S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Almost at once another sound came from the wall, a metallic chorus of catapult springs that had started their lives in the suspensions of heavy trucks releasing and sending paired levers slamming into their stops. Little threadlike blurs went streaking towards the trebuchet. The crew interrupted their celebrations to throw themselves flat as the four-foot darts from the springalds and scorpions came in; one struck the frame of the stone-thrower with a long tannnnnggg and flipped upward in pieces.

Nobody seemed to be hurt this time, but the artillery duel was producing a steady trickle of casualties. . presumably inside the walls too. He was only slightly less unhappy about that. He wanted those men on his side, or at least going back to their farms and workshops and helping to repair the damage. Every one killed or crippled on either side was a loss to Montival as well as to themselves and their kin.

“Hurrah!” Rudi said sourly. “We could do that for fifty years and not knock down those walls. Not to mention I’m bombarding one of my own bloody cities, technically speaking so-to-speak.”

“You could think of it as a rebellious city,” Mathilda said helpfully.

“No, for then I’d have to wonder what I’d done to make folk supposedly my subjects willing to fight me,” he said wryly. “Artos the First I may be-the Powers insist, it seems-but Artos the Tyrant I will not.”

“Pass the cider, Tyrant,” Fred said with a crooked grin; evidently he’d been watching the bombardment too. He went on:

“Both the pontoon bridges are finished, and we’ve got the east bank thoroughly invested. And the siege towers are coming along, for all the good it’ll do us. We could lose twenty thousand men trying to storm the walls. . and I’m not sure it would even work , at that. The Cutters have things sewn up tight in there, particularly the gates. What’s left of the US Army troops aren’t very enthusiastic, but. .”

Rudi grunted thoughtfully and nodded; the but was that in an all-out assault the defenders were almost certainly going to die if the attackers succeeded in taking the wall, pushed off the inner edge if nothing else. Which was a powerful motivator for well-trained troops who knew the way things worked.

“Surrender at the last moment is always. . problematic,” Rudi agreed.

Problematic, he thought, was a tactful way to put it. When warriors’ blood is up and they’re primed to kill, they tend to keep on doing it while anything alive is left before them. Turning your back is suicide, and those who’ve seen the elephant know it. So it’s kill or be killed.

They had excellent general intelligence about the state of things in the city. There was a trickle of deserters, men who let themselves down on ropes in the night, or just shed their armor and jumped into the river and swam for it. He’d interrogated some of them himself. . and caught one or two with the CUT’s taint on them. Forewarned, it was easy enough to spot.

“Then we’ll have to chance the scheme we came up with,” Rudi said. “We have the asset. . and the asset is people, who I’d rather not sacrifice unless I must. But without me. . and the Sword. . it will not work.”

Everyone looked unhappy at that; he was unhappy, though it made no difference. Mathilda looked positively mutinous. He raised his hands.

“No, my love and my Queen. There’s nobody I’d rather have by my side for a venture like this. . but it is a risk, and it would be a hard day for Órlaith if the dice came up snake eyes for both of us. Nor can we risk a long regency with her so young; and the kingdom so young itself. Though Father Ignatius would do a fine job as Regent, to be sure.”

“I would rather juggle rabid skunks,” the cleric said dryly, reaching for the next in the stack of State papers. “With respect. Your Majesty.”

“That’s one reason you would do it well, my friend, but I hope to spare you the nipping and the stench. So we’ll go with Fred’s plan.”

“Hey, don’t pin it on me! I just told you about the. . secret.”

Rudi nodded. “It needs the Sword, and only I can wield it.”

Ignatius said nothing more; he’d argued against Rudi’s scheme, then taken the High King’s decision as final and switched stride without stumbling to bend all his efforts to make it work. Fred Thurston grinned, and poured himself a glass from the jug of cider that hung in a rope sling, sweating through the coarse pottery-it was fermented just enough to make it safe to drink without boiling or chlorine.

“It’s almost worth missing the birth to have Virginia safe away from this and not able to argue with me,” he said. “This way I get to go along without sweating blood every minute.”

“Todenangst wasn’t all that safe,” Mathilda said soberly, then laid a hand on his arm when he winced. “Sorry, Fred. I know it must have been hard, hearing that Virginia was there and in danger, her and the baby, after you thought she was so well guarded.”

He snorted. “Rudi and I had a cussing contest. He only won because the Sword lets him speak more languages. I learned how to say motherfucking son of a BITCH in eight or nine. It sounds really odd in Elvish.” Then he looked towards the city. “I hope to hell this comes off for a whole raft of reasons.”

“This Cole Salander is a good man, and has his wits about him,” Rudi observed. “And a most powerful degree of motivation.”

“Yeah, I thought so too. I’m going to bump him up a few grades. Provided we all live through this. And your cousin Alyssa is even sharper, I’d say. Between them they may be able to pull it off.”

Rudi raised his glass; the cider cut the dust very satisfactorily, just sweetly acrid enough.

“I’ll drink to that,” he said. Then, overriding someone’s throat-clearing: “And yes, there’s enough for more. That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?”

Mathilda jerked in startlement; Ignatius kept writing; and Fred’s head whipped around. Rudi’s hand had already been going to the pitcher.

“No fair,” two soprano voices said in a disturbing almost-chorus. “You’ve got the Sword.”

The etiquette of the High Kingdom was quite flexible in the field-Rudi and Mathilda had made sure of that, having spent enough time in the Protectorate in their youth to see how you could get sewn up in ritual like a cross between plate armor and a cotte-hardie. Certain people had access without prior notice or challenge from the guards, first and foremost his companions on the Quest.

Some of those people could move very quietly, and liked to show off about it even now.

His half sisters Mary and Ritva were among both categories. Signe Havel’s daughters weren’t Bearkillers except by birth; in their teens they’d decided to live with their Aunt Astrid and uncle-by-marriage Alleyne Loring in Mithrilwood, what had once been Silver Falls State Park. That. .

Eccentric lady, Rudi thought charitably as he waved them to the table.

. . eccentric lady Astrid and Rudi’s elder half sister Eilir Mackenzie had founded the Dúnedain Rangers a few years after the Change, inspired by a series of books that Astrid had insisted on calling The Histories and which she’d been obsessed with even before the Change. She was dead now, in the spectacularly successful rescue of Fred’s mother and sisters and sister-in-law from Boise last year. The folk she’d founded were even more devoted to her martyred memory than they’d been to her charismatic person.

The Dúnedain specialized in what the ancient world had called special operations, well taught by experts in the early years. In peacetime they hunted bandits and man-killing beasts and escorted caravans and led expeditions to the dead cities. In time of war they were even more valuable, the more so as the High Kingdom fitted so neatly into their founding myths.