just didn’t attract the eye of wary suspicion the way your average hulking macho brute did, particularly if the target was a hulking macho brute, which most had been. Profound surprise had been the last expression on a lot of faces she and Katrina had dispatched to their putative rewards via stiletto, crossbow, piano-wire garrote, poison-filled hypodermic and various other unpleasantnesses.
It was very like Sandra to see the possibilities instantly when two vicious, intelligent, hungry, traumatized and extremely athletic barely teenaged girls managed to infiltrate her heavily guarded private quarters and demand a job on Change Day Forty. Norman Arminger had just laughed himself sick and told her to go ahead with the Sailor Moon Squad if she thought it was worthwhile. They’d both agreed that the rough and ragged material they were trying to forge into an elite needed a lot of culling, particularly the non-Society elements.
People don’t realize how much of what Norman did was possible because he had people like Conrad carrying water for him and Sandra to handle the Deep Thought. What’s that old saying, you can accomplish almost anything if you’re willing to let someone else get the credit? And now it’s my job to see that this place doesn’t fall and plays its part in the campaign, and I don’t care a damn if the chroniclers all go on about Rudi and Mathilda and don’t give me more than a footnote.
Walla Walla’s defenses stood in a stout irregular rectangle now, ferroconcrete and rubble walls forty feet high faced with hard granite; round towers reared half that again at intervals, with conical roofs of witch-hat shape on top sheathed in lead or copper, the whole surrounded by a deep moat. The wartime hoardings were up over the crenellations of the wall, sloping metalfaced timber roofs that protected the fighting platform from arrow fire and let defenders shoot and drop things straight down from under cover.
The old penitentiary had been the foundation for the big castle that made the northwestern corner of the new walled city; she could see its massive machicolated towers silhouetted against the blazing colors of the western sky. A blimp-shaped observation balloon at three thousand feet up stood black against the dark blue vault of heaven, the long curve of its tethering cable hardly visible at all.
As she watched a signal light began to snap from its basket, aimed east in a rapid flicker of coded Morse, probably sending to one of the castles in the foothills of the mountains there.
There were still around fifteen thousand people here in peacetime, half what Portland had and nearly as much as Corvallis. The rich farmlands, pastures, orchards and vineyards of the Walla Walla valley and the timber of the Blue Mountains to the east brought it wealth, as did trade in peacetime; in war it was an outpost against the city-state of Pendleton to the south and the United States of Boise to the north and east. Or against both and the Prophet’s hordes from Montana, now.
Banners flew from the peaks of tower and gatehouse. Besides the scarlet-yellow-black Lidless Eye of the PPA, there were the arms of the Aguirre family who were Counts Palatine of the Eastermark and Barons of Walla Walla- Or, a tree vert with a wolf passant sable, on a tree brun -and now the crowned mountain and sword of the High Kingdom of Montival flying above them all. Sandra had seen to that throughout the Association territories and encouraged it elsewhere, even before the putative High King got back.
Well, I helped train Rudi… Artos… all those years since I first kidnapped him. He’s certainly very capable; a little sentimental, but hard enough when he has to be, and extremely smart. Deadly dangerous with any weapon, too. I wouldn’t have believed a man over six feet could move that fast, if I hadn’t seen it myself. The only man I’ve ever met as fast as I am.
Her thoughts shied away from the Sword of the Lady. Not that she didn’t believe in it; it was so real that your belief became utterly irrelevant. Too real. You got the feeling that it could tear through the fabric of things at any moment, like a heavy weight through damp paper. Meaning itself crumbled around it.
She went on aloud: “All right, get them moving in relays, Sir Tancred,” she said, as an empty train rumbled in from the east. “It’s important that their kinfolk inside the walls know they’re safe. See all those watchers on the parapet? Seeing vulnerable dependents heading out will help morale a great deal. They can fight to defend their families while the families are out of immediate danger.”
