A redshirted woman on the perimeter called out “Fusil” which was a ridiculously archaic Orth word meaning a long-barreled firearm. The redshirts to either side instantly turned their backs on her to look in other directions. Everyone else, though, did what came naturally: followed the woman’s gaze to the top of a parked drummon on the edge of the square. A Gheeth had climbed up there with a long weapon and was training it in our direction. The woman who had called out “Fusil” skipped forward, raising her hands, and did a cartwheel that took her to the lid of a trash container. From there she sprang sideways, rolled, and came up near a drinking fountain on which she planted a foot to shove off and make a violent reversal of direction that took her toward a scraggly tree. She got a hand on that and swung round it, scampered to the top of a bench, disappeared into a little clot of pedestrians, reappeared a moment later sprinting directly toward the man with the gun but in a moment had changed course again to duck behind a kiosk. In this manner she made rapid progress toward the gunman atop the drummon. He was hard-pressed to aim his weapon at her with all these sudden changes in course. If I’d been in his shoes, I couldn’t have fired, even to save my own life, because her gymnastics were so fascinating to watch.
A shot sounded. Not from the man on the drummon and not from the leader in the ring behind me. It came from somewhere else: hard to pin down because it echoed from the fronts of buildings all around the square. My knees buckled.
Five feet away from me, something unpleasant happened to the Gheeth leader; a redshirt had used this distraction as an opportunity to take him down and disarm him.
The woman doing the gymnastics kept moving toward the gunman atop the drummon, who had frozen up and was looking all around trying to identify the source of the shot.
A second shot sounded. The gun spun loose from the would-be sniper’s hands and clattered to the pavement. He grabbed his hand and howled. The redshirt woman stopped with the gymnastics, dropped into a normal sprinting gait, and went straight to the fallen weapon.
“Fusil!” called one of the other redshirts. He pointed across the canal. Again the two flanking him spun about to look in other directions. It took the rest of us a moment to see what he’d seen.
Across the canal was a food cart, prudently abandoned by its owner. A three-wheeler had drawn up behind it, using it and its array of signs and fluttering banners to provide visual cover. One man was operating the three-wheeler’s controls: Ganelial Crade. Another was standing on its passenger platform: Yulassetar Crade. He was carrying a long weapon. He addressed himself to the sniper atop the drummon, bellowing across the canal. “The first shot was to make you freeze,” he explained. “The second was to make you helpless. The third you’re never going to know about. Show me your hands. Show me your hands!”
The Gheeth held up his hands—one of them bloody and misshapen.
“Run away!” Yul howled, and shouldered his rifle.
The Gheeth avalanched down over the front of the drummon, rolled around on the pavement for a few moments, then came up at a run.
“Raz, we gotta go!” Yul called. “The rest of you in the red shirts—whoever or whatever you are—you’re welcome to come with. Maybe you want to be getting out of town as bad as we do.”
There was a bridge over the canal at the square. Gnel zipped over it and came towards me. The circle of redshirts parted to let him in. He passed through the gap, eyeing them a little nervously, and pulled up alongside me. I wasn’t moving too well. Yul bent down over me, grabbed my belt in his fist, just behind the small of my back, and heaved me aboard the three-wheeler like an unconscious rafter being pulled out of a river. It was extremely crowded now on this tiny vehicle. Gnel made a careful, sweeping turn into the square and headed up a street. He was wearing earphones plugged into a jeejah. Sammann must be feeding him instructions.
The redshirts followed us, jogging beside and behind the three-wheeler. Apparently they saw good sense in Yul’s point that it was time to get out of town. Once it became clear which way we were going, they picked up the pace and threatened to outrun the three-wheeler, prompting Gnel to give it a little more throttle. Before long they were sprinting. We covered a mile in a few minutes, and came into a district of railway lines and warehouses that wasn’t as crowded as the center of Old Mahsht. It was possible for full-sized vehicles to move about normally on the streets here. A pair of them came out of nowhere and nearly ran us down: Yul’s and Gnel’s fetches, driven by Cord and by Sammann respectively.
