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

Chapter Twenty-Eight

An hour later, Lily emerged from the empathic bond she had established with Doni to relive exactly the conversation Doni had had with Anne on the topic of Richard's and Anne's future together ... or rather, their lack of it. Her stunned silence gave Doni time to scan her physically.

Doni wasn't pleased. Lily had lost weight, and she'd had little enough to spare to start with. Worse, the child's development was being affected by her continuing inability to eat or sleep. There was no irretrievable damage yet, but something would have to be done, and quickly, or the possibility that Lily would lose this child was very real.

"Stop it, Doni," Lily said, distracted and petulant as a five year old, and perfectly aware of what Doni was doing. "I'm fine and the baby's fine. We're both a bit hungry and need to sleep more, but we're fine."

"Lily, you're not. And he's not. This has to stop, this minute, or I'm dragging you back to the infirmary and putting you to bed for the duration."

Lily didn't seem to hear her at all. "Damn Him!" she said fiercely. "Why didn't he tell me?" She spun around toward Stephen, a bit too quickly, and started to sway on her feet. Irritably, she rejected his instinctive steadying hand. "I'm all right, dammit!" she seethed.

Her temper was rising rapidly, fed as much by her anger with herself as her fury with Richard. Relief and understanding struggled to surface but kept sinking beneath self-conscious chagrin. Her noble sacrifice had been for nothing, and Anne, of all people, had been the one to tell her so. Anne, for whose sake Lily had put herself and Richard through weeks of unremitting misery, had smiled sadly and said there had never been any need for any of it, proving all over again that there were things about Richard that she understood and Lily did not.

Lily's ego was in as much agony as her heart, ignoble though it might be. She'd been presumptuous and probably stupid; worse still, she had loved him but not trusted him. She had behaved in a manner that clearly said she thought Richard was unable or unwilling to assume responsibility for himself and those he cared for. She had treated him, she was realizing now, like a child.

But damn him, he could have told her. He knew ... he had to have known all along, that Anne already understood he would not return to her. He could have said so. He could have understood how desperately Lily needed to hear him say it...

She was waiting, fury rising, for Stephen to read her unspoken questions and explain Richard to her, as if just being a man made him as guilty as Richard and as responsible for Richard's silence, when she suddenly went still, her eyes unfocused, face slack, her mind concentrating inward. Doni recognized the look immediately. She had a bond-mate; she was a Healer, and she knew.

Something was happening with Richard. From the shock of pain in Lily's eyes, Doni guessed that he had been hurt in some way. But Lily was at a loss because for her, unlike other bond-mates like Stephen and Doni, the linkage was one way; she knew only the barest fact of his hurt, but nothing else.

Lily's face had gone dead white; panic and a sudden, unreasoning need to go to Richard was welling up in her. Doni made a Healer's decision. Whatever had happened to the man, he was still alive. If he had not been, Lily would have known it instantly. And Lily was not strong enough to suffer his pain with him.

Quickly, before Lily could transport herself away, Doni's mind slid into hers, found the familiar synapse, and clobbered it. Stephen, jumping forward, caught Lily's totally limp body before it could hit the floor.

He looked up at Doni wildly. "Did you do this? Why? What happened?"

"I don't know ... and I don't care," Doni said defensively. "The damned man has got himself hurt and she was about to go to him." She was all brisk efficiency. "Put her on the couch, Stephen, while I get what I need. She's not going anywhere until we do something about her weakness."

There was a small, explosive inrush of air, and Doni had vanished.

(Richard Plantagenet, Jake Fowler, and far too few Sa'dians have been trying to keep far too many of the late Zanjani's guardsmen confined to their barracks within the palace while Adrian Talbot finds and disables their radio. Adrian has now done this, largely due to the timely advent of Will Scrope and a whole passel of Sa'idi villagers, but while he and his group have been successful, things are not going quite so well for Richard and company. They have given Adrian the time he needed, but in the process, Richard has been wounded, several Sa'idians have been killed, and Jake is lost...)

