet: to kill. And kill and kill, until nothing of Sauron-on-Haven lived.

"The Lord God of Hosts has delivered them into our hands," she cried. The sound of it was like nothing human. "Warriors of Haven, warriors of humanity—slay them all, slay them with the edge of the sword, leaving not one Sauron alive to breathe. Now for wrath, ruin, and a red nightfall! Death to the Saurons!"

A roar surged across the mass of them, dun-black under the light of Cat's Eye and tinged with red on their blades. It built like surf on the sea none of them had ever seen, like the beating heart of a giant taller than the stars. It seemed inconceivable that it could grow, but it did as the main gate of the Citadel swung open and the distance-tiny figures of the garrison filed out, flowing smoothly into extended battle-formation and moving forward.

A balefire flickered beside Chaya. Bandari threw armfuls of heartlog on it, the resin-soaked wood blazing up in white-hot tongues of flame. The Judge stood oblivious to it, her fists clenched over her head, the long sleeves of her robe falling back from the weathered, corded skin of her arms. Her eyes showed white all around the rims, and there was foam on the lips drawn back in a rictus from her teeth. Now there would be vengeance for Barak, for Juchi, for all the unnumbered dead. Her son fell in flames before her eyes.

"Death!" she screamed. "Death! Death!"

The horde took it up. No chant could be unified in a mass so large, but it rolled over them in long waves, like the slurred voice of a stricken god.

"DEATH!" it boomed. Echoes thundered back from the walls and the mountains, until it seemed stone would shiver and break. The sound woke things older than thought and speech, until every brain in the host vibrated with it. "DEATH! DEATH!"

Chaya stood and howled; the men of the jihad howled with her as they flowed past, over the fortifications and down into the plain, parting around her hilltop perch as water might at a rock in a waterfall. Shrieking, sheerly mad, two hundred thousand men cataracted past her and onto the plain. Cat's Eye stood baleful behind the Citadel across the arc of the sky, its light a path of blood beneath their feet.

"GO FORTH TO CONQUER!" she screamed.

Karl Haller, the last of the Seven able to ride, led the charge. Chaya watched until he was out of sight. We are the kings who die for the People. Or wander through their legends for a thousand years.

As the hordes swept forward, Chaya, twin to Juchi, the Accursed, Judge of the haBandari, walked slowly back down the hill, away from the battle, and walked alone into the growing light of the Cat's Eye.

 

"So much for strategy," Tameetha bat Irene croaked, and tried to raise her voice. It failed, and she put a hand to the bandages that wrapped her throat.

She was sitting on the firing step on the inner ring of the fortifications, still too weak to stand for long. Frustration burned in her, and even now the Bandari watching could sympathize. To come so far, and miss the in-taking of the Citadel!

"Shut up," Raisa said beside her. The Russki girl from the Sozzled Stobor looked paler than usual; the horde's chant of Death! was echoing all around, and there was no mind behind the eyes of the fur-clad warriors who swarmed forward over the slope of the earthworks. Toward the Saurons and their waiting guns.

"I can talk, shiks, I just can't shout," Tameetha choked out.

"So don't try, or you'll be dumb as a fish again!" She stayed very close to the Bandari. That she was blond as a Sauron was coincidence—she was pure unaugmented human stock, simply someone from a Valley community with a great deal of Russia and Finn in its background—but a passing tribesman might not pause to think when he saw the yellow hair.

Tameetha snarled and signaled to Karl fan Reenan. He cleared his throat and relayed the whispered orders to the Bandari who waited below.

"Remember the dispositions," he called in a megaphone bellow. "The aluf says, let the hotnots finish the Saurons." A growl of unhappiness. The folk of the Pale had a feud old as the Citadel with its masters; that hatred was deep and black. "The second regiment is backing them up. We pull out and guard the upper pass section—Hammer says that's the point of maximum danger during the assault.

"We have our orders; what are we, a bunch of furry-arsed nomad shlymels?" That was not tactful, but very few of the wandering tribes understood Bandarit, and they were all charging past like a herd of muskylope in musth anyway. "Trek!"

There were a thousand or so of the Pale's warriors here; the remainder were with the jihad or on the outer fortifications keeping the Sauron field army at bay. The ones here gave a single deep shout, almost lost in the screaming of the horde, and swung into the saddle.

 

Cyborg Rank Bonn made his dispositions in a few crisp sentences. "Full automatic," he concluded. "Open fire at four hundred meters."

