The Given Sacrifice (8 page)

“No, no time for explanations,” his liege replied.

Lioncel felt himself nodding, under a tight-held excitement. His liege-lady was fond
of the maxim that it was better to react in good time with a small force than too
late with a larger one. He used the moment to get his own crossbow and hang the quiver
of bolts to his waist; he was still too young to match a grown man with the sword,
but he was a good shot and his quarrels hit just as hard as a veteran’s.

“I think the enemy are going to try something underhanded and we need to move
now
.”

She flicked the point of her blade towards the ceiling, and the steel-framed faces
of the knights changed; they pulled on the guige straps that slung their shields and
ran their arms through the loops. Armand spun on his heel and began calling orders.

There was a rustle and clank as the command party came through into the outer chambers,
and the ranks of the
menie
stiffened the way a cat did at the beginning of its stalk. This part of the Grand
Constable’s suite was interlinked reception rooms; in normal times they were spacious
and airy, despite the massiveness of the structure around them. Even a small force
of armored men in a bristle of shields and spears and glaives made them at least
feel
crowded. Honed metal winked and glinted as the pole arms shifted into beams of light
from the high windows, amid a smell of leather and male sweat and oiled steel.

“There is a plot against the Crown,” Tiphaine said without preliminaries. “Some officers
of the Protector’s Guard must have been suborned or replaced and we may have to fight
the Guard.”

Which would mean being grossly outnumbered, for starters.

“Anyone who isn’t ready to follow me on this had better step aside right now. Fall
out if you care to.”

Fists and swordhilts thumped on breastplates and shields. There was a short crashing
bark of:

“D’Ath!
D’Ath!”

Lioncel wasn’t surprised; he’d have been shocked if anyone
had
dropped out. These were all men who’d sworn fealty to Tiphaine d’Ath of their own
will. Nobody became a personal vassal of Lady Death because they longed for a quiet
life.

“The cry is
Artos and Montival.
Follow me!”

Then they all trotted towards the stairwell; there were two on this level, spirals
set in the east and west thicknesses of the tower. A slam of boots and a clatter of
harness, men-at-arms and spearmen settling their shields and crossbowmen loading as
they ran.

Mother!
Lioncel thought suddenly with his hand on the cocking lever.
And the girls, and Huon! They’re up there with the High Queen!

The war was
here
, with shocking suddenness, not just out at the front. It was like running down a
staircase in the dark and expecting another step when there wasn’t one, a blow running
up into his chest and squeezing even as his hands fumbled through the loading routine.

This is Castle Todenangst, not some gulch out east
!

Seven Devils Mountains

(Formerly western Idaho)

High Kingdom of Mon
tival

(Formerly western North America)

June 15th. Change Year 26/2024 AD

C
ole Salander was under a fallen tree, sweating and baring his teeth in an unconscious
rictus of tension. The first warning had been a covey of blue-gray upland quail taking
off, and then a Cooper’s hawk perched in an aspen had turned its mad red eyes upslope
and discovered business elsewhere without trying for one of its natural prey. And
then something that could have been a dog giving tongue . . . that was when he’d gone
to ground in a hurry.

Cole glowered at the POW lying to his left out of the corners of his eyes. Alyssa
was the reason he couldn’t just try to outrun the pursuit. The enemy glider pilot
smiled at him��with poisonous not-real-sweetness—and lay quietly with her splinted
arm cradled against her chest. A distant sound . . .

Yup. A hound belling. Shit.

Somewhere the damned dog bayed again, and closer, the sound echoing against rock,
startling the woods into silence. All that could mean only one thing here in the Seven
Devils Mountains of western Idaho. Nobody had lived here even before the Change, and
few had even passed through since the machines stopped. It had to be soldiers in this
time of war. More than one or two, and he didn’t think they were soldiers of the US
Army. Normally that wouldn’t be an insoluble problem; he could cover forty miles a
day or better if he really pushed it, even in mountain country like this, and the
same terrain made a cavalry pursuit impossible. There might be individuals in the
bunch combing the area who could equal his best pace, but no
unit
of any size could.

I should have just bugged out when I found where the glider crashed but no, I had
to be a hotshot.

Soldier and captive were both well-hidden, in a hollow covered by a hundred-foot lodgepole
pine that had fallen across the mountainside sometime in the winter just over, surrounded
by a thick scrum of blue lupine taking advantage of the light let in by the gap in
the canopy. The root-ball wasn’t totally broken off, and the needles had mostly stayed
on the branches as the wounded tree struggled for life. He could smell his own sour
sweat under the sweet pine and flower scents, and hers—though he had to admit she
was a lot less rank even now. You had to be borderline insane to be a military glider
pilot and the last chaotic tumbling smashing crushing moments of your short terrifying
life were likely to suck bigtime, but until then you lived better than a foot soldier,
with cooked food and hot water available every night.

