He turned in amazement. Don had moved away, toward the viggies, but Clarin was sitting calmly on her mule, dark hair tumbled around a clean-washed and expressionless face. ‘You are watching for Justin, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘Because our minds are alike, Tasmin. Because he’s the one,’ she said. ‘The one you can blame it all on.’
‘Do you object?’ he grated, unreasonably angry.
She shook her head, kept her face calm, eluded his wrath. ‘What makes you believe he’d come this way?’
‘The city’s all torn up,’ he snarled, not realizing he had thought it all out. ‘If he has a tunnel, it couldn’t go in the direction of the city. They keep digging foundations and substreets and drainage trenches. He couldn’t have had a tunnel going into the city and kept it hidden. It would have to come this way.’
She smiled, a tiny, barely curved lipline. ‘Amazing, Tasmin. My father told me you were clever.’
‘Your father?’
‘Thyle Vowe is my father. Never mind. So you really think Justin will come.’
‘If he can move, he’ll come.’
‘You could be hurt. Killed.’ She said it calmly, as though it didn’t matter.
He didn’t hear her.
Colonel Lang’s detail arrived at the Black Tower early in the morning, tired but still functioning. A few of the men had been killed, fallen to Tripsinger sniper fire or shattered into bloody fragments by a too close approach to troublesome ’lings, but the dead were no more than Lang had been willing to sacrifice. He had been more concerned about losing his weaponry, but it had arrived virtually intact. Now he directed his men to within a quarter mile of the Tower and there set up his mortars.
Jamieson, fairly well recovered from his injuries on the Enigma, lay on a ledge to one side of the Tower. For the last few days, Jamieson had been living his own resurrection, as though in heaven and granted the privilege of talking with God. He and the Presence had spent long hours in colloquy, hours that were as ecstatic as any Jamieson could remember. Now he lay on the ledge with Tripsingers from Deepsoil Five scattered around him, determined to defend the Presence against whatever came. The men were equipped with weapons that the armorer of the citadel – who had been working on them frantically for days – had assured them would have more than twice the range of the usual stun rifles. Below the Black Tower, Highmost Darkness, and so forth, the two giligees who had stayed behind with Jamieson were preparing to leave. They had not been diligent about their preparations, and Jamieson called to them that the attack was imminent.
‘Get out of there,’ he demanded. ‘Tumble down.’
‘Stayed to be sure you were fixed,’ sang the giligees softly. They had become very fond of Jamieson. He had a voice better than most viggies and was very good to sing with. Listening to Jamieson and the Black Tower had been edifying. They had much to sing to the troupe when they were reunited.
‘I know,’ he caroled. ‘I am grateful. But you must move now. Those troopers down there are setting up mortars.’
The giligees had not seen mortars nor sung them. They had no idea what Jamieson was talking about and were already surfeited with new Urthish words and phrases. Politely but without haste, they started up the narrow trail to the place Jamieson waited.
On the prairie below, Colonel Lang estimated the range of the Tower and ordered his gunner to fire a round. It landed slightly below the giligees, knocking them off their feet, half burying them in shards.
With a cry Jamieson leapt to his feet and ran down the trail, frantically digging out the unharmed giligees and tossing them above him onto a ledge that led back into the ranges. ‘Hurry,’ he screamed at them. ‘Run.’
Threat!’ sang the Black Tower in an enormous voice. ‘Destruction.’
Jamieson gulped a lungful of air and sang, ‘Do not fear. We will protect …’
At the side of the Tower a Tripsinger tried his new rifle on the gunner, drilling a neat hole through him.
Colonel Lang cursed, corrected the aim, and dropped another shell into the mortar.
Jamieson was reassuring the Black Tower, singing all his love and determination, his voice more glorious in this epiphany than it had ever been. He saw the shell coming out of the corner of his eye. He was still singing when it hit.
Near the BDL building, Tasmin felt a tremor beneath his feet. Clarin hastily got out of the saddle and sat, pulling the mules down beside her. Obediently, they collapsed with their long necks stretched along the ground. ‘Get down, Tasmin.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Whatever the Eminence intends to happen.’
The tremor grew into a rocking, a shattering, a tumbling of soil. Before them, the long row of earthen brick storehouses collapsed into a heap of mud rubble.
‘Not quite,’ Clarin breathed. ‘Not quite enough.’
It began again, first a ripple, then a wave, the second reinforcing the first, harmonic vibrations that amplified with each return. The wall around Government House began to twist and topple. Still not enough.
Then more! Vast undulations rolling them first one way, then the other. Trees dancing a wild pavane on the prairie beside them, tipping and bowing. Buildings in the city shaking and trembling. The world so awash with mighty sound that they were deafened by it, making each individual destruction seem to occur in eerie silence. The golden dome of the temple coming apart, dropping in ragged chunks that seemed to take forever to fall.
Tasmin wondered if it had been full of pilgrims. Worshippers of the Great Ones. The Great Ones who were bringing the city down on top of their heads.
And again the mighty shaking, the harmonics of one huge oscillation reinforcing another.
The tower at the corner of the BDL building crumpled in upon itself like wet paper. One corner of the main building sagged and fell. The grounds within the wall shifted and jigged, stones leaping over the
