His Conquering Sword (45 page)

“You’re laughing at me. Tess.” He just looked at her for a long while. Then he spun and walked out to his horse. Mitya waited, resplendent in a gold and blue surcoat that reflected half Ilya’s banner and half the blue lion of the dead prince. Feodor rode behind Mitya, the banner pole fixed against his saddle. Vladimir held Ilya’s gold banner, and Konstans Barshai—with his white-plumed helmet—and Kirill Zvertkov—with his bad arm awkward at his side—flanked Bakhtiian.

Ilya mounted and twisted in the saddle to salute Tess with his horse-tail staff. As one, the jahar started forward. Under a forest of spears they rode out, silk and iron, and leather lacquered until it gleamed, fluttering pennants and rank upon rank of sabers. Nadine rode past with her jahar, proud and confident of victory. A column of archers followed behind them, and then Anatoly Sakhalin’s jahar, riders and archers together, brilliant in the dawn.

Quiet descended on the camp.

“Where is Aleksi?” asked Sonia, coming up beside Tess and taking hold of her hand.

Tess leaned into Sonia, letting Sonia’s warmth and strength be her comfort. “I sent him out to escort Charles along the lines. It’s beautiful to watch them go, isn’t it? Yet what they’ll bring will be terrible.”

They stood for a time in silence. Their years together had brought them that as much as anything: the ability to find peace in each other, and the contentment of a friend who judged you solely on yourself, and nothing more, and nothing less.

“Well,” said Sonia at last, “there’s much to do. I brought Svetlana Tagansky to visit, but now Aleksi is gone.”

“Sonia. I’m sorry I snapped at you yesterday.”

“Oh, Tess. I understand.”

Tess smiled and brushed away a tear. “I know you do. Ilya and I started to make our peace with him, the little one—” She thought of him as Yuri, but she never dared say it aloud; a child born dead was never given a name, among the jaran, but it comforted Tess to know he had one, if only in her own heart. It consoled her to give the baby that link to the other Yuri, whom she had also lost. “Well. Let me meet Svetlana. Oh, look, here is Rajiv.” Rajiv came up then, with Maggie and Gwyn Jones in tow. “Sonia, I’ll come to your tent soon.”

Sonia greeted the others, excused herself, and left.

Tess turned to the newcomers. “Hello, Rajiv. Maggie.” She paused and regarded Gwyn Jones dubiously.

“He’s clear,” said Rajiv. “He knows what we’re doing. He had a few clever ideas, too. I thought we’d bring him in at the first iteration.”

“You have some ideas?” Tess asked. “I don’t mean to be—”

“Skeptical?” Jones grinned. “But I
am
just an actor? No, it’s all right. I was in prison before I studied acting, and—well, let’s just say I’ve learned a few things that might be of use. Consider me a recruit for the cause.”

“Rajiv, do you have the modeler with you?” Tess asked. Rajiv nodded. “Then go on in, but you’ll have to use the inner chamber. If you can rig a perimeter alert and track it for—well, you’ll know what to do. I’ve one more duty to perform, and then I’ll come in.” Thus dismissed, they disappeared inside the tent.

The camp was empty of soldiers now except for a single circle of guards around the Orzhekov encampment and a series of guards and scouts around the main camp itself, stretching out into the countryside so that no force might come upon camp or army unaware.

Under the awning of Sonia’s tent stood a young woman, a child, and two adolescents, one girl, one boy. The young woman chatted easily with Josef Raevsky, seeming unembarrassed by his disfigurement, and Tess liked her for that at once. The dawn wind stilled. A thin streak of clouds paled the western horizon, but Tess could not be sure yet if they were true clouds, or smoke. Faintly, far off, she heard the steady thunk of the artillery, firing on Karkand.

Tess rubbed her arms across her breasts, they ached so badly, and then regretted it immediately, because it made the milk let down. She swore under her breath and just stood there for a while, pressing hard against the nipples with her forearms. Tears brimmed in her eyes and spilled down. The leakage stopped quickly; already it had diminished, and soon it would dry up altogether.

“Oh, God,” she said on a long sigh, wiping her face yet again. She gathered together her self-possession and went to meet the woman whom Sonia had chosen for Aleksi to marry.

