Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
‘It can be stopped if you can move the rockets. Or break down the installations where they are. Or break the controls that go to them …’
Silence. Then a voice almost gentle, speaking words Tasmin did not understand.
‘The Great One wishes to know if there are any individuals – persons – near that place,’ Bondri asked.
From where they stood, they could look down into the city. Rheme had taken Tasmin seriously. The area around the BDL building and Government House had been evacuated of civilians when the troopers surrounded it. Now even they were retreating, moving away quickly, herding a few stubborn civilians before them.
‘Tell the Great One no one is there except those evil ones who have caused the destruction,’ Tasmin told Bondri.
‘The Great One used our language because he needed to know what is true,’ apologized Bondri.
‘Tell the Great One that I understand.’
There was further conversation in the viggy tongue, then Bondri gestured toward the long eastern slope above the city. ‘The Presences will try to stop further destruction. You could watch from up there,’ he suggested. ‘That place should be safe.’
Tasmin moved in the direction the viggy had indicated. He felt hollow, burned out inside, as though his perceptions formed a thin shell around vacancy. Clarin and Don were behind him, leading their mules and his. The animals had been grazing at the foot of the Eminence, no more concerned by its size or the noise it made than by any other on Jubal. Bondri and some of his troupe went off to one side. It was nearing dawn. Only one full day since the Eminence had heaved itself up out of the cracking Deepsoil. One day since the Eagers had gone. Tasmin cursed. From behind him, Clarin reached out, then dropped her hand. There was nothing anyone could say to him now. Since he had heard about the Eagers, he had been shut down, almost as he had been when Celcy died. It was as though everything that had happened had been focused on one point somewhere inside him. Only that one point had validity for him now.
They came to a rocky ledge about half a mile from the edge of the city. A narrow belt of farms lay west of them, then a short street lined with low storage buildings, another street of small stores, and finally the wall that marked the eastern boundary of the three great structures: Government House, the empty citadel, and the BDL building. Around this wall, Captain Verbold’s troops had been established in a solid line, well protected behind hastily built barricades. Now the barricades were abandoned. The troops were on building tops and at street corners some distance away. There were none on the near side at all.
Tasmin glared at the wall as though it were his enemy. Behind the wall was Harward Justin. If something happened to that wall, if that wall came down, Harward Justin would run. He would run. Tasmin licked his lips, amazed at the flavor of that thought, the flavor of seeing Justin run, skittering like a crystal mouse, dodging, evading, eventually being caught. Oh, the catching. Tasmin’s muscles tensed, as though he prepared to leap. Adrenaline poured into his veins, and he tasted it, tasted the thought of doing something himself instead of sitting idly by while everyone and everything else acted.
Oh, yes, Justin would run. And if he did, it would have to be in this direction.
Tasmin stared around himself, searching the ground between where they were standing and the city, peering here and there, his head twisting, eyes glittering.
‘What makes you so sure he’ll come this way?’ asked Clarin.
He turned in amazement. Don had moved away, toward the viggies, but Clarin was sitting calmly on her mule, dark hair tumbled around a clean-washed and expressionless face. ‘You are watching for Justin, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘Because our minds are alike, Tasmin. Because he’s the one,’ she said. ‘The one you can blame it all on.’
‘Do you object?’ he grated, unreasonably angry.
She shook her head, kept her face calm, eluded his wrath. ‘What makes you believe he’d come this way?’
‘The city’s all torn up,’ he snarled, not realizing he had thought it all out. ‘If he has a tunnel, it couldn’t go in the direction of the city. They keep digging foundations and substreets and drainage trenches. He couldn’t have had a tunnel going into the city and kept it hidden. It would have to come this way.’
She smiled, a tiny, barely curved lipline. ‘Amazing, Tasmin. My father told me you were clever.’
‘Your father?’
‘Thyle Vowe is my father. Never mind. So you really think Justin will come.’
‘If he can move, he’ll come.’
‘You could be hurt. Killed.’ She said it calmly, as though it didn’t matter.
He didn’t hear her.
