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Chapter Fourteen

In small groups, the fedaykin were passed by the blockaders in each tower. Watched by armed guards, they crossed the ditches that circled Nûrnen, then approached the old mine entrance to the northwest, where the Atlas Mountains reared up to defend the Citadel. Engineers had pried away the boulders; with any supports that remained from the long-ago days of the entrances use carried away, it looked no different from any other cave.

Hammer-of-God stood at the entrance, Barak with him, counting and checking names and faces against their lists and memories. "One traitor in our midst is more than enough," the General remarked.

"That's it, sir. All present. Ready when you say."

The Edenite looked out over the Valley. The wind cooled eyes tired by too many nights without sleep. Tainted by smoke and dung and blood it might be; as he prepared to enter the mine, it seemed better than brandy.

By the light of Nûrnen aflame and the twinkling of thousands of campfires, he could see the defenses he had caused to be built. A good plan. Circumvallate. Attack from secure positions. Send the tribes into the Shangri-La Valley, and isolate the Citadel. It might even have worked, given time. But time was every bit as much their enemy as their friend. If they could strike directly at the Citadel . . . he grinned mirthlessly and wondered if he would ever see the stars again, or the sky.

"It is not all darkness," the khan Nazrullah said.

Something Hammer-of-God had read during the godawful six months he had spent on his back recovering from the last time slipped into his thoughts. Above all shadows rides the Sun, and Stars for ever dwell. I will not say the day is done nor bid the Stars farewell.

He shrugged and entered the mine. "Move, dog," someone hissed. There was the sound of a kick, then Barak's voice.

"What if you break his ribs? We need him fit to climb for now."

They took the first leg of the climb in darkness, Nazrullah herding Strong Sven forward, Barak at their side, the strongest climbers spaced out along the line of march.

When they had gone so far into the side of the mountain that not even the hindmost could see the sky, they found shielded lanterns cached. They cast as much shadow as light over smoke-streaked stone tunnels, hacked out of the rock, then hardened by exposure to fire; but they were better than stumbling in the darkness, doubled over in some of the passageways, but always heading upward. Toward the mountains, the secret ways, and the Citadel.

From time to time, the rock shuddered slighdy. At one point, they had to wait as four men cleared rocks from their path.

"Water somewhere," Barak whispered. The shaft caught his words and amplified them.

"Watch for ice, then," Nazrullah said. "Is there ice, dog?" Strong Sven gabbled assent. They proceeded more slowly. After awhile, the rock changed from the friable, variegated tufa of the foothills into a tougher stone. Now they had entered the Wall of Allah. Despite their exertions, they were cold. The unevenly cut tunnel pressed in upon them. Breathing grew more difficult as the path rose upward more and more steeply.

"Not long." Nazrullah barely sounded out of breath. Some of the others were panting audibly.

They must make what time they could now, Hammer-of-God knew. When they reached the uppermost stages of the climb, they would have to rest about a quarter of the time, assuming that they could. And they would have to assume that, any instant, they could be attacked by men stronger, faster, and better able to see, hear, and even breathe here in the heights.

Damn. If he were shorter, his leg wouldn't hurt as much. He bared his teeth at the pain and realized that, once again, he was grinning.

The men nearest him pressed against the wall and let him pass. His leg didn't hurt as much.

He edged up to the head of the line and signaled for a halt. Taking out his knife, he showed it to Strong Sven. "Don't think to lose us in these mines," he warned. "You have no food, no light, no blankets. You would wander in the dark and cold until you died. When do we reach your secret way?"

Where . . . where . . . Strong Sven sounded willing, if sullen. There was a cache, a corridor intersected by several others. Some of it may have fallen away by now. From there, if you had the right guide, it was possible to reach . . . . But it was far away, very high . . . .

"We'll see," Hammer muttered. He had no stomach for torture, but he'd let not-so-strong Sven think he did.

And they climbed. They had a very bad moment when someone gasped for breath and sank to his knees. But it was panic and breathlessness, not gas buildup in the tunnel. Briefly, they stopped to eat, to rest, then kept on, always upward.

Finally, air blew in upon them from above. Cold air. Night air. Air from outside.

