Warlord (27 page)

"Back one step and volley!"

Other voices around the circle took it up, and the formation was beginning to look something like a square as leaders took over, pushing men into line. Suzette and two walking wounded troopers were heaving others too damaged to fight over spare dogs and dodging through the snarling chaos at the center of the formation to snap bridles onto leading lines. A half-dozen figures in the dull-crimson jellabas went down all at once; Foley led his augmented group back into the circle after delivering a point-blank load into the backs of the Arabs between them and their comrades. Raj could see the Colonist officers calling their men back, literally flogging them out of range with their nine-thonged whips. They clumped and rode to the banners of their units, into the dead ground where the cannister could not reach. Comparative silence fell; everyone who could walk or crawl had joined the little group around the standard.

"Keep moving," Raj shouted; it sounded as much a hoarse croak. "Hold your fire!" Tewfik wasted no time; a young Colonist with a white flag rode up on a beautiful snow-white wolfhound. It
had
been snow-white; now it was speckled with red, and the herald's drawn sword was red to the elbow.

"You can do nothing," he said, in excellent court Sponglish. "My lord the amir, commander of the Forces of the South, Ghazi of the Faith, offers terms of surrender to brave men. You are outnumbered, surrounded, have no water, no supplies, no place to go—"

Raj waited for the men to answer; they did, without delay:

"Go fuck yerself, raghead!"

A flourished bayonet. "Come an' sit yer wog arse on this, pimp!"

"Up the 5th—Descott ferever!"

"Spirit of Man! Spirit of Man!"

From most, a wordless growl that was matched by the riderless dogs in the center. "Keep moving!" Raj said again; he risked a quick drink from the canteen, capped it again. None of the Colonist forces had dispersed, and the two remaining pompoms were out of the line of fire; the Civil Government fugitives in sight were noticeably fewer. A flurry of orders from Tewfik's command post, just out of effective rifle range, and a block of about four hundred formed up and trotted north, giving his group a wide berth.

Raj felt his lips skin back from his teeth. "Tell Tewfik that if he thinks he can overrun us, he's welcome to try," he said. "How many men did he lose today? Twice what we did? Three times? How much burnt-out frontier does he have to hold? And every minute he watches us, more of our comrades escape. Let him come; don't be shy, we'll see to his other eye for him."

The herald bowed and reined about; the wolfhound seemed to float over the baked gravel like a mirage of snow.

"I love you," Suzette said quietly, pulling up beside him.

"I love you, too," Raj replied. "I just wish we'd had longer to do it in." He looked north, to Komar, a week's travel away and as impossibly far as Terra the lost and sacred.

"Let's go, dog-brothers," he said. "Every second man, mount. Keep it ready to about face. At a walk,
march
."

"Ser."

"
Hunnha
!"
Raj sprang erect, throwing aside a blanket he didn't remember pulling over himself.

"Ser, we're here." M'lewis' voice had a lisp to it now, with most of his front teeth missing. A thick cup of kave steamed in his hands. Raj took it, trying to stop the tremors in his own.

"I was back in the desert," he said, more to himself than anyone else. Most of the other fifteen figures scattered around the lounge of the steamboat
Orbital Paradise
were as unconscious as he had been a moment ago. All were as filthy-shaggy, uniforms caked and stained until the original color was undetectable. "On the retreat, the third night, when they tried to overrun us again, and the gun blew up, you know. I was back there."

"We're
here
,
ser," M'lewis repeated patiently.

Raj took three careful deep breaths, and a sip of the kave; it had plum brandy in it, and the combination hit the acid tension in his stomach hard enough to make him gasp. The others were beginning to stir, as the city noise penetrated the shuttered windows; Suzette slept on, looking absurdly young curled on the cushions beneath a window. Then the steam whistle cut loose above their heads, and every single one of them rolled upright with a weapon in their hands, crouched and ready. The steamboat's captain had not objected to their commandeering the upper salon, not more than once, at least.

And
none
of them was going to be able to sleep without their rifles by their sides, not for a long time.

"Arrg," Foley said. "I feel worse than I did when we got
on
this tub."