Now that Richard's group had been driven from the main corridor leading to the barracks area and into the cross corridor, the guards were coming out in strength ... and from the sound of an explosion further down this cross corridor, it was likely that they had found ways to break into other corridors than the badly destroyed main one ... probably through the rooms that connected them.

Visibility was down to a few feet, at best. With no ventilation, all of these corridors were filling with smoke now. And somewhere in this swirling fog of smoke and dust, Jake and Nasrin had disappeared.

The man crouched beside Richard was the vampire Anoush ... who spoke no English. The three surviving mortal Sa'idians, their faces streaked with smoke and blood, were looking so shell-shocked that it had been impossible, in these few moments, to determine whether or not any of them understood anything Richard was saying to them. They had just seen three of their fellow villagers blown pretty thoroughly to bits. They weren't panicking, and they were still game, but they were clearly stunned as well.

He had to find Jake and Nasrin. He needed Nasrin to communicate with her fellow Exalteds, and he wasn't certain, even now, that Jake could survive in this chaotic battlefield on his own. But Jake had performed as Richard had been sure he would ... although Jake had probably surprised himself.

It was becoming quickly urgent to move from their present location. No guardsmen had ventured into this corridor from the cloud of smoke still billowing out of the mouth of the main corridor to the barracks ... but if they were spreading out through this end of the palace, they would be behind Richard and his little band in moments. To find Jake and Nasrin, they would have to move to their left ... across the mouth of the main corridor, and Richard was about to try to communicate this to them when there was a sudden, violent explosion down that way, unseen in the haze, and a moment later, a long, sustained burst of rifle fire that had bullets flying down this way. Richard and his companions flattened themselves on the littered marble floor, just as a group of guardsmen came stumbling out of the smoke toward them.

Richard came to his knees, trying to bring his rifle to bear in time ... and then stopped. The guards weren't running ... they were being thrown forward by the force of the rifle fire that had mowed them down from behind. Every one of them fell, already dead or not far from it, before they reached Richard's group.

Jake, or Nasrin, or both, Richard thought. It had to be ... there was no one else in this end of the palace who would be shooting at the guards.

Anoush reached up and grabbed his arm, and Richard looked down into the man's grinning face. Anoush said, in garbled French, "Vaje Jake talks to Vaje Adrian."

"Where is Jake?" Richard demanded, but Anoush just stared at him and shrugged. It dawned on Richard that the man didn't speak French; he was repeating, phonetically, something that was being 'sent' to him from another of the Sa'idi vampires ... probably Shapour, who spoke excellent French. More carefully, Richard said, again, "Where is Jake?" and Anoush got a distant look in his eyes for a moment, as he 'sent' this, or tried to.

A moment later, Anoush said, "Jake go to Adrian. Richard well?"

Richard didn't bother to answer. "Nasrin?" he said.

The man frowned. "Nasrin no talk. Nasrin true dead."

Then Jake was really alone ... but on his way to join Adrian. Richard couldn't help him, but he still had this small group to save, if he could.

There was a doorway on the far side of this corridor, about twenty feet away. Wherever it led, it couldn't be a worse place to be than where they were right now. Making a swift gesture to indicate that the Sa'idians were to follow him, Richard headed that way.

Shapour, following the sound of gunfire more than any directions from Anoush ... who, Shapour thought privately, was an idiot, Exalted or not ... brought his small group around a corner and into a reasonable facsimile of hell. Smoke boiled this way from further down the corridor before them; the polished marble of the floor and walls had been torn apart, and the fluted pillars of malachite and lapis lay in broken chunks that exposed the twisted steel rods that were their inner support. Above, the beautifully ornate pointed arches had been blasted to shapeless rubble, some of it hanging precariously with the loss of its supporting pillars. And somewhere just ahead, many guns were firing ... far too many guns for the number of men that Vaje Richard had with him.

Irritated, Shapour sent to Anoush, 'Son of a diseased whore, where are you?'

The answer was maddeningly vague. 'The Vaje Richard has led us through many rooms, Shapour, and across many corridors. The place where we now are seems to be a great lord's throne room ... but we are cut off from the doors, and there are guards everywhere.'

'Idiot! Where is this room? In what direction from the guards' barracks?'

