27 On the Table of Execution
“Wake up, Tompa!” Dante thrust his head into the room, only to find that she was already pushing herself off the sleeping platform.
“What’s happening, Dante?”
She’d used his first name.
“I was having a nightmare, wasn’t I?” She yawned and started to stretch, but stopped in mid-stretch. “Wait. I can still hear it.” She took a wobbly step toward him. “It’s real. Dante, what’s going on?”
“Get up, Tompa. We’re being attacked.”
“But it’s over.”
“Carolyn,” he began, though he scarcely knew where to start. “She killed herself but before that she named you to succeed her as ambassador. And then—”
“Ambassador?” As Tompa approached the doorway she stared at him as though convinced he’d gone totally, unredeemably flap-happy. That look was like a blow, shoving him out of her way so she could lurch into the noisy, chaotic courtyard, covering her eyes against the weak morning light.
She stopped. With a trembling hand, she pointed toward the attackers, who’d split into two groups. The fifty Shons were in one group and the four Klicks—easily worth fifty Shons in battle—in another. Each group was in the process of overwhelming another clump of torpid, hung-over revelers. In scant minutes, the attackers had killed or disabled nearly half the converts. A Shon, screaming in agony, was booted ten feet in the air, where it hit a balloon camera. The camera bounced up and sideways, hitting another camera. The convert, meanwhile, fell toward the ground but before it hit, a Klick whipped its tail like a tennis player’s backhand and impaled the Shon on the deadly spike at its tip.
Her pointing hand dropped slowly to her side. “Oh, my God.”
“And then,” Dante resumed, “she allowed the trial to continue. To the death.”
Awmit dragged Tar-Thara toward them. The girl lagged behind, sleepy, confused, and staring over her shoulder at the raucous slaughter.
Dante realized there was no time for further explanations, especially since he was making such a hash of it and would just have to start over. Directionless adrenaline coursed through him as he turned to Tompa. “What should we do?”
“Do?”
The attackers would have to deal with all the converts before reaching them here at the Temple, and the converts nearer the Temple were waking up quickly. As the attackers pounced on the next clump of converts, they were already having a harder time. Peffer and his pod-loogs met serious resistance. The Klicks found their prey scattering and trying to assault them from behind. The assaults weren’t very successful—Shons flew through the air with sickening speed—but at least they slowed the Klicks’ progress across the courtyard.
“Do?” Tompa repeated. She shook her head, then closed her eyes at the movement and groaned. “This was supposed to be over. Goddamn it, this was supposed to be over!”
Tar-Thara sobbed.
The forty or so remaining converts nearest them were awake now. As one, they seemed to choose the most dangerous—or perhaps most hated—enemy, because they charged toward the Klicks. That left only a handful of defenders between the pod-loogs and the Temple.
“The trapdoor.” Tompa started running toward the stairway column. “It’ll be hard for them to get at us up there and we can escape the Temple by going over the roof, I think.”
“You think?” This plan didn’t seem too well thought out.
“If you don’t like it, Roussel, stay here and wait,” she called over her shoulder.
Awmit started to drag Tar-Thara to the column, but Dante picked her up by the hips, the way he remembered doing with Awmit back at the waterfall. Tompa reached the column first and, instead of going to the first step, vaulted up to the fifth. “The trap door is stuck,” she said as she spiraled up the stairs. “You’ll have to give me a hand.”
Dante put Tar-Thara onto the same step Tompa had leaped to. “Are you sure it’s just stuck, not locked?” he asked.
She gave him a murderous scowl—shades of the old Tompa—but resumed climbing.
Yeah, she was right, as usual. No time for negativity, or for any other plan.
