The Given Sacrifice (21 page)

His finger traced South Capitol towards the gate, tapping to either side of the road.
“These used to be parking lots. They’re mixed-use row housing now, three stories,
workshops and stores on the bottom and people living over. Nothing to worry about,
the people will probably keep their heads down until they know what’s happening.”

Ingolf nodded. That sort of infilling was standard practice in modern walled towns.
Space was always at a premium; the whole point of a wall was defense, but the number
of men required to hold it went up geometrically as you increased the area enclosed
by the perimeter. Fortified settlements were always as densely packed as water supply
and hygiene allowed. Besides their sheer ludicrous size, pre-Change cities seemed
to have come in two varieties: insanely overbuilt, or insanely dispersed and spread
out. Or both. Usually both, in fact.

“The gate complex is here, two blocks. Street patrols are all Cutter light cavalry,
though how they plan to feed that many horses during a siege is anyone’s guess. There’s
definitely a High Seeker there—one at each of the major gates, in fact. I dealt with
one of the junior Seekers once, and it was a memorable experience. I wouldn’t go near
a
High
Seeker if I was on fire and he had the only water in miles. You have some way of
handing this one?”

“Yes,” John Hordle said, glancing at the way they’d come. “Oi’ve done it, taking off
their ’eads works foine.” He tapped the greatsword’s hilt. “Or burning them or chopping
them to bits. They
do
stop moving in the end. But loikely we won’t ’ave to do it the ’ard way because we’ve
zommat special coming. Good thing there aren’t more of them, innit?”

“The problem is going to be getting to the gate,” Wellman said. “The bastards can . . .
see
things. See them coming before they’re visible.”

“The
first
problem is the sentries,” the hitherto silent noncom said.

“Sentry removal?” Ingolf said. “
That’s
not a problem.”

Ian Kovalevsky chuckled. “Not if you’ve got the love of a good woman,” he said.

Hordle grinned, which made his face look like a boiled ham in a good mood. He got
the joke, but the Boiseans looked baffled.

“We’ll ’andle it,” he said, and glanced at the tunnel entrance again.

The last of the Dúnedain were up, about fifty in all, with Alleyne Loring bringing
up the rear. A man in the gear of a Boisean regular came next out of the office, with
the traverse side-to-side red crest of an officer on his helmet. More followed him,
not too noisy for men wearing armor of articulated lames and hoops of steel, but a
lot more so than the Rangers. The second wave of the assault group had made it, or
at least the lead element had. Though how many more could before someone on the wall
noticed was anyone’s guess. The regulars filed off to quiet commands, taking knee
in ordered rows with the points of their
pila
like a growing thicket of steel points in the gloom.

“Got a job of work to do,” Hordle said. “Won’t go away by itself.”

City of Boise

(formerly southern Idaho)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

June 26th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

F
ifteen minutes later, Ingolf was remembering a story he had run across while he was
dickering over a salvage contract for the Bossman of Iowa back about five . . .

No, six. Damn, goes faster all the time. I thought I knew how things worked even if
I didn’t like it, I got the contract for the run to the east coast, and that was when
this really strange stuff all started, six years ago.

. . . six years ago. Just about the only good thing he’d ever heard about the CUT
was that it disapproved of burning coal; mining it was among the very limited set
of jobs that made soldiering look good. Iowans dug up a lot of the filthy stuff around
Des Moines, not having near enough wood for such a huge city, and the air there always
smelled of it.

When the dicker was over and while they sat and twiddled their thumbs and waited for
the young Bossman to come in and OK the deal—he hadn’t been the most reliable of men,
having been raised without hearing the word “no” very much—one of the ministers had
told him that cages of small birds were taken down into coal mines in Iowa. To test
for poison gasses that sometimes accumulated underground and either choked the miners
or swept through the tunnels in walls of flame that burned them alive.

Yeah, there
are
worse ways of making a living than fighting cannibals to salvage artwork for rich
assholes.

The little critters keeled over and went toes-up behind the bars before the gasses
reached dangerous levels for humans, which sometimes gave the workers time to throw
down their picks and run. It was a neat trick when it worked, and Ingolf had been
raised among matter-of-fact farming folk who were prosperous enough but couldn’t afford
much sentimentality. He would have been sorry to use a dog that way, but he’d have
done it if he had to and birds came in only three categories: edible ones, nonedible
ones, and ones which were pretty before you decided whether they were edible or not.
And at a pinch, they were all edible.

The thing was that the
birds
probably thought the miners kept them around and fed them and cleaned out their cages
because they loved them.

Likewise, the Cutters on the rooftop probably didn’t think of their role as making
plenty of noise while getting killed so their main force would know what was coming,
but that was about what it amounted to. That was why officers who knew their business
tried to get someone else’s men assigned this sort of duty, and rotated it when they
couldn’t. Or saw that the ones they could spare most got it.

