"But I wasn't going to take it forever," he said. "And then there was Crystal."
That, evidently, was his sister, who was sixteen or so and strikingly pretty, with wide blue eyes and long tawny-colored hair; she looked a little younger than her age, and she was shorter than Juniper would have expected from her brother's six feet.
She'd have been about seven or eight when the Change came, Juniper reminded herself. Probably undernourished since, which would limit her growth. And she can't be as much of an innocent as she looks, or she wouldn't be alive, no matter how much her brother tried to help her.
"She was working in the castle," Jeff said. "That bastard Mack, he started sniffing around her."
He flushed and his hands clenched into fists on the table. Juniper raised an eyebrow, though she'd heard rumor and reports. Jeff couldn't speak; it was Miguel who went on:
"Malo, that one. Bastardo. He don't just bother girls, he hurt them. The Baron, he don't give a damn."
Why am I not surprised? Juniper thought.
So far it wasn't an unfamiliar story; they'd had hundreds of similar refugees. But:
"But Crystal brought us something," she said softly. "Something important. Important enough for Baron Liu to come after it in person, with such a small escort, as if keeping it all quiet was important to him. Very important."
Sam handed her the papers. They were bound, making a bundle about the size of a hardcover book, but the spine was held with steel post-and-clamp fasteners, allowing leaves to be removed or added. She riffled quickly through it; mostly columns of numbers, written in a small neat hand-someone from Arminger's own chancery, at a guess, and they might be able to identify who from the fist.
"Sam?" she said.
"I'd wager it's an Altendorf substitution code," he said. "The numbers'd refer to the pages, to lines, and then letters within the lines. They're a right nightmare to decode if you don't have the book, because if they're careful they don't even give things away with word frequencies- the and and and bumf like that. I'm no code breaker, but I do know enough to recognize that."
He leaned over and turned the book to the back pages. Her lips shaped a silent whistle; those were maps. Maps of the central and southern Willamette, and the coastline-one of Newport was very detailed, with all the post-Change corrections, and that was the coastal town closest to Corvallis. It had a good pass over the mountains, too. A final foldout map covered the whole of western and central Oregon as far as Umatilla, with copious notes in the same frustrating columns of numbers.
No convenient arrows and dates. Pity the buggers aren't that stupid. All this tells us is that they're up to no good.
And there was a printed sheet of numbered paragraphs in the back cover of the booklet. There always was, in the Protector's publications intended for his overlord cadre.
Number One read: If I capture my worst enemies, I will not stand over them gloating and boasting and telling them all the details of my secret plans and then keep them alive for torture in an escape-proof dungeon. Instead I will just kill them instantly.
For the first time the girl spoke, in a soft shy voice. "I was in the Baron's office, hiding in a closet-I knew we were going to run that night, and I wanted to steal some of the new silver money." A flash of anger: "He owed us all of it and more!"
Then she licked her lips. "And then the Baron and: and Mack came in, and they talked, and he put this in the desk, and locked it. When they left, I came out and took it."
Juniper's eyebrows went up. "I thought he locked it?" she said.
Crystal smiled, and reached into her blouse. She was wearing something like a housedress cinched over culottes, ragged with her trip through the brush but looking as if it had started out much better than what the others of her party wore. When her hand came out, it held a small sack of soft leather, held closed by a thong threaded into eyelets around the top. That chinked with a musical and-literally-silvery sound as she dropped it on the table.
"I had a copy of the key. He put it down where I could reach it, weeks ago, and I had Jeff copy it."
Jeff grinned sheepishly; it made him look more his real midtwenties age. "I sort of learned how in shop class," he said.
Juniper sipped her mead and thought. Then Crystal cleared her throat. "When the Baron was talking: he said something very strange." Juniper nodded, and the girl went on: "He said it all depended on the Tayz Maniacs."
"Tayz Maniacs?" Juniper said, puzzled.
"And the Brits."
Brits I understand, but what are: wait a bit. Take out his accent and his sense of humor – so-called. She'd always had a good ear for regional patterns of speech, and Eddie Liu's was purest New Yawk, without even a trace of Cantonese; his mother had been American born of remote Polish ancestry. What would it sound like if Liu said it?
"Tasmanians?" she said. "But that: what would he mean by that?"
Chapter Ten
Near Amity, Willamette Valley, Oregon
May 12th, 2007-Change Year Nine
Michael Havel reined in and aside, dead weeds and new grass crackling under Charger's hooves. The big gelding halted in the lee of a house that was deserted but still standing, a large frame bungalow with a small red-painted barn whose walls showed gaps; someone's dream place in the country, its shattered windows gaping like eyes weeping for broken dreams. Young saplings from the ornamental trees had overrun lawn and garden, providing welcome cover. Beside him Will Hutton flung up his right hand, clenched into a fist inside its mail-backed leather gauntlet, and the little column of mounted Bearkillers came to a halt with a sway and a surge, the heads of their long lances safely hidden from anything beyond the crest line ahead as well. This was about as far north as the Outfit patrolled regularly and well beyond the settled zone, but nobody would take too much notice of the horse soldiers-except to keep well-hidden, in some instances.
Lancers have a lot of punch, but they're not what you'd call inconspicuous.
Hiding still had its uses-this operation was one-but visibility wasn't equivalent to death, the way it was when he'd learned the pre-Change art of war.
Though hiding armies is still a good idea, and easier than it was, no radar or sensors beyond Eyeball Mark One. But when the actual killing starts, you have to run right up to the other guy to noogie on him and he can just stand there giving you the finger until you do. It still feels weird.
Havel and Hutton and Signe dismounted along with Eric Larsson and his wife Luanne, handing off their reins. The patrol got their mounts into the shelter of the building. A very good eye might see the trail they'd left crosscountry from some distance, but the rolling land made that unlikely. So did the combination of shaggy second growth and forest that covered a lot of it.
Havel nodded to the patrol commander and went walking forward with the others, then stooping; finally they went to their bellies as they came to the ridge ahead. That was no knife-edge crest, just a long low swelling that rose perhaps fifty feet above the level of the countryside and well below the Amity Hills to their west. A sagging board fence grown up in brush and vines marked it, and a few tall firs; they crawled into the undergrowth carefully, pushing forward with helmeted heads and armored shoulders against the thick spiky growth. An occasional muttered curse sounded as a thorn or twig slipped between the rings of chain mail and through the quilted padding beneath.
Then they all uncased their binoculars and pushed back their bowl helmets-the nasal bar made using field glasses impossible unless you did that-and looked through the last screen of tall grass and brush towards the north. There was a burned-out farmhouse not far down the slope, snags of wall reaching up through rampant vine and brush. The ruin stood in a clump of trees; those that lived at all were half dead from the heat of years past, their bare limbs stretching towards the overgrown mound with their other sides in leaf, quivering in the mild breeze from the north. A broken-down barn stood beyond, and after that neglected fields running down to a creek lined with trees; beyond that was another stretch of burgeoning wilderness; the edge of the Protectorate's plow-land and pasture was out of sight at the north end of this stretch, what used to be called the Dayton Prairie.