"Kill the lights!" came a hiss, and the lanterns were shuttered.

After awhile, the tunnel widened. Part of the rock wall had fallen open to reveal the sky. They saw starlight up ahead. Above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell . . . . Sweet suffering God, the light was beautiful. The cache—empty, more's the shame—of which Strong Sven had spoken lay open, but the passageways stretched out before them.

The traitor pointed. "That one."

Having no choice, they followed him. When they could no longer see the sky or smell night air, they dropped.

"Good rock, good walls. We built this part of the tunnel," one of the mujahedin told the man next to him. He didn't know that Hammer-of-God was nearby, so he was probably telling the truth. Thank God for small mercies.

Watchers, chosen in advance, rubbed their hands together as noiselessly as possible while the others wrapped up and slept. Or tried to. It was very cold. The thin air brought them strange dreams.

 

"Too good to last," Sharku said to Mumak after the Soldiers' regiments wrecked yet another clan group of nomads.

They paused; this was as good a spot to consolidate the spread-out travel formation as any, if they were to make maximum speed from here to the Citadel. There was a good road now, and engagements with the nomads were getting frequent enough to slow the separate columns down.

"Ah, well, what isn't, Deathmaster?" Mumak answered philosophically. "Sooner or later, the news of our coming had to get ahead of us. Even though we travel faster, this close to the Citadel, the plainsmen are jammed so tight, one clan against the next, that we bloody well can't smash one set of 'em without the nearest other bunch gawping while we do it."

"Now all of the bastards know we're here. Nothing's going to be easy any more."

"Nothing's going to be as easy," Mumak corrected. "We haven't had much in the way of trouble yet, and I don't expect we will, not until we get back to whatever lines the Bandari whoresons have thrown up around the Citadel. You'll deal with those, too, once we get there."

They all think that. Well, it's what I wanted. They came up to a river, one of the many that flowed into the Jordan, the big stream that drained most of eastern Shangri-La Valley. The stone-paved Citadel-built road ended in the concrete stumps of a bridge. Most of the timber structure lay in the stream, with white water foaming around it.

"Nomads didn't do that," he said grimly. The piers had been cut through neatlby explosive charges shrewdly laid—and then the wreckage blown up again, to destroy any surviving long timbers. Good building timber was rare this close to the Citadel.

"No, they didn't," the scout who directed them upstream to the ford said. "Shod horses—haBandari. In, blew it, got out again, two cycles ago."

Sharku and Mumak nodded. They're building up an account, Sharku thought. Aloud, he asked: "What's this one, the Rapidan?"

"No, the Rappahannock," the Soldier answered. "The Rapidan is next, then the Trebia, then the Scamander, and after that—"

"—the Mame," Sharku finished for him. "I remember."

He'd spent a lot less of his career in the long-pacified Valley than most Soldiers. He was an Intelligence officer by training, specializing in the plains nomads. "Once we cross the Mame, we ought to be in sight of Nûrnen."

More herds—lowing cattle, sheep that cropped the grass down to the ground, broad-backed muskylopes longer on horns than brains, furry stinking two-humped camels—chewed their way through the farmland between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. Seeing that country stripped raw made Sharku want to slaughter every plainsman he could find, but no time now. Push through, kill whoever got in the way, bail out the Citadel . . . everything else faded to insignificance.

Past the Rapidan, the going got easier. Suspecting a Bandari trap, Sharku was suspicious of anything easier than it should have been. He soon satisfied himself, though, that his suspicions were groundless this time. The going was easier because the nomads, once warned that the Soldiers were coming, fled as if before the wrath of Allah. They'd swarmed into the Shangri-La Valley for pasturelands and loot, not to stand up against a Deathmaster and the largest single force the Citadel had mustered in several lifetimes. The ones who wanted to fight were back in Nûrnen and the siege-works around the Citadel.

The land between the Trebia and the Scamanader proved even more empty than that between the Rapidan and the Trebia. Burned-out farm buildings and ravaged fields showed the nomads had been through, but there was worse damage. Once they had to detour around a huge mudslide that had taken out the road when a major dam burst open. Towns smoldered, wrecked to the foundations, and the local populations were gone—pyramids of heads or corpses charred in their homes, or marched back toward Nûrnen.