'We moved always toward the harem, says the Vaje Richard.'

That gave Shapour something to go on. Richard and his group had been moving across the length of the palace ... and the gunfire Shapour heard now had to be the guards who had cornered them. If Richard had moved toward the front of the building, the melee here would have been something else ... though the gods alone knew what. Hurriedly, Shapour split his small group up, with quickly issued instructions, and led his half down the corridor, into the billowing smoke.

They took the guards from behind, a group of perhaps fifteen men against Shapour's six ... and virtually all of the vampires were wounded in the brief, savage fight. But they were already healing as they mowed down the last of the guards and fought their way through the smoke to the huge, gilded double doors and spilled into the "throne room."

It was an audience chamber of some sort, a very large room and incredibly opulent. Jeweled lamps hung from golden chains above floors of intricately inlaid marble designs. Rows of slender, carved alabaster pillars marched down the length of the room on either side, supporting more of the elaborate ceiling arches and creating shadowed colonnades against the walls. At the far end, on a raised dais strewn with vibrantly patterned rugs, a huge, gilded, throne-like chair and a number of only barely smaller chairs had been pushed over to lie on their sides. Behind these, Richard and his four remaining Sa'idians, including the idiot Anoush, were returning the gunfire aimed at them by several pockets of guardsmen who darted among the pillars.

Shapour and his six men joined the fray joyously, while from the far side of the room, the rest of his group came pouring into the fight. In minutes, the gunfire ceased.

Richard came running forward to clap an approving hand on Shapour's shoulder. "Good man," he said quickly, in French. "How fares Vaje Adrian?"

"With complete success, vaje-ye," Shapour said, formally. "And the Vaje Jake goes to join him. The giant, Vaje Will, and the people of Sa'idi guard the captured and wounded of the guards."

Richard didn't look pleased. "Send to Vaje Adrian at once that the captives are to be driven from the palace and into the square. He is to leave four men to guard the doors against their re-entry. The rest of his party is to move on the harem."

Shapour obeyed, sending this to one of the Sa'idi vampires who had remained with Adrian. Richard was already moving, with Shapour and everyone else in his wake as he ran from the audience chamber and down another endless marble corridor. Catching up to him easily, Shapour said, "Vaje-ye, the Vaje Adrian sends that many townspeople have gathered in the square before the palace, and the guards fear to go out."

Richard didn't hesitate. "Tell him that they are to go out, or he is to kill them. We cannot spare the men to guard them. His men must move on the harem now." He emphasized the last word.

Personally, Shapour approved of this ... in fact, he couldn't see giving the guards the chance to run. But mortals were strange in that way, even such a mortal as the Vaje Richard. He sent these instructions to his compatriot at the front of the palace, and a moment later, repeated the answer to Richard. "Vaje Adrian says that it will be done, vaje-ye. Vaje Will and his group are already moving toward the harem area; Vaje Adrian will follow when the guards have been driven out."

It was a good thing that Shapour didn't have to breathe; Richard was setting a pace that would have made running and talking at the same time difficult for a breather ... except that Richard himself seemed to be managing it without any great effort. As they ran, he continued to fire off orders that Shapour dutifully relayed.

He didn't bother to repeat to Richard his fellow vampire's comments that everything Vaje Richard sent that Vaje Adrian was to do Vaje Adrian immediately claimed was impossible ... and then went ahead and did it.

Jake, as much as possible, moved through the interconnected rooms and avoided the corridors ... dashing across these only when necessary and after careful scouting. He was aware that Adrian was moving now, and for Jake to keep himself moving in the right direction to intersect Adrian's path was becoming increasingly difficult, even with Adrian damned near bellowing into his head non-stop.

'Goddammit, Talbot, shut the fuck up!' he sent back, frustrated. He had just run into half a dozen guards as he dashed across a corridor, and he was almost certain he'd done them no damage at all while wasting half a clip of his diminishing supply of ammunition. And he had taken his first semi-serious wound ... a deep gouge on his right thigh that bled way too much before he got it bound up.

Limping, sweating, filthy, bloody, coughing up marble dust, and damned near deafened by the continual noise, Jake was in no mood to put up with Adrian Talbot ... and almost desperate to find him.

