Tasmin put his glasses to his eyes, bracing his elbows on the ground as the lenses swung wildly. There was motion in the courtyard of the BDL building, someone at the gate that separated it from Government House. The Honorable Wuyllum, quite alone. No. Someone staggering along behind him, clutching at him. Honeypeach?
Clarin muttered an imprecation. She, too, was watching Honeypeach Thonks who was covered with blood from a wound on her head. The Honorable Wuyllum turned and kicked at her, then fled as she pursued him through the gate, across the expansive terraces, and into Government House.
It came down upon them. All at once. As though the bottom layer of it had been pulled away. Within the walls, nothing stood, no wall, no fragment of corner, no towering chimney, and then the walls themselves fell.
And finally the BDL building went, tumbling in upon itself in the shivering tide of motion as though it had been built of sand.
‘The citadel …’ he breathed.
‘Empty,’ she said. ‘My father told me it was empty.’
They both saw the dark opening in the earth at the same time. The soil was still shivering when Clarin’s arm went out, her finger pointing toward it even as Tasmin stood up and mounted his mule. The opening expanded. A camouflaged doorway, well east of the fallen area. And out of it came a large man in a small quiet-car, driving speedily away toward the east, toward them, where they waited.
‘Clarin …’
‘Yes.’
‘Get away. He’ll be armed.’
‘I want to …’
‘If anything happened to you, I couldn’t bear it. It would kill me. There’s been enough. Please, Clarin.’
She said nothing more. He sensed her motion rather than saw it. He would not take his eyes off the man before him.
It was dawn. The morning light shone straight into Harward Justin’s eyes, blinding him. He was within yards of Tasmin before he saw the silhouetted figure of mule and man, the blocky outline of a rifle at the man’s side. He had been shaken out of his usual concentration by the earthquake. Without thinking, he wrenched the steering lever to turn back the way he had come, not stopping to realize that the rifle was in its scabbard, that he could have outrun the mule.
Tasmin leaned forward and kicked the mule into a run. He could not hope to catch the man – could not hope to. Did hope to. Wanted to get his hands around that bulbous neck. Fracture that thick, oil-rich skull like a nut, squeeze it.
The car sped back. Justin fumbled on the seat beside him, but the hand weapon he had laid ready had fallen onto the floor when the car made its sudden turn. The car teetered, almost overturning, and he gave up trying to reach the weapon in favor of reaching the secret tunnel from which he had emerged. Directly before him on the scarcely visible track lay the entrance to the hidden cavern, the door still open. There was a large open area behind that door. Once inside that area, he could turn the car. Once inside, he could get at his weapon. The car plunged into darkness. Not far behind, Tasmin pursued it….
Something hit him from one side. Someone. Launched at him from one side, knocking him off the mule. Someone shouting at him.
‘Tasmin, Tasmin, for God’s sake it’s going to blow don’t go in there after him it’s going to blow….’
The earth came apart as it had come apart once before on the Enigma, except that this was not the Enigma, this was Deepsoil, solid as rock, eternal as stone, now broken and riven, with fire belching into the sky as a hundred huge rockets tried to launch themselves and blew apart under countless tons of shattered stone. Rocks fell around them in a clattering hail. Someone screamed in pain. What was left of the rulers’ enclave of Splash One shivered into microscopic dust rising on a white-hot wind. The cloud boiled, towered, heaved itself into the sky, blocking the sun. A dusklike shadow fell.
Tasmin lay on his back, staring at it….’
Someone beside him was moaning.
Clarin. Cradling her arm and crying from pain and shock.
‘I think it’s broken,’ she wept. ‘A rock fell on it …’
He got up, slowly, feeling himself to see if his own parts were present. From the hill behind him came a trill, then a harmonic hymn. Bondri Gesel and the troupe, who had felt it coming, had sung a warning and would now record it all in song.
When Tasmin turned back to Clarin, the giligee was already there, working on her arm.
‘You are making a habit of hurting yourself,’ it sang to Clarin, even as it looked up at Tasmin with angrily speculative eyes.
Tasmin shook his head. Somewhere under all that rubble was a man he had wanted to kill. Still wanted to kill. The emptyness in himself was not filled. Nothing could have lived through that. Justin must be dead, and yet he, Tasmin, was not at all satisfied.
The troops who had just arrived at the Great Blue Tooth, Horizon Loomer, Mighty Hand, the Presence humankind called the East Jammer, had not received any order that countermanded the original one. They set up and got off several very well aimed shells, which knocked a few large chunks off the Jammer. Gyre-birds rose in a whirling, agitated cloud. The ground shook. The men cheered. The Jammer cheered in return, its enormous voice increasing in volume and rising in pitch. The troops found themselves groveling on the ground, hands over ears, screaming at the noise, which did not end until they stopped moving altogether.
Rage had led the Jammer to this unplanned retaliation. Quiet malice led it to communicate the success of the tactic to all other Presences.
At the foot of the Black Tower, one of the giligees whom Jamieson had saved ran frantically among the Tripsingers and Explorers whose sniper fire had successfully kept the troopers at bay.
‘Highmost Darkness wants