The soil in the declivity was shaded and damp, and the wet had soaked through the
mottled green-brown-gray linsey-woolsey of his battle-smock and pants, chilly and
uncomfortable. Summer came late and reluctantly to these heights. The forest was open
here, big old-growth conifers widely spaced, with thickets and aspens around the occasional
clearing where fire or geology had kept the climax vegetation at bay. Fortunately
the wind that bore the sound of the dogs wouldn’t be carrying their scent back to
the animals.

Unfortunately, good hunting hounds can follow a ground trail regardless of the breeze,
once they’ve cut across it.

And while he was confident he could outrun men, even without an injured prisoner he
couldn’t outpace dogs; over short to medium distances four legs just plain beat two.
But there was a mountain stream running strong and cold with melted snow downslope.
If he could just get there and use it to break trail . . .

But I’m tasked with getting Ms. “That’s Pilot Officer Bitch to You, Soldier”
back to our lines. And I’m doing it alone because we’re losing the war and everybody’s
trying to do three men’s work so I can’t fight even if it’s a small patrol. The
enemy
don’t have to send their men out alone.

She won’t run away or shout, she gave her parole and I think she’ll keep it, but I
can’t make her move . . . not all-out, and anything else would be a waste of time
if there’s a pursuit. To be fair, that arm
has
to hurt if she moves fast.

He still felt like he’d fought a grizzly himself.

Mainly because I did.

It wouldn’t stop him from moving fast or fighting hard, he hadn’t actually cracked
bones or torn ligaments, but it would make it a lot more painful. He wasn’t at quite
ten tenths of capacity.

And if I just cut her loose, then her parole is over and she can shout her lungs out
with a clear conscience and then I am so fucked. Unless I just kill her, which isn’t
going to happen. Shit. Maybe trying to get her back to base wasn’t such a good idea
even if she’d be a valuable intel source.

He had a good view through a little gap in the branches of the open forest across
the broad slope. He brought his crossbow to his shoulder and peered through the telescopic
sight, careful to move slowly and keep the lens well back; he might be just out of
the accelerated SF training course, but he
had
done well in it, and he’d been a hunter since he was old enough to take a slingshot
out after rabbits to help fill the family stewpot and guard the truck garden. The
downside of a scope was that it narrowed the field of view but that was all right
if you kept switching back between the scope and naked eyeball.

Two shaggy gray-brown dogs bounded into sight, big ones—as big as he’d ever seen,
and looking to have mastiff and Great Dane and deerhound and a bit of timber wolf
in their ancestry. Or possibly a donkey in the woodpile, if you concentrated on the
size alone. They wore leather collars with steel studs, and they quartered the ground
in an efficient-looking pattern. Fortunately there weren’t any tracks for them to
find right there; he’d come in from the north, trying to loop around the latest known
enemy activity . . . which was now evidently much closer than anyone had thought.

Alyssa Larsson had just smiled every time he asked her where the base was. Now he
knew why: he’d been headed straight towards it all by himself.

I was giving her an armed escort home!

One of the dogs bayed again, a deep-chested sound. That was a signal, it wasn’t just
making noise because it liked to hear the sound of its own voice. Four minutes later
a human figure came loping through the woods. Doll-tiny at this distance, around three
hundred yards, but the scope brought him close enough to see the knee-length kilt
and the long yellow yew bow in the left hand with an arrow held on the string.

Shit. Clan warrior.

They weren’t exactly the enemy’s equivalent of the Special Forces. Those were the
Dúnedain Rangers who were supposed to be
even weirder
. But the Clan Mackenzie were rumored to be neobarb headhunters and they were most
definitely and by hard objective evidence very bad news. He’d talked to men who’d
made it back from the battle at the Horse Heaven Hills. Sometimes in conversations
that carefully excluded officers. They’d all featured profanely emphatic warnings
about the reach and punch of those arrows and the uncanny rate of fire.

They’re sneaky, too,
had been common.

Closer, and he—

No. It’s a
she.
Christ, aren’t there any
normal
women out west, looking after babies and working in the fields and fighting off bandits
while the men are away at war?

—leapt easily onto a jut of rock that stood out from the slope and stood with arrow
half-drawn. That was close enough that her face filled the scope. A young woman, early
twenties like Cole.

It took him a moment to see the details, because the face was
painted
. Not makeup, real lines of black and white like a mask of dark wings starting on
the forehead and sweeping over eyes and cheeks and then curving in along the jaw to
the chin. It gave the countenance an eerie alien aspect, like something you saw in
a dream.

OK, the briefing said
Mackenzies wear war paint.
Nice to know we get information right sometimes.

She wasn’t wearing a helmet, which was good practice doing a scout in the woods; the
protection wasn’t worth the way it restricted your hearing and peripheral vision.
Instead she had on a sort of beret-like thing, with a clasp that held a spray of raven
feathers standing up above her left eye. Brown hair hung in plaits at the front down
either side of her face, and then the scalp was shaven above the ears to leave a braided
roach falling down her back with a length of cord wrapped around it.

