Dies The Fire

Chapter Thirty

"A re you sure you're up to this?" Judy asked, turning and needlessly arranging some instruments in one of the clinic's cupboards.

"No," Juniper said frankly to her tense back. "But I think I've got a better chance of bringing it off than anyone else. What's your medical advice?"

Her friend swallowed. "Well, you're a day or two short of eight months," she said. "But it's been as smooth a pregnancy as I've seen, right out of a textbook. As long as you don't try leaping about or riding a horse-"

"Come on, Judy, we've known each other since we were teenagers."

"That's why I specified," she said dourly. "It's a wonder you're not east over the mountains with Sam and the others, waving your sword and waddling into battle like a pregnant duck."

"Is maith an sc?? s? harad!" Juniper replied ruefully. "A friend's eye is a good mirror!"

"Then delegate," Judy said.

"I can't. There are others to fight for us, but this I honestly think I'm best for-and I don't need to be all that mobile, just able to talk."

Judy shook her head and bit her lip; Juniper gave her an impulsive hug and left the little clinic. The corridor of the Hall's second story was dark, lit only by the windows at either end that gave out on a cloudy, foggy morning; the staircase was in the center of the hallway, and it was steep.

And I am waddling, she thought. You two should not make me come up and get you.

She sighed and waddled up the steps; it didn't occur to her to call instead until she was nearly at the top-you lost the habit, when your daughter was deaf.

"You two were supposed to be packed by now and- what are you doing?"

She choked the words off. Eilir and Astrid were kneeling on the floor facing each other, across three taper candles with a chalice and two cups, and a pinch of incense burning in that, and ritual tools scattered about. Eilir's Book of Shadows was open on a folding rest nearby, and they had the backs of their right wrists pressed together as they chanted.

You didn't interrupt a ritual.

": all my wisdom and all my secrets I share with you for as long as this life endures. Until we meet in Tir na m Ban," they finished. "So mote it be!"

Juniper frowned as they put down their wrists, and a bright bead of blood showed on each-the loft office-bedroom got a lot more light, which was one reason she'd snaffled it off for her own.

"Now, what on earth are you two doing?"

"Swearing blood-br-well, blood-sisterhood!" Astrid said brightly. "Like, we're going to be friends and comrades forever! And be Paladins who fight evil and right wrongs and, oh, all that sort of stuff."

Eilir wiped off the bead of blood with a piece of cotton swab and handed Astrid another.

Like she said, Mom, she signed. You know, like Roland and Oliver. Anamchara.

"Or Gimli and Legolas," Astrid said helpfully. "Only we're both: well, Eilir's not a dwarf."

Tolkein and the others have a great deal to answer for, Juniper thought. Do they think those white horses are magical totems, somehow? As I recall, at their age my best friend and I were mostly concerned with music and TV shows and talking about boys. Of course, things have Changed:

Silently, she held out her hand and looked a question. She didn't order. Eilir's Book was her own; she generally didn't mind her mother reading it, but Juniper never did so without permission.

Oh, my, she thought, looking, through the ritual that her daughter had come up with.

The girl had a natural gift for it, probably someday she'd be a great High Priestess and leave a lasting mark on the coven's own Book of Shadows, but:

Oh, my. No sense of proportion at all. Well, neither did I at that age – but I wasn 't raised in the Craft, with magic sung over my cradle.

She spoke, signing at the same time: "And on the strength of a two-week acquaintance, you're promising to: let's see. Defend each other to the death and always answer the other's call. Be guardians of the weak and helpless. Be Goddess-mothers to each other's kids; that's all right: Goddess gentle and strong, you've each given the other a veto on choice of boyfriends and spouses!"

Well, we couldn't be Paladins together if the other fell for someone yucky, could we?

"That's something you have to get right," Astrid said forcefully.

Juniper stifled a small moan. "M thagann ciall roimh aois," she said, and didn't translate: Sense does not come before age.

Eilir recognized it anyway, and gave her a stare and a sniff.