Colonel Lang’s detail arrived at the Black Tower early in the morning, tired but still functioning. A few of the men had been killed, fallen to Tripsinger sniper fire or shattered into bloody fragments by a too close approach to troublesome ’lings, but the dead were no more than Lang had been willing to sacrifice. He had been more concerned about losing his weaponry, but it had arrived virtually intact. Now he directed his men to within a quarter mile of the Tower and there set up his mortars.
Jamieson, fairly well recovered from his injuries on the Enigma, lay on a ledge to one side of the Tower. For the last few days, Jamieson had been living his own resurrection, as though in heaven and granted the privilege of talking with God. He and the Presence had spent long hours in colloquy, hours that were as ecstatic as any Jamieson could remember. Now he lay on the ledge with Tripsingers from Deepsoil Five scattered around him, determined to defend the Presence against whatever came. The men were equipped with weapons that the armorer of the citadel – who had been working on them frantically for days – had assured them would have more than twice the range of the usual stun rifles. Below the Black Tower, Highmost Darkness, and so forth, the two giligees who had stayed behind with Jamieson were preparing to leave. They had not been diligent about their preparations, and Jamieson called to them that the attack was imminent.
‘Get out of there,’ he demanded. ‘Tumble down.’
‘Stayed to be sure you were fixed,’ sang the giligees softly. They had become very fond of Jamieson. He had a voice better than most viggies and was very good to sing with. Listening to Jamieson and the Black Tower had been edifying. They had much to sing to the troupe when they were reunited.
‘I know,’ he caroled. ‘I am grateful. But you must move now. Those troopers down there are setting up mortars.’
The giligees had not seen mortars nor sung them. They had no idea what Jamieson was talking about and were already surfeited with new Urthish words and phrases. Politely but without haste, they started up the narrow trail to the place Jamieson waited.
On the prairie below, Colonel Lang estimated the range of the Tower and ordered his gunner to fire a round. It landed slightly below the giligees, knocking them off their feet, half burying them in shards.
With a cry Jamieson leapt to his feet and ran down the trail, frantically digging out the unharmed giligees and tossing them above him onto a ledge that led back into the ranges. ‘Hurry,’ he screamed at them. ‘Run.’
Threat!’ sang the Black Tower in an enormous voice. ‘Destruction.’
Jamieson gulped a lungful of air and sang, ‘Do not fear. We will protect …’
At the side of the Tower a Tripsinger tried his new rifle on the gunner, drilling a neat hole through him.
Colonel Lang cursed, corrected the aim, and dropped another shell into the mortar.
Jamieson was reassuring the Black Tower, singing all his love and determination, his voice more glorious in this epiphany than it had ever been. He saw the shell coming out of the corner of his eye. He was still singing when it hit.
Near the BDL building, Tasmin felt a tremor beneath his feet. Clarin hastily got out of the saddle and sat, pulling the mules down beside her. Obediently, they collapsed with their long necks stretched along the ground. ‘Get down, Tasmin.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Whatever the Eminence intends to happen.’
The tremor grew into a rocking, a shattering, a tumbling of soil. Before them, the long row of earthen brick storehouses collapsed into a heap of mud rubble.
‘Not quite,’ Clarin breathed. ‘Not quite enough.’
It began again, first a ripple, then a wave, the second reinforcing the first, harmonic vibrations that amplified with each return. The wall around Government House began to twist and topple. Still not enough.
Then more! Vast undulations rolling them first one way, then the other. Trees dancing a wild pavane on the prairie beside them, tipping and bowing. Buildings in the city shaking and trembling. The world so awash with mighty sound that they were deafened by it, making each individual destruction seem to occur in eerie silence. The golden dome of the temple coming apart, dropping in ragged chunks that seemed to take forever to fall.
Tasmin wondered if it had been full of pilgrims. Worshippers of the Great Ones. The Great Ones who were bringing the city down on top of their heads.
And again the mighty shaking, the harmonics of one huge oscillation reinforcing another.
The tower at the corner of the BDL building crumpled in upon itself like wet paper. One corner of the main building sagged and fell. The grounds within the wall shifted and jigged, stones leaping over the ground like waterdrops on a griddle.
