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Chapter Four

Like ripples from a stone cast into a pool, rumor spread outwards. What the refectory knew now washed up in Nûrnen a few hours later. Oftentimes rumor was garbled, that being the way of such things. This rumor, though, was too big for garbling to matter much. It raced through the city that had risen to serve the Citadel, came to rest in the taverns that lubricated soldiers and Nûrnenites alike.

At one such, a dive called the Sozzled Stobor, Strong Sven held forth. Gesturing with a cup of tennis-fruit brandy, he declared, "We got nothin' to worry about. Those horsefuckers from the high plains'll never get past the Citadel. By Allah or Jesus or whoever you fancy, we'll scavenge from their carcasses for the next five T-years."

From behind the bar, one of the serving-maids, a wide-faced girl named Raisa, said, "Aye, you'd be the one to think so, wouldn't you?"

Several people chuckled, at the bar and at the tables close by the fire. Strong Sven had a large infusion of soldier blood, which helped account for his nickname. Most folk had to be careful about alluding to it. But he was sweet on Raisa, and took from her what would have angered him in someone else's mouth.

He said, "How can we doubt it? We fleece the steppe-rats, too, after all, when they ride through here so their drabs can drop their pups. You think they're going to whip the soldiers?" He chortled at the very idea.

From the safe anonymity of a crowded table, somebody—Strong Sven couldn't pick out who—said, "One of those steppe rats, and a blind one to boot, booted your ass, you son of a Sauron."

Strong Sven felt the tavern grow silent around him. Rage surged in him, and mortification, too. He'd mocked Juchi the Accursed when Juchi came through Nûrnen, mocked him and paid the price for it—old and blind though Juchi was, he had a lot more soldier blood in him than Strong Sven did. Sven had needed more cycles than he cared to remember to rebuild his fearsome reputation.

He thought about taking on the whole table at once. Reluctantly, he decided against it: seven or eight men sat there, and several of them looked tough. Not even a semi-Sauron cared for odds like those. Besides, touches of Sauron blood were anything but unknown in Nûrnen; even the jokester might have his share.

So Strong Sven managed a halfhearted laugh and said, "Shit, if I'd had a Gatling like the ones out in front of the Citadel, it never would've happened."

"Yeah, but they say the Jewboys are ridin' with the steppe nomads." someone else from that full table observed. "Who knows what they've got?"

Another silence fell, this one thoughtful. The men of the Pale had earned solid respect in the Citadel, both for their strength and their cleverness. The Bandari Pale was halfway around the world and had never paid tribute to the Saurons, but everyone knew how they'd aided Juchi to take the Sauron Base of Angband on their borders.

"I don't care if the Bandari are with 'em." Strong Sven said. "They took a pissant little outpost ten thousand kilometers away, but they can't take the Citadel."

"Maybe not," Raisa said. The Russia flavor she gave her Americ deepened, as it did sometimes when she had things on her mind. "But what if they . . . get past it?"

Now the silence told of horror. If the steppe horde got past the Citadel, through the pass it warded, they'd come upon—Nûrnen. The city that served the Citadel had no wall to protect it. For one thing, nobody had imagined it would need one. For another, the Saurons would not have permitted it even had someone imagined the need: from behind a wall, the folk who served them might more readily have rebelled against them.

But without a wall, the Nûrnenites were as naked to the nomads as Raisa was when Strong Sven came to her little room over the bar. And the nomads had scores to settle. Ever since Nûrnen grew up after the Wasting the Saurons inflicted on Haven's older settlements, its inhabitants had profited by gouging the plainsfolk when they came into the Shangri-La Valley. Haven's steppes were thin of air, too thin for most women to bear their children to term. The tribes for a few thousand kilometers about must use the Citadel's pass—and pay heavily for anything they bought in Nûrnen. The warriors of the steppes were proud and violent men, but the Nûrnenites treated them as savages to be tricked and mocked, with the Saurons to prevent reprisal. Memories of that sort of treatment were long.

But there was more. Even Strong Sven felt a chill, as if from a cold wind off the Atlas Mountains. Nûrnen existed for the convenience of the soldiers. If the plainsmen got past the Citadel, what sort of vengeance would they wreak on those who had helped the soldiers hold down Haven?

The wind that blew up Strong Sven's back grew icier still. He wondered if his name had ever found its way up onto the steppe—and knew it probably had. The bards who wandered from encampment to encampment had been embroidering the tale of Juchi the Accursed for a generation now. His exposure on the culling field of Angband Base, his adoption by the nomad tribe of Dede Korkut, his unknowing slaughter of his Sauron father and marriage to his mother—how could any bard resist it? And what better detail of Juchi's heroic death than his victory over a half-Sauron bastard just before he and his sister-daughter Aisha met and slew the Cyborg Battlemaster Glorund? Juchi had died in that encounter, but Aisha lived—lived and raised the steppes to vengeance. She led the horde that bore down on the Citadel. She would not forget Strong Sven's mocking words or his attack on her blinded father.

