By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Twenty-Six

The first thing that Adrian 'sent' for Jake to report to Richard was that the guards, who seemed now not to be worried about intrusion from above, weren't patrolling the roof. There were a couple of guards up there, one at each end of the huge building, but not the circling teams he and Richard had seen up there before.

"Tell him to get rid of them," Richard said calmly.

Jake did, and a few minutes later, swallowing noisily, told Richard it was done. He didn't describe how. He really didn't want to think about how. But Adrian, who hadn't eaten earlier, wasn't hungry anymore.

'Don't be so sensitive,' Adrian, who could feel Jake's reaction, 'sent' in sweetly nasty vibrations. 'Just sustaining the inner man, and all that ... since the outer one has already been adequately served.'

This, clearly, wasn't meant for Richard. Jake thought back, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'... if this could be called 'talking.'

Adrian's thoughts were a salacious purr in his mind. 'Ask Shapour.' But the images that flitted around the edges of the words pretty much made that unnecessary.

Jake turned abruptly and found the tall, stern-faced Sa'idian vampire who had spoken up first at the meeting earlier watching him with much too intent eyes. His stomach did another flip-flop and T'beth, who was picking up on all this, squeezed his arm almost hard enough to pulverize bone. 'Quit it, Jake,' she thought. Her mental voice was never quite as clear as Adrian's, but this was vivid. To Adrian, although Jake could hear it, too, she 'sent,' 'Knock it off, Talbot, or I'll slap the shit out of you when I get in there.'

Adrian did. But he'd already done what he was trying to do; Jake could cheerfully have smacked the little bastard himself, except that he didn't think he could have muscled T'beth out of the way to do it.

Communicating with the vampires of Sa'idi, Jake found, was a problem Richard had solved with his usual ruthless efficiency. Most of them had spent some years in other countries, and picked up other languages. Their dark skin had limited the areas of the world in which they had felt free to roam, but a female named Nasrin, it turned out, had been a well-known (she said) belly dancer and courtesan in Cairo and had picked up passable English. Shapour spoke excellent French, having spent some years in North Africa. Others spoke Italian, Spanish and German, in all of which Richard was fluent, if a bit archaic. Having established this much, Jake was moved to ask exactly how many languages Richard did speak, and Richard said, "Other than these, only Latin and ancient Greek." Not surprisingly, no one else spoke these. And Richard, Jake was relieved to learn, did not speak Hindi, Turkish or Swahili, which some of the vampires did.

Listening to Richard give instruction to his little group, therefore, had a certain surreal quality, since he was switching back and forth between languages, depending upon which of the troop he was talking with ... and stumbling, occasionally, over words common in his day but not when the vampires had learned the languages. On "I Love Lucy," it would have been comical. Here, it was just weird.

But it seemed to get the job done. T'beth, of course, could have translated everything he had to say into Farsi for all of them, but since she couldn't be everywhere once they were actually in the palace, Richard wanted to get his little attack force organized in some manner that would allow him to give orders that would be quickly understood and obeyed. He did this by separating them into groups, each of which included at least one member with whom he could communicate in some language or other. Remembering just who spoke what in the heat of battle might be a problem, but Jake was willing to bet Richard would manage.

All of this was going on while Adrian wound his way through the upper floor of the palace, encountering very few guards. The second floor was mostly private apartments, and for the most part, deserted now. In three bedrooms, Adrian found individual guards entertaining themselves with women from the harem...and in each case, he simply terminated the guard's lease on life and, after questioning the lady involved about the numbers and locations of the other guards, with T'beth feeding phonetic Farsi into his mind and translating the answers he received, urged her to hide herself as best she could for the time being.

"This is not gonna work," Jake finally said, after T'beth had delivered Adrian's latest information to Richard. She looked at him quizzically. "You can't attack a large group of armed men in a fortified palace with twenty people who are speaking a Tower of Babel of languages to each other," Jake said. "Everyone who goes into that place is going to be spending most of his time saying, 'huh?'"