I pulled a lot of outpost duty when I was young and stupid,
he thought as they padded forward through darkness as black as the ink of the bureaucrats
who laired here in the daytime.
So the whole point here is to kill this bunch
without
making a lot of noise. Don’t think it’s necessarily going to be easy just because
you’ve done it before, Ingolf old son. Nobody ever managed it with
you
, though that was partly dumb luck at first.

The inside of the office part of the building was very nearly as inky-black as the
tunnel had been; there just wasn’t much ambient light to come through the windows
with the moon down and the sun not up yet, and the Cutters outside were sensible enough
not to eliminate their night vision by keeping a fire going. The downside was that
they were concentrating on the streets and relying on the access door alerting them
if anyone tried to break through that way because it was thickly fastened with chains
and padlocked. Or on hearing the sound of windows breaking. It was a double-type door,
windowless pre-Change metal and still strong.

“Saw,” Hordle said softly.

He gripped a section of the chain, pulling and twisting to hold it rigid. Ian pulled
the flexible wire saw out of a pouch; the Force used them too, and the Dúnedain had
good gear. Unlike their models in
The Histories
in peacetime they charged heavily for their services when the clients could afford
it, with a bank in Corvallis as their business agents, and
nobody
tried to stiff them. Not twice. A bunch of pissed-off Rangers
and
a Corvallan debt-collector . . . that was like a grizzly bear with a catapult mounted
on its head.

Ian looped the flexible blade around the chain and began to work the handles, going
slowly to keep it quiet and prevent heat buildup that might ruin the tool’s temper.
The miniature chips of diamond set into the wire carved at the soft steel, a quiet
ruhh . . . ruhh
sound.

“Stop.”

Ingolf had been around the man Mary and her sister called
Uncle John
a fair bit since they got back from the Quest. Sprawled by a fire with a mug at his
elbow, cracking walnuts between thumb and forefinger, bellowing some off-key and usually
off-color song, you’d think him a genially boisterous bruiser and not too bright.
Unless you looked closely at the little piggy russet eyes in the massive face. Right
now his actions were as precise as a surgeon’s.

Hordle’s fingers explored the cut in the darkness. “Enough.”

Ian withdrew the saw, coiled the loop and put it back in the pouch. Hordle’s monstrous
hands clamped and twisted, straining for a moment. There was a soft
ping
as the weakened steel yielded. Then an occasional slight
clack
as he threaded the chain cautiously through until the doors were ready to open. The
hinges were on this side, and the doors swung inward too.

Hordle worked the catch with infinite care, and applied his eye to the crack. Then
he tapped two fingers towards his eyes and made the signs that meant:
One man close. Ready.

Hordle set himself like a sprinter. Ian nodded, got out his bow, put an arrow on the
string and held the weapon in his left hand. Ingolf drew his tomahawk again; he needed
only one hand to pull his side of the double doors open. Cole Salander waited behind
them, crouched slightly with his crossbow already at the shoulder.

It was a pleasure to work with people who really knew what they were doing. . . .

The third finger came up. Ingolf gripped the old metal handle and pulled, fast and
not trying particularly to be quiet, but without any unnecessary jerk. Ian did the
same, like the motions of a country-dance. Hordle lunged through in the same instant,
his shoulders clearing the opening doors with not a hair to spare. There was a Cutter
trooper about six feet from the door, looking at it curiously; probably he’d been
wondering at the small sounds.

He started to leap back, started to draw his shete, started to open his mouth and
yell. Hordle took one long scissoring stride, and his hands closed on the man—one
over his face, one behind his head. His size did
not
mean he was slow. A single wrench, and the Cutter’s face was pointing out between
his shoulder blades; there was a crackle like a green branch breaking when you twisted
it, a stink of human waste.

One down, eight to go.

Hordle threw the body aside like a broken doll as he charged and drew his two-handed
blade. A human grizzly with a sword, silent in the night.

Ingolf went through on his heels, Ian beside him already drawing his bow and loosing.
The arrow struck a man at the edge of the roof high in the chest. He staggered back
three steps, hit the balustrade with his buttocks and pitched overside. Three stories
down and he hit concrete with a clattering, very final crunch. Imagination filled
in the figures who darted out and grabbed his ankles to drag him out of sight.

Seven left.

After the ink-pot inside, the rooftop looked almost bright. Two more Cutters were
at either corner of the rooftop, squatting on their heels with the ease of men who’d
grown up without chairs, looking out over South Capitol. They turned and rose snake-swift
at the flurry of motion, one reaching for an arrow and the other drawing his blade,
a quick glimmer of metal.

