The Given Sacrifice (3 page)

Fred hesitated, obviously reluctant. “There’s . . . a way. Dad told me about it. I’m
pretty certain that he told Martin, too . . . but I don’t know who
Martin
told.”

“Ah, so?” Rudi said softly. “Now that is most interesting. If . . . those Powers . . .
thought to ask him, he would have told. Told anything. But they have a weakness; they
don’t
like
the world of matter. They might not have.”

“And anyway, the fortifications . . . it’s the men that count, in the end. But the
number of officers coming over to us is slowing down. Even though the writing’s on
the wall.”

Rudi nodded grimly. “The Cutters can compel men’s minds, if given even the slightest
opening. Notice how bitter Roberts was against the CUT? Somethin’ they did frightened
him badly, and he’s a bold bad man. We need to bring as many waverers to our side
as we can while they still own their own souls. That’ll be easiest if they’re facing
you in particular rather than Montival in general, not least because they know the
common soldiers will hesitate to fight their own. That may well have turned the Horse
Heaven Hills fight in our favor.”

Fred mopped his bowl with a tortilla and chewed on it thoughtfully. When his mouth
was clear:

“There are a lot of Cutter horse-archers still loose; if I run into them . . . there’s
nothing like some plate-armored lancers riding barded destriers on your flanks to
give you peace of mind. Say what you like about the Associates, they can
fight
. I won’t be sorry to have the Grand Constable leading them either, she may not be
the most charming person on earth—”

“An acquired taste, yet worth the effort.”

“—but she knows her trade and then some.”

“Very true indeed, and I’ll be glad when she’s back. But the propaganda the enemy
is putting out paints me as lusting to divide Idaho into fiefs for my supporters and
build castles on it, the way my black spalpeen of a dead father-in-law did with the
lands he took in his day . . . which admittedly was a great whacking amount of territory,
which now sprouts noblemen and castles like toadstools after rain.”

“Yeah, if I ride in trailing a
menie
of armored Associate lancers with pennants streaming and gold spurs gleaming it’ll
make that look sorta convincing,” Fred acknowledged. “Dad never slugged it out with
Portland, but for a long time everyone
expected
that to happen, and there were some pretty bloody skirmishes before we split the
Palouse with them. What’s your plan?”

“I’ll use them at need, but I’d like to keep the chivalry of the PPA in reserve as
far as I can, until we’re east of Boise into lands where there’s no memory of the
wars against the Association. Or of the days when Norman Arminger was the . . . what
was the phrase . . . the
big bad
.”

Fred frowned. “I see your point. And they can be an arrogant bunch, and come across
as even more arrogant than they are, to people who aren’t used to their, ah, ways.
But from a strictly military point of view—”

“War is the means, Fred. Victory is the end, and that’s always about politics. We
need to separate the remaining Boise troops in the field against us from the Cutters;
the Grand Constable and the barons can trample
them
underhoof in finest feudal style with my hearty cheers. So I want air reconnaissance
as far as Boise itself. For that we need good launching sites, say in those mountains
southeast of here for a start—”

“The Seven Devils. Hmmm. There were old airstrips up there before the Change . . .
probably a lot of thermals and updrafts . . . I suppose you want me to turn my field
engineers loose on the approach roads? ’Cause I don’t have any glider squadrons to
spare, to put it mildly. It’s harder for the Air Force to defect, oddly enough. As
units, at least.”

“Right you are. Forbye we can use Bearkiller pilots and ground crew, and Mackenzies
to guard and skirmish down towards the lowlands, if you supply the transport. With
luck we can draw some of the Cutter cavalry off, too, and make them fight us in terrain
that gives us the advantage.”

Edain stirred from where he’d been holding his glass between two palms and listening
silently.

“And you’d be wanting to go up and supervise yourself, Chief,” he said wearily. “Not
leaving it to those whose
proper
business it is. That’s the ill news you had for me.”

“How well you know me!” Rudi said. “Get the Archers ready. I’ll not try to go alone,
lest you sicken with worry and do yourself an injury.”

“Or put the toe of me boot to the stony arse of you, that being the way to get sense
into your thinking parts, Chief,” Edain said. “Now you’ve eaten, I suggest you seek
your tent, unless you’ve decided to do without sleep as well.
Something
is making your judgment worse than it might be.”

