Up Jim River

XV. AND BEHOLD, A PILLAR OF FIRE

They set off the next day from Dacitti in a shower of red maiden and edelweiss and with wreaths of dragon’s blood around their necks. Fifes and drums played them up the Broad Path to the ditch that connected the Xhodzhã with the Rjo-yeszdy at the north end of the island. The Emrikii lined the Path and cheered and threw confetti as they passed. A company of musketeers in powder-blue jacks and cross-belts marched with them as an honor guard. At the Xhorlm Ditch, the well-wishers remained behind and Méarana and her group continued along the Xhodzhã High Road that ran the length of the valley.

Méarana paused to thank Damáire, but he only waved his hands and said, “V’gedda-boddi,” which the translators told her was how the Emrikii said, “you’re welcome.”

With them went a “long hunter” named Bavyo Zãzhaice, who knew the way to the top of the Oorah butte, and Chain, who spoke a bit of the Oorah language. Bavyo had the broad stride and confident mien of one returning to his natural home.

“He is a man-who-likes-aloneness,” Chain explained through Water-shanks. “He lives in the forests and in the Big Mountains, so he gets little practice in talking to other people.”

Indeed, their guide frequently went off by himself when they stopped for night camp, to a lonely crag or an oak grove, where he sat in silent contemplation. Méarana joined him one evening on a great stone outcropping. There was a gap in the forest through which a distant mountain pass could be seen and the flat line of the plains beyond. The sky had deepened to indigo save where the sun had lately gone down, and there the clouds glowed a bright red. Bavyo said nothing the whole time she watched the sunset.

The next day, as they crossed the lower slope and entered the Borigan Forest, Chain fell into step with her. “Bavyo say,” she stammered in halting loor nuxrjes’r, “yes, he set beautiful.” Then she scurried ahead to walk beside him. He seemed to take no notice, and Chain looked everywhere but at their guide. Méarana smiled to herself.

Sofwari came to walk beside her. “What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. How goes your research?”

The science-wallah’s face clouded over and he touched a pocket in his coveralls. “I have only the data from Rajiloor and Nuxrjes’r, but your intuition seems to have been correct, and this is the origin of the anomalous cluster on Harpaloon.”

She took his hand and they walked companionably “Debly, tell me something.”

He hesitated. “What?”

“Why did these worlds crash so badly? The Dark Age was rough on the Old Planets. The prehumans deliberately mixed cultures and languages, and it took centuries to recover; but the Old Planets never forgot the past as badly as here. The Harps have a legend about ancestors who went out on the Shining Path, promising to return. But they never did. That would have been the expedition sent to Harpaloon. I’ve seen the landers in Côndefer Park, and even the’ Loons have forgotten what they were. No surprise, the Enjrunii never heard of the League or the Confederation. But I’ve mentioned the prehumans, Dao Chetty, even the Commonwealth. Nothing. It’s like they never were.”

They continued silently for a space while Sofwari gave it thought. A bird with a flare of red feathers at his crest called out from a branch they were passing and took wing to another tree. “This is outside my expertise,” he said at last, “but my guess is that as rich as the Treasure Fleet was, it was not as rich as a world. What they took with them was nothing; next to the whole of Terra. In the end, there were not enough of them, or they lacked for something essential, or they spread themselves too thin. Perhaps if they had focused on fewer worlds…”

“I understand the world has to be receptive. Look at Gatmander or New Eireann. Had they seeded too few places, and the prehumans had stumbled across them out here…No, their safest choice was to spread their seed as far and wide as they could. Who knows…”

“Who knows what?”

“Who knows what we would find in the Cygnus Arm, if we ever get there?”

She heard chimes, and looked around to see what the sound could be. The Harps placed “soul catchers” in trees and the wind rang the metal pieces woven into them. But this was far outside Harp country.

Donovan was answering his comm. unit. For a moment, the significance did not register. Then she realized. “Blankets and Beads! She’s back!”

Their translators and guide did not understand the elation. Méarana tried to explain to Watershanks that their “endarooa-of-the-stars” had retuned from a trade visit; and Watershanks tried to explain that to two people who had likely never seen an endarooa. A star canoe? What was that beside the wonders they had already seen? Ayiyi! The Scarred One spoke to a djinn invisible!

Donovan said, “They have a fix, but there are only four signals. They have another signal, very weak, from Roaring Gorge, and ad-Din wants to know what happened? Who’s lost their beacon?”

