One of the other men leaned forward.
‘What happens if they start putting pressure on the rest of the boys?’
‘They’ll just have to take it. They knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic.’
The man nodded grimly. Bannion looked round at the others.
‘Any more questions?’
They all shook their heads. Bannion picked up his carbine.
‘Okay, let’s get going.’
Crawling flat on their stomachs, the five men slowly skirted the outside perimeter of the area covered by the remaining lights. They circled until they were facing the next side of the ziggurat. Bannion signalled for everyone to stop. The other four moved close to Bannion.
‘Are we going to move in from here, chief?’
Bannion stared intently at the ziggurat.
‘We’ll just wait a while. It’s weird. There somehow don’t seem to be enough guards round this place.’
‘You want more?’
‘It just don’t seem right that a place like this should be so lightly guarded.’
Bannion had no way of knowing about A.A. Catto’s purges. They waited and watched. As far as Bannion could see, there were no more than half a dozen guards along the whole side of the building. He was just about to give the order to move in, when the sound of a fire fight on the other side of the ziggurat suddenly doubled in volume. Men screamed, guns crashed deafeningly and the barrage of fuse tubes lit up the night. Ramirez looked anxiously at Bannion.
‘It sounds like our boys are getting creamed.’
‘That’s their problem. We got our own job to do.’
Ramirez didn’t answer. Bannion looked round at the rest of the squad. He pointed to where a bank of spotlights lit up the base of the black building.
‘We’ll move up to the edge of the light.’
Cautiously, they crawled forward, and then stopped again. Bannion rose to a crouch.
‘We’ll make for that third entrance. Don’t stop for anything. If anyone gets hit, they’re on their own.’
He rammed a new clip into his carbine.
‘Okay, go!’
They raced towards the ziggurat, firing from the hip as they ran. Two guards came out of an entrance. They were caught in a hail of bullets before they could raise their fuse tubes. Small arms opened up from the first level of the building. One of Bannion’s men went down. Without hesitating in their headlong rush, the remaining four blanketed the area with rapid fire. No more shots came from the upper level.
Bannion reached the wall of the ziggurat and flattened himself against it. He pulled a frag bomb from out of his jacket. He pulled the arming tag, tossed it through the arched doorway and threw himself back.
Debris erupted from the entrance. Bannion waited for the smoke to clear and then jumped inside. The three troopers followed. They found themselves in a long dark corridor. They hurried down it.
They came to a point where two corridors crossed each other. At the far end of the new corridor was a faint light. Bannion and his men ran towards it. As they came nearer, they saw it was illuminating a lone guard, who stood in front of what looked like the door to a lift shaft.
As he saw Bannion and his men running towards him, he pulled a needle gun from its holster. He managed to loose off one burst before he was cut down by carbine fire. Bannion felt a pain in his leg but ignored it.
Ramirez pushed the body of the guard out of the way. He examined the surround of the door. There was a single button set in it at waist height. He turned to Bannion.
‘You want me to …’
He stopped and stared anxiously at his commander.
‘You seen your leg, chief?’
Bannion looked down.
‘Shit!’
There was a gaping hole in the fleshy part of his thigh where a shower of needles had ripped through it. Another few centimetres to the left, and it would have taken his leg off. Bannion took an all purpose field dressing from his combat jacket, and tore off the seal. He ripped his trouser leg apart and slapped on the dressing. His leg became numb, and he felt a little light headed as the powerful pain killer that was part of the dressing went to work. He turned to Ramirez.
‘Okay, get the lift.’
After a few seconds’ wait, the doors opened on a small lift. The four of them crowded inside. Bannion inspected the controls, One was clearly the stud that would take them down. He pressed it and the lift started to descend rapidly.
***
The Minstrel Boy had delved into the secret world of the wayfinder, and was certainly leading Billy somewhere. On the evidence of the route, Billy wasn’t altogether convinced that the particular somewhere was anywhere he wanted to go.
It seemed to Billy that he had been walking without any sense of time or distance for most of his life. The roads that the Minstrel Boy led him along were some of the strangest that Billy had ever seen. They were peopled with apparitions and strange signs that filled him with increasing horror as the journey went on. The only thing that saved his mind was that the worst sights faded from his memory almost as soon as they had passed. It was like living in a long, rambling, dully horrific nightmare.
A thing that worried Billy more than the menacing surroundings was the change that had rapidly come over the Minstrel Boy. The effort of wayfinding was progressively deranging his mind.
As he walked in front of Billy, the Minstrel Boy muttered to himself continuously. He strung words together in random sentences. For a while, Billy had listened attentively to them. It was almost as though the Minstrel Boy was speaking in a secret language.
Billy concentrated for a long time on trying to make some sense out of the Minstrel Boy’s mumblings, Every so often he would think he had finally grasped the point of an entire sequence, then it fell away into babble and repetition. Time and again Billy would find his hypothesis blown.
Despite all Billy’s fear, the Minstrel Boy did, in fact, finally lead him to some kind of normality.
***
If you could call normality a road densely packed with hysterical refugees who streamed up and down in any direction following the current rumours of where salvation might lie.
Fights would regularly break out when opposing philosophies met each other head on.
In some areas the dialectic had become so intense that groups of people would parade up and down a small stretch of road, inviting conflict from others similar to themselves.
It was in these areas that the Minstrel Boy seemed to develop an almost inhuman instinct for survival. His gait would stiffen, he would hunch his shoulders and stride along with a jerky determination that so spooked gangs of hostile rowdies that they would step aside and let him past.
After a couple of unfortunate incidents, Billy realized that his only option was to fall into step with the Minstrel Boy and do his best to present a similar air of menacing abstraction. At times he felt a little ridiculous but it did seem to work. They managed, with the aid of the Minstrel Boy’s surreal sense of timing, to stalk through the worst brawls without a word being said to them.
One thing that Billy was profoundly thankful for was the absence of any more motor vehicles on the refugee trails.
The burned out hulks of hot rods and wheel freak semis were a mute testimony to a violently motorized past.
It wasn’t long after Billy had been involved in that train of thought when a relic of the motorized past suddenly and alarmingly appeared.
A sleek biplane with multiple wings like two predatory birds screamed low over the entire length of the road.
Its black and gold markings made Billy think it came from one of the independent gangs of air pirates who had thrown in with Quahal and then gone over the top with the elaboration of their military regalia.