Chaya gave the baby to Karl. Then she took Sigrid's hand. "Come with me, girl." She led her out of the room.
"Not alone, Grandmother!" Karl shouted. "Not alone with the witch."
"I will go with them," Shulamit, said.
"You will not," Chaya said. "I will choose my own companions. You will stay and care for the child." She looked around the room. "Strong Arm will stay to guard you. I will be guarded by Praise-Be-Given. Now come."
She led the way out of the room of blood and toward the walls. Torches flashed in the truenight darkness, and fires still burned in the wreckage of what had been the most prosperous city on Haven. Around them they could feel rather than see an army assembling. A hundred languages washed around them, as plainsmen, tribes from the High Steppes, Christians in mail armor, Turkomen warriors with curved swords, all assembled for the final jihad against their hated enemy. For a moment Chaya believed they had taken the greatest city of the world, and only one fortress remained . . .
Far ahead, high above in the distance, the lights of the Citadel blazed brighter than stars, brighter than any torches. "Witch lights," Praise-Be-Given said.
Sigrid snorted.
A dozen torchbearers came to walk with them, but Chaya sent them away after taking a torch from one and giving it to Sigrid. As she handed it to her, she said "I know what you intend. Be calm, child."
After half an hour they reached the first wall. Chaya ordered a gate opened and they went through.
"There is danger," the gate captain said. A short man, a Ghurka mountaineer of the Central Atlas clans. He fingered his great curved knife. "Corporal Nural crept close to the enemy camp and heard talk that another battalion from the Valley has come."
Chaya swept her hand toward the Pass. "By the time they get here, we'll have the Citadel. Let them break their teeth against our walls. Let me through."
She led them on to the final gate, and turned to Praise-Be-Given. "Leave us."
"Judge—"
"I did not request your advice."
The Edenite stifled whatever he was about to say. "I'll be within call," he said. "With a rifle aimed at that one."
"You wanted to talk?" Sigrid asked. "I want to bargain."
"I assumed as much. What do you offer and what do you want?"
"I offer your life."
"And my horses."
Chaya snorted. "You don't know what I want, yet you ask for more than I offer?"
"Of course, Judge. And I know what you want. You want a friendly voice within the Citadel. You want someone to prevent the doom that faces you and all your people."
She speaks to me as an equal. Sauron to Sauron. They train them well, for she guesses what I know. "You already have reason not to wish us all dead," Chaya said.
"I want the horses."
"You are mad."
"No, Judge, only logical. If I have my horses, I will have another reason not to wish all of you dead, and more influence in the Citadel as well. I may be the only one in the Citadel who doesn't want to exterminate you. You do understand that with all the best will in the world it will be impossible to stop—" She waved toward the lights of the Citadel. "You threatened what they hold dearest. Do you think they will ever forget? You're enough like us to know."
"You said 'they'."
"I did, didn't I? I grant that I find you interesting. The Race may need your genes. That you came this close to—harming us—is enough to show that not all the best breeding stock on this world lives in the Citadel. But I still want my horses."
"We may yet win," Chaya said.
Sigrid didn't answer.
"You will warn them of our attack."
"At first light even the tribute maidens can see the forces you've assembled in Nûrnen, and broken or no, the Threat Analysis Computer will know that you have no choice but to attack. The most junior Cadet knows that. You can't feed this horde much longer, and you can't take them home through the waste you've created. You must attack and you must win or you will starve; and the lowest rankers of the Citadel know that. No message I can carry will do them any good in this battle. Why must I tell you this? Has your Sauron blood become so thin you can't think straight?"
Chaya stood rooted for a long moment. "Praise-Be-Given," she called softly.
"Yes, Judge."
"I have an errand for you. I want you back here in an hour with—this woman's horses. And I don't want you to talk about it, not to anyone else, and not to me. Just go and get them!"
Praise-Be-Given handed Sigrid the bridle leads with a sour look. He wouldn't speak to Sigrid. "The dogs followed, Judge," he said. "I wouldn't kill them without orders." The Judge had forbidden him to speak of the horses, so this was his subtle disobedience. His look showed that he valued obedience over good sense, but not much.
Even so, Sigrid nodded her thanks. Dogs and horses seemed well, eager for exercise after their confinement. The two-T-year-old pawed the stony ground in impatience. Sigrid turned to Chaya. "We won't meet again."
