The Ringworld Throne (4 page)

“Flamer and fistbombs, then. I hope we do get to use the flamer. It’d help if we could show them another use for alcohol. Grass Giants don’t need our fuel, they pull their own wagons. Vampires aren’t intelligent, are they?”

“The ones near Center City aren’t.”

Forn said, “In most languages it’s
vampires
, not
Vampires
. They take the prefix for animals.”

Language wasn’t Kay’s interest. “Do they charge, Boss? One big wave?”

“I only fought vampires once.”

“That’s one more than me. I hear stories. What was it like?”

“I was the only survivor,” Valavirgillin said. “Kay? Just stories? Do you know enough to use towels and fuel?”

Kay’s brow furrowed. “What?”

and Vala’s head whipped around at a sentry’s bass call.

All was shadows now, and a sound that might be wind through taut cords, and the whisper of crossbows. The Grass Giants were being chary of their bolts. Bullets weren’t replaceable, either, where there was no client race to make more.

Vala couldn’t see anything yet. For the Grass Giants it would be no darker, but these plains were their home. A crossbow whispered, and something pale stood up and fell over. The wind picked up ... that wasn’t wind.

Song.

“Look for white,” Forn called unnecessarily. Kay fired, changed guns, fired.

It was well that the cruisers were spaced far apart. The flash of their handguns was blinding. Vala thought it over, while the fire balloons in her eyes faded. Then she rolled under the cruiser and pulled the flamer and the net bag of fistbombs after. Let the cruiser shield her eyes from the flash.

And the cannon?

They were firing around her. Her sight was back. There, a pale hominid shape. Another. She could see twenty and more! One fell, and the rest backed away. Already most of them must be beyond crossbow range. Their song plucked at her nerves.

“Cannon,” Barok commented, and she closed her eyes just as he fired.

Fire was trying to light in the stubble. There were pale bodies, six ... eight. Thirty or forty vampires stood in plain view, still in gun range, she thought.

Why would men with crossbows fear vampires? Because nobody had ever seen so many vampires together!

It was bizarre, insane. How could so many feed themselves?

High Rangers Trading Group had died in a tower in a deserted city, forty-three falans ago. High Rangers had fought no more than fifteen, that night. Killed no more than eight. All the rest had died, and only a fluke had saved Valavirgillin.

She remembered the song wafting up from the street. The vampires pale, naked, beautiful. The terror. High Rangers had fired from tenth-floor windows, and posted sentries down along the stairwell. One by one the sentries had disappeared, and then—

Kay said, “The wind’s blowing right.”

Barok said, “Cannon.”

She clenched her eyelids against the flash. Barok’s cannon roared, then one from farther away, barely heard.

Barok’s voice was faint. “They could circle.”

“They’re not sapient,” Kay said.

To left, another distant cannon fired. To right, another.

Vampires carried no tools, wore no clothing. Reach into the lovely wealth of ash-blond hair on a vampire’s corpse: you would find too much hair around a small, flat skull. They built no cities, formed no armies, invented no encircling movements.

But the warriors on the wall were buzzing among themselves, pointing, firing bolts into the dark to spin and starboard and antispin.

“Kay? They’ve got noses.”

Barok looked down. Kay said, “What?”

“They don’t have a battle plan,” Valavirgillin said. “They’re just avoiding the smell of fifteen hundred Grass Giants served by a primitive sewer system. It’s the same smell that brought them here! When they get upwind of that, the smell won’t bother them anymore. And then
we’ll
be downwind from
them
.”

“I’ll get Whandernothtee to move his cruiser around,” Barok said, and ran.

Vala bellowed after him. “Cloth and alcohol!”

He came back. “What?”

“Pour fuel into a towel, just a splash. Tie it around your face. It keeps the scent out. Tell Whand!”