It is necessary to redirect the enemy, he thought dispassionately. The maximum number had to be steered into the killing radius—a task involving careful timing.

The cattle were reacting with typical mindlessness, swarming over their inner ring of fortifications—quite good earthworks, though—with no fire preparation, no maneuver, no provision for mutual support. Their numbers were stunning: eighty to a hundred thousand, he estimated, filling his sight from left to right across the kilometer or so of bare space. As many more in the second wave, and a third rushing in on their heels; his position on the high ground of the Citadel's outer rim showed it in panoramic sight, like huge moving carpets spilling down out of the enemy fortifications and flowing up toward him.

Outnumbering his force of four hundred or so by nearly two hundred to one. Still, his were all Soldiers and equipped with automatic weapons. Military history showed clearly the psychological effect of massed automatic weapons fire could not be countered by any advantage of mass. His men didn't carry enough ammunition actually to kill all the cattle approaching, but they had more than enough to stall the horde in place and then retreat smartly inside the walls. Dealing with the survivors . . .

His lips thinned. He did not intend that many survive.

The open space between him and the horde was a shrinking semicircle, shrinking back toward the inner semicircle his men made about the main gate. From behind them, along the Bandari-designed earthworks, came massive thumps. Spigot-mortars firing; of course, they would have this area zeroed in. The Soldiers took cover as the massive shells landed. Not too bad, he decided, picking himself back up and shaking his head to free it of the dirt. And they won't have time for more than one more stonk.

Very close now.

Four hundred meters. No need for further orders. The early morning darkness made the muzzle-flashes of the assault rifles bright red knives stabbing into the horde. Men fell in swathes, scarcely a shot wasted, many striking multiple targets. His own weapon was on semiauto; Cyborg speed made it possible to fire just as rapidly as automatic, and to pick individual targets for each shot. He concentrated on the mounted nobles and khans grouped around their horse-tail banners, conspicuous among the dismounted majority.

Cyborg Rank Bonn frowned slightly as he switched magazines with blurring speed, firing again before the empty struck the ground. More than five thousand nomads had died in the last thirty seconds, but no slackening came in the pressure from behind. Even among the ranks running forward over the heaped, writhing dead and wounded, like spray breaking over rock—but the rock here slid and screamed and writhed. The smell of blood was overpowering, but the ear-numbing roar of the horde had not altered into the expected shrieks of fear. Three hundred meters to the outermost, then two hundred. The rifle barrels were shining bars of light to his IR-sensitive eyes, nearing the point at which the chambers would cook off the rounds before the bolts closed.

Another sound struck his ears, which were capable of sorting components from the high-decibel chaos of two hundred thousand men shrieking at the top of their lungs. A long bass note, like thousands of out-of-tune guitars. Then a keening whisde, loud even when compared to the shouting.

A hundred thousand arrows lifted from the horde and rose into the light of Cat's Eye, crimson blinks as they turned and fell toward the Saurons. Ah. They were capable of more coordination than I anticipated.

"Retreat!" he bellowed. Any longer, and too many would be caught among the enemy—who were, however, now nicely concentrated. The files of Soldiers turned and ran for the postern gates in the high wall behind them.

Another of the huge mortar shells landed. This one was not quite six meters from Bonn's position. He did not precisely lose consciousness—it was very difficult to knock a Cyborg out—but for sixty crucial seconds, he was unable to do more than stagger slowly.

I am cut off. The feeling did not bring fear, but more a sensation of intense annoyance. Another huge whine of arrows.

Bonn was a Cyborg. He could dodge; he could even keep firing one-handed as he batted arrows out of the air above him and twisted free of the paths of others. The rocky ground sang and sparked as the iron heads landed, and the earth grew a carpet of feathered bristles close-set as a drillbit's hairs. A third whistling volley rose from the plainsmen; they screamed their joy to see the Saurons retreat. Thousands more levelled smoothbores loaded with double charges and four or five balls each at the scattering of men around Bonn. The front of the horde belched fire and black-powder smoke. Those lead balls he could not dodge. Three tore into him, one into his groin, another into the inner thigh, one into his ribs.

Pain was merely a datum, incapable of affecting his behavior. None of the damage was immediately crippling to an organism capable of shutting down arteries and rerouting the blood flow. He kept firing and noted calmly that about half his men were doing likewise. Then less than half.

