The Heretic (23 page)

Gaspar didn’t answer. There was no way to answer that would not mean doom.

Rostov laughed lowly, and stepped beside Gaspar, stepped toward the slaves. They must have seen something forbidding in his countenance—Gaspar was too busy taking in, drinking in, Frel, to notice—for they both stepped back.

And then he let the map unroll again, the Redlands map. He held it up like a dividing curtain between Gaspar and the food, the boy, cutting off his view.

“Now,” said Rostov. “Show me. Show me where.”

Gaspar slowly raised his hand. He looked at the map. He would locate it, the hilltop within the surrounding mountains where the Scouts were camped, he would point to it. But no. He would be killing ninety men.

He stared at the map. And, after a moment, Gaspar let out a stifled whimper, like the last breath of a dak that you had to put down for its own good.

“What?”

“I—” he whimpered.
I am not an evil man.

“What are you mumbling about, wastelander? Speak up!”

The bastards! Bastards to put him in such a position. They deserved what was coming.

The bastard Weldletter, making the theft so easy.

In a way it will be Weldletter’s own fault.

And the lieutenant. The Dashian spawn. Taking him hostage, leaving him no choice.

My child, my child!

He wanted to run, to grab Frel and run, but he knew the bodyguards would cut him down at the first move.

Instead, his finger moved toward the map, found the curve of the contour line he was looking for. The bastard Weldletter had shown him how these worked, what they represented.

“Here,” he heard his voice croak. “In this dry run, near a blackstone cliff.”

Over. Now there was only hope. Only—

Gaspar looked up into the shining, black eyes of Rostov, and felt that hope crinkle, like the skin of one of the Schlusels, strapped to those strange, uniformly shaped stones.

He’s not going to let Frel go.

A part of him, a small rational voice, echoed quietly within him that it had been a forlorn hope all along.

Rostov didn’t have to say anything. The same voice said it for him.

You fooled yourself, great chief. You were never going to save your son.

A shot rang out. One of the bodyguard crumpled. Another, and the second man, who had drawn a blunderbuss pistol with almost supernatural alacrity, also grabbed at his chest just under the neck as it exploded and bled. He fell also, writhing and kicking in a pool of his own blood, his limbs out of his motor control and seemingly full of crawling insects.

From the edge of the tent two men stepped forward. Both were in Blaskoye white, but they wore the garments loosely, in an unkempt fashion a Blaskoye would not have been caught dead in.

Both held composite bows notched with arrow.

And those arrows were pointing straight at Rostov.

Amazingly, Rostov only smiled the broader. The more terribly.

“You’ve killed my cousins,” he said. “This is not something we take lightly here in the Redlands.”

He nodded toward the wine slave.

“You’ve come for the girl, I suppose,” he said. “There she is. Take her.”

The lieutenant held his bow steady. “You get her, Kruso,” he said to the other man. The other man quickly moved over, put an hand on the slave girl’s arm, and pulled the wine pitcher toward him. He gently took it from her grasp, set it on a nearby pedestal that had been designed for such a purpose, the delivery of spent dishes. Then he pulled the girl toward himself and into his arm.

“Her ah gotten, Lieutenant,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Rostov shook his head. “Lieutenant,” he said. “That’s not a name. It’s a thing, like carpenter or potter. One who carries out the orders of others, and has no will of his own.”

“My name is Dashian,” the other replied.

“Dashian is the commander,” said Rostov. “You are a lieutenant, not a Dashian.”

“We’re leaving now,” the lieutenant said.

“And how will you do so?”

“Through the entrance,” said the other.

“Unlikely.”

“Maybe you are right,” said the lieutenant. He turned to the other Scout. “Ready, Kruso?”

“Aye, Lieutenant.”

“
No!
” shouted Gaspar. “You can’t go. Not like this. Not now.”

“Goodbye, Gaspar,” said the lieutenant.

“Take the boy,” Gaspar said. “You must!”

“You broke our deal.”

“Take him,” Gaspar pleaded. “He’s dead if you don’t.”

Dashian glanced quickly to the other, the one called Kruso. Kruso shook his head. “Na good, thet many toh carry,” he said.

Rostov began to laugh. “This is the chatter of walking corpses,” he said. “Wind over rocks. Nothing. Lower your bows.” He motioned to them impatiently, pointing downward with a finger. “Lower your bows and the slaves will die quickly, cleanly.”

“I saw the Schlusels,” said Dashian.

Rostov growled impatiently.