Kay spoke from overhead. “I still have targets here. Boss, they’re not in throwing range.
You
go tell Anth to move. Tell him about towels and fuel. Then the Grass Giants might not know, either. Boss? Remember I wanted to show them some use for fuel?”

Idiot
. She splashed a towel for herself and took two more with her. This could turn urgent.

In the dark, with a drop on either side, she had to watch her footing. It had stopped raining. The song of the vampires rode the wind. She breathed alcohol fumes from the towel around her face. It made her dizzy.

She heard distantly, “Cannon.” Closed her eyes, waited for the roar, walked on toward a square shadow. She called, “Anthrantillin!”

“He’s busy, Vala.” Taratarafasht’s voice.

“He’ll be very busy, Tarfa. The vamps are circling round. Get your towels out, splash them with fuel, tie them over your mouths. Then move the truck a sixth around the arc.”

“Valavirgillin, I take my orders from Anthrantillin.”

Fool woman. “Get the cruiser into place or you can both tell it to the Ghouls. Get a towel on Anth, too. But first give me a fuel jar for the giants.”

Pause. “Yes, Valavirgillin. Do you have enough towels?”

The fuel jar was heavy. Valavirgillin was terribly conscious of the weapons she wasn’t holding. When the big shape loomed before her, she was embarrassingly relieved.

The Grass Giant didn’t turn. “How goes the defense, Valavirgillin?”

Vala said, “They’re circling us. You’ll smell them in a minute. Tie this—“

“*Fowh*! What stink is that?”

“Alcohol. It moves our cruisers, but it may save us. Tie this around your neck.”

The guard didn’t move, didn’t look at her. He wouldn’t insult an alien guest. So:
Valavirgillin has not spoken.

She didn’t have time for games. “Point me toward the Thurl.”

“Give me the cloth.”

She threw it to him underhand. He snorted in disgust, but he was tying it around his neck. He pointed then, but she’d already seen the shine of the Bull’s armor.

The Bull looked at the cloth in her hands even as he backed away from the stink. “But why?”

“You don’t
know
about vampires?”

“Stories come to us. Vampires die easily enough, and they don’t
think
. As for the rest ... should the cloth cover our ears?”

“Why, Thurl?”

“So that they cannot sing us to our deaths.”

“Not sound. Smell!”

“Smell?”

Grass Giants weren’t idiots, but ... they’d been unlucky. First somebody has to live through a vampire attack. Even if a child survives, he won’t know why the adults all went away. She, Kay,
someone
should have raised this subject, no matter the rush.

“Vampires put out a mating scent, Thurl. Your lust rises and your brain turns off and you
go
.”

“The stink of your fuel, it cures the problem? But isn’t there another problem? We hear of you Machine People and your empire of fuel. You persuade other hominid species to make alcohol for your wagons. They learn to drink it. They lose interest in work and play and life itself, anything but the fuel, and they die young.”

Vala laughed. “Vampire scent does all of that before you can take a hundred breaths.” Still, the Thurl had a point.
Do we want crossbowmen drunk while vampires circle the wall?

“Is fuel better? Try strong herbs?”

“When can you pick these herbs? I have fuel now, not tomorrow.”

The Bull turned from her and began bellowing orders. Most of the males were on the wall now, but women began running. Bales of cloth appeared. Women climbed up the wall and along the top to the cruisers. Vala waited with what patience she could muster.

The Bull roared, “Come!” He entered an earthen building, the second largest.

It was fabric stretched over the top of a dirt wall and one central pole. Here were tall heaps of dried grass, but other plants too, a thousand scents. The Bull crushed leaves under her nose. She shied back. A different leaf; she sniffed gingerly. Another.

She said, “Try all of those, but try fuel too. We’ll find out what works best. Why do you store these?”

The Bull laughed. “Flavoring, these, pepperleek and minch. Woman eats this, makes her milk better. Did you think we eat only grass? Wilted or sour grass needs something for taste.”