A belt of forest—Terran firs, mostly, their short, flat needles so dark a green as almost to be black—stretched east of the Scamander. Sharku ordered a halt for rest and reconnaissance; anything might have lurked in that gloomy, forbidding wood.

"See?" Sharku said. "This is what we buy for clearing out that rats' nest of New Soviet Men in the trees at the other end of the Valley."

"You're right," Mumak said seriously. "If they'd killed us outright instead, we definitely wouldn't have to be doing this now."

"An odd view. Kerak. Pick some escorts," Sharku said. "And let's see what's out there."

"Let me go, Deathmaster. You stay here," Mumak said.

"Another time." Soldier rank was functional—if you weren't needed to oversee, and had a skill, the skill got used. Besides, as the Sauron Role Model named Rommel had pointed out, a commander had to see the situation to give accurate orders. Particularly now that electronic gear was so scarce. And it won't hurt to have the men see I'm still one of them. "I need to look over the route. You're in command. Assault Leader Kerak, lead off."

The recon patrol swam the Scamander naked but for camouflage body paint and belts with knives, in the chill darkness of truenight. They were there to scout out safe routes through the forest, not to advertise their presence with gunfire. And besides, what deadlier weapon was there for close-in fighting than a Soldier's body?

The patrol split up into two-man teams once on the eastern bank of the river. "Open country again about five klicks east," Sharku reminded Kerak. "We shouldn't have a lot of trouble finding our routes. Nomads aren't likely to go poking their noses into a forest."

"No, but the Bandari might." Kerak's hand dropped toward the hilt of his fighting knife. "Deathmaster, I hope they have. Your new tactics save lives, but I owe these a debt I want to pay in person, not just at rifle range."

"A good way to get killed."

Two kilometers into the woods, they came up to the edge of a good-sized clearing. Till then, everything had been quiet. Sharku said, "We can be more thorough if we split up. You go right and I'll slide around to the left. We'll meet on the far side, fifty meters behind that stump there."

"Right you are." Kerak's green-brown-painted body vanished among the mossy tree trunks. Because he could see farther into the infrared, Sharku's eyes followed him further than an ordinary man's would have, but soon he disappeared even from the Regiment Leader's view.

Sharku semicircled the clearing, found the stump on the far side. He was a little surprised Kerak wasn't waiting for him fifty meters in; he'd given his scout leader a good start. When Kerak didn't show up after five more minutes, Sharku was more than surprised. The prickle at the back of his neck whispered something was wrong.

He started back around the clearing in the direction Kerak would have taken. He'd been relaxed before, not expecting anything but trees and woods creatures. Now he moved with every bit of woodcraft and combat caution he could muster. If something had happened to Kerak, it could happen to him, too.

He drifted forward again, one slow, cautious step at a time. His eyes found—nothing. His eyes . . . there, amid some ferns, lay a body. Had he not been able to use infrared, he might not have noticed it, for it was daubed and streaked in green and brown like his own.

"Kerak." Again his lips moved silently. His scout leader's head lay twisted at an unnatural angle. Whoever had ambushed him had broken his neck, as Snaga had broken the neck of the girl he was raping when it was time to move on.

But who—or what—could treat a Soldier so?

Something stirred in Sharku, something so old and strange he needed several heartbeats to find a name for it: fear. It wasn't the fear of death or mutilation on the battlefield; he'd met that demon many times, and had its measure. This fear bubbled up from a place deeper than genetic engineering could touch.

So, a man, then. In spite of his alarm, Sharku kept enough Soldier arrogance to be confident he could beat any man of the cattle who didn't have a gun. He stood up, took two steps into the clearing. "One of us is going to kill the other," he said, first in Americ, then in Turkic. "Shall we make a proper duel of it? I am Sharku, Deathmaster of the Citadel. Whom do I face?"

Silence on the far side for a long moment. Then the bushes over there stirred. Out came a warrior in dull brown tunic and trousers, with a cuirass of overlapping leather plates. Sharku needed a couple of seconds to notice the shape of breasts and the wide hips under the clothing. The woman bowed to him. "Tameetha bat Irene fan Tellerman, aluf of the Bandari," she answered, in a guttural dialect of Americ. "I'll nail you too, mamzer, if I can."

