“Just—” Bren half-turned to assist Lucasi, and caught movement at the top of the ridge.

Three uniformed Guild appeared at the top, an instant before one of them yelled,

“Halt!”

“Obey them,” Bren said, and held up empty hands. “Put down the rifle, nadi. Let me deal with them.”

There seemed to be four of them. Their enemies came down the sandstone slope in better order than the two of them had just done, and Lucasi held his rifle aimed at the ground.

“Nadiin,” Bren said, keeping his hands in sight. “My bodyguard is under my orders, so you may rest easy; and I trust you know—”

He didn’t know what had hit him. He went sideways, and fire sprayed the sandstone and came back. The whole world flashed black and red, and he was lying on the ground under Lucasi’s weight with an automatic rifle going off just over his head.

“Get to cover, nandi!” Lucasi yelled, over another three-shot burst, and got his weight off him. “ Go!”

“Nadi,” he protested, outraged, but there seemed nothing for it. There was a lump of rock half a body length away, and he rolled downslope to get there, tangled in the damned long dress coat and trying to get all of him into cover. Lucasi aimed another burst up the hill, on which there was one man down and no sign of the others. In the next second, Lucasi came rolling downhill into the same inadequate shelter. Lucasi, being considerably larger, needed more of the rock, which Bren tried to give him.

There was a moment of no-sound, which made Bren think he had gone deaf; but he heard Lucasi moving around. He heard the scrape of a rock under his knee.

“Nadi,” he began, exasperated.

“He would have fired,” Lucasi said. “Forgive me, nandi, but he moved to fire.”

And did the civilian second-guess Guild instincts? If it had been Banichi, he never would have questioned the judgement. It wasn’t Banichi, by a long shot. And he had lied to that dead man about having control of the situation. Clearly. He was upset about that.

But the fact was, they were alive and under cover. He didn’t know how they were going to get out of this nook, and he didn’t know how many rounds Lucasi had left. He could hope maybe the pair who had fled back up over the hill were waiting for reinforcements, but he had the unhappy suspicion they were just working around to a better vantage, to come at them from behind their rock.

“He would have fired,” Lucasi said again.

“One believes you, nadi.”

“One regrets shoving you so hard.”

“Since I am alive, I by no means take offense. You have actually done very well, nadi.”

It was a young face, struggling with distress and imminent failure. And they were in one hell of a mess.

“I have a gun,” Bren said. “One rather expects they will come around the hill and up. Might one suggest you bring the rifle to bear on that situation, and I will watch for anyone to come over the hill, at a range that will give me time to miss at least once.”

“Yes,” Lucasi said, and shifted about to do exactly that, while Bren took the pistol from his pocket and tried to still his racing pulse. He had, unfortunately, their precision weapon, and he was long out of practice.

They waited. There was a sound at one point, a thump, the shift of a light rock from somewhere over the hill. And then a rock sailed over the crest and rolled down the sandstone dome.

Do them both credit, neither of them was fool enough to fire at it. They sat pat.

They waited.

Then after a considerable time, a second sound, from their right. The rock they were hiding behind obscured the source of it.

“They are coming downhill,” Bren said.

“I have a signal!” Lucasi whispered, suddenly twisting about to show him the blinking green light. “Nandi, oursignal. Your bodyguard is out there.”

From the certainty of disaster to a different kind of fear. They’d made enough racket and had enough guns going off to alert the surrounding countryside. His bodyguard knew he was in trouble and had surely gone from a stealthy approach to a desperate haste, maneuvering to take the opposition out.

But how many were there on the other side? Were they the advance guard of the whole damned force that had been banging and thumping away over at Najida? There could be a hundred or more in that convoy.

“What is my bodyguard doing?” he asked in the faintest whisper.

“They are coming in,” Lucasi said. “Nandi, do not fire.”

God, somebody with a correct code was moving up on their position. He took his finger deliberately off the trigger and curled it around the guard, for fear he might squeeze the trigger in sheer terror; but he wasn’t letting his finger stray far from it, either.

Then he heard the best sound in the world.

“Bren-ji?” Jago’s voice.

“Yes,” he said to the empty air. “Yes. Kindly get under cover, Jago-ji. One believes trouble has gone downslope to get around us.”

A little sound, the whisper of a leather-clad body moving, and with scarcely a piece of grit disturbed on the rock, a lithe, large shadow came around the rock and settled between them.

Bren just leaned back against the rock in relief. “Is everyone all right, Jago-ji?”

“Yes,” she said. “But this is a moderately difficult situation you have here, Bren-ji. We believe there are nine to thirteen of the opposition, perhaps more, scattered about.”

He carefully put the safety back on the gun and inserted it into his pocket on the second try.

“Are you injured?” Jago asked him.

“Perfectly fine,” he said. God, he was notgoing to shake like a leaf. He reminded himself they were a long way from out of this, which kept up a moderate draw on spare adrenalin.

“Lucasi has kept me in one piece.”

“Credit to him,” Jago muttered, keeping her head down. “Algini has gone downslope to reconnoiter and see if he can give us names.”

“Did you reach the Edi, Jago-ji?”

“No. They are shooting at everything that moves, and Tano caught a richochet.”

“Is he all right?”

“Minor, but nuisanceful in operations. We suspected that the situation over at the airport had changed, and we became concerned for your immediate safety.”

“You saw the plane.”

“We did see it. Dur, one believes. We have no knowledge where he is based.”

“He saw us. He will have reported our position, Jago-ji. If we can hold out, if the airport has opened up—”

“The convoy clearly saw the plane, too. They immediately attempted to penetrate the Edi perimeter. That set the Edi firing at every movement. We were making no progress there.

And we were concerned—” Jago shoved another clip into her pistol. “—that you might be in trouble from the shift of positions. We knew they would not come west of the road. That left the east as a safe route for them, and youin considerable difficulty. We thought we should hurry about it.”

“One is very grateful,” he began to say, and then heard shots from downslope. He utterly lost his train of thought, thinking of Algini, and Tano, who would be with him.

“Where is Banichi?” he asked.

Jago gave a nod vaguely upslope. “Up there.”

Bren did begin to shiver, just slightly, and stopped it by resting his arm on his knee. He was, he found, chilled to the bone and dry as dust. He still had a little water in the canteen, but if they were pinned here any length of timec it was no time to be profligate with that resource.

A click of rock on rock upslope drew his attention. He looked around on reflex, but the rock cut off his view of anything but Jago, who had looked upslope, and Lucasi, who had flattened himself atop his rifle and tried to get a look up above.

“Banichi,” Jago said, and about that time there was a hurried movement on the slope, and Banichi added himself to their group.

“Bren-ji,” Banichi said, settling in, and threw a hand signal to Jago and Lucasi. “We need to move around this rock, Bren-ji. Our opposition is maneuvering from the other direction, and there are a number of them. This position will not suffice.”