S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Though I wouldn’t be one to talk about wild accidents, Ingolf thought.

He reached over his shoulder to make sure the thong holding his shete in its sheath down his back was still in place and that his arrows weren’t going to rattle in their padded quiver. His strung recurve was thrust through a set of carrying loops on the outside of the quiver, a Mackenzie trick the Dúnedain had modified for their shorter, handier weapons. It was very useful after a little practice, letting you switch weapons quickly without dropping your bow. Checking stuff was so automatic he could do it with about a tenth of his attention and it was obscurely soothing somehow, like stroking a rabbit’s foot.

He and the Lorings came across the ocean, but I started out in Wisconsin and ended up here after crossing the entire continent nearly four God-damned times, no less-Iowa to Nantucket, Nantucket to the Pacific, all the way to Nantucket again and back. With time out to be a prisoner in Corwin, most of which I still don’t remember and the rest I wish I didn’t. Christ, the things I do. .

After an instant the one-time Englishman made a small clicking sound with his tongue, lost in the usual humming and buzz of summer woodland-the strip along the river had been a park before the Change, and largely left alone since. The crew went up past Hordle in a smooth silent stream, spreading out just inland of the water. Ingolf and four others gripped the rope loops along the side and helped haul the boat out of the water and carry it into the shelter of a willow tree’s drooping branches. That would keep the too-regular shape invisible from the wall towers. There were observation balloons up in a circle around Boise, but the enemy didn’t have any flying after a couple of hair-raising episodes early in the siege. Montivallan gliders had dragged barbed forks of burning tow into their gasbags at the end of long ropes, and a couple of the aircraft had even survived it.

I’m not surprised that Alyssa Larsson volunteered to go in there. She’s a glider pilot, being crazy is a job qualification.

The Rangers were all nearly invisible in the moonlit dark, everything dull-toned and non-reflective, their faces covered by the hoods of the war-cloaks, which included masks with a slit for the eyes. Ingolf was relying on his helmet-cover and the brown beard, which made his face less likely to glimmer in the dark. The brown acid-treated steel of his mail shirt was good enough camouflage too.

I haven’t had time to get full Dúnedain kit. . or maybe I’m afraid of feeling silly, and the First Readstown is here and I do lead them now and then, and they certainly think it’s silly-looking, except for the ones like my nephew Mark who think it’s unspeakably cool. Granted it all works well, but. .

Hordle clicked again, and they all ghosted up the slope and into the brush and woods, fanning out in a semicircle around the place they’d landed. The big man came past all of them, checking. Ingolf nodded with sober respect as he eeled past, and caught a glimmer of a grin in return. Hordle’s personal weapon was over his back too-what they called a greatsword around here, with a massive forty-inch blade broad as a palm and a hilt as long as a man’s forearm. At nearly seven pounds he’d have thought it too heavy to use effectively even two-handed, if he hadn’t seen the Dúnedain leader walk down a row of oak pells, leaving a row of stumps behind him.

The big man was married to Eilir Mackenzie, Rudi’s elder half sister and co-founder of the Dúnedain; Ingolf suspected that he and his compatriot Alleyne Loring were responsible for a fair part of the Rangers’ military side. Not that they hadn’t had able pupils, and by all accounts the recently deceased Astrid Larsson-Loring had been a natural anyway. Ingolf had seldom met troops better at noise discipline on a night movement, even his own Vogeler’s Villains in the old days. After a moment the only solid proof he had that he wasn’t alone in the woods feeling the damp gradually soak up through the padding under his mail shirt was the unmistakable mixed military odors; oiled metal gone a bit rancid and amalgamated human and horse sweat and wood smoke soaked into wool and leather. Even those were faint.

The undergrowth wasn’t too thick; obviously the riverbanks were used as turn-out pasture in peacetime. A city needed a lot of working stock, horses and mules and oxen to do everything from pulling streetcars to rich men’s carriages to hauling fodder in and manure out. According to the intel reports the enemy had cancelled night patrols here because they’d been losing too many deserters and needed their loyal troops to watch the others. It didn’t really matter to them if the Montivallans landed men here, since they could be annihilated at dawn once the artillery on the walls could see their targets.

Or so they think.

The reports seemed to be accurate; at least they didn’t run into anyone as they pushed out to establish a perimeter. It was dense-dark, and he moved slowly, feeling his way with hands and the toes of his boots. The rest of the squad was an occasional rustle, not even a broken twig marking their passage.

Ingolf went down on his belly again not far from where Mary probably was-she was extremely good at being inconspicuous-and waited. Three more rafts grounded behind them, and more of the Rangers filtered through the brush. Alleyne Loring came up beside Hordle, and they conversed for an instant in Sign, holding their hands close to each other’s faces in the darkness. Alleyne was about Ingolf’s height, though slimmer; next to Hordle he looked like a teenager.

Of course, being with the Dúnedain means you have to learn two God-damned new languages, one with your fingers.

Sign was useful, he had to admit-though they’d made it compulsory originally because Eilir Mackenzie had been deaf from birth and just wanted it that way, and Astrid loved secret-rules-and-passwords stuff. The Rangers were core-practical enough now despite the elaborate stylishness, but he suspected that back in the very beginning there had been a substantial element of teenaged let’s-pretend-in-our-tree-house to it all. A lot of them actually did live in tree houses, though the Ranger term was flet .

After that they all settled down and waited. Ingolf chewed on a couple of slices of dried apple to keep his blood sugar up, and did silent exercises to keep himself supple, setting muscle against muscle without moving. The inevitable bugs of summer woods near a river he just ignored; that went with the job, and he’d been doing it since he was seven and his father first took him out after deer.

An hour later he began to worry.

He could just see the North Star and the Dipper from here, between the leaves of two cottonwoods, and he lined them up and did the trick. Draw a line through from the North Star to the two top stars of the Dipper, treat that as the hand of a clock, add an hour for every thirty days after March 7, double the figure and subtract it from twenty-four. That gave you the time, and he made it oh three hundred hours give or take. Which was much later than the signal was supposed to come.

Something had gone wrong.

He was worried, but not very surprised. This was a big complex plan, and in his experience those never went off perfectly. You were ahead if they worked at all. The only reassuring thing about it was that if nothing happened, they could just go back the way they came and let the regular infantry and the engineers and artillerists get on with the siege while they drank a toast to the memories of Cole Salander and Alyssa Larsson.

As long as we get back before dawn, unless we want a catapult bolt up the ass on the way out. And dawn comes early this time of year.