If the provinces across the lake weren’t the ones in rebellion,

A second explosion hammered at the stones. Itisidi looked back and up, and swore; but Cenedi grabbed her arm and hurried her along where handlers held Babs waiting.

He spotted Nokhada, darted, arms encumbered, among the towering, shifting bodies; and wondered how he was to load the saddle packs with his bundled clothes and the computer, but the handlers took his belongings from him.

“Careful!” he said, wincing as the handler almost dropped the computer, the weight of which he hadn’t anticipated. His computer went into one bag, the clothes and the kit went into the other, on the other side of Nokhada’s lean and lofty rump, Nokhada fidgeting and fighting the rein. The mecheiti this morning all had a glimmer of brass about the jaw, not blunt caps on the rooting-tusks, but a sharp-pointed fitting he’d seen only in machimi—brass to protect the tusks.

In war.

It was surreal. The fighting-brass was, with Nokhada’s head-butting tendencies, not a weapon he wanted to argue with or even stay on the ground with. He took the rein one handler gave him, couldn’t manage it with the sore arm, shifted hands and hit Nokhada with his fist, trying to make the creature drop a shoulder. Riders all around him were already up. Nokhada objected, fidgeted up again, and resisted a second order, circling him, wild-eyed in all the surrounding haste and excitement. Thatwas how things were going to go, he thought, unsure he could restrain the creature in an emergency—scared of its strength and that jaw as he hadn’t been since the first.

“Nadi,” a handler said, offering a hand, and atevi strength snared and held the rein.

He grabbed the mounting-strap, relied on the unceremonious shove of the handlers, shoved his foot in the stirrup on the way up and landed, sore-boned, and with a wrench of his sore shoulders, on the pad, with his heart pounding. He took a quick fistful of rein to bring Nokhada under control in the general confusion, as someone opened the outward gate.

Cold morning wind blasted through the court, stinging his face as all the mecheiti began to move. He looked distractedly for Babs and Ilisidi. He brought Nokhada another circle, and Nokhada found a fix on Babs before he even saw Ilisidi.

He couldn’thold Nokhada, then, with Babs headed for the gate. Nokhada shouldered other mecheiti and struck a loping pace in Babs’ wake, into the teeth of an incoming gust that felt like a wall of ice.

The arch passed around him as a blur of shadow and stone. The vast gray of the lake was a momentary, giddy nothingness first in front of him and then at his right as Nokhada veered sharply along the edge and up the mountainside.

Follow Babs to hell, Nokhada would.

XII

« ^ »

It was across the mountainside, and up and up the brushy slope, across the gully, the very course he’d bashed his lip taking, the first time he’d ridden after Ilisidi.

And ten or so of Ilisidi’s guard, when he snatched a glance back on the uphill, were right behind him… along with a half a dozen saddled but riderless mecheiti.

They’d turned out the whole stable to follow, leaving nothing for anyone to use catching them—he knew that trick from the machimi. He found himself ina machimi, war-gear and armed riders and all of it. It only wanted the banners and the lances… no place for a human, he kept thinking. He didn’t know how to manage Nokhada if they had to break through a mob, he didn’t know whether he could even stay on if they took any harder obstacles.

And ride across a continent to reach Shejidan? Not damned likely.

Jago had said believe Ilisidi. Djinana had said believe Cenedi.

But they were headed to the north and west, cut off, by the sound of the explosions, from the airport—cut off from communications, from his own staff, from everything and everyone of any resource he knew, unless Tabini was sending forces into Maidingi province to get possession of the airport—which the rebels held.

Which meant the rebels could go by air—while they went at whatever pace mecheiti flesh and bone could sustain. The rebels could track them, harass them as they liked, on the ground and from the air.

Only hope they hadn’t planes rigged to let them shoot at targets. Damned right they could think of it—no damned biichi-giabout it: Mospheira had designed atevi planes to make that modification as difficult as possible—they’d stuck to fixed-wing and generally faster aircraft, but it couldn’t preclude some atevi with a reason putting his mind to it. Finesse, he’d heard it said in the machimi, didn’t apply in war—and war was what two rebel aijiin were trying to start here.

Push Tabini to the brink, break up the Western Association and reform it around some other leader—like Ilisidi?

And she, twice passed over by the hasdrawad, was double-crossing the rebels?

Dared he believethat?

An explosion echoed off Malguri’s walls.

He risked a second glance back and saw a plume of smoke going up until the wind whipped it completely away over the western wall. That was inside, he thought with a rising sense of panic, and as he swung his head about, he saw the crest of the ridge ahead of them, looming up with its promise of safety from weapons-fire that might come up at them from Malguri’s grounds.

And maybe their disappearance over that ridge would stopthe attack on Malguri, if the staff could convince a mob and armed professionals they weren’t there—God help Djinana and Maighi, who had never asked to be fighters, who had strangers like that man with the gun standing on the stairway, people Ilisidi and Cenedi must have brought in… people who might not put Malguri’s historic walls at such a high premium.

Cold blurred his eyes. The shooting pains in his shoulders took on a steady rhythm in Nokhada’s lurching climb. There was one craggy knoll between them and sharpshooters that might be trying to set up outside Malguri’s mountain ward walls—but Banichi and Jago were seeing to that, he told himself so. Brush and rock came up in front of them, then blue sky. Perspective went crazy for a moment as first Ilisidi and Cenedi went over the edge and then Nokhada nosed down and plunged down the other side, a giddy, intoxicating flurry of strides down a landscape of rough rock and scrub that his subconscious painted snow-white and sanity jerked into browns and earth again. Pain rode the jolts of Nokhada’s footfalls—torn joints, sore muscles, hands and legs losing feeling in the cold.

No damned place to take a fall. He suffered a moment of panic, then feltthe mountain, God save his neck—Nokhada ran with the same logic and the same necessities as he knew, and he clenched the holding strap in his good hand and wrapped the rein into the fingers of the weaker one, beginning to take the wind in his face with an adrenaline rush, hyper-awareness of the slope and whereNokhada’s feet had to touch, however briefly, to make the next stride.

He was plotting a course down the mountain, drunk on understanding, that was the crazed part, his eye saw the course and his heart was racing. His ears felt the shock an explosion made, but it was distant and he was hellbent for catching the riders ahead of him—not sane. Not responsible. Enjoyingit. He’d damned near caught up to Ilisidi when Babs gave a whip of the tail and took a course that Nokhada nearly killed them both trying to reach.

“ ’ Sidi!” he heard Cenedi yell at their backs behind them.

He suffered a second of sane, cold panic, realizing that he’d maneuvered past Cenedi and Ilisidi knewhe was at her tail.

A rock exploded near them, just blew up as it sat on the hillside. Babs took the slot beside a narrow waterfall and struck out uphill among stones the size of houses, higher and higher into the mountains.