And maybe not even enough time for this one. The Klicks now had a fight on their tails, but the pod-loogs had finished off their opposition and were streaming toward the porch. They’d be here in a minute. Peffer, the leader of the pod-loogs, was approaching the low, flat, room-sized rock that Tompa had dubbed the execution table. He and his troop had knives they planned to use to slice morsels of flesh from Tompa until she died—but knives could also be tossed. Were Shons as adept at throwing knives as they’d been at throwing rocks, back at the waterfall? He couldn’t risk that they were, because Tompa, Awmit, and Tar-Thara would be sitting ducks until the trap door was open.
Dante glanced up at Tompa, who had reached the trapdoor and was pushing it with her shoulder. Tar-Thara was just starting to push, making the door budge, and Awmit was a step behind.
“Isn’t locked,” Tompa grunted in triumph as the door moved slightly. She seemed to be expecting him to answer, because when he didn’t, she looked down. Their eyes locked for what seemed an eternity, though it was really only seconds. Finally, Tompa looked away. “You aren’t coming.”
He’d thought this was a corner of the universe with special rules, where fairness was divinely ordained. But no self-respecting god, he realized suddenly, would give out fairness like candy on Hallowe’en; that would debase one of the fundamentals of morality. Bez-Tattin was giving him the chance to be a hero while fighting for a woman he loved. That was miracle enough.
And so the decision wasn’t hard. What had Carolyn said? Nothing makes decisions easier than holding your own death in your palm. He shook his head slowly, savoring the sadness etched on her features. “Run safely, Tompa.”
She opened her mouth but said nothing.
He turned toward the courtyard. A loud, aggressive charge had rattled many a human soldier; it might have the same effect against Shons. Screaming a battle cry, Dante charged.
His gaze locked onto the red and yellow, flame-patterned vest of the Shon leading the attackers: Peffer, the egomaniac who’d struck a devil’s bargain with the Klicks to blow up the pub and frame Tompa, in exchange for power. Except for the half dozen nearest Peffer, the pod-loogs trailed behind in what was, for Shons, a disorganized string. Was that because these were Tukes, the most individualistic of the four Shon species, or because their prook-nah was no longer solid because of Tompa’s majestic successes?
As Dante leaped to the execution table, Peffer and the six pod-loogs with him backed up, waiting for the rest of the herd. There were noticeably fewer Shons than a couple of minutes ago, perhaps thirty. In the distance, Dante noticed that the four Klicks were all still standing, but fewer than half of the forty converts who’d charged them remained. This was a slaughter, not a battle.
Dante couldn’t let Peffer wait for his herd. He charged into the midst of the seven isolated Shons, and realized as he leaped that he hadn’t told Tompa he loved her. That gave him extra anger as he grabbed the arm of the closest pod-loog and swung the creature toward the path of another one. The Shon’s arm broke with a hideous crack and a high-pitched wail, but Dante kept swinging it around because it had a knife in its other hand. The pod-loog smashed into another one. Both of them went down, the second with the knife protruding from its neck.
The four other pod-loogs closed ranks to block Dante’s path to their leader. They tried to draw their switchblades, but only two of them got their knives open before Dante fell on them with fists pummeling. The fight wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t classical hand-to-hand form, but the Shons proved to be susceptible to punches to the head and chest, and so it was effective. Three of the pod-loogs flew back when he landed solid rights. They didn’t get up. The fourth lashed out with the knife in a panicky, ineffective swipe, as though he’d lost courage against the invincible justice of Tompa Lee’s cause.
Dante understood the Shon’s fear. De
fending Tompa, he was invincible. He fell back half a step, bending his leg like a spring, then kicked out with his other leg, smashing into the pod-loog’s chest. It spun head over heel and lay still.
While he was dispatching the six Shons, however, the other twenty-five pod-loogs had joined Peffer.
Dante reached down and pried the knife from the fingers of one of the Shons he’d knocked out. He crouched, knife in hand, as the pod-loogs dashed into a ragged ring around him. He could feel their prook-nah in his bones, and it wasn’t strong. For a moment they stood there, unmoving. Dante turned in slow circle, holding the knife ready, noting that several of the pod-loogs were bleeding and just half of them held knives. In the distance, only a dozen of the converts remained standing, stalling the Klicks’ advance with their life’s blood.
