The Tears of the Sun (41 page)

“Delivery from Ayers for the President's mother at the Brick House,” she said to the guards in a singsong monotone.

The soldiers at the entrance to the Presidential Compound were standing to attention; she watched a fly crawl over the face of one of them, and he didn't move even when it reached his eyeball, merely blinked. There was a Natpol doing the actual examination of documents. Ritva smiled nervously through an impulse to sweat.
These
documents weren't even improvised fakery; they were just someone else's, quickly stolen by a Dúnedain team who'd snatched the bearer and had her tied up in a warehouse. The black-and-white picture was of a tallish blond woman of about her age, and there was about the degree of general resemblance Ritva bore to half the young women in Boise. But she wouldn't have been fooled herself if she made an effort to compare picture to features, not even briefly. Luckily not even Boise's obsessive devotion to order and regulation extended to using
color
pictures. And it was natural to be nervous around a document check outside the dwelling of a ruler.

Act like a peasant who's bringing something to Regent Sandra at Castle Todenangst,
Ritva thought.
You've watched the poor devils sweat there, often enough.

“Pass,” the Natpol said in a tone as bored as the expression on Ritva's face. “Next!”

The Presidential Compound bore the marks of haste in its construction. This had been the citadel from which Lawrence Thurston extended his realm, in the chaos of the first Change Years; there had been chaos and fighting in Boise, and then typhoid and cholera and the Black Death, until he came and gave men a name and a flag to rally around.

The walls were high and thick, but they'd been roughcast and smoothed only enough to give no easy handholds. They followed the lines of a block across from the State capitol, with what had been the Williams Office Building as their core; it was the Citadel now, bulking high with cranes and machicolations above. Other buildings had been incorporated into the outer wall, sometimes simply used as forms into which concrete was poured. It gave the fortifications a weird angular look, jagged and irregular. Most of the interior was a concrete-floored parade ground, where soldiers and bureaucrats and their various hybrid offspring clattered back and forth to the offices around the periphery amid the odd horse or mule-drawn cart.

It
is
a castle, just a strange-looking one,
Ritva told herself.
It does all the things a castle does.

The General-President was
not
at home right now. They'd checked that carefully.

I am brave. I am
very
brave, in fact. But I am not stupid and I don't want to die
, she thought.

She walked to the Brick House; it was an ordinary two-story dwelling of red brick with a shingle roof, substantial but not really large, disassembled in some wrecked suburb and rebuilt here. The
current
General-President had a much more extensive suite in the Citadel, and another in a fortress south of town. A pair of soldiers stood at the steps that led up to the verandah, big concave oval shield on shoulder and six-foot javelins braced to the side, armor and the brass eagles and thunderbolts on the shields polished blazingbright. Their eyes followed her, but neither moved until she reached the steps.

Then they both turned in, and the spears moved out to make an X in front of her.

“Name and business,” one of them said crisply.

“Wanda Meeker,” Ritva said.
I've got more names than the Lady these days!
“Delivery from Ayers Produce.”

They looked her over, checked the basket with its two dozen eggs in straw and bricks of butter wrapped in coarse paper on a lump of ice in a clay cup, and one of them said: “Pass.”

Then they turned back, with a crisp stamp of hobnails and a toss that sent their spears turning and then slapping back into the callused hands. It was discipline for discipline's sake, but oddly impressive. Ritva remembered how she'd walked up these steps the last time—in Dúnedain formal blacks with the crowned silver Tree and Seven Stars on her jerkin, Mary and the other questers at her side.
Then
she'd been Lawrence Thurston's honored guest after Rudi and Edain saved his life, about to set out on a path that led to the battle at Wendell and the ruler's own death.

Now . . . she pulled the bell-handle. The string attached to it yielded with a feeling of weight on the end that ran through a copper tube into the house. Bells tinkled, and she heard slow footsteps and a shadow behind the beveled glass panels of the door before it opened.

“Did I order this?” Cecile Thurston said. “I suppose I did. Come in, come in.”

Ritva blinked, shocked. She remembered Lawrence Thurston's wife as a quiet woman who'd radiated both strength and warmth and showed a flash of cutting wit now and then; she'd been educated in some profession that the Ranger didn't remember, before the Change. Now there was little of the light brown left in her hair as she stood in the door of the Brick House, and the gray that had spread to most of it seemed dull. So did her own blue eyes.

And there was little energy in the way she walked. In the kitchen her two daughters were sitting at the table busy at what looked like schoolwork; one of them jumped up to take the basket and transfer its contents to a big icebox, made from a cut-down refrigerator in the usual way. They didn't look much different from what she remembered, skins of dark-olive shade and tightly curled hair, the elder round-faced and the younger thinner. Their faces were drawn with worry, though, and there was a wariness to their eyes that hadn't been there before. The kitchen smelled pleasantly of soap and wax and the roses and dahlias which stood in vases on the window-ledges, and faintly of cooking.

And there was a pregnant blond woman sitting at the table too, with a two-year-old boy squatting on the tile floor by her side and a cup of chicory non-coffee before her. She was extremely pretty, but slightly puffy around the eyes, which were a little bloodshot too.

Juliet Thurston!
Ritva thought, keeping her face bovine-calm and uninterested.
Rhaich, Rhaich! Siniath faeg!

She mentally added a phrase which translated literally into the Common Tongue as:
An individual excessively attached to their mother in a carnal manner who is also the offspring of a female Warg.

The tired eyes scanned across her listlessly, then came back. The wife of the ruler of Boise yawned and said: “Lawrence, go play in the living room.”

“No!” the boy said.