The Bull gathered armfuls of plants and strode out bellowing. She could have heard his roar in Center City, she thought. His voice and the women’s, and presently the scuff of their big feet as they climbed.

Vala retrieved her fuel bottle and climbed after.

From the top she watched the big shadows, warriors motionless, women moving among them distributing impregnated towels. Vala intercepted a big, mature woman. “Moonwa?”

“Valavirgillin. They kill by
smell
?”

“They do. We don’t know what smell protects best. Some men already have alcohol-scented towels. Leave them those, give the Thurl’s plants to the rest. We’ll see.”

“See who dies, eh?”

Vala walked on. The alcohol fumes were making her a little giddy. She could handle it, and for that matter her towel was nearly dry.

This morning Vala had been thinking that Forn was mature enough to practice rishathra, or perhaps to mate straight off. Forn had beaten that prediction. She could hardly be remembering the smell of vampires. She’d recognized the scent of a lover!

That old scent of lust and death was into Valavirgillin’s nose and nibbling on her brain.

The Grass Giant warriors were still shadows amid the moving shadows of women. But ... they were fewer.

The Grass Giant women had noticed, too. Breathy screams of rage and fear; then two, four, ran down the embankment shouting for the Thurl. Another ran the wrong way down, moaning, out onto the stubbly field.

Vala moved among the remaining defenders, sloshing fuel on towels. Women, men, whoever she could find. Haste would kill. Fuel would protect. Herbs? Well, the smell of the Thurl’s herbs might last longer.

In every direction she could see pale hominid shapes. So little detail. You had to imagine what they looked like; and with the scent tickling your hindbrain, you saw glorious fantasies.

They were closer. Why wasn’t she hearing guns? She’d reached Anthrantillin’s cruiser. Up onto the running board. “Hello? Anth?”

The payload shell was empty.

She used the trick lock and climbed into the payload shell.

All gone. No damage, no trace of a fight; just gone.

Soak a towel. Then: the cannon. The vampires were bunching nicely to spin. Bunching around Anth or Forn or Himp, somewhere down there? It didn’t matter. She fired and saw half of them fall.

Sometime during that night she heard a repeated whisper of sound. “Anthrantillin?”

“Gone,” she said, and couldn’t hear her own voice. She screamed, “Gone! It’s Valavirgillin!” and barely heard that. Her bellow, his bellow, reduced to whispers by the cannon’s ear-shattering roar.

It was time to move the cruiser. The vampires had pulled way back here, they’d learned not to bunch, but she might find fresh prey elsewhere. Guns weren’t needed on the starboard and spin sides. Upwind from the vampires, crossbows would reach them.

“It’s Kay. Are they all gone?”

“Yes.”

“We’re low on firepower. You?”

“Plenty.”

“We won’t have any fuel come morning.”

“No. I set all mine out and told the women about it. I thought—Moonwa, the Grass Giant who was forcing towels on the warriors—teach her to use the cannon? Do we want—“

“No, Boss, no. Secrets!”

“Take too long to train her anyway.”

Kay’s head rose into the cannoneer’s chamber. He pulled out a jug of gunpowder, hefted it with a grunt. “Back to work.”

“Do you need smallshot?”

“Plenty of rocks.” He looked at her. Froze. He set the jug down.

She slid down. They moved together.

“Should have soaked that towel again,” she said unsteadily. It was her last coherent thought for some time.

He, not Vala,
Kay
wriggled out of the door and splashed into mud in a blowing rain. Vala followed, to snatch him back.

He ripped her shirt off. She pressed herself against him, but he howled and ripped it again, and turned in her arms, and turned back with two dripping half shirts and pushed one into her face and one into his own.

She breathed deeply of alcohol fumes. Choked. “All right.”

He gave it to her. He tied the other around his own neck. “I’m going back,” he said. “You’d better fight your gun alone. Under the—“

“—circumstances.” They laughed shakily. “Are you safe? Alone?”