War in Heaven (40 page)

Instantly, Danlo felt the heat of guilt and compassion burning up his throat. It pained him that he had caused Kantu pain; and it pained him even more that he should feel any sort of compassion for the slight wounds of this murderous man.

"I ... am sorry," he said. "Here, let me see, perhaps I can — "

"Well tend our wounds when we get to the apartment," Tobias snapped. And then, as the pilot slowed the sled in front of a large white-stone apartment building faced with lacy iron balconies, he told Danlo, "You'll come inside with us; Benjamin Hur has asked me to bring you to him, and I've promised that I shall."

"But you have already broken one promise today," Danlo said, and his eyes flashed with dark blue lights. "Why not another?"

"I won't argue with you about what I've had to do," Tobias said. His red face reddened even more deeply. "You'll stay close to us, or else we'll knock you off your feet and drag you through the city."

Danlo said nothing but only stared at Tobias through the clear winter air.

"Can't you see how important you are to us?" Tobias asked. "Now come with us, please."

With that, he motioned towards the apartment building, and three more ringkeepers rushed out. They came up to the sled and stood by as Tobias, Kantu and Danlo climbed out on to the street. "Keep close," Tobias ordered them. "Keep close to Danlo wi Soli Ringess, and don't allow him to skate away."

And then he slapped the sled's red plastic shell and, to the driver, he said, "Thank you, Yurik. I hope I'll see you later tonight."

With that, Yurik fired the rockets yet again, and the sled jumped forwards and disappeared down the street.

"Now let's all please hurry," Tobias said. He waited a moment while the three new ringkeepers and Kantu Mamod surrounded Danlo, and then he led them up the white granite steps into the building.

The Kalla Fellowship had taken over the entire building; the apartments on all four floors were full of ringkeepers sleeping in makeshift beds and sitting down to their common meals as they plotted the downfall of Hanuman li Tosh. The apartments were full of other things as well. Immediately upon walking through the door, Danlo noticed that the front fireroom had been stripped of all furniture and stocked with bags of kurmash, sleeping furs and spare skate blades — and, of course, with bullet-guns and lasers and eye-tlolts and knives and other weapons of assassination and war. Along one wall of the room stood a great workbench, and there the circuitry and parts of some sort of explosive device were laid out as casually as on a table set for dinner. The jewels of a laser, too, lay ready to be assembled. Danlo almost expected Benjamin Hur to step out from one of the sleeping chambers to greet him and glory in these deadly treasures, but it was not to be so. As soon as one of the ringkeepers had shut the door, two efficient-looking women tended Tobias Urit's and Kantu Mamod's wounds, quickly gluing shut their lacerated flesh and applying a salve of thinskin for protection. Meanwhile, other ringkeepers made ready a change of clothing: plain brown furs to replace their outerwear and black facemasks instead of their blood-stained white ones. One of them asked Danlo to remove his white feather, and this he did. But when she wanted to cut off his long, black hair altogether, Danlo refused. With his facemask and the hood of his furs pulled up over his head, he said, no one would be able to tell who he was; furthermore, Tobias didn't want to waste another moment. When their preparations had been completed according to his plan, he led Danlo, Kantu and four other ringkeepers towards the door.

"We'll skate across the city," he told Danlo. "It will be much harder for Hanuman's godlings to track us on skates than to pursue the sled."

"Where ... are we going?" Danlo asked.

"Benjamin Hur keeps another apartment down on the Street of Smugglers," Tobias said. Before pulling on his new facemask, he wiped the sweat from his red beard and then told Danlo exactly how to find this apartment. "If we become separated, I would ask you to go there by yourself."

"It might be better if we became separated, yes? Then no one else would be killed because of me."

"But then
you
might be killed, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, and I can't allow that."

"I ... am sorry that you cannot."

"Will you promise me that you won't try to escape? We'll skate much more quickly if we skate freely."

For a moment, Danlo considered this. "Why should you think that I would honour my promise, then, when you would not honour your own?"

"Don't make me beg you," Tobias said though clenched teeth.

"Very well, then," Danlo said, "I promise not to escape."

