Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Twenty-One

"Come out of there, you—aha!"

Tamman broke off in mid-exasperation and eased the glittering block of molecular circuitry gently to the floor with a wide, triumphant smile.

Removing it had proved even harder than Sandy had feared. Not even implants could trace circuits in three dimensions without a schematic, and they'd found too late that it would have been far simpler to disconnect the console from the wall and go in from the back. Dust had infiltrated the ancient seals, as well, drifting up to irritate eyes and inspire bursts of sneezing, and Tamman had had an interesting moment when he bridged what he'd thought was a dead circuit. But two and a half painstaking hours had finally yielded their prize, and Sean met Tamman's grin with one of his own.

"Foosh!" Sandy fanned herself with a dirty hand. "When I think how much quicker we could have done this in a proper shop—!" Sean switched his grin to her. Then he frowned.

"Hey—shouldn't Harry be back by now?"

Sandy and Tamman stared at him, and he felt their matching surprise. All three of them had been oblivious to time as they concentrated on eviscerating the console; now their eyes met his, and he saw them darken as surprise gave way to the beginnings of concern.

"Damn right she should!" Tamman rose and snatched up the hand lamp. "The way she likes to run, it shouldn't've taken her more than two hours—tops—to get to the cutter!"

Sean started for the stairs and drew up with a gasp, for his injured side had stiffened as he watched his friends work. Pain beaded his forehead with sweat, and he muttered a curse and hit his implant overrides. He knew he shouldn't—pain was a warning a body did well to heed, lest it turn minor injuries into serious ones—but that was the least of his worries.

Sandy frowned as his suddenly brisker movement told her what he'd done, yet she said nothing, and the two of them half-ran up the treads on Tamman's heels.

They scrambled out past the tree, panting from their hurried ascent, and stared into the darkness. There was no sign of the cutter, and Sean bit his lip as cold wind ruffled his hair.

Tamman was right—Harriet should have been back thirty minutes ago. He should have noticed her absence sooner... and he should never have let her out on her own! He'd known better at the time, damn it, but he'd let himself worry more over the possibility of losing an hour or two than her safety. He pounded his fists together and stared up at the sky with bitter eyes, but the alien stars mocked him, and his jaw clenched as he powered his com implant and sent out a full-powered omnidirectional pulse, heedless of the quarantine system's sensors.

There was no response, and the others looked at him with matching horror. Harriet should have heard that signal from forty light-minutes away!

"Oh, Jesus!" His whisper was a plea, and then he was running for the valley wall with no thought for such inconsequentials as his injuries, and his friends were on his heels.

They ran with implants fully active. It took them less than fifty minutes to reach the cutter, despite their feverish concentration on their search, and if Harriet had been within five hundred meters of the trail in any direction, they would have found her.

Sean leaned on a landing leg, sucking in air, enhanced lungs on fire, and tried to think. Even if she were dead—his mind shied from the thought like a terrified animal—they should have spotted her implants. It was as if she'd never come this way at all, but she must have! She had to have!

"All right," he grated, and his panting companions turned to him anxiously. "We should have spotted her. If we didn't, she's not here, and I can't think of any reason she shouldn't be. We can use the cutter for an aerial search, but if she's unconscious or... or something—" his voice quavered, and he wrenched it back under iron control "—we might miss something as small as implant emissions. We need better scanners."

"Brashan." Tamman's voice was flat, and Sean nodded choppily.

"Exactly. If he puts up a full-powered array he can cover five times the ground twice as fast. And Israel's med computers can access her readouts for a full diagnostic if she's hurt." He forced his hands down to his sides. "It'll also be a flare-lit tip-off to the quarantine system when he goes active." He bit the words off in pain, but they must be said, for if they threw away caution now, it might kill them all. "If it is watching the planet, there's no way it'll miss something like that."

"So what?" Tamman snarled. "We have to find her, goddamn it!"

"Tam's right," Sandy agreed without a flicker of hesitation, and Sean's hand caressed her face for just a moment. Then he opened the cutter hatch and went up the ramp at a run.

"I've found her."

The people in the cutter jerked upright, staring at Brashan's tiny hologram, and the centauroid's crest was flat. Another endless hour had passed, and even the fact that the quarantine system hadn't reacted in the slightest had meant nothing beside their growing fear as seconds dragged away.

Brashan straightened on his pad, his holographic eyes meeting Sean's squarely, and his voice was very quiet. "She's dying."

