The Ringworld Throne (12 page)

It was all going very smoothly, Vala thought. Very much according to prediction and plan. That worried her.

Three nights ago they had put a final shape to their plans.

Four Reds had come to the war. Warvia and Tegger had stayed, but two unmated males, Anakrin hooki-Whanhurhur and Chaychind hooki-Karashk, had been persuaded to return to Red territory carrying instructions that might be the saving of them all. Whand had had enough of vampires, and it seemed he and Spash had gotten pregnant. They would stay to refuel Cruiser Three. That left Valavirgillin and Kaywerbrimmis, the remaining drivers, split up to command two cruisers.

They’d chosen the teams early, then argued about it every night since.

Raking through a mountainous Grass Giant midden for several days had not improved the Machine People’s standing with these tribes. Vala was sure of that. But Grass Giant dung had yielded many barrels of saltpeter crystals.

The relief map outside the wall had become elaborate and wonderful. Only at halfnight and halfday was there light for Ghouls and the other species to work together on it; but they’d had a falan, seventy-five days, to do that. Dirt was replaced with colored clays. Once witnesses agreed on the shape of the land, they’d baked it hard under coals, and afterward used colored sand to mark possible routes for the cruisers. They were still moving those lines when night fell, and all retreated inside.

The vampires didn’t come every night, but they came in swarms.

Vampires didn’t learn, didn’t communicate. Moonwa had mounted the Marsh People’s curved window in the starboard-spin curve of the wall. The vampires attacked from starboard-spin, and warriors of four species killed them with guns and crossbows, firing around the edge of an invisible shield.

Vala had learned crossbows that way, several nights running. She loved the false sense of invulnerability ... false, because the window would not stop vampire scent.

The main building was a near-dome, fabric stretched over the top of a dirt wall, with a central pole. It was awesomely big, but awesomely crowded. Fifteen hundred Grass Giants—more women than men, a great many children, infants everywhere—made a stench rich enough to slice with a scythe-sword.

Wemb was in a cluster of wives. They were feeding her by hand, feeding themselves, too, and Wemb seemed to be enjoying it. Barok waved at her, and she waved back without getting up. Recovering nicely, Vala thought, from the night she and Barok had spent down among the vampires.

Barok would ride with Cruiser One. Vala had wondered if he would drop out of the game with Whand and Spash, or chase down the vampires who had taken his daughter.

Grass Giants were big, but they could stand crowding. For Machine People, Vala discovered, the problem was to avoid getting stepped on.

The Reds were prickly. Grass Giants steered clear of them.

If Reds and Machine People were feeling overmatched, why weren’t the even smaller Gleaners intimidated? But they’d found strategies that seemed to work. Some were playing with the children, some were grooming adults. Their nearsighted eyes found insect parasites with precision.

The Thurl pulled himself free of a ten of wives. He asked Vala, courteously and with no malice, “Do you have what you wanted of the shit pile?”

So, it was time to reveal a secret. “Yes, we thank you. When we mix the crystals with the sulfur and charcoal the Reds are gathering, we will have what propels our bullets.”

“Ah,” the Thurl said, hiding surprise.

He could not make gunpowder: he still didn’t know the proportions, Vala told herself. But now he knew that this was no mere Machine People perversion.

Into the quiet, vampire music insinuated itself, and quiet became silence.

But now the vampires’ song had a rising instrumental accompaniment. First it matched the vampire music. Vala had learned to pick out the harp, the grieving tube, the whistling tube, the thutter. Now the Ghoulish music swirled away, jarring with the vampire song, drowning it, while the thutter in the background played faster and faster, pulling heartbeats along. And now there was no vampire song at all.

Next down they’d been rolling. By night they camped on a bluff above a river. The vampires left them alone.

They reached Ginjerofer’s herds early on the second day. The Reds had fuel waiting. Charcoal and sulfur they had imported from far away, trading away their own wealth, with little yet to show for it.

Night covered the sun before the cruisers were loaded. The Reds made camp around the cruisers. When the vampires came, the cannon fired over the heads of Red sharpshooters. By dawn the vampire dead numbered forty or more.

