The Tears of the Sun (52 page)

The Mormons poured after them, nearly as quick. A dozen of them locked shields and smashed into the display window, where the glass had already been weakened by the punching bodkin points of the arrows and javelins. It turned into a glittering wave of fragments, and then their hobnailed boots were trampling the mannequins and sending sprays of gold and platinum, diamonds and rubies and tanzanite into the body of the store.

The Dúnedain followed, on their heels and then past them with a dreadful bounding agility, accompanied by one swearing, scrambling member of the Force.

Ritva vaulted a display rack, rolled under a thrust from a
pila
and cut backhand and upward into a groin; the man screamed astonishingly loud and thrashed, and blood sprayed across her torso. Another was beyond him, swearing as the dying man tangled his feet and display cases on either side pinned him in place; she charged, shoulder-checking him in his shield as he staggered. That was like ramming her shoulder full tilt into a brick wall, but he went over backward and two Mormons jumped on him, their sword-arms pumping like pistons.

It was obvious where the two Mrs. Thurstons and their children were; as agreed they were clutching at pillars and cabinets and screaming at the top of their lungs as their guards tried to drag them to what they thought was safety, adding one more element of chaos to the scene. The spot they'd picked to linger was cluttered, too; big leather sofas, discreet and heavy display cases with marble bases, and the desks and counters of the shop staff.

That left no room for the soldiers who hadn't gone to hold the door to form a shield-wall. In an open field they would have been more than able to hold the Rangers and the Mormons both until help arrived, even outnumbered; they were strong, picked men, beautifully trained and equipped. The problem was that they were trained and equipped for one type of fighting and only that, each man a part in a single many-legged machine. This brawlmêlée left them in isolated ones and twos facing Dúnedain whose war-style brought a malignant perfection to a tumbling slashing stabbing scramble from ambush.

The Mormons simply swarmed those facing
them
under, showing a reckless disregard for consequences. The Thurstons kept screaming, a needleedge of distraction, and those trying to drag them away snatched up their shields as the swarming fight staggered near. Ritva forward-rolled around her sword-hand under the thrust of a
gladius
and came to a knee, hammered the edge of her little steel buckler down into the man's foot in a grisly crunch of small bones breaking, then thrust upward into his throat and killed him as he bent over in swift involuntary reflex.

A leap forward, across a tile floor already slippery with blood, and she found herself facing the last soldier of the Sixth still standing. He'd lost his helmet and was flicking his head to get the blood out of his eyes from a cut on the forehead. He was a young man, younger than she, with bristle-cut red hair and a freckled face whose skin was tight over the bones and wet with sweat and blood. The green eyes were utterly steady as he set himself to die.

A flickering long-lunge towards a foot brought the shield down; Ritva knew somewhere far from the present all-consuming moment that she was moving to ten-tenths capacity in an impossible blur of speed, almost as fast as Astrid. She turned the lunge into a feint with a skip and a beat, and drove the sharp point of her long sword into the upper part of his arm, just below the spot where the leaves of the
lorica segmentata
stopped. The point ripped into meat and glanced off bone, and the soldier gave a muffled cry of despair and pain as the shield dropped out of his hand; the Boise type were held by a central grip, not loops with a forearm thrust through.

Two more lunges drove him back towards the Thurston family as the point flickered in faster than thought. He still had his short sword, but the
gladius
was not meant for fencing. As he felt the family at his back the soldier suddenly threw the sword at her and turned, grabbing Shawonda Thurston in his arms and wrestling her around by main force, putting his back between her and the blades of the attackers he thought menaced them for one last sacrificial moment.

Ritva ducked and batted the blade aside with her buckler, a hard bang and ring of metal; a whirling two-pound Frisbee of edged metal thrown by a strong man was not something to be taken lightly. Her body was already moving forward, feet positioning for the lunge that would slam her point into the back of the soldier's neck above the edge of his
lorica
. A sweet inevitability of motion, truth in bone and nerve and metal—

Shawonda Thurston's desperate face was looking over his metal-clad shoulder, eyes enormous. She wrapped her arms around his neck in a convulsive movement, her head jammed into his shoulder.

