Breedmaster Titus nodded, satisfied. "Another strong Soldier for the Citadel," he said.
The Soldier's mother smiled. "Of course," she said. "He's mine." Her smile took on an edge. "I could have wished him a Cyborg. Perhaps, the next?"
"Perhaps," said the Breedmaster. But he committed himself to nothing. A Cyborg, unlike a common Soldier, was as much made as born. The biomechanicals had to be cultured in nutrient vats from cells brought from Old Sauron, and implanted in utero, with no certainty that the fetus would prove viable; much of the Citadel's remaining biotechnology was devoted to them, and the trace elements required for the process were scoured from half the planet. There were six mature Cyborgs in the Citadel, and only another fourteen out in the Bases. One young adult besides, and one child, in the Citadel. The Citadel's resources would stretch to no more.
Titus would have given them up altogether. The process was grossly inefficient, and anything but cost effective. But the mythos demanded Cyborgs: Cyborgs, therefore, he had to have.
Sieglinde seemed oblivious to the pause, which in any case had consumed but a fraction of a second. He gave her the rest of her due, as was his duty. "That is four sons you have given to the Race. You are to be commended."
She inclined her head. She understood necessity as well as he. The Race had long since used up its heritage from the homeworld, the thousands of fertilized ova to be brought to term in the wombs of captive women. Now there were none left; and Soldiers were reduced to merely human expedients: breeding like cattle, and with cattle, in a process only a little more effective than a lottery.
Sieglinde was a rarity even by the standards of Old Sauron, a woman of pure Soldier stock who was both viable and fertile. Her three older sons were all healthy, no evidence yet of lethal recessives. So too was this one. Yes, thought Titus. She had done well. Well enough, perhaps, to grant her what she asked for.
He would not say so, of course. That would have been premature. It was enough that she knew that he was pleased. More than that, a Soldier did not need.
Sieglinde sighed a little. She was Soldier bred and born, and birth was her battlefield. Now that her child was accepted into the Race, she could let herself yield a little to her body's need for rest.
The Breedmaster took her son from her arms. He was lively even for a Soldier, flailing against the hands that held him. His reflexes, the Breedmaster had said, were near the upper edge of the optimum range. He would be lethally quick, but not so quick that he startled himself into a convulsion. His nightsight would be excellent, but he would not be dayblind. His hearing was keen enough to set him twisting and staring at the rustle of paper in the Breedmaster's pocket. He was full Sauron of impeccable line. He would grow into a commander of Soldiers.
"The next one," she said from the edge of sleep, "will be a Cyborg."
Cyborg Rank Bonn extricated himself carefully from the rubble of the practice-room wall. Someone rather too clever for his own good had set a drillbit to excavating it, to see if the story that drillbits had brought down the walls of Angband Base was true. The boy had been sent to a Base even more distant and forsaken than that one, and set to work testing his ingenuity on the remnants of machinery there.
Bonn thought the wall had been repaired adequately. It had not been strong enough to resist the full weight of a Cyborg Rank, thrown all but effortlessly by the young Soldier who stood with hands at sides, waiting. Bonn flexed a shoulder. His bones were as flexible, and as strong, as good steel. They were not as young as they had been, or as impervious to an encounter with plaster over mortared stone.
He brushed plaster from his gi and frowned. "There is such a thing," he said, "as excessive force."
"There is such a thing also as the teaching of a lesson," said his adversary coolly. "One should never underestimate one's opponent."
Bonn bent his head a degree. "One should also judge one's response. You will be held responsible for the restoration of the wall."
His pupil's head bent a half-degree. "Sir."
"Soldier." He bowed stiffly. The other bowed with considerably more grace. "Dismissed."
He watched the young one go. Young, he thought, and reckless. But gifted in the arts of combat. As was only fitting in one born Cyborg, of the best blood in the Citadel.
It was a pity that women in these days were not admitted to the rank of the death's head. She was the only Cyborg of her generation, thanks to a succession of overly conservative Breedmasters, followed by Titus, who, though Cyborg himself, was both conservative in regard to making Cyborgs, and inclined to experiment with them when he made them. She was needed above all to breed sons who could, the Breedmaster willing, be made Cyborgs. She had a daughter already, Cyborg as she was, and showing a remarkable degree of promise for one so young.
And need the Breedmaster be willing? Bonn thought. Sigrid was the Breedmaster's heir. She was trained in the techniques—she had taken part in her daughter's making.
Suppose, thought the Cyborg Rank. Suppose that the Breedmaster could be circumvented, new Cyborgs made, a line of super-Soldiers begun upon Haven. Suppose that this could be done. Then the world would change. Indeed, it would.
For now, however, he must focus on the immediate goal. Sigrid was ready to conceive. Cyborg Rank Bonn was prepared to oblige her.
He nodded to himself. He would ask her soon, when she had had time to ponder the lesson. She was close to the peak of her fertility. His nose had caught it in the match; and he'd been, truth to tell, distracted. He had paid amply for that distraction.
He paused. Had she known it? And exploited it?
Well for her if she had. A Soldier used every weapon in his—or her—arsenal.
He was almost smiling as he went to the next of his duties.
Sigrid stepped out of the bath. Lakshmi offered her a warmed towel. It was a decadence, but the servant could be as stubborn as her mistress when it came to providing what was proper.
Her skin loved the feel of warmth and softness and skilled hands, rubbing away the aches of training. She arched and purred.
Lakshmi giggled. "Just like a cat," she said in her singsong accent. "So strong, too. Like steel and silk."
Sigrid shook her off. The tribute maiden followed, gently persistent. Sigrid shrugged and stood still. Her breasts were tender, and not only with bruises. She was ready to conceive again.
She looked down at Lakshmi as the girl bent to dry her feet. She was close to whelping, herself. It would be time soon to send her to the breeding pens. She had asked Sigrid to birth her child: sentimental, and typical of cattle, but efficient enough. Sigrid was a capable technician. Even the Breedmaster had been heard to admit it.
Sigrid's sister, Sieglinde, had quarters in the officers' wing, with access to the crèche as befit the mother of four sons. She had two of her sons with her, young Galen whom Sigrid had entered in the database just that morning, and Harad escaping his nurse to fling himself headlong at Sigrid. She scooped him out of the air. He did not screech as cattle children did, even those who were part Soldier. She nodded approval. "But you should never trust anyone to catch you if you jump," she said.
"You did," he said.
"I might have chosen not to."
"Not you," said Harad.
She dropped him. He curled into a ball and rolled, and bounced to his feet, grinning at her. She allowed herself the ghost of a smile.
"You are so good with the children," said Sieglinde. "When are you going to have another?"
"Soon," said Sigrid. She walked past her sister to the window, which looked down on the boys' court. It was empty now in half-night, with the sun just set but Cat's Eye already dominating the sky. Its light was kinder to Cyborg eyes than full day.
"Make it sooner," Sieglinde said. "Signy is what? Two T-years? Three? It's past time you gave her a brother."
Sigrid shrugged.
The children's nurses took them away, Harad protesting volubly, if softly, that he wanted to stay with Sigrid. Sigrid found her jaw was clenched. Her whole body was tight, tight enough to make her bruises throb. Bonn had given a good account of himself before she used his own mass to launch him into the wall.
His mass, and her anger. She could admit it here, in the cool Eyelight, with Sieglinde watching her in silence.
"You don't want another baby, do you?"
Sigrid's shoulders stiffened. She relaxed them muscle by muscle. "Why do you think that?"
"You'd have one if you wanted one," Sieglinde said. "Cyborg Rank Bonn fancies you, you know. He might have to duel Cyborg Rank Metz. Or Assault Leader Udun. Or—"
Sigrid repressed the impulse to whip about. Sieglinde was baiting her. Sieglinde often did. "Do you know," said Sigrid with perfect calm, "how tired I am of being run after like a bitch in heat?"
"Of course I do," said Sieglinde. "I take them when you turn them away."
Sigrid did turn then, but slowly. Sieglinde's face was placid. "You're jealous," Sigrid said.