He knew he was staring. Some surprises, like some fears, ran too deep for the control genetic engineering brought. "You killed Kerak?" he blurted.

Her hawk face split in a mocking grin. "Bet your ass I did, soldat. Found myself a tree trunk to hide behind, waited till he came by—fool was humming to himself, told me right where he was at—broke his fucking neck. He never knew what hit him. With a little bit o' luck, I'd've scragged you too." Her features clouded. "Even Piet only got the first one, though."

To most Soldiers, the remark would have meant nothing. But Sharku's specialty was Intelligence. He'd become familiar with the Bandari legends. Their folk hero, Piet van Reenan, was supposed to have slain a Soldier (some version he'd heard said a Soldier and a Cyborg) in single combat before he died himself of some massive bodily overload.

It was, Sharku admitted to himself, just possible. Van Reenan had been of the Frystaat blood that kept cropping up among the Bandari to this day. The Soldier took another look at Tameetha. Wide shoulders, especially for a woman, scanty subcutaneous fat that left the muscles he could see defined like a man's—she carried a goodly number of those genes herself. She might have broken Kerak's neck. She might break his, too.

"By your Three Faiths, Bandari," he began, and saw her eyes widen ever so slighlty at his knowing and using that oath, "you've really gone and buggered this whole stinking world, do you know that?"

"Fuck you and your muskylope turd of a mother, Sauron," she said. "You've no bliddy business talking about buggering Haven, not after what your kind did to it when they got here."

"It was here for the taking. We took it," he said. It was strange, talking to a cattle female—no, a female barbarian warrior—but he might learn what else they faced before they reached the Citadel. And Bandari liked to talk. And talk . . . . "The only difference between what we did to Haven and what you Bandari did to carve out your stinking Pale is one of scale. We were stronger, so we took more. Methods? After what you've done here, you'd better think twice before you squeal about the moral advantage."

She glared. He'd hit a nerve. "We didn't use Hellfire."

"But we did. And how many of your friends died on the way here? None of your own, but how many plainsfolk?"

"Hotnots," the Bandari woman said dismissively. The word and the way she said it raised echoes in Sharku's mind: he would have said cattle in that exact tone.

"Besides, when has a Sauron ever given a flying fuck about what happens to the nomads? They—"

In the middle of the sentence, without change of expression or voice, she plucked a knife from her belt and threw it at him. She launched herself behind it, another blade in hand.

Sharku was fast enough to knock aside the thrown knife, but he couldn't do that and pull out his own before Tameetha was on him. She struck upward, to rip his belly and seek his heart. He grabbed her wrist, arrested the point bare centimeters from his skin. She was, he realized with something approaching horror, almost as strong as he. Her left hand grabbed for the knife he hadn't been able to draw.

He chopped her hand aside. Real hand-to-hand combat, as he'd discovered before, was a much less orderly, much less precise business than the practices on neat padded mats back at the Citadel. Close-quarter fighting between Soldiers and cattle rarely lasted long enough to give much of a corrective. Have to do something about that, whispered the one percent of his mind not actively engaged in fighting.

Tameetha butted, trying to break his nose with her forehead. He ducked; the blow landed on his own frontal bone, and shook them both about equally. His thumb found the nerve plexus inside her knife wrist. He squeezed with everything he had. That should have crushed a bone, but Frystaat genes built bones to stronger patterns than was usual on Haven.

Even if it didn't do just what he wanted, he got enough from that squeeze: it forced the tendons of her hand to open so the knife fell out. One less variable, he thought. He was beginning to have her measure. She was well trained and—yes!—far stronger than he'd ever imagined a woman of the cattle could be, but she wasn't very fast, at least not by his standards. And she was not used to fighting anyone near her own strength, which he was.

The fight didn't last long after he realized that. He won a groan from her when he wrenched her arm back at an impossible angle. Then he landed a solid kick in the pit of her stomach, the tough lames of her armor buckling under the force. She folded up and crashed heavily to the grass. Without wind, with internal injuries that must be bleeding, she still tried to rise. He kicked her in the neck. She went down again, strangling with a crushed larynx.