Rudi nodded good-bye to Fred and rose. “
You
try presiding at meetin’s and reading reports all day, Edain, and see if you don’t
seize any excuse to get away!”

More soberly, and looking out into the fire-starred darkness beyond the tent: “And
I’ll be sending those pilots into peril. They can at least see the face of the man
who’s asking them to do it.”

Seven Devils Mountains

(Formerly western Idaho)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

June 12th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

P
riva
te Cole Salander (1st Special Forces Battalion, Army of the United States) suppressed
an impulse to dive for cover as the glider whipped by close overhead, just beyond
the tips of the firs. He hadn’t had any warning; walking in tall conifer woods meant
the only sky he could see was right overhead and the flying machines were as quiet
as a ghost.

Instead of moving he froze, just turning his head down towards the ground to hide
his face. Jumping for concealment made you more conspicuous. He’d had that well enough
drilled in during the last couple of years for it to be reflex; he was a solidly built
and broad-shouldered young man, with a snub-nosed face, pale eyes and sandy hair cropped
in the Army’s high-and-tight, now still as a statue.

In the old General’s day you had to spend several years in the ranks with superior
fitness reports and then qualify for the Rangers before they let you volunteer for
the Special Forces, and they washed out most of the applicants even so. He knew standards
had probably slipped and training had certainly gotten compressed since the war against
the western powers started, and over the last eight months since President-General
Martin Thurston was killed at the great and bloody cluster-fuck known as the Battle
of the Horse Heaven Hills everything had started unraveling for sure.

I wouldn’t be pulling this mission on my own otherwise, and me just out of training.
This is a job for a four-man team with at least an experienced leader.

But he was stubbornly determined to prove that he was as good as any of the old-timers.

Once the glider was out of sight he dropped his field pack, slung his crossbow so
that it lay right down his back and deployed his climbing rope in a loop around the
rough barked trunk of a big column-straight pine that must have been growing here
when his great-grandfather left Värmland still in his mother’s womb. That and a scramble
from branch to branch above the clear section got him sixty feet up in less than a
minute, amid a spicy sweet sap-scent.

From there he had a magnificent view through his binoculars, though he made a note
to rub the sticky residue off his fingerless gloves before touching his crossbow again.
Forest, a slice of green meadow starred with red Indian paintbrush, even a herd of
elk grouping together on a ridgeline against the menace of wolf-packs. What he couldn’t
see was the glider, which meant . . .

Which means it crashed, and probably pretty hard.

He grinned as he half-slid and half-fell down the big tree and hit the ground with
a grunt and a squat. There wasn’t much in the way of landing sites around here; mountains
had lots of updrafts, but not many flat smooth places. Gliders were useful, but they
had short working lives. So did their pilots.

Cole had noted the bearing of the aircraft against three landmarks, one of them a
high snow-topped peak to the west. He got out his compass, checked against the map
and his memory of how the terrain lay, and started through the woods at a trot.

•   •   •

“
Bearkiller
is sort of
symbolic
. There’s no need to take it personally,” Alyssa Larsson said, her voice a feeble
rasp in her ears. “It was a black bear Uncle Mike killed, anyway. I’ve seen the head
on the Bear Helm. Big, but not a grizzly like you, no sir.”

The bear beneath her didn’t respond, except to sniff more energetically. She reached
for the clasp of the seat belt and whimpered slightly at the jagged rasp of pain through
her left forearm. Then she shook her head—which itself hurt badly enough to notice
any other time—and decided that would have been a lousy idea anyway. This wasn’t the
time to operate on pure reflex, no matter how bad the hurting was or how dizzy and
nauseous she felt.

The glider had snapped off one wing and come to rest more or less upside-down, twisted
to the side just enough to make her position the most awkward possible. The bubble
canopy was about seven or eight feet above the ground, and spotted with the blood
that was still dripping from cuts and a squashed nose. She didn’t think
that
was broken, and none of her teeth felt loose despite the way her lips had been mashed
against them, but it was unfortunate that she was bleeding. The boar grizzly sniffing
around under the crashed aircraft probably found the scent far, far too appetizing.

