The Given Sacrifice (4 page)

“But better you than me, and the brass will want that pilot alive to question,” he
finished, snuggling the butt into his shoulder and aiming downward.

Tung.

This time the head of the bolt was only six feet from the target. It flashed into
the bear’s open mouth and he could hear the bone crunch as it drove into the palate.
The huge animal toppled backward and struck with an earthshaking thud, paws outstretched
and belly up. Now he could see the head of his first bolt, the tip just showing; it
must have traversed the whole width of the animal’s body.

When he reloaded and reached for his water-bottle his hands really
were
shaking, enough to spill water over his face. Cole stopped for a moment to just think
himself steady, while he made doubly sure that the great limp furry form below him
really wasn’t breathing anymore. He suspected that the vision of the bear’s face as
it seemed to be right on the other end of the scope was going to come back to him
at night for a long time.

One of the instructors who’d taught his class was a grizzled old coot who looked like
he’d been carved out of ancient roots, and he’d been a Ranger back when the old General
was a pup before the Change. He’d told them
adventure
meant
someone else in deep shit, far away
. Cole was beginning to appreciate what the man had meant.

Getting down from the ledge was a lot harder than going up had been, and his body
felt like strong men had worked it over with baseball bats and bicycle chains from
toe to chin. Each movement revealed some new bruise or nick or scrape, none of which
had seemed important with Old Eph at his heels and all of which hurt like hell now.
He walked back upslope towards the wrecked glider, keeping carefully alert and limping
a little where the claws had taken the heel off his boot and wrenched the leg. Bears
usually didn’t travel in pairs, but you never knew. He’d do a quick fix on the footwear
when he had some time.

When he arrived the pilot had managed to get herself out of the glider and down to
the ground, probably by cutting herself free with the knife and falling. Her left
arm looked to be out of commission, and her face was a mask of blood from a pressure
cut on the forehead and a nose that was swelling after being smacked into something
hard.

Curly leaf-brown hair peeked out from beneath a leather flying helmet with goggles
pushed up on her brow; her eyes were light blue-green, but what he could see of her
skin was a sort of pale toast color, save for a little bluish scar between her brows.
The whole ensemble was probably exotically pretty in a pixie sort of way when she
wasn’t bleeding and beat-up. And, he judged by the way she’d been facing that bear,
she was fully capable of chewing nails and spitting out rivets.

She’d just managed to get up on her feet when he arrived and stopped a couple of yards
away, and she dropped into a fighter’s crouch with the knife held in an expert grip.
Cole started to laugh. She was also about a thumb’s width over five feet, and skinny
with it, confronting his five-ten and hundred and eighty pounds, not to mention his
crossbow and hatchet and bowie and sword. Her scowl got more ferocious at his mirth,
but she wasn’t any more daunted by him than she had been by the bear that had been
about to scoop her out of the cockpit like a nut out of its shell.

“You are one tough scrappy little bitch, I’ll give you that,” he said admiringly.

He was also careful to stay out of reach. Nobody was safe if they had a knife and
were determined to use it.

“That’s Pilot Officer Bitch to you, soldier,” she said.

Briefings and rumor had it that westerners talked funny, but apart from the effects
of her nose swelling shut she sounded pretty much like people from his part of the
world, maybe a little rounder on the vowels. He looked at the glider caught in the
rocks and trees, at the pilot, and thought hard. While he did he also looked at his
left hand; one of the fingernails was standing up from the quick, mostly torn away.
He absently stripped it loose with his teeth and spat it aside.

“Dang, that smarts,” he said mildly. “Look, girl . . . Pilot Officer . . . what say
we call a short-term truce while we fix ourselves up? That bear near enough got a
piece of me and I don’t think he meant you any good at all, likewise. I’d feel sort
of stupid if I had to kill you now after going to all that trouble.”

“You’re Boise, aren’t you?” she said; it wasn’t really a question. “Not a Cutter.”

“Yup, US Army,” he said. “I’m a Methodist, more or less, if that matters to you.”

“All right,” she said grudgingly.

There was a spring seeping out of the rock not far away. He ended up donating some
material from his medical kit, and then slitting the sleeve of the leather flying
suit she wore along the seam to examine her left forearm. It was thin, though the
slight muscles on it were like wire cords, and he couldn’t feel any gross break. She
hissed as he touched one spot.