"And I won't wish you well. Go, Cyborg."
Sigrid nodded and strode away at a brisk pace. The horses followed contentedly, the foal wobbling unsteadily behind its mother. Sigrid walked steadily, but the back of her neck tingled. Her life depended on the obedience of Praise-Be-Given, and she knew that it would take only a wave of Chaya's hand to end her life.
A line from a school poem came unbidden. It was only by favor of mine, he cried, that you rode so long alive . . . .
She was out of sight of the gates, over a low hill, when she heard bells ring in the towers behind her, not the rapid ringing of alarms, but long, slow tolling. The word must be out that Aisha was dead, another of the Seven fallen. Somewhere not too far off, people were firing into the air—not that that had not been a common occurrence since the city fell, but this had a more desperate sound, the concussions closer together and accompanied by shouts and cries.
She picked up speed. Her body felt like a watersack filled to the bursting point. She shut down the awareness. The child at least was quiet. It had dropped some time since. She was beginning to dilate. But she was not yet, not properly, in labor.
There would be time enough. She could control it to a sufficient extent, provided there were no undue delays. This brisk pace was more help than harm: the muscles needed good, steady exercise just before they went to work in earnest.
The wall behind her flashed with torches, but she had no need of light. This was the old road from Nûrnen to Firebase One, a road that the Breedmaster's daughters had traveled a hundred times in childhood. Ahead the road led through an orchard now hacked and burned and full of filth. Human filth lurked amid the rest, drunken flotsam, corpses, and a lone figure with a musket slung on its back, stripping the bodies.
Sigrid paused for a moment, then tied the horses to the stump of a ruined peach tree. She crept up to the corpse robber. The snap of his breaking neck was oddly pleasant. She took his weapons as spoils of war. The musket was worthless but he had found a good pistol which she kept. Then she turned her back on Nûrnen and its tumult.
The way grew steeper. Sigrid's breath came steady, catching only when she had to haul the foal up the steepest slope.
She hurt all over. A lesser person would have whimpered in misery. The baby's weight dragged at her, and her body, preparing for labor, was slipping her usual degree of control. Processes that should have been automatic, such as breathing and the frequent, sudden urges to piss, became matters of conscious urgency. Besides that, she was in skirts, and hampered when she most needed not to be.
The horses at least were cooperative, and the dogs seemed to comprehend the need for both speed and silence. If her memory was correct—and it might not be, with as much as she had to contend with, challenging even a Cyborg's command of data—there was a high meadow up near the meeting place, with grass sufficient to maintain the horses until they could be collected. A similar place had accommodated them in Cliff Lion Springs, and for similar reasons.
One last steep climb, if memory served—was this what it was like to go senile, this groping at data that should have been there for the asking, this darkening of eye and mind as the body asserted its own imperative demands? She did not remember that she had been so discommoded when her daughter Signy was born, but she had not been climbing mountains then, or fighting a war.
One last climb, no tax on her when she was in condition, grueling now; and yes, there was the level space, the hollow in the mountain's side, paved with rough grass and stones. The grass was half brown with winter, half green with the rains that had been falling off and on through the past few cycles. Sigrid slipped halters and leads and hid them under a stone. The horses went right to the grass. The foal, turned loose, executed a single precise caracole and dived for its mother's teat.
The she-dog understood her duty. She took station on a rock, panting, and with an eye out for a convenient spot of dinner. The he-dog, as always, came to Sigrid's heel.
Her treasure was as safe as it could be. Now, thought Sigrid, for the Citadel.
There were ways into the Citadel other than the route the commandos had taken. There were many such boltholes and escape routes, all of them closer and easier of access than the one called the Cloaca. That one had been built by cattle in an insufficiently paranoiac age. The tunnel Sigrid hunted for was cattle-built on this end, but Soldiers had finished it by turning the adit of a mine into a secret access to their stronghold. In later years it had become a resort of adventurous Soldier children. Sigrid had known it as such, and, like the rest of her agemates, called it Goblin Rock in reference to the outcropping that overshadowed it, of peculiar shape and commanding size. She had had combat exercises there, as all the young Cadets did.