“Then you saw how this has to end.
You
will live, in a manner of speaking. I will trade you to your father,” he said. “Perhaps a little worse for wear, perhaps no longer quite the man you were. The others…well, I have my cousins to avenge, so I’m afraid I cannot promise to make it quick. This one”—he nodded toward Gaspar—“must watch the boy die, of course.”

Gaspar felt himself shaking. So much he had risked. Now to have it all yanked from his hands.

I’m a coward, after all,
he thought.
I do not want to watch him die. I would want to go before. I would beg to go before if I thought Rostov would listen.

“Enough,” said Dashian. Gaspar looked up, ready for the end to come. But the lieutenant was not speaking to Rostov. He was speaking to the other, the sergeant. “Kruso?”

Together they raised their bows and loosed the arrows. The string sang out and the arrows shot upward, toward the ceiling. Then past the ceiling and through the great venting hole at the very apex of the structure. Upward and out into daylight.

Rostov reached for the knife in his belt, ignoring the pistol stuffed in beside it. He was moving toward the boy.

I would beg, but he wouldn’t listen.

And then the sky began to rain arrows.

* * *

Split-awareness interpolation complete to ninety-three point two seven degrees of accuracy,
said Center.
The tracking and location purposes are served.
My recommendation is that you return to single-channel awareness with extreme alacrity.

Hell, yes,
said Abel.
We’re here.

6

Abel and Rostov moved toward the boy at the same instant, but Abel got there first. Abel realized that this wasn’t because he was faster. No, the Blaskoye had moved to snatch not the boy, but the wooden platter which had moments before held a stack of meat.

A shield for arrows,
thought Abel
. He adapts quickly.

For a moment their eyes met, Abel’s and Rostov’s, and, though the other said nothing, Abel was as sure of the other’s thought as he was of the voices of Center and Raj. He was sure, because he had experienced exactly the same thought, and with it, a moment of complete understanding.

One day, I will kill you.

Then the Blaskoye snatched the wooden platter away, and Abel pulled the child toward himself.

He had brought twenty Scouts with him on the trail of Gaspar and, donning the Blaskoye garments they’d come prepared with, had entered the oasis encampment and managed to follow the Remlap chief though the settlement undetected. It had not been difficult to blend in, since Awul-alwaha had become a stew of heretofore opposed Redlander tribes. The tents were as varied as the dress. Even if the others had been declared Blaskoye or this new species of tribe, the Redlander, they had not gotten new clothing or new tent-cloth. So they had answered the summons of their new masters bringing what they possessed.

Trailing Gaspar had been difficult, but not the hardest tracking job he or the Scouts had undertaken by far. Like many Redlanders Abel encountered, Gaspar was not as good at fooling Scouts and covering his tracks as he believed himself to be. The desert took marks well, and, once written in scuffed ground or oddly broken twig, those telltales tended to last a long time. The Scouts had often used Redlander arrogance in this regard against them. Many others who had thought the soft Farmer Scouts incapable of tracking them had met their fates in surprised astonishment and disbelief. Abel’s greatest challenge had been finding a place to hold the donts, since he could not take them into the oasis proper. But Awul-alwaha had solved the problem for him, in a manner of speaking, for there were corrals already built ringing the encampment. These had probably been built by incoming warrior bands as temporary structures for donts and daks while they established more permanent quarters. Most were occupied, but some were vacant. Abel had left his Scouts’ donts in one of these. He tried to select the one closest in as possible. He’d left behind a guard of two to watch over them, and to keep them dressed and ready. He and the rest of the Scouts followed Gaspar into the encampment. Gaspar was feeling his way, moving slowly, and Abel and his men had not had any trouble catching up with him and shadowing him once again.

Then, when he’d seen the chief slash his way into the smaller tent attached to the enormous central tent, he’d known this was the final destination.

Abel’s two squads had scaled the sides of the structure from the outside, then infiltrated through the vents in the tent-cloth where roof met rounded tent walls. These vents had a curtain of fabric draping before them to discourage flitters and insectoids from getting in, and the flaps had concealed the Scouts stationed in the vent openings.

If they’d been noticed climbing the outside of the tent, no one had raised an alarm. Perhaps they were taken to be workers, repairing wind or sun damage. Perhaps this had been aided by the fact that each Scout had stopped and examined the ropes and stakes holding the tent erect just before they began their accent. Several of them were observed to have bent down to test the knots for weakness, one even producing a knife with which to probe the fibers of the rope here and there, no doubt for safety’s sake.

