On the Oceans of Eternity (37 page)

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought it was too risky for the airship to set down here?”

“They’re not,” Chong said. “We’ve got a big net set up on the highest roof, fastened to a hook on a pole. They’re going to snatch us off with a slow approach.”

“Oh,
joy.”

The offices of the Islander mission were as bright as the kerosene lanterns could make them. As he watched the radio operator gave a last tap at the key, flipped open the casing of the radio and began methodically smashing the interior with the butt of her rifle. He winced again, at the waste; at least this was one of the post-Event models, not the irreplaceable pre-Event printed circuits. Others went by with armfuls of documents, throwing them onto the fire in the courtyard outside.

“Let’s do it,” Arnstein said.

“Right,” Chong replied. “I’ve got the explosive charges ready on my mortars, with all the remaining ammunition.”

The palace-citadel of Troy was like a set of adobe sugar cubes piled three stories high around irregular courts; there were gleams off colored shapes on the walls as they passed, a glimpse of hands raised in prayer, a boar turned at bay, a great-eyed goddess leaning on a long sword. Humans were few, palace servants huddled in comers clutching at each other, once a man running by with a golden vase in his arms. A slave, from his skinny shanks and ragged tunic; where he thought he was going with his loot was a mystery, given what Walker’s barbarian allies were rumored to do in a captured town. Others lay sodden and unmoving, breached amphorae of wine spilling like blood beside them. That was a lot more sensible, all things considered.

“Up through here, Councilor,” Chong said, looking over his shoulder as they came through into a broad upper chamber—part of the queen’s suite, he remembered.

The Islander party broke into a trot—mostly Islanders, there were a couple of locals along with the Marine escort, both girls; there had been enough time for that. One of the office staff had snatched up a toddler from somewhere, and the child was making a steady, thin wail. The vanguard of the escort vanished up the next staircase; Ian turned to take a last haunted look at the dying city outside the broad unshuttered windows.

Something happened. Ian Arnstein never remembered exactly what; in the next moment of clarity he found himself lying on his back, with his head twisted up against the wall. An inlaid griffin-footed table lay against his body, but he could see around the edge of it. Things were happening in the darkened room—the kerosene lantern was burning in a corner, the liquid from its reservoir spreading slowly over the gypsum slabs of the floor. Gunshots were strobing, the vicious repeated snaps of revolver fire, the heavier red blades of rifles, a bloom of white-red from a shotgun. But the sounds were distant, muffled; his ears hurt, and he raised a hand to paw feebly at one. His fingers came away red and wet from his face, but he felt no pain.

I should help
, he thought.

The words were distant, with an unhuman calm. There was a Python .40 at his waist, but his hand was too weak to do more than touch the checkered walnut of the butt.

The firing had stopped as weapons emptied and cold steel’s unmusical clash and rasp took its place. Figures were fighting, figures in Marine kakhi and Coast Guard blue and others in form-fitting black. The black figures were hard to see in the dimness, as if shadows had come to life to kill their creators. He blinked.
Hoods, too,
he noted in a daze; like ski masks, leaving only a strip across the eyes bare. They carried swords, like Japanese swords, except that they were straight-bladed, and blackened except for a strip along the single cutting edge. The swords wheeled and flashed, blurring through the air, clashing against bayonet and rifle butt.

He saw a Marine drive the twenty-inch blade of his bayonet through the stomach of a black-clad figure, then stagger backward and fall with a spiked disk in his throat. Major Chong was backing unwillingly up the stairs, his
katana
clashing with the blades of two attackers, the swords flickering like beams of light in a dance of killing beauty.

Then something fell with a soft heavy weight across Arnstein’s legs. He looked down and kicked in reflex as he realized it was a body; one of the dark-clad figures, eyes open and staring. There was a soft heavy resistance as the corpse flopped free. The dark clothing was some snug knitted fabric; there were boots and webbing harness of soft black leather as well, and black-enameled metal buckles. The belt bore a pistol holster, empty, and a sword sheath was strapped across the back, slanting to put the hilt over the left shoulder. A hand twitched, glittering; over it was strapped a tiger-claw arrangement of steel blades, more a climbing tool than a weapon.