Dante finished his circle and, still crouching, faced Peffer.
“As consequence of being surrounded,” Peffer said, “ugly enemy human continues breathing momentarily only.” His mouth curled into a squinting, open-mouthed expression Dante had never seen before. “Strangulate!”
The pod-loogs began tightening their circle around Dante. He crouched and turned, risking a glance toward the porch. Tompa wasn’t visible from here. He hoped he’d already bought her enough time to escape.
Suddenly, when the circle of pod-loogs had tightened to fifteen feet of him, he knew what to do. He bent down and grabbed the nearest fallen Shon by the arms. As the attackers closed on him, he whirled the unconscious body around and around. The first circle built up speed and raised a cloud of dust, but hit no one. On the second revolution, he felt contact through his arms; the body-club had smashed into a pod-loog, sending it stumbling back. He hit another pod-loog, then another, and another, slowing the body-club’s momentum enough that it was all Dante could do to keep it whirling through the dust-choked air.
The pod-loogs retreated a step. Dante keep spinning, even though he was getting dizzy.
“I ordered unequivocally strangulate!” Peffer screeched.
The Shons closed again, more warily, trying to dart close as soon as the body-club passed them. Dante spun faster, catching three pod-loogs in the face, then another. A knife whizzed through the air past his head.
The ten or twelve remaining pod-loogs retreated again, and Dante flung the body-club after them. Abruptly, the pod-loogs turned at the same moment and fled past Peffer, who stood his ground with malevolent courage. “Cowards,” he sneered without moving his gaze from Dante’s face. “Traitors to the sacred prook-nah.”
As though Peffer’s words were a curse, the pod-loogs’ flight gained them nothing. They ran toward the four Klicks, who had now finished off all the converts. Dante didn’t know whether the lizards thought the pod-loogs were attacking—and if they’d converted, that was possible—or they simply didn’t recognize their allies, but the Klicks met them with savage, spiked tails. Pod-loogs screamed. One flew through the air as a Klick’s tail swatted it like a baseball.
The Klicks resumed their deliberate approach across the bloody, dusty courtyard.
Dante tried to will away the dizziness that followed his twirling attack. All around him lay bodies, mostly unmoving although a few, moaning, tried to creep away. He’d singlehandedly vanquished thirty Shons. He actually was a hero. Balloon cameras surrounded him, so the sailors on the Vance would have seen him. But had Tompa witnessed his shining moment?
He started to turn toward the porch. He’d made only a half turn when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Peffer charging toward him, brandishing knives in both hands.
The trapdoor opened onto darkness. Tompa swallowed hard, fearing that she’d gambled everything on a dead end, but then she noticed that there was indeed some light.
She squeezed into the narrow opening and found herself in a dark, insect-filled tunnel in the base of the statue. Black shapes the size of her thumbnail crawled ponderously along the walls and ceiling, like shadows with nothing to cast them. As she looked up, one fell onto her face. With a yelp, she brushed it aside.
“Bugs,” she whispered in a shivery voice. “They’re just bugs.” Bugs were nothing compared to what Dante faced. Roach-damn him for being foolish and male and brave and willing to sacrifice himself to save her . . .
Focusing on the light at the end of the short tunnel rather than the creeping shapes, she climbed into the space. Had Dante somehow known that this tunnel was so narrow he might have gotten stuck in it? No, he’d always tried to protect her even though she hadn’t been able to admit it until just now. Even his good cop act along with Ambassador Schneider hadn’t really been an act. He was too earnest, too flap-happy, to pull off an act like that.
“Leave the trapdoor open,” she called down to the two Shons, “for Dante.”
As Tompa crept on hands and knees toward the light, something crunched under her hand and a bitter odor filled the tunnel. She looked at her hand. A bug, still wiggling, was smeared across her palm. She scraped it off and continued backing out, carrying the dead insect’s stink along with her.
