He nodded toward the wine slave.
“You’ve come for the girl, I suppose,” he said. “There she is. Take her.”
The lieutenant held his bow steady. “You get her, Kruso,” he said to the other man. The other man quickly moved over, put an hand on the slave girl’s arm, and pulled the wine pitcher toward him. He gently took it from her grasp, set it on a nearby pedestal that had been designed for such a purpose, the delivery of spent dishes. Then he pulled the girl toward himself and into his arm.
“Her ah gotten, Lieutenant,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Rostov shook his head. “Lieutenant,” he said. “That’s not a name. It’s a thing, like carpenter or potter. One who carries out the orders of others, and has no will of his own.”
“My name is Dashian,” the other replied.
“Dashian is the commander,” said Rostov. “You are a lieutenant, not a Dashian.”
“We’re leaving now,” the lieutenant said.
“And how will you do so?”
“Through the entrance,” said the other.
“Unlikely.”
“Maybe you are right,” said the lieutenant. He turned to the other Scout. “Ready, Kruso?”
“Aye, Lieutenant.”
“No!” shouted Gaspar. “You can’t go. Not like this. Not now.”
“Goodbye, Gaspar,” said the lieutenant.
“Take the boy,” Gaspar said. “You must!”
“You broke our deal.”
“Take him,” Gaspar pleaded. “He’s dead if you don’t.”
Dashian glanced quickly to the other, the one called Kruso. Kruso shook his head. “Na good, thet many toh carry,” he said.
Rostov began to laugh. “This is the chatter of walking corpses,” he said. “Wind over rocks. Nothing. Lower your bows.” He motioned to them impatiently, pointing downward with a finger. “Lower your bows and the slaves will die quickly, cleanly.”
“I saw the Schlusels,” said Dashian.
Rostov growled impatiently.
“Then you saw how this has to end. You will live, in a manner of speaking. I will trade you to your father,” he said. “Perhaps a little worse for wear, perhaps no longer quite the man you were. The others…well, I have my cousins to avenge, so I’m afraid I cannot promise to make it quick. This one”-he nodded toward Gaspar-“must watch the boy die, of course.”
Gaspar felt himself shaking. So much he had risked. Now to have it all yanked from his hands.
I’m a coward, after all, he thought. I do not want to watch him die. I would want to go before. I would beg to go before if I thought Rostov would listen.
“Enough,” said Dashian. Gaspar looked up, ready for the end to come. But the lieutenant was not speaking to Rostov. He was speaking to the other, the sergeant. “Kruso?”
Together they raised their bows and loosed the arrows. The string sang out and the arrows shot upward, toward the ceiling. Then past the ceiling and through the great venting hole at the very apex of the structure. Upward and out into daylight.
Rostov reached for the knife in his belt, ignoring the pistol stuffed in beside it. He was moving toward the boy.
I would beg, but he wouldn’t listen.
And then the sky began to rain arrows.
Split-awareness interpolation complete to ninety-three point two seven degrees of accuracy, said Center. The tracking and location purposes are served.My recommendation is that you return to single-channel awareness with extreme alacrity.
Hell, yes, said Abel. We’re here.
6
Abel and Rostov moved toward the boy at the same instant, but Abel got there first. Abel realized that this wasn’t because he was faster. No, the Blaskoye had moved to snatch not the boy, but the wooden platter which had moments before held a stack of meat.
A shield for arrows, thought Abel. He adapts quickly.
For a moment their eyes met, Abel’s and Rostov’s, and, though the other said nothing, Abel was as sure of the other’s thought as he was of the voices of Center and Raj. He was sure, because he had experienced exactly the same thought, and with it, a moment of complete understanding.
One day, I will kill you.
Then the Blaskoye snatched the wooden platter away, and Abel pulled the child toward himself.
He had brought twenty Scouts with him on the trail of Gaspar and, donning the Blaskoye garments they’d come prepared with, had entered the oasis encampment and managed to follow the Remlap chief though the settlement undetected. It had not been difficult to blend in, since Awul-alwaha had become a stew of heretofore opposed Redlander tribes. The tents were as varied as the dress. Even if the others had been declared Blaskoye or this new species of tribe, the Redlander, they had not gotten new clothing or new tent-cloth. So they had answered the summons of their new masters bringing what they possessed.
Trailing Gaspar had been difficult, but not the hardest tracking job he or the Scouts had undertaken by far. Like many Redlanders Abel encountered, Gaspar was not as good at fooling Scouts and covering his tracks as he believed himself to be. The desert took marks well, and, once written in scuffed ground or oddly broken twig, those telltales tended to last a long time. The Scouts had often used Redlander arrogance in this regard against them. Many others who had thought the soft Farmer Scouts incapable of tracking them had met their fates in surprised astonishment and disbelief. Abel’s greatest challenge had been finding a place to hold the donts, since he could not take them into the oasis proper. But Awul-alwaha had solved the problem for him, in a manner of speaking, for there were corrals already built ringing the encampment. These had probably been built by incoming warrior bands as temporary structures for donts and daks while they established more permanent quarters. Most were occupied, but some were vacant. Abel had left his Scouts’ donts in one of these. He tried to select the one closest in as possible. He’d left behind a guard of two to watch over them, and to keep them dressed and ready. He and the rest of the Scouts followed Gaspar into the encampment. Gaspar was feeling his way, moving slowly, and Abel and his men had not had any trouble catching up with him and shadowing him once again.
Then, when he’d seen the chief slash his way into the smaller tent attached to the enormous central tent, he’d known this was the final destination.
Abel’s two squads had scaled the sides of the structure from the outside, then infiltrated through the vents in the tent-cloth where roof met rounded tent walls. These vents had a curtain of fabric draping before them to discourage flitters and insectoids from getting in, and the flaps had concealed the Scouts stationed in the vent openings.
If they’d been noticed climbing the outside of the tent, no one had raised an alarm. Perhaps they were taken to be workers, repairing wind or sun damage. Perhaps this had been aided by the fact that each Scout had stopped and examined the ropes and stakes holding the tent erect just before they began their accent. Several of them were observed to have bent down to test the knots for weakness, one even producing a knife with which to probe the fibers of the rope here and there, no doubt for safety’s sake.
It helped that on the ascent, their muskets weren’t showing, although bows and arrows were. Abel had ordered them to cover the rifles strapped across their backs beneath their Blaskoye robes, and to arm themselves with bows and arrows when in position. He wanted repetitive firepower. Attempting to reload a musket muzzle while balancing on a bit of fabric was a task beyond even most Scouts.
Meanwhile Abel and Kruso had entered through the front door. When the doorguard questioned them, Kruso had put on his best South Redland’s accent and claimed they were Flanagans, the sea-coast scavengers feared by all in the Delta provinces, come in answer to the Blaskoye call to arms. Since no one had ever seen a Flanagan, they were shown through.