It helped that on the ascent, their muskets weren’t showing, although bows and arrows were. Abel had ordered them to cover the rifles strapped across their backs beneath their Blaskoye robes, and to arm themselves with bows and arrows when in position. He wanted repetitive firepower. Attempting to reload a musket muzzle while balancing on a bit of fabric was a task beyond even most Scouts.

Meanwhile Abel and Kruso had entered through the front door. When the doorguard questioned them, Kruso had put on his best South Redland’s accent and claimed they were Flanagans, the sea-coast scavengers feared by all in the Delta provinces, come in answer to the Blaskoye call to arms. Since no one had ever seen a Flanagan, they were shown through.

The real lapse in security is the obvious Blaskoye belief that no one from the Valley could survive a trip to Awul-alwaha,
said Raj,
much less that some Valleyman could walk right into town and request an audience with the great sheik himself. This will probably be the last time they ever make that mistake, however.

They’re letting me walk in with my rifle,
Abel thought.
This Rostov is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.

It is a calculated gambit to shore up allegiance with so many recently conquered tribes,
said Center.
As we have witnessed, Rostov literally unmans those who resist. So he allows those who remain the illusion of self-determination, at least about their persons.

So they had infiltrated.

When he’d seen he had a clear shot, he’d considered shooting Rostov first, but he was not close enough to identify the girl for certain. He calculated that as soon as Rostov fell, pandemonium was likely to break loose. He needed that extra moment to be sure he had the right slave girl in sight. His girl.

So he’d gone for the nearby men-at-arms. Besides, they held rifles, and Rostov had only a pistol stuck into his belt—beside that gleaming silver knife.

One day, perhaps soon, I will regret not immediately killing Rostov,
Abel thought, even as he pulled the trigger and the first guard fell.

Patterns indicate a martial buildup due to internal population pressures and intertribal rivalries resulting from uneven black-market trading between Cascade and Progar,
Center said.
Zentrum’s plans will take into account the loss of one leader, however valuable.

Center thinks you shoot down one Rostov, another will pop up in short order due to the powder-keg situation,
Raj said.
He may be correct on that score, but I, too, wish you could have taken the shot. Hang the girl.

No.

All right,
Raj replied.
You’ve got the girl caught up in a fate she never asked for now.
The least you can do is take her and run!

The girl was nine, tall for her age. She was mostly skin and bones, however, as Abel discovered when he lifted her up and threw her across his shoulder. At first she resisted, until he said to her in Landish, “Stop now. You are Loreilei?”

A whispered “Yes.”

“I am taking you back to your family.” Instantly, she went still and grabbed tightly to his robes. Her breathing increased to rapid gasps, but she made no other sound.

Abel glanced back at Rostov. He was holding the plate by one side and over his head to fend off arrows. Two had already lodged in the wood’s exterior. With his other hand, he was aiming his pistol straight at Abel.

He’s got me dead to rights.

Then a musket butt crashed across the side of Rostov’s head, taking him and the platter like a club. The pistol cracked, smoked, and fired, but the shot was spent into the floor. Rostov stumbled, then raised the plate to ward off another blow.

It was Kruso, using his fired musket as a bludgeon.

“Leave off,” shouted Abel. “Take the boy and go!”

Kruso instantly obeyed, pulling up the boy like a sack of meal and holding him under one arm. They sprinted toward the entrance.

The doorguard, so easy to pass on the way in with a bit of subterfuge, were in no mood to let them out again. But five arrows found the two men and both were screaming and cursing as Abel and Kruso barreled between them. The entrance to the sheik’s tent lay not ten paces before them now. Abel risked a glance back.

Rostov was right behind them, his gleaming chrome knife in his hand. Trailing the sheik was Gaspar. The chief had found the strength to lift himself up and follow after, as if pulled by a magnetism he could not resist.

And behind Rostov were the Blaskoye, kinsmen by the look of their raiment. They had, it seemed, suddenly realized that their leader was under attack and were swarming to the offensive behind him.

“Now!” Abel shouted into the upper reaches of the tent in Landish. “Away!”

The Scouts disappeared from the vent holes and, Abel knew, had grabbed portions of tent fabric and were sliding down the side. There they would finish the work they’d begun before they ascended. Each went to the nearest anchoring stake to find the partially sawn rope that held tension on the enormous structure and complete the task of severing that rope entirely.

Even as Abel turned back to spring for the entrance and daylight, he saw the sides of the structure begin to sag. And when he burst through to outside, it was falling all around him, falling down upon the contingent of Blaskoye who were on the heels of Rostov.

He was in the dust of the pathway in front of the tent.