After a moment, Adrian's quieter, penitent thought reached him. 'Jake, you're getting closer. I can feel it. Keep going the way you have been.'

Brilliant. He 'had been' running wherever the hell these darkened rooms took him ... and he wasn't entirely certain it was always in the same direction, especially since a couple of times he'd had to duck back out of rooms that were already occupied ... by no one who was friendly to him.

Distantly, and not as clearly as Adrian's thoughts, he could also hear T'beth's almost continual frustrated cursing ... from the harem area. Jake stopped dead. From the harem area. That was where Richard would be making for next ... and where he would be sending Adrian.

Jake had a rough idea of the layout of the palace, gained in conveying Adrian's mental pictures of it to Richard on two occasions. He knew where he was in relation to the harem ... sort of. If Jake went toward the harem, he would run into Richard ... or, if Adrian's mental messages got stronger as he moved, he would find Adrian.

It was at least a plan. Jake sighed deeply and set off again.

He had made it through another two or three large suite complexes and a number of corridors when, suddenly, stepping out of one more door, he found himself face to face with four of the ayatollah's guardsmen who had been creeping silently this way, plastered too close against the side of the corridor for him to see them until he was in the open. Smiling wolfishly, his rifle already bearing on Jake, the lead guard said something Jake couldn't remotely understand as his finger began to tighten on the trigger...

'Down!' Adrian's thought slammed into Jake's head hard enough to just about knock him off his feet all by itself. Jake dropped like a stone while bullets sang through the air, from two directions, where he'd been standing an instant before. Running footsteps came toward him ... and over him. Someone stepped on his outstretched hand. And Adrian was suddenly on his knees beside him, his great teal eyes dazzling in the uncertain light ... and swimming with bloody tears. "Jake ... where are you hit? Jake..."

Jake struggled to sit up. "I'm not hit. For Christ's sake, Talbot ... lemme go!"

Adrian's arms dropped immediately, but the expression that bloomed on his face was embarrassing enough in itself. "You're okay?" he said, as if he could hardly believe it.

"Shit, yeah. Are you?"

"Yes." Adrian's smile was positively joyous. Any minute now, Jake thought, he's gonna throw his damned arms around me again.

To forestall this, Jake stumbled to his feet and bent to grab up the rifle he'd dropped. Looking down at Adrian, who was still staring at him as if something way too demonstrably affectionate was in his mind, he said, "Let's go, then, Talbot, before Richard decides to be courteous enough to make these damned guards look downright welcoming, okay?"

"Okay." Adrian swallowed, too hard, and let Jake pull him to his feet. The men Adrian had been leading, who had followed the fleeing guards on down the corridor, came running back now, success evident in their savage grins. Adrian straightened his shoulders and made a quick gesture, heading on down the corridor with the whole bunch of them ... and Jake ... close behind him.

In the end, it came down to a room-by-room, corridor-by-corridor firefight, and it soon became obvious that someone had assumed command of the guards and was trying to get them to join forces. The nature of the battle had changed entirely as the numbers of guardsmen diminished, and now their objective seemed to be the same as Richard's ... the harem area.

Like the barracks, the harem was separated from the palace proper, and access was limited. If the surviving guards could get into the harem, they could fort up and hold off the intruders easily. And it was this that Richard was busily preventing in his dispositioning of his troops. Wherever the scattered pockets of guards turned, they were now running into groups of either Adrian's men or Will's, and very few had been able to close on the harem area before they were cut off.

When Richard finally met up with first Will, and then Adrian, they were no more a few yards from the last cross corridor that bisected the main corridor to the harem door ... and Will's scouts reported that there was a barricade across this corridor, with an unknown number of guards behind it.

"Richard," Adrian said, "T'beth is damned near screaming to get out here and get into the fight." Exactly what she had been screaming into Adrian's and Jake's heads, Adrian thought better of repeating.

"Tell her," Richard said calmly, "that she will have her chance momentarily. First, we must block off the doors to the rooms along the main corridor here to prevent the guards from escaping from this area."