She was certain that the cattle had not discovered it, and nearly certain that its entrance was undamaged by either war or weather. Past the abandoned mineshaft that was its disguise, it should be as solid as it had been when Soldiers carved it out of the rock.
She clambered up the final slope and out onto a brief level. There was the rock with its hunched and looming shape and its gaping mouth. There was the mineshaft's opening within the maw, a black and lightless oblong.
The wind was blowing. Sigrid had barely noticed it—one seldom did, on Haven; it was a constant, like the thin air and the creeping cold. But suddenly it had become the loudest sound in the world: a thin moaning sound as it played around the mineshaft, rustling in the dry grass, hissing over the talus slope.
Sigrid stole through the pitch dark, every sense alert to what might lie ahead. Then a strange scent, and a restless sound. Someone was sitting in front of the adit, perched on a pile of stones.
Sigrid barely paused, barely hesitated. The he-dog ran ahead of her, but did not bark. He seemed to recognize the scent, although he could not have encountered that precise member of Sigrid's race and personal bloodline before.
"Harad," she said, calm even to coldness.
"Sigrid," said her sister's son, equal calm, equally cold. "Cyborg. I was waiting for you."
"For me?" Sigrid inquired. "Or for some one of the cattle both clever enough and fool enough to try this way into the Citadel?"
"Well," said Harad, his mask of Soldier sternness slipping. "We've got guards on all the boltholes now, in case any more cattle come trampling in. I asked for this one. I thought—I postulated that you might come this way, if you were anywhere near, and if you were going to make a break for it."
"Is it known then?" asked Sigrid. "Do they know where I've been?"
"Breedmaster knows," Harad answered her. "The TAC tells him."
She considered that. Yes, the TAC would know, if there were any way at all for it to gather the data. "Titus is in command in the Inner Keep?"
"You know that Battlemaster Carcharoth is dead?"
"I know that the cattle claim to have killed him," Sigrid said. "And that they claim to have taken the Inner Keep."
"A few came alive past the Battlemaster," Harad said. "He never came out of the tunnels. By then I had been sent to warn the field army. I am told that the Cadets and their mothers had good hunting for a while before they killed all the wild cattle." He paused, and a new note came into his voice. "I reported to the new Deathmaster, and I followed him through the battle as his aide! I am a Soldier now."
"A new Deathmaster. Tell me."
"Deathmaster Sharku! Not a Cyborg, but—Aunt Sigrid, he is a Soldier like the old heroes. Like Deathmaster Quilland, or—"
"Or?"
"Or like First Soldier Diettinger, even."
"A rare one indeed, then," Sigrid said.
"Well—but he is a good Soldier. I was just behind him in the battle to Firebase One."
"Where is your officer?"
"At the old guard room inside the tunnel."
"Take me to him. He can send another to watch this portal, and I need you to take me into the Citadel. I'll have errands for some of his Soldiers, too."
Harad nodded. "It is bad, down below?"
"I must report to the Breedmaster."
He stiffened at the implied rebuke, but he was Soldier to the bone. He saluted her crisply. "As you will, Cyborg."
Sigrid returned the salute as if he had been an adult Soldier. She did not compliment him. That would have been redundant. Nor, for the same reason, did she bid him follow.
He fell in behind her in the guard's position. Together, without need of lamp or torch, since they had the light of their own bodies, they walked into the mineshaft.
Shulamit sat cooped up in a stone box of a room, no more window to it than a prison cell, and rocked the cradle with her foot. It was a rich cradle, with plenty of carving and enough gilt to support a family in the Pale for a T-year. One of the sayerets had brought it with a bliddy lot of tears and a mumbled something-or-other. Another one had brought nappies for the baby, somebody else a linen shirt, somebody else again a pile of blankets and, much more to the point, a sleepy-eyed cow of a woman with big wet splotches on her blouse. Lost her brat, Shulamit figured, and had milk enough for armies.
Maybe even enough for Ruth, with her Sauron blood.
Shulamit leaned over the cradle. Ruth was asleep. Newborns slept, she was tolerably certain, pretty much nonstop, except when they ate, which was every couple of minutes. The nurse snored on a cot in the next room, ready at the first peep out of the baby to amble in and pop a tit in the waiting mouth.
