“If you do as I say, yes, your people will be spared.” He looked at Ian. “But there is a price that must be paid.”
“I knew there must be a catch,” Ian grumbled. “How much blood need be spilled?”
“Seven hundred,” Reza said. “If you wish your people to live, you must find exactly seven hundred souls who are willing to fight and die for the rest. Men or women, it makes no difference. They must assemble in a single line upon the plain on the far side of the mountain of light, with no weapons other than those that may be hammered in the forge or carved from wood.”
“Why seven hundred?” Enya asked. “And what are they supposed to accomplish other than satisfying Kreelan bloodlust?”
“There must be seven hundred because that is the number of the host that accompanied the First Empress here after she died, after her spirit inhabited the vessel, the crystal heart that was awakened by your touch,” Reza explained. “The Seven Hundred who brought her here were the ones you found in the burial chamber, the Imperial Guard. The number will not be lost on the warriors who are coming here; they will understand.” He looked around at the others in the room. “As for what your volunteers are to accomplish, they will fight for your world,” Reza said, “against an equal number of Her warriors, similarly armed. Theirs shall be a sacrifice for the rest of your people, those who survive the destruction of the cities.”
“We could not hope to win against trained warriors,” Ian said.
“It is not a battle that is meant to be won, Ian Mallory. It is a sacrifice, a showing of the honor of your people, that the Kreela will understand and respect.”
“I take it, then,” Ian asked darkly, “that the seven hundred who go forward onto the Plain of Aragon may all expect to die?”
Reza nodded. “It is the only way.”
The room was deathly silent. As they spoke, the others of the Council had gathered around the trio, the uninjured helping those who were. Even imprisoned and under sentence of death without a formal trial, the Mallory Council still held the future of their people in their hands.
“I say we put it to a vote,” Enya said, looking at Ian. “We’ve got nothing left to lose, except the lives of everyone on this planet, Raniers and Mallorys alike.”
“Let the Raniers die!” someone hissed like acid eating through metal.
“Don’t say that!” Enya retorted. “Not all of them are like Belisle. There are–”
“You cannot save them,” Reza said quietly. “If you give them warning, Belisle will find a way to turn it against you. He would confine the Mallorys in the cities where they would be killed, and evacuate the Ranier families to the forests, although that would not save them in the end. Only those who choose to fight on the plain have the power to save your world, but the Raniers must also bear their share of the price of your planet’s survival; it is they who shall be sacrificed to the guns of Her warships.”
The faces around him were grim. Even the most hardened of the Mallorys here knew that there were innocents among the Raniers, people who had helped them in some way, or who simply had no control over the planet’s course as Belisle led them through tyranny. Men, women, children, they would all die in the cities. They would have to, that the rest of Erlang’s people might live.
“I say do as he says,” growled an older woman who had suffered more hardships than she cared to recount. “Better to make a stand than to just wait and get shot, either by the aliens or by our own.”
Ian nodded respectfully. Her words were well thought of in this circle. “And you, Markham?”
“Aye,” a big man, an equal in physique to Washington Hawthorne, said easily, as if he made these kinds of decisions every day. “I’ll raise an ax and a little Cain any day. All the better that it be for a good cause.”
“Waverman?”
“Aye.”
And so it went, around the room. The vote was unanimous. They would fight.
“Does that meet with your satisfaction?” Ian said to Reza after the last of the council had nodded her head. “Will that be enough blood for you?”
“Ian!” Enya said, dismayed. “He offers us a way to survive, after trying to help us against Belisle. You have no right to treat him that way.”
“We’re the ones who’ll be dying, girl. He has no stake in this.”
“You are wrong, my friend,” Reza said gently. He could feel Ian Mallory’s pain and trepidation, and was not resentful that he was the focus of the man’s anger. Mallory did not – could not – understand the Way or the fulfillment of the Prophecy. But there was no other course for them to take.
“How’s that?”
“Because I am the one who will lead your people into battle.”
Ian only looked at him.
“Why you, and not one of us?” someone else demanded.
“Because only one who wears the collar of the Empress may declare such a combat,” he explained.
“How much time do we have?” Enya asked in the silence that followed.
“I do not know exactly,” Reza said, “for I do not know where the closest Kreelan warships might be. But I would say that we only have a few hours to act.”
“A few hours isn’t enough time,” Ian said pointedly.
Reza fixed him with a stony gaze. “It is all that you have.”
The next step, getting the Council’s instructions out of the Parliament building and to the Mallorys outside, was not as difficult as Thorella or Belisle would have liked. One of the guards was a Mallory sympathizer known by Ian to be trustworthy, and he was passed a message in code, written on a stained sheet of paper that had once been a shopping list for the company store in Laster, a town far to the north. The guard, in turn, passed it to the servant of Mallory City’s mayor, who passed it to someone heading out of the building. In less than an hour, the instructions had been transmitted over the inter-city communications networks to every village on the planet.
The orders were viewed with incredulity by many, but there was no mistaking Ian Mallory’s coded signature, and they knew that he would die long before he revealed it to Belisle’s minions. While there were a few who refused to believe it, thinking either it was a trick or that the Council simply did not know any more what it was doing, the vast majority of Mallorys did as they had been instructed.
It was fortunate that the message had been sent late in the evening, for it gave the Mallorys the cover of darkness to carry out their instructions. Evacuation plans were on hand for every township, and in the darkness the Mallorys began their exodus, taking with them only a prescribed bundle of things essential for survival – a few tools, a good knife, some food – to avoid arousing too much suspicion from the periodic Territorial Army patrols. Since most of the townships were ringed by forests that the villagers had known since childhood, finding their way to the designated rendezvous points was not a problem. Moving in silence, carrying the very young and the old or infirm who could not walk or keep up, the Mallorys disappeared by the thousands from their homes.
By first light, when the horns blared at the mines signaling the start of another twelve-hour shift, only the Ranier shift supervisors had appeared, wondering what had happened to all their workers. In the meantime, the miners who were streaming from the mines headed quickly toward their ramshackle homes… and then vanished.
Thirty-Five
“What the devil do you mean, ‘No one’s showed up to work?’” Belisle shouted into the comms terminal.
The man at the other end shrank back. “Just what I said, Mr. President,” he stammered. “There was no one at the gates except the supervisors, and the miners working the night shift practically ran home. We tried to find them, even sent in TA patrols, but there wasn’t anyone there. Anywhere. The whole township’s empty.”