Juniper held on to silence with both hands: Oh, won't that turn adolescence into a total paradise! Did your best friend ever think a boyfriend was worthy of you, any more than a father did? Unless your best friend wants him herself.

Aloud, she went on: "At least you didn't make vows of celibacy or promise to always to wear the same outfits and do each other's hair and eternally help each other with dishes and homework!"

Both gave her hurt looks. She sighed. "Eilir, Astrid is cowan: " : though I suspect not for long, she added to herself, as she continued aloud with voice and hands: ": but I suppose you did remember that a ceremony like this is a promise to the Mighty Ones? That you've asked Them to bind you to a purpose? And that They are likely to hold you to it?"

Her daughter nodded solemnly, and so did Astrid.

Juniper sighed. "Parenthood! All right, done is done. If you're coming, come along, Oh Blood-sworn fourteen-year-old Paladins."

The girls picked up their saddlebags, shouldered their bows and followed as Juniper turned and walked cautiously down the stairs.

The open space before the Hall was crowded, horses milling, kilted archers saying good-bye to children and spouses and friends; Dennis and Sally were in a desperate clinch made awkward by a stomach the size of Juniper's, with Terry sobbing and clutching at their legs. The climb down the stairs to the ground floor left Juniper puffing a bit, and lagging behind the youngsters who tumbled out the door and sprang into the saddles of their Arabs.

Before she stepped into the waiting buggy-another bit of useful museum plunder, well-sprung comfort for her currently cumbersome self-she turned and looked at the Hall. The great house loomed dark above her in the morning gloom, hints of color and shape and drifting fog. Then a break in the lowering sky let the morning sunlight in, and the shapes blazed out at her, curling up out of the mist that lay along the ground and drifted amid the tall wet forest that rose north and east, breaking like surf over the teeth of the palisade.

The great tree-trunk pillars that ran from veranda to second-story gallery and supported the roof above had been shaped smooth, then carved with intertwined running designs like something out of the Book of Kells, stained and painted in rich browns and greens with gold hints and then covered with varnish. Where the support beams for the gallery crossed the pillars their ends jutted a yard further out, worked into the shapes of beasts real and mythical, the newly chosen totems of the Mackenzie septs- snarling wolf and horned elk, hawk and raven, dragon and tiger.

At each end of the house the two timbers of the roof had been extended up past the peak, curling around into spirals- one deosil, the other widdershins-and between them the antlers and crescent moon.

"It's like Edoras, and the Golden Hall of Medusel!" Astrid said behind her, her voice soft with awe.

It's like a cross between an Irish museum and a very gaudy backwoods Chinese restaurant, Juniper jibed to herself. Dennie and his apprentices went bloody well berserk.

All the same, she shivered a little. If she'd seen something like this before the Change, she would have laughed until she cried. Now:

We need myths, she thought. We live by them. But can we live in them?

"Now, when this pin has been pulled free, Mr. Trebuchet is no longer our friend. Understand?" Ken Larsson said.

He ignored an impulse to beat his hands together against the chill of the mountain valley and the cold wind that blew down from the heights. That really wasn't very productive when one hand was off at the wrist, and you had a leather sheath tipped with a hand-sized steel hook strapped over the forearm. It still hurt a little too, even a quarter-year after Iron Rod's sword hacked through, and he could still wake up remembering the ugly grinding sensation of steel cracking through bones. Rothman and Pam had done a good job with it.

She never said it didn't make any difference to her; just showed it by the way she acted, he thought, with a brief stab of amazed pleasure even now. Christ, I'm lucky.

Aloud he went on genially: "Mr. Trebuchet is ready to go and anything you get in the way of the parts-like your hand, for instance-is going to go with it."

He waggled the steel hook at them and grinned. The squad of young Bearkillers and ranchers' kids nodded back at him eagerly, looking up at the great machine. None of them seemed to notice the late-afternoon chill or overcast that made his bones ache a little, and the stump where his left wrist used to be ache a lot. Their enthusiasm did make him feel better: and the trebuchet was something to be proud of, as well.