Aleksi passed by the Veselov jahar riding out, Anton Veselov in the lead, his cousin Vera leading the archers at the back. Ambassador’s row was quiet as its tenants waited for the outcome of the battle. In the Company encampment, no one stirred, although he saw the woman, the
playwright,
sitting under the awning of her tent, writing furiously. She did not even look up as he rode past and crossed a trampled margin and came into the encampment belonging to the Prince of Jeds.

Charles Soerensen waited for him, outfitted this day in a light cuirass of leather, with a smooth round khaja helmet strapped onto his head. Marco Burckhardt stood beside him, wearing a felt coat instead of a cuirass. Seeing Aleksi, they mounted the fine Arabian mares that Bakhtiian had given them.

“You’ll escort us to Bakhtiian?” Charles asked.

Aleksi nodded. “But we’ll have to hurry if we want to catch up with him”

“Hold on,” said Marco curtly. He blinked three times and tilted his head. “Incoming,” he said at the same time as Soerensen abruptly dismounted and threw the reins to Marco before darting inside his tent.

Ten heartbeats later he stuck his head out. “Aleksi. I need you.”

Like Bakhtiian, Soerensen did not give orders unless he meant them to be obeyed instantly. Aleksi gave his horse over to Marco and, with only the briefest hesitation at the threshold, went into the prince’s tent.

A woman he had never seen before sat at the table. She had black hair and pale brown skin set off by the shimmering blue shirt she wore: Aleksi stopped and gaped. She had no body below the waist. She only
seemed
to be sitting at the table. The prince stood bent over the table, marking words on a piece of paper.

“Repeat that charge for me,” he said.

The woman spoke, and Aleksi realized all at once that she was not
there
any more than the lantern illuminating Dr. Hierakis’s tent was there. She was an illusion. She did not exist. Yet the prince acted as though she did. “The Protocol Office has detained Hon Echido and other representatives from the Keinaba house for breaking the interdiction of Rhui on four charges: the lesser charges of trespass and of impersonating Rhuian natives and the greater charges of taking with them a female and the actual act of violating the Interdiction order of their own overlord.”

“Where the hell—?” muttered the prince. “And who instigated this, do you have any idea?”

The woman moved her eyes and to Aleksi’s horror he realized that she was
looking at him.
“Who is this?” she asked.

It was like being under the scrutiny of the gods. Maybe she
was
one of the gods, manifesting from the heavens to oversee her children on the earth.

“That,” said the prince, not looking up, “is Tess’s brother Aleksi.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “Hello, Aleksi. I’m Suzanne. Pleased to meet you.” Then she grinned, betraying her humanity. Aleksi did not think that gods introduced themselves.

“Well met,” he said reflexively, and was rewarded by a second smile before her attention moved back to the prince.

“The Protocol Office can, of course, act on the emperor’s behest or even its own behest, but in this case it seems to have been the officers stationed on Earth who moved against Keinaba, in which case—”

“In which case,” interrupted Soerensen, “it was Naroshi who put them up to it.”

The woman shrugged. “He did say he would keep an eye on you.”

The prince smiled suddenly, an ironic quirk of the lips. “So I can’t say that he didn’t warn me? This is all very well, but I’m going to have to come back now.”

“Yes,” Suzanne agreed, looking quite serious. “You must. You’re the only one who can extricate them.”

“And the information Echido alone holds, not to mention that ke, is far, far too valuable to fall into Naroshi’s hands, since we don’t know how much he knows, or how much he learned when his agents were at Moraya, or whether they even got hold of a cylinder like Tess did. Suzanne, think of the consequences!”

“I’m thinking,” she said gravely.

“This could destroy everything we’ve started to build. Aleksi.” He straightened up. He looked, to Aleksi, somehow brighter and more vital than he had before this strange communication, as if the challenge animated him. As if this sort of challenge was what he lived for. “I have two notes here, one for Cara and one for Tess. Find a courier, someone trustworthy, to take the messages to them—there should still be actors in the Company camp, if need be. I’ll need you back
at once,
because we have to leave now. Suzanne, how will you pick me up?”

“Already arranged from this end,” said Suzanne briskly. “The question is how
you
can make the rendezvous.”

The prince looked again at Aleksi, and Aleksi hurriedly retreated outside.

“Well?” demanded Marco.

Aleksi hesitated. “Suzanne. Is she one of your kind? From the heavens?”