Surreptitiously, even though there was no one to see, Shulamit rubbed a breast under her shirt. Still there, still dry, and not likely to change, either, till she bred her own brat.
Meanwhile, she was tantie and mother-surrogate to this one. "And damn Karl Haller to lower Hell for dumping it on me," she growled, but very quietly so as not to wake the baby. "Why me of all the women in the army? He could've picked worse, but damned if I know how."
Ruth had nothing to say to that. Shulamit went back to rocking her. She screwed up her face in her sleep. Shulamit stiffened, but she didn't wake up, or start yelling for another installment of dinner.
"By the Three, they're ugly at that age, aren't they?"
Shulamit started out of her chair. She must have dozed off. No other way Karl fan Reenan could have gotten in on those big feet of his, gotten as far as the cradle and loomed right down over it, poking in with a finger near as big around as the baby's wrist. "Hey!" Shulamit snapped. "Don't wake her up."
Too late. The baby had a healthy set of lungs, and a lot of practice already in expanding them to their full capacity.
Before Shulamit could make a move, Karl scooped the baby up—Yeweh, he knew not to let the head flop, or that was dumb luck—and started rocking her. And she shut up, just like that. Let Shulamit lay a hand on her and she just howled the louder. Let her nurse take her and all she did was yell till the tit was stuffed in her mouth. Five seconds in Karl bloody fan Reenan's hands and she was purring like a kitten.
"You're going to make a wonderful father," Shulamit said sourly.
She could tell when he was blushing, though it wasn't easy, especially in lamplight. It didn't make her feel as much better as she'd thought it would. He ducked his head and stared hard at the baby he was holding, and muttered something that might have been, "Go ahead. Rub it in."
She didn't, for some reason, want to. Seeing him with that baby, considering what she was and all, made Shulamit feel strange. Sauron baby—but hers. Aisha's and Old Karl's. And Aisha dead in her birthing chamber. The funeral must be any time now; she had to go and take the baby. Her throat hurt. Her eyes were blurry.
Karl said something. It took a while to register. "The Cyborg is gone."
"What do you mean, gone?" Shulamit asked when she got the words to make sense. "Not—not—" Damn. Say the word. "Not dead?" That was her right and hers alone. She'd promised to kill Sigrid and no one was going to rob her of the pleasure.
"Nobody knows," Karl said. His voice was as thick as Shulamit's felt. He brushed Ruth's head with a finger, ruffling the silky dark hair. She just blinked at him. Couldn't focus yet, Shulamit was fairly sure—though with Saurons you never knew. "There was some sort of meeting the way there always is, and word came in that Aisha was dead, and you went out, didn't you?"
Shulamit nodded, impatient. "I had to take care of the baby. Karl put her in my arms. Chaya went off with that—that thing—and I brought the baby here."
"So you went out, and Strong Arm Jackson had to go somewhere. Chaya brought her hack, although the Judge doesn't remember when . . . . Karl said this would happen, especially with all the troubles. She's getting worse, and nothing anyone can do about it.
"When everyone came back, Sigrid wasn't there. Nobody can find her. Somebody says they saw her walking through Nûrnen, maybe alone, maybe with one other person. Go-Forward says a gate captain saw her at the walls with Chaya, but people see the Judge everywhere. Another person, a deserter caught by the Watch, claims he saw a woman-with-child robbing the dead. Since he was caught doing the same, he's not exactly a reliable witness. An old woman scavenging outside Sauron Town says she saw someone walking with some horses—"
"That's got to be her. Unless her horses are still at the stable."
"No, they're gone." Karl shook his head. "The old woman—she's a Nûrnenite so she claims she's part Sauron, of course, they all do . . . or did . . . and can see in the dark—says she was walking into Sauron Town, toward the Citadel."
"She's gone! Blast it! Where's Chaya?"
"She's at the hall, building support for the jihad," Karl said.
"Has Chaya organized a search?"
"The Judge's not concerned. Says we have enough to do as it is. I think she—understands—Sigrid."
"Nonsense. That's not Chaya talking, that's you. She's still got a grip on your balls, hasn't she? With your luck she always will. I'll kill the bitch!"
"You have a one-track mind."
"At least it's a useful track." She reached for her rifle where she'd put it, leaning up against the wall by her chair, and slung it. "Here, take care of the baby for a while, will you?"
