Chapter Twenty-five
Ellina watched numbly as Ty moved almost too quickly for her eyes to follow. He was shooting at the juggling balls the fool in brightly colored rags kept tossing at him, blowing them out of the air with showers of sparks and puffs of smoke.
The crowd below seemed to think this was part of the show—they were cheering and shouting happily as they watched. But Ellina knew the truth—she knew this was no show. This was real and if even one of those bombs got through…
Suddenly a bunch of acrobats who were clearly not acrobats stormed the platform. The guards all around her—both Kindred and the special unit of Chorkay guards Ty had been training—began fighting them off but the screaming, panicking nobles were getting in the way.
They were all rushing this way and that, pushing and shoving, trying to get away from the bombs and the assassins, heedless of anyone’s safety but their own. Their high-heeled shoes clattered on the wooden platform and their high, panicked shrieks added to the general pandemonium.
Ellina would have liked to try and get away herself but where could she go? The steps were blocked and the drop from the top of the platform was twenty feet or more. Besides, she felt frozen—trapped in her heavy skirts and rooted to the spot, though she was buffeted back and forth by the panicking noblemen pushing and shoving around her.
She felt a tug at her heavy skirts and a small voice shouted, “Potentate-what’s happening? Are those bad men?”
Tutti’s going to get trampled if I don’t keep her close! she thought, coming back to herself. Dropping the armful of flowers, which were immediately trampled by the scuffling, high-heeled shoes of the noblemen and the boots of the guards, she leaned down and wrapped her arms around the little girl protectively.
“Stay close to me, Tutti,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the noise. “Everything is going to be all right.”
“But the men! The bad men!” Tutti was starting to cry.
Ellina picked her up and held her, feeling the little girl’s legs wrap around her waist as she cradled Tutti small frame close.
“It’s all right,” she said in the little girl’s ear. “It’s all right. The guards will protect us.”
But could they? The acrobats all seemed to be armed with long, deadly collapsible poles which they had withdrawn from their colorful rags and were using to parry the guards’ blasters and swords. The metal poles were thin and flexible and they seemed able to deflect blaster shots and sword thrusts with equal ease. How long before they fought their way through the guards—who were being pushed and shoved by the nobles so they could hardly fight—and got to her and Tutti?
Her heart racing, she looked anxiously at Ty. The big Kindred was shooting with amazing precision, blowing each bomb out of the air before it could touch any solid surface and spread its chain of destruction. His blaster was a blur, targeting each colorful ball that was not a ball almost before it left the fool’s hand. But how long could he go on, never missing a single shot?
And then something seemed to go wrong with his blaster. Ellina saw him look at it and then saw the fool throw one last bomb.
Ty dropped his blaster and caught the bomb in mid-air, then tossed it high in the air. There was an explosion—a much louder one than any of the previous bombs, Ellina thought distractedly—and then a rumbling began, right overhead.
As a dweller in an underground city all her life, Ellina knew the meaning of that sound.
Cave-in, she thought, feeling her stomach give a sick twist. Oh no—cave-in!
Most of the tunnels and corridors used in the kingdom were so well reinforced there was no fear at all of cave-ins. But occasionally, an older tunnel which hadn’t been properly tended would give way, burying unwary travelers below tons of rock and rubble and the shifting green sands of the barren world overhead would come pouring in like an evil, unwanted rain.
The screaming around her intensified—the nobles knew what the sounds meant too, for all that the palace was the best reinforced structure on all of Helios Beta.
“Get out of my way!” someone shouted in her ear. It was Hennessy, she saw. He was wide-eyed—his carefully coiffed hair wild and his eyes rolling in their sockets. He shoved Ellina to one side so hard she nearly dropped Tutti and ran past her, wild to get away from what was about to happen.
Something huge fell—so close to her that Ellina could feel the wind of its passage—and then, suddenly, a boulder the size of a large dining table landed directly on Hennessy’s head.
Well, it might be more accurate to say it landed on his entire body, Ellina thought numbly. For the boulder crushed him to jelly and then went right on through the wooden planking of the platform, as though it had pressing business with the ground below and it couldn’t be bothered with stopping.
Guess I won’t have to worry about the High Priest trying to make him my consort now, she thought and a crazy, hysterical giggle tried to rise up her throat. Ellina swallowed it back down with some difficulty. Calm—she had to be calm.
But being calm wasn’t easy considering the circumstances. There was more rumbling over head—more rocks and boulders raining down. Tutti was screaming in her arms and clutching her so tightly Ellina could hardly breathe and Lor had run down into the bosom of her gown and had curled where her third breast should have been—if she’d had one—and was crouched, trembling there.
Again, Ellina wanted to run—wanted to take herself and Tutti to safety. But there was no place to run to.