T'beth, who except for Richard had done more fighting than all the rest of them put together, smiled serenely. "Jake, once the shooting starts, you'll be amazed at just how well everyone understands our fearless leader. Besides, these people can communicate with each other mentally, the way we do. That's why Richard only needs one in each group he can talk to."

Richard, finished with whatever he'd been saying to the others, turned back to Jake. "Where is Adrian now?"

"In the big garden court ... where the swans are." There were a lot of guards there, Adrian was sending, but they weren't guarding anything. This bunch was just kicking back, enjoying themselves ... and drinking heavily. Adrian didn't even have to try his whammy on them; they were much too busy telling each other dirty jokes and lying about the women they'd screwed to notice him flitting about in the shadow of the colonnade ... and none of them were patrolling.

They were all, however, armed to the teeth. With any luck, considering how much they were drinking, when trouble started they would probably shoot each other.

Adrian entered the corridors in the front part of the palace ... the administrative area he hadn't paid much attention to before. Richard wanted to know if there was what he called a "means of communication," which Adrian took to mean a radio room … and there was. It was located within the warren-like complex of offices along the very front side of the building, near the big double doors that gave out onto the square out front ... and this entire area was heavily guarded, by men who were sober, scared, and hair-triggered. Adrian almost wore his whammy out getting the hell out of there unseen.

The harem area, too, was heavily guarded ... not against intruders, Adrian gathered, but against the guards themselves. Whoever had assumed command of this crew had apparently decided that access to the women would be controlled, and there were at least a dozen guards patrolling the corridors there, in addition to those stationed on the door.

Oddly, most of the guards Adrian found who were off duty had kept to those areas of the palace that had been theirs before Zanjani's death. There was a large barracks area, a mess area, recreation rooms and so forth, and this was where he found them ... way too many of them. Again, discretion being the better part and all that, he got the hell out of there as soon as he'd answered Richard's rapid-fire questions about numbers and access and so forth.

That left the basement. What Richard wanted there was for all the stairways to the main floor to be unobstructed ... which meant that Adrian had to break the locks on the doors where possible ... and do it quietly enough to avoid alerting anyone above. The other thing Richard wanted was to know which staircase led to the harem, and Adrian didn't have to guess. The scent of perfume, drifting down from above, identified it clearly. He described its location to Jake, for Richard, in great detail.

Richard thought about it for a few minutes, studying the massive, uninformative bulk of the building from the place where he squatted on his heels in the tree shadow near the street. It wasn't a simple problem. Adrian had given him a rough count of perhaps a hundred guards, scattered in various locations around the palace. Jake waited, standing behind him, as long as he could stand it, and then finally said, "So how are we gonna do it?"

Richard looked up at him in silence for a moment. Then his teeth flashed in the dark. "Successfully," he said, and stood up. He stepped back, moving carefully to attract no attention from the guards across the street, and went to speak with his troops.

He gave brief, crisp orders in each of the necessary languages, and there were no questions from the huddled vampires ... but eyes began to glow eagerly as they listened. Then it was time to clear the rear entrance in anticipation of the arrival of the men of Sa'idi, whom Will would be bringing to Saravan soon. Richard selected two of the female vampires ... those with the lightest skin, who would be most visible, and removed some of their clothing and artistically rearranged what he left on them. Both of them ... Nazrin, and a woman named Mehrnaz, stood before him, unselfconsciously bare-breasted and mostly bare-legged, and listened carefully to his instructions. When he had finished, there were feral smiles on their faces as they passed their guns to others for safekeeping.

"Ooh," T'beth sighed. "Can I play, too?"

Richard smiled at her. "That was my intention, lady. Your expertise will be invaluable."

Grinning, T'beth shrugged her crossbow off her shoulder and shoved it and her rifle into Jake's hands. "Don't drop them," she said, tossed him her burnoose, and skinned off her tank top. The leather pants stayed, but Richard didn't protest.