There was another explosion, up the stairway leading to the roof. This time he could hear it, more or less. The glassy barrier separating him from the world lifted, enough for him to know that he hurt and that his head was a throbbing ache.

Enough for a jet of fear; Chong wasn’t supposed to allow him to be taken alive...
but the last he could have seen of me was a limp, bloody body lying against the wall.

Then came a snarling roar like nothing else in the post-Event world; the roar of internal combustion engines, close at hand overhead. Another explosion, and the two dark-clad figures who’d pursued Chong tumbled back down, one crawling and dragging the other.

“Grenades,” she gasped—the English word, thickly accented. Then more Greek, also with an accent and in gasps as she fought for breath: “Kleo is hurt—wounded me—the thing that flies—with the Red Sword mark, the Lady’s enemies, it comes—”

There was a heavy thump from above, a chorus of yells, and a rushing mist of water down the staircase like heavy rain—the net being snatched up by the hook, the ballast dumped from the dirigible’s tanks for emergency lift, he realized. Freedom, safety, life.

That penetrated the muzziness about his brain a little. He scrabbled with feet and hands, trying to push himeself erect. A blade flashed to rest near the tip of his nose, close enough for him to smell the blood on it. He stared up along the length of it, past the gloved hands holding the long hilt in an
iajutsu
grip, up to the eyes visible through the slit of the mask. They widened slightly.

“This is the one the Goddess told us of!”
a light voice said, speaking the archaic Greek of this era.

Arnstein stood as the blade tapped under his chin, shakily raising his hands. He towered over the black-clad fighters. More than he should have. His eyes sharpened; the attackers were short even for Bronze Agers, and slim with it, for all the speed and ferocity of their movements. Women.

Ninjettes,
he thought dazedly.
Well, I’ll be damned.
The Republic’s military was about a third women, jealously maintained Coast Guard tradition, but he’d never heard that Walker had bothered to upset local taboos that way. Not even the Nantucketers had all-female units.

He licked his lips, trying to nerve himself to fight and force them to kill him. Before he could hands gripped him, ran him back against the wall, plucked the pistol from his belt, searched him with expert skill. A loop of cord was thrown around his hands and jerked tight, a one-way knot. The fresh pain brought him more to himself, and despite fear and hurt he gagged a little at the thick feces-and-blood stink of death, with the sharp acid odor of stomach acids under it.

Others were finishing the Islander wounded; Ian averted his eyes from the knife strokes. They were seeing to their own hurt, sorting them, laying out the dead, bandaging and—it seemed incongruous even now—giving injections from the medical kits some of them carried.

One who seemed to be the leader stopped at a slight figure whose hands cluched at a belly that welled blood, black as the cloth in the darkness. She bent to meet the eyes of the wounded one.

“You are sped beyond healing,” she said, after a moment. “How?”

“Here,” the wounded girl gasped. She pulled down the mask, exposing her throat and tilting her chin. “So... I go ... less disfigured... to Her.”

“As you will,” the leader said. “You will have your pyre and your ashes will go to Her temple.”

She put the point of her sword to the offered spot below the ear, holding it with her left hand. Her right came back, and she slammed the heel of that hand down on the hilt. The victim gave one convulsive jerk and lay still. When the leader came to Arnstein, he was astonished to see a track of tears sparkling down from the eyes to soak into the fabric of her mask.

“You will await the Lady of Pain,” she said.

He knew who she meant. The
Despotnia Algeos,
the Lady of Pain, Avatar of Hekate. Alice Hong, Walker’s bitch-queen, sadist and surgeon. This must be some weird special-operations branch of her lunatic cult. Silence went on, in the thick smell of death and the dimness. The whatever-they-were cleaned their weapons, reloaded their revolvers and shotguns—modern-looking break-open breechloaders much like the Republic’s—and kept watch. The noise from the streets was changing, more screams, then a crescendo of firing, light cannon, a strange
braaaaap
...
braaaaaap
...