“Ulna,” he said. “Not a compound, and the elbow isn’t dislocated. Nightstick fracture,
I’d say, right about midway. Doesn’t feel bad.”

“Doesn’t feel bad to
you
,” she said. Then: “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

He trimmed some deadwood branches into a set of immobilizing splints, bound them on,
and arranged a sling. After that she sat sullenly brooding while he used his climbing
rope and a half hitch around a tree to pull the glider down, breaking off the other
wing in the process. The cockpit was disappointingly bare of anything useful; there
was a map, but the only things marked on it were the suspected locations of
his
side’s troops. Two that he knew about were pretty accurate.

Cole wasn’t surprised at the lack of data, since whoever was in charge of enemy glider
doctrine would have anticipated something exactly like this. If the enemy were stupid
they wouldn’t be winning. There wasn’t anything in the way of emergency gear, either.
Every single ounce of weight was precious in these things.

“Look . . .” he paused to give his name and rank.

“Pilot Officer Alyssa Larsson, on the A-List of the Bearkiller Outfit, flying for
the High Kingdom of Montival,” she said.

“OK,” he said, organizing his thoughts. “Name, rank and serial number, right? You’re
not one of the castle freaks.”

“A PPA Associate? I should hope
not
.”

He nodded. “We’ve got two options here. I can just let you go, in which case you’ll
starve or get et by something or die of exposure. Unless your base is close—”

He lifted an enquiring eyebrow, and she laughed sourly at the invitation to fall into
an elementary trick.

“OK, or you can surrender and I’ll take you back to
my
base.”

“How far, and in what direction?”

He snorted a chuckle. “I’m not an idiot either,” he said, then nodded when she just
smiled.

It was a wry expression, but then, it had to hurt with those injuries. He went on:

“Right. If you come with me, I want your word you won’t try to backstab me or give
me away to your people.”

“I’m not going anywhere near the Cutters,” she said flatly. “I’ll take my chances
with the wolves and bears and tigers first.”

He kept his face neutral; his impulse was to say
well, of course, the Cutters are fucking mad weasel lunatic neobarbs
, but it wasn’t something you could say to the other side about your sort-of allies.
For that matter most of the westerners were officially neobarbs too. Instead he thought
hard, and went on slowly: “My CO . . . Captain Wellman . . . ah,”
Hates the Cutters like poison,
he didn’t say.

They’d tried to put a Church Universal and Triumphant chaplain in with Battalion about
three months ago, now that Boise didn’t have a President to keep them at bay. The
man had just disappeared two days after he arrived, and nobody had known a thing.
He suspected that Wellman and the sergeant-major had taken care of it personally and
buried the body in a latrine about to be filled in.

“. . . ah, the CO is an absolute stickler for the rules.”

Which had the advantage of being true; scuttlebutt said it was the reason Wellman
hadn’t switched sides, which some of the men thought he
should
do. Cole hadn’t wanted to believe the stories about Martin Thurston, but with his
own mother and his
wife
, for God’s sake, defecting to the enemy and screaming that they were true . . . and
he was dead now anyway, which left Fred Thurston as the old General’s only living
son, and
he
was on Montival’s side.

Fubar squared.

The glider pilot looked at him searchingly for a long moment, then nodded slowly.

“My chances right now with a busted arm and no gear aren’t much,” she said. “OK, but
I
will
take off if I get a chance and think the odds are good. I’m not giving a general
parole. We’re not allowed to, anyway.”

“Fair enough, neither are we,” he said. “Now, what about something to eat?”

She snorted and pulled out a paper-wrapped something from one of her many pockets.
The wrapping had
Rat. Bar
stenciled on it.

“This is the sum total of my supplies. As the label suggests, it’s made from dried
rats.”

Cole did a double take before he was sure she wasn’t serious. He had a couple of pounds
of hardtack and some dried fruit in his pack, along with some salt and half a bag
of dried chili flakes his mother had sent him. He grinned anyway and felt the edge
of his smaller knife, the one he used for general camp work, including skinning. Special
Forces were supposed to live off the land in the field—they were known as
snake eaters
for that reason—but right now he didn’t have to settle for reptile meat anyway.