Teodorq shrugged. “Mine went missing during the fight in Roaring Gorge. I ain’t going back to get it.”

Debly Sofwari ducked his head. “Same thing. When they Harps ransacked my equipment…”

Méarana grabbed him by the sleeve. “You were supposed to keep it on your person! Not stuff it away in your baggage! What were you thinking? If you’d gotten separated from us, we would never have found you!” She had begun pushing and shoving him; and he seized her hands at the wrist.

“Why berate me over what might have happened? If I had told you, what could you have possibly done about it?”

“D.Z. wants to know,” said Donovan, wagging his comm., “if we want pickup.”

Paulie said, “Easier than climbing up that mesa.”

Méarana backed away from Sofwari. “Tell him no,” she said. “We’ll be on top tomorrow morning.”

“The priestess back in Daciiti,” Theodorq said, “said day after is when the god comes.”

“Donovan, tell D.Z. that the ship should search for an approaching astronomical object. An asteroid or something.”

Donovan did so, adding, “And D.Z. it would not be a good idea to let Blankets and Beads come between that object and the mesa.” He signed off and tucked the comm. back in his breast pocket.

Méarana, watching him, said, “How did you hide your comm. from the Harps?”

The Fudir grinned with Donovan’s lips. “There’s always one place you can stick things where most folks won’t look.”

The path to the top of the mesa was steep. Bavyo assured them that there were no turnoffs to lead them astray. He then wished them good fortune and turned to the main trail. Méarana cried with astonishment. “Wait!”

But Chain said through Watershanks, “He walks his own path. The Oorah trail is not his trail.”

Billy Chins grunted. “Some guide.”

“I will go with Bavyo,” Chain announced. “He needs a woman to walk beside him, and how the barbarians used Skins-rabbits will not matter to him.” She, too, turned her feet to the main trail, speaking a few words with Watershanks as she passed.

The others gathered round. Teodorq watched the two Emrikii depart. “That can’t be good.”

“Watershanks,” said Méarana, “what did she tell you?”

“She assured me that the Oorah consider a guest as their most precious treasure.”

“Fine,” said Paulie, “but without we have an interpreter, what can they tell us?”

Donovan stood to the side with a thoughtful frown, running his fingers across his scars. “Oorah,” Méarana heard him say. “The people of the village? Do you think it could be, or is it just a coincidence?”

The way was steep, though unlike the Longfoot trail, there was no point at which they had to resort to toe- and handholds. But the air was thin and cold, and there was trouble catching one’s breath. Coming to a primordial lava flow, the trail passed through a slot cut through the rock and fashioned anciently into stairs. In the rock were carved the runes:

Donovan stopped and ran his fingers over them, feeling out the shape of the figures. “Kapartār,” he said, as if to himself. “Could that be ‘guhbahdāw’?” He stood, staring and silent.

“I suppose it could be,” said Teodorq. “But for my eyes it could be ‘For a good time, summon Tsuzi Elkhorn.’” Paulie laughed with him.

Méarana said, “Donovan, what does guhbahdāw mean?”

“Hmm?” The scarred man turned from his contemplation of the carving. “Oh. It means ‘beware.’”

Teodorq looke at Paulie. “That can’t be good.”

Paulie said, “Stop saying that.” And the mountaineer made a sign with his left hand to avert the evil.

“Pedant talks about phoneme shifts. A ‘bh’—or ‘v’—tends to become a ‘b,’ for example; and a ‘b’ becomes a ‘p.’ But sometimes people pick up phonemes from neighboring folk and ‘b’ may become ‘bh’ again. This looks to me like the old Tantamiž that we saw in Madéen O’ Loons, or on the old captain’s logs that Greystroke stole from the Harpaloon temple.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Méarana. “I mean, what are we supposed to be wary of?”

“Life.”

“We needed a sign to tell us that?”

Méarana started into the cut, but Teodorq suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders, lifted her up, and set her down behind him. “I think,” he said, “that this is what yuh hired me for, babe. Paulie, you take rearguard. Donovan, Billy, in the middle with the scholar and the lady.”

“I can handle myself,” Méarana told him.

