She could move her eyes and blink and swallow; nothing else. Her bladder had emptied, and if she had had anything to eat for the last few days her bowels would have voided. Her heart spasmed, beating quickly and irregularly. Her breathing was shallow, uncontrollable. She had a view forward across the snow-covered stone square to the low circular wall and the dark-on-white chevrons of a forested mountain beyond.
She felt the stones beneath the snow ring to hoofbeats like a drum-roll and glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye.
There was a scream and a terrible tearing noise, then great hooves pounded past; a pair of camouflage-clothed legs kicked and struggled in the air in front of the flashing hooves, and then the scream gurgled to nothing.
She closed her eyes.
There was a single loud shot and then a ragged thump a few metres away. She opened her eyes to see the black back and haunches of the great beast fall heavily to the snow. A single, jacketed arm flopped into the snow beyond the head of the animal.
A sial. One of the things they raced in Tile, with criminals’ brains emplaced. She stared at the arm lying loose on the snow, and saw movement. She watched the fingers clench, then slowly unfold and go limp.
The sial’s hide steamed gently in the cool air. She could see blood on the snow, where the animal had passed in front of her.
She waited. The paralysis went on. Then she heard the squeaking, cramping sounds of somebody walking towards her across the snow. Two sets of footsteps.
Two identical pairs of boots came into view; one pair went over to the fallen sial. She could see the person wearing them up to about mid-thigh level; he was standing near Miz’s motionless arm. The butt of a large hunting rifle was lowered to rest on the snow. She could hear other footsteps, but only those two pairs of boots were visible. The pair in front of her tilted as the person wearing them squatted. She saw knees, then a pair of clasped hands, held in front of a smart uniform jacket the colour of dried blood and decorated with insignia she didn’t recognise; then a face.
The young man pushed the cap back from his blond-browed, gleaming face, revealing a bald scalp. He favoured her with an enormously wide smile.
“Why, Lady Sharrow!” he exclaimed. “Fancy meeting you here!” He glanced over to where his twin was also squatting down, still holding the hunting rifle and studying the dead animal.
The one with the rifle saw her looking at him and waved cheerily. He lifted the limp arm lying on the snow in front of him, and made that wave too.
Miz’s hand was made to flop up and down. Tears came to Sharrow’s eyes.
The young man said, “Yes, and you brought some of your little friends with you. How chummy. What a pity Mister Kuma seems to have taken all our criticism to heart!”
He laughed, and then she felt herself lifted up by the armpits until she was half-resting on her knees. The young man stood behind, holding her.
“Oh, look,” he said. “Isn’t that a shame.” He tickled her under the armpits. “But Molgarin will be pleased.”
Molgarin, she thought groggily. Molgarin; that means some-thing; that was what I was trying to remember. Molgarin…
She looked over the bulging, still-steaming corpse of the dead sial to where Miz lay sprawled on the snow, joined to it.
The sial had had some sort of great metal spike secured to its head by a collar fitted round its neck and head. The spike was a metre and a half long and perhaps ten centimetres thick at its base. The artificial horn had pierced Miz through the chest; it protruded from the back of his hunting jacket for nearly a metre. The snow around him was bright with blood. His face looked like Roa’s had; slightly surprised.
The tears welled in her eyes. Then the young man let her down and laid her carefully on her back. She had time to see camouflage-suited men with guns slung over their shoulders coming out of the tower’s door carrying boxes, and glimpsed two dark, fatly sleek shapes approaching through the air above the valley; as she saw them they slowed and dropped and she heard the sound of their jets.
As soon as her back pressed into the snow her tongue started to slip down her throat, but then the young man turned her over on her side and she could breathe again.
“Don’t go away, now,” she heard him say. His footsteps sounded in the snow, fading behind her.
He had lain her down where she could see Miz’s face. She wanted to look at it for just a little longer.
Then the one squatting by Miz took out a long viblade knife and put it to his neck. She closed her eyes.
When the humming noise stopped and a few more seconds had passed, she opened her eyes again to see the second young man walk past her, carrying a bag.
The noise of the jets was suddenly very close. Their engines shrieked and a great bustling, tumbling cloud of dusty white rolled across the stone square.
Miz’s beheaded body leaked blood onto the snow.
Her tears trickled onto the snow, too. The paralysis meant that she couldn’t sob.
They put her on a stretcher and carried her towards the bomb-hold of one of the two heavy VTOL bombers, along with their loot from the tower and the equally paralysed body of Feril.
She was still lying on her side when they carried her across the square, so she was the first to see Dloan sitting at the edge of the trees not far from where she, Miz and the android had emerged a quarter of an hour earlier.
Dloan sat observing the scene, out in the open where he was easily visible and apparently unarmed. Even from that distance she thought she saw in the way he sat there, in his posture and bearing, something hopeless and terrified and alone.
She watched him watching them all, with no tears left to cry.
Somebody saw Dloan; she heard shouts. Guns were turned towards him. Dloan stood slowly, as though weary. He took something from his pocket and aimed deliberately at the men on the stone square.
He didn’t have to fire; Sharrow heard projectile rifles and lasers crack and snap all around her, and she saw Dloan jerk and shake and fall in a small storm of kicked-up flurrying snow.
The firing stopped quickly and he lay still.
They carried her into the belly of the great dark aircraft.
23 All Castles Made Of Sand
“Of course, I personally-the two of us-bore Mister Kuma no personal ill-will. But you know how it is; orders are orders, eh? Shame about the old Solipsists, too, but such is life; they got involved beyond their depth. We only hired them to attack the Land Car but then they went and got ideas about beating you to the Gun. They should have backed out when they were told to. But, hey, there I go; I don’t want to anticipate whatever Molgarin may choose to tell you. That’s where we’re heading now, my lady, to Molgarin’s Keep in the cold desert beyond the Embargoed Areas, in Lantskaar!” he said, pronouncing the word with a kind of hammy relish. “Exciting, isn’t it?”
There were sixteen people secured within the brightly lit bomb-hold of the leading bomber, strapped tightly against its walls in bucket seats: Sharrow, Feril, the two identical young emissaries in their smart red-brown uniforms and twelve effi-ciently anonymous men in blanked camouflage suits, mostly armed with lasers and micro rifles. One carried a stun rifle; presumably that was what they had turned on her. She could see properly only because she was so tightly strapped in, her head held back against the bulkhead behind her by a harness. This was not a special security measure for her; the rest of the hold’s passengers were similarly tied down. Only she and Feril did not have a quick-release handle clenched in their hands.