“We won’t starve today; pity the rest will go to waste and we can’t take the hide,
but the coyotes have to eat too. Bear tastes like pork.”

“I always thought it was a little gamy unless you soak it in vinegar a while,” she
said. “Or beer.”

The pilot started to smile, then winced as scabs pulled. “Not a feast at Larsdalen
or Todenangst,” she said. “But sort of . . . fitting.”

Castle Todenangst, Crown deme
sne

Portland Protective Association

Willamette Valley near Newburg

(formerly western Oregon)

High Kingdom of Montival

(western North America)

June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

S
quire Lioncel de Stafford’s muscles still ached very slightly from the morning’s run
in armor up and down the endless flights of stairs, with a shield on his left arm
and a weighted wooden practice sword in his fist. Just enough that it felt good standing
at parade rest behind the Grand Constable’s chair, where she sat with the document-and-plate-laden
table between her and the Lord Chancellor of the Association, Conrad Renfrew, Count
of Odell.

The Silver Tower had the exotic luxury of a functioning elevator, powered by convicts
on a treadmill in the dungeons, but Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath didn’t believe in letting
her
menie
go soft merely because they were stationed at HQ for a week.

She’d led the run, of course.

A confidential secretary from the Chancellor’s office took notes in shorthand, with
an occasional
no, not that!
to halt the pen about to render permanent an embarrassingly frank opinion about some
exalted personage. One of the Count’s squires stood behind his wheelchair, and the
Grand Constable’s pages were serving a working lunch when they weren’t standing silently
against the far wall out of earshot; still, it was a sign of the trust attached to
Lioncel’s position that he was present as the two most powerful officials of the Association
conferred in private.

Just now Tiphaine tapped one finger on a note signed in crimson ink:

���Sandra’s gotten a complaint from the Seneschal’s wife at Castle Oliver and passed
it on to me with a flag for action after consulting you, Conrad.”

Both the nobles lifted their eyes slightly at the mention of Sandra Arminger, formerly
Lady Regent of the Association and now Queen Mother. There was nothing above this
level save her apartments, the crenellations, cisterns, a heliograph station, a detachment
of the Protector’s Guard and the roof. The Queen Mother was doing pretty much the
same work that she had as Lady Regent, and from the same places.

Lioncel carefully didn’t look up. Lately she’d actually been noticing one Lioncel
de Stafford a little beyond the pat-on-the-head level. Not in a bad way, but it could
be alarming when things shifted like that.

“Castle Oliver . . . middle of the Okanagan . . . barony held in Crown demesne . . .
twenty-two manors, the castle and a lot of grazing and woodland. The Seneschal would
be Sir Symo Herrera,” the Chancellor said. “His wife . . . Lady Aicelena of the Chelan
Dennisons. Aicelena’s running the place while Sir Symo’s away, the usual.”

Conrad of Odell was nearly sixty and built like a squat muscular toad, with a face
that would have looked coarse-featured and rugged even if it hadn’t been terribly
burned long ago. A bit gaunt now, without the spare flesh he’d had before the Battle
of the Horse Heaven Hills last year. He’d been smacked off his destrier there and
suffered a hairline fracture of the pelvis. He was out of traction, but still wearing
a long embroidered robe with wide sleeves, informal garb for an invalid, which looked
rather odd with the massive gold chain of office.

Tiphaine nodded. “Sir Symo’s at the front with the Oliver levy . . . he’s been doing
quite well, too.”

“So has she,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Deliveries on time, no major complaints,
the books balanced last time I send auditors around, and she doesn’t keep asking to
have her hand held. What’s her problem, and why didn’t it come direct to me? Why does
the military side need to get involved?”

“Apparently a party of men-at-arms on their way south from County Dawson, seventy-three
lances and followers plus some light horse, stopped there. Lady Aicelena quite properly
invited the chevaliers and esquires in for dinner and had an ox-roast put on in the
courtyard for the rest.”

“Ouch,” the Chancellor said. “I think I can see what’s coming.”

Another nod, this one short and curt. “They repaid her by dropping the drawbridge
and then emptied the storehouses in the castle bailey and the barns in the home manor
of everything a horse could eat. Nobody hurt and nothing else taken except for a couple
of chickens, but from the description it was as near as no matter robbery at spear-point.”

