Everyone on the left crowded over. The two sheepdogs were nearly as hysterical as their charges, as the influx squeezed them into a solid bleating block of rolling eyes and exposed tongues. They did their duty, though, keeping the sheep together with nips and barks, sometimes running over their heaving backs to do it.
Ritva’s stomach clenched when the column rode out. Horsemen in three-quarter armor of lacquered leather plates edged in steel, its liquid sheen a dull red the color of dried blood, armed with bow and shete and nine-foot lances. Every breastplate bore the golden rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and so did the round shields slung over their backs.
Their spiked helmets were slung to their saddlebows; the heads were cropped close enough to be like plush fur, even shorter than Boise regulars, or shaved altogether, in odd contrast to tufts of chin-beard. Their faces were things of slabs and angles, all with a slightly starved look. She’d met men like that before, more often than not over a blade or in a shower of arrows, though once at closer range.
Not just Cutters. Not rancher levies. That’s the Sword of the Prophet.
The savage training of the House of the Prophet in Corwin bit deep, and it marked a man more than the scars of fire. She let herself look alarmed and curious, with a bit of a gape; it was a mark of the discipline of the riders that not one of them turned his head aside to glance at a good-looking young woman. When the last of them rode by and the short train of two-wheel carts that carried their minimal bagged had passed she blew out her cheeks
“Those guys look serious,” Ian said quietly.
“ Tell me. We had a bunch of them chase us from not far east of here all the way to Nantucket. Nothing stopped them except killing.”
“That frightened off the others?”
“No, I mean nothing stopped them except killing them all. All except the last five.”
“Determined.”
“ Ai, you have no idea. There were over five hundred to begin with.”
“ Very determined. So five gave up?”
“That was after my big brother had the Sword of the Lady. That can
… do things… even to them.”
“Oh.”
“Note that the Sword of the Lady is a long way away from us, right now. But the Sword of the Prophet is right here, and so are some of the Seekers.”
“Yeah, that had occurred to me now and then.”
Traffic took a while to unsnarl, but eventually it started moving again and they crossed, over the tree-lined river and to the high steel portals of the gate-complex, then through its tunnel darkness and into the city. The city wall was high, about the same as Portland’s, but they hadn’t bothered coating it in stucco-old Lawrence Thurston had been an inhumanly businesslike man. She didn’t know if Boise really smelled a little worse than it had last time, or that was her imagination; it certainly wasn’t bad compared to some she’d sniffed, and positively fragrant next to the coal-smoke reek of giant Des Moines. There was no way to cram tens of thousands of human beings and their fires and forges and animals inside a wall and not have it smell bad to country-bred noses.
“Ah, the smell of civilization,” Ritva said.
Ian snorted, then said: “I think we drop off the sheep here inside the gate. Isn’t that the sign Woburn told us about? And I’d better become mute, it’s what it says on my draft exemption papers.”
A broad avenue led eastward from the river gate to a golden-domed building that had been the State capitol; the walled citadel that held the General-President’s residence was south of it.
Last time here I was an honored guest, when we were heading east to the Sunrise Lands. Now I’m a spy and I’ll be tortured and killed if they catch me. It’s an up-and-down life in the Dunedain Rangers!
Like most walled cities there had been a lot of infilling since the Change, second stories added to houses and new workshops built. Like the more closely regulated cities, Boise also had a stretch of cleared land just inside the fortifications, letting troops move quickly in an emergency. It also served as holding pens for livestock; each dealer had a sign with his name and license number. It was all very orderly, as far as anything concerned with sheep and other beasts with wills of their own could be. They turned the flock in between the wattle hurdles and into the corral. They quieted quickly; sheep weren’t intelligent enough to figure out what humans had in mind for them. Unlike pigs. Pigs were dangerous in large numbers, for exactly that reason.
The contractor who’d bought Woburn’s sheep was a weathered middle-aged man; he took a look at the flock with an experienced flick of the eyes, scanning for sickness or scrawny individuals. Then he went through and checked a few at random to make sure they were what they appeared. The sheep were mostly overage ewes, sold off when their best wool and lambing days were done. The hides would bring nearly as much as their tough stringy meat, with leather in such demand for the war, but soldiers weren’t picky eaters either.
He had an assistant, a youngster in his late teens with stained working clothes and a shepherd’s crook. He was staring at Ritva, which wasn’t unusual, but there was as much hostility as jittery adolescent lust in it. He was silent until she handed over the invoice with Woburn’s signature.
“What are you doing with that?” he said. “Why isn’t the man handling it?”
“I’m giving it to your boss, stranger,” she said mildly. “And you should mind your own business.”
“ You’ve no business handling that, girl,” he said. “You should be home, and dressed decent. Let men do men’s business. The day is coming-”
Ritva stuck a finger in the young man’s face, the point almost touching his nose, and he jarred to a halt in astonishment.
“Who is this asshole?” she asked the dealer.
“He badgers the flocks for me around the town pens,” the man said. “And he’s my cousin’s kid, for my sins. That side of the family has been listening to the new preachers.”
“He pisses off the people you do business with,” she said; Ian was keeping quiet, in case anyone was struck by his accent. “And my brother here is mute, or he’d be pissed off.”
Which accounts for why he isn’t in the army, she thought.
“The little dick ain’t me,” the dealer pointed out. “And the sheep don’t mind his disposition.”
He signed the spare copy, and took out a checkbook with the grizzly bear logo of the First National Bank of Boise on its cover. Ritva had just turned to untie her horse string when the sheep-badger spat on her foot.
“Sorry,” he said with a sneer. “Aiming for the dirt.”
Very slowly, she turned around again and smiled at him. The grab and twist that followed were almost too swift to see; the young man had just enough time to clutch himself and screech before he folded up and fell to the ground, with his tongue waving in his speechless mouth like an undersea weed.
Ritva waited for an instant, then kicked the fallen man twice with cold deliberation, hard enough that the steel-reinforced toe of her boot made thudding sounds with a very satisfying undertone of crunch but not hard enough to kill. He began to whimper, and then vomit in helpless choking, gasping heaves. Blood and bits of tooth came along with the contents of his stomach, a sour bite under the warmer musky smells of sheep and sheepdung and straw.
“Any problems?” she said to the contractor, using the fallen man’s hat to wipe her boot and then throwing it into the puddle of puke.
He grinned. “Wanted to do that all this year myself, but he is family. Let’s get you gone before the Natpols”- he meant the National Police, who were Boise’s constabulary-“show up. Here’s the check and give my regards to Rancher Woburn. I’ll take care of the dogs the usual way.”
She folded it and tucked it into a pocket; she’d cash it if possible. Woburn’s cover story was that she and Ian were bandits who’d jumped the legitimate drovers and run off the flock and stolen the documentation, and he had cowboys of his own ready to swear to it. Whether that would help if the current regime in Boise decided he was guilty was another matter, but he was ready to take the chance. When they were far enough away not to cause any curiosity about a mute speaking, Ian muttered: “Wasn’t that a bit conspicuous?”
“Only in the right way. Judging from the people we met on our way here, that was a perfectly credible reaction. People in Boise the city think of cowboys… and cowgirls… as the type who take offense. And he did spit on my foot, sweetie.”
“Remind me never to spit on you. Of course, I doubt I’d be inclined to. You play rough, don’t you?”
Ritva shrugged and made a slight moue of distaste. “The little orch was a Cutter. I’ve hardly ever met a