He was still functioning at what he estimated was approximately ninety-one percent of optimum combat capacity when the first of the tribesmen reached him. He threw the bayoneted rifle through the man's chest like a spear. Long-bladed knives appeared in both his hands, and he moved in a flickering stroboscopic blur of motion into the mass of the horde, where their own numbers would hamper them. He kept moving for nearly a hundred meters, killing or crippling with metronomic regularity, twice every .75 seconds on average. It was the bulk of his own kills, many still thrashing, that stopped him. One leg was crushing in a nomad's rib cage, both hands were slicing through flesh—a throat and a stomach—and his head was butting forward to smash in the frontal bones of a fourth enemy when the clubbed musket chanced to strike full on his spine in the small of his back.

Not even a Cyborg could command legs severed from the brain's nerve impulses. Bonn used the leverage of his shoulders to turn as he fell, and the knives cut the man who'd killed him nearly in half as he slumped backwards on the mound of corpses he'd made. Another man rushed in with a curved shamsir raised over his head, and catapulted backward with a bone-deep slash across the front of his thighs. Another nomad chopped into Bonn's legs with an axe—costing him not even pain—and died with a knifepoint through the top of his skull. Bonn flipped the weapon out and through the eye of another taking aim at him with a musket from three meters away.

The arrow went through his throat from left to right just behind the jaw. It had a four-bladed head, two triangles. The carotids were both sliced through, and blood began to pour down his severed windpipe. Bonn clamped control down on the arteries, keeping consciousness just long enough to fling the other knife into the archer's stomach.

A slamming thump sounded from behind the Citadel's walls. Black against the reddish sky, a dot hurtled skyward and out, aiming for the horde's center of mass a kilometer from the Citadel. Less than five hundred meters from Bonn's position.

He was dying. He allowed himself a smile at the nomad who poised above him with sword raised. Sharku may have calculated the probability of this, he thought. It was reassuring; such a Soldier was fit to rule. His kind had not performed optimally of late.

There was a single instant of intense light.

Blackness.

 

"Trek! Trek! Trek!"

Music to soothe the savage ears, thought Hammer-of-God. The army of the Pale, all that was left of it, was marching out of Nûrnen. There had been six thousand a few T-months ago; a third had gone ahead, another third was still in the fight, or spreading Sapper's little going-away presents through Nûrnen. Much joy the Saurons—or the nomads, in the unlikely event they won—might have of it. The rest of the People were mustered and moving, cavalry and foot, wagons and muskies, to the immemorial music of the Bandari caravan.

They looked like a caravan, an extraordinarily well-armed, well-provisioned, well-stocked caravan. Any of them who didn't know exactly how tempting they'd be to raiders on the way back to the Pale, probably deserved to get an arrow in the gullet for his stupidity. On the other hand, while some raiders might have managed to steal assault rifles from the wreck of Nûrnen, many of the riders in this caravan had one, and ammunition if not to burn then by the Three to shoot Hell out of any number of hotnots. Plus they'd be meeting the Pale's screening force, and falling back with it past the Bases. Dyar would be sticky, if the Saurons got reckless—but reckless overconfidence was something he was reasonably sure had been well and truly knocked out of the Saurons for the present.

He sat his big brown gelding on top of a pile of rubble, ignored the black-red throb of pain in his leg, and watched them swing past. As always happened with Bandari, once they got going they started to sing. The lot in front of him had a round going:

Seven they fought the battle of Nûrnen town,
Battle of Nûrnen town, battle of Nûrnen town,
Seven they fought the battle of Nûrnen town,
Oh, lordy, they fought!

Farther down, it was a bawdy song that would have made a land gator blush, and past that, good solid Psalm-singing such as even an Edenite could approve of.

O clap your hands, ye people;
Shout unto God with the voice of triumph!

And for punctuation throughout, the clap of explosions in the city behind them. One, two, three—pause. Had one missed fire? No, there went the next, and the one after that.

Hammer found that he was grinning. He must have looked like a tamerlane. There went a line of storehouses, right up in flames that clawed the sky. And there went half the armorers' quarter with a wondrous whoosh and roar. And away past the city, up around the mountain, the deeper crump of a mine collapsing. A great pity they hadn't been able to do the same with the Citadel.

Sword-of-Righteous-Wrath sat beside him; a young cousin pale with loss of blood. "War is waste," he said unexpectedly.

