sacrificial moment.
Ritva ducked and batted the blade aside with her buckler, a hard bang and ring of metal; a whirling two- pound Frisbee of edged metal thrown by a strong man was not something to be taken lightly. Her body was already moving forward, feet positioning for the lunge that would slam her point into the back of the soldier’s neck above the edge of his lorica. A sweet inevitability of motion, truth in bone and nerve and metal-
Shawonda Thurston’s desperate face was looking over his metal-clad shoulder, eyes enormous. She wrapped her arms around his neck in a convulsive movement, her head jammed into his shoulder.
“No!” she screamed. “Don’t! Don’t!”
Ritva’s battle-trance broke at the desperate appeal. She diverted the killing lunge upward with a wrenching effort, and her body slammed into the young man’s back and bounced off it; he was hard-braced, and the combined weight of him and his armor and the girl were twice her mass. The soldier and Shawonda stumbled backward without falling, but they were close to it.
Ritva moved again, but this time she reversed the weapon. The fishtail pommel of her long sword had an outer rim like the edge of a blunt chisel. She struck with it against the young man’s head, behind the ear. He didn’t go absolutely limp; you couldn’t hit someone in the head that hard in a combat situation and be sure you weren’t killing them. He did lose all interest in everything but lying still and hurting as the shock rattled his brain in its fluid casing. Shawonda released him and stared at his body lying at her feet.
“He’ll live,” Ritva said, and shook her with a push of buckler on shoulder. “Pull yourself together, girl!”
Shawonda did; she took a couple of sobbing breaths and then crouched to pull the wound pack from the soldier’s belt. She ripped the pad open with her teeth and strapped it against the wound in his left arm with a swiftness that showed she’d taken first-aid courses.
“He was nice,” she said, with tears tracking down her face and diluting the red spatters that flecked it. “He talked to me when his sergeant wasn’t there.”
Then she stumbled back to her mother, wiping her hands on her skirt. The older woman put an arm around her and hugged both her daughters to her body, nodding over them at the Dunedain.
Ritva spared time for one sharp nod back, then looked down at the soldier for an instant. Her lips quirked, and she dropped back into Edhellen: “You are one lucky son of a bitch. You really got a triple return tripled on chatting her up like that!”
The screams had cut off, except for young Lawrence Jr.’s, and his mother was soothing him; you could hear the sharp hoarse panting breaths of the survivors, and moaning and whimpering from the hurt. The rest of the raiding party came up. She did a quick scan; ten of the Mormons were dead, three of the Rangers, and others were having wounds dressed. The soldiers of the Sixth hadn’t gone down easily, surprise and numbers and bad ground or no.
One of the Dunedain was carried between two guerillas, and another was applying pressure to a pad. There wasn’t much point from the look of it; that deep a stab wound up under the short ribs made with enough force to penetrate mail would probably be fatal even if it hadn’t nicked a lung, and there was blood on her lips as well. It was Condis, whom Ritva had known a little and rather liked, even if she was very earnest. Now the knowledge of death was in her dark eyes, and her face was rigid with the strain of not screaming.
Astrid came over as they set her down, looked at the wound and up at the Mormon holding the bandage. He shook his head very slightly.
“Hiril,” Condis mumbled, struggling not to cough. “Lady. Send.. . me to Mandos. Please, you.”
“Are you sure, brave one?”
A nod, then a grimace and: “Nidh, naneth, nidh!”
Ritva swallowed. That was: It hurts, mother, it hurts! Sometimes there was only one last gift to give a friend.
Astrid went quickly to one knee. Her left hand cradled the girl’s head to position it, and she bent to kiss her gently on the forehead despite the spray of blood coughed into her face. The motion hid the sweep of her hand as she drew a long slender knife from her right boot, and it moved in a swift precise thrust. Then she kissed the still form’s forehead again, closed the staring eyes and stood, wiping a sleeve over her face to clear her eyes and sliding her knife and sword carefully through the crook of her elbow to clean them before she sheathed the steel. A friend laid Condis’ sword on her body and folded her hands on the hilt.
“Go in peace, Bride of Valor,” Astrid said; that was what Con and dis meant. “Wait for us, in the silent halls of the Uttermost West. It will not be long.”
Then she raised her head. Members of the raiding party were already rushing past her towards the stairs, with bundles of arrows and glass globes full of clingfire. A dull ringing sounded where a padlock was being pounded off a door by a sledge; the upper stories of this building were kept locked as storage. Immediately afterwards there was a rushing thunder of boots on metal treads.
Ritva’s eyes went up too. The flat roof above would be either the platform for escape, or the last place she would ever see.
“Tolo a nin,” Astrid said. “Gwaenc!”
Ritva translated. “Come with me. Let’s go!”
Martin Thurston looked up as he rode through Boise’s gate. The signal heliograph on the northwesternmost of the four towers was snapping, repeating a message as a request for clarification. The gathering clouds made it dim, thunderheads towering from black bases up to cream-white and then turned crimson by the westering sun. Something within him would have noticed the beauty of it once, if only in passing.
Nothing is nothing nothing now. Bits and bits that flake off and spin down and down and nothing is nothing and that is very good.
The signal was faint, not enough sunlight striking the mirrors, but then someone touched off the limelight. High above, hydrogen and oxygen and wood alcohol sprayed out of nozzles onto a stick of pure quicklime. A few seconds, and the light blinked brightly again. Martin frowned. He knew Morse as well as he read English, and the message was being sent in the clear; the identification number was a relay station well north of the city. And…
“Blimp?” someone said. “There aren’t any blimps.”
“There is the Curtis LeMay,” Martin said.
“But that flying white elephant and all its gear were decommissioned and broken up and sold for scrap after Wendell!”
“Perhaps not,” Thurston said.
He could feel things moving in his mind. Like fish under water, or worms in earth. Some part of him was astonished at the detached curiosity of the other part as it considered the sensation.
“Things were confused just then. Paperwork could have been misfiled by traitors within our ranks. Message, maximum priority, all weapons emplacements on wall and citadel. Fire on the blimp. Incendiary rounds authorized. Category A mission rules of engagement, execute immediately.”
Another man grunted. Category A meant ignore collateral damage.
A panting messenger approached, letting his bicycle fall. A Natpol, wheezing and red faced. Shields blocked his way as he bent over, holding himself and gasping.
“Sir!” he shouted, over the ten yards. “Sir, we have a situation!”
“Let him through,” Martin said.
They did, though two pila -points touched the back of his neck. By then he had his breath back, a little.
“Mr. President, there’s an incident at Aladdin’s Emporium. Sir, your wife was… is there, with your son and mother and sisters. Sir, it’s enemy specops forces and Mormon terrorists. They appear to have hostages, sir. Your family.”
Part of the sweat on the man’s face was sheer terror. Martin could feel the rage that would have flowed through him, even taste it, something like sucking on rusty iron. But the emotion chased itself around in a circle, like a hamster on a wheel at the other end of a reversed telescope. There if he needed it, but not really part of him.
“Nothing,” he said.
Everyone was looking at him. He could use the responses that mighthave-been.
“Nothing can be gained by panic,” he went on; it was what he would have said.
“Centurion Leiston, another maximum priority message. Launch gliders from all fields within reach.”