Danlo stood still for a moment, and his eyes shimmered with the light of events as they might unfold. If he
did
try to escape, Tobias' ringkeepers would only continue to hunt him through the streets, and many more innocents might be harmed or even killed. He decided that it would be best for him to confront Benjamin Hur as soon as possible. In the end, it was not Tobias but Benjamin who was responsible for all that had happened that day. Danlo's best hope of ending the violence that swirled around him like the winds of a storm — and perhaps the greater violence throughout the city — lay in cooling the fires of Benjamin's heart and reminding him of the dream they had once shared.

"I promise not to escape," Danlo said again. "But I promise as well to try to stop you if you try to harm anyone else on my behalf."

At this, Kantu Mamod touched his broken nose and looked at Tobias, who said, "We understand each other, then. Now, let's please go."

And so they went out on to the streets. The building's rear door let out on to a little alley, almost as dark as a tunnel beneath a mountain. But after a short hike through the newly fallen snow, they reached a bright purple gliddery where they snapped in their skate blades and joined the throngs out to find their midday meals. Tobias took the lead, positioning Danlo in the centre of the ringkeepers who followed him.

Despite the heavy flow of skaters, they made swift progress, turning on to a green glissade that almost immediately intersected with the East-West Sliddery and thence on to a gliddery leading towards a rather dangerous district known as the Bell. Danlo well-remembered the twisting glidderies there, for he had explored them street by street during his wild days as a journeyman. After they had crossed the Way — the broadest street in the city and the only one officially made of white ice — they passed into crowded streets little used by the godlings and academicians who clung to the safety of the Old City. It was a beautiful day, with a patina of new powder melting beneath the strong noon sun. In this bright, open light, with the colours of purple ice and white snow and the red and brown furs of the manswarms a glory to behold, the Bell seemed no more threatening than Resa Commons.

And then, just after they had passed across the purple and green chequered intersection with the Long Glissade, their peace was broken. Outside a well-known restaurant, a long queue of people stood waiting on the street to take their meals. Danlo remembered eating at this very restaurant himself on the day after he had begun designing his lightship; it was a free restaurant, specializing in the plain but hearty foods of Urradeth. The men, women and children who stood kicking their skate blades into the purple ice were mostly of the poorer sects: hibakusha and harijan, autists and aphasics and common whores. But today, quite a few astriers stood in line as well, along with various merchants, wormrunners and even an exemplar from Bodhi Luz. And they all seemed impatient and angry that they should have to wait beneath the open sky. Such lines, one astrier woman loudly complained, hadn't been seen in a thousand years. And a harijan man dressed in bright but ragged yellow silks wondered if the shortages would soon close the free restaurants altogether. In truth, the free restaurants still had plenty of food to serve. But the private restaurants had almost run out of the cultured meats, the spices and oils and rare fruits from which they concocted their famous dishes, and had recently raised their prices beyond the means of all but the most extravagant. This inflation had driven even the astriers to the free restaurants — as well as many others. And so it had become almost impossible to sit down to a simple meal of kurmash without waiting in line for an hour.

It was as Danlo and his escort were passing along this line of would-be diners that a fight broke out. A nervous harijan boy was dancing about trying to dig designs in the ice with his skate blades. But he had the misfortune to collide with a wormrunner standing next to him, and one of his steel blades skived the wormrunner's fine boots. When this cruel man saw the scratches that the boy had made, he fell into a fury. "Look what you've done!" he shouted. Without warning, he cuffed the boy's ear, knocking him to the ice. The boy's father, a small but rather violent-looking young man, turned in line to see what had happened. Without bothering to help his son, he immediately pulled a knife from beneath his quilted silks and tried to stab the wormrunner in the face. But the wormrunner already had his laser out; he simply burned the poor harijan man through his eye and spat on him as he fell and joined his sobbing son on the ice. Then he spat again and called out, "Why should anyone have to wait for greasy kurmash and a few rotten nuts?" With that, he glanced at the man that he had so casually murdered and skated off into the street.

But his line of flight took him directly towards the ringkeepers surrounding Danlo. The wormrunner rudely pushed through a group of barefoot autists, but when he came to Kantu Mamod, he found that this man was not so easily moved. "Get out of the way!" he shouted as he lifted his arm to sweep Kantu aside. On any other day Kantu might have allowed the wormrunner to pass. But Kantu, eyeing the wormrunner's laser and the evil work that it had just done, would not let him close to Danlo. He whipped out a knife of his own and closed with the wormrunner. He was much quicker than the harijan man had been; he slashed the steel knife across the wormrunner's wrist, cutting the tendons and causing him to drop the laser. And then, to the cheers (and cries of horror) of the crowd on the street, he plunged the knife into the wormrunner's heart, killing him instantly.