"Where are you going?" Karl demanded, as if it wasn't as plain as the nose on his face.
She showed him a flash of fang. "Hunting, up by the Citadel walls."
He shocked the spit right out of her by saying calmly, "No, you're not." And standing, she couldn't help but notice, squarely in her path to the door. With the baby in his arms, sound asleep, so coshing him wasn't an option even if she could have hit that skull hard enough that he'd notice it.
"Shulamit," he said. With his deep voice he actually sounded authoritative, and never mind that he still had the same foolishly pretty face he'd ever had, on top of that brick of a body. "You've got your oath and all, and I respect it, as who doesn't, but this isn't your hunt. Karl bar Edgar gave you a charge until the jihad is finished. Will you abandon it to pursue a private feud?"
"Oh, my," she sneered. "Can't we talk like a book."
He didn't budge. "Go-Forward had an idea you'd try something like this. He said keep you here, and keep you penned up if necessary. He doesn't need any renegade Ivrit girl running wild with a hair up her ass, getting in his way when he's in a hurry."
"Go-Forward Haller never said anything like—"
"He also said," said Karl, and he was enjoying it, she could see, "that you can rack up trophies enough later when it's time to do it, but right now you stay put and you guard that baby. What do you think is the first thing she'll come for, if she comes back with a troop of Saurons?"
Shulamit's breath caught. He was playing on her paranoia, she knew it as well as she knew the feel of his skin under her hand, but Yeweh knock him into perdition, he was right.
He nodded no need for her to say anything. "She wants Ruth. There's genes in her that the Citadel's hungry for—not just Sauron and nomad but Pale blood too, fan Haller blood. That's an outcross they've never seen. And if the Saurons get Ruth—if they snap you in two the way they easily can, all it takes is one little shake—Aisha will walk the nights, you can be sure of it. Aisha died so Ruth could live. Not so she could grow up a Sauron."
"We've broken the Saurons," Shulamit said, but her defiance had lost its edge. "We've taken the Citadel."
"We have not," Karl said, and his voice was bitter—bitter as gall. "They lied to us, Shuli. General Hammer got out because only General Hammer was left alive."
"You're lying," Shulamit said, levelly enough considering. But she had the baby to think of, and he knew it, damn him.
"I wish to Eblis I were lying," he said "But I'm not. The Judge herself told me. I'm old enough now, Chaya says, and the leaders, with Hammer-of-God gone—they have to know. We have to know. So we can get out."
Shulamit shook her head. She was trying to clear it, but he took the gesture for bullheadedness. Which most of the time it would have been, no lie there.
"Where's Hammer then? Isn't he part of the force that's reinforcing the—"
"You see . . . Hammer's buying time for The People, and lives. Chaya ordered him to go into the tunnels under the Citadel, near the Karakul Pass, and wait until the jihad begins—Then he's to lead what's left of our forces back to the Pale."
"How could I be so blind. But Hammer lie—" Shulamit stammered. "I thought I'd see the Citadel fall first. Only the Judge could have made him do it."
"He must have known what his lie would cost. It's a long way down that tunnel," Karl said. "I can see how things are falling apart here. Yeweh, even you could if you opened your eyes for a change. Hammer's going to blow Nûrnen up and get out. And we're going with him. With your rifle guarding Ruth, and my warhammer, too, and as many other weapons as we can spare. She's the best thing that came out of this whole bloody war. And you want to give her up so you can go spit in a Sauron's face before she kills you?"
"I might kill her," said Shulamit, low in her throat, meaning every word.
He curled his lip in contempt and stood like a rock, with Ruth for a shield. She couldn't gun him down. Not even as furious as he'd made her, he and his horrible, awful, Yeweh-verdamt story of truth and lies; even as easy as it would be to bring up her assault rifle and fire. And not just because of Ruth.
"Ruth—What about Karl? He's going with us?"
"Later. The Judge needs him now. She weakens hour by hour. Aisha's death took something out of her. After Barak . . . Karl's worried she may not survive the night."
She'd happily pound him to a pulp, but not shoot him—no, not kill that great block of balls-for-brains. She loved him almost as much as she hated him, right now, and she needed him, what was worse. She couldn't make it back to the Pale without him, not if the Cyborg got on her trail. And Ruth's.
