"Are these for sale?" Valiha asked him.
The man was obviously surprised at the question. It was well-known that Titanides never bought slaves. But good business practice demanded steering clear of them, never offering offense-or at least treating them as the dangerous animals they were. So the man got up and made a perfunctory bow. His English was not great, but good enough.
"All for sale, sure. You in the market?"
"It so happens we are," Valiha said. She put her hand around his throat and squeezed. Long, long ago, she thought, someone was this man's mother. He was her darling baby boy. She felt a moment's regret as she heard his spine snap. I wonder what happened to him? she thought.
It was the only eulogy he would get from her.
When she looked up, the ten guards were dead. It had been done so quickly that many of the people on the crowded boulevard were only now becoming aware that it had happened at all. One moment there had been a slave caravan, and the next there were just slaves and Titanides lining bodies in a neat row. Some people hurried away. Others, noting that the Titanides made no more aggressive moves, watched warily, then went about their business. No one screamed. No one wept.
They stripped the corpses and piled weapons and clothing on the street, then removed the chains from the slaves. It took some time to convince them they were actually free. Valiha and her band held the scavengers off long enough for the freed slaves to take their pick of the booty. Cembalo volunteered to escort those women who wanted to go to the Free Female Quarter.
"Most of these will be enslaved again within ten revs," Hornpipe sang.
"This I know," Valiha sang. "However, I did not come here to clean up the world. Just this part of it, and just for a moment" She reached into her pouch and took out the radio.
"Rocky, do you read me?" she said, in English. Titanide song was often garbled when put through these clumsy human devices.
"I'm here, Valiha."
"There are four Titanides on their way to you. They will build pens for these creatures. We have eleven in hand. Did the Captain give you instructions for their housing?"
"She did. Until we know if Nova's elixir remains potent in the house, they are to be kept some distance away. I have selected a site."
"We will be with you shortly."
There was no trouble on the way out of town.
Valiha paused at the graveyard and gathered a few bushels of dirt into a leather pouch. It was probably unnecessary-most corpses left unburied eventually went zombie-but it was a certainty that the Bellinzona soil was thick with deathsnake spores.
They made good time to the Junction. When they got there, they arranged the corpses on the ground, back to back, belly to belly, and scattered the soil over them. As the zombies began to stir feebly they were put into the newly-built cages.
Valiha felt satisfaction when the job was done. She watched the monsters shuffling to and fro, bumping into the walls, directionless.
It would be very interesting to see what killed them.
SEVENTEEN
"I don't like this," Conal said, for the third time.
"I can't fly the plane," Nova said. She snapped the safety line to her harness, and looked at him.
"I still don't like it," he grumbled. "I don't know if you appreciate the danger to Adam."
"I guess I deserve that," Nova said, keeping her temper firmly under control. "But I'm playing your game. I'm going out there to rescue my little sister."
He looked at her for a long time, then nodded.
"Watch those feet," he warned again. "For chrissake, don't let that thing slash you up."
"I will watch, but not for the sake of Christ." She opened the door, latched it in place, and stepped out on the wing. Carefully, keeping herself turned so he couldn't see it, she unfastened the line and hooked it to a cloth loop on her shirt. If the deathangel dropped her bro ... sister, Nova intended to jump after him. Her.
Great Mother, hear your daughter and grant her luck.
She looked down, and was pleased to note she felt only cautious, not afraid. Her concern was not of falling, but of falling at the wrong time.
She held on as Conal eased the plane closer. He edged around until Nova could almost touch him. She took a firm grip on the knife.
The deathangel turned its skull-face toward her, dipped one wing, and plunged straight for the ground.
Nova could hear Conal shouting into the radio. She stuck her head in closer and did some shouting of her own.
"Chase him, damn it! Follow him down! Get me in close enough so I can rip the christ-loving psalm-singing prick!"
Conal did as he was told, but not as quickly as Nova wanted. Even so, she had to hold on with both hands. Inertia, she told herself. You feel light, but your mass is the same.
He had the plane in a nose-dive, the throttle back all the way. Still the plane gained speed. They closed in again behind the deathangel who turned away with a contemptuous flicker of his ratty tail feathers. Conal zoomed by, pulled up, turned left and Nova found herself hanging by her fingernails, her feet having slid off the transparent wing surface.
Conal did a tricky little flip-flop that left her momentarily weightless, and she scrambled to get her boots down, felt weight returning, and looked up to see they were about to hit the angel.
This time, when Conal was through with his frantic maneuvers, she was holding on with only one hand. He leveled out and throttled back again, and she climbed up breathing hard.
"It's no good," Conal said. "I almost hit him."
"I know," she said, getting back in.
Conal was holding the loose end of the safety line and looking angry. He was about to say something, but Cirocco's voice came over the radio.
"He's still dropping, Conal. Why don't you level out and join us?" He turned, spotted Cirocco's plane following the angel, which now descended at a more leisurely rate. He followed them down.
The deathangel went down for a long time. When it finally leveled out, it was at an altitude of one kilometer.
"Well," Cirocco said, dubiously, "it had to be tried. If we hadn't tried it, we'd all have been kicking ourselves forever."
"Is it over, then?" Robin asked.
"It might as well be," Cirocco said. "My dears, that thing has reduced our chances of catching Adam by a factor of ten."
"Worse," Nova said.
"Okay, worse. And worse than that, if it does drop Adam, it's our fault he's down so low."
"We had to try it," Chris said.
Cirocco nodded thoughtfully.
"Folks, we just got sent a message. Gaea will not hurt Adam. But she's willing to let us kill him, if we get too cute. So let's back off, like about a kilometer, and hope that son of a bitch gets up a little higher."
They did, and after a short time the deathangel rose to two kilometers and leveled out there. Then another appeared from the bright yellow sands of Mnemosyne and took Adam. They watched as the second one disintegrated just as the first had, and the third flew tirelessly on.
"Cirocco, I'm going to have a fuel problem," Conal said.
She watched as the figures from his computer filled her screen. Then she sat back and thought it out, going over it all three times, until she felt sure she had the right course of action.
"I'm going to give you some fuel now," she told Conal. "Leave myself enough to reach the base in the north wall. I'll leave the Four there, and come back in something bigger and meaner."
"Got you."
So Conal dropped down to the level Cirocco was maintaining, went below her, then put his plane on autopilot as he crawled out to catch the fuel hose dangling from the larger plane. He plugged it in and watched the fuel fill his own tank.
"Stay behind and below, as we discussed," Cirocco told Conal. "I won't be away long."