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Chapter Eight

Regiment Leader Ufthak stood at the edge of the crag, and looked down at the mouth of the Karakul Pass. From this distance the cattle milling before the Gate looked like ants stripping the bones of some giant beast who had slumbered far too long and fallen to an ignominious fate. It wasn't hard to see that carcass as the Sauron Unified State, not with over a third of a million enemies swarming before the Karakul Pass.

The wind tugged at his feet and he shifted to gain a better purchase on the rocks. He was inside the third courtyard of the Inner Citadel on a claw of rock too tenacious for even the raw weather of Haven to have tamed. It had also become known as the meeting spot of conspirators and lovers not eager to have their conversations overhead by the ubiquitous Threat Analysis Computer.

Not that there might not be a hidden microphone sculpted somewhere in the natural rock formation; however, the screeching wind made it difficult most of the time even for Saurons with their enhanced hearing to hear words shouted only centimeters away. Now, with the corroboration from Sharku's heliographed message about the Pale's involvement in the Shangri-La Rebellion, it appeared that everyone had been granting the TAC more infallibility than it had ever deserved.

The approaching sounds of leather soled feet on rock warned him of approaching visitors. He turned to see Gimli the Archivist, one of the six members of the First Council, and a short squat man he couldn't remember ever having seen. Unusual for Ufthak, who prided himself on knowing more about the comings and going of the Citadel than the TAC.

"Welcome, Archivist. If anyone questions why we are here, say it is to witness the cattle who have come to view their graveyard."

"Were it only so," Gimli answered, the last words turned to a whisper by a passing gust. "If Carcharoth continues underestimating these Bandari cattle, it may well become our graveyard."

"Yes, and if he hadn't sent Sharku and the regiments to the ends of the world—but enough of this, it all has been said too many times before, by ourselves and others. The damage has been done and now we must keep the Bandari dogs out of the henyard."

"These rocket mortars they used on our fortifications have changed the equation," Gimli said. "Without these static defenses, even the Battlemaster admits there is little we can do, with only two garrison battalions, to stop so many warriors. I have asked for, and received, the Battlemaster's belated permission to open the Weapons Vaults for armaments that will keep the cattle from breaching the Pass."

"At long last, some sign of sanity from our esteemed Battlemaster. What about the First Council? Why have they not insisted upon this days ago?"

"They are a revered and august group, but, unfortunately, far past their prime. Also, they fear the Battlemaster and his arbitrary authority. And, like too many of our fellows, they look upon Cyborgs as infallible; a mistake the first Diettinger warned us of before and after the Cyborg Revolt. Most of the members of the First Council believe a Cyborg can do no wrong; for them, to think otherwise is to cast uncertainty upon the Sauron ideal. Only the sight of cattle entering the Inner Keep could make them reconsider their cherished beliefs."

"Should the cattle make their way successfully through the Karakul Pass, Nûrnen will fall like an overripe Finnegan's fig. Unless Sharku relieves us, it is possible the Citadel itself may be in peril."

"Nûrnen stands in their way."

"We cannot rely on Nurnen. The Battlemaster has stationed half of the 16th Battalion to hold the pass, the other half to fortify the city, a thankless and hopeless job. Carcharoth is holding the 17th in reserve here in the Citadel. The wiser among our stalwart allies flee the city like rats from a burning hut. Two hundred and fifty Soldiers, bolstered by old men and youths, to hold a thousand times that many—another of Carcharoth's follies!"

"How have things become so bleak? I had not known."

Ufthak shrugged. "The Battlemaster relies on the TAC."

"It has not been wrong before."

"Are you certain?" Ufthak asked. "Sharku believes otherwise. We have lost no battles in the past because we have been stronger than the enemy. This does not mean we have fought efficiently, or even intelligently. Sharku has examined a dozen previous campaigns and shown how we might have won with fewer losses and less expense. Now it is late. Perhaps too late, even if Sharku arrives in time."

"I hadn't realized things had grown so bleak."

"Few know the true military situation." Ufthak shrugged. "Unless some miracle weapon resides in the Weapon Vaults, we may find ourselves in peril regardless of all Sharku can do."

"So you said before." Councilor Gimli nodded. "And so I have brought one who may be able to help. Tech master Thorin is one of those who guards the vaults."

The short, stout man stepped forth. Few outsiders would have recognized him as a Sauron; Ufthak, however, noticed the carriage and certain other subtle cues that told him he was in the presence of another Sauron. Not a Soldier, but, nonetheless, a Sauron. A Citizen. One unchanged from the times before they came to this world.

"Greetings," Thorin said. "Word of your exploits and Regiment Leader Sharku's have reached even those of us who labor unseen and unheard to keep the Citadel well and functioning."

