S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

The other officer rubbed at his eyes; Rudi’s experience of war was that you went through most of it with your brain fogged from inadequate or interrupted sleep, or both. Particularly at those moments you most needed to be keenly alert.

“Yeah, we have been seeing some of that, but I hoped it was the usual feinting, marching men back and forth in view to keep us guessing,” the man said. “What’s going on over east?”

“Some incendiaries from their trebuchets aimed at the fort, and they’re pushing zigzag saps forward to get catapults closer to the wall. Straight-out Vauban. And they’re building more wheeled siege towers. I didn’t have time to observe much. You know how it is right now-”

“Screwed,” Betjeman said. “All right, it’s irregular, but I’m glad to see the troops. It doesn’t feel right here. They’re going to try something, I can smell it, but we’ve got no air reconnaissance at all.”

I hope we don’t have to kill this one, Rudi thought.

It was illogical, but somehow you minded more if a man was good at his trade. War was a filthy business, but the qualities someone needed to do it really well were fine ones. The man seemed to be brave, stubborn, and to have an animal nose for trouble.

This Betjeman could be a pillar of the realm, him and his children and children’s children.

He and Fred made a smart right face and marched to the side of the road, as if in response to some order. Other commands were being barked out; file after eight-man file of men began trotting forward, through the postern and up the spiral stairs towards the ramparts. Rudi closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated. He could feel the men, in a way-they were part of Montival, part of the great living organism that stretched from the single-celled things that dwelt in the deep crevasses of Earth and fed on its heat to the golden eagles balancing the wind high above. Himself and Mathilda not the heads of it exactly. . not so much the rulers as a. . focus, or an embodiment.

But of the High Seeker, nothing. Perhaps a coldness, an absence, but even that was weirdly nonspecific. As if the man’s presence-and the things that somehow used him as a portal into the world of matter they hated-was simply not inscribed in the story of existence as everything else was.

For this war is but a single chapter in the story of how the universe is to unfold. Two rival versions of that, each seeking to overwrite the other, throughout all the cycles of the world, to make the other as if it had never been. . never even been imagined to be.

He and Fred were most of the way to the postern when the gate officer’s voice rose:

“Wait a minute, I know that man! He was in the Third Brigade, they all got taken at the Horse Heaven Hills, their Eagle and all! You, soldier- guard, guard turn out the -”

There was the sound of a blow and a grunt, but even for an expert it was very difficult to quickly disable a man in armor with your hands if you hadn’t taken him by surprise. They sprinted through the door, the moving column crowding over to make room. The tubae snarled and blatted again: at the double-quick and the entire snake of troops stepped up to two strides a second, a steady jog trot, without missing a beat.

The door through the thickness of the wall opened into a wide space, the walls bare concrete with square beams inset and the ceiling twelve feet up. The walls held racks for spears where they weren’t staircases, the throwing pilae that Boise’s infantry used, and between them the big curved oval shields. Wellman was shaking his hand and cursing; Betjeman had his own blade out and was backing away with a group of half a dozen around him. Fred’s soldiers continued their controlled rush up into the interior of the fortress, moving like a single multi-legged iron centipede to seize the key points-the gate hydraulics, the napalm system, the heliograph station on the tallest tower, and the interior doors that could cut the fort off from the walls on either side.

Formal discipline was a wonderful thing; they were all doing the job they’d been detailed to do, and leaving anything else to the people who were presumably tasked with it. It was an attitude that made them like a single weapon moving to its commander’s will on a battlefield. Sometimes there were drawbacks.

“Sergeant Dawkins, fall out three files!” Fred barked. “Envelop!”

The noncom pivoted as if the command had played directly on his nervous system. Twenty-four men followed him, their shields snapping up until they were held just below the eyes. The files slid past each other like sheets of oiled steel in a machine, one facing the little knot of men directly, the two on the flanks angling forward slightly to flank them.

“Pilae-ready!”

Two dozen heavy man-high ironshod javelins cocked back on brawny arms, moving like the bristling feathers on the crest of a bird. They weren’t long distance weapons, but they didn’t have to be here. It was a big room, but only a room. Rudi cast a glance backward. The eyes visible over the shield-rims differed-shades of blue, mostly, or hazel or black-but they were each as impersonal as a stamping-mill or the long narrow pyramid-points of the spears themselves, waiting for the word of command. It was as frightening as any physical threat he’d ever seen, in a short but eventful life.

Betjeman glared defiance. Rudi drew the Sword. Cool fire flooded him, as it always did when he wielded the gift of the Powers in battle; as if he were a God himself, some thing that commanded sky and sea and the flicker of the lightning and strode laughing through the storm.

“Leave this to me,” he said, stepping forward, drawing his dirk with his right hand, the one he used for his shield at other times.

The Boisean officer glared at him. Then something changed in his face. First dawning recognition, a silent movement of the lips in a holy shit . Then the pupils of his eyes flared wide, until the greenish iris shrank to a thread hardly dividing black and white. The man vanished, leaving an alien and incarnate Purpose. He gave a guttural roar, a shocking sound, and charged.

Rudi pivoted as he did. The Sword licked out, and the point touched the side of the man’s leg just above the knee. The wound was trifling, and so cleanly cut that it took an instant before the blood welled. The man went down as if poleaxed; then he curled around himself and buried his face in his hands, weeping. After a moment he raised his face.

“I don’t. . I don’t remember. . where am I?” His eyes darted around, his own now but bewildered. “This is West Gate Main. . what day is it?”

“He’s been keeping bad company, whether he knew it or not,” Rudi said grimly to Fred.

Then to the subordinates still clustered with their weapons up: “Throw down! Throw down, and I promise you your lives. Tend to this man, he’s had a bit of a shock.”

Steel clattered on the concrete pavement, and the three files moved forward. There was no unnecessary roughness in the way they disarmed the men and put them under guard; they were countrymen and essentially in the same army, with accidents of location mostly determining who was on what side. He saw relief on their faces, the expression of men who’d been prepared to die for honor’s sake but realized they didn’t need to.

One of Betjeman’s men went down to a knee beside him, taking him gently by the shoulder: “Sir? Sir, do you recognize me?”

“Of course I bloody-what’s going on ?”

Edain and the High King’s Archers poured into the room as the last of the Boiseans climbed upward; he was sweating and swearing under his breath at being separated from his charge. Most of the Dúnedain followed.