Marco raised an eyebrow. “Suzanne called? Goddess, it must be urgent.”

Aleksi ran over to the Company camp. There he found the playwright. She was so engrossed in her work that she did not even look up when he stopped beside her.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

She glanced up. “Oh. Hello. Aleksi, isn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon,” he repeated, “but the prince has asked that I give these messages to you to send on to his sister and to the doctor. He’s leaving.”

“He’s
leaving?”
asked the playwright. “Oh, my.” Aleksi was afraid she would ask him to explain, but she merely took the notes and marched off in the direction of her tent. He jogged back to Soerensen’s tent to find that the prince had already mounted and was waiting for him.

“Now,” said Soerensen before Aleksi had settled into the saddle, “we must ride at first toward the battle, as if we’re headed in, so people will think that’s where we’ve gone. But then we have to somehow leave without being seen and make our way out to these coordinates—we’ll be headed north-northeast, into the near hills, to meet the shuttle.”

“What is a
shuttle?”
asked Aleksi.

“It’s a kind of a ship. Can you manage it?”

“Yes,” said Aleksi. “I can manage it. But why must we go so secretly?”

Soerensen looked out at the camp. “Damn it,” he said to no one in particular. “But it has to be done.”

“What has to be done?” asked Marco mildly.

Soerensen urged his horse forward, and Aleksi and Marco came up on either side of him. “Today, the Prince of Jeds has to die.”

D
AWN CAME. DAVID WATCHED
as the siege engines fired, and fired again. Clay pots filled with naphtha were launched into the city, and smoke began to rise up from within the walls into the heavens. He wiped sweat from his brow and helped a limping man back away from the engine, and sent another to take his place.

The rumble of the towers rolling into place reached his ears, and the higher sound of metal on metal, the clash of arms. He had no good view of the walls. He did not want one. Already wounded men—khaja laborers all—struggled back from the front lines, those that could. David knew well enough that others lay alive but wounded under the killing rain of arrows, helpless to get themselves free. If they were lucky, once the battle moved beyond the walls, they could be rescued. Cara had laid down the law firmly enough for Bakhtiian: All persons in the jaran army received care or none did. David wondered what would happen when Cara got hold of the first wounded enemy soldiers, assuming that any lived long enough to get so far.

Suddenly, a man shouted a warning and two riders escorting David shoved him down. There was a crash. Splinters flew through the air. A man screamed out in pain. Debris peppered David’s helmet, and dust coated his vision.

He scrambled up and ran forward. A lucky hit for the Karkand engineers: They had hit a siege engine far enough back from the lines that no one had thought it within range. Four men lay tangled in the wreckage, bleeding, moaning; one was silent and twisted at a horrific angle.

David coughed through the dust. “I need men to carry these wounded out!” Laborers had scattered back from the hit, terrified. Now, heartened by his presence, they hurried forward to aid him. David tested the mechanism, but it had been thoroughly smashed.

“We’ll give this one up,” he shouted. “Here, move that one back ten paces, and I want screens over the men there.”

Riders and khaja laborers ran to do his bidding. He had a sudden flash, watching them work together, that this was why he had come out here today to help kill poor innocents on the other side of the wall: so that in time, all of them could learn to work together. It was a poor excuse for a rationalization, but it helped him live with himself.

The other engines fired on with renewed vigor. David took himself back and sat down to try and figure out the trajectory of the rock, to see if they could target the enemy’s artillery.

Ursula el Kawakami braced herself as the tower shuddered forward toward the wall. Inside, it was dark and stuffy; she felt the others pressed around her, about half of them Farisa auxiliaries and half jaran riders—unmounted now, of course—who had volunteered for the first assault, mostly young men from granddaughter tribes and servant families, hoping to win a name for themselves and a greater share of the loot. From outside, she heard the steady hammering of arrows against the wooden tower and she smelled burning pitch: They were trying to set the tower on fire, but it was covered with leather soaked in water and a lotion called
firebane,
and she doubted it would catch.

What did it matter, anyway? For all of her life, Ursula had wanted nothing more than to fight in battle. Not for her the martial arts craze that had swept through League space, offering aggressive young men and women an outlet. War was an ugly, primitive business, and an unacceptable means for resolving conflict. Everyone knew that.