Richard told Jake what to 'send' to Adrian, waited long enough for Adrian to get into position, and then, with a sharp gesture, sent the three half naked females on their way. Squealing with helpless femininity, their empty hands in evidence, trying ineffectually to cover their merrily bobbing breasts, T'beth and the others went running out of the park and into the street ... straight toward the suddenly alerted guards at the palace entrance.

It was, Jake thought, a hell of a way to run an assault.

The guards at the rear entrance of the palace came to immediate alert, bringing their rifles to bear, with the first high-pitched feminine squeal, as T'beth and her two companions darted out into the street from the park. But what the guards saw was three obviously unarmed and seriously undressed females, running toward them with every evidence of hysterically pleading for their help.

It was an Islamic society. Half-naked women just did not appear in the street here, and the guards, with their discipline already broken down, reacted exactly as Richard had anticipated they would. Two had sense enough to stay by the entrance, while the other four, shouldering their rifles, ran to meet the "helpless" women. T'beth took out the first two, one with a darting kick to his head that snapped his neck, the other with a powerful fist to his chest that damned near came out his back and probably exploded his heart. Nasrin and Merhnaz had no trouble with the other two. At the entrance, Adrian had slipped up the stairs from the basement and went at the two remaining guards from behind. They never knew what hit them.

As soon as the guards were down, the remainder of Richard's little army streamed across the street and into the short corridor behind the entrance, helping to drag the dead guards out of sight on their way. T'beth and her companions quickly shrugged back into their burnooses and retrieved their weapons.

There was no talking in the corridor. Everyone had already received their orders in the park and now the teams Richard had divided them into peeled off and headed for their separate destinations. T'beth and another of the female vampires slipped down the stairs to the basement headed for the harem stairs. Richard had decided that the first item on the agenda was securing the women in the harem, and everyone else was directed to get into position but to do nothing further until T'beth and the Sa'idian woman with her 'sent' that the women were protected.

Three teams of three each, one of them led by Ed Perry, went up the stairs to the second floor and hurried to the positions Richard had designated. Except for one of the Sa'idians who was assigned to guard the entrance itself, the remaining attackers, with Richard and Jake, went down the stairs into the basement, and headed for the stairways there that would take them where Richard had decided they must go first.

Adrian had destroyed the lock on the door at the bottom of the stairs to the harem, so T'beth and her companion, a woman named Ravan, were able to silently run up the stairs to the open doorway above ... where the only guard actually inside the harem was stationed. He saw them ... an instant too late. T'beth's foot took him in the throat, and he strangled on his own crushed windpipe as she snatched his rifle from his hands.

It had happened too suddenly for the women who were still awake to react, and only one or two made small squealing noises before recognizing T'beth and understanding, from the weapons she was carrying, that a rescue was underway. T'beth sent them to wake everyone and get them gathered together while she and Ravan took care of barricading the door to the corridor as quietly as possible with whatever large furniture pieces were available.

The harem was a large complex of rooms, some private, some communal. T'beth selected one of these last that had a clear field of fire facing the corridor door and hustled all the women into it, while she and Ravan pulled more furniture over to provide some cover for themselves as they took up their positions in the open doorway of the room. Satisfied, and while Ravan 'sent' a similar message to her blood kin, T'beth 'sent' to Jake, 'Tell His Royal Nibs that we're hunkered down here okay, Jake. And good luck.'

She could hear it, distantly, as the shooting started only seconds later.

The guards in the corridors near the harem converged on the harem door as soon as they, too, heard the shooting. There was a great deal of yelling and gesticulating as everyone tried to make it clear to everyone else that none of them had any idea what was happening or who it was happening to. A consensus, sort of, was eventually reached that they should send someone to obtain this information, while the rest of them retreated into the harem ... to guard the women, of course, and only incidentally making themselves more secure. Accordingly, two of their number were dispatched, albeit unwillingly, to scout out the noise, while the others discovered, to their consternation, that the door to the harem just wasn't opening with quite the ease it should have.

