“Dat makes two,” said Dieter. “How many more messengers have the Names sent?”
“May he never come again,” said another, who spit on the paving stones.
“Fool,” the dark-haired woman scolded him. “Cooperation is our only hope of beink allowed to return.”
The Memsahb shook her head almost imperceptibly. “No, perhaps the Fudir was right about the Twisting Stone. Longer chances have won the game. Come. Back inside. There are still the accounts to review, and it grows chilly out here.”
Greystroke emerged after they had gone and, brandishing his anycloth, became once again a pilgrim seeking the Mosque of the Third Aspect, to be guided unwittingly out of the Corner by helpful Terrans. As he hurried off down the covered stairs, he wondered what the Memsahb had meant by “the Twisting Stone.” There was something familiar there, a passing phrase, a similar term; but it did not come clear to him.
At Graf Otto’s Stairs, he paused. He was being watched—an odd feeling, one he was unaccustomed to. But the sound of footsteps echoed his own. He bought a kebab from a street vendor, and took the moment to gaze idly about. He did not expect to see anyone, and his expectations were granted.
The Other Olafsson, he thought. The Seven had mentioned a previous visitor. The second courier’s duty was to monitor the first, and if he failed to carry out his mission, execute him and take his place. The servants of the Dreadful Name were quite as skilled as any Hound, and more so perhaps than even a senior Pup. Interesting, he thought. If the Other knew that he was not in fact Olafsson Qing, he might never reach his ship alive.
He quickened his pace, and turned an unexpected corner, reconfiguring his anycloth as he did into a different pattern and cut. He wore once again the brocaded kurta of a prosperous dukāndar-merchant.
Shortly after, he heard the footsteps again.
While Greystroke simultaneously sought one trail while trying to lose another, Little Hugh O’Carroll tried to grasp the Rieving of New Eireann. The physical damage was simple to inventory; the psychic damage, more difficult.
There is a subtle difference between a world that has been ravaged and a world that has been ruined. There are no physical parameters for it; there is nothing that can be measured or tested. It can be seen not in the manner and extent of the devastation, but in the faces of those devastated. The Eireannaughta had gazed once before on a burnt and gutted Council House; but before it had been with grim determination. Now it was with slumped shoulders, and something seemed to have receded from behind their eyes.
Unlike the Rebels and the Loyalists, the Cynthian rievers had come neither to change the world nor to preserve its hallowed institutions nor even to suck the teats of its commerce. Even the ICC owned that much interest in the worlds they managed. One of their corporate maxims was: If the people get rich, you can steal more from them. The Cynthians had come only for “pleasure and treasure.” They took as much of both as they could, and not all the ruins they left behind were buildings.
A surprise attack across Newtonian space has a paradoxical feature: The defenders receive plenty of warning and yet can do little but wait. Once off Electric Avenue, the attackers must brake to co-orbital speeds, and even with the outsized alfvens all warships carry, this requires several days. But the same cruel dictates of Shree Newton limit the defenders’ ability to intercept the incoming fleet. Long before the Cynthians reached New Eireann, Colonel-Manager Jumdar knew there was nothing she could do to stop them.
Not that she contemplated surrender. Her database assured her that among the pleasures the Cynthians sought was the pleasure of combat. They were a folk for whom adjectives like “brutal” and “ruthless” were accounted compliments; and nothing so outraged them as a foe who would not fight. Those who surrendered were treated more harshly than those who were defeated—which is not to say that either was treated very well.
Jumdar’s two ships—troop transports for her rump-regiment—were only lightly armed; and no help could be expected from their home base at the Gladiola Depot, or from Hawthorn Rose, where the remainder of the regiment had gone to complete the original contract. Long before help could arrive from either system, the pirates would be done and gone.
So it would be the Eireannaughta police boats and Jumdar’s two battalions, presently scattered in peacekeeping posts the length of the Vale of Eireann. At her urgent broadcast plea, veteran Loyalists and Rebels stepped forward to defend the Vale and were issued arms from the ICC armory. Handsome Jack was brevetted Major, First Battalion of Volunteers, and given charge of this ragtag group. He immediately advised the colonel to strip the Mid-Vale of troops and to concentrate them in Fermoy and New Down Town. There was little to attract loot-hungry rievers outside the two large cities. They hadn’t come to milk the cows in the Ardow.
“And put your troops under cover,” he added. “These Cynthians will put their own surveillance in orbit and will drop steel rain if they see anything needing it.”
“We must be,” added Voldemar O’Rahilly, who was senior-most of the Loyalist contingent, “as hard to spot from orbit as was the Ghost of Ardow.”
To Jumdar’s surprise, Handsome Jack Garrity had nodded and said, “If only he were with us today.” But he and the O’Rahilly were still thinking in the old tropes, in the old fashion of a wild and wonderful donnybrook. They were still thinking of fighting for a cause. They were not prepared for the utter carelessness of the Cynthians.
After they had left, Jumdar sat at her desk, stroking the Dancer and calling orders to her two battalions—one to gather in Fermoy, the other in New Down Town. Her staff identified map coordinates where each company could take cover, parking garages and groves of trees under which armored cars could hide. (The heavies had gone to Hawthorn Rose.) Units were placed close enough together for mutual support, but not so close that their mobilization would be evident to overhead surveillance. Compliance was swift and unquestioned.
Then, all there was to do was to wait for their doom.
“And so it went,” Tomaltaigh O’Mulloy explained to Little Hugh as they stood before the smoldering skeleton of Council House. Around them clustered the leaders of the Loyalist underground, the remaining Rebel leaders, and Major Chaurasia of the 2nd Battalion, 33rd ICC. The fires had cooled, though there was still a residuum of heat from somewhere deep within the ruined structure that revealed itself in streamers of dull gray smoke. An evil smell shrouded the place, a heavy body of bad air composed in equal parts of metal, wood, plastic, and human flesh.
“I’ve never seen the like,” the ICC major said. “I’ve never seen the like.” He had said this several times already, and Little Hugh wished he would shut up, say something useful, or at least something different. The wind shifted and the thin, foul smoke wound around them. Kerchiefs emerged to cover nose and mouth. Men and women coughed, backed away.
“If only ye’d come back sooner,” O’Mulloy said. He was an old Oriel supervisor who had taken Eireannaughta citizenship before the coup.
Little Hugh didn’t know what possible difference that would have made; but he did not rebuke the man. He did notice that Voldemar O’Rahilly stood a little to the side with his beefy arms crossed over his chest and his golden hair flowing past his shoulders. He had been remarkably cool to the sudden reappearance of the Ghost of Ardow, and Little Hugh remembered what the Fudir had said on Jehovah before their departure.