Most of the automatic rifle fire had been from Matthew Kumalo, standing in the door of the low-hovering Alpha. He’d shot not specifically to kill ogres, but to protect Teodoro Baver and Hans Gunnarsson. First at those ogres in the process of attacking them, then at those which failed to flee, and still posed a threat. He’d killed or otherwise downed perhaps half a dozen.
Inside the Sanctuary, with both the emperor and Maamo dead, the remaining ogres had no leader. But they knew that death and destruction lay in one direction, and they, like the survivors outside, fled in the other, out the windows, without harming Nils or Jampa or the remaining members of the Circle.
The hair still prickled on Nils’s bare arms from the demon’s psychic scream, when Hans looked in through a window. “Nils! Come quickly!” he called. “Matt has come in the sky boat to take us out of here!”
Nils first picked up the emperor’s sword, then helped Jampa through a window and left, while the monks fled into the hallway. Baver had a rifle by then, and stood on the porch at a corner, in case any further threats developed. It was he who’d shot Maamo. When they were all out, he called to Nils: “Is it safe in there?”
“Yes.”
Baver went to the window, peered in, then handed the rifle to Nils—he knew the Northman had learned to shoot one in the Orc War—and climbed through. The place was a slaughterhouse, and it took him a moment to identify the emperor. Physically he was unrecognizable, but he was obviously human and wore a robe, a blood-soaked robe. Baver felt gingerly in its right-side pocket and found his recorder slimy with blood. In the stress of the moment, the emperor had forgotten it and gone to his sword, never to learn that he hadn’t picked up the pistol.
After Nils had helped Jampa aboard, Baver and Hans boarded too. Then Nikko lifted. Dawn had progressed, and with the hull on one-way transparent, the Dzong was visible to them in some detail.
She took the craft straight up, like a bubble in a pool, to five kilometers. Both Hans and Jampa Lodro looked out fearlessly; the old master in particular was delighted. When Nikko stopped their climb, they could see across the entire district.
Matt looked at Nils. “What now?” he asked.
Nils, in turn, looked at Jampa. Do you wish to stay here and lend your leadership?
Jampa shook his head. They’ll be happier without me. I’ll go back to my students. But first I’d like to know more about this. He gestured about him at the pinnace. Psychically he’d already gathered the basics of what lay behind the bloodbath he’d witnessed.
It was Hans who said then that he was hungry. Matthew got food from cold storage—Danish cheese and bread, potatoes and leftover roast pork—heating the leftovers in the two microwaves. He’d seen Nils eat before, Hans was a teenager who’d said he was hungry, and Baver looked leaner than he’d ever seen him. So he served a lot of it. Meanwhile Baver had checked the handgrip of his recorder, and inside found his cubes, the empty and the full. He copied the full cubes into Alpha’s computer.
Nikko had locked the pinnace on a coordinate at five kilometers, and joined them at breakfast. While they ate, they talked—all but Jampa, who had no mutual language with any of them but could understand them all. Nils asked questions for the old master, who seemed content with what he learned.
Mostly though, Matt and Nikko debriefed Baver, Nils, Hans, and each other, to the computer. Not singly in isolation, it wasn’t that critical, but together, sharing their experiences.
Matt had seen Baver being taken to the palace, but his guards had carried their swords unsheathed. He hadn t dared a rescue under the circumstances, and didn’t see him when he came back out. He saw and recognized Nils a little later, being carried to the gomba, and had followed his progress on the viewer. It was while watching the gomba that he’d seen first Hans and then Baver again. He’d moved to make a pickup, and Nikko had lowered to fifty meters, but both Baver and Hans had seemed so intent, so purposeful, it seemed best to let them continue whatever they were separately doing.
Hans had found Nils’s and Jampa’s horses browsing a flowerbed approximately where they’d been left. The gravel path had been raked that evening, and it was plain to see where the ogres’ tracks had left it.
Baver had left the emperor’s apartment with his guards, and in a lower corridor shot them both. It was, he said, the most difficult thing he’d ever done, despite having already killed men in the fight with the Kalmuls; these men weren’t trying to kill him. Next most difficult was the minute immediately afterward, wondering if the emperor or any guards had heard. But they seemed all to have left, including the one at the nearby side entrance where Nogai had been taking him. Presumably the emperor had used the front entrance and never heard the shots.
He’d explored the inner garden then, looking for a place to hide through the day, and had found nothing suitable. The portal to the inner garden proved unguarded, however, and from outside it he saw a grove of shaggy evergreens that looked like a possibility. He’d planned to use his radio there, and see if he could call in a rescue. As he’d approached the grove, he’d seen the building behind it. From close up he’d heard a sort of roar or howl, and froze where he was. Then he’d seen someone on the porch, and in the dawnlight thought he recognized Hans.
According to Matthew, his worst moment—worse than Kazi’s dungeon—was when the ogres came boiling out of the Sanctuary to attack Baver and Hans. He’d had to spray slugs around freely, with a fair chance of hitting the people he was trying to protect.
The sun was high—the local time was 0847 by the computer—when they finished. Hans had fallen asleep in his seat. Nikko took the controls again and started up the fertile valley toward the army post. Slowly, with Matthew operating the viewer on high mag, Nils watching for some sign of Chen. Close outside of town they saw three horses, two of them Mongol ponies, grazing in a ditch by the road. Nearby, Chen slept in the shade of a mulberry tree. Nils had Nikko land him in a forest glade on a bordering ridge, from where he trotted down to tell Chen that Hans was all right. And that all three horses were his to take home with him.
When Nils got back to the glade, the pinnace landed again, picked him up, and took off for Jampa’s House of Enlightenment. The Kumalos offered to wait till nightfall to land there, if landing by daylight would cause a disturbance. Through Nils, Jampa said it undoubtedly would, among the novices, but that would be good for them. And in fact, several of those working in the field fled headlong to the forest when they saw the Alpha settling toward the Songhouse. Matthew and Nils got out with Jampa and shook his hand where the monks could see.
Then the old master sauntered to the longhouse, and the Alpha lifted again.
“Well, Nils,” said Matthew, “it’s back to the Balkans now, I hope.”
The Northman shook his head. “Not at once,” he said. I want to see Achikh, at Urga. He is my anda, my soul brother. I should see him again before I go so far away.”
Nikko called up a map on the computer screen, found Urga and its coordinates, and they lifted.