A number of shoulders, applied to the door with some force, achieved some movement ... but it also achieved a sustained burst of semi-automatic rifle fire from within the harem that stitched a neat line of holes across the wide door and seriously wounded two of the group. This brought on a period of rethinking ... also more yelling and gesticulating.

While this was going on, one of the scouts returned, running, screaming that the townspeople were attacking the palace in force and that the guards would all be murdered in their beds. As none of this particular bunch happened to be in their beds, this shouldn't have seemed all that great a problem, but panic is an easily contagious condition, and the scout was a virtual Typhoid Mary of panic. The inevitable result was much, much more yelling, gesticulating, and a certain amount of angry shoving and threatening.

This might have come to actual blows or shooting among themselves except that several more guards came running down the corridor, one of them in the uniform of a sergeant. This worthy, by means of yelling louder and gesticulating more forcefully than anyone else, managed to restore some order. However, having gained a position of command over this group of perhaps a dozen guards, his first order to them was to force the harem door. This met with some degree of reluctance until he raised his own rifle threateningly, at which point the order was obeyed ... with the result that more gunfire came from within the harem and two more of the guards were wounded.

The sergeant, shouting even louder now, tried to organize one more assault on the door ... and his loyal troops shot him.

There was a moment of profound silence ... at least, in this particular corridor. Shooting down your sergeant is generally frowned on, even among troops as disorganized as this group. But what was done, was done.

The silence, however, gave them the opportunity to become aware that the distant shooting they could hear seemed to be coming from just about all sides of the palace ... which presented several problems. The first of these was that, had they been moved to join the fray, they had no idea in which direction they should proceed to that end. The second was that, had they been moved to run like hell, well ... same problem.

In the end, they reached a group decision to stay where they were until events cleared up these difficulties. Furniture was pulled from rooms opening onto the corridor to provide a sort of barricade across its width, behind which the guards, several of them wounded to one degree or another, settled down to await their fate.

Had they had an officer ... or anyone else who could think clearly, among them, they might have considered that their fate was already behind them.

Richard had assigned to Adrian the most critical part of their attempt to take over Zanjani's palace ... the attack on the administrative offices, where the radio device, if there was one, would be located. Nothing was more important than preventing the beleaguered guards from calling for help. In the capital of the country, or at any nearer military base, the conditions that had existed in this small corner of Iran would not be known, and the guards could make a good case that they were blameless, the victims of a popular uprising or rebellion by the locals.

It had been Richard's instinct to take on destroying their means of communication himself, but it was logical to leave the task to Adrian. Adrian, like the Sa'idians, was not as vulnerable to injury as Richard, and his chances of surviving to make it through the alert guards in the front part of the palace were better than Richard's.

Richard's task, therefore, was to prevent the large number of guards located in the barracks area from interfering with Adrian's attack on the offices. To do so, he had nine people to work with, including himself and Jake.

The barracks area, like the harem and almost exactly on the opposite side of the palace from it, was a large complex of rooms separated from the palace proper and accessible primarily through one main entrance. There were, as well, two stairways ... one to the second floor that was located deep in the complex adjacent to what appeared to be a sort of briefing room, and one ... from the barracks kitchen, at the very rear, to the basement.

Richard had sent one team of three Sa'idians, led by the woman Mehrnaz, to the head of the stairway that rose to the second floor, and another team, led by a man named Javeed, to the stairway that led down to the basement. He, Jake, and the woman Nasrin went up to the main floor by way of another stairway and raced along deserted corridors to the entrance to the barracks area. Here, they quickly and quietly pulled pieces of furniture from adjoining rooms to provide some cover and settled down behind their makeshift barricade to wait, first for word from T'beth that the women in the harem were protected, and then for the sound of gunfire from Adrian's move on the office complex.

They didn't have to wait long.

Jake, huddled down beside Richard behind what looked like some kind of mid-height armoire ... it had doors and tons of gilded carving and came to about mid-chest when he stood up, said suddenly, "T'beth says she's got things under control in the harem."