Ruth, who lay in his arms as if he were her cradle. Ruth, who would be Shulamit's best revenge on that Sauron bitch, a spit in the eye to outdo any other she might have come up with.
Even so, thought Shulamit. She knew whose fault this was, first and foremost and always. "Damn you," she said. "Damn you, Karl fan Reenan."
The Threat Analysis Computer room stood near the end of a blind corridor. Its door had protections, none of them easily apparent even to a Cyborg. There was no label on it but a small plaque engraved with the Lidless Eye. Inside was a chair, a table, a terminal.
There were other rooms like this, other terminals in the Command Center, most of them dead or slaved to the main computer in the Inner Keep. A master strategist might have noticed that these were all on another level. He would also, by the time he came this far, have realized that this was officer country—Cyborg country. The Red Room was near it, about which even Soldiers spoke softly if at all. Whatever the appearances, this was a citadel within the Citadel, secured in ways that no cattle could understand.
Sigrid had passed checkpoints neither manned nor man-trapped. Every Soldier who was not defending the walls must be walled up in the newly secured, trebly guarded Inner Keep. If she had been cursed with imagination, she would have found the stillness eerie. The only sound was the click of the dog's claws on the floor, the clack of her bootheels, the hiss of her breathing. As thick as the walls were, no sound of fighting reached her.
Sigrid stood in front of the door. The Eye was on a level with her own. She had not allowed herself to think, until now, of where she was. Home.
Her own quarters had been in the Inner Keep, but she had spent hours—days—years of her life in this wing, some of them in the room she was about to enter. She was not pleased to note that her heart rate had increased by a fraction.
The door was locked as always. She palmed it, and uttered a particular sequence of syllables.
The lock clicked. An infinitesimal degree of tension eased in her neck and back. She was still in the database. She did not exclude the possibility that it was a trap. Nor did she move as the door slid open, but she was hyperalert, poised to spring.
Nothing. The lights were on low, quite bright enough for Cyborg vision. The screen was on, flickering a fraction less steadily than it had when she was here last, almost a Haven-year ago.
The man in front of it did not turn. His ash-fair hair had gone quite gray. His posture was as ramrod-straight as ever, his voice as deep, modulated precisely for the acoustics of the room. "Examine these data, Cyborg. Extrapolate."
Sigrid moved up behind him. She was armed still with the dead-robbers pistol, but she made no move to draw or cock it. She did not feel defenseless, nor did she feel cowed. What she felt . . . gravid, yes. Subtly awkward, with her center of balance so drastically shifted. He would have heard that in her step.
"Breedmaster," she said. It was all the greeting she would give him, or he accept. His control was complete. She detected no sign of emotion, either anger or gladness. His eyes were fixed on the screen.
THREATS TO THE CITADEL, it read in letters that seemed to waver like amber-orange flames against a black sky. RANK ORDER.
Below that was the answer.
THREATS TO THE CITADEL:
1. BREEDMASTER TITUS
2. BATTLEMASTER CARCHAROTH, NOW DECEASED
3. GIMILZOR, SON OF SHARKU AND CHICHEK, CONDITION CRITICAL
4. DEATHMASTER SHARKU'S REGIMENTS
5. THE HORDE ON THE PLAIN
6. THE THREAT ANALYSIS COMPUTER
OTHERS TOO LOW A PROBABILITY TO EVALUATE.
As Sigrid absorbed that, Breedmaster Titus typed in a new query. THREAT ANALYSIS OF THREAT ANALYSIS COMPUTER IF PROVEN DYSFUNCTIONAL.
She had been too long among the Bandari. She was sorely tempted to laugh as they did at flawless absurdity.
The TAC had no sense of humor, misplaced or otherwise. The answer came promptly. PROBABILITY OF MALFUNCTION: NIL.
"So it would say," Sigrid observed.
Titus shook his head. His fingers, long and thin like her own, flashed over the worn keys. ANALYZE PROBABILITY THAT THREAT ANALYSIS COMPUTER HAS REVERSED PRIORITIES.
The cursor blinked. Letters scrolled across the screen. PRIORITIES AS PROGRAMMED.
Sigrid reached past Titus to key in a line. ANALYZE PROBABILITY THAT CITADEL IS THREAT TO CITADEL.