“Yeah? That’s what the late Tsuzi Elkhorn said to me at Whisker Bluff. But she was only half-right, and it was a whole fight. So, shut up, babe. Without yuh, there’d be nobody to sing my story. I mean, yer the reason we’re here an’ not somewhere else. My head would be decorating a spike outside Josang prison, and yer old man would be a drunk in a Jehovah bar. And Debly, here, would be playing with himself and swabbing people’s cheeks instead of being on this here quest where his name might be remembered for something that matters.”

Sofwari began to protest, but Teodorq had already started up the cut. Donovan paused before following him. “I don’t know,” he said with a grin. “The Bar on Jehovah might have been the better choice.”

Méarana pushed him along. “Move along, old man. Mount your head on a spike or mount it on a bottle of uiscebaugh, you’re embalmed either way.”

The passage took them up onto the lip of a wind-whipped parapet. Emerging, they saw that the rim of the mesa was a ridge that encircled a great barren bowl of a valley. It was at least a thousand double-paces from lip to lip. The village of the Oorah was strung around this bowl like a wreath woven of greens and fir branches. Fields were set in terraces in the side of the bowl. Below them, huts nestled. Inward of the huts was barren rock: no vegetation grew, no trees, no bushes.

“Like the caldera of a volcano,” said Sofwari as they made their way around the ledge.

“Except here,” Méarana said, “the fire comes down from the sky, not up from the ground.”

Thin lines of people filed into the caldera, each person carrying something which he laid in a great pile in the center of the bowl. Through the stiff wind they heard the faint murmur of singing and the people swayed to the rhythm of it.

“Offerings to the approaching god,” Sofwari guessed.

One of the supplicants, turning back after dropping her offering, pointed and raised a cry, and heads began to turn their way.

“Perhaps we have interrupted something,” said Watershanks.

Donovan stepped to the edge of the parapet and cupped his hands. “Halloo!” he called. “Nawn inki yergay mbetão!”

This caused a flurry of activity beneath them. People ran to and fro, sleeves were tugged, hats held out to shade eyes, more fingers were pointed. Finally, an old man was led out. Despite the cold, high-altitude air, he wore nothing beside a short skirt and what looked like a dusting of talcum powder over his chest, face, and arms. He bore a staff made of a thick, twisted tree limb and his hair was a rat’s tangle. An acolyte held a megaphone to the man’s lips.

“Ungloady pr’enna?”

Donovan thought about that, then shouted back, “Onkyawti por enya?”

Now the priest, if such he was, appeared puzzled. Then he made a sign on his body and said, “Ongalodai per enna?”

Donovan smiled. “He knows the ancient dialect!” he told the others. Then he called, “Naan Donovan. Naan ingey irke vendum!”

Tangled hair bobbed as the priest nodded vigorously. “Vanakkam! Ullay waruvangal.” He pointed ahead of them. “Munney po! Munney po!”

Donovan turned to them. “He says welcome and come in, and we should go forward.”

They found the path down through the terraces half a league farther on along the parapet. But once down to the next level they had to “pinnal po,” go back the way they had come to find the stairs to the next terrace down.

“I had wondered about that,” said Billy Chins. “Their village occupies the low ground, which disadvantages them. But they have created a maze through their crop terraces, so an invader cannot charge straight down. Though if the Emrikii learn to make rifled muskets, they could stand on the parapet and pick off people in the village.”

“The Harps could take this place,” said Watershanks. “They could rappel down the sides of the terraces like they did down the cliffs at Candle-town.” Whether that thought heartened him, he did not say. The Harps, in any case, were far away and getting farther.

The entire ring of habitations was called Ūr, or Oor; but different segments along the ring were called by different names. When Méarana and her company finally emerged onto the terrace where the houses were set, they found themselves in Mylap Oor, or “Peacock Town.” There was a great stone statue of a peacock there under the shade of what they called a “funny tree.” The peacock was said to be the goddess Fahbády worshipping the god Žiba. That one god might worship another struck Méarana as peculiar. Maxwell certainly did not worship Newton! And since the stone peacock gazed nowhere but into the empty bowl valley, how did anyone know what she worshipped?

A happy, laughing crowd met them and escorted them around the ring-village to the headman’s house. Along the way, they passed bronze statues, mostly of young women, but including also some young men and a few older men dressed like the bonze who had first greeted them. Donovan told them, after asking their escorts, that these were the nayanmars, the sixty-three saints of Žiba. The statues were beautifully done and many of them were adorned with floral wreaths around their necks or with bouquets and jar-candles and joss sticks at their feet. It is the festival of “Rupa Ðamupa,” they were told by those who kissed them as they passed.