"Not really," Sieglinde said. "I want a Cyborg son. You could have one for the asking. I mind that. But I like bedding and birthing. You hate them both."
"I like bedding," Sigrid said. "Birthing is battle like any other. But not if it's the only battle I'll ever see."
"What better battle can a woman fight?"
There was no proper answer to that. Sigrid gave it the one she had. "I would have it all. The woman's battle. The man's. Everything that makes life worth living."
Sieglinde regarded her without comprehension. The perfect Soldier's woman, was Sieglinde. She obeyed without question, bore sons without complaint. She never fretted that she must not pass the walls of the Citadel, nor risk her precious genes and her precious womb in any field but that to which she was born.
There was something missing in her. Some spark; some edge. Her sons had it and to spare. She was but a vessel. A womb.
What Sieglinde lacked, Sigrid had in full measure. Too full. A child born with too much of the heritage died far more quickly than a child born with too little. The latter, after all, was only cattle. The former was more than nature could bear.
Sigrid looked back and down. Her fingers, clenching behind her on the window ledge, had crumbled the stone.
Her voice was raw, grating in her throat. "I should have been left for the stobor."
"You almost were." Sieglinde blinked gravely in Sigrid's silence. "You're dangerous, you know. Lady Moria told me that. She said the Breedmaster was going to expose you. Then he decided to keep you, to see what you would be. He's curious, Breedmaster is. Lady Moria says that's a vice, except in a scientist."
Sigrid laughed. "Of course he never intended to expose you."
"No," said Sieglinde. "I'm exactly what he wanted."
Sigrid opened her mouth. Shut it. Blinked once.
Sigrid was, genetically and by training, a Cyborg. That was more than a simple super-Soldier, a supremely efficient killing machine. It was also an enhanced intelligence, and a greatly enhanced ability to process data.
That ability was housed in what was, after all, a human system. A young one, and fully female. Its gonads did its thinking for it rather more often than she liked to admit. That was a failing even of Cyborgs.
"He wanted me," said Sieglinde. "Not you as you turned out to be. Cyborgs are difficult. Cyborg women worst of all, because they can't be risked, and yet they live to risk themselves. He wanted a woman who would be what he needed her to be. Strong, to breed strong sons. Calm, to bear what a woman must bear."
"I am the best that he has bred," Sigrid said.
"And the worst," said Sieglinde. "I am the future as he sees it. Our women are too few. Too valuable. They can't be permitted to be rash. Without a core of purebred women, the genes of the Race will dilute into the pool of the cattle like the air of a small planet into space."
"He'd breed the wits right out of you," said Sigrid, no more than a whisper. "Out of us."
"It's for the good of the Race," Sieglinde said. Perfect, placid Sieglinde, who was content to be as she was. "See, you're all in knots. Wouldn't you rather be happy?"
"Happy." Sigrid laughed like a bullet cracking through bone. "I was never bred to be happy. And now I see . . ."
"Now you see what you never wanted to see. I'm the best of what will be. You are an aberration."
There was not even malice in it. Sieglinde knew it for truth.
"Our father," said Sigrid, and she did not often call him that; it was not what he was, who was Breedmaster of the Citadel before all other bonds of blood or breeding, "our father is a master of his art. Even Caius never dreamed as he dreams."
"Breedmaster Caius never thought of it. He came from Old Sauron. He didn't see everything that this world would make us."
"Our father sees it," said Sigrid, "but does he know what it is he sees? Women like cattle, true cattle, witless and content, breeding daughters like themselves, and sons like the best of our Soldiers. What would the Lady Althene have said to that, who was Second Rank on the Fomoria? What would she call this thing?"
"Efficiency," said Sieglinde.
"She would call it degeneracy. The Race is more than its sons. It is its daughters, too. Take away their part and you lessen us all."
"Is that why you won't give the race a son?"
Sigrid stared at her sister. Sieglinde was as placid as ever, unafraid of the danger that was in Sigrid, because she could not imagine that anyone—even Sigrid, even maddened—could wish to harm her.
"There," said Sigrid, spitting out the words. "There. He's bred out rebellion, and he's bred out sense. The best of a woman of the Race is that she too can fight, she too can defend herself and her blood. He would have her defenseless; protected, never protector. He'd weaken us by half, to serve his own convenience."
Sieglinde did not understand. She was not even annoyed. Her glance was pitying. "You're always so angry," she said. "Aren't you afraid you'll take a fit and die like Sigurd?"
"Sigurd was flawed. Breedmaster knew it too late. I have no such flaw."
"Maybe not," said Sieglinde. She yawned. "He only lived fifteen T-years. You've lived twenty. It's a pity. It wouldn't have mattered if he wanted to go out and fight. That's what Cyborgs do."
"Yes," said Sigrid, cold and still. "That's what Cyborgs do."
"Cyborgs fight," said the Breedmaster, "and train the young. Women breed, and bear the young."
"What of a Cyborg who is a woman?"
Breedmaster Titus turned from the terminal to look at Sigrid. His eyes were as cold as hers should have been. But the anger was too great. It had festered too long. It made her say what she knew better than to say, with passion as ill restrained as in her sparring with Cyborg Rank Bonn.
"Let me go," she said. "Give me what you give any young Soldier fresh from the crèche: his freedom, his proving, his manhood. Let me do a deed that benefits the Race."
"You have done it," said the Breedmaster. "You gave it a daughter who is Cyborg. It is time you gave it another: a son this time, to fight for us and to train our young."
"I shall give the Race a son," said Sigrid. "Many sons. But what of me? What of what I am? You had me trained as a Soldier is trained. You taught me as you teach your assistants—"
"So that you may be Breedmaster when I am gone."
The interruption was completely unlike the Breedmaster. It was not a surprise. Sigrid had known since she began who would be Breedmaster after Titus. If she lived so long.
"You waste me," she said, "keeping me like cattle."
"I keep you because you are too valuable to waste. Should I risk your knowledge and your heritage as I risk a Soldier, simply because you ask for it? A Soldier is valuable, yes, but he exists to prove himself. If he is fit, he survives. If he is not fit, he dies before he can pass on his genes. You," said the Breedmaster, "are unquestionably fit You lack wisdom, but that will come. You lack control, but that can be remedied. Your duty is here. Here you will stay."
There was no moving him. He did not see what for her was necessity. A Cyborg was the ultimate Soldier. What a Soldier would do simply because he was ordered to do it, a Cyborg was bred and trained to consider, at lightspeed, and to make his own decisions. Soldiers did not rebel. Cyborgs could, and did. Not en masse since the Revolt that saw the destruction of too many of their number and the end of too many bloodlines. But a lone Cyborg could conclude from the available data that his orders were inefficient or harmful to the Race, and choose to disobey them.
These orders were efficient. For the Breedmaster. These orders were beneficial. To the Breedmaster. Sigrid was indeed too valuable to risk.
She was also too dangerous to keep penned. She was by nature a fighting animal. Controlled combat in the practice rooms was not enough. Controlled exercise on the lands of the Citadel was insufficient. She could feel the bonds of reason fraying—the fits of anger, the sudden, unbridled surges of strength.
Pregnancy was a cure, of sorts. Her body would subside into the calm of gestation. Her mind would fray further, but her mind was not what the Breedmaster wanted. Her genes and her womb were all he cared for.
Something was wrong with that reasoning. She could not for the moment see what. She was gone from the Breedmaster's office, with no memory of dismissal. If that disturbed him, then well enough.
Something moved, out on the steppe. The Sauron sentry came to watchful alertness, discarding like an unwanted cloak the boredom that is a sentry's normal lot in time of peace. His fingers caressed the trigger of the Gatling gun that covered part of the approach to Shangri-La Valley. This was a busy pass, but also a very large one, and it had been some little while since he had seen any travellers.
Even with his enhanced vision, the moving speck was only that, a speck. He brought binoculars to bear. The speck resolved itself into a pair of human figures, afoot. The sentry frowned, actively suspicious now. Haven's nomads were universally mounted, on horses or camels if they had them, on native muskylopes if they did not. Dismounted nomad was a contradiction in terms.