They had a very keen sense of smell.

It was young but fully adult and big even for a silvertip. About the size of a medium
horse, say nine hundred to a thousand pounds. One of the many wandering down into
all their old range now that humans were scarce and didn’t have guns, following in
the pawprints of the faster-breeding wolves. It was sniffing the ground carefully;
their eyesight was bad, and the glider probably too strange to assimilate readily
into its mental vocabulary of shapes and smells. Then it realized where the blood-scent
was coming from and reared. Suddenly the gaping roaring red mouth and white fangs
were far far too close, only an arm’s reach from the canopy.

Skrreeeetch.

A massive paw tipped with five long claws swiped across the tough synthetic. The whole
fabric of the glider bucked and twisted; the bear outweighed it by a considerable
margin, machine and pilot together. Alyssa smothered a scream of pain as her battered
body was flung back and forth against the buckled metal of the cockpit like the clapper
of a monastery bell with a mad monk hauling on the end of the rope.

Slap-slap-slap
, and the bear’s giant paws were working like pistons in a water-powered factory,
tossing the glider back and forth the way a piñata at a posada party in Larsdalen
swung under the sticks of shrieking blindfolded children. She’d done that herself
as a kid.

The image wasn’t as pleasant with herself as a meaty treat inside instead of hard
candy and dried fruit and nuts. Metal buckled and tore with screeching sounds. Suddenly
cold air and the rank scent of the bear flooded in as the canopy came off, torn from
its hinges by a massive blow.

Alyssa snarled back at the animal, fumbling out the utility knife from its sheath
on the leg of her leather flying suit and using her teeth to open the blade. The important
time to show
sisukas
was when it was hard, which made this the absolutely ideal moment.

The four-inch knife was razor sharp. Maybe if she could slash the beast across the
nose it would give up—

The grizzly stopped, peering at her with its massive barrel head cocked to one side.
Its tongue came out like a red flag, sweeping over its nose.

You could see its mental processes working behind the little piggy eyes:
Smells like fresh meat. Injured, bleeding, helpless. Worth the trouble, yes-no? Yes.
Go for it. Yum!

Then it slouched back on its haunches, preparing for an upward lunge at the prize
temptingly just out of easy reach. She swiped the air with the knife and shouted:

“Come
on
, you piece of fuzzy dogshit! Come get what Uncle Mike gave your second cousin once
removed! I
am
a bear killer!
Haakaa päälle!
”

•   •   •

The monstrous humpbacked brown shape was unmistakable, Old Ephraim his every own self.
Even these days grizzlies weren’t common in the open sagebrush country Cole had grown
up in, but he’d hunted black bear, and he’d talked to men who’d tackled Old Eph. Their
advice had been heavy on the
don’t try it alone
, but needs must.

Whung!

The crossbow kicked back against Cole’s shoulder. He’d been aiming for the spine;
the grizzly had its back to him as it reared on its hind legs towards the shouting
pilot brandishing her pathetic little cheese-knife. Even with the x3 scope on his
Special Forces model that was a chancy shot at a hundred yards and uphill. It
hit
the bear, he’d have put the next bolt into his own head if he’d completely missed
that big a target with a scope and time to take careful aim and nice still air. But
it struck just to the left of the backbone, slamming into the beast’s massive body
and probably smacking a rib loose along the way.

The bear staggered and twisted under the impact before it whirled to find what had
struck it, bawling in rage with every hair bristling. Even the end cap of the twenty-inch
bolt disappeared into the dark fur. This was an Army model built to drive through
armor, not a hunting weapon; it had a thick steel prod made from salvaged leaf spring
across the business end, and it could send a heavy shaft out at three hundred and
fifty feet per second. He’d had a three-edged broadhead in the groove and more in
the quiver, rather than just the standard-issue pile-shaped points. Men-at-arms in
plate weren’t the most likely targets in the mountains and the slashing effect made
for a quicker kill.

One of the good points about being in the Special Forces was that you had wide latitude
to tailor your gear to the mission.