Cloaked shadows rose behind them, flipping up like gymnasts from where they’d clung
to the brick, hidden by the overhang and their war-cloaks. Mary hit the coping with
her soft soundless elf-boots, crouched with the motion and sprang. Suddenly the two
Cutter sentinels seemed to be dancing, dropping their weapons and putting hands to
their throats. Mary’s fell, with her riding him down with her hands straining back,
like a bad horseman sawing at the reins, and Ritva’s was down too.

Mary bounced up to her feet, leaving the
rumal
around the dead man’s throat where she’d flicked it with a backhand cast—a long silk
handkerchief with a gold coin knotted into one end. Ritva used a piano-wire garrote,
but Mary was a traditionalist, in her way. . . .

Five . . .

Cole’s crossbow spoke as soon as he was clear of the door, and a man threw up his
arms, took two more steps, and fell.

Four.

Ingolf had his own target. One Cutter had very sensibly ignored everything else, and
even more sensibly ignored the long trumpet hanging from a tripod of poles—standing
and blowing in the middle of a fight wasn’t likely to be conducive to long life or
prolonged music either, more like a single strangled blat followed by a dull thud.
Instead he snatched up a covered lantern and ran towards the fire signal, a big steel
trash bucket heaped with straw and splintery pinewood. There would be no hiding
that
if he pitched in the flame and the alcohol in the glass reservoir too.

Ingolf halted, took stance, flipped the two-foot hickory handle of the tomahawk to
get the balance perfect as it smacked back into his callused palm and threw in the
same motion. Less than twelve seconds had passed from the moment the door opened to
that when the wood left his hand.

Thousands of hours of old Pete’s patient coaching when he was a child and a teenager
went into it, more in camps since when there was nothing else to do but practice or
drink. God help him, times when he’d taken turns throwing and standing in front of
a tree as a mark, and done the whole thing while a whiskey jug was going the rounds
after dark and the deceptive flickering of firelight shone in his eyes. A dozen times
for real. You didn’t need a tomahawk as often as you did a bow or a shete, but when
you needed it nothing else would really do.

The throw had the sweet surprise of something perfect. The blackened steel of the
head flickered through the night and went into the back of the Cutter’s thigh, splitting
the tendon just above the knee; he hadn’t dared try for the torso, armored with a
leather coat covered in steel washers. The man went down with a thud and the lantern
clattered ahead of him away from his outstretched fingers, rolling to the foot of
the trash bucket.

An arrow—Ian’s—went through the space he’d just vacated a fraction of a second after
he fell, a flicker of half-seen motion in the night.

Ingolf was already charging the instant his follow-through finished. He didn’t pause
when he came to where the man lay, just starting to push at the pebbled asphalt with
his hands and reach for the lantern again and making a breathless squealing sound.
Instead he leapt up when he was two paces away, as high as he could, and came down
boot heels-first with all the momentum of his more than two hundred pounds of bone,
muscle, weapons and armor.

The impact jarred him all the way up to his teeth and he stumbled to his knees and
one hand. He could hear bones crack as he landed and an agonized wheeze as the man’s
breath was driven out of his collapsing lungs. Then he wrenched the tomahawk free
from where it had sliced through tendon and muscle and into bone and struck twice
at the base of the man’s skull—with the blunt poll, not the blade,which might stick
in bone.

Damn, but this gets a little more disgusting every time,
he thought as the crunching feeling vibrated up the handle, like hitting a teapot
full of jelly.

Three . . .

When he got back to his feet everything was over, as he’d expected; surprise was the
greatest force multiplier, and when you got total surprise and threw in guys like
John Hordle, there was only one possible outcome. Ambushing beat the hell out of a
stand-up fight. He’d been aware of the greatsword’s blackened blade moving in a pivoting
figure-eight, and a couple of meaty thudding, cracking sounds.

And then there were none. Forty-five seconds, max.

It wasn’t even very startling that they’d all come through with nothing but bruises,
though he still had a slight unacknowledged sweat of relief break out when Mary came
up grinning. It wasn’t that she actually enjoyed killing men, even Cutters, but she
did like the rush of a successful action, that crazed sensation of godlike immortality.
He knew the feeling. It was like telling yourself that you could always put the corncob
back in the mouth of the jug after one more swallow. . . .

Or possibly hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because if feels so good when
you stop.

“Ready for that meadow full of sheep?” she said cheerfully.

“Ready and eager.”

“Too bad. How can a girl compete with ewes? Maybe if I started wearing a fleece to
bed . . . that might be fun. . . .”

Hordle was wiping down the blade of his greatsword with a swatch of linsey-woolsey,
as they all cocked an ear to check if the noise had carried. There hadn’t been much,
but it hadn’t been absolutely quiet either. Ingolf looked at the bodies Hordle had
left and blinked, altering course to avoid getting his boots wet. The first one was
beheaded, which was more common than you’d think, and he’d taken the leg off another
just below the hip with the backstroke. The other . . . it must have been a straight
overarm cut landing on the base of the man’s shoulder.