He shifted the scope slightly. Pleated kilt and plaid over the shoulder in a green
and brown tartan with slivers of dull orange, a broad leather belt, buckled ankle
boots and knee-hose. A short sword a lot like the one he carried except that it was
on the left hip and not the right, with a green-painted steel buckler the size and
shape of a soup-plate clipped to the scabbard; a long dirk; a smaller knife tucked
into her hose; and a green brigandine over her torso. On it in dark outline was a
crescent moon cradled between antlers, and a big war-quiver stuffed with gray-fletched
arrows jutted up over her right shoulder.

Eyes scanned back and forth, patiently, not hurrying or narrowing in on any one spot
yet, instead sinking into the landscape and looking for the break in the pattern.
He recognized the technique, and was thankful he’d taken the time to break up the
outline of his crossbow with scrim and little bits of vegetation. Straight lines and
too-regular curves drew the gaze in the wilderness.

OK, that’s extreme range, but I’m a really good shot and there’s not much wind, so
I could almost certainly put one through the center of mass . . . of course, there’s
the armor, those brigandines are nearly as good as a solid breastplate . . . and the
dogs would go for me . . . nah, better be cautious, this is an intelligence mission
not a hot op; I’m trying to
get away,
not
fight.

His training had emphasized focusing on the mission. And that aggression was a means,
not an end. Those were the differences between an army and a
neobarb
mob.

At last she made a short chittering noise that would have passed as forest background
if he hadn’t been watching her, and a man in the same gear appeared. Cole blinked;
he hadn’t seen the second Mackenzie at all, and it made him very glad he hadn’t chanced
a long-range shot at the first one while someone unseen was covering her. The man
was slender and of medium height, looking wiry-strong, with a brown mustache and short
chin-beard. The rest of his head was apparently shaven, except for a lock at the back
that spilled down in a braid. His face was painted as well, though more lightly, and
somehow looked astonishingly like a cat’s, and there was a tuft of gray-brown fur
in the clasp of his
 . . .
Cole blinked . . .
Scots bonnet
! That was what it was called!

These people are seriously
strange.
Those knights and castles and things they’ve got out west are bad enough, but
this
?

There was nothing eccentric about the way he quartered the ground, though, with the
dogs trotting at his heel and his gaze scanning the pine-duff and old aspen leaves
ahead of him. Occasionally he would go to a knee and peer more closely. Cole recognized
that too—an experienced tracker looking for sign. He lay and sweated and thought he
heard an
almost
entirely inaudible snigger from his prisoner.

I don’t suppose it matters what they do with the head after they kill me . . . I should
be able to take out whoever stumbles across me first, but that’s one bolt and I can’t
reload as fast as an archer can shoot . . . they’re too far apart to shoot one and
rush the other with my sword before they get me and there are the dogs but maybe if
I’m really fast and even more lucky . . . and if
this
time there’s nobody in reserve I can’t see yet . . .

They could just be not finding him; he was
good
at concealment. Or it could be a trap. At last the newcomer turned to the woman on
the rock and shook his head. They gestured at each other—military sign language, he
thought—and then she nodded. Cole forced himself not to blow out his breath in relief
as she took an oxhorn slung at her waist and put the silver-mounted mouthpiece to
her lips.

Huuuuu-huuuuu-huuurrrrr!

The sound was surprisingly deep, and it seemed to resonate in his chest for a moment,
but it meant they thought nobody was around. It brought a dozen more kilted archers
loping through the woods. He lost sight of some as they continued on past the coffin-tight
hiding place and the rest shook out into a skirmish line. If they didn’t walk right
into him and they assumed this area was clear afterwards, he had a good chance of
staying hidden until they all went on about their business. And after they’d checked
the area once they probably wouldn’t be back. There was a
lot
of forested mountain around here.

Go away,
he thought, clenching his stomach muscles in an involuntary attempt to project the
thought that was half a formless prayer.
Nothing interesting here, you gave it a once-over, much more important stuff elsewhere,
move along now. . . .

One halted, a dark-skinned woman with her hair in a multitude of tight braids tipped
with little silver balls.

That’s not a bow she’s carrying,
he realized as she came closer.
That’s a staff.

A six-foot length of carved rowan-wood, topped by a circle flanked by two silver crescents.

What the hell is
she
doing? That’s not a weapon. Focus, Cole, focus, you’re missing something.

He narrowed his attention. Through the sight he could see the dark woman blink and
frown, looking like someone trying to remember or catch a nagging thought at the edge
of perception. She halted and drew a circle in the forest floor with the butt of the
staff and inscribed lines within the figure in some complex pattern of angles and
curves. Then she began to
spin
the staff, first over her head, then touching the end down with what looked like
careful precision on the figures she’d drawn. The circle on its end was a disk of
silver-rimmed crystal, and it caught the morning sun in a flickering glitter as she
whirled the wood at arm’s length again. After a moment she began to walk outward in
a spiral, still turning the staff wrist-over-wrist like a quarterstaff.