Warlord

with their nine-thonged whips. They clumped and rode to the banners of their units, into the dead ground where the cannister could not reach. Comparative silence fell; everyone who could walk or crawl had joined the little group around the standard.

'Keep moving,' Raj shouted; it sounded as much a hoarse croak. 'Hold your fire!' Tewfik wasted no time; a young Colonist with a white flag rode up on a beautiful snow-white wolfhound. It had been snow-white; now it was speckled with red, and the herald's drawn sword was red to the elbow.

'You can do nothing,' he said, in excellent court Sponglish. 'My lord the amir, commander of the Forces of the South, Ghazi of the Faith, offers terms of surrender to brave men. You are outnumbered, surrounded, have no water, no supplies, no place to go-'

Raj waited for the men to answer; they did, without delay:

'Go fuck yerself, raghead!'

A flourished bayonet. 'Come an' sit yer wog arse on this, pimp!'

'Up the 5th-Descott ferever!'

'Spirit of Man! Spirit of Man!'

From most, a wordless growl that was matched by the riderless dogs in the center. 'Keep moving!' Raj said again; he risked a quick drink from the canteen, capped it again. None of the Colonist forces had dispersed, and the two remaining pompoms were out of the line of fire; the Civil Government fugitives in sight were noticeably fewer. A flurry of orders from Tewfik's command post, just out of effective rifle range, and a block of about four hundred formed up and trotted north, giving his group a wide berth.

Raj felt his lips skin back from his teeth. 'Tell Tewfik that if he thinks he can overrun us, he's welcome to try,' he said. 'How many men did he lose today? Twice what we did? Three times? How much burnt-out frontier does he have to hold? And every minute he watches us, more of our comrades escape. Let him come; don't be shy, we'll see to his other eye for him.'

The herald bowed and reined about; the wolfhound seemed to float over the baked gravel like a mirage of snow.

'I love you,' Suzette said quietly, pulling up beside him.

'I love you, too,' Raj replied. 'I just wish we'd had longer to do it in.' He looked north, to Komar, a week's travel away and as impossibly far as Terra the lost and sacred.

'Let's go, dog-brothers,' he said. 'Every second man, mount. Keep it ready to about face. At a walk, march.'

Chapter Eleven

'Ser.'

'Hunnha!' Raj sprang erect, throwing aside a blanket he didn't remember pulling over himself.

'Ser, we're here.' M'lewis' voice had a lisp to it now, with most of his front teeth missing. A thick cup of kave steamed in his hands. Raj took it, trying to stop the tremors in his own.

'I was back in the desert,' he said, more to himself than anyone else. Most of the other fifteen figures scattered around the lounge of the steamboat Orbital Paradise were as unconscious as he had been a moment ago. All were as filthy-shaggy, uniforms caked and stained until the original color was undetectable. 'On the retreat, the third night, when they tried to overrun us again, and the gun blew up, you know. I was back there.'

'We're here, ser,' M'lewis repeated patiently.

Raj took three careful deep breaths, and a sip of the kave; it had plum brandy in it, and the combination hit the acid tension in his stomach hard enough to make him gasp. The others were beginning to stir, as the city noise penetrated the shuttered windows; Suzette slept on, looking absurdly young curled on the cushions beneath a window. Then the steam whistle cut loose above their heads, and every single one of them rolled upright with a weapon in their hands, crouched and ready. The steamboat's captain had not objected to their commandeering the upper salon, not more than once, at least.

And none of them was going to be able to sleep without their rifles by their sides, not for a long time.

'Arrg,' Foley said. 'I feel worse than I did when we got on this tub.'

True enough, Raj thought dully. When you were riding fast you didn't have time to think. The whistle roared again; they were well past the cut where the docking canal took off from the Hemmar and passed through the thick water-gates of East Residence. The Orbital Paradise was a hundred feet long and half as wide, a shallow-draft hull just big enough to carry the engines that wheezed and chuffed beneath them, with a superstructure like a rectangular wedding cake topped by the twin smokestacks. The paddle wheel at the rear churned into reverse as they slid into the dock, nudging into the rope buffers.

The quays were as crowded as usual, all except this one. A troop of heavy cavalry waited, down where the crewmen were manhandling the gangplank across to the pavement and looping thigh-thick ropes to the bollards; men in the uniform of Vernier's Own. Twenty men on powerful Newfoundlands, in black uniforms and gauntlets, burnished black steel breastplates, helmets topped with black jersauroid plumes. All of them were leading extra dogs, ready-saddled.

The lieutenant of the escort saluted and began a speech of some sort as Raj and his Companions clattered down the gangplank; he stopped in mid-word as they walked past him without pausing.

'My, ain't they purty,' M'lewis lisped, as the Descotters swung into the saddle with graceless ease.

'Barholm wanted me soonest,' Raj said. 'Probably for the frying post. Let's not keep the executioner waiting, shall we?'

* * *

'Out! Useless sluts, halfwits, out, out!' barked Anne, Lady Clerett. She was dressed in pale cream with black trim, the colors of mourning, and she swept forward toward her friend with arms outstretched. 'No, wait, you, fetch refreshments, prepare the baths, fetch clothing for Lady Whitehall. Well, don't stand there gaping, go!' The slavegirls fled in a twitter of voices and fabric.

'Oh, Anne,' Suzette mumbled, letting herself slump forward. Her carbine thumped to the floor and the Hammamet carpet as she rested her head on the other woman's shoulder and let the strong maternal hug support her weariness. But business could not wait more than moments.

'I'm filthy, I've got fleas, your dress,' she said, as Anne guided her to a chair. A flash of acute embarrassment at her state went over her; the room was not large, but it was roofed in pale yellow glass and walled with torofib silk printed in delicate patterns of reeds and lotus and jewel-scaled marsh sauroids. Cool air sighed up through cast-bronze grills in the floor, driven by steam-powered fans in the vaults far below. Nobody could say that Anne used her position with new-rich showiness; she had set herself to learn an aristocrat's version of good taste with the same fierce determination she used on any other task she undertook. A good deal of it had been tutoring by her friend Suzette, Missa Wenqui as she had been then. .

'Here, sweet,' Anne said, hard triumph in her voice, as she pushed a silver frame across the inistaria table between them. 'You've got just time to read this, then a bite and a shower and my masseur and a full dress- up.'

Suzette blinked crusted, red-rimmed eyes down at the frame. It was the letter she had sent from Komar, but annotated in vermilion ink, a man's blocky writing. By the end of the missive the pen had been pressed hard enough to tear the paper.

'My husband was so interested,' Anne said. 'And Chancellor Tzetzas was. . horrified at what his subordinates had done in his name.' A lazy cat-smile. 'So horrified that he signed over every inch of land and scrap of personal property in the County of Komar to the Vice-Governor.' Her fingernails pressed the inlays of the table. 'He's too useful. . Barholm thinks he's too useful. . to dispose of now. And Suzie-' the long-fingered hands closed on hers '-your man certainly came out of this better than anyone else. Better than that fool Stanson, who seems to have done nothing more than get half his behind shot off. Which should make him twice as