It was basically an application of the lever principle; a long beam between two tall A-frames, pivoted about a third of the way down its length. Swinging from the end of the shorter arm was a huge basket of welded steel rods full of rocks; fastened to the other end was a sling of chains and flexible metal mesh. You hauled down that, fastened it to the release mechanism, and loaded a rock or whatever else you wanted to throw into the sling-dead horses or plague victims pitched over a city wall had been a medieval favorite.

Then you hit the trigger, and the huge weight of the basket full of rocks swung that end of the lever down, hard.

The longer section on the other side of the pivot went up, and turned that force into speed, with the sling adding more leverage. Your projectile went hurtling downrange, as far and fast as anything before cannon. Or after cannon stopped working. It was that simple.

Simple. Simple until you get down to the details, Larsson thought.

He was quite proud of his version. The basic idea was seven centuries old; like so much else, it originally came from China. But he'd thought of improvements-from the base resting on wheel bogies from heavy trucks, to the geared winches that hauled the weight up, to the neat grapnel mechanism that gripped the lever. The medieval models had been built by rule of thumb; precise calculation of mechanical advantage and stronger, lighter materials made this one considerably more efficient.

And now it was ready:

"Stand back, kiddies," Larsson said, remembering Fourth of July celebrations past. Fireworks didn't work, not anymore, but:

"Daddy's going to give the Protector a boot in the ass!"

They cheered, but obeyed. Larsson squinted at the outline of the Protector's Echo Creek castle-at least the sky was cloudy, so he wasn't looking into the sun-ran his hook through the loop at the end of the lanyard cord, and gave a sharp tug.

Chang- whack!

The claws holding the beam snapped back. Cable un-spooled with a rumbling whirr. The great basket of rock seemed to drop slowly at first, then faster and faster, and the steel beam of the throwing arm whirred upward so swiftly that inertia bent it like a bow.

Sss-crack!

At the very top of its arc the chain-and-mesh sling swung upward as well. Another hook was cunningly shaped to let the upper chain of the sling go free at precisely the right moment, and the big boulder flew westward-tumbling as it went, slowing as it reached the height of its arc and then dropping down towards the fort like an anvil from orbit. Dust puffed up around the trebuchet, from under its wheels and the four screw jacks that stabilized it for firing.

"Hit!" shouted a Bearkiller trooper, looking through a pair of heavy tripod-mounted binoculars they'd reclaimed from a tourist lookout point. "Hit!"

Larsson had his own monocular out and put to his good eye-the castle was about half a mile away, and he wanted to know just how his baby functioned. He could see where the quarter-ton rock had struck; in the middle of the earth wall of the fort, halfway between ditch and the palisade. A cloud of dirt drifted away, and he saw the boulder three-quarters buried in the heaped soil.

Well, so far we're just helping build the castle wall, Lars-son thought. No damage except to the barbed wire. But next time:

"Incoming!" the woman at the binoculars shouted. Then: "Short!"

Larsson looked, tensed to dive for the slit trench. A rock rose over the gate of the castle, arching up-in a reverse of his own shot, it seemed to get faster and faster as it approached.

Thud.

It landed in the roadway, cracking and cratering the asphalt, then rolling along until it came to a halt about a hundred yards in front of his own trebuchet. More than enough to hammer anything trying to sneak by the castle on either side, but less range than his, with a lighter load. Probably mounted on some sort of turntable.

"You shouldn't have thought you'd be the only one to come up with this idea, Professor," Larsson said with an evil chuckle. To the crew: "All right, winch her down!"

The crew sprang to work, pumping at the cranks on either side of the frame's rear. There was a quick ratcheting clatter as they took up the slack on the two woven-wire cables that ran up to the peak of the throwing arm and out through block-and-tackle at the middle of the rear brace. That slowed as the weight came on the cables and they had to work at it, but the gearing made the effort steady rather than hard. At last the arm was down, and Larsson threw the lever that brought the jaws of the clamp home on it and slipped home the safety pin-a steel rod the thickness of his thumb and as long as his forearm.