Richard nodded, but didn't turn to look at him. On his other side, the woman Nasrin said, "Ravan sends the same; Shapour sends that the Vaje Adrian moves them now."

Before she finished speaking, the sound of gunfire, distant but distinct, broke across the silence of the night.

Richard leveled his rifle across the top of the armoire. "Now," he said softly.

Jake was remembering what he had said earlier, over in the park. "Be sparing of your ammunition," he had told them, "but allow no one to leave the barracks area." Jake swallowed noisily. This wasn't going to be target shooting on a range in Canada. This was going to be heavy ammunition blowing apart flesh and blood.

They had built their little barricade about six or seven meters from the big double doors that were the entrance to the barracks complex. Behind them, the corridor went straight through this end of the palace to the big central court, with a cross-corridor intersecting it about halfway back. The door to the central court was locked, according to Adrian's quick scout of the area, and Richard had told him to leave it that way. But they would be vulnerable to anyone coming along the cross-corridor behind them. Nasrin had been given the task of watching that corridor. It would be up to Jake and Richard to keep any of the guards from coming out through the main barracks doors.

This was attempted almost immediately. At the sound of gunfire from the front of the building, the guards inside the barracks area, naturally enough, thought to come out into the main corridor to try to determine what was happening and where. As soon as the doors began to open, Richard sent a quick burst of fire in a neat line across them and the doors fell immediately back into place, with some muffled howling and cursing from behind them.

"They will try to rush the door while firing at us now," Richard said calmly. "Be ready, Jake."

Be ready. Shit. Jake stared at the doors that were still quivering lightly. Was he ready to shoot into the bodies of real, live human beings?

The doors exploded outward violently, and the sound of gunfire was suddenly deafening. Not even aware of his finger tightening on the trigger of his rifle, Jake felt the gun bucking in his hands as he released a long, sustained burst of fire into the mass of men who came boiling out through the doors and were firing blindly, unable yet to locate Richard and Jake behind their barricade. Beside him, Richard was shooting just as determinedly, raking his fire in an arc across the width of the doors.

Jake didn't know what he had expected, but whatever it was, it wasn't this. Men fell in rows, blood spurting out through their backs onto their fellows, who fell in turn, until suddenly there was no one standing in the open doorway anymore, and except for Jake's still-racketing gun, the corridor had fallen into sudden silence.

Richard put out a hand to squeeze Jake's shoulder, and Jake's gun, too, fell silent.

Jake stood there for a minute in stark disbelief. He had just shot people, maybe killed people. He had felt the heavy wooden armoire in front of him shudder as bullets meant for him thudded into it. He didn't have a scratch on him, and he didn't have any urge to vomit. He had watched blood spray across the face of a man as the man in front of him fell ... and it could have been his, Jake's, bullet that had caused the blood to spray out that way.

"Replace the clip," Richard said. His voice was a small, distant sound in the smoke-filled corridor, but Jake automatically obeyed, fumbling in his waist-hung ammunition bag for another clip. He snapped out the old one and secured the new with an efficiency that would have made Ed Perry proud of him. His hands, he was surprised to see, weren't shaking.

The doors to the barracks area were still wide open, held in that position by the fallen bodies lying between them. Jake didn't count; he didn't want to look that closely. All of the khaki uniforms were splashed with red.

"Shapour sends that resistance is much," Nasrin said, unexcitedly. "But he thinks it goes well."

As soon as she spoke, Jake was aware of the distant gunfire. Unlike his own, it hadn't let up. There must be a hell of a fight going on in the front part of the building. Break a leg, Talbot, he thought, but didn't try to 'send' it to Adrian. Adrian very likely couldn't afford to be distracted right now.

More gunfire, from somewhere within the barracks complex, most likely meant that the guards had tried the stairs and found those, too, blocked by eager rifles. There were a few moments of steady fire, and then it fell off to occasional, sporadic bursts ... and then silence.