PROBABILITY, the TAC replied NIL.
She permitted herself the whisper of a sigh. ANALYZE PROBABILITY THAT THE SEVEN ARE KEY TO CITADEL'S PRESERVATION.
The TAC whirred for a long, long moment. At last it replied. PROBABILITY: 67.333% +/-5.
ANALYSIS OF THREAT TO CITADEL, she typed, OF CYBORG SIGRID.
This response was prompt. PROBABILITY TOO LOW TO EVALUATE.
"How long has it been showing this insanity?" Sigrid demanded.
"Long," said Breedmaster Titus. "It offers little hope. None, one might say, except that one is arrogant, and Soldier, and therefore unwilling to accept the possibility of defeat."
"That is your analysis?"
At last he turned to face her. Outward expressions of shock were not necessary in a Cyborg, but they were felt.
He was not old for a Soldier, even a Cyborg. Yet he seemed as old as Chaya. His face was a death's head; his eyes had sunk deep in hollow sockets. They glittered as if with fever—and that, too, made her think of Chaya.
As she scanned him, he scanned her, thoroughly. The tilt of his glance indicated her pregnancy. A brow flickered upward: a query. After so long, this subtle communication between Cyborgs was both a pleasure and a pain.
"Bandari," she replied to his implicit question. "A fan Reenan. Nearly pure Frystaat strain."
The Breedmaster of the Citadel did not stoop to admiration. But approval—that, briefly, he would give her. Then he said, "You disobeyed orders."
She bent her head. "I did."
"Was it profitable?"
That was an odd question, even for him. "I have this get of the Bandari founder's line, and I have mares," she said, "who foal on the high steppe."
"And an army of conquest invested against the Citadel."
"It is not my army, and I did not bring it."
"You stink of it."
She resisted the urge to touch her skirt. "One uses what tools one can."
She was quoting one of his own axioms. He did not acknowledge it. "The Citadel is falling," he said. "Three centuries of conquest have been dissipated in unassimilated data, in possibilities we never deigned to consider. We are the last of Sauron. After us there is nothing."
His fingers sought keys, but his eyes remained on Sigrid. She divided her attention between his face and the screen.
ANALYZE THREAT TO HAVEN OF SAURON DOMINATION.
THREAT LEVEL SEVERE. PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS 11.5% +/- 3.
"Even our slaves have turned against us," said Titus.
Sigrid was no stranger to fear. She had been taught to feel it, and to use it, long ago. But this was a stronger fear than she had known since she was a child. "Have you altered the programming?" she asked him.
He laughed harshly. "Would I know how?"
"You might try."
"Perhaps." He turned back to the screen. The initial ranking of threats to the Citadel had scrolled to the top. His name glowed on the screen's boundary like the flames that ringed Nûrnen. "None of us knows what makes this machine work. Some of the younger Soldiers believe it to be an oracle, a soothsayer chained in silicon and steel, immortal and incorruptible. Where it gets its data, how it processes them . . . mysteries as profound as any shaman's."
Sigrid, who had killed a shaman in KaTLinsvale, spoke sharply, in a tone calculated to snap him to his senses. "That is nonsense. The TAC has listening posts all over the Citadel and in Nûrnen, with slave terminals in every base still under our control. You know that as well as I do. You've fallen victim to your own myth-making."
"Don't we all?" His fingertip rested just below his name, underscoring it. "What am I, that I threaten the Citadel above all others?"
"Ask the computer," Sigrid said.
"And be a slave to my own superstition?"
"Are you afraid to learn the answer?"
He knew how she was manipulating him: he had trained her to do it. He chose, or let himself be forced, to yield. He typed slowly, letter by letter: ANALYZE THREAT TO CITADEL OF BREEDMASTER TITUS.
Lights winked. The TAC muttered to itself.
As soon as the image occurred to Sigrid, she discarded it. She was letting the situation, and its imagined ramifications, affect her more strongly than the actual data warranted. Hormones, she thought. Pregnancy laboring to terminate itself in spite of her control.
REFERENCE IN ARCHIVES, the TAC informed them. FILENAME DENETHOR.
Titus sat absolutely still. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly calm. "What utter nonsense."
