finger. The sight of the approaching men did not seem to surprise him, for he turned away without a word and, quickly for one of his advanced years, hobbled back to his carriage shouting orders to his slaves as he came. In a moment they were running down the slope. Ma'el's bearers, who had already abandoned their vehicle, were racing after them.
Sinead looked at the men advancing toward them, the light from the fireworks reflecting like stars off their swords.
'Ma'el,' she said quickly, 'we need your vessel to make a transdimensional jump, there's no time to bring it down through normal space. Do you want to do it?'
Ma'el replied by withdrawing the chart and the remote-control screen from his cloak and tossing them to the ground where they were already unfolding for use. He said, 'Your digits are smaller and faster than mine.'
Slowly and with the confidence of their greater numbers the men advanced in line abreast, swords carried across their chests. It was too dark to see their feet, but Declan felt sure that they were marching in step. Each end of the line was curving forward into a crescent formation, the obvious intention being to encircle their victims. Knowing that was not a tactically desirable situation when there was only one defender trying to protect three, he sprinted toward the center of the line with his long-axe swinging in wide circles around his head.
They heard him coming, but now it was their eyes that were being dazzled by the fireworks display behind him while his had grown accustomed to the darkness. His first blow knocked away his opponent's weapon and, judging by the sound he made, smashed the other's sword arm as well. He continued the swing toward the next man in line, who tried to turn away and received the axe blade in the small of the back. That one dropped to the ground, immobilized by legs that would no longer work. Of the six that were left, four moved out of range of his weapon intending to encircle him while the other two began running toward Sinead and Ma'el.
Those two had to be stopped.
It took a moment and several prodigious swings of his axe to break away from the four, and Declan was still several paces behind them when one of the two men grasped Ma'el by the cowl, baring his head and bringing the sword point to his throat, obviously intent on a capture and the extraction of information rather than a quick killing. Sinead was on her knees and looking down intently with both hands moving over the remote-control screen. The other man was closing on her with his weapon raised high to bring it down on the back of her neck.
For an instant, a terrible fear took Declan as he thought of that small, beautiful body he loved being converted into bloody dead meat, with her bright, agile mind and healing skills that together had labored and coaxed and nagged and finally loved him back to life gone forever, and with them their unborn child. Unable to control his feelings, he filled his lungs and emptied them with a sound, part scream of anger and pain at her expected loss and part bellow of sheer rage so loud and terrible that it frightened even himself. The men attacking Sinead and Ma'el froze at the sound, giving him a chance to get close before both turned to look at him. It was the last thing that they would ever do because by then his axe was already sweeping toward them in a wide, transverse swing that made a bloody end to both of them.
'This is difficult enough as it is,' said Sinead irritably, her attention still on her rapidly moving hands, 'without you getting blood all over my control screen. Can't you move the fight away?'
'Thank you, Declan,' said Ma'el quietly, and went on, 'Sinead, nullify the sound attenuators. When you bring the craft in, it must make much more noise than the fireworks.'
Declan moved clear of them and the four remaining soldiers followed him, knowing that they would have to bring him down before they could risk attacking the other two. They circled him cautiously beyond the radius of his rapidly swinging weapon, occasionally jumping forward to try to stab him in the side or back as the axe head whistled past. He countered that by leaping forward, too, and shortening the distance to the attackers in front who retreated. Then one of them, plainly impatient with a game that nobody was going to win, moved back several paces. Grasping his blade at the weapon's center of balance, he hurled it spearlike at Declan's. The Hibernian dropped to his knees quickly and the blade glanced off his shoulder, opening a long cut in his forehead, eyebrow, and cheek as it spun away. Blood was running into one eye, partially blinding him, but he was able to see the thrown sword lying nearby. Still swinging the axe he rose to stand over it, knowing that while it was at his feet there were only three men with swords to contend with.
He swore as he saw the fourth man with what looked like a short knife in his hand moving toward Sinead and Ma'el, but he was too far away and too busy with the other three to do anything about it.
Suddenly the hillside was lit by an intense blue light and there was a deafening, hissing scream as the space vessel emerged from its dimensional jump almost on top of them, bleaching out the light of the fireworks and reducing their thunder to a low grumble. For a moment the four remaining attackers stood paralyzed by fear so that he could have slain them easily, but instead he watched them run screaming down the hill while Sinead brought the vessel into a gentle but incredibly noisy landing. Carefully, she folded and put away the chart and remote-control screen and followed Ma'el into the vessel with Declan close on her heels. The soundproof seal hissed shut behind them and they could hear themselves think again.
'Declan, you're wounded,' Sinead said in an angry, concerned voice. 'That eye… Let me look at that eye before we lift off…'
'Not yet,' he said, and pointed through the forward screen into the valley where the fireworks display had ceased and the only lights visible were a few bobbing torches that were being carried by members of the fleeing crowd. Reassuringly, he went on, 'My eye isn't damaged, just bloody, the cuts are above and below it. So first I want you to take us down there so that I can steal some of their abandoned fireworks. I might have a use for them…'
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ma'el Report. Day 112,303…
Declan remains secretive regarding the setting up of a family home in Hibernia other than that it will not be in my laboratory, and his secrecy includes Sinead. His explanation for this is that if his plan proves not to be successful, only he will know the full measure of his disappointment Both of them remain intensely loyal to me. Over the past year they have become much more than friends and protectors. But I know that if either of them had to make the choice between myself and the other one, the decision would not go my way.
'I could implant each of them with a CVI, which would bind them emotionally to me rather than each other, but that would only make of them willing but unhappy servants, and they are already willing and happy to serve me while loving each other. I am in great need of their assistance, but I will not do such a cruel thing to them.
'Instead I will break the most important precept in the canons of both the Commonality of Taelon and its Synod by revealing to a lower order of intelligent life the truth. 'Although not all of it…'
–
Sinead had sewn closed the wound and covered half of De-clan's face with what he thought was an unnecessarily large and foul-smelling pad, when she sat close beside him and lifted one of his arms to wrap it tightly around her waist. They had returned to orbit; both the sun and the moon were hiding somewhere behind the darkened world below them so that the stars that filled the sky were bright and beautiful and seemed closer than they had ever been before. She put her head on his shoulder and sighed.
'Ma'el,' she said, 'when will we be finished with all this traveling, and the killing even when we only have to watch it rather than being forced, as in Cathay, to take part in it? The way I feel these days, the constant fighting and needless cruelty down there on our world seems so stupidly wrong. With your Taelon knowledge, cannot you teach us to make our world a place where a child can grow and learn in health and safety?' She gestured at the crowded sky beyond the forward screen. 'Look at the stars where you live, they are so lovely and serene and, and most of all, peaceful.'
When Ma'el replied there was more pain and anger in his usually quiet voice than they had ever heard in it before.
'Believe me,' he said, 'the stars are not peaceful.'
They were silent knowing that to ask questions would only delay the answers that were coming.
'You inhabit one small and at present unimportant world among many hundreds,' he went on quietly, but with the angry edge remaining in his voice. 'The peoples of some of them are less intelligent than yours and some,