What vengeance would the nomads wreak on him personally if they knew he was the one who'd reviled their accursed Juchi, the same Juchi whose desiccated fragments still stood impaled by the side of the road just outside of town?

As was his way, Strong Sven covered alarm with bluster. "Never happen," he said loudly. "Never fucking happen. The soldiers, they'll chew those fur-hat bastards to rags. Like I said, we'll all get rich off the Stobor pickings. Hey, sweet thing"—he reached out and stroked, almost fondled Raisa—"gimme another brandy."

He drank till his head buzzed and the tavern seemed to roll and sway whenever he moved his eyes, but the fear would not leave him.

 

"Well, I believe you, Shuli," Barak said soothingly. "But she's got a belly like she swallowed a pumpkin; she can't do much harm from behind that even if she is a Sauron. And a Cyborg."

Shulamit paced like a caged tamerlane, up and down in front of the three horses; they were all wearing nosebags, and munched stolidly as they ignored her. Like the bliddyfuls running this joke of a hotnot army, she thought savagely. Her hand caressed the pistol-grip of the Sauron assault rifle; she had not let it out of her reach since it had been awarded to her at the ceremony. The three of them had ridden off to these rocks for privacy, there was none back around the headquarters tents and the households of the seven. Too many servants, guards, hangers-on, all creeping round and listening, waiting for a chance to serve or save—may their dear loyal souls fry.

"Well, whose fault is it she's about to pup—" she turned on her heel and jutted her chin at Karl. "—daddy?" she finished, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"She didn't tell me she was going to get pregnant," Karl said.

"Nu? Maybe you forgot what usually causes it? Your papa never tell you about that part?"

They were standing nose-to-nose now, windmilling their arms; it was hurtfully familiar, almost nostalgic. Karl had been her first lover; she'd always assumed they'd marry in a few years—until he went sniffing after the Sauron bitch like a long dog in rut. Sigrid had used and dumped him—the memory of what she'd seen, when she stumbled on the two of them at the hot-springs of Cliff Lion Oasis burned her yet—but she wasn't about to forgive him. Just yet.

"Shut up!"

Barak bar Heber grabbed them both by the back of the neck; the fingers jabbing into Shulamit's flesh above the collar of her jacket seemed like articulated metal rods. Normally that would have been a futile thing to attempt with Karl bar Yigal, who had far more than usual of the genes of the Founder's people, but Barak was three-quarters Sauron by blood himself. Years older and more experienced to boot. Karl gave a tentative heave and settled down as he realized it would mean a real fight to get away. Barak shook them both, then held them motionless until they relaxed.

"All right, you nunikim," he grated at last. "Maybe you're right, Shuli. She smells a bit like a Sauron, but there are a lot of mixed-bloods down in the Valley . . . maybe you're right, though. In which case, this little wildichaver here was hooked by a very big land gator himself. A Cyborg can play games with your mind, who knows what a Cyborg female can do. So have a little consideration, eh?" Shulamit opened her mouth, considered for a moment, and shut it with a snap.

"Well, Ruth bless us with her wisdom, a thought has penetrated that thick little skull! shall we be a little less righteous for a while? Hmmm?"

He shook Karl in his turn. "As for you: at your age, all boys think with their pricks—myself included, back when. It's no disgrace, but it's no great honor, either. You're not dipping it now, boy, so think. Develop your brain beyond the level of a land gator ganglion! You're the one who got close to the shisk. Really close. We've got evidence now, from the tame hotnot Shuli found. Now, talk."

Karl glanced down at the toes of his boots, face twisted in concentration. When he looked up, the heavy bones under his mahogany skin were somehow more prominent; for a moment both the others could see a shadow of the man he might be in another decade, if he lived.

"She was strong," he said, in a voice just a touch above a whisper. "She lifted me . . . . I didn't hold back at all, and I didn't hurt her. That's never happened." He stopped, hunting for words. When he spoke again it was less than a whisper. "She was strong, very strong."

"So." Barak's face was long and lean, usually open and friendly as well. Now the skin stretched tight over it, making it a thing of slabs and planes and angles. He knew exactly what Karl meant; his own heritage gave him a similar problem with normal women. "We'll ask that lady some questions, after this battle." The grin that followed was feral and precise. "But since she's swallowed an anchor, she won't be going anywhere, will she now?"

 

Gently, as if to a child, Breedmaster Titus said, "Battlemaster, we need to take additional steps to ensure the security not only of the Citadel but also of the breeding population it contains."