“No!” she screamed. “Don't! Don't!”

Ritva's battle-trance broke at the desperate appeal. She diverted the killing lunge upward with a wrenching effort, and her body slammed into the young man's back and bounced off it; he was hard-braced, and the combined weight of him and his armor and the girl were twice her mass. The soldier and Shawonda stumbled backward without falling, but they were close to it.

Ritva moved again, but this time she reversed the weapon. The fishtail pommel of her long sword had an outer rim like the edge of a blunt chisel. She struck with it against the young man's head, behind the ear. He didn't go absolutely limp; you couldn't hit someone in the head that hard in a combat situation and be sure you weren't killing them. He did lose all interest in everything but lying still and hurting as the shock rattled his brain in its fluid casing. Shawonda released him and stared at his body lying at her feet.

“He'll live,” Ritva said, and shook her with a push of buckler on shoulder. “Pull yourself together, girl!”

Shawonda did; she took a couple of sobbing breaths and then crouched to pull the wound pack from the soldier's belt. She ripped the pad open with her teeth and strapped it against the wound in his left arm with a swiftness that showed she'd taken first-aid courses.

“He was nice,” she said, with tears tracking down her face and diluting the red spatters that flecked it. “He talked to me when his sergeant wasn't there.”

Then she stumbled back to her mother, wiping her hands on her skirt. The older woman put an arm around her and hugged both her daughters to her body, nodding over them at the Dúnedain.

Ritva spared time for one sharp nod back, then looked down at the soldier for an instant. Her lips quirked, and she dropped back into
Edhellen
: “You are one
lucky
son of a bitch. You really got a triple return tripled on chatting her up like that!”

The screams had cut off, except for young Lawrence Jr.'s, and his mother was soothing him; you could hear the sharp hoarse panting breaths of the survivors, and moaning and whimpering from the hurt. The rest of the raiding party came up. She did a quick scan; ten of the Mormons were dead, three of the Rangers, and others were having wounds dressed. The soldiers of the Sixth hadn't gone down easily, surprise and numbers and bad ground or no.

One of the Dúnedain was carried between two guerillas, and another was applying pressure to a pad. There wasn't much point from the look of it; that deep a stab wound up under the short ribs made with enough force to penetrate mail would probably be fatal even if it hadn't nicked a lung, and there was blood on her lips as well. It was Condis, whom Ritva had known a little and rather liked, even if she was very earnest. Now the knowledge of death was in her dark eyes, and her face was rigid with the strain of not screaming.

Astrid came over as they set her down, looked at the wound and up at the Mormon holding the bandage. He shook his head very slightly.

“Hiril,”
Condis mumbled, struggling not to cough. “Lady. Send . . . me to Mandos. Please, you.”

“Are you sure, brave one?”

A nod, then a grimace and:
“Nîdh, naneth, nîdh!”

Ritva swallowed. That was:
It hurts, mother, it hurts!
Sometimes there was only one last gift to give a friend.

Astrid went quickly to one knee. Her left hand cradled the girl's head to position it, and she bent to kiss her gently on the forehead despite the spray of blood coughed into her face. The motion hid the sweep of her hand as she drew a long slender knife from her right boot, and it moved in a swift precise thrust. Then she kissed the still form's forehead again, closed the staring eyes and stood, wiping a sleeve over her face to clear her eyes and sliding her knife and sword carefully through the crook of her elbow to clean them before she sheathed the steel. A friend laid Condis' sword on her body and folded her hands on the hilt.

“Go in peace, Bride of Valor,” Astrid said; that was what
Con
and
dis
meant. “Wait for us, in the silent halls of the Uttermost West. It will not be long.”