Cruisers carried trade goods, and Vala made gifts; but forty vampire dead were what bonded these species together.

The third day carried them through Snowrunner’s Pass. The length of a daywalk varied by difficulty of the terrain, by altitude and slope and species; but Vala thought they’d covered two honest daywalks. They could reach the vampires’ refuge by midday tomorrow, if they were crazy enough to travel so directly.

In the morning Cruiser Two came rolling down. Warvia rode above the cannon housing, beneath a sheet awning.

Twuk called cheerily, “Waast! Is it so, that Snowrunner’s Pass is the easiest through the mountains?”

“When Reds and Ghouls agree, who can doubt?”

“Vampires think so, too!”

Cruiser Two was noisy with victory. Even Grieving Tube’s dark head lifted into the light, squinting, and grinned grotesquely before it sank back. Vala didn’t notice Warvia’s silence, then. Red Herders were rarely merry.

The din roused others. Vala saw wet black heads surfacing in a line along the shore. The River People came no farther, and Vala let them be, while Kay, Chit, Twuk, Paroom, Perilack, and Silack told their interwoven stories.

Kaywerbrimmis parked Cruiser Two on a knob of rock above the pass. The view was of unbroken clouds, not what Kay had hoped for, but he would wait. All had bathed in the streams they crossed, twice in three days. If they were not scentless, at least they’d tried.

(They weren’t scentless now, grinning and touching and word-wrestling to be next to speak. Vala could guess something of how the night had gone.)

Darkness flowed over them. Vampires began to stream through the pass. Grieving Tube, on watch, alerted the rest.

Cruiser Two’s heavy cargo, still piled in the pass, must have carried a scent. Kay sighted the cannon starboard of that point and waited. He killed twenty with three blasts.

The vampires left the pass empty for a while. Then they’d begun darting across. Kay’s passengers used the chance for target shooting, but otherwise let the vampires through. Bolts and bullets could be recovered, but not gunpowder.

They bunched up again later. Kay used the cannon again, and stopped almost at once. “They had prisoners, Vala. Big slow guys with big hands and big shoulders, wide-bodied women a head shorter, both of ‘em with yellow hair blooming out around their heads like mushrooms. Warvia saw them best. Warvia?”

Warvia roused herself. “We know the Farming People. Herbivores. They grow and tend root vegetables and keep animals, too, in partnership with Red Herder tribes who defend them. We didn’t see any Reds last night.”

Paroom: “They weren’t bunched up and they weren’t trying to escape. They were each with their own vampire, ah, companion. I couldn’t get a clear shot. We shot a few that didn’t have company—“

Twuk: “They sang at us. Grieving Tube played along. That scared them!”

Kay: “I couldn’t use the cannon because of the prisoners. Not that we were any help to them. What under the Arch would vampires want with prisoners?”

Tegger said, “Herds.”

He spoke almost absently; he was studying Warvia, who would meet nobody’s eyes. Still, it was an ugly thought. Double-ugly: it implied uncomfortably high sapience in vampires.

“The wind,” Kaywerbrimmis said, “was cold and wet and clean in our nostrils until the night was half gone. The vampires started crossing again, and these didn’t have prisoners. They ran. Maybe the smell of their own dead made them nervous. It was fine shooting. Then the wind shifted around and we smelled them, too.”

Grieving Tube was looking out from under the awning, listening, though her face was deep in shadow. “I would have hunted them, Kay,” she said. “Our music confuses them, freezes them.”

Kay’s eyes were on Vala. “Whatever. I invited Grieving Tube to join me in rishathra.” Unspoken:
the Ghoul woman was about to join the vampires!
“She played, we danced. Warvia accused me of abandoning the fight, but the rest got the idea quick enough—“

In the general laughter, Harpster’s tenor whisper sounded clear. “How was he?”

Grieving Tube: “Inspired. Paroom, too.”

