The Swan Riders (10 page)

But it wasn't just them. All the Swan Riders who had come to the Precepture were very young. At the time, I'd been too busy noticing that they'd come to kill us to remark upon their age. But now that I had, it made no sense. An army composed
entirely
of young people? “But why?” I said. “Why are they all so young?”

“Neuroplasticity, mostly,” said Talis, feeding slips of grass into the embers of the fire. For a moment I thought that was all he was going to say: a very Talis sort of explanation. “It's the same reason most of the successful AIs were very young. I was twenty-two, and that was pushing it. Ambrose—your Abbot—back in the day, he was sixteen. Young people take the upgrade better. And they have a better chance of surviving what we do to them.”

I did not like that
we
. But I did not say so, and Talis pressed on. “Plus, also: joining a cult? That's a young man's game.”

But even that did not compute. They joined young, but what happened to them after?

And what was happening to Sri?

A third hour. The fire was cold. The jerky was eaten. The horses were well rubbed and groomed. Francis Xavier had taken his hair out of its knots and brushed oil through it, and was now reknotting it, section by section, pulling it so tight against his scalp that it looked painful.

And Talis was pacing. Hopping up onto a rock and back down again, just to move. Like Elián had once been, Talis was terrible with stillness.

I missed Elián. I missed him with a fierceness I did not dare look too closely at. He was out here, somewhere, in this tense and empty country.

Elián.

And Xie.

And also, a life in which horses did not figure. Gordon Lightfoot had sure hooves and a willing heart, but I was not making much progress as a rider. I was stiff from my rib cage to my kneecaps, and my chest and shoulders felt as if they'd caved in around my heart.

Sri had shown me stretches, her hands on the small of my back, on the points of my shoulders.

And Xie had tried to teach me once—

I got up.

I'd thought it was unregal, or at least un-Scottish, but Xie had tried to teach me the sun salutation. I'd demurred, but I'd seen her do it every day. Her body stretching, in work clothes in the evening, and in the mornings, bare.

I stood straight. I took a deep breath. I arched my spine backward. My throat exposed, my breasts lifted, my heart opening—Xie.

The structure of the sun salutation was enough, though barely, to keep me from overloading.

What would I do, when I lived past my body?

And what had happened to Sri?

Talis stopped his pacing and watched me.

At three hours and twenty-five minutes, Sri's horse came back.

Sri was not on it.

The horse, Roberta, came pounding down the main line at speed, then crashing down the embankment toward us. FX shouted something I didn't have enough context to translate and threw his arms open in front of her. Roberta reared and dodged but slowed enough for Talis to catch the trailing reins. “Whoa, hey, whoa,” he said. “Hey, girl, easy.” He ran beside the horse for a moment, feeding out rein, letting her trot around him in a long arc, slowing, slowing. “Easy, there,” he said. “Easy.”

The horse danced in place, shaking her head and snorting.

“What's happened?” I asked. “Where's Sri?”

“Yeah, it's flattering that you think I'm omniscient, Greta, but . . .”

Francis Xavier looked at Talis. “Sri would never—”

“I know,” said Talis. He put his hands on the horse's neck, coaxing her calm. “Sri would never fall. Sri would never let a horse bolt off.” His voice was singsong soft, but his eyes were brightly serious. “Sri would never get herself into trouble after I ordered her not to.”

Roberta was calmer now. “What's the matter, girl?” Talis asked her. “Did Timmy fall down the well?”

The horse snorted and pushed at Talis's shoulder with her head.

“Guess that's a yes.” The AI ran his hand backward through his hair, raising it into spikes as if putting up his antennae. “On the other hand, our two point six just went to an eight point three.”

He looked at me, and I remembered what Sri had said. He'd risked her without risking me. But that only worked if he was willing to write her off.

Francis Xavier had not moved, but his body seemed poised to leap. The words he wanted to say—Sri's name, surely—glowing silently in the way he pushed his lips together.

Eight point three.

“Dammit.” Talis looked at me, wrinkled his nose, and decided. “Saddle them up, Francis. Let's go be heroes.”

It took just 4.5 minutes for us to pack our gear and saddle the horses and be off. We zagged up the embankment, pointed ourselves at the low humps of the lost skyline, and went at a gallop. Francis Xavier took the lead—or took point, for suddenly we were a military expedition. He had his wings on. Leaning forward with his speed, he swept down the old rail line like an avenging angel.

I was just trying not to fall off and break something.

We rode into sound, into the low rumble of the trommels.

The humps of the downtown rose as the distance vanished, becoming individual fallen buildings—the ones that had been concrete gone loose as sand castles, the ones that had been dressed stone gap-windowed, tumbled like a child's blocks. All of them were half lost beneath creeping dunes of sand and dirt and bunchgrass.

The city rose around us and then sank away, and then we were at the lip of a gentle river valley. There were gardens down there. A smattering of goats. The smell of a cooking fire. None of the trommellers were in sight.

No sign of Sri.