He stared, aghast; he'd intended to break her neck like a stick, give her what she'd given Kerak. Maybe this is better, he thought, she'll suffer more.

He shook his head. He wasn't Snaga: he killed because he had to, not for the sport of it. Warily, lest she hurt him even as she died, he approached with drawn dagger.

The wariness saved his life. The rutch of a bowstring and the hunnn of exhaled breath as the archer loosed had him crouching and diving backwards, rolling away as the arrow went thock into a tree. Another followed before the sound had died.

Sharku cursed as he flitted noiselessly around the clearing. The Bandari were probably doing the same thing he and Kerak were—scouting ahead of a larger force. They hadn't brought firearms for the same reason his assault rifle was back in camp, to avoid noise at all costs. Bows did not make much noise, however.

Two more figures in mottled leathers darted across the clearing to where Tameetha lay; they held bows in their hands with knocked arrows. The bows had pulley-wheels at the tips. Sharku's reports estimated their range at up to three hundred meters. One Bandari knelt beside Tameetha's thrashing form as the other stood guard.

"Vanished Homeworld!," Sharku muttered. No wonder the Bandari ranked next in might on Haven to the Soldiers if they made even women into warriors like that one. And, of course, they had the enormous advantage of being able to point to the Soldiers as the greater danger, so their own machinations and crimes went unnoticed till too late.

Physically, Sharku wasn't damaged past scrapes and bruises that would quickly heal. He moved slowly, taking his time to go east through the woods again, past the spot where lingering IR warmth and scent indicated the archers had waited.

Keeping at maximum alert as adrenaline drained away took all the control he had over glands and nerves. It paid off, though: not far from the edge of the woods he scented horses, then heard a quiet stamp as one shifted weight. Four of them; and a man, in dark leathers like the ones Tameetha and the bowmen had worn. This fellow was less wary than she had been.

The Bandari was still trying to soothe his horses when Sharku hit him in the side of the head with what was just short of a killing stroke. He sighed and crumpled, and the horses broke free and galloped away into the open field to the east. Sharku slung him over his shoulder like a sack of barley and started back to the Scamander on a wide arc around the clearing where he and Tameetha had fought. If fate was kind, having a Bandari prisoner might begin to make up for losing Kerak. Even with field techniques, the Soldiers could tear what they needed to know from his carcass.

By the time Sharku reached the river, the prisoner was starting to squirm. Swimming with an uncooperative captive would be more trouble than it was worth. Sharku hit him again, not quite so hard this time.

The trip back across the Scamander showed how worn he was. He wondered if the river was trying to rise up and drown him, but the real foe was his own exhaustion. That made him wonder, too, how many of the Soldiers were close to their breaking points.

We can't break, he thought as he wearily splashed up onto the western bank of the Scamander. We still have too much work ahead of us.

 

Everything had gone wrong—the Citadel bypassed, the Gatling nests that should have warded the pass blasted by the cursed mortar the Bandari had fetched, Nûrnen burning, works going up to keep the Regiments now in the west end of the Valley from rescuing the town or the Citadel . . . all in all, it was enough to drive a man mad, especially when that man was the one who had ordered the Regiments away from the Citadel in the first place.

Carcharoth's smile stretched slowly across his face. Nothing could drive him mad, not now. He was mad already.

Part of his mind knew it and still struggled against it. The rest, though, the rest had tipped onto that slippery slope the moment he realized the TAC, in which he'd placed his trust, proved fallible after all. Let a Cyborg's most basic assumptions be overthrown and everything they supported would eventually crash down with them.

The outer shell of the Battlemaster's persona still held, though even it had cracks—he'd seen white all around the edges of Dagor's eyes, as if they were those of a spooked horse. Still, the wild Soldier clung close to him; he'd done a good job of establishing a master/disciple relationship before his own degeneration had made further advance along that front difficult. Now, even while Carcharoth paced the battlements of the Citadel's outer walls, in his own mind he moved more through the misty world of legend than the mundanity of the siege. As reality faded within him, the archetypes of the mythos the Soldiers—the Saurons—had fostered reached upwards into his consciousness. The flame thrower he often carried seemed more and more a part of him. It was right that he should have the power to enforce his will with a whip of fire.