"Sometimes one forgets just how large the Citadel truly is, Techmaster, and how many labor in its behalf. Your people have declined both in numbers and status under this long period of Cyborg ascendance. There are those of us who look for a return to the Founder's ideals of a new Sauron homeworld, not a backwater run by Cyborg masters with little understanding of destiny and the machines that will enable us to rule the stars again."

The little man's eyes shined. "You echo the dreams of those who labor below."

"I say what my leader tells me," Ufthak said. "For me, I am content to follow Sharku."

"Regiment Leader Sharku," Gimli said.

"For now that is his title. We can hope for another. I speak from his works. His discourses."

"We have seen some of those works," Thorin said. "Now they are no longer available. The Battlemaster forbids them, and harries them from view."

"We have more," Ufthak said. "From those who work the heliographs. From his wife. His accounts of the campaigns in the Valley make interesting reading. Would you like to be included among those friends?"

"I would indeed. Certainly, I know many who could be counted as new friends of our young Regiment Leader. Most have already heard of the Ranker who predicted the conspiracy among the Bandari to split our forces and relieve the Citadel of its protection, even when the TAC said otherwise."

"This is good to know. There will be an accounting for these and other errors when Sharku returns. It is good to know now that he has allies throughout the Citadel. His friends will be remembered."

For the first time Techmaster Thorin showed real passion. "There are many of us who have believed for a long time that the leadership here has been asleep. If we are to truly turn this world into a new Homeworld, we must regain the power and knowledge of our ancestors."

"Maybe," Archivist Gimli added, "this cattle attack is the wakeup call we've needed."

"Indeed it is," Ufthak agreed. "And it will be up to us to prepare the way for the new order."

"Is there anything we can do?" Gimli asked.

"We? I know one who can." Ufthak smiled slyly. "It is my understanding, Archivist, that Regiment Leader Sharku is a direct descendent of Galen Diettinger. We shall need proof of this if we are to restore the Founder's principles to the Unified State."

Gimli looked thoughtful. "I had not heard this. It must be well hidden."

"Hidden or not, it must be found if—"

"I understand." Gimli looked out at the field of the dead. "I had not expected to see so many enemies this close to our gates."

"That is the first group. There are far more coming."

"I see. Indeed—Ufthak, the Citadel holds many records. We don't always see them all."

"Sir?"

"But one of my predecessors often said that there has been so much inbreeding in the Citadel that every Sauron alive is in some respect related to Galen Diettinger and the Lady Althene."

"Then you should have no difficulty in providing the proof we need. Meanwhile, I will inform our supporters of this new and important discovery."

The Archivist looked at Ufthak as though he were seeing him for the first time. "It is an abuse of my office if I manufacture false lineages."

"I would never ask you to do that, Archivist. Certainly it would be a disaster if anyone suspected it. Yet we need proof that Sharku numbers First Soldier Diettinger among his ancestors. I can't imagine that such a task would prove formidable to a man of your skills."

Gimli looked at the fields of death again. "And there are more coming?"

"Soon."

The Archivist sighed. "I shall comb the records most thoroughly, Regiment Leader. I'm sure I will be able to find all the proof we will ever need."

"Good," Ufthak said. "Now Techmaster. What do we have in the Weapons Vaults that can stop these barbarians?"

"Those vaults have been sealed for a long time, Regiment Leader. We don't know everything that we will find. Some of the—relics—we have tended for lifetimes, but they decay. But there are also the records and plans."

"So?"

"We have had no time for more than a cursory inspection, Regiment Leader. However, we have already found some items of interest. There are machine guns that fire bullets of greater caliber and with far more speed than our Gatlings. We have already begun to unpack them and make ammunition as described in the manuals. We have instructions on poison gases, one called 'nerve gas' that sounds as terrible as any weapon ever made. Unfortunately, it would take weeks to make up the stocks. Many of the chemicals and reagents are in short supply in the Citadel stockrooms."

"Anything else?"

"The Battlemaster has ordered—"

"I no longer care what the Battlemaster has ordered. I speak for Sharku." He looked both ways, and said, quietly but forcefully, "First Soldier Sharku."

"First—you're mad!"

"No. Battlemaster Carcharoth is mad. And his orders have nearly destroyed the Citadel."

"You plan—"

"You need not be concerned. I want to know what is in the vaults."

"I will tell you when we know more."

 

"Yeweh Shield of the People," Barak murmured in awe. Shulamit knew exactly what he meant. She had heard of the great Wall all her life—the story of its building and its fall were ancient legend, like Babylon and Egypt and Earth—but seeing it was something altogether different. For long minutes the eyes refused to believe that it was a construction at all; the scale was wrong, it was like hills. Kilometer after kilometer, from the northern foothills of the Atlas right across the ragged gash of the Karakal Pass, anchored in high cliffs to the south. Once it had been a series of huge interlocking wedges; now it was more like a row of rotten teeth, like the jawbone of a fallen god. Even the stumps were dozens, maybe scores of meters high.