Conrad nodded in turn. “After the Crown emergency requisitions, that was probably
the last surplus the area has,” he said thoughtfully. “Except what can be bought in
at wartime prices.”

“Right. That cupboard’s going to be bare when the next
legitimate
call comes.”

The Lord Chancellor and the Grand Constable both had suites on the level just below
the Queen Mother; it made conferences like this easier. Much of the Portland Protective
Association’s government was handled from here in the great fortress-palace of Todenangst,
and the hierarchy of status was quite literal; the higher up the massive ferroconcrete
bulk of the Silver Tower you were, the more exalted the rank and the less there was
of the tomblike gloom usual in castles. This high there were pointed-arch windows
and balconies, letting in a flood of afternoon light through the Gothic tracery along
with plenty of fresh air slightly laden with smells of woodsmoke and flowers.

Lioncel still felt a slight chill at the tone of his liege’s voice; calm and even
and . . . angry. There were reasons her title of
Lady d’Ath
was usually pronounced
Lady Death.

“That was also Royal property they took, especially if they didn’t pay,” the Chancellor
said.

“Not a penny. Our northern heroes just made noises about military necessity and hightailed
it on down the main rail line towards the Columbia, radiating innocence and dribbling
stolen alfalfa-pellets and cracked barley.”

“Who was the Dawson commander?”

“Sir Othon Derby,” Tiphaine said.

Conrad Renfrew closed his eyes, consulting some inner file before he spoke:

“He’s the second son of Lord Hardouin Derby, Baron de Taylor, one of Count Enguerrand
of Dawson’s major vassals. Arms:
Argent, on a bend azure three buck’s heads cabossé d’or
. With a crescent of cadency, of course. Twenty years old, reputation as a hothead,
engaged to one of the Count’s daughters. Bit young for an independent command, I’d
have thought.”

“Temporary command; Enguerrand sent him back north to bring in this bunch as replacements
for others we’re letting go home for one reason or another. The new levy were mostly
men who’ve come of age since the Prophet’s War started.”

“How long since they were called up?” the Chancellor asked.

“When they arrived at Oliver it was twenty-three days since they took the oath at
Castle Dawson’s muster-yard,” Tiphaine said, a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

Ah,
Lioncel thought.
That’s the official start of their period of service.

Landholders, from counts and barons down to footmen holding fiefs-minor in sergeantry,
were liable to war-service whenever their overlords or the Crown called. That was
what being an Associate was
about
, after all—fighting to protect the realm, which was why a special dagger was the
mark of belonging to the Association. The first forty days after a summons to the
ban
were at the fief-holder’s own expense, though. Only after that was the Crown obliged
to furnish maintenance, with a right to draw on Royal storehouses.

So they wouldn’t be able to plead even a shadow of lawfulness,
he thought.

Unexpectedly Tiphaine turned slightly. “Lioncel,” she said. “Your opinion—concisely.”

Lioncel gulped; having questions like that shot at you was one of the less attractive
parts of moving up from page to squire.

“Umm . . . definitely unchivalrous conduct towards a gentlewoman, my lady, unworthy
of a knight. And a violation of the terms of service. This Sir Othon
was
obliged to see to his men’s provisioning, but that doesn’t mean he can act like a
bandit on Association territory . . . or anywhere in Montival. Plus it will leave
a hole in our supply plans in that area, and it’s a major north-south corridor. My
lady.”

“Correct,” Tiphaine said, making a small gesture that stiffened him back into anonymity.

“Sandra
so
does not like getting ripped off,” Conrad of Odell said, looking upward. “We used
to call it
an aggressive zero-tolerance policy
.”

“You don’t say,” Tiphaine said dryly, glancing in the same direction. “She
is
my patron too, Conrad.”

She snapped her fingers without looking around. “Boy! The Count of Dawson’s status
reports,” she said.

The Baroness of Ath was forty and looked ageless in the way people who spent their
days outdoors in all weathers often did, a tall woman with a build like a swordblade,
her sun-faded silver-blond hair cut in a bob much like those worn by pages, and eyes
the gray of sea-ice. Her male-style court dress of curl-toed shoes, hose, shirt, jerkin
and houppelande coat were as plain as ceremony allowed and mostly shades of rich dark
fabrics, relieved only by her chain of office and the small golden spurs of knighthood.
A round chaperon hat hung on one ear of her tall chair, the liripipe dangling.