True enough
,
Raj thought dully. When you were riding fast you didn't have time to think. The whistle roared again; they were well past the cut where the docking canal took off from the Hemmar and passed through the thick water-gates of East Residence. The
Orbital Paradise
was a hundred feet long and half as wide, a shallow-draft hull just big enough to carry the engines that wheezed and chuffed beneath them, with a superstructure like a rectangular wedding cake topped by the twin smokestacks. The paddle wheel at the rear churned into reverse as they slid into the dock, nudging into the rope buffers.

The quays were as crowded as usual, all except this one. A troop of heavy cavalry waited, down where the crewmen were manhandling the gangplank across to the pavement and looping thigh-thick ropes to the bollards; men in the uniform of Vernier's Own. Twenty men on powerful Newfoundlands, in black uniforms and gauntlets, burnished black steel breastplates, helmets topped with black jersauroid plumes. All of them were leading extra dogs, ready-saddled.

The lieutenant of the escort saluted and began a speech of some sort as Raj and his Companions clattered down the gangplank; he stopped in mid-word as they walked past him without pausing.

"My, ain't they purty," M'lewis lisped, as the Descotters swung into the saddle with graceless ease.

"Barholm wanted me soonest," Raj said. "Probably for the frying post. Let's not keep the executioner waiting, shall we?"

"Out! Useless sluts, halfwits, out,
out
!"
barked Anne, Lady Clerett. She was dressed in pale cream with black trim, the colors of mourning, and she swept forward toward her friend with arms outstretched. "No, wait, you, fetch refreshments, prepare the baths, fetch clothing for Lady Whitehall. Well, don't stand there gaping, go!" The slavegirls fled in a twitter of voices and fabric.

"Oh, Anne," Suzette mumbled, letting herself slump forward. Her carbine thumped to the floor and the Hammamet carpet as she rested her head on the other woman's shoulder and let the strong maternal hug support her weariness. But business could not wait more than moments.

"I'm filthy, I've got fleas, your dress," she said, as Anne guided her to a chair. A flash of acute embarrassment at her state went over her; the room was not large, but it was roofed in pale yellow glass and walled with
torofib
silk printed in delicate patterns of reeds and lotus and jewel-scaled marsh sauroids. Cool air sighed up through cast-bronze grills in the floor, driven by steam-powered fans in the vaults far below. Nobody could say that Anne used her position with new-rich showiness; she had set herself to learn an aristocrat's version of good taste with the same fierce determination she used on any other task she undertook. A good deal of it had been tutoring by her friend Suzette, Missa Wenqui as she had been then . . . 

"Here, sweet," Anne said, hard triumph in her voice, as she pushed a silver frame across the inistaria table between them. "You've got just time to read this, then a bite and a shower and my masseur and a full dress-up."

Suzette blinked crusted, red-rimmed eyes down at the frame. It was the letter she had sent from Komar, but annotated in vermilion ink, a man's blocky writing. By the end of the missive the pen had been pressed hard enough to tear the paper.

"My husband was so interested," Anne said. "And Chancellor Tzetzas was . . . horrified at what his subordinates had done in his name." A lazy cat-smile. "So horrified that he signed over every inch of land and scrap of personal property in the County of Komar to the Vice-Governor." Her fingernails pressed the inlays of the table. "He's too useful
 . . . 
Barholm thinks he's too useful . . . to dispose of now. And Suzie—" the long-fingered hands closed on hers "—your man certainly came out of this better than anyone else. Better than that fool Stanson, who seems to have done nothing more than get half his behind shot off. Which should make him twice as stupid."

"I missed," Suzette mumbled, fatigue-poisons blurring her eyes.

"What was that?" Anne looked up sharply.

"I said, he won't be missed," she replied more clearly. A thought made her blink at Anne's mourning clothes. "Someone's died?" she asked.

"Someone's going to, my dear. Someone's going to."

Raj felt himself toppling forward off the bench and jerked himself upright again. He was attracting a few glances, here in the Star Chamber, but less than might be expected; theological controversy was the city's pride and sport, and there was plenty of it here. The great round chamber was filled to capacity with Hierarchs, Sysups, Analysts, Grammers, Church dignitaries of every type and variety from all over the Civil Government; there were even representatives of the Central and Western Territories Sysuprics, in old-fashioned vestments and talking with Spajol accents. Many of them looked a little uneasy, since the Spirit of Man of This Earth was the state cult in the areas ruled by the Military Governments, and the Orthodox from those lands were not used to operating so openly.