She and the others of the advance party were coming at it from the western side of the Steppes. Far ahead lay the stone-paved Sauron road that ran down from the Citadel to Nûrnen. It was still dimday, and she could see the dark flood of nomads fanning out before them through the Atlas Foothills.

brrrrrrt.

Red fire stabbed out. The Bandari party was still outside the Gatling's range but flattened instinctively; screams and shouts of Allahu Akbar echoed back from the monumental ruins. The humans ahead seemed as tiny as ants, a scurrying mob of drillbits.

Barak swung down from the saddle. "Margulis," he snapped. "Get that thing moving. The rest of you—what are you waiting for, the Saurons to throw rocks so you can build a sheep pen? Avrithai! Follow me!"

The Bandari dismounted and fanned out; unlike nomads, they were trained for combat on foot as well as on horseback. They darted forward, working from rock to rock. Shulamit adjusted the sights of her Sauron rifle and flopped down behind a boulder; ahead of her was a tangle of felt-clad bodies. The heavy 15mm Gatling slugs had torn heads from bodies and limbs from torsos, sawing open rib cages and bellies until the raw stink of it was nearly enough to make her gag. I should get used to this. This is war. Stobor cried somewhere, the smell of food fighting against the fear of man and giving an edge like hysterical laughter to their pack-howl.

There had never been a war like this. The rocky slope ahead of her was covered in bodies, clumps and windrows and pieces slung headlong. Shulamit slid the muzzle of her assault rifle between two leaves of stone and sighted carefully. Breathe in. Breathe out. Squeeze the trigger when you breathed out. Squeeze. Squeeze. The rifle tapped her shoulder and spat brass cartridge cases. She could see the rounds flicking at the stone around the firing slit of the Sauron bunker. Others of the People were opening up all around her, with Sauron weapons or the single-shot rifles of the Pale. She whipped the rifle back and rolled aside; none too soon, as Gatling fire sawed at the rock where she had lain. Heavy bullets went crack between the leaves of rock.

Shulamit leopard-crawled to a new firing position. More nomads were charging by; thousands of them, all across the defile. She saw a green banner with the crescent moon go down; another man snatched it up and carried it forward a half-dozen paces before Sauron bullets hammered him to the earth. Another picked it up, and another.

"Allahu Akbar! Gur! Gur!"

The yelping warcries were louder than the snarl of Gatlings and assault rifles. Shulamit bounced up and ran a dozen paces upslope and forward, under cover of a tribal warband; when she dove to earth and fired again, they were gone. Only a few hundred meters to the first of the Sauron pillboxes—

Something went by overhead. She buried her face in her arms. Whump. The ground pounded at her breasts and belly through her armor. Grit flicked between tight-squeezed eyelids; she blinked them open and blinked again to clear her vision. The beautifully balanced Sauron weapon came up easily, but the bunker ahead was tumbled stone.

"I wish Karl were here," she muttered.

The blocks of stone shifted, tumbling in dust that puffed red-white beneath fading Cat's Eye. She fired again and again as the Sauron fought to free himself; the half-seen figure jerked and stumbled. Those might be her bullets, but there were scores of Bandari firing at him—and many more nomad bows and jezails. She dashed forward again. Stocky fur-clad men with yataghans and sabers swarmed over the ruined bunker. One flew backward, his face a red blur, and then the others were standing in a circle. Their blades rose over their heads as they lashed downward. A few seconds, and a blond head rose on the point of a spear.

Exultant shrieks echoed from the ruins of the Wall, from the scores and hundreds close enough to see. Shulamit dove into new cover just as another bunker further up opened on the victors and chewed them into rags of bone and flesh, some of them moaning and whimpering. The Bandari girl's eyes were open—round and wide—but she squeezed the eyes of her mind closed as she clicked the magazine free, slid it into a pouch and retrieved another. It was not until she'd pulled back the charging handle that she realized there was someone else in the depression.

Two someones. Barak and Sannie; he was tying off a bandage around her upper arm, fingers impossibly agile and neat in the darkness stinking with cordite and black powder and blood all around them.

Shulamit rolled on her back. I really wish Karl were here, she thought again. Even if I had to be wounded. The thought made no sense, but the yearning was real. From here she could see quite a ways down the paved road; the Ariksa was set up there, behind moveable bulwarks of thick timber and drillbit gut. As she watched one moved forward, scores of muskylopes and men heaving and pulling. Sauron bullets plowed the dirt around them, and some fell but the range was long and the shielding tough.