"We need something a little lighter, if we want to hit the palisade or the interior," he said, looking down the row of boulders. Each had its weight chalked on the surface, along with a serial number.

"Number thirty-two!"

The loading crew had two-man pincers for carrying stones, with turned-in sections at the tips, and stout horizontal wooden handles like spades. Four men went after boulder thirty-two, each pair clamping their pincers on it and walking it over to the sling. Larsson carefully raised the chain and loop and dropped them over the hook, removed the pin:

"Incoming!"

This time the yell was much louder, and the sound from the castle was different, a long vibrating tunnngg! from the motte tower.

"Cover!" Larsson said, and jumped into a slit trench; Havel had smiled that crooked smile when he told them those should go in first.

I'm not doing bad for an old man, he thought, puffing and keeping his head down. So I may not be good at waving swords:

Something went over his head with a loud whhht. A fractional second later there was a sharp crack from behind him. He turned and raised his head. There was a row of mantlets about ten yards behind the rock-thrower-heavy shields on bicycle wheels, for archers and crossbowmen to push towards hostile walls. One had been hit.

Not just hit, he thought, whistling softly to himself.

The missile was a four-foot, spear-sized arrow with plastic vanes and a pile-shaped head. It had punched right through the metal facing and double thickness of plywood, and buried itself in the rib cage of a rancher's man who'd been leading a horse behind. The man went down, screaming like a rabbit in a trap and flailing with his arms, but the legs stayed immobile. More people scattered eastward, running from the sudden danger; a few ran three or four steps, then turned and dashed back to drag the injured man to safety. He screamed even louder at that, and was undoubtedly going to die anyway-a pre-Change trauma unit probably couldn't have saved him, but:

That was well done, Larsson thought, wincing slightly. Still: ouch.

He'd gotten case-hardened since the Change-his mind suppressed memories of the night of blood and screams in the ranger cabin with an effort so habitual that he didn't even have to think about it.

But this isn't just a game of engineers, the way business was a game with money for counters. Or if it is, it's a game with human beings as pieces.

On the heels of the thought came more distant sounds from the castle: six together this time, tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng.

"The first one was a ranging shot!" Larsson shouted. "Heads down, everyone!"

More black dots came floating out from the castle, from the tower and along the wall. Deceptively slow-looking at first, then gathering speed. Larsson dropped to the bottom of his hole and looked upward. Something went overhead in a blur, and there was a hard whack! sound of metal on metal, duller chunks as steel spearheads buried themselves in wet dirt. There were shouts, but no screams.

Larsson shouted himself: "Everyone stay in their holes until I say you can come out!"

There was no quaver in his voice; he was proud of that. He knew the javelins probably couldn't hurt him: but his gut and scrotum didn't seem to know that, and they were sending very unpleasant messages up to his hindbrain. When he thought about what he was going to do next, his sphincter got into the action.

And I can come out myself whenever I want. I don't want to, but I'm going to do it anyway.

He launched himself out of the trench. The loop at the end of the firing lanyard was about a dozen yards away; the point of his hook sank into the dirt in the middle of it, and he let his backward slither pull it taut.

Chang- whack!

The boulder arched out towards the Protector's castle; before it was halfway the multiple, musical tunnng of the dart-throwers sounded.

"Now I understand why they had so many sieges in the Middle Ages, and why everyone hated them," he muttered to himself as he tumbled back into the protective embrace of his foxhole.

"Hit!" someone shouted, after the javelins struck. "Broke off a section of the palisade this time!"

He could hear the crew cheering from their trenches and felt like shouting himself: until he realized that he'd just probably pulped several men into hamburger with a three-hundred-pound boulder, and equally probably mutilated and crippled several more.