When she emerged from the tunnel, the stones under her hands grew rougher. Thousands of years had weathered them to a jagged texture. She rose to her feet as quickly as possible and looked around.
Balloon cameras flocked overhead so thickly that the porch roof was in shadow. Behind her, the pitted grey statue of Bez-Tattin loomed twenty-five feet high. To her right lay the escape route she’d hoped for: a flat expanse of roof leading to one of the two hump-like mountain peaks that embraced the Temple grounds like bookends.
Tar-Thara came out of the tunnel and headed toward the edge of the roof, presumably to watch the battle in the courtyard. Tompa turned that direction, but couldn’t make herself look.
A cloud of dust rose from the courtyard like smoke. Through the haze she could see the rainbow gate and the farthest stretches of the courtyard, with the other, sun-bloodied peak in the background. An ominous silence ruled the courtyard compared to the frenzied fighting of a minute ago. A few moans were all she heard. She couldn’t tell if any of them were Dante’s.
When Awmit emerged from the tunnel, Tompa helped him stand. “Dante human fares warriorly how?” he asked.
“Dante human conquers mightily,” Tar-Thara called from the edge of the roof nearest the courtyard.
He was still alive?
Knowing that, Tompa could face whatever the courtyard might hold. Running across the rough stones was impossible, but she and Awmit hurried as fast as possible to where Tar-Thara stood with her toes overhanging the edge of the roof. At first Tompa’s head throbbed from the effort to make sense of the panorama below; too much dust, too many corpses, too many bodies writhing in pain. All because of her. Awmit and Dante had talked as though the Servants of Bez-Tattin would pop out of nowhere to aid the injured. Why weren’t they down there now?
Because it wasn’t over, of course.
After a few seconds, two separate scenes leaped out at Tompa. Four Klicks strode toward her across the courtyard, going out of their way to step on any bodies lying in their path. Behind them, a spume of dust rose like the wake of a boat as their tails lashed from side to side in eagerness to cause more pain.
But Tompa didn’t look at the Klicks for long, because immediately in front of the porch, Dante was dodging from a Shon who held two knives. The Shon lashed out with a knife but missed. Dante tripped him. As the Shon fell, Dante tried to pin him. The Shon scooted away and lashed out again. This time a red stain spread across Dante’s upper arm.
A camera floated closer to the fight, momentarily blocking Tompa’s view. By the time she’d moved impatiently to her right—noticing, while her attention was distracted, that the first of the four Klicks would reach the fight within seconds—Dante was smashing the Shon’s head against the execution table once, twice. The Shon lay still. Dante picked up one of its knives and staggered backward.
Tompa cupped her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. “Dante, behind you!”
He looked up
, squinted, then waved. “I love you, Tompa Lee.”
As the last word left his mouth, the closest Klick leaped at his back. A scream tore from Tompa’s throat.
Dante sensed the body behind him and flung himself to the right, barely avoiding the claw-like fingers of the charging Klick. He fell backward. The Klick tripped over the edge of the table of execution, squashing what remained of Peffer’s head and landing beside Dante on the hard stone. For a split second, he and Dante faced each other, sprawled side by side. It wasn’t Krizink.
Dante was more agile than the larger alien and got to his feet more quickly. Avoiding the lethal tail, Dante dove for the Klick’s head, knife first. The blade sank into soft tissue on the underside of the jaw. The Klick roared in pain and thrashed about wildly, yanking the knife handle from Dante’s grasp. The Klick tried to rise, fell back, rolled over, and then lay there tearing at the knife in his throat. The knife finally came out and clattered to the stones near Dante’s foot. He picked it up. The Klick roared once in agony and then lay still. He watched Dante with half-closed eyes but made no effort to rise.
Hearing the advance of heavy footsteps, Dante staggered back toward the center of the table. That was the only place to go, because the three remaining Klicks had surrounded him.