The two people slowly approached the entrance to the valley. One appeared to be leading the other. The sentry forgot them for the moment. By themselves, they had to be harmless. But if they were intended to distract him so that raiders could attack the mouth of the deft that led into the valley, they would fail. The Soldiers laughed at sneakier ploys than that.
At last, reluctantly, the sentry decided there were only the two of them. One was a woman, still of childbearing years but no longer young. She was not visibly pregnant, either, so there went the most obvious reason for her coming to the valley. The other, the man she was leading, had gray hair and a white, wispy beard that blew in the cold breeze. He walked awkwardly; the sentry needed a moment more to realize he was blind. Not only did his eyes stay closed, the lids seemed sunken into their sockets, as if no eyeballs lay beneath them.
For all his genetic modifications, the sentry felt ice walk up his spine. The tale was from half a continent away, but it was not the sort that shrank in the telling; over a generation's time it had come to Shangri-La Valley. Unlike most folk on Haven, Sauron Soldiers were not supposed to be superstitious. All the same, the sentry jerked his hand away from the Gatling as if it had suddenly become red-hot. That blind man had known worse than bullets. Shivering and doing his best to blame it on the weather, the sentry let the woman lead the man into the pass.
Dirt and clumpy grass lay underfoot, by their irregular pressure against the soles of his boots and by the sound they made as he scuffed through them. More sounds came from either side: echoes from the nearby canyon walls. "Careful here," his daughter said; her hand on his arm was his sole link to a world wider than what he could feel and hear. "The slope gets ever steeper. Don't stumble."
"I shan't, Aisha, unless I trip," Juchi said. He heard the futile pride in his voice; his senses, those he still had, were swift and keen. Automatically, he cocked his head for a better look at the terrain over which he'd pass. Futile again . . . . "Where are we now?" he asked.
"Halfway through the cleft," Aisha answered. "The Citadel sits above us on the rocks, armed and armored like a tamerlane, and folk from half the world pass by on their way to Nûrnen. The rubble of the great Wall reaches to the hills on the south."
The Great Quake had brought down the Wall, a century before; it had stretched from the mountains on the north to those on the south, and had been a century and a half a-building. Legends of it were sung around fires from one end of the continent to the other. It must have been a wonder to see, although the Citadel was wonder enough, rising in concentric tiers around a central spike set flush against the mountain's wall. Only the mountain itself, which towered two thousand meters above the keep, reduced the inhuman scale of those great works. Even the lowest and outermost of the walls was higher than a bowshot was long.
Juchi sighed, long and slow. "I never dreamed I would see it." He laughed harshly at himself. Like the head-cocking gesture, the word remained, half a lifetime after his eyes were gone. He sighed again. "I've wandered farther than ever I dreamed I would, back in the days when I rode with Dede Korkut's clan. And what did it gain me in the end?"
"Great glory," his daughter answered stoutly. "Who but you ever drove the Saurons from one of their lairs, made a whole valley free of them?"
"A greater curse," Juchi said. "Who but I slew my father, lay afterward with my mother; who but I bred children who were also my sibs? How can I atone for such sin, make myself free of it? Blinding did no good; my mind sees still."
Aisha said, "You have borne it, where a lesser man would have fled into death."
Juchi's laugh held nothing of humor. "That is your fault more than mine. Had you obeyed and left me, death would have found me soon enough. Many times, oh, how many times, I've wished it had."
"No." Aisha had been a stubborn child; that had changed not at all since she grew to womanhood. She went on, "Allah and the spirits must have had reason for twisting your life as they did. Before its end, they will grant that you know that reason."
"Then they'd best hurry," Juchi said. "I cannot see my beard, but I know it is the color of snow. I need not see to know how my bones ache, how my heart pounds, how my lungs burn with every step I take. Soon I will die whether you let me or no, daughter of mine."
"That is why we have come at last to Shangri-La Valley. Here sit the Saurons in their power, the Saurons but for whom your curse would never have arisen. By the god, by the spirits, I will see that you have justice from them before the end. If they do not give it to you, I will take it from them myself." Aisha spat on the trail to show her contempt for the overlords of Haven.
"What do they know of justice?" Juchi said. My daughter hates the Saurons far more than I, he thought. "They know only force. And why not? It has served them well over the years. And their blood is ours as well, in me through the father I slew; in you, poor child, through me."
And perhaps I come to the Shangri-La seeking death, not justice. He had longed for death, but shrunk from suicide. The Saurons might well oblige him with what he had lost the right to hope for long ago—a warrior's end in battle,
"I wish only that you would leave me to my fate, child," he said.
"I am no child," Aisha said wearily; how many times had they argued this round and round? "And I do not willingly claim their blood, while you, Father, you struck a great blow against it."
"You may not claim the blood, but the blood will claim you," Juchi said.
Aisha did not answer, not in words. The pressure of her hand on his arm changed; she was moving forward again. Juchi followed. From the breeze that blew into his face, he tried to scent out what lay ahead in the valley.
With every step he took, the air seemed to grow thicker. That, he knew, was his imagination, but the Shangri-La Valley was far and away the greatest lowland Haven boasted, millions of square kilometers in extent and ringed with mountains. Women came from thousands of kilometers around to bear their babies here; the steppe tribes paid the Saurons a steep price for the privilege, in goods and in women. So did the merchants who thronged through the pass to trade.
The breeze brought the fresh, green scents of growing crops. By Haven's standards, the climate of the Shangri-La Valley was tropical; a man from the Terra now long lost in legend would have judged it no worse than austere. It was mild enough to let wheat survive. In the Tallinn Valley, oats and rye were the staple crops. Of course, the Tallinn Valley could have been dropped unnoticed anywhere here.
The breeze also carried the odors characteristic of man, and man in large numbers: smoke and sweat (the amount of labor required to wrest a living from even the most salubrious parts of Haven was plenty to raise sweat even in the moon's icy climate) and ordure. Falkenberg and Castell City and Hell's A'-Comin' had been cities once, before the Saurons smote them from the sky. Towns still stood not far from where the bombs had landed. Other towns had grown by the Sauron Bases, large ones here in the valley, smaller ones on the steppe.
Another, newer city lay close to the inner mouth of the valley. Nûrnen had grown up to serve the Citadel, the Saurons' greatest center on Haven. After more than three hundred T-years as masters of the moon, the Saurons were not averse to such luxuries as it could provide them. Further, the more work the humans they contemptuously called cattle did for them, the less they had to do for themselves and the more they could remain fighting machines. That suited them. Thus Nûrnen throve.
"Take me into Nûrnen," Juchi said suddenly.
Aisha stopped. "Why do you want to go there? Of all the towns on Haven, Nûrnen loves the Saurons best."
"Just so," Juchi said. "Through all the long years since they came, simply hating them has not availed. They are too strong, and their strength repels hatred as armor will turn a sword stroke. Those who love them may know where they are truly weak."
The noise Aisha made, deep down in her throat, did not betoken agreement. But she led Juchi into Nûrnen all the same. She had guided him for more than twenty T-years now. When he gave her a destination, she got him there. Whatever she thought of the life she led, she never complained.
"I've given you a long, empty time, my daughter," Juchi said.
"You did not give it to me; I chose it for myself," Aisha answered. "And how could I have found a better one? Who would have taken me into house or yurt, bearing the burden of ill luck I carry?"
"Through me, all through me. You could have left me behind, left your name and birth behind, gone off and lived among folk who knew nothing of your misfortune."
"You tried that, Father. Yet your name and birth returned to work your fate. Why do you think it would have been different for me?"
To that, Juchi had no good answer. Allah and the spirits accomplished a man's fate as they would, not so as to delight him. The best he could hope to do was bear it with courage.
Soon after the pass opened out into Shangri-La Valley, Aisha stopped to pick a couple of clownfruit from a tree. She gave one to Juchi. As he bit into it, the mixture of sweet and tart brought to mind a perfect mental picture of the red-and-white fruit. Even after so long without eyes, he knew what things looked like. Yet it was a sign of Sauron power that food grew thus, unguarded.