"No," Sean whispered. "No, goddamn it!"

"She is approximately seven kilometers from your current position on a heading of one-three-seven," Brashan continued in that same flat, quiet voice. "She has a broken shoulder, a punctured lung, and severe head injuries. The medical computer reports a skull fracture, a major eye trauma, and two subdural hematomas. One of them is massive."

"Skull fracture?" All three humans stared at him in shock, for Harriet's bones—like their own—were reinforced with battle steel appliqués. But under their shock was icy fear. Unlike muscle tissue and skin, the physical enhancement of the brain was limited; Harriet's implants might control other blood loss, but not bleeding inside her skull.

"I cannot say positively, but I believe her wounds to be deliberately inflicted," Brashan said, and Sean's dark eyes burned with sudden, terrible fire. "I say this because she is presently in the center of a small village. I hypothesize that she must have been carried thence by whoever injured her."

"Those fucking sons-of-bi—!"

"Wait, Sean!" Sandy cut him off in midcurse, and he turned his fury on her. He knew it was stupid, yet his rage needed a target—any target—and she was there. But if her brown eyes were just as deadly as his own, they were also far closer to rational.

"Think, damn it!" she snapped. "Somehow someone must have spotted her—and that means they probably know she came out of the Valley!"

Sean sank back, his madness stabbed through with panic as he recalled the fate the Church prescribed for any who dabbled with the Valley of the Damned. Sandy held his eyes a second longer, then turned to the Narhani.

"You said she's dying, Brashan. Exactly how bad is it?"

"If we do not get her into Israel's sickbay within the next ninety minutes—two hours at the outside—she will be dead." Brashan's crest went still flatter. "Even now, her chances are less than even."

"We have to go get her," Tamman grated, and Sean nodded convulsively.

"Agreed," Sandy said, but her eyes were back on Sean. "Tam's right," she said quietly, "but we can't just go in there and start killing people."

"The hell we can't! Those motherfuckers are dead, Sandy! Goddamn it, they're trying to kill her!"

"I know. But you know why they are, and so do I."

"I don't fucking well care why!" he snarled.

"Well you fucking well ought to!" she snarled back, and the utterly uncharacteristic outburst rocked him even through his rage. "Damn it, Sean, they think they're doing what God wants! They're ignorant, superstitious, and scared to death of what she's done—are you going to kill them all for that?"

He stared at her, eyes hating, and tension crackled between them. Then his gaze fell. He felt ashamed, which only made his need for violence perversely stronger, but he shook his head.

"I know." Her voice was far more gentle. "I know. But using Imperial weapons against them would be pure, wanton slaughter."

He nodded, knowing she was right. Perhaps even more importantly, he knew even through his madness why she'd stopped him. He looked back up, and his eyes were sane once more... but colder than interstellar space.

"All right. We'll try to scare them out of our way without killing anyone, Sandy. But if they won't scare—" He broke off, and she squeezed his arm thankfully. She knew what killing the villagers would do to him after the madness passed, and she tried not to think about his final words.

Father Stomald knelt before his altar, ashen-faced and sick, and raised revolted eyes to the outsized beaker of oil. To pour that on a human being—any human being, even a heretic! To light it and watch her burn...

Bile rose as he pictured that blood-streaked, hauntingly beautiful face and saw that slim, lovely body wreathed in flame, crisping, burning, blackening... .

He forced his nausea down. God called His priests to their duty, and if the punishment of the ungodly was harsh, it must be so to save their souls. Stomald told himself that almost tearfully, and it did no good at all. He loved God and longed to serve Him, but he was a shepherd, not an executioner!

Sweat matted his forehead as he dragged himself up. The beaker was cold between his palms, and he prayed for strength. If only Cragsend were big enough to have its own Inquisitor! If only—

He cut the thought off, despising himself for wanting to pass his duty to another, and argued with his stubborn horror. There was no question of the woman's guilt. The lightning and thunder from the Valley had waked the hunting party, and despite their terror, they'd gone to investigate. And when they called upon her to halt, she'd fled, proclaiming her guilt. Even if she hadn't, her very garments would convict her. Blasphemy for a woman to wear the high vestments of the Sanctum itself, and Tibold Rarikson, the leader of the huntsmen, had described her demon light. Stomald himself had seen the other strange things on her belt and wrist, but it was Tibold's haunted eyes which brought the horror fully home. The man was a veteran warrior, commander of Cragsend's tiny force of the Temple Guard, yet his face had been pale as whey as he spoke of the light and her impossible speed.