"Of many things," Hammer-of-God nodded. "We're destroying what it took generations of sweat to build. War is always expensive, though—and our enemies will be much poorer for a few generations."

Glorious, glorious destruction. " 'The hills melted like wax,' " he said to no one in particular, " 'at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.' "

" 'The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the people see his glory.' " Ilderim Khan inclined his turbaned, infidel head. While his eyes were laughing, his face was as sober as an Elder's. "We too are people of the Book."

"God is not mocked," said Hammer, but with less outrage than he might have mustered, if he had been less busy counting explosions. Marija bat Yende fan Gimbutas, Sapper's only surviving protege, had been given a free hand with captured Sauron and Nûrnenite ordnance. She had mined or boobytrapped or slow-matched every important installation in or near Nûrnen, set it all to go off on a schedule too complicated for ordinary mortals to understand, and assured Hammer-of-God that yes, it would happen exactly as Hammer wanted it.

And so it was doing. Except for the Citadel. Well, it was not given to any man to accomplish everything.

"We disabled them," Hammer said.

"As far as you knew," said Ilderim Khan. His mare, a slab-sided, ewe-necked, hammer-headed nag the color of beaten gold, took a sudden dislike to Hammer's gelding, who had done nothing whatsoever to earn it. She squealed shrilly and struck at him with her forefeet.

Hammer's horse, being a sensible beast and well aware of his position in the universe—far on the periphery, with the mare in the center—backed up and started to slide down the slope. Just as he got the gelding back to solid ground, the ground itself rocked, flinging them both down. More of Marija's destruction.

He had time, while he fell, to think, Hellfire! My leg! And time in landing to twist, and to feel the wrench as muscles gave way. But not the leg—not by the Three, the bloody leg.

Then Ilderim Khan was there, pulling him to his feet—one foot, anyway, and the other would damned well carry him regardless—and saying something, but what it was, he couldn't hear. The whole world was mumbling in the wake of the explosion. Munitions dump, he thought.

That had to have been a mistake, or a chain reaction. All munitions should be on Bandari wagons, making their way back to the Pale.

He took the reins of his humbly apologetic horse, rubbed the long nose in acceptance of the apology, and took stock. The column was still moving, if slower than before, and with some runaways among the animals. For the most part it was in decent order.

"Sauron's revenge," he said, though he could barely hear himself. He turned to bare his teeth at the Citadel.

Nothing, still, from up there. Uneasiness, that had been niggling at the back of his mind, moved to the fore. He flipped the reins back over the horse's neck and contemplated sixteen hands of Shangri-La Valley thoroughbred, his bloody miserable excuse for a left leg, and a rock that might do for a mounting block. Vanity of vanities, his inner voice rebuked him. All is vanity.

He'd made it his job to see the army of the Pale out of Nûrnen. Another regiment led by Karl had passed the Citadel and was riding fast toward where he waited at the Gates of Paradise. There were flames behind, in a pall of foul smoke. It looked like Hell, and Hell too all about them, blasted and ruined fields, mines blown up and flooded, bridges burned or blown to smithereens, the orchards ringbarked, the forests torched. Raiders still rode through the desolation, and would ride, for all Hammer knew or cared, till Judgment Day.

"Such a judgment," he said. His hearing was coming back: his voice sounded dim still and tinny, but better than before. " 'Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.' "

The caravan was past his vantage point, the head of it well on up the road, heading for the earthworks, and from there to the pass. He shot another glance back at the Citadel.

"Selah," he said harshly. "Thy will be done." He pulled and heaved himself into the saddle, glaring away Ilderim Khan's offer of help.

It took him a moment to see again through the red fog of pain from his leg. Once that faded to a ruddy haze, he half-turned the gelding on the hill, and took one last look at the battlefield at the gates of the Citadel.

The saddle was no more comfortable for Hammer-of-God's leg than the ground, but morning's infusion had dulled the pain a bit. Nothing but a hot bath and a day's sleep could really help, and Hellmouth alone knew when he'd get that. The last of the blockforce were clattering by him, over the crest and down the other side of the pass to deploy. Tumbled stone lay about them, the wreckage of the great Wall, more recent debris from the mortar bombs that had sledgehammered through the Sauron blockhouses a few cycles ago.

"Call it a precaution," he said to the other commanders. "Call it a message from God. But we'll stay here until we see what happens."