She guided their steps onto the shoulder of the paved road that wound through the ruins of the Wall and down into the lower plateau where the city stood.
"Here are the Saurons' gallows," Aisha said tightly.
"Aye," Juchi said. "I can smell them."
Men—and a few women—hung from the long row of gibbets; some by their necks, or by their feet, or in iron cages. Most were dead. They bore placards listing their crimes: BANDIT OLEG and the caravans he had attacked, or RIVER PIRATE BARTON with a tally of ships. Some were much simpler: INSOLENCE or RESISTANCE TO A SOLDIER.
Before long they entered Nûrnen. First, outlying villas and farms for wealthy merchants, and truck-gardens rented by peasants. Then smithies, forges, machine-shops; the Saurons permitted more technology here than in most places, as a useful supplement to the manufactories in the Citadel itself. The clamor of busy streets surrounded Juchi: men and women afoot and on horseback, wagons with squealing wheels, the rhythmic footfalls of litter-bearers. Cobbles or blocks of volcanic tufa made a strange footing beneath his boots, more used to the clumpy grass of the steppes.
"Turn here," Aisha said, directing his footsteps south.
The plateau that held Nûrnen fell in a series of gigantic steps. Highest and nearest to the Citadel was Saurontown, in which dwelt Soldiers who had reason to live outside the bleak, looming fortress above. The streets were a regular grid, the buildings stark and plain, handsome in an austere fashion. Most of the people wore plain gray, or livery of the Citadel; only the odd entertainer or harlot made a splash of color, although some of the gardens shone in bright contrast to the buildings.
Abroad stretch of cleared land and steep switchback streets separated Saurontown from Nûrnen proper. The only other paved roads Aisha had ever seen were in the Pale, and those were mere tracks compared to these. Below was a vast sprawl of buildings; she looked up from guiding her father/brother's steps and stopped to gape.
"Is it very great?" Juchi said, a trifle wistfully. "Greater than Strang?"
"Beyond belief," Aisha said. Almost to the edge of sight, buildings sprawled about a twisting maze of streets; tumbledown hovels and lofty churches, the mansions of great merchants with trees showing over their courtyard walls, covered bazaars stretching for hectares, huge public squares with precious water shooting from fountains. "Strang could be lost a dozen times here."
Juchi shook his head; he had been awed on his visits to the Pale. "I can hear a great roaring," he said. "Like nothing else I have ever heard. They say a hundred and fifty thousands of people live in Nûrnen—before this, I did not believe it."
"Neither did I," Aisha said. Then, staunchly: "But each one of them walks on two legs or rides on four, as we do."
They walked. They were used to that, but never to a place where one could walk and walk and still be among buildings and people.
"This is a street of silversmiths, Father. A caravanserai where merchants may rent space for their beasts. Here is a market for slaves . . . and here is a tavern."
The blast of heat from the door, the noise inside, and the smell of beer and tennis-fruit brandy had already told Juchi as much. The noise faded a little while the drinkers sized up the pair. A moment later, it picked up again: they were judged harmless, at least at first glance, Juchi almost smiled at that. He'd worked more harm than any tavern tough could dream of.
"Here is a stool," Aisha said. Juchi felt for it with his hand, sat down. Someone approached the table—a barmaid, by the rustle of skirts.
"What'll it be, sir, lady?" she asked, her voice losing some of its professional good cheer as she got a look at Juchi's face. She spoke Russki, but with a different accent from that of Tallinn Valley, an accent that grew stronger as she lost some of her calm.
"Kvass," Juchi said.
"Beer for me." Aisha had farmer's tastes in some things. "And a roast chicken for the two of us to share."
"I'll bring your drinks right away. The chicken will take just a little while—we're cooking three of them now, and they should be done soon." The barmaid hesitated, then said, "Maybe you'd better show me your money first, since by the look of you, you're new in town."
Aisha fumbled in the pouch she wore at her belt. A moment later, silver rang sweetly on the tabletop. "Will that do?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, ma'am." The barmaid retreated in a hurry. She came back very quickly, set a mug of beer in front of Aisha and a skin of kvass before Juchi. He tasted it, and made a sour face. Town taverns had a habit of serving a thin, weak brew, and this one was no exception. Someone new came up to the table; a man, and no lightweight, either, not from his stride. He reeked of fear.
"The taverner," Aisha whispered to Juchi. She raised her voice to speak to the man: "How may we help you, good sir?"
"I'd talk to your companion, if I could," the fellow said. Hearing Aisha use Russki, he answered in the same language, though his voice had a shrill Americ accent: the Saurons spoke Americ among themselves, and Juchi had heard it more than any other tongue on the streets of Nûrnen. Americ made him nervous. It was the language Badri had known best. He pulled his mind back to the here and now, back from the image of Badri that hung always before his eyes.
"I will speak with you, good sir. Ask what you would." That openness made the taverner hem and haw, and Juchi had never heard of a bashful taverner. He knew what was coming:
"Forgive me if I offend, graybeard, but there are tales that cling to an old blind man who travels with a woman younger than he is."
"I am the man of whom those tales tell," Juchi answered calmly, as he had many times before. The tavern went deathly still. Juchi's shoulders moved up and down in a silent sigh. That had happened many times, too.
The taverner gulped, loud enough for Juchi to have heard even without his genetically augmented ears. Legends, by their very nature, dealt with the long ago and far away. To have one sitting at a table had to disconcert the taverner. He needed close to half a minute to gather himself after that gulp. At last he said, "I don't want your trade here. I ask you politely to leave in quiet and peace."
"Our silver is as good as anyone else's," Aisha said hotly. She took slights harder than Juchi, who felt he deserved them. The legs of her stool bumped on the rough planks of the floor as she started to get up so she could argue with the taverner face to face.
Juchi set a hand on her arm to stop her. "Wait, daughter." He turned his empty eyes toward the taverner. The man gulped again. Juchi kept his voice mild: "Tell me, sir, if you would, why you want me—want us—to leave."
"Because—because—" The taverner stopped, took a deep breath, tried once more: "Because you are who you are, curse it, and because you did what you did. And because Nûrnen is a town that depends on the Soldiers and their goodwill. They'd not think kindly of me if I let you stay."
"Those are fair reasons," Juchi said. "We will go." Aisha started to protest further. He shook his head at her. "Come, lead me away. I would not stay where I am not welcome. Is it any wonder, then, that I have wandered through all these many years?"
"Everywhere you travel," Aisha said, "folk treat you unjustly."
"No, only with horror, and horror I have earned. Now let us go."
As Aisha led Juchi toward the door, a man at a table he passed said, "And good riddance to you, too, motherfucker." He laughed at his own wit.
Juchi reached out and effortlessly lifted the man with one hand. The fellow squawked and kicked at him. Juchi felt the muscle shift, heard the whisper of cloth against moving flesh. His body twisted to one side before the booted foot could find its target.
"Motherfucker!" the man yelled again. His hand slapped against the hilt of his knife. At effectively the same instant, Juchi's hand closed on his wrist. Juchi squeezed and twisted. Bones crunched. The man screamed. Juchi threw him away. He smashed against something hard. Juchi stood in a warrior's crouch, waiting to hear if he got up. He did not.
"Horror I have earned. I grant this," Juchi said. "The contempt of such a dog I have not earned. Come, Aisha; lead me away from this place where I am not welcome."
He reached out his hand for hers. She took it, and guided him toward the doorway. Behind him, someone said softly, "More Soldier blood in him than in most Soldiers, by the saints. Look to Strong Sven, somebody—see if he'll ever get up again."
"Let him lie there," someone else replied. "He picked on a blind man; he deserves what he got. Maybe he'll keep his stupid mouth shut next time."
Slightly warmed by that, Juchi followed Aisha down the street. He listened and tried to learn. Nûrnen was indeed a town on good terms with the Saurons. The best indicator of that was how seldom he heard the term. Like the taverner and the other man in his establishment, most people called them Soldiers, their own name for themselves. Juchi did not care one way or the other. Just as he was what he was, they were what they were, and names did not matter.