They split up, leaving a good-sized group in place to keep any more guards from joining those already behind the barricade in the main corridor. Access to the rooms Richard was concerned about could be gained from other corridors, and all of these had to be cleared of any guards, and the doors blocked. Richard led one party to the right, with Adrian and Jake, and sent Will and another party to the left, with Shapour to provide communication between them.

It had sounded easy when Richard said they would do it. What none of them were aware of was the numbers of guards who had converged on these rooms, in groups of half a dozen to a dozen or so, separated from each other but fighting now with the ferocity of desperate men.

'Talbot!' T'beth shrieked into Adrian's already fully occupied mind. 'If you don't get here soon, I swear I'm gonna shoot you myself!'

Adrian, ducking a stream of bullets by throwing himself behind an elegant cherry wood desk ... and pulling Jake down with him ... was too busy to answer. He'd lost Richard again, somehow, and he and Jake seemed to be the only ones who had come into this particular room. Somewhere on the far side of it, at least two guards were determined to make sure they regretted it.

"I'm really getting tired of this," Adrian said mournfully. "The next time Richard suggests taking over a palace, we just say no, okay?"

Jake looked at him. "To Richard?" he said doubtfully.

He had a point. Adrian sighed. He didn't need to; it was just such a nice effect, even if there was no one there but Jake to appreciate it.

Jake saw Adrian lean against a wall, rifle slung ready to fire, black headband creeping down over his eyes, a smudge of something dark that probably didn't bear close investigation on one cheek. The vampire looked strained. It wasn't possible that he was tired; it was hours still ‘til dawn and they'd hardly breached the first floor. They still had to tackle the harem and release those women ... assuming any of them were left alive or in good shape to release. T'beth was so busy bitching about not being able to get in on the fighting that she hadn't told anyone how many of the women inside where still alive and well.

'What's wrong?' Jake sent a mental message to Adrian.

'Just having flashbacks,' Adrian replied. 'Christ, it's like World War One ... or Two. Pick one.'

More gunfire roared down one of the colonnaded passageways and Adrian flinched. Barely.

'Just like fucking Poland,' he sent the message to Jake. 'A memory lane I'd rather not ramble down.'

Richard appeared around a corner, obviously wondering what was keeping them. "Is there a problem?" he asked. He could have sworn these two were right behind him. Wars without people...

"No," Adrian replied. "I just wasn't sure where that gunfire was coming from."

Richard looked a bit quizzical at that illogical statement—the gunfire was coming from several different places--but shrugged. "We must fight our way to the harem. I need you with me."

"Oui, mon capitaine," Adrian saluted, giving no hints of the troubling memories he'd been having. He and Jake followed Richard down the passage towards the harem, guns at the ready.

Jake could understand why Adrian was having war flashbacks. Streams of bullets from rifles, automatic rifles, handguns and machine guns were arcing through the air, occasionally finding a target in soft flesh. Even a vampire could be felled by a bullet in the head, or by having his or her spinal column severed by a spurt of machine gun fire ... at least one of the Sa'idi Exalted was down permanently. Jake tried not to remember Nasrin's demise, but he kept seeing the smile on her face as the grenade blew her into the True Death. Their casualties were bad, but far more of the Saravan guards were down; dead or severely wounded. The screams of the latter blended with the gunfire for a cacophony from hell. The floor of the colonnade was slick with blood.

There were guards at the harem door; desperate guards, determined not to allow the intruders past. At least twenty of them, maybe as many as thirty. It was hard to tell in the corridor; they'd formed a barricade some 15 feet or so in front of the harem entrance. They fired at the intruders; all three of them ducked back into safety, but Jake heard Adrian grunt. The professor's right arm was blood-spattered, but luckily it was a flesh wound and healed even as Jake watched.

"Ask T'beth how many women are still alive," Jake urged Adrian, who had barely noticed his wound.

Adrian nodded, and sent the message to his old friend. "She says twenty-two," he replied after a minute. "The guards killed all the pregnant ones as being too hard to look after and no good for sex." The expression on his face wasn't pleasant; one of the harder things to understand about Adrian was the fact that he actually liked babies.

"Shit," said Jake.