She groped her canteen free and sipped. The water was shockingly cold on her raw throat.

"Why—" she said, and coughed. "Why don't the Saurons have something long range?" It was a bit better when she talked of impersonal things.

Barak looked up, his last touch gentle on Sannie's shoulder. "A Sauron with a sword or rifle is worth twenty, forty ordinary men," he said. "But all the reflexes in the world can't outrun an artillery shell. If the Saurons had built cannon, others would have tried—us, certainly—and when both sides had distance weapons, their advantage would go down. They're probably regretting that line of thought right now."

His strange eyes probed the fire-shot darkness ahead of them. "Not long now. We're nearly to the crest, through the old Wall."

Karl, Shulamit thought. Don't get your bliddy arse killed. I need you.

 

The Sauron caught the head of Karl bar Yigal's warhammer. Karl was faster than most men, much faster—but the Sauron's hand hadn't seemed to move at all.

He hadn't been expecting the force behind the blow, though. Bone shattered in his hand, and the tall man lurched. The backswing stroked the serrated head of forged steel into his temple. Brains and blood spattered on stone.

The sight didn't make Karl wince any more. He had time to notice the others around him; nomad and Bandari were both looking at him in awe, and nobody objected when he stripped the Sauron of his weapons and slung the assault rifle over his back.

"Come on, then," he said, pointing upslope.

They were on the western edge of the pass, climbing over shattered volcanic rock and the frost-crumbled concrete of the Wall's foundations. The Citadel was visible to the south: ascending circles of black stone wall and the long spike of the Inner Keep rearing up against the rock chimney that formed the base of the cliff extending to the top of the Atlas range, the roof of the world, above them, all lit by the dreadful unnatural light, blue-white and actinic, like a model through the clear air on the slopes of the Atlas to the west. Below them the pass was packed with attacking hordes. It was like watching a wave breaking on rock, as they washed against the interlocking fire of the Sauron bunkers. But here it was the wave that advanced, crying out and killing as it died. Behind them the Bandari mortars crunched forward, setting up for another bombardment.

"We're above them," Karl went on—the original officer was dead. "Nobody but single scouts up here. We can finish them off and take some of the flanking bunkers from above." He drew a deep breath. "Follow me."

 

"I've never seen anything like it," Hammer-of-God said in awe. "The hand of the Lord is on them."

A Sauron pillbox blew up on the slope above, a huge globe of orange fire against the night; for a second men and parts of men were silhouetted against the stars. Probably suicide. The bunkers were cunningly placed, dug into the ruins of the Wall, mutually supporting. They could do little against a sea of men indifferent to death. The bunker beyond fired until the lapping curve of bodies choked the gunslits. Bandari staggered up the rocky slope with something slung between them; they dropped it on the bunker's roof, bent over it for a moment, then dove away. A red-shot pillar of black erupted; when it cleared, the steel hatches had vanished in a writhing tangle of reinforcing rod shocked clear of shattered concrete. Another wave of nomads broke over the pillbox, this time leaping down into the hole the satchel charge had made.

A Sauron emerged. He was fighting, too strong for any number of men to hold when the space for hands on his limbs and body was limited. Each blow with fist and knee and foot and butting head killed, yet more climbed over the bodies to reach him. Some of them had steel in their hands. More plucked at him, and in a few seconds the Sauron warrior's body was nude, pale beneath the stars—then streaked with blood. He disappeared beneath the scrimmage, and then showed again . . . or pieces of him did, held aloft in triumph over screaming bearded faces.

"Hand of God?" Chaya asked, beside him on the hillock. "I've never doubted God, but this makes me a believer." He looked at her. "In Hell, General Jackson."

"Men run to Hellmouth as to a bride's embrace," Hammer-of-God said with simple faith, and a lifetime's experience of war. "It's Adam's sin, turning us from grace."

From here they could see across kilometers: the whole U-shape of the Karakal Pass, up to the fortress itself perched on the mountain's slope, and west to the saddle where the ground fell away to Nûrnen. And the ground moved, moved in a dark carpet that shone with starlight on a hundred thousand swords. The Bandari siege-mortars were islands of order in that swarm, turning northward to duel the Citadel's outerworks into silence as the horde went by in a torrent. A torrent that screamed in exultation as it passed the Seven and their standards, echoes booming back and forth between the mountain walls, falling in diminuendo from the giant fragments of the Wall. The sound was like nothing human, a white-noise roar that shivered in bones and guts.

A tongue of flame shot out from a bunker outside the Citadel's Wall: a flame thrower, one big enough to drop an arc of fire spilling across a hundred meters. There was a sharp smell, like—tar. Flame spouted again.

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