Indeed, Stomald thought with a queasy shiver as he turned from the altar, perhaps she was no woman at all, for what woman would still live? Three times they'd hit her—three!—at scarcely fifty paces, and if her long black hair was a crimson-clotted mass and her right eye wept bloody tears, her other wounds didn't even bleed. Perhaps she was in truth the demon Tibold had named her... but even as he told himself that, the under-priest knew why he wanted to believe it.

He descended the church steps into the village square, and swallowed again as he beheld the heretic in the bloody light of the flambeaux.

She looked so young—younger even than he—as she hung from the stake by her manacled wrists, wrapped in heavy iron chains and stripped of her profaned vestments, and he felt a shameful inner stir as he once more saw her flimsy undergarments. Mother Church expected her priests to wed, for how could they understand the spiritual needs of husband or wife without experience? Yet to feel such things now...

He drew a deep breath and walked forward. Her bloody head drooped, and she hung so still he thought—prayed—she had already died. But then he saw the faint movement of her thinly covered breasts, and his heart sank with the knowledge that her death would not free him from the guilt he must bear.

He stopped and turned to face his flock as Tibold approached. The Guardsman bore a torch, and its flame wavered with the shaking of his hand. He stopped two paces from the priest, and the pity in his blunt, hard features made Stomald wonder if perhaps he, too, had tried to insist this woman was a demon out of revulsion for what they now must do to her.

He met Tibold's haunted eyes, and a flicker passed between them. One of understanding... and gratitude. Of thanks that they had no Inquisitor to break that slender body upon the wheel before her death as the letter of the Church's Law demanded, and that, demon or no, she had never waked. That she would die unknowing, spared the agony of her horrible end... unlike the men who would always remember wreaking it upon her.

He turned away from the Guardsman who must share his duty, facing his people, and wondered how they would look upon him in days to come. He couldn't see their faces beyond the fuming flambeaux, and he was glad.

He opened his mouth to pronounce the words of anathematization.

Harriet's weakening implant signals left no time to return to Israel, and Sean landed the stealthed cutter within a half-klick of the village. He selected a six-millimeter grav rifle from the weapons locker to back up his side arm, and Tamman chose an energy gun, but Sandy bore only her grav gun and a satchel of grenades. Sean wished she'd taken something heavier, yet time was too short to argue, and he led them through the darkness at a run.

The torch-lit village square came in sight, and his mouth twisted into a snarl. Harriet—his Harriet!—hung by her wrists from a stake, heaped faggots piled about her chained, half-naked body, and her hair was soaked with blood. His hands tightened on his rifle's grips, but he felt Sandy's anxious eyes, and he'd promised her.

"Go!" he snapped, and she hurled the first plasma grenade.

Stomald cried out in horror as terrible white light exploded against Cragsend's night. Its fiery breath touched hay ricks to flame and singed the assembled villagers' hair, and screams of terror lashed the priest.

He staggered back, blinded by the terrible flash. There was another—and another!—and he heard Tibold's hoarse bellow beside him and cringed, trying to understand, as three figures appeared. They seemed to step forth from within the fury consuming the smithy, the granary, and tanning sheds. Their featureless black shapes loomed before the glare, and the one in the center, a towering giant out of some tale of horror, aimed a strange musket shape at the slate roof of the church.

Sparkling flashes ripped stout stonework to shrieking splinters in an endless roll of thunder that scattered screaming villagers in panic, but Stomald's heart spasmed with a terror even worse than theirs. It was his fault! The thought leapt into his brain. He'd hesitated. He'd rebelled in his heart, contesting God's will, and this—this—was the result!

Tibold seized him, trying to drag him away, but he stared transfixed as the shape beside the giant aimed its own weapon at a trio of freight wagons. There was no flash this time, and that was even worse. A hurricane of chips and snapped timbers erupted, and the only sound was rending wood and the whine as fragments flew like bullets.

It was too much for Tibold. He abandoned the crazed priest to flee, and Stomald felt only a distant sympathy for him. This was more than any warrior could be asked to face. These were the demons of the Valley of the Damned, come to snatch away the demon his traitor heart had longed to spare, and terror filled him, but he stood his ground. He had no choice. His faltering faith brought them here. He'd failed his flock, and though his sin cost him his immortal soul, he was God's priest.

