The Swan Riders (13 page)

We went for seventy-one minutes at an easy pace, keeping one rank of hills between us and the little canyon where the creek cut deep into the dry, dusty soil. The signal contrail tattered in the wind behind us. Soon enough there was nothing left.

Francis Xavier took the point, and Sri kept a rear guard. They both had their crossbows loose in the holsters at their knees. The landscape changed, rising and growing rougher as we approached the ridge and the dry river valley beyond it. The grass gave way to silvery drifts of winterfat scrub and little rivulets of bare ocher clay. Our hooves raised puffs of dust, and I knew we were leaving a plume. But nothing came at us.

But then we came in sight of the ruined church and saw that we were not alone.

The church wall was a dark rough line at the top of the hill. The graveyard spilled down the slope from it into a haze of EM fog—thorium; the graves. All expected. But there were also goats scattered grazing on the hillside, and a little tent pitched beside a tilted mausoleum. A man and a woman were sitting together on one of the grave markers, shepherds' crooks loose in their hands.

“Huh,” said Talis, and raised an arm in hail: “Ahoy, the ship!”

Francis Xavier jerked his reins and pulled Heigh Ho Uranium between Talis and the goatherd couple, turning sideways to give the AI more cover. There was no threat yet, but he reacted so fast, to its mere potential, spinning and raising his crossbow. A Swan Rider to the core, and suddenly a terrifying creature.

“Drop your staffs,” Francis shouted, training his weapons on the goatherds. The light pierced through his prosthetic hand. It was aglow, and absolutely steady. “Put your hands up.”

“Easy, there.” The woman put her staff aside and stood, sending her shadow rolling down the hill toward us. Her eyes were lost behind her goggles. She spread her empty hands. “Easy. Got nothing here but some goats.” The man stood beside her, his staff still in his hand. They wore billowing, bright clothes in the trommeller fashion. Like Francis Xavier they were wearing head scarves in the cold, blowing dust. I could see the woman's mouth, the man's eyes. Nothing more.

“I said hands up,” said Francis, jerking upward with his crossbow, and the man put his hands up over his head with the staff still in one. There was tension in them both: in their posture, in their circulatory patterns, in the faint flare of EM around their heads. The man's fingers were white-knuckled around his staff, and he glanced nervously at the tent.

Did they have something there? A child sleeping? Something else?

We edged forward—a strategic move, to get the sun out of our eyes. The old grave markers stood higgledy-piggledy, like a forest of stumps. Reed grass, which in summer would have been shoulder high, was bent into billows all around them.

Francis Xavier stood up in his stirrups, keeping his aim and his eyes on the strangers as he spoke low to Talis: “Cut round to the ford?” Heigh Ho Uranium was prancing in place, too well trained to move but catching her rider's mood.

Talis paused, nodded. “Back away then. Let's go.”

Francis actually guided Yuri backward a handful of steps, weaving between the slanting gravestones, then swung round and moved toward us.

And the crossbow exploded in his hands.

It was a peerless shot: the incoming bolt hit the stock with a shattering crack; Francis Xavier cried out at the smack in his hands; the bow spun out of his grip, flying sideways, cartwheeling through the air.

Talis wheeled NORAD round to face the shooter: a full 180 in three steps and less than a second. Yuri had reared and Francis was shouting, fighting to stay mounted, but in another moment he too had turned. I was slower than either, even though Gordon's willing heart was with me. By the time I got the horse facing away from the hill we were looking down the quarrels of a half dozen crossbows.

Armed people had risen like ghosts from behind the gravestones, from under the billows of grass.

And among them Sri sat on her horse, her face as sweet as apple cider, her crossbow still aimed straight at Francis Xavier's now-empty hands.

Bareheaded among the masked and shrouded people, mounted among foot soldiers, neat as a queen: Sri. She swung the weapon over an inch—at Talis—cranked it, and dropped in a quarrel. “Surprised?”

Talis raised his black eyebrows. “Well,
obviously
.”

I had been farthest back, down the hill, so now I was closest to Sri, and the armed men. Talis tightened his knees and NORAD came forward, tossing her head and snorting: in an instant we were side by side. Francis Xavier, a big man on a big horse, loomed up behind us like an avenging angel.

Sri did not look intimidated, and given the dozen men with crossbows at her back, perhaps she did not need to be.

“On the other hand, it's elegant,” said Talis. “Paranoia as a trap? I mean, that's brilliant. Neatly done. You got us back in range of trommellers—oh, am I not supposed to know these people?” Because all the armed people had lit with sudden terror/bewilderment/surprise. Talis smirked at them and rattled on. “Back in range of these anonymous people, whom I certainly cannot identify. You got us to someplace predictable, someplace where an ambush could be set up, someplace where we're sensor-blind? Well done. I mean, really. I would take off my hat if I were a hat person, or, you know, a person. Also, I will have a weapons platform over Saskatoon in four and a half minutes.”

Sri blinked.

“What makes you think we're from Saskatoon?” said the got-nothing-but-goats woman.

Talis shrugged. “You want to hide a conspiracy? Don't do it in Saskatchewan.” He addressed the crowd at his feet. “Four minutes, fifteen seconds.” He shook his head. “You shouldn't have let me talk. Honestly. Who doesn't know that?”

“Well,” said Sri. “We all have things to learn. Could you go up toward the church, please?”

“Or, just a thought, we could stay right here and talk about orbital weapons, and the price of betrayal.”

Sri swung her bow two degrees: at me. “I think you know, Talis: I'm an excellent shot.”

Sri, who I could trust to hurt me, if she had to. Sri, who was dying. She looked right down the stock and into my eyes.

“Ah,” said Talis. “Two or three medium-sized cities.”

“And we all hope it doesn't come to that,” said Sri, her finger on the firing latch. “Up the hill.”