Lawrence Jr. was a handsome-looking lad, and he grinned with a gap in his white teeth as he used a two-year-old's favorite word; both his parents were well made, with the long-limbed build he showed promise of. His eyes were a brightly alert dark blue, and his hair curly and brown with light streaks from the summer sun. He was clad in a miniature version of Boise's army uniform, complete with small boots.

“Lawrence, do I have to tell you twice? The third time comes with a spank.”

“ 'Kay, Mom,” he said.

His air was cheerful, just a child whose attention had been gotten, and he picked up the painted wooden cavalrymen he had been marshaling and gallumphed out of the kitchen making horse-noises. The living room was visible from here, but far enough away that a soft-voiced conversation couldn't be heard.

Ritva wasn't openly armed; the little knife on her belt was the universal tool nearly everyone carried. The blade was only four inches long, but it was honed shaving-sharp, and it was good steel. A step, a blow, a slash . . .

No,
she thought.
I can't kill cut a mother's throat in front of her toddler, and her with child. Better to use it on myself.

That was illogical, she knew. In war she'd be perfectly ready to pull the lanyard on a trebuchet and send a five-hundred-pound boulder over a city wall to strike whom it would, and this
was
war. Some things went deeper than logic, though, or beyond it. Everyone was looking at her; the listless, slightly slumped body language was gone and her body was quivering with alertness, her weight up slightly on the balls of her feet and everything flowing smoothly.

Juliet's face had firmed too. “Mary Havel, isn't it? Or the other one?”

Three slight gasps, and then she saw recognition dawn on the others, too. Very carefully she spread her hands and kept her own voice level and light.

“
Mae govannen
, my ladies,” she said. “I am here to see if you need our help. I am Ritva Havel, yes.”

The fog seemed to clear from Cecile Thurston's eyes as she peered and then slowly recognized the Dúnedain too; it had been only the one meeting, several eventful years ago, after all. Her daughters sat bolt-upright, and the eldest said:
“Elvellon!”
she said:
The elf-friend!

Ritva held up a soothing hand at the clumsy Sindarin that followed. She remembered that Shawonda had been entranced by the Histories even when they first met; she guessed shrewdly that she'd fled into them since as a refuge from her troubles since, and as a source of strength and hope in a world whose foundations had crumbled beneath her in a welter of treachery and blood. The Rangers got a fair number of recruits from exactly that pattern of thought and feeling.

“In the Common Tongue,
nethig
,” she said; that meant
little sister
, and brought a tremulous smile.

Juliet's reaction surprised Ritva most of all; she buried her face in her hands for a moment and started to cry. Not what she would have expected given their previous acquaintance, at all. Doubly so before a stranger.

“I take it,” she said carefully, “that you want to leave too, ah, Mrs. Thurston? Leave your husband?”

“Oh, God, yes, please, he's not Martin anymore! Since he came back from Bend . . . he, he, he
hit
me. And then he said if I argued with him again he'd cut out my
tongue
, that I didn't need that to
breed
.”

Cecile Thurston gave a grimace of distaste, and the two girls stared at their sister-in-law with shock and dawning horror; evidently she hadn't said that in front of them before.

“I can't . . . I can't bear the thought of him
touching
me again!”

Well, that settles that,
Ritva thought.
This can't be a put-on to set me up. Cunning elaborate plans like that only happen on the spur of the moment in stories. She' d just yell for the guards, and I can't get out of here. And I've hardly ever seen anyone so frightened . . .

She remembered fighting the Seeker who'd cut out Mary's eye; his own gaze, like a spiral downward into a depth that wasn't even black, was
nothing
, un-being where even meaning was no more. Then she tried to imagine waking up and seeing that on the pillow next to her, and felt a rash of sweat break out under her arms and around her neck, along with a twist in the stomach.

“Euuuu,” she murmured to herself.

Juliet scrubbed at her face, and called mastery back to herself with a series of deep breaths. “How . . . what can you do?” she went on steadily.

Ritva shook her head. “This change in your husband, it happened after he came back from meeting the Prophet, Sethaz, in Bend?”

“Yes. Before then, he was . . . he was
Martin
. Now it's as if there's two people in his head, or another one that can put Martin on like a
mask.
”

Like one of those grubs that eats out an insect from the inside,
Ritva thought.
Only with the soul as the host. I won't say that, though.

Cecile was glaring at her daughter-in-law; Ritva could fill in that too. As long as it had merely been a matter of parricide and usurpation, Juliet had been all for it. Only once the whole web of betrayal had turned on her had it become
bad
. The older woman took a deep breath and obviously pushed the matter aside for later. She did say: “It wasn't Fred, was it.”

The inflection didn't have a question in it. Ritva replied gently but firmly: “No. It wasn't.”

Then: “Do you have a map of the city?” she said. And to Juliet: “When is your . . . when is Martin due back?”

“The day after tomorrow,” she said. “There's a report of some sort of force moving through Nevada . . . but there are always Rovers and bandits down there.”

And we went through that way for a while,
Ritva thought; it was the path that avoided Boise's all-too-active patrols.

“Can you get out of the Compound?” Ritva asked. “Taking all here with you?”

Juliet cast a quick glance at the others. Ritva caught it and went on: “The mission is to rescue Lady Cecile and Janie and Shawonda . . . Fred's kin. To them we have a debt of honor. You were no part of our plan and it's an added risk.”

The bloodshot eyes were shrewd. “And you need them to undermine Martin's position.”

“Yes. Will you, too, denounce him?”

Juliet took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes. I can't stay, I
can't
.”

“Then we have little time. Ah, thank you, Shawonda.”

The girl spread a map of the city out on the kitchen table; it was a modern one, showing the walls. “Now,
can
you get all these outside the Compound walls?”

Juliet nodded, her fists clenching. “I . . . I think so. Yes. As long as Martin isn't here. For a little while at least. But there will be guards, at least two platoons of the Sixth.”