“Dashian!”

The scream came from behind him, and he spun around as Rostov burst from the tent. He quickly put the girl down, shoved her behind him, and turned to face the Blaskoye.

But Rostov stopped in his tracks, as if he’d run into an invisible wall.

What the hell?

Risk a quick look behind you, lad,
said Raj, laughter in his voice.

Abel did so. His twenty Scouts were lined up with drawn muskets, each muzzle aimed at the heart of the Blaskoye.

Then Gaspar ran past Rostov and, as a man might snatch an insectoid from the air, Rostov reached out and snared the Remlap chief by the neck and yanked him back and to his side. Within a split second, he had his knife at Gaspar’s throat.

“Papa!” A small loud voice from nearby, and the slave boy was struggling in Kruso’s grasp and had broken free toward his father and the Blaskoye.

Rostov cut Gaspar’s throat with a practiced brutality and shoved the still stumbling man toward the approaching boy. Meanwhile, the Blaskoye ran for cover.

“Fire!” Abel yelled.

It was just enough distraction.

A hail of balls kicked up the dust and followed Rostov, but no one had tracked him quickly enough, and he was gone before any could reload.

Gone to get reinforcements,
said Raj.
Time to leave.

“Stay here,” Abel said to the girl behind him. He and Kruso darted out to the slave boy, who was standing over his father. Gaspar lay face up, his neck oozing. The boy was attempting the impossible task of staunching the femoral bleeding.

“Come tha away, youngen,” Kruso said gently. But his hand was firm as he pulled the boy back and led him toward the Scouts. Abel gazed down at the Remlap chief a moment longer. There was the trace of a smile lingering on his face. Perhaps his last sight had been the boy. Perhaps not.

Abel turned to the Scouts. “Home,” he said. He picked up the girl again. His men, now reloaded, made their way at a fast trot out of the encampment, back to the edge of the desert and to the corral where the donts awaited them.

There was no question of throwing off pursuit. This was going to be a race. He hoped his other orders had been obeyed. They would find out soon enough.

They rode west. For the first quarter-watch, he had the donts running on two legs, but the creatures could not sustain such a pace, and eventually he ordered everyone to a more endurable gallop.

He’d been right about the pursuit. Within a half watch, a glance behind revealed a cloud of dust rising on the horizon—a large one, at that. Abel estimated it would take at least a hundred riders to kick up such a fury of redness.

And so it went for two days of hard riding. They stopped only to water the donts, and then only to let them slurp at soaked sponges, nothing more. Abel slept in the saddle, and had to tie the girl to his back at points so that she could slumber and not fall off. They traveled by day and by night. There was no question of a pause, a rest. Not yet.

Then Abel saw the landmark he was looking for, a great hill of rounded stone in the distance, and headed toward it. This was where they got to find out if Weldletter’s cartography was going to prove crucial or get them all killed. He had an accurate memory of every place the Scouts had passed, thanks to Center, but the remainder of the Scouts did not. And the ones he’d left behind in pursuit of Gaspar did not have him to guide them to the rendezvous point.

All they had was Weldletter’s map.

Because, of course, the map of the Redlands they’d allowed Gaspar to take was a forgery. Accurate enough in its broad outline, but completely misleading when you got down to the details.

As to the map of the Land itself that Gaspar had stolen—that one hadn’t been a misleading copy at all. It was an out-and-out fake. He and Weldletter had spent some enjoyable moments coming up with believable troop numbers and fortification figures that he’d then had Weldletter pen to the papyrus. Would the Blaskoye detect the ploy? In some ways, it didn’t matter. Both fake maps had served their immediate and most important purpose: bait for one who was bait himself, but hadn’t known it.

Maybe somewhere inside, Gaspar
did
,
Abel thought
, and yet couldn’t help himself.

To the left up ahead,
said Center.
Between those red sandstone structures lies the entrance to the canyon.

Soon the donts were off sand and onto the stones of a dry wash, their horn-coated feet clattering as the Scouts passed. The walls of the canyon quickly rose on either side of them and soon became cliffs a fieldmarch high. It was past noon, and the canyon was in shadow. This was at least relief from the unremitting sun.

The going became narrower and the donts were huffing and puffing at the steep upward climb. It was almost, but not quite, beyond them—especially with their Scouts urging them on with frenetic intensity. The animals were beginning to fail, however. Abel knew they must rest soon or most of the mounts, as desert-tough as they were, would die. He was quite willing to drive them until it killed them if he had to, but to do so would leave his men stranded here, only a quarter of the way back home.