That evening, at a banquet in their honor, they learned that the festival celebrated the coming of the god in two of his aspects: Vrabha the Creator and Žiba the Destroyer. The headman, who was also the hierophant for the entire Oorah tribe, sat them on great embroidered pillows and placed cones of incense before them and decked them with leis. Then he brought in troupes of naked dancing girls, between performances of which he explained the traditions of the Village People.

Eons ago, Vrabha the Creator placed the Oorah on the mesa to bring life to the world by preparing a place where the god might come: the Vagina of the Earth, although the pagans in the Lower Lands called it the Well at the End of the World.

“But it is not the End, but the Beginning,” he explained.

The speech had to run through Donovan’s ears and out his tongue, which made at times for slow-going. The ancient Tantamiž had changed in one way for these people and in another way for Donovan’s, and so they spoke in the dead tongue that was their common ancestor. Donovan felt exalted. He was, however inexpertly, speaking as the Vraddies of the old Commonwealth of Suns had spoken in the glory days of Terra. He was, in some manner, at one with them.

“But the god is three in one,” the old man explained. “He not only brings life, but he sustains it, and destroys it, and thus brings the wheel full circle; for the destruction is the conception. And so when the god comes, we hold this festival to honor his saints. We take our most precious treasures and place them in the Vagina of the World to be consumed by his love. Thus it has been. Thus it will be.”

Paulie said, “This food tastes funny.”

“It does have an odd flavor,” Donovan agreed. He asked the headman what spices had been used to flavor the meat and the headman told him.

“Tānikam,” he said. “What some folk call ‘coriander.’”

Donovan paused with his spoon half-lifted. “Coriander?” he croaked. “This is corander? But it grows nowhere else but Terra!”

The headman shrugged. “Perhaps it is but a different thing called by the same name.”

Donovan finished swallowing. “It is not so much of a such,” he said.

Méarana laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Sometimes a dream is more alluring than the fact.”

But Donovan shrugged off the hand. “Then we should dream more realistically.”

Méarana looked away. “She was here, wasn’t she? Your headman confirmed it. They called her a reincarnation of Fahbády the Peacock. She came down from heaven in a chariot, walked among them, and then rose once more. You can’t say my quest was unrealistic if we actually succeeded.”

Donovan saw tears in the corner of her eyes, and did not answer. Success was no proof at all. One man might succeed on the wildest of hunches; another fail after careful calculation. If the True Coriander had proven a disappointment, the same was not true of what it symbolized. He gazed at the bowl valley, which the verandah of the headman’s palace faced. The Burnt-Over District, he thought. There must be places like this on a dozen worlds; places where the god returns at intervals and screws them over with fire from the sky.

That sort of repetition bespoke the mechanical, like the tock of a metronome. Whatever the original purpose had been, it was simply repeating itself now, like a scanner stuck on a bit.

“At least,” said Méarana softly, “I know at last where she went.”

“But you don’t,” Donovan told her. “She came here, yes; but she left to go elsewhere. And these people don’t know where. This is the end of the trail.”

“No it isn’t,” Méarana said, pointing to the stars that were appearing in the violet sky. “She went there.”

And there was a blue star, brighter than all the others, rising above the eastern rim of the bowl, directly in line with the Vagina of the World.

“She’s decelerating,” Maggie Barnes told them over the comm. as they gathered for the night in the Longhouse of the Nayanmars. The building was decorated for the festival in banners and icons. And one of the bronze statues had been rolled into the building with them. The second-oldest, they had been told.

“No,” the captain continued, “I don’t know what kind of engines she’s using, but they ain’t what we use. She’s a-coming our way at a fair clip. D.Z. says she has a two-year period relative to Enjrun’s year and reaches conjunction at northern hemisphere spring.”

“That fits. We think the harper’s mother tracked down the object and rendezvoused with it—it’s some sort of old Commonwealth tech—”

“We ain’t stupid, Fudir. And I gotta say if it pans out, yer high-handed arrogance commandeering my ship may just damn-well pay for itself five times over.”

“Short of what the Kennel will want kept confidential. Send the boat down for us in the morning, after the festival.” He glanced at Méarana, who nodded. There was no urgency to the rendezvous, and it hurt nothing to be polite to their hosts.

