“I can leave my body with you as surety and still guide the raiders. I will project my spirit so that they can see it, and hear my thoughts. Ram has misgivings, because once our warriors are aboard the Alpha, they could take it over if they decided to, and your people with it. But if I’m with you in the Beta, then I am his hostage.”
It all sounded strange to Willi, regardless of which pinnace Nils was on. He’d heard how Nils was supposed to have escaped, and that he’d come down in the spirit to plan with the Northmen, but that didn’t make it feel real. On the other hand it didn’t distress him. Willi was a very practical engineer; his ultimate criterion was not how well something fitted his pre-existing notions, or its explainability. It was its workability that counted. And this blind man, by whatever means, had escaped a guarded dungeon.
“Ivan,” he said into the radio, “come over and be ready to take on the troops. Nils will stay with me, but he says he’ll still be able to guide you.”
There was a pause. “Huh! Well, I guess that’s not much weirder than if he was here with me, considering… How’s he going to manage that? I’m no telepath.”
“You’ll have to wait and see, I guess. He seems totally confident about it. Captain Uithoudt, have you followed this transmission?”
“Affirmative. What was that about Nils staying with you?”
“He says you’ll feel better having him in our control when his warriors are occupying Alpha with some of our people.”
Ram grunted. He had felt concern, but he wasn’t sure how much this relieved it. “All right,” he said. “Just make sure you are in control.”
Of one thing Ram was certain. He was committed, done with waiting, and he wasn’t going to back down now.
When the two pinnaces had taken off, the Northman army began to move. They didn’t continue eastward however. Two platoons of warriors turned back in the direction they’d come from. The remainder, roughly eight hundred warriors and one thousand bowmen, divided into two equal forces. Half rode north, the other south.
XXV
The city appeared on the horizon and seemed to move toward them, spreading, the black tower dominant even at a distance, marking the palace. And now what? Ivan thought. He glanced at Charles DuBois sitting beside him, wiry, muscular, the perennial handgun champion at the Deep Harbor harvest games. Sidearms were belted to his waist now and the pockets of his mechanic’s coveralls bulged with grenades. The man’s hobby was guns and his reading was of war. Probably he’d regretted living on New Home instead of, say, twentieth-century Earth.
Ivan reduced their air speed as they approached the first rows of buildings, and suddenly he was aware of something between Charles and himself. The Northman knelt there, or seemed to, and on the other side of him-through him-he saw Charles staring narrowly.
“Go slower and circle the tower not far above the higher roofs,” Nils instructed. The voice was not a voice, Ivan realized; it spoke within his mind. He cut both speed and altitude and swung around the tower.
“Closer and slower. Then look down and watch for me.” And he was gone. Seconds later Ivan saw him atop a ventilator cap, and floated down beside it, not quite landing. Nils disappeared. Charles jumped out, hurriedly placed four small charges, and jumped back aboard. The pinnace veered away some seventy meters, there was a sharp blast, and the ventilator cap spun into the air, accompanied by shards of rock and pieces of mortar.
Quickly Ivan moved the pinnace back to the spot, landed, and activated the shield. Speed was important now. Charles was out again, with a collapsible tripod, and swiftly began setting it up, its pulley over the shaft opening. The six Northmen crouched in the pinnace, still grinning, waiting.
Nils was there again. “It’s not blocked,” he said, gesturing at the shaft. “They don’t know how I got out. The noise alarmed them just now in the guard room, but they don’t know what it was or what it means. I’ll go back down and distract the guard officer. The longer it is before they know what’s happening, the less chance they’ll have to bring in more soldiers.”
He disappeared again.
Charles pulled slender cable off a winch newly bolted to the pinnace deck. It had loops at five-meter intervals. “All right, out!” he said to Sten, who gestured to the other Northmen. Ivan knelt by the winch control and watched first Charles and then the Northmen start one by one down the shaft. The last two were still on top when orcs came streaming from a stairway onto the roof with swords drawn, charging the pinnace and ventilator. The first several crashed into the unseen shield as into a stone wall, falling back stunned. Those behind stopped short and stood uncertainly, their eyes shifting from the final disappearing Northman to the pinnace door, through which they could see the kneeling Ivan. Their leader spoke sharply. Two of his men trotted to the head of the open stairs and out of sight. Then he looked thoughtfully at the commast: Ivan moved to the panel and lowered it to safety.
At the bottom of the shaft, Charles crawled quickly into the narrow horizontal duct. Nils was waiting at the junction ahead and directed him into the branch that led to the guard room. The eyeless Northman was a pale light that illuminated nothing; the walls of the duct were as black as if he wasn’t there. When Charles had negotiated the turn and started toward the opening, he heard an angry voice ahead, with a tone of command.
“The guard captain is a telepath,” Nils whispered in his mind. “He’s sensed you; be ready. They’ll shoot arrows into the duct as soon as they see anything.”
A cold hand had gripped Charles’ gut as he crawled. Now it turned to a feeling of utter paralysis through which somehow he continued to crawl forward. The square of light ahead grew quickly until it was an opening almost within reach of his hand.
And almost miraculously the fear disappeared. Now he felt only calm and alert, quick and strong. He lay there long enough for the warriors to close up behind him, at the same time pulling a grenade from a pocket. Sten squeezed his foot. He pulled the pin, let the safety lever snap free, and deliberately counted to three before awkwardly tossing the grenade through the opening. An arrow zipped into the duct and rebounded, slicing his calf with its sharp-edged head, and there was an explosion in the guard room. Quickly, furiously, he scrambled head-first into the opening, and, without taking time to look or think, he rolled onto his back and pulled his upper body out with his hands. Sten grasped his feet and pushed, and in one spasmodic moment he was being lowered head-first, then dropped. The stone floor crashed into him, striking his extended hands, then his back, and he rolled to his knees beside a shattered orc, drawing his autopistol. An orc in a doorway was pulling his bowstring. Charles snapped a shot, and saw him fall as the arrow struck the high ceiling.
There was an instant’s silence, then a thud and a grunt and Sten rolled into him. Instantly the Northman was on his feet, reaching up to help the next man who was sliding out of the duct, back arched, like some grotesque steel-mailed myth birthing from a stone womb. A hurried arrow darted from the doorway, striking Sten’s steel cap and deflecting. Charles fired three more rounds, drew a second grenade, let the safety go, then fired another short burst as he rushed and pitched the grenade around the corner of the door. It roared, fragments whirred, and he darted in. There were cots and fallen men. One man was still on his feet against a wall, eyes and mouth wide, and he shot him down.
The key! He was supposed to get the key! Charles ran out again, saw an orc with a breastplate sprawled by the table, knelt, and shot off the ring that held the single large key to his belt.
There were shouts then, like voices in a well, words neither Anglic nor Scandinavian, and two of the Northmen ran past him into a short corridor toward the sound, swords in their hands. He started after them.