Lioncel slid the logistics file she’d called for forward and stepped back behind her
chair, standing in the formal posture with one hand on the hilt of his sword and the
other over the heavy cut-steel buckle of the sword belt. That let him feel more than
hear the rumbling of his stomach. He’d had a very substantial lunch and he was hungry
again
hours short of dinnertime; everyone laughed and told him it was being fourteen and
shooting up like a weed.

“Oh, by Our Lady of the Citadel,” Tiphaine said after a moment, flicking pages.

Odd,
Lioncel thought.
I’ve never heard that used as one of the Virgin’s titles before.

She went on: “Did the man seriously expect to ship fodder all the way south from
Dawson
for his destriers? Without the railway draught teams eating everything they were
pulling by the time they got to the Okanagan country? Enguerrand’s a Count these days;
it doesn’t give him supernatural powers.”

Conrad flicked through the same file and grinned, an alarming expression as the thick
white keloid scars on his face knotted.

“They’ve got a lot more oats than money in the Peace River country and Dawson levies
haven’t fought down here in the south much. At a guess, back when the
ban
was called out at the start of this war my lord Enguerrand told his quartermasters
to get the fodder wherever it was cheapest and then forgot about it. Then
they
tried to draw on his own elevators full of nice cheap tribute grain before they realized
how shipping costs would screw their cash flow, and ever since then they’ve been robbing
Peter to pay Paul. Coming up short now and then, which was where young Sir Othon found
himself, I’d wager. And there’s not much coin circulating up there even now, too remote.
Just not used to paying cash for grain.”

“The Count will pay for this, and a fine, plus compensation-money to Lady Aicelena
for the abuse of her hospitality,” Tiphaine said flatly. “Or Baron de Taylor will.
And the bold Sir Othon can see how he likes a month of attitude adjustment in Little
Ease.”

Lioncel winced behind an impassive face as the older nobles smiled, or at least showed
their teeth.
Little Ease
was a dungeon oubliette beneath the Onyx Tower, a cramped cell carefully designed
to make it impossible for an inmate to either lie or stand or sit properly, not to
mention the rough knobby surface and utter blackness and total silence and cold and
filth and damp. Sending people there was done by the prerogative Court called
Star Chamber
 . . . over which the Queen Mother would preside.

“Oh, a month . . . that’s a bit much, unless you want a gibbering madman,” Conrad
said cheerfully. “A week would be about right. It’ll just
feel
like months. Like forever and a day in Hell, in fact.”

“All right, a week. You’re getting soft, Conrad.”

Conrad’s smile grew more alarming. “You can be a bit . . . drastic . . . when you’re
peeved. That’s probably why Sandra had you consult me, you know. We want to
discipline
Sir Othon and his lieges, not drive them to desperation. Besides, we’ve reformed.
We’re the good guys these days. Sorta.”

“Sorta, kinda.” Tiphaine rubbed one hand across her forehead. “I don’t have time for
this crap. Our command structure is still scrambled six ways from St. Swithin’s Day.
I’m being bounced back and forth from here to Portland to the front like a Ping-Pong
ball. Trailing files and letters like a comet’s tail. And you would be too, Conrad,
if you weren’t in that wheelchair.”

Conrad Renfrew shrugged.

“If the High Kingdom of Montival were a human being it’d still be in diapers,” he
said. “And His Majesty is trying to run a war with what used to be six or seven separate
armies two years ago. Us, and six separate armies built to
fight
us plus bits and pieces of odds and sods. It’s not
our
command structure, even if we’re the biggest single element; it’s
Montival’s
command structure. And yes, it’s fucked.”

The Lord Chancellor chuckled like gravel shaken in a bucket.

“And
Ping-Pong
? Pre-Change metaphors are
so
twentieth century for a near-Changeling like you. You’re dating yourself, Tiph.”

“Dating myself? Doesn’t that make you go blind?”

Didn’t
dating
also mean something like
courtship
before the Change? Then—

Lioncel suppressed a startled giggle with an effort that made him cough as he struggled
to maintain adult
gravitas.