The others were already bedded down, although Teodorq sat on his bedding against the wall with his nine in an open scabbard and Goodhandlingblade across his lap. “They seem friendly enough,” Donovan told him.

The Wildman shrugged. “Then I lose a few hours’ sleep before Paulie spells me. I’d rather be cautious and wrong than careless and wrong.”

A bench ran along the inside walls of the longhouse and Donovan sat beside Teodorq. “You know, Teddy, I had my doubts at first; but you’ve been a good man to have. The way you handled those Harp warriors showed good judgment as well as bravery.”

“Yeah. I’m good. It’s what we call counting coup back home. The law of least effort. The real bitch is when yuh have to kill a friend. That’s hard.”

“Yes,” the scarred man said after a moment, “I guess it is. But I know one thing harder.”

“What’s that?”

“Betraying a friend.”

The Wildman thought about that for a while. “But sometimes yuh wind up on the other side. Like Arjuna or Cu Chulainn—the Original Hound from way back when. Then yuh got it to do. I’m gonna hate like hell to kill Paulie. He’s been okay, and that was a good trick, cutting the arrow in midair.”

“I don’t understand. Is it that old blood feud between plainsmen and mountaineers?”

Teodorq shrugged. ‘Yuh best get yer sleep, boss. Big party tomorrow.”

Méarana, too, was wakeful, and Donovan went to stand beside her in the doorway of the longhouse, where the blue star was already perceptibly brighter. “End in sight,” he said.

The harper nodded, but said nothing.

“Afraid what you’ll find?”

She crossed her arms and shivered; and Donovan laid his arm around her shoulders. “Maybe you and I, we’ll complete what she started,” he said.

“I don’t care about old Commonwealth tech. Oh, I suppose it’s important, but…”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

“Oh.” Méarana leaned against him. “Did you ever want something when you were a child, something you wanted so badly but never had, and you wanted it all the more for not having it?”

Donovan could not remember his childhood; but he said Yes because it sounded right.

“There was nothing special about her leaving, Father. Just a note. ‘Back soon.’ It should have been more. She should have said something more.”

“You never know when it’s the last time. No one ever knows. First times, though. That’s different. You called me ‘Father.’”

She leaned closer. “I was never sure before that I wanted to.”

“You almost did, a couple of times. At first, I was afraid that you would. Later, I was afraid that you wouldn’t.”

“I guess this is the time when I go all warm and gooey.”

Donovan laughed and, unlike the laugh of the scarred man, it was a pleasant one to hear. He kissed her on the forehead, and said, “I told you once that I’d always hoped something good had come out of the Dancer affair. I’m glad something did.”

The Sleuth was shaking him awake. Donovan! Fudir! Brute! We have trouble!

Groggy, he opened his eyes a slit. Red dawn was stealing through the open windows. “What is it?”

The old headman said, “We take our most precious treasures and place them in the Vagina of the World to be consumed by his love.”

That means to be incinerated by the power beam.

“Yeah, yeah. And…?”

Chain assured us that the Oorah consider a guest as their “most precious treasure.”

That means…

“Oh, shit.”

“And exceptionally deep, too,” said the Fudir.

«The door is the only way out of the longhouse. The stairs up through the terraces are a maze. We are seven to several thousand.»

“Will they use force?”

For a god of this sort? Of course.

“Armament?”

Billy and us got dazers, both fully charged. Teddy’s nine. Méarana has a pellet gun, and Sofwari has the needier, if he ain’t lost that, too. Knives, each of us. Méarana has three, two in the baggage. Paulie and Teddy have longswords. Watershanks has a knife, but nothing else.

“And all that against several thousand?”

A hefty fee for the ferryman; but otherwise, not a chance.

Donovan closed his eyes….and sees a young girl in a chiton. “There is a way out of this,” she tells him, and her voice is like a melody.

The headman came shortly after the second morning hour. He was accompanied by flower girls strewing their path with spring petals, by a musician playing a morning rag, and by several very large acolytes.

Méarana told him, through Donovan, that she wished to dedicate her most precious treasure to the god: her harp. Teddy agreed and named his best sword. No one else admitted possessing a most precious treasure—Donovan had one, but he was not about to sacrifice her—but they agreed to accompany their friends down to the pile of offerings. And so, flanked by the flower girls—and the large acolytes—and followed by the musician, all of them singing in harmony, they set off in a procession to the path that led down from the longhouse.