Down below the hill, a gaggle of hotnots had gathered, Mongols, Christian Ironmen, Turks, a couple of Tartars, some of the Cossack chiefs. They looked from him to the retreating column, broad-cheeked faces flat, empty of expression. The ones who wanted to avoid the assault on the Citadel, the better to stake out claims around it. He gave them his widest, whitest grin, and swept his arm wide, encompassing the whole vast field of desolation. "It's all yours," he said in steppe Turki. "Every last blood-dripping bit of it. God give you joy of it."

He waved them on. Karl's regiment was well into the Pass now. Up ahead, the Bandari were singing a song he knew well, one of his favorites of them all.

 
Turn around and go back down,
Back the way you came—
See Babylon, the mighty city,
Rich in treasure, wide in fame:
We have brought her towers down,
Made of her a pyre of flame, and—
Oh, Lord, the pride of man,
broken in the dust again!
 

Sharku saw Cyborg Bonn die. He turned tight-lipped to Sigrid. "That's another we couldn't afford to lose."

"It may make our jobs simpler, though," she said.

"You're a cold one."

"I might say the same of you. By the way, what will you do about your—former wife?"

"I haven't decided. Have you?"

"Not entirely."

"I won't have her harmed. Or humiliated."

"I had no intent to do that," Sigrid said. She turned motionless as she examined the battle below, Cyborg senses and Cyborg analysis in full play. Then she turned to Sharku. "Bonn did well. It's time. Mumak."

"Yes, Lady Sigrid?"

"Tell Gimli it's time to use the Sundevil."

Mumak looked from her to Sharku, unsure. "First Soldier?"

"Do it."

When Mumak had left to find Gimli, Sigrid spoke quietly. "I was with those"—she pointed out to the battlefield—"too long. I should have recalled the ways of the Soldiers. Of course he was right: the First Soldier ranks even a Cyborg Breedmaster. I won't make that mistake again. Sharku, do you think we will ever be—friends?"

"I don't know."

Then it was too late for talk, as the great doors behind them opened and Soldiers rolled a long thin tube on wheels out onto the upper parapet. Old Gimli, his robes discarded for a coverall with green and gold epaulettes, directed. "Mastertech Thorin, do we have steam?"

"Three hundred pounds, Techmaster."

"I see you started early reviving the old ranks," Sigrid said quietly.

"I saw no reason to wait."

"Load," Gimli said.

Sharku watched with interest. Nothing like this had happened for three hundred years, and every senior ranker he could spare was up on the parapet, along with a hundred picked Cadets.

Behind the Cadets a company of the First Regiment under Vizgor stood guard No one would interfere.

A section of the First escorted a group of techs, who brought out a shiny steel cylinder rounded at the ends. It was a meter in diameter and half again that long. They inserted it into the tube of the steam catapult. Gimli bent over it. Sharku could see that he opened a panel on the cylinder and made adjustments with some kind of control. "I'll never understand that sort of thing," he said quietly.

"You don't have to," Sigrid said. "You command. But our children will understand it."

Sharku turned to look out over the parapet into brightening daylight. The hordes were riding hard toward the gates. They had regrouped after recoiling from Bonn's sally. When they reached extreme arrow range the leaders halted them and set up groups to begin a continuous hail of arrows against the lower battlements. None reached as high as the parapet where Sharku stood, but he heard the zing! of a rifled slug over his head. Even the high parapet wouldn't be safe for long now.

Then they heard the chug of the Bandari mortars. Something exploded behind the main gate.

There was a cheer from below, and barbarians in baggy pants ran forward carrying an enormous battering ram. Sharku counted twenty companies, well disciplined, carrying ladders. Other groups came forward with muskets and Bandari rifles to fire at the Soldiers protecting the walls. Hundreds fell, but when one dropped another came up to take his place.

"Notice how the Bandari direct them," Sigrid said. "I can almost feel sorry for them."

"Do you think the Bandari officers know there won't be any help from the Inner Keep?" Sharku asked.

"No, but it probably wouldn't make any difference. Not to them," she said.

"Interesting. I see why you're interested in their genes."

"We'll have to decide what to do about them when this is over," Sigrid said.

"I'd have thought that obvious. There'll be work for a dozen Deathmasters next month."

"I wouldn't be too hasty about killing them all," Sigrid said. "They aren't the enemy." She pointed up to the sky. "There's the real enemy of the Race. We may need allies." When he frowned she said "You've read history. What did Alexander do with the Persians? And Rome with the Franks . . ."