Carcharoth nodded. He kept his eyes fixed on the death's heads Titus wore on his collar tabs. The Cyborg emblems seemed to steady him. He knew he hadn't been thinking as clearly as he should lately. Too much had happened too fast. Overload, he thought. It was one of the risks of being a Cyborg.

With their breeding and biomechanical implants, Cyborgs thought faster, farther, and wider than ordinary men, just as their bodies outperformed even those of regular soldiers. But their achievement had its price. When a Cyborg dismissed data, he dismissed them completely. That was how Glorund, Carcharoth's predecessor as Battlemaster, had died: he'd decided Aisha could not be of Soldier stock, and proved vulnerable when she proved she was.

Carcharoth's problem was similar, but deeper. His mistake had been believing the Threat Analysis Computer and so assuming the rising in the west end of the Valley had nothing to do with the Volkerwanderung sweeping down from the steppes. Now he knew beyond doubt he'd been wrong. The conflict between what he was forced to view as truth and his previous lifelong confidence in the TAC, a confidence central to his whole belief structure, was shaking his connection to reality.

He knew that. Given enough time free from additional stress, he might be able to repair the damage. He wasn't being granted that time. As best he could, he fought the process. But the war went on at levels different from those he was used to consciously controlling. And every skirmish lost left him with fewer mental resources for the next one.

Titus said, "Given the limited forces at our disposal, Battlemaster, how do you recommend we safeguard women and children? Without them, the Race is doomed regardless of success in the field."

"Yes." Carcharoth studied Titus' death's heads again. At a purely tactical level, he still functioned well. The answer took but moments to compute: "Confining dependents to the Inner Keep for the duration of the emergency will allow maximum protection with minimum diversion of manpower resources from combat. I suggest the most genetically valuable—Soldier-born women, their children, and the most promising of the others."

There were tens of thousands of ordinary tribute maidens and their offspring in the Citadel, but the soldier-born women were the core of the breeding program, rare and precious. Only one in three births was female, and only a minority of those were suitable for reproduction. Back on Old Sauron, the children had been conceived in laboratories, and many brought to term in artificial wombs. Such refinements were long vanished on Haven.

"Excellent," Titus said. "I trust you will draft the appropriate orders?"

"Yes." They formed themselves in Carcharoth's mind. Very likely they'd already formed themselves in Breedmaster Titus' mind, too; he must have been relieved to find his Cyborg counterpart capable of action after all.

Carcharoth wondered why Titus was not going through the same process of mental sorting out (coldbloodedly rational though he was, he didn't care to think of it as a progressive deterioration). When he turned the still-formidable force of his mind on the question, its answer came back quick and clear: responsibility. Titus hadn't given the commands that put the Citadel at risk; Carcharoth had. He was paying for it.

Oh, but the rebels, the nomads, and above all the Bandari, they would pay, too. The Battlemaster waited till Titus, having finally had enough of nagging him, gave up and went away. Then he drafted the orders the Breedmaster had requested of him. That didn't take long; when he put his mind to something—when he was able to put his mind to something—he still performed with Cyborg efficiency.

Even as he wrote, he knew the orders would create grumbling among the Citadel's women. They grumbled enough already; he'd heard that in the refectory. Had someone tossed him a piece of stainless-steel small change, he'd have broken the carpers' necks for them. Some of them, no doubt, hoped the Citadel would fall so they could resume the louse-plagued, hungry, fear-ridden existence they'd enjoyed up on the steppes.

"By the Fomoria that became Dol Guldur, I'll show them," he muttered. Had Titus or any other death's head heard him, he would not have stayed Battlemaster another heartbeat; a Cyborg far enough gone to start talking to himself was in no condition to retain his command. But Carcharoth was not yet far enough gone to slip where his peers would notice.

His thoughts slid back to the flame thrower. As he'd explained to Dagor, it was a highly specialized weapon. Far more often than not, an assault rifle made a more useful tool. But the terror a man wrapped in flames engendered . . . Carcharoth got an erection just contemplating it.

The long-dead man who'd shaped the mythos from which the Race, by coincidence of planetary name, had drawn so much, that man had known of the fear fire forced on foes. So many of the powers on Sauron's side in those battles had used weapons of flame: the Nazgul with their flaming swords, the Balrog with his lash of fire.

A slow smile spread across Carcharoth's features. Was not the flame thrower a lash of fire against the enemies of the Citadel? The smile got broader. He'd burn them all. The smoke from their pyre would mount high into the heavens, and the Race would rule supreme over all Haven forevermore.

When you got right down to it, Carcharoth thought, Battlemaster was an insipid title. Balrog of the Citadel—now there was something to inspire fear all the way to the Northern Ocean.

With the cunning he still retained, he reminded himself the time to propose the change in nomenclature was not yet ripe. Once the nomads had been incinerated, though, who could have the effrontery to speak against anything he proposed?

No one, he told himself. No one.

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Framed