Karlsarm loped well in among the buildings, with his staff and guards, before combat broke loose. He heard yells, crack of blasters, hiss of slugthrowers, snap of bowstrings, sharp bark of explosives, and grinned. For they came from the right direction, as did the sudden fire-flicker above the roofs. The airport was first struck. Could it be seized in time, no dragons would fly.
Selene light had drenched and drowned pavement luminosity. Now windows were springing to life throughout the town. Karlsarm’s group broke into a run. The on-duty militiamen, barracked at the airport, were few.
Wolf’s detachment should be able to handle them in the course of grabbing vehicles and that missile emplacement which Terran engineers had lately installed. But Domkirk was filled with other men, and some of them kept arms at home. Let them boil out and get organized, and the result would be slaughterous. But they couldn’t organize without communications, and the electronic center of the municipality was in the new skyscraper.
A door opened, in the flat front of an apartment house. A citizen stood outlined against the lobby behind, pajama-clad, querulous at being roused. “What the hell d’you think—”
Light spilled across Karlsarm. The Domkirker saw: a man in bast and leather, crossbow in hands, crossbelts sagging with edged weapons; a big muscular body, weatherbeaten countenance, an emblem of authority which was not a decent insigne but the skull and skin of a catavray crowning that wild head. “Savages!” the Domkirker shrieked. His voice went eunuch high with panic.
Before he had finished the word, the score of invaders were gone from his sight. More and more keening lifted, under a gathering battle racket. It suited Karlsarm. Terrified folk were no danger to him.
When he emerged in the cathedral square, he found that not every mind in town had stampeded.
The church loomed opposite, overtopping the shops which otherwise ringed the plaza. For they were darkened and were, in any event, things that might have been seen anywhere in the Empire. But the bishop’s seat was raised two centuries ago, in a style already ancient. It was all colored vitryl, panes that formed one enormous many-faceted jewel, so that by day the interior was nothing except radiances—and even by moonlight, the outside flashed and dim spectra played. Karlsarm had small chance to admire. Flames stabbed and bullets sang. He led a retreat back around the corner of another building.
“Somebody’s got together,” Link o’ the Cragland muttered superfluously. “Think we can bypass them?”
Karlsarm squinted. The skyscraper poked above the cathedral, two blocks farther on. But whoever commanded this plaza would soon isolate the entire area, once enough men had rallied to him. “We’d better clean them out right away,” he decided. “Quick, intelligencers!”
“Aye.” Noach unslung the box on his shoulder, set it down, talked into its ventholes and opened the lid. Lithe little shapes jumped forth and ran soundlessly off among the shadows. They were soon back. Noach chittered with them and reported: “Two strong squads, one in the righthand street, one in the left. Doorways, walls, plenty of cover. Radiocoms, I think. The commanders talk at their own wrists, anyhow, and we can’t jam short-range transmissions, can we? If we have to handle long-range ones too? Other men keep coming to join them. A team just brought what I suppose must be a tripod blastgun.”
Karlsarm rephrased the information in bird language and sent messengers off, one to a chief of infantry, one to the monitors.
The latter arrived first, as proper tactics dictated. The beasts—half a dozen of them, scaled and scuted crocodilian shapes, each as big as two buffalo—were not proof against Imperial-type guns. Nothing was. And being stupid, they were inflexible; you gave them their orders and hoped you had aimed them right, because that was that. But they were hard to kill… and terrifying if you had never met them before. The blast-gunners unleashed a single ill-direCted thunderbolt and fled. About half the group barricaded themselves in a warehouse. The monitors battered down the wall, and the defenders yielded.
Meanwhile the Upwoods infantry dealt with the opposition in the other street. Knifemen could not very well rush riflemen. However, bowmen could pin them down until the monitors got around to them, after which a melee occurred, and everyone fought hand-to-hand anyway. A more elegant solution existed but doctrine stood, to hold secret weapons in reserve. The monitors were expendable, there being no way to evacuate crea: tures that long and heavy.
Karlsarm himself had already proceeded to capture the skyscraper and establish headquarters. From the top floor, he had an overview of the entire town. It made him nervous to be enclosed in lifeless plastic, and he had a couple of the big windows knocked out. Grenades were needed to break the vitryl. So his technicians manning the communication panels, a few floors down, must en—dure being caged.
A messenger blew in from the night and fluted: “The field of dragons has been taken, likewise a fortress wherein our people were captive—”
Karlsarm’s heart knocked. “Let Mistress Evagail come to me.”
Waiting, he was greatly busied. Reports, queries, suggestions, crisis; directives, answers, decisions, actions. The streets were a phosphor web, out to the icy moon-lands, but most of the buildings hulked lightless again, terror drawn back into itself. Sporadic fire flared, the brief sounds of clash drifted faintly to him. The air grew colder.
When Evagail entered, he needed an instant to disengage his mind and recognize her. They had stripped her. They had stripped off her buckskins and gold furs, swathed the supple height of her in a—shapeless prison gown; and a bandage still hid most of the ruddy-coiled hair. But then she laughed at him, eyes and mouth alive with an old joy, and he leaped across a desk to seize her.
“Did they hurt you?” he finally got the courage to ask.
“No, except for this battle wound, and it isn’t much,” she said. “They did threaten us with a… what’s the thing called?… a hypnoprobe, when we wouldn’t talk. Just as well you came when you did, loveling.”
His tone shook: “Better than well. If that horror isn’t used exactly right, it cracks apart both reason and soul.”
“You forget I have my Skill,” she said grimly.
He nodded. That was one reason why he had launched his campaign earlier than planned: not only for her sake, but for fear that the Cities would learn what she was. She might not have succeeded in escaping or in forcing her guards to slay her, ‘before the hypnoprobe vibrations took over her brain.
She should never have accompanied that raid on Falconsward Valley. It was nothing but a demonstration, a. test… militarily speaking. Emotionally, though, it had been a lashing back at an outrage committed upon the land. Evagail had insisted on practicing the combat use of her Skill; but her true reason was that she wanted to avenge the flowers. Karlsann wielded no authority to stop her. He was a friend, occasionally a lover, some day perhaps to father her children; but was not any woman as free as any man? He was the war chief of Upwoods; but was not any Mistress of a Skill necessarily independent of chiefs?
Though a failure, the attack had not been a fiasco. Going into action for the first time, and meeting a cruel surprise, the outbackers had nonetheless conducted themselves well and retreated in good order. It was sheer evil fortune that Evagail was knocked out by a grazing bullet before she had summoned her powers.
“Well, we got you here in time,” Karisarm said. “I’m glad.” Later he would make a ballad about his gladness. “How stands your enterprise?”
“We grip the place, barring a few holdouts. I don’t know if we managed to jam every outgoing message. Mistress Persa’s buzzerwave bugs could have missed a transmitter or two. And surely our folk now handling the comcenter can’t long maintain the pretense of being ordinary, undisturbed Domkirkers. No aircraft have showed thus far. Better not delay any more than we must, though. So we ought to clear out the population—and nobody’s stirred from their, miserable dens!”