This time the troll chief didn’t howl; he roared! Raising his sword, he took a first step toward Nils, and Hans shot. Shot the troll who’d held Nils’s arm, for he still had no clear shot at the troll chief. The arrow struck deeply, for the yeti guards wore no mail, only a breastplate. It severed the spine, slashed through the heart, penetrated the cartilaginous sternum and stopped against the breastplate. The troll collapsed while its chief paused to stare. At the same time Hans shouted, “Run, Nils, run!”
The ogre nearest Hans’s window turned and leaped toward it as if catapulted. Despite himself the boy jumped back. The railing behind him was buttocks high to his long frame; he toppled backward over it and fell to the ground, a meter and a half below the porch. The first ogre through didn’t see him at first, then did, and hopped over the railing, sword in hand.
There was the sharp “blam!” of a pistol from a corner of the porch, and another. The ogre jerked, turned, and
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came back over the railing like a leopard. The pistol fired again, once, twice. The ogre faltered, slapping at its chest. Another came through behind it, and others through other windows, windows with both glass and shutters closed. The pistol banged again, then again, and was silent, empty.
Inside, Demon-Maamo had turned to the window and the shout, the source of the arrow. Then realized that the ogres were moving toward the windows as if in relief at having something they could attack unquestioningly. Ignoring the blind man now, he spun and pounced to the Circle, striking with his sword. As he killed the first monk, the shared trance was broken, but before the others could react and scatter, he’d killed three more. Tenzin fled toward a window and the ogre rushed after him, cleaving the geshe diagonally from shoulder to waist.
Outside, gunfire snarled, the racketing noise of an automatic rifle. He didn’t notice. He turned toward Songtsan Gampo, who’d drawn his own sword. The only ogres who’d stood firm through the confusion were the four beside the ruler. The emperor was pointing, shouting: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill the traitor!”
Through the windows came roars of pain, screams of terror, confusing them further. One ogre who’d gone out a window climbed back in, yammering loudly in the ogre speech, then ran across the Sanctuary, jumping corpses, slipped in a pool of blood and nearly fell, catching himself with one hand, before bounding headfirst through a window on the other side, bursting out its glass.
The four beside the emperor neither left nor obeyed him. Now the giant ogre turned to him and attacked. Only one of the guards stepped to meet him, and Demon-Maamo overwhelmed him, cut him down. The other three stepped back. Demon-Maamo struck, smashing down the emperor’s futile parry, splitting him from crown to pelvis, snapping bones like twigs.
Then he turned to Nils, snarling, big fangs bared, and took one step. Gunfire hammered from a window, and
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the great ogre body went down. In the interface dimension between reality as we know it and the Sigma Field, there was a terrible psychic scream of frustration and anger that seemed to go on for a long time, though objectively it lasted for perhaps five seconds. Then it cut off abruptly. Before it died, the Circle had done enough, accomplished its work.
FIFTY
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 Deodoro 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!”