"Most names," he amended out loud. Aisha made a questioning noise. "Never mind," he told her. He could still feel the quick, precise motions his muscles had made as he chastised the foulmouthed fool. The memory would stay with him. That was his trouble, he thought. He was blind, but the memories stayed with him.
Soldiers lined up for a meal in one of the Citadel's refectories. It was first come, first served, regardless of rank. If a simple Section Leader took his place in line before a Chief Assault Group Leader, he was served before him, too. The Soldiers did not make distinctions among themselves where distinctions were unnecessary.
Glorund the Cyborg was no simple Section Leader. Nor was he merely a Chief Assault Group Leader. Nevertheless, the Battlemaster took his tray and waited his turn with everyone else. Once a young officer, an Assault Group Leader with, everyone said, a promising future ahead, had stood aside for him. The fellow was a blank-collar-tab Soldier within half a cycle, and bound for duty on the most barren part of the steppe Glorund could find. After that, no one curried favor with him in the refectory line.
In these days, family groups often ate together in their private quarters, particularly among the lower-ranked Soldiers. Glorund disapproved; he would have preferred the old ways, when Soldiers all slept in barracks and ate together. It was not practical to go back—water flowed uphill more easily than a privilege could be retracted once granted—but he intended to see there was no further degeneration.
The refectory workers who slapped food onto the tray were all from Nûrnen. Soldiers did not need to cook; therefore, they did not cook. The food was nourishing but unexciting—stewed heartfruit, a meatloaf made from ground mutton and muskylope, a chunk of rye bread, a mug of beer. Glorund, like lower-ranking Soldiers, was no gourmet. No geneticist had ever found a good enough reason to bother amplifying the sense of taste. Still less for Soldiers, who could eat anything a scavenging land gator could, and did at need.
Glorund's ears, however, were not only genetically modified but also boasted the bioengineered implants that accompanied the Cyborg death's heads on his collar tabs. He heard, and listened to, every conversation in the refectory. Differential signal processing let him pay attention to each of them in turn. That was useful; even people who knew intellectually what he could do sometimes made interesting slips if the refectory was crowded. He was particularly interested in mentions of the name of Carcharoth, his Chief of Staff and so his main rival for supreme power. The younger Cyborg had been showing slight but dangerous signs of impatience along with his ambition.
What he got from his scanning was something entirely different. "The blind man's come into the valley," he heard a Soldier say who'd been on sentry-go. His modifications did not literally let his ears prick up, but he willed into being the mental analog of that primitive physical process. If he heard the word blind again, he would key on it, correlate it with this first mention.
To Glorund, to all the high-ranking Soldiers of the Citadel, there was only one blind man, the one responsible for the loss of Angband Base and Tallinn Valley. Not for the first time, he thought the Citadel should have mounted a real punitive expedition, no matter that Angband Base lay far, far to the west. Cattle should never be allowed to get the notion that they could beat Soldiers. So often in combat, what men believed counted for as much as what was true. Granted, Quilland Base, the nearest outpost, was semi-independent and prickly about it (Angband had been virtually a domain of its own for a century before its fall), but the thing could have been managed.
But more cautious heads had prevailed back then: Soldiers who had argued that an attack on Tallinn Valley would draw in the Bandari. And in the end Juchi had destroyed himself more thoroughly than any mere outsiders could have done. The most difficult lesson for Soldiers to learn was that abrupt, straightforward aggression was not always the best solution to a problem. Though to be sure, what was left of Tallinn was a Bandari protectorate these days.
"—blind man smashed him against a table, broke three of his ribs."
Glorund hadn't been consciously following that conversational track; the gossip of other ranks seldom held much of value. Now he replayed it, and learned of the bar fight in Nûrnen. Haven was a tough, unforgiving place; few handicapped folk could survive here. Fewer still could hope to win a fight against a sighted foe. Even for Juchi, that did not seem likely, not so many years after his fall. For anyone else, though, it seemed impossible. Glorund kept eating. His metabolism was augmented, too, to power his implants. He needed twice the calories of an ordinary Soldier, or three times those of an unmodified man. No matter what he decided to do, he had to fuel up first, as if he were a pirate's steamboat taking on wood before it sailed. When he was done, he rose from his bench, stacked his tray, and left the refectory. He did not even pause to draw weapons: what need for them, against the old blind man he sought? He did stop a moment at the Citadel's outer gate, to record a message that he was going into Nûrnen for a while. He needed no one's authorization to proceed; Soldiers, and especially Cyborgs, were supposed to use their initiative.
Nûrnen was a dozen kilometers from the Citadel, down the pass and out its throat: a couple of hours' walk for an unmodified man, half an hour's run for the finest unmodified athlete. Glorund got there in less than twenty minutes, and was not breathing hard when he arrived. The paved road was crowded—it always was. The tonnage of supplies needed to keep ten thousand Soldiers and their women, children and servants fed was considerable. The Cyborg took the cleared grass strip beyond the roadside ditch. He paused to button his greatcoat just outside of town, to hide his collar tabs. That a Cyborg was in Nûrnen would have raced through the place as quickly as word of Juchi's presence had reached the Citadel. Sooner or later it would get around anyhow, but better later than sooner.
He needed to ask fewer questions than an ordinary man would have. He simply strolled through the streets as if window shopping and let his enhanced ears do his work for him. He kept keying on blind. By the time he'd heard it three times, he knew in which tavern Juchi had had his fight—the Sozzled Stobor, down by Silver Street. He paused on the way to buy a couple of barbecued lamb ribs. When he was done with them, he tossed the gnawed bones into the street. There they lay; he hadn't left enough meat on them to interest scavengers.
The taverner bowed low as he came in; any Soldier automatically expected that much deference in Nûrnen, and was likely to turn a place inside out if he didn't get it. "Clownfruit brandy," Glorund said.
A barmaid fetched it for him. She was pretty. He watched her appreciatively. He had a wife back in the Citadel and a dozen or so children from unpartnered tribute maidens, but any Soldier was supposed to disseminate his genes as widely as he could, doubly so for Cyborgs—it improved the quality of the tribute stock. Soldier genes were common everywhere within a thousand kilometers of the Citadel, and for lesser distances around the other Bases.
Maybe another time, Glorund thought with mild regret. He'd come into Nûrnen for a purpose more important if less enjoyable than spreading a barmaid's legs.
He had another shot of brandy, then ordered bread and cheese to go with it "You eat like a land gator," the barmaid said as she watched him methodically demolish the meal. She meant it as a compliment; on Haven, being able to put away large amounts of food in a hurry was a survival characteristic.
Glorund smiled back at her, thinking that perhaps he would bed her after all. That, too, was a genetic imperative. But no. First things first. He stretched and yawned, giving a good impression of a man who felt lazy and loose. "Hear you had a strange sort of brawl in here not so long ago," he remarked casually. "Raisa," he added. A Cyborg's infallible memory had many uses. Cattle attached great value to those in power remembering their names.
That was all the prompting she needed; if she was as eager to screw as she was to talk, he thought, she might well wear him out, Cyborg Soldier though he was. "We sure did," she said. "Blind man—Ivan over there"—she pointed to the taverner—"says he's Juchi the Accursed, whaled the stuffing out of Strong Sven. Everybody in town knows Strong Sven, and nobody wants to quarrel with him. He has a good bit of Soldier blood in him, or so they say."
"Half the people of Nûrnen have some Soldier blood in them," Glorund said. An understatement; half had enough to notice. All the same, the identity of Juchi's opponent had startled him. A T-year before, Strong Sven had fought a Soldier to a standstill. The Soldier was no prize, genetically speaking, but he hadn't been left out for stobor, either. So Strong Sven unquestionably was of mixed blood. And what did that say about Juchi?
Ivan the taverner spoke up: "I wouldn't let Juchi stay here, not after he admitted who he was. I like the Soldiers, I do, and I want naught to do with anyone who fought and hurt your folk." He puffed out his chest in righteous—and possibly even sincere—indignation. As he deflated, his right hand moved in a sign the people of Shangri-La Valley had learned from the steppe nomads. He added, "Besides, I didn't want his ill luck rubbing off on my place."
