Conqueror

All the other towers had surrendered quickly enough, when Civil Government troops came calling at the back entrance with field guns for doorknockers. Some of them were empty even before the soldiers arrived, their militia defenders tearing off their uniforms and running back towards their homes. All except those here on the northeast quadrant, where the men holding them had hauled down the Lion City banner of a rampant cat and left their own flag of white crescent on a green field flying defiantly.

'Hate to waste men on the rag-heads,' Gruder said, scratching at a half-formed scab on his neck.

Raj's smile was bleak as the dawn still six hours away. 'I don't think that will be necessary,' he said quietly. 'I've sent-ah.'

Juluk rode up, his pipe between his teeth. His men ambled behind him, their dogs wuffing with interest at the smells on the night air.

'Hey, sojer-man, you do wheetigo trick, fly over walls, eh?'

'I didn't want to stay home scratching my fleas with you sluggards,' Raj replied. Horace and the Skinner chief's dog eyed each other.

He pointed at the towers ahead. 'Know who's there?' he said.

Juluk stretched and belched, knocking the dottle out of his pipe against one bare horn-calloused heel. 'Wear- breechclout-on-heads,' he replied.

The Skinners' home range touched on the Colony's northeast border. That was their name for the Arabs; they called the people of the Civil Government the sneaks, and the western barbarians long-hairs. Or they just used their generic term of contempt, farmer.

'They think they're heroes,' Raj said. 'I say that if any of them are alive when the sun comes up, your women will laugh you out of the camps when you go home. They'll offer you skirts and birthing-stools.'

Juluk's giggle broke into a hoot. He turned to his followers: 'L'gran wheetigo konai nus! Eel doni l'bun mut!'

The big devil knows us! He's given us the good word!

'And that,' Raj said as the nomad mercenaries pounded by, screeching like powered saws in stone, 'takes care of that.'

* * *

'Further resistance is hopeless,' Raj called up toward the second-story window. 'Colonel Strezman, don't sacrifice brave men without need.' Not least because the Civil Government can use them, he thought. Whatever happened here in the west, there would be war with the Colony again within two years.

His skin prickled. He was quiet sure High Colonel Strezman wouldn't order him shot down under a flag of truce. He wasn't at all sure that one of his men might not do it anyway.

The last of the Brigaderos regulars had holed up in several mansions not far from the plaza. Like most rich men's homes throughout the Midworld basin they were courtyard-centered dwellings with few openings out to the world; their lives were bent inward, away from noise, dust, thieves and tax-assessors. Their thick stone walls would turn rifle bullets, and the iron grills over the windows might make them forts in time of riot. How little they resembled real forts was shown by the smashed courtyard gate and the rubble beside it, where a single shell from the field-gun back down the road had landed. Most of the windows were dark, but there was enough moonlight for the riflemen crouching there to see the street quite well; also a building was burning not too far away.

A long silence followed. The street-door of the central house creaked open, and Strezman walked out surrounded by a knot of his senior officers.

'My congratulations on a brilliant ruse of war,' he called, stopping ten meters away. 'Your reputation proceeded you, Messer Whitehall, and now I see that it is justified.'

He spoke loudly, a little more loudly than the distance called for. There was blood on the armor covering his right arm, and on the blade of his single-edged broadsword. He wore no helmet, and his long white hair fluttered around an eagle's face in the hot wind from the fire. Torchlight painted it red, despite his pallor.

'My congratulations, High Colonel, on a most skillful and resolute defense,' Raj said sincerely.

Given the cards he was dealt, Strezman had played them about as well as he could-as well as anyone could without Center whispering in their ear.

'Will you surrender your remaining men?' Raj asked formally. 'Your wounded will be cared for, and the troopers and junior officers given honorable terms of enlistment in the Civil Government forces on another front. Senior officers will be detained pending the conclusion of the war, but in a manner fitting to their rank and breeding.'

Strezman swallowed, and spoke again. Still louder, as if for a larger audience.

'My orders from His Mightiness are to resist to the last man,' he declaimed. 'Therefore I must decline your gracious offer, Messer Whitehall, although no further military purpose is served by resistance. To honor the truce, I hereby warn you of my intention to attack.'

Their eyes met. The hostages, Raj knew. The lives of these mens' families were forfeit, if they surrendered. . or if they were known to have surrendered. Even though a stand to the death here accomplished nothing, not even much delay.

The officers with Strezman drew their swords and threw away the scabbards. They raised the blades and began to walk forward, heads up and eyes staring over the massed rifles facing them.

Raj chopped his hand down. Smoke covered the scene for an instant as a hundred rifles barked; when it cleared every man in the Brigaderos party was down, hit half a dozen times. The High Colonel was on his knees; blood pulsed through teeth clenched in a rictus of effort and he collapsed forward. The tip of his sword struck sparks as it left his hand and spun on the cobbles, a red and silver circle on the stones.

Raj flung up his hand to halt the fire. In a voice as loud as the Brigadero colonel's a moment before, he called:

'Let the bodies of High Colonel Strezman and his officers be returned to their households-' the servants who followed their masters to war '-to be delivered to their prince, in recognition of how their men-how all their men-died with them in obedience to General Forker's orders.'

The vicious little sod, he added silently. He hoped the Brigade didn't depose Forker any time soon; the man was worth five battalions of cavalry to the Civil Government all by himself. If shame didn't keep him from harming the garrison's families, fear of his other commanders probably would, after Strezman's final gesture. Although if there was any justice in this Fallen world, the Brigade would chop him, and soon.

'Gerrin,' he went on in a normal voice. The other man's torso was bound with bandages over ribs that might only be cracked, but he was still mobile.

'Get the rest of them out; there must be eight hundred or so. Down to the docks before daylight, suitable guards, and onto those two merchantmen Grammeck commandeered. Have someone reliable, Bartin say, handle it. The ships can pick up pilots and a deck officer apiece from the rams, they've come into the harbor. I want them sailing east by dawn, understood?'

* * *

No need for a decimation, Raj thought grimly. The 5th Descott had lost more than that, running the gauntlet of the murder-holes of the gatehouse and in the headlong charge that cleared the plaza for the men behind them.

He looked down once more from the podium around the fountain; only a day and a night since the town meeting gathered here. . now the square was filled with soldiers. The 5th and the 2nd Cruisers still in neat ranks before him; many of the others mixed by the surge over the walls and the brief street-fighting that followed. Many missing, already off among the houses. The only firing came from the sector of wall still held by the Colonial merchants, the burbling of their repeater carbines and jezails as an undertone to the savage hammering of Skinner long rifles. He didn't think that would take long; he could see one of the towers from here, and squat figures made stick-tiny by distance capered and danced on its summit, firing their monstrous weapons into the air.

Every once and a while, a figure in Colonist robes would be launched off the parapet to flutter in a brief arc through the air. Some of the screams were audible this far away.

'Fellow soldiers,' Raj said. 'Well done.' A cheer rippled across the plaza, tired but good-natured. 'A donative of six months' pay will be issued.' The next cheer had plenty of energy. 'I won't keep you, lads; just remember we need this place standing tomorrow, not burnt to the ground. You've done your jobs, now the city-and all in it-is yours until an hour past dawn. All units dismissed!'