"Isn't it?" Sigrid's legs had had enough. She lowered herself to the floor, knowing perfectly well how vulnerable that made her—but certain of one thing in a rapidly shifting universe. The Breedmaster of the Citadel would do no harm to a woman pregnant with so interesting a combination of genes. She made herself as comfortable as she could, never taking her eyes from Titus.
He stared at the screen, and at the name of the file. "So the TAC imagines that I despair. Does the TAC forget that I am a Cyborg?"
"I doubt it," said Sigrid. "It very probably remembers the latest, and late, Battlemaster."
"Two Cyborgs gone senile in one cycle is highly improbable."
"Not by the laws of coincidence. The Judge of the Seven, Sauron stock, has fallen victim to age and stress as well. She's taken another route. She has her jihad. We can ask the TAC—"
"And I should make a third gone senile?" Titus turned away from the screen, flexing his shoulders. As worn and haggard as his face was, his eyes were clear, if bleak. "Yes, I spend my hours shut up here with my palantir, scrying out what future I can for the Race. No, I'm not blind to the advantages as well as the disadvantages of our position. Nûrnen has fallen. A significant proportion of the population of the steppe rampages around our walls. A sortie tried but failed to seize our inner citadel.
"Against which we can place the failure of that attempt, the strength of the Citadel to withstand siege at the low level of technology the cattle can bring to bear—"
"Not so low," Sigrid said. It was no light thing to interrupt a senior Cyborg in midspeech, but this was no light occasion. "They have captured assault rifles, plus the munitions stores in Nûrnen. Whose brilliant idea was it to scatter them through a city so vulnerable to attack?"
"It was a Council decision of the fifth generation on Haven," Titus answered coldly. "Yes, I comprehend our folly. All of it, with quite distressing clarity. We committed the sin of hubris, as our ancestors would observe."
"Not, I hope, to the point of total destruction," said Sigrid.
"As Old Sauron did?" He went on in her silence. "The Race is prone to arrogance. We never have disciplined ourselves sufficiently to breed it out. For which now, as before, we pay. Still, we have advantages. We have the Citadel. We have our forces in the Valley, Sharku's reinforcements have come, Ghâsh's force is coming as well. We can eliminate the horde between us, make a lesson of it that will resonate as strongly in the myths of Haven as the Wasting itself."
"That's arrogance still," Sigrid said, "and as blind as thinking that the cattle would never dare to throw an army against the Citadel."
His brows went up. If he was angered, he chose not to show it. "You believe so, Cyborg? Explain."
"You're not considering the Bandari," Sigrid said. "The nomads, yes—they have no more sense than four-footed cattle, and no more thought for the future. Their only coherent impulse is greed—for food, for loot, for rutting. The Bandari are different. Too many of them are Soldiers by blood, gathered from the culling grounds of the Bases and raised as warriors in a warrior culture, if not quite up to the standard of ours. But close, Breedmaster. Chillingly close."
"I am aware," the Breedmaster said, "of the Bandari and their experiment with the question of nature over nurture. Granted that they can field formidable forces—their numbers can hardly be greater than ours, cattle and cannon fodder aside."
"True," said Sigrid. "What you don't know is their hard common sense. They've perpetrated a substantial deception among their hotnots: that the inner Citadel is theirs, and that the horde has only to mount an assault and the rest of the Citadel will fall. Under cover of that, they're getting out—taking all the machines and weapons and munitions they can gather, and heading for the Pale."
Titus' eyes narrowed. He almost—almost—smiled. "Oh, are they? Wise people."
"Will you allow it? Assault rifles, explosives, even such trivialities as light fixtures and the principle of central heating, in the hands of the Ivrit?"
"Have you made any effort to stop them?"
Sigrid stiffened Part of that, to be sure, was a tightening of her abdomen that was too evidently a contraction. "I am here. I came in through the adit, with Harad for escort."
He typed ANALYZE THREAT TO CITADEL FROM BANDARI.
ALREADY DONE. FILENAME GIBBON.
"Gibbon?" Sigrid asked.
"I know the reference," Titus said. "You came with Harad, and sent him to his mother, who is approaching the door with her customary unhurried haste."
So she was. Sigrid should have heard her, but it was difficult to concentrate when so much of her control was focused on keeping the baby from arriving in the middle of this battle of wills.