“We all—“ Kay stopped suddenly, for no more than a heartbeat, but Vala knew at once. “We all joined in. You understand, Vala, we had them backed up at the pass. As soon as we stopped shooting, they flowed through like a wide river. The smell of them, we could have chopped it into bricks to sell to the elderly.”

Tegger was looking up at his mate. Warvia’s silence disturbed him, Vala thought, but he hadn’t noticed anything more ominous. Kaywerbrimmis said, “I think the Thurl gave us Twuk because she’s small. Inspired decision.” Twuk smiled brilliantly at him. Warvia was looking into far distances, her face like stone.

“Two-tenths of night passed this way, I think. Then the wind swung around. I didn’t notice right away: the vampire scent was gone, but we had our own smells by then. But Chit saw—“

Chit: “Vampires trying to creep upon us across the ice. They’re not much darker than snow themselves.”

Kay: “The wind went gusty and stayed that way. They’d get a whiff of us and look around, and we were conspicuous, I guess.”

Paroom: “Ten tens of them.”

Kay: “Toward morning they stopped coming entirely. We left a carpet of vampires dead in the pass.”

Twuk: “There’s nothing under the Arch like the stink of a hundred vampire corpses. They do avoid their own dead.”

Vala: “Might keep it in mind.”

Twuk: “We collected our cargo and our bolts and bullets at halfdawn. Vala, I think we
saw
the Shadow Nest.”

“Tell it.”

“Warvia?”

The Red woman didn’t look down. “From spin the light of day flowed toward us while we were still in dark. We were exhausted, but I was at my post, here on the cannon tower. The clouds parted. I saw two black lines. Hard to tell how far, hard to tell how high, but a black plate with structures above, high in the center and glittering silver, and its black shadow parallel below.”

“Not much more than what Harpster told us, “ Vala said, probing.

A flash of anger, throttled. “I could see the silver curves of the river, this river, flowing into the shadow.”

“We know of the Shadow Nest.” A new voice heard from: a glossy black shape of uncertain gender and uncertain age slid out of the water and stood erect on the mud. “I am Rooballabl. Welcome to the Homeflow; have free passage of us. I speak the Tongue better than most. I’m told none of you will rish?”

“Not underwater, Roobla,” Vala said with regret. That
would
be a coup. “Shadow Nest?”

“The Shadow Nest is a cave without walls. A black roof fifteen hundred paces around, with open sides. Vampires have lived and bred below since before any of us were born.”

Harpster spoke without emerging from the awning. Only Vala heard. “Fifteen hundred paces around would be less then five hundred across, in Water People paces. Two hundred for Grass Giants, three for the rest of us. Three hundred paces in diameter, as we were told.”

Vala asked, “Roobla, how high is that roof?”

Rooballabl exchanged a quick sequence of honks with someone still in the water. Then: “Fudghabladl doesn’t know.” More honking. Rooballabl said, “Low enough to block rain even in high wind. Understand, only Fudghabladl has been there.”

“What’s the Homeflow like under the Shadow Nest? Can vampires swim?”

A gabble of honking voices. One came forward—white fringes on his head and along where his jaw would have been—and chattered at Rooballabl. Rooballabl said, “We must hug the bottom when we pass through. None of us go anymore. The water is a sewer, sometimes a whonkee.” Unknown word. “Vampires never swim.”

Unseen, Harpster spoke. “Whonkee, path of the dead.” Vala nodded.

Warvia swung down into the cannon enclosure.

Vala watched Cruiser Two while the discussion ranged. Warvia didn’t emerge. And where was Tegger?

The River People had observed the vampires for generations, but from their own viewpoint. Vampires sporadically rolled corpses into the Homeflow, hundreds at a time, from ten to twenty species including their own. A turn later there would be a glut of fish. That used to be worth knowing ... but old Fudghabladl hadn’t been near the Shadow Nest in twenty falans or more. Fishing aside, nothing that lay beyond was worth traversing the Shadow Nest.

Vala dropped her voice. “Harpster. Corpses rolled into the Homeflow are lost to you, aren’t they?”

“Fish eat them, and Fishers eat the fish, and in the end all is ours.”

“Flup. You’re being robbed.”