Barholm sat behind him, on a throne that had risen soundlessly to head-height on a hydraulic column; he was in full vestments as Supreme Pontiff, strictly speaking the Governor's prerogative, resting his chin on one fist. The light through the Star-shaped skylight in the domed ceiling cast a hard glitter on the jewels and metallic thread in his robes, the gold and ebony of the chair.

"And it says clearly in the Canonical Handbook," the speaker at the podium in the center of the room was droning, "that the greater set subsumes the lesser, the metaphysical implications of this being, firstly, that all subroutines are necessary but not sufficient to the operation of the code, and secondly, that an operational subroutine may therefore be treated as a virtual entity in, though not obviously for or by, itself. Thus if—as I hold Orthodox doctrine to state—the Spirit of Man of the Stars is the Spirit governing
all
stars, and since the Star of This Earth is unquestionably a Star, and since This Earth is unquestionably in orbit around that Star and therefore under the celestial influence and governance of that Star, then the Spirit of Man of This Earth—" there was an audible gasp at the mention of the deity of the western heretics who ruled in the
barbaricum
and lost territories "—is actually no more than a facet of the Spirit of Man of the Stars!"

"
Heresy
!"
Shouts of outrage from the sloping tiers of seats. The speaker was a Regional Sysup from Ayzof, a town on the northeastern shore of Pierson's Sea; she was in full cannonicals, silver jumpsuit and overrobe, and headdress with wire-rimmed glasses and Starburst over her head. "
Heresy
!"
A
claque of Renunciate Nun abbesses in the upper tiers tried to start a chant:
Dig up her bones! Dig up her bones
!

"Silence!" Barholm thundered. "This is a meeting of the rulers of Holy Federation Church, not a street riot!" Monastic guards trotted around the pathway behind the upper seats and pushed or clubbed the white-suited abbesses back into their seats. It was a minute before the buzz of conversation died down; Barholm's own aides on the bench beside Raj were engaged in a heated if whispered debate, arguing the use of the archaic plural in the Cannonical Handbook's terminology for "Star."

"—and therefore," the Regional Sysup was continuing doggedly, reading from the notes on the lectern before her, "the This Earth Spiritists are, though they know it not, neither heretics nor pagans such as Christos or Jews or Muslims, but rather children of Holy Federation Church
in schism from ecclesiastical authority only
,
and therefore ripe for reunion." She touched her amulet, a commo unit of venerable age, the cracks in its synthetic housing inlaid with precious metals. "Endfile."

"Endfile," the assembled clergy murmured.

"The Chair logson the Honorable Sysup-Representative of the Priest of the Residential parish," Barholm intoned. The man who took the podium next was tall and lanky, with a nasal Western accent to his archaic book-learned Sponglish; the representative of the Priest of the
old
Residence, second only to the Governor in the formal hierarchy of the Church, but under the political control of the Earth Spiritist barbarians of the Brigade.

"Waaal," he drawled. "Thissehere argument is interestin', but I cain't rightly say it means much. Because whether or not
we
think the Brigaders is heretics, they surely does think
we is
heretics, and won't nohow reenter communion with Holy Federation Church. Unless you planning to whup them." Barholm tensed, then relaxed fractionally. "Endfile."

"Endfile," the crowd murmured, sounding disappointed at the pithy brevity.

Raj remembered an ancient chronicle he had read, of a previous synod: a Sysup from the provinces had said, In East Residence, if you ask a baker for bread he will tell you that the Spirit proceeds from the Stars; if you inquire of the bath attendant whether the water is hot, she will reply that the Spirit proceeds from the Man of the Stars.

since you are in communion with me, and i am representative of the federation, does this not make you the avatar of the spirit? 
 

Raj clutched at his amulet, imagining himself rising and speaking to the assembled hierarchs. He shuddered, feeling a nausea-panic almost as great as the one he had felt when Tewfik's squadrons charged home into the Valley of Death.
Bad enough to be the Sword of the Spirit, and a piss-poor job I've been doing of that—