He pressed on the button, the safety. It didn’t depress, so he pushed it forward. Ah! That must be it. Then if one lined the hole up with the target and squeezed the little lever . . . Looking down the top of the barrel, he pointed it at the girl asleep in his bed, then lowered it and called to her.
“Girl! Wake up!”
She didn’t move, so he went to her and shook her roughly by a shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered and opened; she raised her head slightly from the pillow. “Get up! Now!” He slapped her. She blinked, became more fully conscious, then abruptly knew where she was and got quickly from the bed.
“Come with me,” he said, and led her into his study. “Stand there.” He pointed to the middle of a rug. She went there and stood, small and naked, her eyes frightened.
He raised the pistol and sighted down it. With a bow, he thought, one usually wants to put the arrow through the heart. He squeezed the trigger, and the gun fired with a bang that made him jump. The girl fell backward to the floor and lay there like a marionette with its strings cut.
Songtsan Gampo peered intently at her—clearly she was dead—and then at the seemingly harmless thing he held. . Meanwhile the yeti door guard on duty had
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bounded in and stood staring, along with the emperor’s night runner.
The emperor looked at the ogre. “She is dead,” he said. “Leave her on the rug; pull it into the corridor and wrap her with it.” He watched the yeti drag her out, then turned to the runner. “Send someone to take the body to the trash bin, and someone else to arrange a special pickup. Otherwise it will stink.” He wrinkled his nose. “It does already. Also send to the guard barracks and have Corporal Nogai wakened. Have him select another guardsman and bring the star man to me at once.”
As he’d spoken, he’d stepped to his desk chair and laid the pistol on an arm of it. On the desk itself he turned a sand glass over, one in a row of them. “Also have Nogai informed that I want the star man here in the time the third sand glass takes to empty. Run! You and Nogai both will be punished, you and the man you send to waken him, if the glass is empty before he arrives. Go!”
The runner turned and fled.
FORTY-SIX
The adjutant had called for another period of trotting. Maamo did it easily—he was, after all, the supreme, the epitomal ogre—but the others, tired as they were, found it difficult. With the exception of about two hours at the army post, they’d been trotting and walking almost continually since somewhat before noon the day before. Now the sickle moon stood well above the ridge to the east. The first light of dawn would soon show.
In the distance, Maamo could see a line of torchlights, motionless sparks on the wall of the Dzong. just now, he judged, it was less than two kilometers to the edge of town, perhaps four to the Dzong’s Great Gate. There would be food for them in the yeti messroom; then they could go to their beds and collapse.
Just oehind him he heard the adjutant call a halt, and stopped.
Everyone dismount.”
That, of course, meant the humans. A yeti reached up and lifted the blind barbarian down; Jampa Lodro got down himself.
“We will rest here for ten minutes,” the adjutant said.
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“I do not want the yetis stumbling into the Dzong exhausted. It would be unseemly.” He looked at Maamo. “I want you and your people to lie down and rest. When we arrive at the Great Gate, the three of you will go directly to your barracks. You’ll have no further duty today.’
Maamo nodded. It was what he’d wanted and expected to hear.
But it was not what the demon hidden inside him wanted to hear. As Maamo’s hidden tenant, he’d intended to accompany the captives to the emperor and hopefully the Circle. There to take control of Maamo, and through him the other two ogres, to destroy first the Circle, then the emperor. To follow the adjutant’s order would ruin that plan. Therefore-—