S. Stirling - Sunrise Lands

Kuttner rode close, and slapped him casually across the face. Sweat broke out on Ingolf's skin as he strove to move.

"You have much to learn," he said. "Much to experience, Ingolf apostate. The Ascended Masters have called your name. It echoes through the Valley of Paradise and whispers in the Eternal Flame. The Prophet is dying, and in His passing He will require servants. And there is a drum you desecrated that needs a new hide to cover it. Come with me."

"Lacho Calad! Drego Morn!" Ritva shouted in unison with her sister.

There were four men in the Cutter patrol that came over the rise, pushing hard to catch the pair they'd been chasing for hours. Two died as the sisters shot, the ar rows cracking into their breastplates and sinking halfway to the feathers; it was only thirty yards, and they'd carefully picked the ones with bows in hand and arrows on the string. The Cutters had all been in the battle yesterday, and the quivers of the other two were empty.

They charged without hesitation anyway, one leveling a lance and the other holding his shete up. Acrid dust shot up from the hooves of their horses, heavy with pebbles in this stretch where the flat plain met the northern foothills.

"Where did you two get that ambling crowbait?" Ritva shouted, as she legged her horse into a gallop towards them.

Which was unfair; Duelroch and Mary's Rochael had been standing idle all yesterday, and the Arabs had uncanny endurance to boot. On the other hand, fighting was the last thing on the Lord and Lady's earth you wanted to do fairly. The mares built speed with jackrabbit bounds despite the shallow slope they were climbing.

The two Dunedain and the pair of Cutters closed with the shocking abruptness a combined gallop produced, but the Cutters' horses were laboring. She could see snarls of effort on the men's faces, and the marks of exhaustion. Then only a pair of pale eyes over the shield rim as the enemy braced themselves for impact, ducking down behind their shields against arrows…

… and the twins pivoted left and right, splitting to either side like water from a wedge and throwing themselves away and down in the saddle as well. Ritva took her weight on her bent left leg and pressed her face into Duelroch's flying mane for an instant. The lance head went through the space she'd been in; then she was back in the saddle as her leg uncoiled like a spring, bringing the mare up on her haunches to shed her hurtling forward momentum.

Or most of it; still on her hind legs, Duelroch had to crow-hop twice to keep from tumbling, with dust shooting forward from under her hooves. Then she landed and whirled, superbly responsive to Ritva's shift of balance. The Ranger's hand went back over her shoulder and she had the arrow drawn to the ear before the horse had fully settled again. It stood stock-still to the signal of knees and legs as she aimed for half a second, with the kiss-ring on the string touching the chapped skin of her upper lip and the narrow pile shaped arrowhead resting on the arrow ledge over her gloved knuckle.

The Cutters were frantically trying to rein their own horses in and around, but they'd only begun when the snap snap of bowstrings on steel cut sharply through the whistle of the wind and the hammer of hooves.

Crack.

At less than twenty feet even the best armor wouldn't stop a bodkin point from a powerful bow. The leather plates over the Corwinite horse soldier's upper spine hardly even slowed it as it punched through and into bone. The man dropped limp as an empty sack, striking the ground and rolling twice, snapping the shaft of the arrow off.

Crack.

Mary's arrow missed the spine, smashing through just beside it and out the man's chest, transfixing the lungs but not the heart. He screamed and fell and dragged, one boot twisted in the stirrup; the horse stopped and looked back at him in puzzled alarm. Mary swung down out of the saddle and did the needful thing with her sword, putting the point behind one ear and giving a single sharp push; the man didn't resist, either too nearly unconscious or glad of the release from pain.

Then they freed the horses, stripping off saddle and bridle and slapping their rumps to set them off; they'd find water, and probably somebody would round them up eventually.

Mary grimaced as she came up, wiping and sheathing her sword.

"I hate doing that," she said, taking a drink from her canteen after they had both tasted earth and murmured the prayer.

"Me too, sis," Ritva said, thankful her kill had been clean.

Her hands fought to shake; suddenly she was conscious of sweat and itches and the heat of the noonday sun. Hot dry wind was cool on her sodden hair as she slung her helmet to her saddlebow.

"I think Rudi got cut off a little south of here," she said worriedly.

"Mer," Mary said, agreeing. "But he might get ahead of them and circle north. Let's get to the rendezvous and see who made it."

They worked their way northward, towards a butte shaped like a camel's head and hump. Ritva's head came up as she caught the ringing stamp of a shod hoof on rock, and then she relaxed again and lowered her bow as Father Ignatius stepped out from behind a curve of stone. Edain came next, and then young Frederick Thurston. He looked like a man who'd been hit behind the ear with a sock full of wet sand, but not quite hard enough to knock him out.

But then, Ritva thought compassionately, he's got it worse than us. He's seen treachery by his own kin.

"Rudi?" Mary said sharply; he and the younger Mackenzie left the battlefield together.

Edain's sunburned face flushed. "We had a big clump of them on our heels so we split up. I managed to lose mine and get here." His lips thinned. "We've been waiting since."

Father Ignatius nodded and glanced at the sun. "Anyone who is not here yet isn't going to arrive," he said.

Then he pointed north, to a tall hill. "And there is a dust trail heading in this direction. At least a score of men."

Ritva winced. That meant either the enemy, or Boise cavalry… who might well now be the enemy; she didn't have enough of a feel for the place or the politics to know how openly Martin Thurston could hunt the ones who knew he'd killed his father.

If it's the Cutters, they caught someone and made them talk, she thought.

"What do we do?"

Ignatius smiled; it was grim, but confident. "We need to find the others… Rudi most of all."

"Head back towards the Prophet's men?" Mary said. "And… well, if they've caught him, they'll either kill him or take him east. That's a big piece of flatland and then hills east of here. We can't search it all."

"Not on the ground," Ignatius said. "But I think there is an alternative, God willing."

Ignatius looked at the leveled crossbows and raised his empty hands in a sign of peace.

"Give me a moment to speak, my sons, and then do as you will," he said.

The great curved shape of the Curtis LeMay filled most of the emergency airfield; it was staked down to a dozen heavy steel posts sunk in the earth on either side. The gliders and their launching apparatus were scattered across a wide stretch of sparse pasture around about. Soldiers and ground crew stood about in clumps, their faces grim; many showed the marks of weeping. The air was warm and very still, and smelled of latrines and metal and crude cookery, and under that a chemi cal taint from the steel gas-generating boxes on a half dozen great six wheeled wagons.

"The couriers said you were wanted in connection with the president's death," Hanks replied flatly.

The men and women behind him growled slightly, gripping their weapons and staring narrow eyed.

"We saved the president once," Ignatius pointed out. "You know that, and that it makes no sense for us to save him once to kill him a few weeks later. But don't take my word for it."