Seconds ticked away with the maddening slowness of hours. There was no further sound or movement from within the barracks.

"Help me," Richard said suddenly. He was pulling at the big, heavy furniture pieces in front of them, and he seemed to be trying to make a space between the two heaviest ... the armoire Jake stood behind, and an ornate chest of drawers. Unthinkingly, Jake obeyed, and between them they opened up a space about four or five inches wide. Richard slid past Jake and began to do the same thing on the far side of him, but the wooden whatever-it-was there wasn't as heavy and he didn't ask for help.

"What are we doing?" Jake asked. His eyes darted nervously toward the gaping doors. Beyond them, the large room where Adrian had said many guards were lounging looked utterly empty ... and certainly was not.

"It has been too long," Richard said. "They will try something else ... perhaps explosives. Get down, Jake."

Richard crouched low behind the wooden whatever-it-was, peering out through the narrow opening he'd just created. Jake hurried to do the same. Nasrin was already hunkered down close to the floor, grinning at him. Jake smiled back at her. She was certainly a good-looking woman; maybe she really had been a famous dancer...

What Richard had just said finally dawned on him.

Explosives?

Adrian and his two Sa'idans paused at the top of the stairs they'd taken from the basement to get to the main floor of the palace. One pair of teal eyes and two pairs of brown took in the stretch of pink marble floor and green marble columns of the short corridor ahead of them. One way led to the front of the building, with its huge front doors and offices ... where they were to go. The other way led to the courtyard full of fountains and undoubtedly confused swans.

On the whole, Adrian thought as he checked the clip on his rifle and clicked the safety off, he'd rather face twenty angry Iranian guards than one angry swan. He'd get his chance soon enough.

A burst of rifle fire was their signal to move. Two teams of three invaders had come down the stairs from the second floor, firing at the guards by the doors. More shots were fired, yelling and screaming echoed through the marble halls. Adrian's team went charging down the short corridor, depending on their fellow teammates to cover for them. Adrian exchanged glances with Ed Perry, in charge of one of the teams that had come down, but there was no time or breath to speak. Shapour was in charge of the other team, and didn't even look at Adrian, being too busy killing somebody.

Adrian's finger was on the trigger and he was firing away without even blinking. Bullets sent chips of marble flying; one guard who managed to avoid being shot was blinded by a chunk in his eye. Blood made the marble floor even pinker and very slippery.

Ed Perry walked over and shot the blinded guard in the head. The man stopped screaming and fell, blood and other fluids seeping from under him.

The silence, in the wake of this act, made everyone look at each other. Nobody who was still standing was wearing khaki. They'd done it. Nine of them had taken out twenty or so guards and the front corridor of the palace was theirs.

"Not bad for a Pretty Boy," Ed said to Adrian.

"Not bad for a redneck spook," Adrian nodded back. He cast his mind out to Jake. 'The front doors are ours, we're heading for the offices now.'

He didn't get a reply, but that didn't worry him. Jake was probably occupied. He cast his mind out, seeing if there were any others in the vicinity.

Shit.

All those drunken, heavily armed guards that had been lounging the courtyard?

They were now heading this way.

And they were mad.

"RUN!" Adrian yelled, snapping out his old cartridge and ramming a new one home as he sprinted towards the glass walls of the offices.

Stupid, stupid move, Talbot, he cursed himself even as the reality of glass walls loomed above him. Trapped in cubicle hell, nine against untold numbers of drunken, scared and angry guards.

"Nice knowing you, Ed," he stuck out his hand.

Ed shook it. "It's been a hell of a ride, Adrian," he replied.

Shapour said something in French that made Adrian laugh. Ed's French was so rusty it could give someone tetanus. "What did he say?" he asked.

"He said, 'Is this not the point in your American movies where the cavalry comes to the rescue?'," Adrian translated. "Gunfight in the Saravan palace, now playing at the Roxy." Adrian's voice was wavering on the dangerously high, and Ed contemplated slapping him but decided it wasn't worth it.