"Where would he have gone, then?" Glorund asked. As long as the cattle were so forthcoming, he would pump them for all they were worth.
Just for an instant, his thoughts went back to the barmaid. She was the one who answered: "When they went out the door, they turned left, going south through town. Maybe they were trying to get a place to rest, but who would give them one, knowing what they were?"
It was a good question. Glorund knew that not all of Nûrnen was as pleased with the Soldiers and their constant presence as Ivan professed to be. Still, Nûrnen depended on the Citadel for its livelihood. Few townsfolk would risk their overlords' wrath for the sake of a couple of wanderers. The Battlemaster threw down a silver coin with the shark shape of the Dol Guldur stamped on one side and the old Americ motto KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT on the other. Coppers jingled as Ivan started to make change. "Keep it," Glorund said. "You've helped me."
As he went out into the street, he glanced up at the sky. Byers' Sun stood almost at the zenith; Cat's Eye was low in the east: second cycle, third day noon, more or less. Another thirty-five hours of daylight, at any rate. Sleeping patterns on Haven tended to the peculiar. Some people catnapped when they felt like it, regardless of where—or whether—Byers' Sun and Cat's Eye were in the sky. Some tried to keep a rhythm of long stretches of awareness and long sleeps. Soldiers, for their part, usually went without sleep as long as they could, then slept hard for ten hours or so. Glorund had to think of Juchi as a Soldier. Likely he and the woman would not have settled down to rest, not here in a city where so many people had reason to despise them, but they would have pushed on into the valley. If they did stop to sleep, it would be away from people.
Working through the logic took but a moment. As soon as he saw the end of the chain, Glorund went into a Soldier's trot. Like a broken-field runner, he dodged round the people and carts crowding Nûrnen streets. Some Soldiers got into trouble when they tried moving quickly in town: they forgot that people would seek to dodge out of their way, and sometimes zigged into them when they should have zagged away.
Glorund was a Cyborg. He made no such simple mistakes. He saw a kilometer and a half of street as a single unit, plotted his course through it with accuracy and finesse. His processing equipment and reaction time let him treat the journey as a series of freeze-frames, with the men, women, horses and muskylopes essentially motionless as he moved past them.
Soon he was past the southern limits of the town. The road was paved in the center with stone blocks like an old Roman road on Terra, and intended for much the same purpose: moving armies of Soldiers into and out of the valley. It was convenient for heavy haulers, carts drawn by oxen and muskylopes, as well as the sprung carriages of the wealthy, and saddle horses reined down to a walk or a trot. Faster mounted traffic loped or galloped by on the wide graded shoulders. Pedestrians, unless they wanted to chance being trampled, usually opted for the softer ground just off the road.
He slowed and examined the road's edges with care. He knew the shoes a man from Nûrnen or another valley town was likely to wear, knew also the boot styles of the local nomads and, of course, of his fellow Soldiers. All those, save to some degree the nomads, he mentally eliminated; his eyes literally took no notice of them. That disposed of more than eighty percent of his possibles; the rest he studied more closely. He did not need long to settle on two pairs of prints as most likely to belong to Juchi and his guide.
One of those sets of prints was a good deal smaller than the other. Since Juchi's guide was known to be a woman, that alone made those two pairs a decent bet to be the ones he sought. Legend said she was his daughter, his sister or both at once, but Glorund, with resolute Cyborg rationality, discounted legend. Data counted for more, and data he had: the smaller set of feet—the ones he'd tentatively identified as belonging to Juchi's companion—took firm if short strides. The other set of prints, the ones from the larger feet, was scuffed and dragged along through the dirt, very much as if the person who made those tracks could not see where he was going.
Glorund grinned a carnivore grin and resumed his effortless Soldier's trot. Now to see to revenge for Angband Base. It would be late revenge, and minimal, but not to be discarded on account of that. Word of how Juchi met his end would also become legend, legend that would grow and make fear of the Soldiers grow with it. Glorund's grin stretched wider. Not entirely incidentally, the news of the Battlemaster's dealing personally with a problem which had dogged the Citadel for a generation would solidify his support . . . and weaken that of a certain overly ambitious Chief of Staff.
Unlike an unaugmented tracker, the Battlemaster did not have to slow to keep track of his quarry's trail. Now he simply screened from his vision centers all footprints in the road save the two pairs he sought. Sometimes Cyborgs made mistakes by programming themselves to ignore data that later proved important. Glorund did not think he was making a mistake, not here.
As he ran on, the trail grew fresher. He was not taken by surprise when Juchi and the woman with him left the road to turn down a narrow country lane, then headed for the shelter of an apple orchard not far away. He mentally checked his weaponry. He had a knife, and he had himself. That was plenty. Juchi, after all, was unlikely to be toting an assault rifle. As for the woman with him, well, she was a woman, and largely (altogether, if the legend was a lie, as legends mostly were) of cattle stock. He screened her from his consideration as thoroughly as he had the irrelevant footprints.
He added two things to his inventory of weapons. He had privacy here, and he had plenty of time. Grinning still, he trotted toward the orchard.
Aisha looked up from the small fire she was building. Her nostrils flared, testing the wind, and she tilted her head to listen. "A man is coming."
"Yes, I hear him." Juchi turned his head toward the sound. Even after so long, he sometimes expected to see what he was hearing. Whoever the approaching stranger was, he had a gait like a muskylope's, tireless and easy. Juchi heard his quick footfalls but only calm, steady breathing, as if the fellow were just ambling along.
Suddenly Juchi did see, in his mind's eye that no brooch could pierce. He saw himself as a young man out on the steppe, saw another man approaching him at a trot. It had been just such a trot as this. The man had been his Sauron father Dagor. Just before Juchi killed him.
The fellow now was in among the trees, weaving between them faster than a man had any business doing. Aisha said, "He has a gray greatcoat." Hatred was bitter in her voice.
"He is a Sauron," Juchi said. "Well, if he wants me, he has me. I shall not run from him, nor would it do me any good to try."
They waited; Aisha was painfully conscious that the rapid pounding of her heart would be audible to the Sauron . . . and that Juchi's was as calm as that of a man asleep.
Less than a minute later, the Sauron came into the clearing.
"Greetings, guest," Juchi said. "Will you share salt and bread with us?"
"Yes," the Sauron answered, "but afterwards I will kill you all the same."
Aisha drew in a sharp breath and started forward a little, her hand moving toward her knife. Juchi set a hand on her arm and shook his head. He turned back to the Sauron. "You are honest, at any rate. Shall we talk awhile first, that I may learn who so boldly seeks my death?"
"As you wish. I just now thought to myself that I have all the time I need to do as I will with you," the Sauron said. "Think not to escape, either, for I am no mere Soldier. I am Glorund, Battlemaster of the Citadel. I know you cannot see them, but I wear the death's heads on my collar tabs."
Cloth rustled. He was loosening his greatcoat, then.
"He speaks the truth," Aisha said, her voice quavering. "He is a Cyborg."
"I did not think he came here to boast and lie," Juchi said. He was calm. He'd passed beyond fear for his life in the moment he'd plunged his wife/mother's brooch into his eyes. He nodded to Glorund. "Well, Battlemaster, so you will take your revenge for Angband Base, will you?"
"Exactly so," Glorund answered. "Our reach is shorter than it was in the long-ago days; we have not maintained as much technology as we might wish. But we still know what examples are worth. Now that I have you, the cattle will quiver in fear and horror whenever they speak of your death. That serves the Citadel."
Juchi shrugged. "Men quiver in fear and horror when they speak of me now," he said. "Allah and the spirits know I have deserved death. But no one yet has dared call me coward. I shall not flee you. Indeed, I warn you that I will strike back if I may. I began fighting Saurons long ago; the habit is hard to break."
"Strike if you wish," Glorund said. "It will not avail you." Juchi had not dealt with Saurons for many years, but he remembered the arrogance they could put in their voices, the certainty that things would be as they said and only as they said. Glorund had it in full measure.