Tancred nodded, looking thoughtful for a second; he was an extremely capable young man or he wouldn’t be commanding the Protector’s Guard regiment, but he needed to gain a broader perspective if he was going to rise further. Another thing Sandra and Conrad had drummed into her hard long ago was that a big part of commanding was finding which of your subordinates could learn and then keeping them at it.
A second throng of civilians waiting a hundred yards farther down rose to their feet. This clump was more feisty, or just more frightened, and tried to stumble forward in a rush. The infantry sweating in their harness cursed wearily as they locked their big kite-shaped shields together into a wall to keep the frightened peasants from cluttering the track too soon. The train screeched to a halt as the brakemen wrestled with the horizontal wheels between each car.
She heard the sergeant shouting again: “Get back there, you dimwit churls, wait your turn- wait your Saints- forsaken turn -push them back, men, push them, Turchil, you weeping pustle on Satan’s dick, put your shoulder into that shield and push, man! ”
“They’ll be loading the noncombatants and refugees and sending them west all night, then, Grand Constable,” Tancred went on. “If we push, we should be able to get it done by the time the army’s ready to march, which will leave the line clear and the rolling stock and teams on hand at our supply base on the navigable Columbia. There’s an intact line all the way northeast to Dayton we could use as we advance.”
“Very good, Sir Tancred,” Tiphaine d’Ath replied. “We should get out of the way, then. You’re camp commandant until I get back from consulting with the Count. I’ll probably be staying the night at the City Palace; it would raise questions if I didn’t.”
She’d have to wait for the local overlord to come out; it would be within her rights but a political faux pas to enter the city before an invitation and ideally himself to welcome her in person, and she’d sent word she’d be busy all day. On the other hand, it would also be impolite not to be here near the gate waiting to be greeted at the hour she’d specified. Tiphaine d’Ath tried very hard never to be unintentionally offensive.
“Don’t take any nonsense,” she went on. “You speak with my authority, and the Lady Regent’s, and that of the High King. And send me Lord Forest Grove soon as he’s ready. Tell him the Count should be here fairly soon, and I’ll need him then to report on the situation up near the front.”
Lord Rigobert Gironda de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove, was in charge of the allied…
Montivalan. We’re all part of Montival now, not just allies. Completely and utterly forget how we spent the first ten Change Years fighting each other, Tiph, and the next ten watching each other with gimlet-eyed suspicion and thinking about fighting each other again someday. Down the memory hole, as Sandra puts it. You’ve got seven regiments of Yakima foot from the Free Cities in this army and glad to have them, the stubborn bastards fought us to a standstill, after all. Montivalans.
… Montivalan screening force to the northeast.
His men were buying time for this army to form up. Buying it with blood, and now he had to come back for a conference.
There was no avoiding it, but Tiphaine d’Ath looked in that direction, towards the distant line of mountains, and suppressed a fierce desire to be there.
And to know what the hell’s been going on up there. Reports just aren’t the same.
COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK BARONY OF TUCANNON (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE) PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Make a mistake, you sons of bitches. You’re out there. I can feel it, I can smell it. Come on, screw up.
Ingolf Vogeler carefully leveled the binoculars from where he lay just below the crest of the ridge, using a hand to shade the lenses so they would give no betraying flash in the noonday sunlight. This whole country on the fringe of the Blue Mountains was smooth ridge and slope making valleys, sometimes with a bit of a creek running down the vale between, sometimes dry, getting steeper as you went east.
Send me a nice cocksure kid, Lord, he thought. Or Manwe or Varda or whatever. Nineteen, a hard-on with legs, he’s invincible, he’s immortal, he knows it all. Give me something to work with.
There was a thin stand of tall straight ponderosa pine along the top here, smelling like butterscotch and vanilla as sap oozed out of cracks in their orange bark; the trees got thicker behind him too, up into the heights. Downslope were scattered thickets of shrubby mountain mahogany, and then grass rolling away in billowing folds