Lots of stories get told of bands of desperate men who are incredibly brave against overwhelming odds ... who die glorious deaths. Adrian didn't want to die a glorious death.

He heard gunfire, saw the mad onrush of uniformed Saravan guards waver and begin to turn. Somewhere, behind the ripple of khaki, a blond giant was commanding a troop of ... okay, cavalry. There wasn't a horse or a yellow ribbon in sight, but they were cavalry. Many white grins flashed in dark, medium dark, cafe au lait and near-white faces. Will had arrived with the Sa'idi villagers.

(You were expecting John Wayne?)

Abruptly, all the lights within the barracks area died, and the broad open doorway revealed nothing more than yawning blackness beyond the dozen or more bodies ... some of them still groaning and twitching, that held the double doors wide open.

"Get down!"

Richard's voice was as sharp as a slap, and Jake and Nasrin obeyed it without thinking. Flat on his belly on the marble floor, peering through the narrow space between the armoire and the chest of drawers before him, Jake only halfway saw something small arcing from the gaping doorway.

The explosion of the grenade, within the enclosed corridor, was mind-numbing and ear-shattering. In the instant before, Jake had heard Richard's rifle rattle briefly, but he didn't see whomever it was that Richard was shooting at ... probably at the brave or foolish soul who had revealed himself long enough to lob the grenade.

Whomever he had been, he had held the grenade an instant too long, and it exploded in the air, spending its force on the makeshift barricade from above. Wood splintered and collapsed in the concussion wave; marble was gouged from walls and ceiling and vaporized in the smoking air. But Richard, Jake and Nasrin, flat on the floor behind the smashed barricade, were all firing through gaps in the mess of shattered wood even as marble bits showered down on them amid the flying shards of wood. The mass of men who had come pouring out through the doors, confident that the grenade had taken out their adversaries, ran right into the withering fire of three rifles set on full automatic ... and fell, in rows, atop the bodies already lying beneath their feet.

It took longer this time; someone had assumed command within the barracks and this rush was organized and determined. Jake felt the heat from the barrel of his rifle work its way back to his finger on the trigger but kept firing ... until, quite suddenly, there was no one left to shoot at. This time, Richard didn't have to tell him when to stop.

Through the heavy, swirling haze of smoke and vaporized marble, Jake could see, among the men who had fallen, several who were injured lightly enough to try to scoot back inside the barracks. Without thinking, Jake found himself lowering his eye to his rifle again, prepared to stop them, until Richard said, "Let them go."

Their barricade had become a mass of jagged wood fragments, but it was still several feet high. Jake lay there, secure behind it, his heart thudding against the unyielding marble floor with enough force, it seemed, to lift his body. The realization that he had been about to try to kill wounded men who were just trying to save themselves hit home with sickening finality.

Somewhere along the line, he thought, he had become a soldier ... and he had no idea when or how it had happened. All of these men ... the bodies lying so quietly now before the darkened barracks area, the many more still inside, weren't human beings anymore. They were just enemies, to be destroyed before they destroyed him.

Richard had turned his head and was looking over his shoulder. Behind them, the doors to the rooms on either side of the corridor from which they'd pulled the now-shattered furniture were only about four meters away. Richard said, "Jake, when I begin to fire, get back into the doorway of the room on your left. Stay flat on the floor until you are inside. Reload your rifle. Then stand and, when I signal, give covering fire." He didn't even look at Jake; he knew, now, that he would be obeyed.

Jake slithered around until he was facing the opposite direction, then, as Richard began to shoot again, he scrabbled, crab-fashion, back down the corridor to the doorway on the left and into the room beyond. His hands were already digging into his ammunition bag as he pushed himself to his feet.

With his rifle freshly loaded, he stole a quick look out into the corridor, astonished at the amount of damage he could see from here. The force of the grenade had gouged an enormous hole in the ceiling, part of it broken through to the floor above. The walls were almost as badly torn, and the wooden jumble of what was left of the barricade bore no resemblance to furniture. He could hardly believe that he and Richard and Nasrin had survived all of that with no apparent damage.