Then she raised her head. Members of the raiding party were already rushing past her towards the stairs, with bundles of arrows and glass globes full of clingfire. A dull ringing sounded where a padlock was being pounded off a door by a sledge; the upper stories of this building were kept locked as storage. Immediately afterwards there was a rushing thunder of boots on metal treads.

Ritva's eyes went up too. The flat roof above would be either the platform for escape, or the last place she would ever see.

“Tolo a nin,”
Astrid said.
“Gwaenc!”

Ritva translated. “Come with me. Let's go!”

 

Martin Thurston looked up as he rode through Boise's gate. The signal heliograph on the northwesternmost of the four towers was snapping, repeating a message as a request for clarification. The gathering clouds made it dim, thunderheads towering from black bases up to cream-white and then turned crimson by the westering sun. Something within him would have noticed the beauty of it once, if only in passing.

The signal was faint, not enough sunlight striking the mirrors, but then someone touched off the limelight. High above, hydrogen and oxygen and wood alcohol sprayed out of nozzles onto a stick of pure quicklime. A few seconds, and the light blinked brightly again. Martin frowned. He knew Morse as well as he read English, and the message was being sent in the clear; the identification number was a relay station well north of the city. And . . .

“Blimp?” someone said. “There
aren't
any blimps.”

“There is the
Curtis LeMay
,” Martin said.

“But that flying white elephant and all its gear were decommissioned and broken up and sold for scrap after Wendell!”

“Perhaps not,” Thurston said.

He could feel things
moving
in his mind. Like fish under water, or worms in earth. Some part of him was astonished at the detached curiosity of the other part as it considered the sensation.

“Things were confused just then. Paperwork could have been misfiled by traitors within our ranks. Message, maximum priority, all weapons emplacements on wall and citadel. Fire on the blimp. Incendiary rounds authorized. Category A mission rules of engagement, execute immediately.”

Another man grunted.
Category A
meant
ignore collateral damage
.

A panting messenger approached, letting his bicycle fall. A Natpol, wheezing and red faced. Shields blocked his way as he bent over, holding himself and gasping.

“Sir!” he shouted, over the ten yards. “Sir, we have a situation!”

“Let him through,” Martin said.

They did, though two
pila
-points touched the back of his neck. By then he had his breath back, a little.

“Mr. President, there's an incident at Aladdin's Emporium. Sir, your wife was . . . is there, with your son and mother and sisters. Sir, it's enemy specops forces and Mormon terrorists. They appear to have hostages, sir. Your family.”

Part of the sweat on the man's face was sheer terror. Martin could feel the rage that
would
have flowed through him, even taste it, something like sucking on rusty iron. But the emotion chased itself around in a circle, like a hamster on a wheel at the other end of a reversed telescope. There if he needed it, but not really part of him.

“Nothing,” he said.

Everyone was looking at him. He could
use
the responses that mighthave-been.

“Nothing can be gained by panic,” he went on; it was what he
would
have said.

“Centurion Leiston, another maximum priority message. Launch gliders from all fields within reach.”

The man was in his late twenties, one of Martin's inner circle; he looked up at the weather, calculated the risks, and nodded brusquely before dictating quickly to messengers who dashed off at the run. The ruler of Boise went on: “That blimp is not to escape under any circumstances. Category A rules of engagement.
Do it.
”

He turned his head. “Legate Koburg. The first auxilia of light infantry, I want some missile troops. And the rest of the Sixth.”

Martin drew his saber. “Sixth Battalion.
Follow me!
”

The men had heard the Natpol's news. They roared their anger as they swung in behind his horse and began to double-time down the pavement in a slamming unison. Thunder flickered across the northern horizon, no louder than their feet.

 

“We'll hold them as long as we can,” Nystrup said. “They can't get at us more than two or three at a time in the stairwells. As man is, God was; as God is, so we shall be. Get going! Use what we've done. Make it count.”