"Techmaster Gimli reports all is ready."

Sharku looked down at Harad. "Thank you. Mumak."

"Sir."

"Sound the warning. Gimli, aim for the center of that group."

Mumak raised his hand high, then dropped it. Trumpets sounded, deep tones, then came a sound that no one alive had ever heard: the old air raid warnings of the Citadel began their keening wails.

Down below the barbarians paused in their headlong rush. The Bandari leaders shouted them on. "Am Bandari Hai!" The cry came faintly up to the battlements. "Allahu Akbar!" ten thousand throats roared in answer.

And still the sirens wailed.

"Take cover, First Soldier," Mumak shouted. "Clear the battlements! My Lady, inside!" There was fear in Mumak's voice, but he didn't go inside until everyone else had left the parapet. When he had seen to the closing of the great bronze doors, he sidled up to Sharku. "Thought I'd shit in my pants when I heard those damn things," he muttered.

"Down," Gimli said. "Behind the stone walls. Away from the windows. Don't look out. First Deputy Mumak, are the battlements clear?"

"Clear, Techmaster."

"Fire."

The whoosh of the catapult was astonishingly soft, almost an anti-climax after all the shouting. A hush fell over the Citadel, and the only sound was the wailing sirens.

 

The attack pouring over the plain before the Citadel was the most impressive thing Hammer-of-God had ever seen. Even across kilometers there was a sense of majesty to the sheer size of the horde; shapeless, though, except for the fringe of Bandari order along its rear, where the siege mortars were being levered forward. There were still fires across an arc of horizon behind them, showing that the first two-score thousand nomads down into the Valley were busily at work, converting it into the sort of desert they felt comfortable in.

Hammer blinked red-rimmed eyes and kept his spine ramrod-straight; his armor itched underneath, and he felt like something the cat dragged in . . . but he was the victor here.

"They'll run out of men before we do," Hammer-of-God said, looking down on the slaughter with a face that might have been carved from stone. The tiny Sauron force was hardly a dot before the advancing thousands. "Not like the soldati to make a gesture like that. I'd have expected them to wait on the walls."

"What's that on the high parapet?" Sword-of-Righteous-Wrath asked.

Hammer-of-God turned his telescope to the highest level of the Citadel. There were a lot of Saurons up there, and they'd brought out one of their steam catapults. As he watched, the Saurons loaded it, then—

"They're going inside," Sword-of-Righteous-Wrath said. "All of them, General?"

"All," Hammer-of-God said. A horror came over him. "As if it's something they don't want to watch—"

He saw a puff from the catapult, and a dot arced out high over the plain, shooting far past the advance and into the main battle of the hordes. Then it blossomed into—something, like a dandelion seed, so that it floated down toward the battlefield.

Later, he said he had heard the voice of God. All he knew was that he was shouting to the Bandari. "Look away! Don't look at that Hellish thing! Turn your heads, hide your eyes!" he screamed.

A moment, and some of the others around him took up the cry, although they couldn't know why, only that their General was—frightened? Hammer-of-God? Whatever they heard in his voice made them believe.

Even with eyes closed and heads turned away the light was nearly blinding. A flash, and more than a flash, because it was already brighter than the sun and it grew brighter still, brighter than any light seen on Haven in three centuries and more.

Light. For an instant he could see the bones of his hand, and then there was nothing—nothing but red-shot darkness, and pain. Hands bore him up; others were shouting, screaming, a horse was screaming in pain until a pistol-shot silenced it. All that was muffled, below a roaring that echoed back and forth from the stony walls around him until his head rang like a bell in some heathen temple.

"General!" Someone was shouting in his ear. "What shall we do?" Felt like young Sword-of-Righteous-Wrath from the strength. "They're blind! All the horde, they're blind! And—Jesus wept, General, the/re falling, they're falling, the whole horde, blind and dying, General, what shall we do?"

He forced his brain to function. Pain was nothing new to him, even if this time it lanced from his eyes into his head. "Which direction does the wind blow?"

"Down into the Shangri-La."

"Get everyone moving out to the steppes—everyone who can. Fast."

"But what happened?" Shulamit whimpered. "What happened?"

"The pride of man, broken in the dust again," Hammer-of-God said. "We presumed too much. We have gone into the lair and awakened the lioness."

He could barely see shapes and outlines, so he knew he wasn't blind. He almost regretted that, because it meant he'd have to live to serve out Chaya's judgment. Take my children home. "Aye, Judge." he said aloud.