"But I'm not going to get bent out of shape about it, as Mike says," he murmured to himself, his lips thinning. "So many dead, and you cretins are adding to the total, when you could be helping. If your Protector had organized to get people out of Portland-"

He yelped involuntarily as one of the man-length darts plowed into the dirt near him; it sank a third of its length into the hard-packed rocky soil and quivered with a harsh whining sound that played along his nerves like a saw-edged bow on a violin. Three more banged off the steel framework of his rock-thrower.

And we are not going to stand around cranking Mr. Tre-buchet down again, he thought, swallowing an uneasy mix of terror and exhilaration. Hmmm: next time, really big, thick movable shields to protect the crew?

"All right!" he called out aloud. "Next flight of javelins, one of us runs back-you, Jackson, the minute they hit you get out of your hole. We've given the Protector's men the kick in the ass we promised 'em!"

The crew cheered again. Larsson nodded, looking at the luminescent dial of the mechanical watch he'd found. Just before sunset-though with this overcast, it was hard to tell; it was definitely getting dark, though.

He looked towards the castle-and saw only mud, because he certainly wasn't going to risk his life for a gesture.

"When you want to set a man up for a punch in the face, get someone to kick him in the ass," he muttered to the dirt.

Thanks for getting Astrid off to that bunch of Wiccans, Mike, he thought, not caring to share the thought even with the wall of his trench. Just the thing to keep her fascinated.

With a wrench like a hand reaching into his chest and clutching:

And take care of Pam and my kids, you hear? My strong and beautiful kids. Christ, why did it take a disaster to realize how great they are?

The trail was doubly dark, with the overcast night and the branches overhead. It smelled cold, and wet as well-it hadn't started raining yet, but the wind from the west had a raw dampness to it, a hint of storms to come. They were nearly a thousand feet above the castle at Echo Creek, and the air was colder here, closer to the approaching winter.

Mike Havel grinned to himself in the darkness, an expression that had little mirth in it, placing each foot carefully on rock and damp earth.

Which means we better get this done soon, if it's to be done at all, or we winter at Pendleton. Which would be goddamned chancy for half a dozen reasons.

He walked slowly but quietly, listening to the quick panting of the burdened men ahead-locals from the CORA force, hunters who knew the deer-tracks over these hills as well as their home-acres. He didn't, and neither did Sam Aylward, but they moved almost as easily, instinct and the faint reflected light and the whispering of air through trees and around rocks giving them clues enough. Both were dressed alike, in loose dark clothes and boots and knit caps and dark leather gloves; Havel had his sword across his back with the hilt ready over his left shoulder, and his bow case and quiver slanting to the right.

Aylward had a take-down longbow resting in two pieces beside his arrows, all muffled so that they wouldn't rattle and under a buckled cap. Neither bore armor, besides buckler or targe.

"Wish we could have practiced this more," the Englishman grumbled softly.

They didn't need to keep absolute silence, but quietness was a habit in circumstances like this.

"Too much chance they'd have heard about it," Havel answered in the same tone-not a whisper, which actually traveled further than a soft conversational voice. "That camp leaks like a sieve. Hell, I didn't tell you what I had in mind, until I learned you'd done a lot of hang gliding, did I?"

A soft chuckle. "Run me down on the others," he said. "I presume they're the best-or I bloody well hope so."

"They're the best who happened to have the necessary experience; it's not a sport your ordinary Idaho plowboy takes up," Havel said. "Pam's cold death with a sword, and she's learned the rest of the business very fast. Eric and Signe are pretty good, they've had seven months hard practice and they're natural athletes, and I've seen them both in real action. Good nerves and good muga, both of them, and coming along fast."

Aylward nodded, unseen in the darkness. Muga was a term they were both familiar with from unarmed-combat training; it meant being aware of everything around you as a single interacting whole.

And I wish to hell Signe was knocked up and off the A-list for now; we're going to be married soon, for Christ's sake, he thought, then pushed it away with a swift mental effort.

Can't afford to get worked up about that, or I'll make mistakes and get us killed. Christ Jesus, that's likely enough anyhow!