Talis paused. “You heard the lady, Francis,” he said. “Take point.”

And Francis did. We turned, and Francis Xavier led us fearlessly toward heaven knows what. Gordon Lightfoot had his ears pinned, his steps bounced like stiff springs. “AI to AI, Greta,” said Talis, “what do you think? Maybe two hundred people in Saskatoon—call it half involved with this lot, half purely innocent. Not an ideal ratio, obviously, but not a terrible absolute number . . .” But just there, in the middle of considering mass murder, he stopped talking.

The goatherd couple was taking down the little tent. Underneath it was—something. Wire coils, a spinning disk. An emitter on the front that was hissing, crackling—

“Greta!” Talis shouted, swinging over NORAD's back like an acrobat, dismounting on the fly. “Get—”

Down.

The electromagnetic pulse hit me right between the eyes.

E
MP.

Electromagnetic pulse. A weapon that targeted not soldiers, not matériel, but information. Electronics. AIs.

The Abbot—my teacher, my tormentor, near to my father: an AI who preferred a mechanical body—he had died of EMP wounds.

EMP hit me. Whiteness went to darkness. Time stopped.

Then it started again. I dragged myself into it to find my head splitting (not literally: later I checked), my heart skittering, and Talis midrant.

“She's too new for this,” he was saying, and he sounded furious. “She's too vulnerable for this. She's too valuable for this. What were you thinking?” He was kneeling over me, peering at my pupils, checking my pulse. He looked terrible: his face prickled with sweat and lopsided as if he'd had a stroke. He put his fingertips over my datastore, but I could not feel even the faintest trace of his sensors. Was I that scrambled? Or was he that hurt?

I moved my head a little—and infrared came back, all at once, with a bright spike that almost made me throw up.

In flaring false-color I could just make out Francis Xavier striking backward with an elbow at the men who were trying to grab him. Someone had pulled off his prosthetic, and that sleeve swung like a banner as FX spun. He was magnificent.

And badly outnumbered.

Talis, meanwhile, was not finished throwing his fit. “You
idiot
, Sri,” he spat. He didn't just sound furious, he sounded frantic. “No, not even an idiot: this is so far beyond idiocy—this is the supermassive black hole of bad ideas around which the whole galaxy of stupid rotates. I swear, if we lose her—”

Oh, of course: he was frantic because he was worried about me. “Talis,” I coughed. And then, because he was still talking about gravitational density: “Michael! I'm all right.”

“Oh,” he said, calming as if someone had flipped a switch. “Oh, well, now I just feel silly.”

“That's okay,” I said.

“Okay, is it?” said Talis. “Well, your heart went into v-tach for four point two seconds, Francis Xavier is getting the snot beat out of him as we speak, and I seem to have walked us into a trap. But apart from those little details . . .” He turned. “Francis, honestly, what are you trying to do over there? That's enough.”

The big man subsided, panting. One of the strangers wrapped an arm round his throat in a gesture that looked almost brotherly. I fixated on the image for a second: the one black eyebrow poked from behind goggles knocked askew, the way the man's billowing sleeve buttoned tight on the wrist with five bright buttons. They all wore such sleeves—tick-borne encephalitis being a trouble in postwarming Saskatchewan—and fixating on small details was a characteristic of malfunction in AIs.

Talis rocked back on his heels, overbalanced (so unlike him, that clumsy tumble), and ended up sitting in the grass with his back against the remains of the church wall. I felt a similar whirling weakness, but it was clearing. My vision was evening out, and my skull seemed to have survived the metaphorical railway spike Sri had driven into it.

Sri.

I could trust her to hurt me, if it would help me. But how was this helping? My thoughts were shattered.

Talis, braced against the wall, offered me a hand. I took it. Sat up. The world jittered around me, as if someone had given the sky too much caffeine.

Talis, though, had no eyes for that part of the drama. He spread his fingertips along my collarbone, and this time I felt his sensors, staticky and faint. “How are you feeling?”

“Moderately rotten. You?”

“Yeah . . . not having the best day. But there it is. Five hundred years, you know: you win some, you lose some, you exact some terrible revenge.” He pulled himself up to sit—lounge, really—on top of the ruined wall.

“Hi,” he said, waggling his fingers at the tense and silent crowd. “I take it you know who I am. So you have me at a disadvantage. Or, rather, you'd hoped to.”

The threat hung there, glittering. He knew who they were, and thus their families could be targeted.

“Thirty seconds to back off,” said Talis. He'd clearly fallen hard from the horse: a bruise was coming up on one cheekbone and he had quills of dried grass sticking out of his hair. But even so he looked like one of the Fates as he held up his fingers and began to tick off seconds.

The crowd bunched and shifted. Looks were exchanged from behind gold goggles. Thirty seconds to back off? It was, by Talis's standards, a generous offer. For the first twenty seconds I thought they would take it.

I definitely thought they
should
take it.

But they didn't.

Talis folded a last finger closed and shrugged. “Did you want to give me names, or should I stick with wide-blast targeting coordinates?”

“You know my name already,” said Sri. “So why don't you talk to me.”

“Ah, Sri.” He sounded soft, amused. Was he upset? “Sri, Sri, Sri. Don't be greedy. As master of the world, I have love enough for all my children.”

He meant: you can't protect them. I could feel my datastore realigning itself, my sensors struggling back to life. Surely we had only minutes before Talis could reach his satellites. Once he did . . .

“We're not who you think,” said the nothing-but-goats woman.

“Come on,” said Talis. “You can't have a shadowy hidden conspiracy in Saskatchewan. There's no one out here.”

But there was. There was
someone
. One of those shrouded, silent men. The one at the back. I recognized something in the way he was standing, still but leaning forward, something . . .