Aisha's baby was crying loudly now. He could hear her above the wails and screams of the people. And from far below in the pass, too far to hear any distinct sounds, there was a high pitched moaning.

From the wagon behind him someone keened, "In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not."

O God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again. "Trek, trek," he shouted. "Move, you bliddy bastards."

He turned for one last look into the Pass. His vision was still red, and he couldn't see the plateau below the Citadel. "What do you see, Sword-of-Righteous-Wrath?"

"I see the people dying."

Hammer-of-God turned away. "The Wasting. The Wasting has come again to Haven."

 

Mumak wouldn't let Sharku be the first out on the battlements. He stood in his way until Gimli and his Technician Caste rankers reported that it was safe.

Sharku waited impatiently. Mumak had been given responsibility for his safety and Lady Sigrid's, and, in the old order Sharku intended to bring back, a taskmaster was supreme in his own domain, no matter whom that might inconvenience. It was time to set new examples, but that didn't make the waiting easier.

Finally, he was able to examine the strike zone.

It was a scene he had only heard of from schoolbooks. Thousands, tens of thousands dead, but worse were the dying, who lay in heaps, still twitching and writhing in what must have been the agony of the damned.

He felt Sigrid's hand on his shoulder. They looked into each other's eyes briefly, then back to the killing ground. There was nothing to say.

"Semaphore from Deathmaster Ghâsh," Harad reported. "The cattle are broken. He requests permission to storm their earthworks."

"Denied. Have him wait until the cattle are thinned. Mumak."

"Sir."

"Tell the gunners to let all through the Pass who want to go through. Let them harry the steppes. They can carry the tale of what happens to those who earn the wrath of the Citadel."

"Yes, First Soldier."

"You said I was a cold one," Sigrid said quietly.

"Techmaster."

"Aye, First Soldier."

"Tell me what has happened out there."

"I estimate the weapon to have a yield of eight kilotons, First Soldier. Shall I explain?"

"Briefly."

"It is a measure of weapon power. Eight kilotons is small. We have one Hellfire weapon that should yield nine hundred kilotons, if the descriptions are accurate."

"What will happen now?"

"Those behind stone walls, or in mines, will not be harmed at all," Gimli said. "You understand I report what the Archive Computers tell me. No one living has seen anything like this."

"Continue."

"Of those within three hundred meters of ground zero all were dead instantly or within seconds. To five hundred meters, ninety-five percent will die within the day, and virtually all will be dead within the week. At two kilometers half will die. Beyond that, increasing numbers will live, with various degrees of injury."

"Describe the injuries." Sharku watched the scene below. Many of those who had been moving now lay still, but there were many others wandering blindly on the battlefield.

"Their hair and beards will fall out. They will bleed at the gums, and, in the worst cases, teeth will fall out. Cuts and bruises will take long healing if they ever heal. Of those who recover, many will be sterile."

"The women behind the earthworks? Will they bear healthy children?" Sigrid asked.

"Those behind two meters of earth at that distance will be as safe as you and I," Gimli said.

Sigrid nodded in satisfaction. "There's our labor force. And the tribute maidens we'll need to replace what we lost to Sapper's bombs."

Sharku stood rigidly, looking at the battlefield, but seeing more than that, seeing the vast wastelands the Bandari had created. To the southeast smoke still curled from the ruins of Nûrnen. Behind him, work crews were clearing the Inner Keep of wreckage. A banner unfurled from the battlement; as he watched, the Lidless Eye—opened.

"Never closed again," he said quietly. He looked back at the field of slaughter. "Never closed again. We cower behind walls. We hide from the Empire, and for what? So that the cattle can breed warriors who may one day kill us? No. It is time and past time to look the Empire in the face."

He looked down at Harad, and pointed up, out beyond Cat's Eye to the stars beyond. "That's your destiny." Then he turned back to face the Soldiers along the battlements, and shouted. "Never closed again."

"Never closed again," Sigrid answered.

A moment's hesitation, then a Soldier shouted it. "Never closed again!" The cry was taken up by the Soldiers of the First Regiment who stood guard over their First Soldier. "Never closed again!" Others joined the cry, until it resounded through the Citadel, ringing from the stones, echoing through corridors from the Inner Keep to the outer gates, until every voice in that vast fortress was shouting.

"NEVER CLOSED AGAIN!"

THE END

 

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Framed