As we later established, the redshirts numbered twenty-five. We somehow got all of them onto the two fetches and the three-wheeler. I’d never seen people packed so tight. We had redshirts on the roof of Yul’s fetch, elbows linked together to keep them from falling off.
Cord took all of this pretty calmly, considering that she couldn’t have known, until just before they piled into the fetch, that she was going to be transporting a dozen and a half vlor experts in red T-shirts. As she drove us out of there, she kept looking over at me aghast. “It’s okay,” I told her. “They are avout—they must have been Evoked. I don’t know what math they are from—obviously one that specializes in vlor—maybe an offshoot of Ringing Vale or some such—”
Behind me, an amused redshirt translated all of that into Orth and got a round of chuckles.
I got embarrassed. Horribly, mud-on-the-head embarrassed.
These people were from the Ringing Vale.
I tried to turn back to look at them but something impeded movement. Groping to explore, I discovered three hands, belonging to Valers behind or beside me, pressing wads of blood-soaked fabric against my face and scalp. Lacerations. I hadn’t been aware of them. It wasn’t the strangers crammed into her fetch that so disturbed Cord; it was my face.
During most of this I’d been having the wrong emotions. At the very beginning when the two Gheeths had mugged me, I’d been scared. Appropriately. That’s why I’d run away. Then I had convinced myself that I could handle this somehow. I could evade the mob in streets or canals. I could talk some sense into Laro, plead my case. They didn’t really mean to kill me; this couldn’t be happening. The cops would get here any minute. Next had come a sort of dazed acceptance of my fate. Then the fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale had arrived. Everything after that had been fascinating and sort of exhilarating, and I had surfed through it on some sort of chemical high: my body’s reaction to injury and stress. A minute ago I’d greeted Cord with a big bloody hug as though nothing had happened.
A few minutes into the drive, though, I fell apart. All of my injuries began sending pain to my brain, like soldiers sounding off at roll call. Whatever convenient substances my glands had been squirting into my bloodstream were withdrawn, cold turkey. It was as if a trapdoor had opened beneath me. Just like that I became a shivering, weeping tangle of nerves, squirming and grunting in pain.
Twenty minutes’ drive, under Sammann’s direction, took us to a site on the left bank of a big river that flowed from the mountains down into the Old Mahsht fjord branch. It looked as though it might have been a broad sandbar in some earlier age, but had long ago been paved over and played host to a succession of industrial complexes, now in ruins. At one end of it was a recreational boat ramp and picnic ground with a couple of smelly latrines. We pulled in there and scared off some holiday-makers. I was carried out of Yul’s fetch and laid out flat on a picnic table that they’d covered with camping pads to make it soft, and tarps to protect the camping pads from whatever was leaking out of me. Yul opened his medical kit, which like all of his other gear was not store-bought but improvised from found objects. Into a big, heavy-gauge poly bag he dumped white powder from a poly tube: salt and germicide. Then he filled it up with a couple of gallons of tap water and shook it for a minute, producing a sterilized normal saline solution. He tucked the bag under his arm and squeezed it hard against his ribs, shooting out a jet of fluid that he aimed into my wounds to flush them out. Picking a wound, he would yank off the gauze and sluice it until I screamed, then give it another thirty seconds. Gnel followed in his wake, working with something smelly. As he was using it on my split eyebrow I realized it was a tube of glue—the same stuff you’d use to stick the handle back onto a broken teacup. Wounds too big to glue were bridged with glass-fiber packing tape. At one point a Ringing Vale suur dug into me with a sewing needle and a length of fishing line from Gnel’s tackle box. Once a wound had been hit with glue, tape, or fishing line, someone in a red T-shirt would slap petroleum jelly on it and cover it with something white. A Ringing Vale fraa, obviously a masseur, went over my whole body without so much as a by-your-leave, looking for broken bones and hemorrhages. If my spleen wasn’t ruptured when he got to it, it was by the time he moved on to my liver. His verdict: mild concussion, three cracked ribs, spiral fracture of one arm bone, two small broken bones in one hand, and I could expect to pee blood for a while.