His eyes went to the mountains on whose skirts the Citadel sat. He laughed. A sentry—a youth who might make a Soldier if he lived—gaped at the spectacle of a Cyborg snickering. Carcharoth turned on him. "What would you have me do, boy? Bury myself with vain labor at the Threat Analysis Computer like that fool of a Breedmaster?"

"N-no, sir," the boy stuttered.

Carcharoth laughed again. You'd have to be a madman to think anyone would climb those peaks and take the Citadel from behind. Who would bother even to scan them, when the air ran out before the mountains did?

And yet, high on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains, where only a madman would think to find enemies, he spied motion. Even he doubted it. But where common sense had run out of him like beer from a cracked cup, his senses still functioned on a level of animal perfection. He saw what he saw: men, attenuated by distance even to his Cyborg's sight, toiling upwards.

What are they after? So small a force could scarcely endanger or even distract the Citadel in direct assault—and there were five thousand meters of sheer cliff between their position and the Inner Keep. Too many were up there to make a reconnaissance party; a handful would have sufficed for that.

Carcharoth's mentation implants still worked, after a fashion. Methodically, he searched through everything he'd ever learned for connections between the mountains and the Citadel. In microseconds he found one, in the most literal sense of the word: some time not long after the Citadel was built, a tunnel had been dug from the fortress up to . . . a point not far above where the climbers labored. Records showed the workers had been quietly killed after the work was accomplished, and then three generations later the tunnel had been sealed with a ferroconcrete plug.

The cattle had a purpose, then, and not mere reconnaissance. They wanted to sneak down a long dark tube and give the Soldiers a surprise, did they? He turned to the TAC and sent a message to the Duty Officer: THREAT TO INNER KEEP THROUGH CLOACA TUNNELS. PREPARE AND DEFEND.

EXECUTE.

The Battlemaster's smile was enough to make one of the young sentries recoil in horror. Carcharoth made a mental note of that, to settle accounts later. Now, he was busy.

He all but flew down from the wall, then trotted across the parade ground at what was close to full sprint for a non-Cyborg. He didn't have the flame thrower on now; he'd left it in a little chamber a couple of doors away from Interrogation. But it was, for where he was bound, the perfect weapon.

With the vivid projection lent him by his Cyborg enhancements, he saw the bandits crisping in flames like moths diving at a candle, heard their—brief—screams, smelled flesh cook and char. The imagined odor made his mouth water.

He pushed past Soldiers and tribute maidens and their brats as if they did not exist; for him, they might as well not have been there. Then a man called after him in accented Americ: "Where away so fast, Battlemaster?"

As few would have, that voice pierced his fantasies, brought him back a moment to the here and now. He said, "Come with me if you care to see, Dagor." Then he pressed on again. By the footfalls behind him, Dagor followed.

A procession of two, they hurried past the corridor which held the armored room wherein dwelt the TAC—and, these days, Titus as well. Carcharoth's lips drew back from his teeth in a snarl of contempt. Let the Breedmaster manipulate useless symbols if he would. Carcharoth had no need for symbols. He'd come across what was real.

Deeper into the heart of the Citadel he pushed, following the map in his mind as if it had been projected in the air in front of him. When at last he pulled open a door, its hinges squealed in rusty protest but could not withstand his strength. Dust lay thick inside; no one had come here in many years.

"Where are we, Battlemaster?" Dagor asked in a low voice that fit the gloom of the surroundings.

Carcharoth did not answer, not with words. He undogged a door that stood against the far walls. That was thick metal, salvaged from the hull of the Dol Guldur itself, still spotless after the centuries. When it came open, it revealed a tunnel cut into the living rock. Cold, musty air flowed out of the tunnel and engulfed him. Without hesitation, he plunged into the opening.

No light had shown there since the cattle cut it not long after the Dol Guldur came to Haven and the Citadel was raised. Nor did Carcharoth carry torch or candle. Nevertheless, he could see. His own body radiated enough infrared to give his enhanced and cybernetically augmented eyes a source of illumination.

He advanced slowly even so. The footing was treacherous; cracks and crevasses had opened in the floor. Dagor stayed on his heels. The wild Soldier was no Cyborg, but he had the glowing infrared image of Carcharoth to follow.