Teddy and Paulie were also singing, in their own languages, a jarring dissonance. What words Donovan caught sounded bawdy, but given how the Oorah had conceptualized the power beam, somehow appropriate.

The musician had an instrument that Donovan knew as a steel guitar, but was known here as an ishtar. He played the rag in alap—slow and improvisational—adding each new note of the scale at the right time. The Pedant reminded him that an alap could meander for hours and the Sleuth wondered if that meant they had lots of time. “We don’t know when he started playing,” the Fudir reminded them.

When they reached the base of the path, the ishtarist upped his tempo to jor and a tabla man walking beside him added rhythm. Donovan told his companion in Gaelactic, “When he ups his tempo again to jhala, things will start to happen, fast.”

Donovan could see the statues of all sixty-three saints. The Sleuth told him that these must be the statues of earlier sacrifices. With each new pass of the god, the oldest-but-one of the statues was retired, melted down, and recast in the image of the latest sacrifice.

Their own children. Sometimes, an elder. No wonder they welcome guests.

“Thank the gods,” said the Fudir, “that she came in the wrong season.”

Bavyo must have known; and so had Chain, but Donovan wasted no breath cursing them. The Emrikii had likely interpreted their eagerness to find Oor as a willingness to be sacrificed. It may have saved an outlying farmstead from a bloody mesa-top raid.

The offering pile was large, but given the size of the ring-village, not terribly so. Donovan was reminded of the sacrifices to Newton he had witnessed, in which a bull was dropped from a leaning tower to smash on the flagstones below or—in more humane settings—was felled by a weight smashing his skull. (It was important only that gravity killed the beast.) The offal and tripe were burned to the god; but the tasty meat—the rump, the flank, the loins—were butchered and distributed to the poor in the temple’s district. So a child of Oor might offer a beloved toy—but one that was worn out after much play.

A mongrel dog had been pegged into the ground by its leash. Seeing the harper’s distress, Teddy turned and cried out for Donovan to translate, “I dedicate this sword, Goodhandlingblade, to the god!” Under his breath, he added, “to the Chooser of the Slain.” Then he tried to stab it into the earth. In doing so, he accidently severed the dog’s leash, and the animal, sensing its freedom, tore immediately from the bowl.

The crowd murmured, trying to understand whether this was a good omen or not. Teodroq tried to look sheepish.

Then the priest looked up at the sun and barked an order and the well-wishing crowd turned to file out of the bowl. Watershanks cried out and ran after the dog. To catch him and bring him back? The priest knew better; and likely he had seen such last-minute changes of heart by previous volunteers. He signaled to one of his acolytes, who sped after Water-shanks, caught him easily, and struck him on the side of his head with an obsidian-edged club. The riverman fell without uttering a sound. The acolyte checked him, then made an angry gesture, and left him lying there.

Donovan reached into his scrip and pressed a button on his comm. unit: 999 999 999. Méarana glanced at him, and he nodded. There was no mistake now. The Oorah intended them for kindling.

The lander from Blankets and Beads soared up and over the western rim of the mesa. It had come down quietly in the night and had been waiting in the wastelands for Donovan’s signal. It circled the bowl once, to get bearings, and to scatter the flower girls and the musicians. They cried out at this apparition and one of them called to Holy Fahbády, who had come and gone in just this sort of chariot.

“Remember what we agreed,” Donovan cautioned them. “One at a time up the ladder. Méarana first. Billy last.”

The musician had recovered his ishtar and he and the tabla man resumed the rag they had been playing, although they missed notes and beats now from nervous glances at the chariot. They backed away at jor tempo.

The priest stood a moment longer. Perhaps the chariot was intended as the most precious offering of all?

The craft settled to the ground and the hatch popped open almost immediately. Kid O’Daevs stuck his head out. “Move yO’ asses! Ten mintes to closest approach! Wild Bill takes off in five!”

They moved as one to the base of the ladder, and Sofwari helped Méarana onto the rungs even before it was fully extended.

The priest cried out and the burly acolytes rushed them. Teddy pulled his nine and shot the first. Paulie winged the second. Billy sprayed them with his dazer but, waving it back and forth as he did and not concentrating his fire, only numbed them.

