Dies the Fire (81 page)

“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.

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 hind-brain. When he thought about what he was going to do next, his sphincter got into the action.

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. Trebuchet 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:

 

 

 

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.

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.

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 theatres 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.