After curving down for a time, the tunnel began to climb.

Here parts of the way were rough, natural bubbles in the volcanic basalt. The Battlemaster nodded in grim satisfaction. This was the way he'd thought it to be.

"Where are we?" Dagor repeated.

Carcharoth pondered. Having someone fully appreciate his brilliance might be pleasant. He deigned to explain. "Long ago, we opened this secret way up into the mountains. The secret was kept too well among us; I doubt anyone but I knows of it now. But the Bandari, curse them, have somehow found it from the other end. The records say the tunnel was blocked, but I doubt that will hold them. Thus I shall meet their would-be raiders here deep underground, where the advantage will be all mine."

"But, Battlemaster—" Dagor had nerve, if he dared protest to a Cyborg. Stammering a little, he went on, "Shouldn't you have told someone before you set out on this course? What if you fail?"

"The Balrog stands forever alone. So it is written, so shall it be."

"I don't understand," Dagor said, and then, after a moment, "Do you—do we—Sau, uh, Soldiers then have legends too, like the tribes of the plains? I hadn't thought so until just now."

"Not a legend. Say rather deeper truth."

Dagor said "Battlemaster, shall I go back and fetch aid for you?"

Carcharoth considered. Part of him wanted to fry Dagor for his presumption. Watching a gout of liquid flame crisp a man would be . . . pleasant. But no. Though the madness in him grew with every heartbeat, it had not yet consumed him. Not quite.

And he knew the error he had made, and the price a Cyborg who made such an error must pay—alone. Regretfully—he would have liked someone to see what was all too likely to prove his last stand, to weave it in among the legends of the Race—he said, "Aye, tell them if you feel you must. And Dagor—"

"Battlemaster?" the young wild Sauron said. But, though his voice doubted, Carcharoth saw that some deeper part of him understood.

He finished, "If any man save I should come alive from this tunnel . . . avenge me."

"It shall be as you say, Battlemaster." Dagor looked away. Trying not to reveal his emotions, Carcharoth judged. The genetic material might have been promising, but the training—just for a moment, the Battlemaster functioned very much like his old self. The youngling's training, he thought, should have been much better and would require improvement if he ever expected to make anything of himself.

Dagor fled down the tunnel, toward the men—and the women, and the children—sheltering in the heart of the Citadel. When he presented his back to Carcharoth, the Battlemaster again all but flamed him down—the impulse to exterminate a fleeing foe was strong, strong. A last time, he mastered himself. Dagor was not the foe. The foe lay ahead. Carcharoth resumed his advance, looking for the perfect place in which to lie in wait for the enemy.

 

Three T-days into the climb, the first man died. The guard whose watch he failed to relieve went to check on him and found him cold. They wrapped him in his blanket and laid him out with care along the side of the tunnel. Someone grumbled that one of the other commandos might welcome the extra warmth.

"We don't get that cold," Sannie hissed. "Sir, what do you think?"

"Leave it. God knows, I'd like to come back and retrieve his body, give it decent burial," Hammer-of-God muttered.

"He lies in the finest tomb on Haven," Nazrullah said. Sannie nodded, saving her breath for the climb. She smoothed the coarse wool over the dead man's face. Her own fingers had not swollen as much as those of the other fedaykin. It made them clumsy. In his nightly meditations on "what could go wrong," that reminded Hammer-of-God to check on the engineers' gloves. If they lost fingers in this climb . . .

Vertigo took out another man; a rockfall caught one Tibetan woman and the three men of different tribes who tried to dig her out and were caught in a second shower of jagged rocks.

No one fell behind. Shamyl son of Shamyl began vomiting and complained of agony in his right side. The medikos among the death commandos whispered together about attempting surgery, but the young mountain man disappeared one rest period when the lanterns were out.

Iskendar of the Silver Hand—Alexander the Great—had lost more of his three hundred. But he had won his battle. Now the air stabbed in their lungs. Hammer-of-God's leg ached, then numbed with the cold. It took as much courage as anything he had ever done to examine it for signs of blackening. He would not allow himself to die, he vowed as slowly as his son had when his wound rotted. He would make it look like an accident. And still they climbed, up past the roughest of the walls into a passage where the walls were smoothed out, symmetrical. Sauron work, no doubt. Barak leaned up against the side of the tunnel, listening. "Damned water," he grumbled.

