Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

Next cell. “Ikas Babut se Vroly, Roereirein Lyhyt?” The third in the cell was a Miesashch tetrapod with the jitters, his split hooves tick-tacking aggressively against the floorplanks. “I’ll unlock the collars on all of you. You, despois,” he told the Miesashch, “can stay here or leave by the street door whichever you prefer. If you want you can give me your name and homeworld and the names of kin I should notify. I can’t take more than those on my list, the skip just won’t hold that many.”

Next cell. “Weggorss Jaje, Otivarty Jaje, Krathyky Jaje, Imagy Jaje? Good. The Bialy Vitr think highly of the Bond Jaje, they have offered one thousand gelders for the return of each lobe of the Bond, there are four Jajes in my camp already, eight thousand in my hands when I set you all down on Helvetia’s pavements. Be assured I shall take very good care of you.”

There was a spate of whispering among the Jajes, they were using their highest register; the fugitive sounds tickled his ears and gave him the beginnings of a headache. The boldest of the four moved a step toward him, a velvety black female invisible in the twilight inside the cell. “This one is Otivarty Jaje. What is the calling of the Presence who speaks us?”

“Swardheld Quale, ship Slancy Orza out of Telffer.”

More whispering. Otivarty stepped away from her Bond again. “The calling is known, the word is acceptable, we will come.”

Quale started for the storeroom and the ladder, his seven hustling along behind him, anxious to be out of there. Equally anxious, the extra three hurried the shorter distance to the street exit; the Froska had Quale’s cutter, she sliced through the lock tongue and began lifting the bar.

Pels was in the storeroom already and on his way up the ladder. Quale shooed his herd of ex-slaves through the door and was about to follow when he heard a rumbling mutter, then an exclamation of shock and fear from the Froska as the door was wrenched from her hand and sent crashing against the wall.

Blankfaced, muttering Hordar came stomping in, hands like claws reaching for the outsiders, mouths open, lips fluted to produce a whistling growl, eyes wide with no one home behind the shine. The extras took one look at them and ran the other way. Quale waved them past him, played his stunner across the front rank of the mob. Five Hordar fell. The Hordar behind them marched over them, stomping heedlessly on them, crushing them.

“Shit,” he said. “Oh shit.” He slammed the door, reached for a bar that wasn’t there. The door quivered as the Surge crashed against it. He went up the ladder faster than he’d come down it, slammed the trap and yelled at the ex-slaves to help him shove bales on it.

They got the first bale in place as the trap shuddered and started to rise, rolled another over beside it, then a third. The bales quivered as the Hordar below pounded and shoved at the trap, but they had to stand on the ladder to reach it and couldn’t get enough leverage to shift the weight piled on it. The barrier held.

Quale scowled at the faces turned hopefully toward him. These Vrolys were both slender, the four Jajes added together wouldn’t make one of him. Lyhyt was vaguely vegetative like Kinok, though not Sikkul Paem; he was broad and tall, but maybe not as massive as he looked. The Froska female wouldn’t take much space and would suffer in silence for pride’s sake, but the Miesashch could be a problem if he panicked. The third from Touw’s cell was a fragile nocturnal whose species Quale didn’t recognize, but she at least looked fairly calm. “Listen,” he said, “I’ll take a chance I can lift off with all of you. It’s a wild gamble, you might be safer finding a place to hide up here where you can ride that mess out…” He broke off, looked up as he heard the tinny clatter of a yizzy.

A fireball came straight at him. He dived away, rolled over, dived again, rolled behind a stack of crates.

The second fireball missed him by the width of a hope, splashed on the roof and started it smoldering. The others had scattered almost as quickly, hunting cover, but the inklin didn’t waste more fire on them. The yizzy swept past, went soaring up to the mooring tower; the rider began working on the airships. More yizzies converged on the towers. The airships were as fire safe as chemistry could make them, but with a dozen firethrowers heating them up, even the heavily sized yosscloth was beginning to smoke. Before long the heat would kindle the hydrogen in the ballonets and the conflagration that followed would melt more than the tower.

While Pels was helping the ten pack themselves into the skip, Quale risked another look over the parapet.

The street was packed with Hordar moving and breathing as if they were limbs of a single beast. The whole city was coming to press against the Fekkri, the Hordar flowing like a river of ants over the few Tassalgan guards stupid enough to try stopping them. The Surge tore them apart, tore off arms, legs, heads, anything one of the many beasthands could get a grip on. He saw a pair of guards trapped in a doorway trying to shoot themselves clear; pellet guns on automatic, they emptied clips one after another at the mob, the pellets scything across the front ranks, knocking down dozens of men and women. The Surge ignored them, came on without noticing the dead and injured, cast them aside like sloughed skin cells. The guards panicked, tried breaking into the House behind them. They couldn’t get away. The Surge threw off a tendril which flowed after them and pulled them back to the street; it hurled them against a wall, knocked them again and again into the stone, rocked them back and forth under casual undirected blows, it kicked them off their feet and stomped them into stewmeat. The chatter of the guns, the yells of the guards, their final screams were lost in the SOUND coming from the Surge, a hooming howl/growl without words, only a rage so tangible that the hair stood up on Quale’s arms and rose along his spine. He backed away and ran for the skip.

Pels had got the weight of the passengers distributed as well as he could, but the machine was still dangerously overloaded. Quale eased into the pilot’s seat and punched on the liftfield, cycling it gradually higher as the drives warmed and tried to take hold. They whined and shuddered; after a tense moment when he was sure they weren’t going to bite, the skip lumbered clumsily into the air. He held her an arm’s length off the roof while he tested her handling. She was sluggish and crank, the slightest misjudgment on his part might flip her or send her into a slip and that would be that for all of them. He eased her higher, a hand span at a time, until she was finally high enough to clear the parapet.

Two yizzies backed away from the siege on the airships and came swooping at them. Quale turned the skip through a wide gentle arc, gradually accelerating, cursing under his breath at the impossibility of losing the inklins fast enough. Pels slid over Touw se Vroly’s lap so he could snap loose Quale’s stunner, which had a longer reach to it than his own. One of the inklins squirted fire at them, but a gust of wind carried it wide. Back in his cubby, Pels bared his tearing teeth, hissed with satisfaction and put that inklin out; he got the second inklin before she could release more fire. The two collapsed in their saddles; strapped in so they didn’t fall, they went drifting off, ignored by guards on the ground and their fellows in the air.

Quale relaxed and nursed the laboring skip through the city, picking a circuitous route that avoided the taller buildings, the speakers’ minarets, mooring towers, and the like. Below them the Surge went on, spreading from precinct to precinct, leaving death and destruction behind it as it moved.

Quale brought the skip down slowly, carefully, landing her in a grassy swale between two groves, one a collection of nut-bearers, the other ancient hardwoods. There was a small, stream wandering vaguely westward across the middle of the swale and a tumbledown shelter tucked away under a lightning-split cettem tree still alive and heavy with green nuts. He left Pels and four of the ex-slaves there to wait for his return and took the others to Base.