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 devel-
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oped. 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 slaughter house, 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 man 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
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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 gornha, 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. Trie 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
ards, and in a lower corridor shot them both. It was, e 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.