"You condemn me for taking Angband Base," Juchi said. "Why should I not condemn you and all your kind for what you have done to Haven?"
"Because you have not the power," Glorund answered at once. "Haven is ours because we are strong enough to hold it, to shape it as we will." Yes, he was arrogant, arrogant as a cliff lion stretching in front of a herd of muskylopes.
Juchi had thought that way once, till his own downfall led him to a different view. He said, "Your kind, Sauron, did not have the power to hold Angband Base. Thus by your own argument you ought to leave me in such little peace as may be mine."
"Had you stayed in that faraway valley, you would be right. But you are here now, in the Shangri-La Valley, the stronghold of the Soldiers, and here, I gather, by your own free choice. That makes you a fool, and for fools the death penalty is certain. I am but the instrument the universe chooses to carry out the sentence."
"Why not say you are a god and have done?" Aisha spat.
"There are no gods," Glorund answered. "I am a Soldier and a Cyborg. Here and now, that is all I need to be. I am a lord among the Soldiers, and the Soldiers are lords among the human cattle of this world."
"Do you take pride in that?" Juchi asked.
"Why should I not?" Unmistakably, Glorund was preening. "Year by year, we breed more Soldiers, shape this world in our image."
"And year by year, your reach grows shorter. You said as much yourself. When your kind came to Haven, you came in a starship. Where is your starship now, Sauron? You had fliers, they say. Where are your fliers now? You call your folk great conquerors? Were you not then fleeing defeat, like a beaten nomad tribe driven from good pasture country to badlands where grass hardly grows? Boast of your might, and hear your boasts ring hollow in your ears."
Aisha clapped her hands in delight at her father's defiance. Juchi hoped to hear some sign of anger from Glorund, the sharpness of an indrawn breath or the small mineral noise of teeth grinding together. From an ordinary man, even from an ordinary Sauron, he knew he would have won them. Yet Glorund still sat as relaxed as if they were talking about the best way to trim muskylope hooves. The biomechanical implants that made him a Cyborg gave him inhuman calm.
Inhuman is good word for it, Juchi thought. Many doubted whether Cyborgs truly were human beings any more, or only war machines fueled on bread and meat instead of coal. Juchi was glad no Cyborg had led at Angband Base. That fight had been hard enough as it was. But had he died in it, he would not have gone on to sin as he had. Maybe better, then, if a Cyborg had been there. He'd chased round such thoughts countless times in his years of wandering, never to any profit. That did not keep him from getting caught up in them, from wishing his life somehow could have been different.
He realized he'd missed something Glorund said. "I'm sorry," he said. "I was woolgathering."
"A fit trade for a nomad," the Sauron said, the first trace of wit Juchi had heard from him. "Let me try again: aye, we were defeated. The herds of cattle trampled down our forefathers by weight of numbers. Is that warfare? Half a dozen drillbits may gnaw flesh from a man's bones. Does that make them mightier than men?"
"The fellow they gnawed will never worry about the question again," Aisha put in. "He lost, and so did you. So will you all, until no bearer of the Lidless Eye walks alive on Haven."
"And what have you Saurons done with Haven since you came here?" Juchi demanded. "Have you made it better? Stronger? Or have you simply gone about the planet destroying anything that might get in the way of your quest for power?"
"Those who rule brook no rivals," Glorund answered. "So has it always been, on every world; so shall it always be. Accept a rival to your power and one day you will find you have a master."
"But your power is not based only on the fighting magic you Saurons carry in your bodies," Juchi said.
"By the Lidless Eye, what else is there, you bad-genes wretch?" The Battlemaster's words Still came out in that perfectly controlled tone, but they betrayed anger all the same.
Juchi nodded to himself. Flick a Sauron on his fighting ability and he bled. Juchi did not intend to let him clot. He pressed on: "You won Haven with machine magic, and slew everyone else's machines when you came. You had to—machines can kill from farther away than any Sauron's arm can reach. But now that that magic is gone for everyone else, it is dying for you as well. And fight as boldly as you will, how can you ever hope to leave Haven again without the machine magic you've spent all these years killing?"
"When we have fully mastered the world, we will restore technology—under our control," Glorund answered. "It can be done; Cyborgs can outthink men of the cattle as well as outfight them."
Juchi snorted rudely. "I've wandered widely across Haven this last half of my life. Though I do not see, I hear and I know. Aye, you hold Shangri-La Valley tight, here with your Citadel. Here you still retain some of your magic, enough to conjure Cyborgs—for now. But for how much longer, even here? In the other and lesser valleys where Sauron fortresses still dominate, they have lost the art. And, Battlemaster Glorund, think on this—is a Citadel a place from which to fare forth to conquer all the world, or is it a place to huddle, warded against a world that hates you?"
Glorund sat some time silent. In that silence, Juchi was reminded of the electronic ruminations of the Threat Analysis Computer at Angband Base. He wondered how Glorund was analyzing the data he had presented, how the Cyborg went about weighing those data against the ones he already possessed. No matter how Juchi had scoffed at it, the Threat Analysis Computer had proved abominably right. Could Glorund's augmented flesh and blood match the machine?
Juchi never learned the answer to that question, for Glorund said, "I can tell you what the Citadel and its valley are. They are the fitting place for you to die."
"Aye, Sauron, that is so, but not for the reason you think." Unobtrusively Juchi shifted his weight, readying himself for the attack that, he knew, would come at any moment. While Glorund hesitated still, he took the chance to get in the last word: "What better spot for me to lie than in the center of Sauron wickedness? Perhaps your land will gain some atonement from me, as I have already rid one part of Haven of your foul breed."
What would have been killing rage in an unmodified man ripped through Glorund. The Cyborg Battlemaster felt it only as an augmented urge to be rid of Juchi once and for all. He had no need for the rush of adrenaline that sped the hearts and reflexes of cattle, even of Soldiers. All his bodily systems functioned at peak efficiency at all times. Without gathering himself, without changing expression, he leapt at the blind man whose very existence mocked the Soldiers, who would not be silent, and who somehow kept piercing, deflecting, the cool, perfect stream of Glorund's own logic.
A man of the cattle would have died before he ever realized Glorund had moved. The Battlemaster learned in that instant that part of Juchi's legend, at least, was true. He reacted to Glorund's attack with speed many of the Soldiers at the Citadel might have envied, knocked aside the first blow intended to snap his spine, struck out with the dagger that had appeared in his right hand.
Glorund chopped at his wrist. That should have sent the knife spinning away. Juchi held on, grappling with Glorund. His every kick, every hand-blow was cleverly aimed, Soldier-fast and Soldier-strong. The knife scored a fiery line across Glorund's ribs before the Battlemaster finally managed to knock it out of Juchi's hand.
"The Breedmaster who left you out for stobor was an idiot," Glorund said.
Juchi's only answer was to butt him under the chin. Even Glorund saw stars for a moment. Juchi's blindness mattered little in the hand-to-hand struggle in which they were engaged. Both men fought more by ear and by feel than by eye—and Juchi, however he had learned them, knew all the tricks in the warrior's bag. But however skilled, however swift, however strong he was, he was no Cyborg. He hurt Glorund once or twice. Even so much surprised the Battlemaster. But Glorund made Juchi first groan and then scream.
"There," he snarled, snapping Juchi's right arm against his own shin. "And there." He rammed his knee into his enemy's midsection. "And there!" A final savage twist broke Juchi's neck. It was not the slow, lingering kill Glorund had looked for, but it would serve.
Juchi's will to live was stubborn as any Soldier's. His lips shaped one last word: "Badri," he whispered with all the breath left in him. Then at last he died. Glorund started to scramble free.
With a wordless scream, Aisha leaped on the Battlemaster's back. Glorund had looked for that, looked for it with anticipation. He would, he thought, have her two or three times and then either kill her or take her back to the Citadel for breaking. He swept out an arm to roll her off him. It was a casual sweep, not one he would have made against an opponent he took seriously. But he still thought of Juchi's legend as legend and no more; he did not believe Aisha was truly Juchi's daughter and sister both, did not believe she too could hold Soldier genes. Cyborg logic was very seldom wrong. When it was, the surprise was all the more shocking.