“Can I have some water?” he croaked.

The one who’d been guarding him hit him three times in less than two seconds, with her elbow, with the ball of her foot, and the third time with the pommel of her sword. Pain flooded through him, like white light along his nerves. He was conscious of his own gaping mouth, but for long moments too paralyzed to breathe.

“The Goddess-on-Earth said you must be taken alive,” his captor said. “She didn’t say you had to be happy.” He couldn’t see the expression on the face behind the mask, but the eyes were suddenly avid. “You will feed the Dark Goddess well. If I am lucky, I will help with that.”

It was several hours before the noises in the city died down. Ian’s tongue felt thick, dry, and fuzzy; his head felt fuzzy, too, and he supposed this must be what shock felt like, combined with extreme fear and weariness. He was a scholar of sedentary habits who’d never see sixty again, even if it was three thousand years before he was born, and this sort of thing was
not
his speciality. Unwillingly, because it would be so tempting to sink down into a fog of apathy, he flogged his mind back to a semblance of alertness. The
fighting
noises had died down, at least. From the city came the pulsing roar of fires, and underneath that a huge brabbling murmur that poured like a cataract of white noise into the palace windows.
Screaming and shouting,
he realized. There were nearly thirty thousand people packed into the fifty acres or so of the miniature city below the heights of the palace-citadel. Thousands of Walker’s troops were probably pouring into the city, possibly tens of thousands of his barbarian allies. The tribal confederation of the Ringapi had had a rough time since they left the middle Danube, and they had a bad reputation in a sack even when they were in a good mood. That was the death agonies of a whole people he was listening to, a threnody of agony and terror and despair larger than worlds.

Then firing sounded closer; the dull thumps of the flintlock shotguns Walker had handed out to his barbarian allies, and then the crisper bark of rifles. His guards came tensely alert at door and windows. The noise ceased, and there were crashing and screams of pain, laughter and exultant tribal screeching, while the smoke grew thicker. Then:

“The King comes! The King of Great Achaea! The King of Men!”

The harsh male shout cut through the background noise like a knife. The dark-clad women drew their swords and went to one knee facing the door, heads bowed and the blades across the outstretched palms of their hands. Soldiers came into the room, riflemen in gray patch-pocketed tunics and trousers, laced boots, leather webbing harness, and helmets like flared round-topped buckets with a cutout for the face and straps leading to a cup at the chin. An officer with a pistol in his hand and sword at his waist followed, added his quick scan to theirs, then stepped aside.

William Walker strode through, Alice Hong at his side. Ian struggled a little more upright, pushing his back against the blood-speckled, bullet-pocked painted plaster of the wall, smearing red across griffins and lions and proud nobles in chariots. The renegade looked around, raising a brow over his single cold green eye. A smile blossomed as he looked at the captured American.

“Not bad work,” he said in English. “Not bad at all, Alice. I must admit I didn’t think this Sailor Moon Platoon of yours would be any practical use. but they came through big-time.” He switched to Achaean: “You have done well, Claw Sisters. Very well; the King is pleased.”

“Never underestimate the power of faith, Lord Enabler,” Hong said lightly, as her followers rose and sheathed their blades. “Or of deep
manga
scholarship.”

She wore a stylish version of her cultists’ gear, picked out here and there with silver studs. Walker was in something like a loose karate gi of a coarse black silk, with the pants tucked into polished calf-boots and a black-leather belt to hold
katana, wazikashi,
and revolver. The only touches of color to highlight the piratical elegance were the massive ruby signet ring on his right hand and the crimson wolfshead picked out on his eye-patch. When he grinned the scar that ran up under it moved, and his face went from boyishly attractive to a caricature of evil.

All hail the Demon King,
Arnstein thought, surprised at the sardonic note his mind could still muster.
Although I’ve seen something awfully like that... where...
That was it; the black outfit Luke Skywalker wore when he walked into Jabba the Hutt’s palace in the third Star Wars flick,
Return of the Jedi.

Oh, Jesus,
he thought.
I’ve been captured by psychotic media fans
.