Danlo, of course, true to his word, tried to stop this killing. But it all happened very quickly. By the time he had turned to face the advancing wormrunner and descried his intent, the wormrunner had dropped to the street spouting fountains of blood across the purple ice.

"No!"

Danlo called out this single syllable with all the force of the winter wind; he screamed so hard that his throat burned and his voice suddenly died in a gasp of hot breath and pain. He had no time to reflect on this further murder, however, because at that moment a man in a golden cape and facemask skated right up to Kantu Mamod. While many onlookers foolishly crowded around them, this man looked at Kantu Mamod's bloody knife. Then he looked at Danlo and the ringkeepers who had moved to surround him with their bodies.

"Please remove your masks," the man said to them. He spoke smoothly, but his voice was edged with steel. "Remove your hoods and masks."

"Leave us alone," Kantu said hotly, pointing his knife at the man. Drops of steaming blood rolled off the steel point and fell to burn holes in the ice. "I don't know who you are, but you've no right to ask us this,"

"I didn't
ask,
" the man said. "Remove your masks now, or I shall remove them for you."

Tobias Urit pushed close to Kantu then, and said, "We were out to take our meal when this wormrunner went mad. And now we intend to continue our journey."

"First remove your masks."

"That we can't do," Tobias said. "Not for a nameless man who wears a mask himself."

At this, the man suddenly nodded his head as if bowing. And then, with a single, swift motion, he swept the mask from his face and said, "I'm Nigel of Qallar. And that man whom you're protecting is Danlo wi Soli Ringess. I recognized his voice when he cried out."

"It's a warrior-poet!" one of the ringkeepers standing in front of Danlo cried out. Nigel's curly black hair and copper skin gleamed in the sun. "It's one of Hanuman's warrior-poets!"

This news finally encouraged the onlookers to want to flee the street. But such a great mass of people could not move out of the way very quickly. In a moment of time, Nigel's killing knife magically appeared in his right hand while he held a black-tipped needle-dart in his left. And in the next moment, Tobias Urit pulled his laser free from his furs, and the four ringkeepers near him drew their knives from their pocket sheaths as quickly as they could.

"No!" Danlo cried out again.

Tobias Urit might have killed the warrior-poet, then. Unlike most men, the sight of a warrior-poet gripping his killing knife did not shock his nerves; there was no slight hesitation of terror that the warrior-poets often relied on to strike their victims dead in a flash of steel or quickly injected poison. In truth, it had been Tobias Urit, along with Benjamin Hur himself, who had executed two other of Hanuman's ronin warrior-poets. But Tobias could not bring himself to raise his laser and fire upon the waiting warrior-poet. In the end, he found his honour as all men must try to do. When he looked upon the swarms of women and children (and men) screaming just behind Nigel of Qallar, he couldn't fire his laser lest he miss and perhaps burn an innocent boy through the eye. And so he pocketed this terrible weapon, and moved to draw out his knife instead.

"Go!" he shouted, digging his elbow into Danlo's ribs. "Skate away as quickly as you can! I'll meet you later."

"No," Danlo said. "No, I have promised to — "

"Skate now, I said! You can't stop this, so please go!" Just then the ringkeeper in front of Danlo began to draw a bullet-gun from beneath his furs. Out of fear of the warrior-poet's poisons, perhaps, he seemed not to care if he sprayed lead bullets about like a mustilox defending himself against a wolf. But Danlo would not allow him to fire this mindless weapon. He locked his hand on the cold steel barrel, thereby immobilizing the frustrated ringkeeper for a moment. And in that moment, the warrior-poet moved. "No!" Danlo shouted, even as the warrior-poet flung his dart at the ringkeeper's face. The little needle tore through the ringkeeper's leather mask and penetrated his cheek. He jumped, then, as if struck by lightning; he convulsed and shuddered and froze, and then he fell against Danlo like a toppling statue. His soft, brown eyes fairly oozed his fear at being paralysed and unable ever to draw another breath.