Richard had turned and was facing him, and now he lifted his hand and made a sharp, downward gesture. Automatically, Jake's finger tightened on the trigger again, and he poured a relentless stream of fire into the open doorway to the barracks area while Richard slithered back to disappear briefly into the room opposite. Instantly, Richard was on his feet, bringing his own rifle to bear on the barracks. As he began to fire, and Nasrin began to scoot toward him, another grenade arc-ed out of the blackness beyond the barracks door ... and this time, they got it right.

The barricade, such as it was by now, exploded upward and outward as the grenade went off at its base. Nasrin, caught in the open, was driven flat against the floor. Jake saw her head hit hard enough to splatter blood on the marble beneath her.

"Keep firing!" Richard yelled. Bent low, he darted out into the open under Jake's fire, grabbed Nasrin by the hair, and dragged her back toward the doorway he had just left ... but not quickly enough. Jake didn't see him get hit; his concentration was on the barracks doorway. But from the corner of his eye, he saw Richard spin away suddenly and fall, and he shot a darting glance that way in horror.

Richard had been hit in the arm, the same arm that had been pulling Nasrin. His left sleeve and the floor beneath him were bright with blood. But he was already reaching with his other arm, to grip Nasrin's hair again, and with his feet he pushed himself, on his back, through the doorway, pulling her with him.

Sure that they were both safely inside, Jake stopped firing and reloaded his rifle with suddenly shaking hands. "Richard!" he hissed, across the corridor. "You okay?" A pretty stupid question, he realized. He could still see the blood streaked across the floor.

But Richard's voice didn't sound especially upset. "Yes," he said, "as is our lady friend."

Jake took his eyes away from the barracks door long enough to glance quickly across the corridor. Nasrin, on her knees, was binding Richard's upper arm as he sat with his back against the opened door. She smiled at Jake, a reassuring and very comradely smile. She was a vampire; he could see her damaged nose and mouth healing as he watched.

He tore his gaze away and concentrated again on the barracks. From within, there was more gunfire, this time from many guns, as the guards tried the stairways again. More distantly, there was sporadic gunfire, and then a long period of sustained fire from the front of the building.

"Anoush," Nasrin said suddenly, "sends that your friend and the men of Sa'idi come." Anoush was the Sa'idian vampire Richard had assigned to guard the rear entrance to the palace.

"Will's here?" Jake said hopefully. They could surely use the help.

"Tell him he is to tell the Vaje Will to make for the area in the front, to support the Vaje Adrian," Richard said calmly.

Nasrin was quiet for a moment, then she said, "Anoush sends that he begs the Vaje Richard to allow him, too, to join the battle."

Jake could hear Richard's impatient sigh, then, "Tell him to assign two of the men of Sa'idi to watch the entrance. Anoush and half a dozen others can join us here; tell him to bring them into the cross corridor behind us. All the rest are to go to the Vaje Adrian until he tells them he has no further need of them."

Jake was almost weak with relief. At least they would be getting a little help ... if damned little. And it had better come soon. There was more gunfire ... a lot more, from within the barracks area. The guards must be getting desperate. God knew what they were liable to try next.

"Jake," he heard Richard saying with unnerving certainty, "get ready. They will try a more sustained rush, probably in the wake of a further explosion. This will be their most determined effort."

It will? Jake, looking down the corridor at the mass of bleeding bodies cluttering the floor in front of the barracks doors, couldn't imagine an effort more determined than the one that had sent most of those men charging desperately into the withering fire of his and Richard's rifles.

"Signal," Richard added calmly, "when you must reload. Nasrin will cover for you."

Reload? Richard expected the guards to come at them long enough for him to run out of ammunition and have to reload?

Jake looked down at his hands on the rifle for a second. He was astonished at how steady they were. Adrian is never gonna believe this, he thought, and then heard Richard hiss, "Now!"

And the whole damned world blew up in his face.