Aisha's fist smashing down on his arm brought home to him he that had made a mistake; she not only had Soldier genes, she had a goodly proportion of them. Her father had a three-quarter sire and one-half dam, the passionless computer part of his brain calculated. She had a five-eighths sire and one-half dam. Fairly pure strain, of excellent quality. Reflexes in the upper seven percent of Soldier range.
He twisted desperately now, in full earnest. He was as fast as a leaping cliff lion. He was not fast enough to keep her from drawing her knife across his throat.
Blood spurted, hideously crimson. Soldiers clotted far faster than ordinary mortals; Cyborgs held their circulatory systems under conscious control. Glorund could will away bleeding in an arm, in a leg, in his belly. But in his neck—! Whether his brain lost oxygen from bleeding or from his own willfully imposed internal tourniquet, the result would be the same, and as bad.
Pieces of the world went gray in front of him. The color even of his own gushing blood faded. He kicked out at Aisha. If he was to die, he wanted to take her down with him, lest her genes be passed on to those who hated Soldiers.
He thought he felt his booted foot strike home, thought he heard her cry out in pain. But all his senses were fading now, not just his vision. When he fell to the ground, he hardly knew he lay against it.
Was his bleeding slowing? He forced a hand to claw its way up his side to the wound that opened his neck. Yes, the fountain had dwindled to a trickle. If he stayed very still, he might yet live.
Something dark appeared over him. He concentrated. Aisha. She still had that dagger. He tried to raise a hand to protect himself. Too slow. He knew he was too slow. The point, sharp and cold, pierced his left eye and drove deep. All he felt at the end was enormous embarrassment.
Slowly, ever so slowly, Aisha got to her feet. She bit her lips against a shriek as the broken ends of ribs grated against each other. Even dying, Glorund had been faster and stronger and deadlier than anything she had imagined. Now she understood how and why the Saurons ruled so much of Haven. How they had ever been stopped, why they did not rule the human part of the galaxy, was something else again. She wanted desperately to pant, to suck in great gulps of air to fight her exhaustion. Her ribs would not permit it. She sipped instead, and trembled all over. "Father," she whispered. "I have given you justice."
A noise, not far away—Her head whipped around. Her fist clenched on the hilt of her dagger. The blade was still red with Glorund's blood. Even as she made the gesture, she felt its futility. If that was a Sauron coming through the apple trees, she was dead. Only wildest luck and surprise had let her slay the Battlemaster. She would not enjoy surprise here, not standing over Glorund's butchered corpse. And as for luck, surely she had used it all in killing him. Her shoulders sagged in resignation; she waited for her end.
But she still did have some luck left, she realized when the newcomer walked into the clearing. He was no Sauron, only a peasant dressed in sheepskin jacket and baggy trousers of undyed wool. He carried nothing more lethal than a mattock.
His eyes widened as they went from her face to the dagger to the two bodies sprawled close by, back to her face, back to the bodies. They almost popped from his head when he noticed that one of those bodies wore a greatcoat of Sauron field-gray. He shifted the mattock to his left hand so he could move the other over his heart. Aisha had seen that violent crisscross gesture in some of the valleys she'd visited. It belonged to a faith many farmers still followed.
"You killed them both?" the peasant whispered in Russki. He gripped the mattock in both hands and fell back into a clumsy posture of defense.
Aisha shook her head. The motion hurt. Every motion hurt. "No," she answered wearily. "The Sauron killed my father. I killed the Sauron."
"You are a woman," the peasant said, as if it were accusation rather than simple statement of fact. "How could you slay a Sauron Soldier?"
"I am called Aisha. My father is Juchi." She pointed to the corpse that was not Glorund's. Juchi's death had not hit her yet, save to make her numb—she noticed that she still spoke of him in the present tense.
This time the peasant dropped the mattock to crisscross himself. "The accursed one," he whispered.
"So people have named him," Aisha agreed, more wearily still. "He taught me to fight—before misfortune cast him down, he was a great warrior. And I—I share his blood." The third repetition of the peasant's ritual crisscrossing began to bore her. She said, "If you're going to run screaming to your Sauron masters, do it. I won't flee. I'm sick to death of wandering."
"Don't talk like a fool," the peasant said, crisscrossing himself yet again. "We bury these bodies, we maybe have time to run away, Bog willing." He picked up the mattock and set to work. Dirt flew.
"Why do you need to run away?" Aisha asked.
"This happens on the land I work for the Saurons, so they will blame me." He paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. "Drag the bodies over here while I work."
Aisha obeyed. She did not relish the idea of her father sharing a grave with a Sauron but, as Juchi himself had said, perhaps that was only just. Glorund's greatcoat came open as she hauled him by his boots to the edge of the growing hole.
The peasant kept digging for another couple of minutes. Then he happened to look over at Glorund's collar tabs, and saw the death's heads embroidered there. As if drawn by a lodestone, his gaze swung back to Aisha. "You slew—a Cyborg?"
Now, at last, he did not bother crisscrossing himself. He did not bother digging any more, either. He whirled and threw his mattock as far as he could. It clattered off a tree trunk. He lumbered away, back toward the road.
"Where are you going?" Aisha called after him.
"What does it matter?" he yelled over his shoulder. "Wherever I run, it will not be far enough. But I must try." The thump of his heavy strides faded as he dodged through the apple trees. Aisha felt a sudden, almost overwhelming surge of pity for him—she was grimly certain that he was right, that he would be hunted down and killed. His crisscross Bog would not save him when the Saurons learned their ruler was dead.
And what of herself? Only minutes before, when she'd thought the peasant a Sauron, she'd been ready to give up and die. Now she found that was no longer so. She looked down at her father. Yielding tamely to the Saurons would spit in the face of everything for which he'd lived. She could not fight them all, not here in Shangri-La Valley. That she had killed Glorund the Battlemaster was a greater victory than she had any right to expect. She must escape, to strike a harder blow later.
Which left getting away. The foolish peasant had fled at random, and probably would not go more than a few kilometers from this land he'd been working all his life. He could no more conceive of taking refuge on the steppe than of building a shuttle and escaping into space.
But the plains and their clans were Aisha's second home. Aye, the Saurons might seek her there, but seeking and finding were not the same. Before she consciously came to a decision, she was jogging toward the steppe. It was a slow jog, with knives in it, but she kept on.
She skirted the town of Nûrnen, staying off the main road in favor of the farmers' tracks that snaked their way through the fields. At the inner margin of the pass she turned south into a district of rough hills and canyons that lay between the road and the southern mountains; shepherd's pathways there led out onto the steppe.
She jogged on, ignoring her hurt, ignoring how tired she was. All her life she'd been able to do that at need. She seldom thought about why it was so. Now she did, acknowledging the Sauron blood that ran in her veins through Juchi. She felt that she was putting it to its proper use, as he had before her—using it against those who had brought it, all unwanted, to Haven.
Had the Saurons in the Citadel or in their sentry posts at the outer mouth of the cleft wanted her, they could have taken her. She knew that. They had assault rifles and Gatlings and no doubt deadlier weapons as well, leftovers from the starship that had carried them here. But now, without Juchi at her side, no one took any special notice of her. She seemed just another woman who had finished her business in Shangri-La Valley and was on her way back to her clan.
She kept jogging for several kilometers after she left the pass. Only when the tall grass behind her had swallowed up the way back to the lowlands did she stop to wonder what to do, where to go next. For long minutes her mind remained perilously blank. All her adult life she had led her father/brother about, served as his eyes and as the staff in his hand. She'd wanted nothing more. Now he was gone. She still knew no grief, only vast emptiness. Without Juchi, what point to her own life? What could she do? What could she be?
"I am Aisha," she said. The wind still blew the words away. She said them again. The wind still blew. What did her name mean? Her voice firmed as she declared: "It will mean what I make it mean."
She still had no idea what that would be. She turned northwest, toward distant Tallinn Valley where she had been born, and began to find out.