For an instant the bear spun in place, convinced that something had bitten it. Then
its nose went up for an instant, it caught his scent, the head went down and the whole
mass headed his way in a shambling avalanche of fur, fangs and claws. Cole’s hands
were steady as he reloaded, but his mouth was a little dry, and he didn’t waste any
time admiring the first shot or wishing it had been two inches to the right and dropped
the beast with a severed spinal cord. Instead he pumped frantically at the lever set
into the forestock. Six seconds was the standard rapid-fire rate for cocking a GI
crossbow; he managed to cut it to four, with another two to slap the next bolt from
his belt-quiver into the groove under the holding clip and bring the weapon back to
his shoulder.

Even so the beast’s roaring muzzle was shockingly close through the scope. Old Eph
could move faster than a galloping horse over short distances. They were nearly as
quick as tigers for all their size. Cole let his breath out as his finger gently squeezed
the trigger, with the crosshairs on the base of the beast’s neck. Then he turned and
ran full-tilt along the path he’d picked out beforehand, slinging the weapon across
his chest and cinching it tight as he went.

There was no need to look back. He knew exactly what was there, and he could hear
its guttural bawling roars of pain and rage as it galloped. It was undoubtedly going
to bleed out, but it would have plenty of time to catch Cole in a straightaway run
first.

Up ten yards of steep rocky slope, and he could hear stones spurting from under the
grizzly’s paws. A forty-foot Douglas fir had fallen against a rock-face years ago,
its trunk bleached white and hard as bone. He leapt onto it and ran along it at speed,
preparing to jump to a ledge in the nearly vertical slope of dark basalt beyond. Even
if it could walk on something this narrow, there was no way the log would carry its
weight. Heavy animals were cautious about falling, since they hit a lot harder than
men if they did.

The grizzly cast caution to the winds and tried to follow him up the tree-trunk anyway.

Cole pitched off with a yell as the far tip of the trunk broke away where it rested
against the cliff. He curled himself into a ball around his crossbow as he fell ten
feet or better, landing loose. Rocks punched at him as he landed and bounced and rolled,
including one with stunning hurt over the kidneys and several glancing blows on his
head; luckily the hood of his battle-smock took a little of it. Behind him the bear
was scrabbling at the wood before it followed him in a slide that was half-fall, but
he didn’t waste any time looking at it or feeling his hurts.

Instead he came out of the roll running, leaping for a handhold in a rock-fissure.
He went up four feet in the first jump, scrambled as much again as he grabbed frantically
for plants and knobs of stone, then nearly fell again as something heavy slammed into
the cliff below him. His hands clamped on a wrist-thick pine rooted in the cliff’s
face and jerked him upward. Instinct made him pull his feet up too, which was fortunate
as something hit his right boot hard enough to tear the hobnailed heel half-loose.

The glancing impact of the bear’s claws nearly twisted him free of his grip. Operating
on reflex he used the momentum of the blow to swing himself upward and did a loop-over
he couldn’t have duplicated on a base gymnasium’s equipment if he’d practiced for
months. Pain jagged at his groin as he got one leg across the trunk of the pine and
levered himself upright to stand on it.

“
Got
you!” he gasped down at the frenzied animal, almost inaudible even to himself beneath
the bear’s rasping battle cry.

Adrenaline fizzed through his body, and now his hands shook a little. The raving face
of the bear was below him with the fletching of the second bolt just visible at the
base of its neck. The open mouth sprayed blood and slaver, and it tried to scrabble
up after him again. The claws swiped a foot beneath his boots.

“Here’s where weighing half a ton and not having fingers is a drawback, Eph,” he gasped.
“Christ, if I ever get grandkids they’ll never
believe
this one and they’ll roll their eyes every time the old fart has one too many after
dinner and trots it out.”

He braced himself against the rough rock behind him, took several deep slow breaths,
and began to reload the crossbow. The bear was moaning now as well as roaring, blood
coughing out of its open mouth in gouts. He felt a slight twinge of pity, which was
easier now that he was more or less safe.

“Sorry, Eph,” he said, slipping in another bolt.

It was dying, but there was no point in letting it suffer. You could get killing angry
at a man who plain chose to be an evil son-of-a-bitch, but a beast just . . . did
what it did according to its nature. There was nothing personal in it, any more than
there was in bad weather hammering a wheat-field ready to harvest or hoppers eating
bare the pasture your sheep and cattle needed.