The crowd murmured, trying to understand whether this was a good omen or not. Teodroq tried to look sheepish.
Then the priest looked up at the sun and barked an order and the well-wishing crowd turned to file out of the bowl. Watershanks cried out and ran after the dog. To catch him and bring him back? The priest knew better; and likely he had seen such last-minute changes of heart by previous volunteers. He signaled to one of his acolytes, who sped after Water-shanks, caught him easily, and struck him on the side of his head with an obsidian-edged club. The riverman fell without uttering a sound. The acolyte checked him, then made an angry gesture, and left him lying there.
Donovan reached into his scrip and pressed a button on his comm. unit: 999 999 999. Méarana glanced at him, and he nodded. There was no mistake now. The Oorah intended them for kindling.
The lander from Blankets and Beads soared up and over the western rim of the mesa. It had come down quietly in the night and had been waiting in the wastelands for Donovan’s signal. It circled the bowl once, to get bearings, and to scatter the flower girls and the musicians. They cried out at this apparition and one of them called to Holy Fahbády, who had come and gone in just this sort of chariot.
“Remember what we agreed,” Donovan cautioned them. “One at a time up the ladder. Méarana first. Billy last.”
The musician had recovered his ishtar and he and the tabla man resumed the rag they had been playing, although they missed notes and beats now from nervous glances at the chariot. They backed away at jor tempo.
The priest stood a moment longer. Perhaps the chariot was intended as the most precious offering of all?
The craft settled to the ground and the hatch popped open almost immediately. Kid O’Daevs stuck his head out. “Move yO’ asses! Ten mintes to closest approach! Wild Bill takes off in five!”
They moved as one to the base of the ladder, and Sofwari helped Méarana onto the rungs even before it was fully extended.
The priest cried out and the burly acolytes rushed them. Teddy pulled his nine and shot the first. Paulie winged the second. Billy sprayed them with his dazer but, waving it back and forth as he did and not concentrating his fire, only numbed them.
It spread confusion, and that was enough. But the edge of the bowl was now lined with spearmen, who began to hurl their weapons. Paulie cleaved one spear as he had the arrow in the Roaring Gorge, and Teddy matched the feat. Billy actually seized one out of the air and threw it back, though being on the low ground, he did not quite reach the astonished spearman on the rim. Donovan called to Paulie, who faded toward the ladder.
Then an Oorah on the rim put a pipe to his mouth and huffed.
A dart embedded itself in Teddy’s midriff. He looked down at it and said, “That can’t be good.”
It was not much of a dart, and by itself would have meant little damage. “Poison,” he called to the others. Then, “Paralytic. Hurry!”
Sacrifices who tried to run were better handled by paralyzing them than braining them with obsidian clubs. The poison would leave them alive for the holocaust.
Teddy looked around, saw Donovan and Paulie on the ladder and Billy scrambling onto the lowest rung. He said nothing about waiting one’s turn, but only gauged what time would be needed. The harper was helping Sofwari into the airlock. She looked up and their gazes met.
Teddy waved at her, then he bent and plucked Goodhandlingblade from the ground and sped after the retreating priest and his bodyguards. “Teodorq sunna Nagarajan of World!” he cried, waving the sword over his head and shooting left-handed at the spearmen on the rim. A second paralytic dart tagged him, but the adrenaline was flowing. “Teodorq Nagarajan of World! Remember me!”
The acolytes guarding the priests turned with their short-swords and bucklers, but Teddy dispatched them easily, for the battle-fury was on him. An upswipe to knock a buckler aside, then thrust, and one down; he converted his extraction into a backhand cut that severed the carotid artery of a second man. Two. Spin on the ball of the foot and hack the arm of the man trying to sneak around his left. Three. The others broke, and Teddy found his legs too heavy to chase them. The priest stood unmoving, facing him with no more than a hemlock sprig. Magic, he recognized, even powerful magic, though hemlock had no meaning on the plains of World. He sang his deathsong at the top of his lungs. Were three enough for an honor guard? He had not paused to count the men he had shot with his nine. Where was it now? Dropped when the clip ran out. His most precious treasure, left now as an offering for a god who was only some ancient broken machine, and not the true god at all.
A blowgun man toppled from the terrace. Teddy saw Billy in the mouth of the airlock, aiming with a two-handed grip on his dazer. Another shot, but the dazer did not have the range. “Run!” Billy called. “Run, you ignorant savage!”
But he could not make it back; nor could they reach him in the time remaining. Too many blowguns. Teddy saluted with his sword, converted smoothly into a swinging arc, and the priest’s head leapt from his shoulders in a fountain of blood.
Then his body was a block of wood, devoid of all feeling. He fell face-first onto the obsidian ground.
But he gripped his sword the proper way around, a last defiance. Being utterly numb by then, he never felt it slide in.
Kid O’Daevs reversed the gravity grid and the mesa fell away behind them. The pilot threw in a sharp lateral vector to get off the bull’s-eye, and none too soon, for the pile of offerings on the viewscreen burst into a great ball of flame. Superheated air wavered and grew purple, rose like a geyser, and the wind rushed in from the sides, buffeting the lander and calling up long-disused curses from her pilot.
Méarana did not watch. She sat buckled in her seat and wept.
Watershanks, she had hardly known; but Teddy had been with her for a long time and she had come to regard him as a shrewd and faithful retainer, with more bottom to him than she had at first perceived. And it was just possible that, had he not drawn all attention to himself with his wild charge, the paralytic darts would have dropped them off the ladder like so many senseless mannequins.
Her first impulse was to order the lander to go back and destroy the village. Teddy believed that a dying warrior required an escort of his slain to enter the mead hall, and why should the Oorah’s religion be honored and not Teddy’s?
But the lander was not a warship, and could do nothing but circle the village and scare everyone. Beside, how could she plead mercy for the hard and vengeance-minded children of the Roaring Gorge and not for the uncomprehending children of the Oorah Mesa?
And so she blamed Donovan. The lander had come down in the night. Could they not have made their way to it? So what if the night was unlit and the way out uncertain? So what if there were no place for the lander on the steep and forested slopes of the mesa? Or that Debly might have gotten separated from them while climbing down those slopes and, lacking a beacon, never-ever be found?
So in the end, she blamed herself. She had brought Teddy to this place, where he could die fighting savages. And it did not matter that he had taken a terrible pleasure in the dying.
XVI. IN THE BACK OF BEYOND
As Blankets and Beads closed on the mysterious object, its size and scope unfolded. It was the largest vessel they had ever seen. Indeed, it was difficult to think of it as a vessel at all. It seemed more a work of nature. A dozen Gladiola arks could have nestled comfortably on its landing decks.