Conqueror

'Cabot, you can't mean to leave me here?' Suzette said, her eyes large and shining.

'Only for a few months,' he said, sitting beside her on the couch.

She seized his hand and pressed it to her breast. 'Not even for a moment. Promise me you won't!'

* * *

'Let me out, my son,' the priest said shortly.

'I'm no son of yours, you bald pimp in a skirt,' the trooper growled. He was from the 1st Cruisers, a tall hulking man with a thick Namerique accent.

Savage, the priest thought. Worse than the Brigade, most of whom were at least minimally polite to the orthodox clergy.

The East Gate had a small postern exit, a narrow door in the huge main portal. A torch stood in a bracket next to it, and the flickering light caught on the rough wood and thick iron of the gate, cast shadows back from the towers on either side. A crackle of rifle-fire came from somewhere, perhaps a kilometer away. Faint shouting followed it; part of the continual cat-and-mouse game between besieger and besieged. Behind him Old Residence was mostly dark, the gasworks closed down for the duration as coal was conserved for heating and cooking. Lamps were few for the same reason, showing mellow gold against the blackness of night. The white puffs of the priest's breath reminded him to slow his breathing.

'I have a valid pass,' he said, waving the document under the soldier's nose. There was a trickle of movement in and out of the city, since it was advantageous to both sides.

'Indeed you do,' a voice said from behind him.

He whirled. A man stepped out of the shadow into the light of the torch; he was of medium height, broad- shouldered and deep-chested, with a swordsman's thick wrists. Much too dark for an ex-Squadrone, a hard square beak-nosed face with black hair cut in a bowl around his head. Major Tejan M'brust, the Descotter Companion who commanded the 1st Cruisers. The priest swallowed and extended the pass.

'Signed by Messa Whitehall, right enough,' the officer said.

More of the 1st Cruiser troopers came out, standing around the cleric in an implacable ring. Their bearded faces were all slabs and angles in the torchlight; most still wore their hair long and knotted on the right side of their heads. He could smell the strong scent of sweat and dog and leather from them, like animals.

Another figure walked up beside M'brust and took the document. 'Thank you, Tejan,' she said. A small slender woman wrapped in a white wool cloak, her green eyes colder than the winter night. 'Yes, I signed it. I did wonder why anyone would take the risk of leaving the city just to fetch a copy of the Annotations of the Avatar Sejermo. The man couldn't understand the plain sense of the Handbooks himself and he's been confusing others ever since.'

The priest's hand made a darting motion toward his mouth. The troopers piled onto him, one huge calloused hand clamping around his jaw and the other hand ripping the paper out of his lips. He gagged helplessly, then froze as a bayonet touched him behind one ear.

Suzette Whitehall took the damp crumpled paper and held it fastidiously between one gloved finger and thumb. 'In cipher,' she said. 'Of course.' She held it to the light. The words were gibberish, but they were spaced and sized much like real writing. 'A substitution code.'

The relentless green gaze settled on him. Her expression was as calm as a statue, but the Descotter officer beside her was grinning like a carnosauroid. He threw back his cloak and held up one hand, with a pair of armorer's pliers in it, and clacked them.

The priest moistened his lips. 'My person is inviolate,' he said. 'Under canon law, a priest-'

'The city is under martial law,' Suzette said.

'Church law takes precedence!'

'Not in the Gubernio Civil, Reverend Father.'

'I will curse you!'

The marble mask of Suzette's face gave a slight upward curve of the lips. Tejan M'brust laughed aloud.

'Well, Reverend Father,' he said, 'that might alarm ordinary soldiers. I really don't think my boys will much mind, seeing as they're all This Earth heretics.'

The hands holding him clamped brutally as he struggled. 'And,' M'brust went on, 'I'm just not very pious.'

'Raj Whitehall is the Sword of the Spirit,' Suzette said. 'He is a pious man. . which is why I handle things like this for him.' She turned her head to the soldiers. 'Sergeant, take him into the guardhouse there. Get the fireplace going, and bring a barrel of water.'

'Ya, mez,' the man said in Namerique: yes, lady.

M'brust clacked his pliers once more, turning his wrist in obscene parody of a dancer with castanets. 'They say priests have no balls,' he said. 'Shall we see?'

The priest began to scream as the soldiers pulled him into the stone-lined chamber, heels dragging over the threshold. The thick door clanked shut, muffling the shrieks.

Even when they grew very loud.

* * *

'Not much longer,' Gerrin Staenbridge said.

The thick fabric of the tower shook under their feet. A section of the stone facing fell into the moat with an earthquake rumble. The rubble core behind the three-meter blocks was brick and stone and dirt, but centuries of trickling water had eaten pockets out of it. The next round gouged deep, and the whole fabric of the wall began to flex. Dust rose in choking clouds, hiding the bluffs two kilometers away. The sun was rising behind them, throwing long shadows over the cleared land ahead. The ragged emplacements along the bluffs were already in sunlight, gilded by it, and it was out of that light that the steady booming rumble of the siege guns sounded.

'Time to go,' Raj agreed.

They walked to the rear of the tower and each stepped a foot into a loop of rope. The man at the beam unlocked his windlass.

'I'll play it out slow like,' he said. 'And watch yor step, sirs.'

Gerrin smiled, teeth white in the shadow of the stone. When they had descended a little, he spoke.

'I think he was telling us what he thought of officers who stay too long in a danger zone. Insolent bastard.'

The tower shook again, and small chunks of rock fell past them. Raj grinned back. 'True. On the other hand, what do you suggest as punishment?'

'Assign him to the rearguard on the tower,' Gerrin said, and they both laughed.

There were dummies propped up all along the section of wall the Brigade guns were battering, but there had to be some real men to move and fire up until the last minute, before they rappelled down on a rope and ran for it. All of them were volunteers, and men who volunteered for that sort of duty weren't the sort whose blood ran cold at an officer's frown.

They reached the bottom and mounted the waiting dogs, trotting in across the cleared zone. Raj stood in his stirrups to survey the whole area inside the threatened stretch of wall. The construction gangs had been busy; for an area a kilometer long and inward in a semicircle eight hundred meters deep, every house had been knocked down. The ruins had been mined for building stone and timbers; what was left was shapeless rubble, no part of it higher than a man's waist. Lining the inner edge of the rubble was a new wall, twice the height of a man. It was not very neat-they had incorporated bits and pieces of houses into it, taking them as they stood-and it was not thick enough to be proof against any sort of artillery. It was bulletproof, and pierced with loopholes along its entire length, on two floors. The ground just in front of it was thick with a barricade of timbers. Thousands of Brigadero swordblades had been hammered into them and then honed to razor sharpness.

The falling-anvil chorus of the bombardment continued behind them. The tower lurched, and a segment of its outer surface broke free and fell, a slow-motion avalanche. Very faintly, they could hear the sound of massed cheering from the enemy assault troops waiting in the lee of the bluffs.

Raj grinned like a shark at the sound. He hated battles. . in the abstract, and afterwards. During one he felt alive as at no other time; everything was razor-clear, all the ambiguities swept away. It was the pure pleasure of doing something you did very well, and if it said something unfavorable about him that he could only experience that purity in the middle of slaughter, so be it.

'Good morning, messers,' he said to the assembled officers, once they were inside the interior wall. The room