Talis held up his hand and we slowed to a walk. Quiet. Careful. We eased down the path from the ruined city into the valley, came around a clump of cottonwoods, and found ourselves face-to-face with—

I started, but it was only a statue.

A bronze statue of a man on horseback, in what was once called heroic scale—just a bit larger than was comfortable in humans. Francis Xavier's size, roughly. The green face was weary and betrayed beneath a broad-brimmed hat, and the horse looked tired. But what caught our eyes were the wings someone had tied to the rider's back.

Not real Swan Rider wings—not Sri's wings, not trophies of a capture. They were tattered constructions of branches and snow goose feathers, roughly roped on. But even so they tilted off the defeated horseman like a threat.

“Charming,” said Talis. His face was a blank. He might have felt anything, or nothing. He might have been doing the orbital mechanics calculations necessary to move weapons platforms in his head.

It felt like a place to pause, but we didn't pause. We rode forward, into gardens. On the far side of them was what had to be the trommeller compound. It was built with its back against the bluff: a rough half-ring of huts, built igloo-like from big blocks of dressed stone, presumably recovered from the fallen city. Together, they formed a thick wall and base for a geodesic dome of iron girders. Some of the dome pieces were covered. Others were open to the sky.

We could smell cooking, hear faint voices. A curtain doorway twitched. A child climbing the dome as if it were a jungle gym took one look at us and disappeared. But no one came to greet us.

At that moment the trommels shut off. We could hear them spinning down and down and down, and down. And down. Then silence squeezed in. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” murmured Talis, nearly under his breath. “Francis?”

“Come out!” Hearing Francis Xavier shout an order was like hearing a lapdog snarl. “Show yourselves unarmed, and appoint a voice to parlay.”

One of the curtained doorways twitched aside, and a woman came out with a toddler on her hip. She was dressed in the trommeller fashion—in a crazy quilt of bright scraps and metal buttons—but her head was uncovered. A long braid—blonde going wire-grey—swung down over one shoulder. “Swan Riders,” she said. “Come in and welcome.”

“No,” said Talis, again under his breath, and Francis repeated it: “No. Bring everyone out here, and show yourselves unarmed.”

“You don't have a count of us,” said the woman mildly—and truly enough. Twenty people could spill out of those little block houses, and we would not know whether ten more awaited us within, weapons ready. Talis shrugged in answer, and the trommeller woman pushed out one hip to balance her child better, as if the little person were a basket of laundry. “You're looking for your girl?”

“Yes,” answered Talis dryly. “We're looking for our girl.”

“She's here,” said the trommeller woman. “And the griddle's hot. Come in.” She pushed the curtain back and turned away. The toddler made a grab for her braid as it swung with the turn. It looked so innocent—but of course children were no guarantee of innocence. Some people were willing to put them on the firing line.

Francis Xavier still had a cocked crossbow in his hand. He lifted it and pointed at the woman's back as she vanished. The curtain fell into place. Francis kept his aim, but the curtain seemed unfazed.

Now what?

“Nineteen people,” said Talis. “Mostly seated. A cooking fire. Geothermal heat pump, but no significant power source.”

“How—” I asked.

“Keyhole satellite,” Talis answered. “You can't get the feed?”

Surveillance satellites and the weapons platforms were ever brushing across my awareness, but locking on to their feed, the way Talis was doing . . . I shook my head. “I can't.”

“Keep trying,” he said. “It's just a trick of focus. Like learning to wiggle your ears.” And then he wiggled his ears, of course. “
No count of them
my foot.”

“Talis,” said Francis Xavier. “What do we do?”

“We go get our girl,” said Talis, and swung down from NORAD's back. Francis Xavier dismounted too, but Talis caught his sleeve before he could go anywhere. “We go get our girl, and we kill anyone who so much as looks at us funny. Clear?”

“Clear,” said the Swan Rider. And he swept, weapon-first, through the curtained door.

Talis and I followed.

It was dark for a moment—and ghost-green as my vision-enhancements kicked in—and then it was bright again, as we passed through the little hut and into the open space under the dome.

There was a wave of startled voices, people turning around, standing up.

And there was Sri. She was lying on a mat near the fire. One of the trommellers, a man of forty or so, was leaning over her. He was saying: “That's too—”

Sri saw us at once. There was a rush of something across her face—too frightened to be relief. The trommeller man spun to follow her gaze. There were dust goggles perched on top of his turban, and a crusted line of dirt and dust around his eyes and nose that marked the edge of their protection. It gave him an almost cartoonish look of shock, surprise.

Sri tried, and failed, to get up from the mat: her elbow gave way and she fell on her back with a whoof of air. “They didn't touch me,” she gasped out. Her words were jammed together, gasping, high. “They didn't touch me, Ta—” She snapped her mouth closed, halfway through the name. Quite right, too. Why give anyone that card to play? All around the room people were staring at us. There were seven children, but that left twelve adults. If it came to numbers, we were outnumbered.