It spread confusion, and that was enough. But the edge of the bowl was now lined with spearmen, who began to hurl their weapons. Paulie cleaved one spear as he had the arrow in the Roaring Gorge, and Teddy matched the feat. Billy actually seized one out of the air and threw it back, though being on the low ground, he did not quite reach the astonished spearman on the rim. Donovan called to Paulie, who faded toward the ladder.

Then an Oorah on the rim put a pipe to his mouth and huffed.

A dart embedded itself in Teddy’s midriff. He looked down at it and said, “That can’t be good.”

It was not much of a dart, and by itself would have meant little damage. “Poison,” he called to the others. Then, “Paralytic. Hurry!”

Sacrifices who tried to run were better handled by paralyzing them than braining them with obsidian clubs. The poison would leave them alive for the holocaust.

Teddy looked around, saw Donovan and Paulie on the ladder and Billy scrambling onto the lowest rung. He said nothing about waiting one’s turn, but only gauged what time would be needed. The harper was helping Sofwari into the airlock. She looked up and their gazes met.

Teddy waved at her, then he bent and plucked Goodhandlingblade from the ground and sped after the retreating priest and his bodyguards. “Teodorq sunna Nagarajan of World!” he cried, waving the sword over his head and shooting left-handed at the spearmen on the rim. A second paralytic dart tagged him, but the adrenaline was flowing. “Teodorq Nagarajan of World! Remember me!”

The acolytes guarding the priests turned with their short-swords and bucklers, but Teddy dispatched them easily, for the battle-fury was on him. An upswipe to knock a buckler aside, then thrust, and one down; he converted his extraction into a backhand cut that severed the carotid artery of a second man. Two. Spin on the ball of the foot and hack the arm of the man trying to sneak around his left. Three. The others broke, and Teddy found his legs too heavy to chase them. The priest stood unmoving, facing him with no more than a hemlock sprig. Magic, he recognized, even powerful magic, though hemlock had no meaning on the plains of World. He sang his deathsong at the top of his lungs. Were three enough for an honor guard? He had not paused to count the men he had shot with his nine. Where was it now? Dropped when the clip ran out. His most precious treasure, left now as an offering for a god who was only some ancient broken machine, and not the true god at all.

A blowgun man toppled from the terrace. Teddy saw Billy in the mouth of the airlock, aiming with a two-handed grip on his dazer. Another shot, but the dazer did not have the range. “Run!” Billy called. “Run, you ignorant savage!”

But he could not make it back; nor could they reach him in the time remaining. Too many blowguns. Teddy saluted with his sword, converted smoothly into a swinging arc, and the priest’s head leapt from his shoulders in a fountain of blood.

Then his body was a block of wood, devoid of all feeling. He fell face-first onto the obsidian ground.

But he gripped his sword the proper way around, a last defiance. Being utterly numb by then, he never felt it slide in.

Kid O’Daevs reversed the gravity grid and the mesa fell away behind them. The pilot threw in a sharp lateral vector to get off the bull’s-eye, and none too soon, for the pile of offerings on the viewscreen burst into a great ball of flame. Superheated air wavered and grew purple, rose like a geyser, and the wind rushed in from the sides, buffeting the lander and calling up long-disused curses from her pilot.

Méarana did not watch. She sat buckled in her seat and wept.

Watershanks, she had hardly known; but Teddy had been with her for a long time and she had come to regard him as a shrewd and faithful retainer, with more bottom to him than she had at first perceived. And it was just possible that, had he not drawn all attention to himself with his wild charge, the paralytic darts would have dropped them off the ladder like so many senseless mannequins.

Her first impulse was to order the lander to go back and destroy the village. Teddy believed that a dying warrior required an escort of his slain to enter the mead hall, and why should the Oorah’s religion be honored and not Teddy’s?

But the lander was not a warship, and could do nothing but circle the village and scare everyone. Beside, how could she plead mercy for the hard and vengeance-minded children of the Roaring Gorge and not for the uncomprehending children of the Oorah Mesa?

And so she blamed Donovan. The lander had come down in the night. Could they not have made their way to it? So what if the night was unlit and the way out uncertain? So what if there were no place for the lander on the steep and forested slopes of the mesa? Or that Debly might have gotten separated from them while climbing down those slopes and, lacking a beacon, never-ever be found?

So in the end, she blamed herself. She had brought Teddy to this place, where he could die fighting savages. And it did not matter that he had taken a terrible pleasure in the dying.