"Don't complain," Sannie told him. "We may run short."

"The sound masks anything else that might be there," he complained. "I can't hear."

And it wouldn't have mattered much if he could. They were all jumpy, all imagining noises and voices and lights that weren't there. It was the thin air.

They passed out of that tunnel under open sky and wind so cold that it practically froze their eyelids shut. Already they were higher than you'd have imagined anyone could climb and live. This, Nazrullah said, was the level of his village.

Gasim muttered something about coupling with afritahs, rather than women, to which the Afghan replied with an obscenity about yaks and plainsmen. Barak swiftly distracted them.

Not long now, Strong Sven reported, wheezing. He began to go more and more slowly, muttering to himself, weeping on occasion as he sought to remember. "Do you regret your bargain?" Hammer-of-God wanted to ask one of any number of times. Easy enough to release the traitor from it. He had not been pleasant company.

He became speedily less pleasant when Barak, Gasim, and Nazrullah began to question him. "I told you," he wept. "Up ahead. There's a rockfall. You have to move it . . . ."

"You expect us to listen to that, get ourselves killed in an avalanche?"

"Behind it is the seal. Move it—if you can." His voice was thin with malice as well as exhaustion.

The engineers spent what seemed like a frozen eternity poking and prodding at the rockfall when they found it. Any one of those stones might be the keystone to a collapse. Ultimately, the engineers couldn't be risked. Volunteers pulled the rocks aside. "That patch is artificial," Hammer's cousin Smite-Sin Jackson said. He scraped away at it with a knife blade. "Ferroconcrete, just as we thought." He tapped the rock wall with a hammer, then started to scrape.

"What's that?" someone asked. "Who scraped against something?"'

Barak pressed against the rock. "Nothing there," he said. "Just the damned water."

They spent the rest of that waking period working in shifts—very short shifts. Removing rock. Digging into the living rock, planting their charges, then pressing back huddled together, as much as possible, as the fuses were laid. They held themselves immobile.

Hammer-of-God flexed his leg, not wanting it to collapse if he had to move fast. "Be ready," he whispered. Certainly, the explosion might be heard and the concussion felt through the rocks. The time it took to draw and shoot might be more time than the Saurons would let them have.

"Now!"

Smite-Sin touched fire to the fuses, then flung himself, gasping, to safety in the bend of the passage. Prayers and imprecations that the Saurons consider this another quake or rockfall hissed upward in the silence as thin tracks of flame raced toward the charges.

There was that heart-stopping moment that kills engineers wondering if their explosives were going to work this time. And then, fire and explosions tossed them about like beans in a jar. Coughing, gagging, and tossing aside broken rocks occupied them for what felt like an eternity. The engineers edged out, poking at the rock face.

"Is it going to hold?" Barak asked.

"Can't know till we try it." For once, Be-Courteous didn't have a whole speech prepared. They were all shivering a little from reaction.

"Let me go first," said someone. Hard to tell who it was in the dark, when your ears were still ringing and everyone had a blackened face.

I lead. The words were on the tip of Hammer-of-God's tongue. Son, there are two kinds of leaders. Those who lead from behind, if you can call "leading" what they do, and those who lead from up front. But he wasn't the man for this job, he knew. He was the only one who knew that, sometimes, you had to order other people into danger it would be easier to face yourself.

He growled something that the man could take for assent or approval. Then he added "Take him!" The wall breached, their traitor suddenly became a whole lot less valuable, except maybe as protection for a brave man. Strong Sven's leash was passed to the new leader.

The passageway ran on—level now, thank God, given the way they were all coughing from the powder and the rock dust. You could tell the difference in the way the Saurons built for themselves . . . steeper gradients, fewer handholds or stopping places. They didn't need such things themselves and clearly saw no reason why they should build them—or order them built—for anyone else.

Barak stopped so suddenly that Sannie bumped into him.

"I hear . . . something," he rasped. "We're not alone in the tunnel."

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Framed