THUDUMP.
Water—and bits of the dead man dangling over the fountain—sprayed through the room. The water prevented the fragments from being deadly . . . or not very deadly.
Silence fell in the echoing aftermath of the explosion. Adrian held the slowmatch next to the fuse of another grenade.
“If discipline is not restored immediately,” he said, half-surprised at the calmness of his own voice under the enormous reined-in tension, “I am going to light this grenade and drop it in the pouch.”
“We’d all be killed!” one of the Sea Strikers wailed.
“That’s the idea.” Adrian nodded. “We have a battle to fight, and it’s that way. Anyone have a problem with that?”
“No, sir.”
There was a general chorus of agreement, and men who’d seized women released them, forming up and heading for the doors.
“Simun.”
The little mercenary came up, limping and pressing the tail of his tunic against a slash wound along one thigh—a vulnerable point in light-infantry armor, protected only by the studded leather strips of the military kilt.
“Simun, get some of the walking wounded together. Police this area, get the surgeon working . . . oh, he is.”
The man had half a dozen of the more seriously wounded lying on improvised pallets, and twice that number of the hareem’s occupants. Some of the hale ones were tearing up sheets to help him.
“Anyway, keep things under control.”
Simun nodded. “Good choice, sor,” he said. “Cut like this, Gellerix ‘erself couldn’t tempt me.”
“I’ll be with the unit,” Adrian went on. “See you when it’s over.”
“I’m coming too.”
Adrian looked around, startled, and met level green eyes. The auburn-haired girl offered him his sword; she’d taken a similar weapon from one of the dead, and a small buckler. The filmy hareem costume was plastered to her, mostly with blood, and there were smudges of it across her face where she’d bound back the russet-colored hair with a strip of cloth.
“Miss—”
“Fuck that,” she said. She was speaking Emerald, with a slight Confed accent—upper-class Confed, he realized. “I’m a . . . soldier’s daughter, and I’ve been here an Almighty Allfather-cursed year, and I’m going to kill some of these Islander bastards.”
“Soldier’s daughter?” Adrian said.
“Name’s Helga. My father . . . fought with Justiciar Demansk’s armies.”
Things clicked behind Adrian’s upraised eyebrows. She’s really not bad with a sword, Raj mentioned.
That meant she wasn’t what she’d implied, the daughter of some long-service Confed trooper. Women of that class didn’t train with the sword—certainly not in the classic Emerald style. Some rich young women did; it had been quite the craze for the last couple of years, much to the scandal of the conservative nobility. A few had even appeared in the Vanbert Games, first-blood matches, until a reforming Justiciar had outlawed the practice. Noblewoman, he thought.
observe, Center said.
A grid formed over her face, countour lines sprang out. Justiciar Demansk’s face appeared beside it, and arrows sprang out to mark points of resemblance.
allowing for gender, probability of close genetic relationship is 97%, ±1, Center said. as near unity as a hasty analysis permits.
And Demansk . . . one of his daughters was taken in a pirate raid, and not ransomed, Adrian thought. Demansk had several sons, but that was the only daughter he’d ever heard of . . .
The analysis had taken half a dozen seconds. “All right, Miss Helga,” he said crisply. “You may rest assured of my protection.” The courtly phrase seemed oddly out of place in this room of gilding and blood. “But keep close to me and don’t get in the way.”
“I won’t,” she said. The sword moved easily in her hand; it was the standard Emerald style, single-edged and with a handguard of bronze strips. “This may get in some other people’s way, though.”
* * *
“They’ve stopped retreating, sir,” Donnuld Grayn panted.
“That’s obvious,” Esmond said, taking a bite out of the skin of the orange in his hand and tossing another to his second-in-command.
He squeezed the juice into his mouth, pitched the husk aside, and swished his hand in an ornamental fountain before drying it on the skirt of his tunic. The noise of combat grew in the courtyard ahead, and far and faint came the distinctive sound of one of Adrian’s grenades. Esmond’s grin grew; from the barely-glimpsed tower came another slow, aimed arquebus round. There was a shriek behind him—somewhere on the battlements that he’d bypassed when he took his men straight through the breach in the wall. Amazing what an entire oxcart full of gunpowder run into the ditch in front of the wall would do. The dry moat just focused the hellpowder’s power on the stone.