Django Wexler - The Thousand Names

“I wouldn’t have let them,” Marcus said.

“Then they’d just kill you, too.”

“Is that why you told me I should let you handle it?”

He felt her nod. “You have to look at it logically,” she said, only the faintest quiver in her voice. “If I’m going to end up raped and dead anyway , there’s no sense in you getting killed as well if it won’t change anything.”

“Easy for you to say.” He thought about that for a moment, then said, “Well. Not easy. But if I had just sat by while something like that happened, I don’t think I could have lived with myself afterward.”

“At least you would have had the chance to try.”

Another pause. Marcus cleared his throat.

“It’s a good thing it didn’t come to that, then.”

“It’s a good thing,” Jen agreed.

There was a long silence. With Jen soft and warm beside him, Marcus’ eyes finally closed, and sleep beckoned.

“I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice was so quiet it might have been an incipient dream. “I can’t. If it really comes down to it. .”

Marcus intended to ask her what she meant, but he was asleep before he got the chance.

• • •

The sun seemed to have been nailed to the sky. It refused to move, in spite of Marcus’ repeated glances and entreaties, and hung a few degrees short of its zenith like the flame in some enormous oven.

If he’d had a watch, he’d have checked it, for the hundredth time. The only watch he knew of in all of Khandar sat in Janus’ breast pocket, and Marcus was unwilling to reveal his anxiety by asking the colonel the time.

Trying to conceal that sort of thing from the colonel was a lost cause, however. Janus glanced at him and said, encouragingly, “It’s not noon yet, Captain. A few minutes more.”

“Yessir,” Marcus said. “Besides, I doubt the Desoltai will be completely punctual.”

“On the contrary. I expect them to be where we want them at noon on the dot. In fact-” Janus shaded his eyes with one hand. “Yes. I believe that’s the vanguard.”

Marcus looked, and at first saw nothing. Gradually, though, a patch of the unmitigated brown-on-brown landscape resolved itself into brown-robed riders, on brown or sandy-colored horses, passing across brown rock and rills of windblown sand. With the sun high overhead, there weren’t even shadows to give them away. No wonder we never spot the bastards in time.

He turned to the two runners, chosen from the hardiest of the young recruits. They saluted and hurried off at his gesture, having memorized in advance the message they were to repeat to Val and Mor if all went according to plan. Marcus satisfied himself that they were scampering down the rear of the hill, then turned back to Janus.

He and the colonel occupied a fissure in a massive boulder, around which sand and smaller rocks had built up until it was nearly covered. The shelf was deep enough for a half dozen men and provided a lip of rock that would screen anyone waiting there from casual observation. It was an excellent vantage point.

“He’s getting sloppy,” Janus murmured.

“Who is?”

“Our friend the Steel Ghost. Look-they’re in a single column. No outriders, no scouts.”

Marcus frowned. That didn’t sound like the Desoltai. “Do you think they’re onto us? This could be a trap.”

“Unlikely,” Janus said. “I suspect they’ve simply become a little overreliant on their secret advantage. Remember, the Ghost already knows where the raschem army is headed.”

They’d been up half the night making sure of that. At Janus’ direction, pickets had marked down the locations and patterns of the lights flashing in the darkness around the camp. A detachment of picked men had surrounded one of them, neat and quiet, and dispatched the three-man Desoltai patrol without anyone being the wiser. The messages that followed had been composed by the colonel, an apparently meaningless sequence of flashes and pauses that Janus assured Marcus the Ghost would understand. In the meantime, Give-Em-Hell’s cavalry had been noisily unleashed, driving back the other Desoltai observers and guaranteeing there would be no contradictory testimony.

It had all been carried out very smoothly, Marcus had to admit, especially for a regiment that had been on the brink of mutiny the day before. But that was only natural. Every soldier’s nightmare was being stuck fighting a foe he couldn’t hit back. Offered the chance to strike a blow, the Colonials had jumped at it, and morale had surged. Even the Fourth Battalion troops had shown some spirit.

“They’re coming this way,” Janus said. “Now it’s down to discipline.”

Marcus gave a grim nod. He bent his thoughts toward Val and Mor, and every man in their commands, as though he could calm them by mental effort alone. Hold fire. . hold fire. . wait for it. .

There were a lot of Desoltai. Janus had been right about that, as about so much else. They rode five or six abreast, a rough column snaking along the twisting course between two sandy rills. It went on for what looked like miles. Marcus did a rough mental estimate and came up with two to three thousand horsemen. That has to be close to everything they have. He wondered if Janus was right and the Steel Ghost was down there in person. There was no gleam of a metal mask amidst the riders, but those brown robes could hide anything.

“Almost there,” Janus said, as calm as if he were watching a tennis match. “Captain Vahkerson has kept his nerve, in any case.”

“He always does,” Marcus said. The Preacher had a hold over his cannoneers that bordered on the fanatic.

His eyes were glued to the tall blue-and-gray rock that they’d fixed as the starting post, standing out from the dusty landscape like a menhir. It was a few hundred yards from the little hill. The leading horsemen were approaching it, so close that they could have reached out and touched it, when one of them reined up. Behind them, the column shuffled to a halt, spreading out across the flat ground and up the sides of the rills.

“Not quite far enough,” Janus said. “We’ll have to signal from here.”

“Now?” Marcus queried.

“Now.”

Marcus grabbed the musket that leaned against the lip of rock, aimed it in the general direction of the Desoltai, and pulled the trigger. The familiar mule kick of the gun shocked his shoulder into numbness, and the crack of the shot carried out across the desert and echoed off the walls of the valley.

The chance of the ball hitting anything at this distance was nil, but the flash and the sound would be obvious for a long way. Val and Mor would be watching. The single shot from the hill was the signal to open the attack.

For a lingering moment, nothing happened. The Desoltai milled, shouting and pointing. Marcus had a brief fantasy that something had gone horribly wrong, that he and Janus were alone out here with two thousand desert warriors and the Steel Ghost.

Then the flashing tips of bayonets emerged from behind the rills on either side of the long column. Neat rows of dusty blue uniforms double-timed over the crests, far enough to get all three ranks into view, then halted and leveled weapons with practically parade-ground timing. Some of the Desoltai caught sight of them, but they had barely enough time to turn their horses around before sergeants up and down the line yelled the order to fire.

The massed chorus of musketry, at this distance, was a rolling crash like nearby thunder. Neat puffs of off-white smoke rose from every lock and barrel. They were too far away to hear the horrible zip of balls and the smack of impact in man and horseflesh, but Marcus had heard it often enough that his mind filled it in. Among the Desoltai, all was suddenly pandemonium. Men fell, horses stumbled, lost their footing, rolled over their riders or collapsed in a broken-legged heap. Every one of the riders was suddenly fighting for control of his mount, as even animals trained for battle panicked at the unexpected attack.