He raised the sanctified oil like a shield, dry lips whispering in prayer, and a handful of villagers stared in horror from the cover of darkness as their youthful priest advanced alone against the forces of Hell.

Sean blew the village fountain apart, but the lone madman walked through the spray and kept right on coming. Sean bared his teeth as he saw the blue and gold priestly robe, and it took all he had not to turn the rifle upon him, yet he didn't. Somehow, he didn't. Tamman splintered a half-meter trench across the square, and the priest halted for a moment. Then he resumed his advance, stepping over the shattered cobbles like a sleepwalker, and Sean swore as Sandy went to meet him.

Stomald faltered as the smallest demon walked straight at him. The silhouetted figure entered the spill of light from the flambeaux, and, for the first time, he truly saw one of them.

His prayer rose higher at the blasphemy before him, for this demon, too, wore the semblance of a woman in the holiest of raiment. Torchlight fumed in her eyes and glittered from the gold of her profaned vestments, the fires of Hell roared behind her, and she came on as if his exorcism was but words. Terror strangled his voice, yet the holy oil he bore was more potent than any exorcism, and he sent up a silent prayer for strength, unworthy though he'd proved himself. She stopped five paces away, and there was no fear in her face—not of the frightened priest, not of the blessed weapon he bore... not even of God Himself.

Sandy swallowed rage as she looked past the priest at Harriet, chained amid her waiting pyre. But then she saw his terrified face, and she felt a grudging admiration for the courage—or the faith—that held him here.

He stared at her, eyes filled with fear, and then his hands lashed. Something leapt from the beaker he held, but reflex activated her implant force field. Thick, iridescent oil sluiced down it, caught millimeters from her skin, and the priest's mouth moved.

"Begone!" he shouted, and she twitched, for she understood him. His voice was high and cracked with terror but determined, and he spoke the debased Universal of the Church. "Begone, Demon! Unclean and accursed, I cast you out in the Name of the Most Holy!"

Stomald shouted the exorcism with all the faith in him as the shining oil coated the demon. She paused—perhaps she even gave back a step—and hope flamed in his heart. But then hope turned to even greater horror, for the demon neither vanished in a flash of lightning nor fled in terror. Instead she came a step closer... and she smiled.

"Begone yourself, wretched and miserable one!" He reeled, stunned by the terrible thunder of that demonic voice, and his brain gibbered. No demon could speak the Holy Tongue! He retreated a faltering step, hand rising in a warding sign, and the demon laughed. She laughed! "I have come for my friend," she thundered, "and woe be unto you if you have harmed her!"

Crashing peals of laughter ripped through him like echoes from Hell, and then she reached out to the nearest torch. The holy oil sprang alight with a seething hiss, clothing her in a fierce corona, and her voice boomed out of the roaring flames.

"Begone lest you die, sinful man!" she commanded terribly, and the furnace heat of her faceless, fiery figure came for him.

Sean watched Sandy confront the priest. Her implant-amplified voice made his head hurt—God only knew how it must have sounded to the priest! Yet the man had stood his ground until she touched the oil to flame. That was too much, and he took to his heels at last, stumbling, falling, leaping back to his feet and running for the imagined sanctuary of his church while Sandy's bellowing laughter pursued him.

Yet there was no time to admire her tactics, and he slung his grav rifle and charged across the square. Tamman's energy gun splintered more cobbles, driving the villagers still further back, but Sean hardly noticed. He scattered heavy faggots like tumbleweeds, and his face was a murderous mask as he gripped the chain about Harriet's body and twisted the links like taffy. They snapped, and he hurled them aside and caught at the manacles. His back straightened with a grunt. Anchoring bolts screamed and sheared like paper, and if she was still breathing as her limp body slid into his arms, he was close enough to read her implants directly at last. He paled. The damage was at least as bad as Brashan had said, and he cradled her like a child as he turned and ran like a madman for the cutter.

Stomald cowered in the nave of the broken church, rocking on his knees and praying with all his strength amid lumps of stone blown from the vault above him. He clung to sanity with bleeding fingernails, then cringed in fresh terror as something flashed into the very heavens beyond the village. A howling streak of light exploded across the stars in an echoing peal of thunder, and a hot breath of air rolled down through the church's cracked roof on the shrieking wind of its passage as it screamed low over Cragsend.

Then it was gone, and he buried his face in his hands and moaned.