There was a little amusement in the Englishman's voice: "And this is probably the last chance you'll get to go off on your own, away from the paperwork and the all those cloudy decisions, eh? Corporal to general-and if you knew how hard I'd fought to keep the same bloody thing from happening: "

Mike shrugged. "Maybe not. Things are different now. No Pentagon, no brass."

And how. There's probably nothing but bands of Eaters haunting the Pentagon, he thought. Sort of. what did Greenberg call it? A literalized metaphor?

He'd loathed the place and the city it was located in at long distance every day of both hitches.

Idly: I wonder what happened to the President? He'd never liked the man much. Probably the Secret Service got him out, and he's still running things. in about a hundred square miles around Camp David, maybe.

He went on aloud: "Hell, what was that Greek king, the one who got all the way to India-"

"Alexander the Great?"

"Yeah. Always the first one in: here we are."

The hunters had brought them to the clearing on the crest of Echo Mountain, and carried the hang gliders as well, bearing them lengthwise up the narrow trail. Aylward went forward to check them over, using a tiny metal lantern with a candle within and a moveable shutter. Havel did his own examination, and then went the other way, up the sloping surface of the open space until he reached the steep up-curled lip facing southeast.

That made a natural slope to lie on with only his head above it, until all the others had gathered behind him. He used the time to see what could be seen of the castle, matching it to the detailed maps he'd memorized.

There was more light over there than you'd expect; he hadn't seen anything like the actinic glare of the searchlight since before the change. The beam flicked out, traversing slowly back and forth along the parapet.

"Puts them in the limelight, doesn't it?" Signe said from his left.

Havel grinned in the darkness. Literally in the limelight; lime burning in a stream of compressed air, with a big curved mirror behind it. That was what they'd used in theaters to light the stage, before electricity. His father-in-law's education was coming in really useful.

"Don't look at it," he said, turning to repeat the order on the other side. "It's supposed to blind them, not us. All right, now take a good look at that tower. Match what you're seeing to the maps you studied."

He did himself. The enemy had obligingly put torches all along the palisade of their motte-and-bailey castle, which would give them a better view of the first ten yards and kill their chances of seeing anything beyond that, even without the searchlight stabbing into their eyes.

"Amateurs," Aylward muttered.

Havel nodded; the best way to see in the dark, barring night-sight goggles, was to get out in the dark, well away from any source of light. It was a lot easier to see into an illuminated area than out of it. If he'd been in charge of that fort, he'd have killed every light, and had a mesh of scouts lying out in the darkness and damn the cost. The CORA men hadn't been able to threaten the fort, or get much past it: but they had been able to discourage the garrison from walking around after sunset.

The torches outlined a round-shouldered rectangle with Highway 20 running through it from east to west. There were buildings on either side of the roadway, and the circular cone of the motte halfway between the corner and the gatehouse. Obligingly, the Protector's men had a big iron basket full of pinewood burning on top of the tower.

"Everybody satisfied they know where they're going?" Mike said, waiting for the nods.

Aylward's had an edge in it: We should have practiced this more, chum.

Havel's reply: We should have, but we couldn't. Pray hard.

"There's a nice updraft over the lip of this cliff and we've got better than fifteen hundred feet of height on the target, so there's not going to be any problem with that. Come at the tower from the west, with a bit of height to spare. If you miss, just keep going-we've got people out there in the ground between our lines and the creek. And do not-I say this twice-do not launch until I'm down and give the signal."

He caught Pamela's eye, and Aylward's; they could be counted on to restrain any adolescent foolishness. Eric was grinning, despite all that had happened since the Change:

I told him he'd be a dangerous man once he got some experience, and Christ Jesus, I was right! Havel thought.

It wasn't that his brother-in-law had a taste for blood, but he did like to fight.

Signe and Pam were ready, both looking tautly calm. Good. They both know this is serious business. Aylward's calm was relaxed; for a moment Havel felt a bitter envy of Juniper Mackenzie. God, I'd give a couple of fingers for someone with his skills and no ambition to be numero uno!

It was time.