Tasmin put his glasses to his eyes, bracing his elbows on the ground as the lenses swung wildly. There was motion in the courtyard of the BDL building, someone at the gate that separated it from Government House. The Honorable Wuyllum, quite alone. No. Someone staggering along behind him, clutching at him. Honeypeach?
Clarin muttered an imprecation. She, too, was watching Honeypeach Thonks who was covered with blood from a wound on her head. The Honorable Wuyllum turned and kicked at her, then fled as she pursued him through the gate, across the expansive terraces, and into Government House.
It came down upon them. All at once. As though the bottom layer of it had been pulled away. Within the walls, nothing stood, no wall, no fragment of corner, no towering chimney, and then the walls themselves fell.
And finally the BDL building went, tumbling in upon itself in the shivering tide of motion as though it had been built of sand.
‘The citadel …’ he breathed.
‘Empty,’ she said. ‘My father told me it was empty.’
They both saw the dark opening in the earth at the same time. The soil was still shivering when Clarin’s arm went out, her finger pointing toward it even as Tasmin stood up and mounted his mule. The opening expanded. A camouflaged doorway, well east of the fallen area. And out of it came a large man in a small quiet-car, driving speedily away toward the east, toward them, where they waited.
‘Clarin …’
‘Yes.’
‘Get away. He’ll be armed.’
‘I want to …’
‘If anything happened to you, I couldn’t bear it. It would kill me. There’s been enough. Please, Clarin.’
She said nothing more. He sensed her motion rather than saw it. He would not take his eyes off the man before him.
It was dawn. The morning light shone straight into Harward Justin’s eyes, blinding him. He was within yards of Tasmin before he saw the silhouetted figure of mule and man, the blocky outline of a rifle at the man’s side. He had been shaken out of his usual concentration by the earthquake. Without thinking, he wrenched the steering lever to turn back the way he had come, not stopping to realize that the rifle was in its scabbard, that he could have outrun the mule.
Tasmin leaned forward and kicked the mule into a run. He could not hope to catch the man – could not hope to. Did hope to. Wanted to get his hands around that bulbous neck. Fracture that thick, oil-rich skull like a nut, squeeze it.
The car sped back. Justin fumbled on the seat beside him, but the hand weapon he had laid ready had fallen onto the floor when the car made its sudden turn. The car teetered, almost overturning, and he gave up trying to reach the weapon in favor of reaching the secret tunnel from which he had emerged. Directly before him on the scarcely visible track lay the entrance to the hidden cavern, the door still open. There was a large open area behind that door. Once inside that area, he could turn the car. Once inside, he could get at his weapon. The car plunged into darkness. Not far behind, Tasmin pursued it….
Something hit him from one side. Someone. Launched at him from one side, knocking him off the mule. Someone shouting at him.
‘Tasmin, Tasmin, for God’s sake it’s going to blow don’t go in there after him it’s going to blow….’
The earth came apart as it had come apart once before on the Enigma, except that this was not the Enigma, this was Deepsoil, solid as rock, eternal as stone, now broken and riven, with fire belching into the sky as a hundred huge rockets tried to launch themselves and blew apart under countless tons of shattered stone. Rocks fell around them in a clattering hail. Someone screamed in pain. What was left of the rulers’ enclave of Splash One shivered into microscopic dust rising on a white-hot wind. The cloud boiled, towered, heaved itself into the sky, blocking the sun. A dusklike shadow fell.
Tasmin lay on his back, staring at it….’
Someone beside him was moaning.
Clarin. Cradling her arm and crying from pain and shock.
‘I think it’s broken,’ she wept. ‘A rock fell on it …’
He got up, slowly, feeling himself to see if his own parts were present. From the hill behind him came a trill, then a harmonic hymn. Bondri Gesel and the troupe, who had felt it coming, had sung a warning and would now record it all in song.
When Tasmin turned back to Clarin, the giligee was already there, working on her arm.
‘You are making a habit of hurting yourself,’ it sang to Clarin, even as it looked up at Tasmin with angrily speculative eyes.
Tasmin shook his head. Somewhere under all that rubble was a man he had wanted to kill. Still wanted to kill. The emptyness in himself was not filled. Nothing could have lived through that. Justin must be dead, and yet he, Tasmin, was not at all satisfied.