The Protectors war

"We made it," the dark man murmured. "Before God, we actually made it." He crossed himself again. "Even at peril of our souls, it's worth it."

Juniper sighed. "First, Mr: Lopez, isn't it?" He nodded. "We've got freedom of religion here; and we'll help you pass on to the university people, or the Bearkillers, or the good monks at Mount Angel, if you prefer. Frankly I've been sort of embarrassed at how many people here have taken up the Craft, but there are still Christians among us: Why didn't you head for Mount Angel, by the way? It's closer."

"I think of that first, but too many damn soldiers in the way," he said frankly. "Those hijos, they kill us all slow, they catch us, even the ninos."

Sam grunted agreement. "The Protectorate's got continuous cavalry patrols along there-and the border's well marked."

Miguel nodded; he was a stocky brown-ski

"That was wise of you," Juniper said.

She flicked a hand, and Astrid and Eilir sat down on the benches across from the fugitives. Chuck went and poured mugs of beer for everyone, then resumed his stance a little behind Juniper, watchful without being tense-this might be a trick. With four of the most formidable warriors in the Willamette Valley at hand to protect her, Juniper didn't feel particularly threatened. She didn't want the fugitives to feel pressured either, and wasn't sure whether having Chuck behind her in full fig was a good idea, but he certainly thought so and she didn't want to argue about it.

Instead she teased the story out of the three of them. Miguel Lopez had actually been a resident of the town of Gervais before the Change and had managed to survive hiding near it, which was a rarity; his family had arrived a few years before from Jalisco in Mexico, migrant farmworkers like many in that town. He'd moved around hiding from Eaters and refugees and the plagues-living mainly on a pickup load of cracked oats, livestock feed his family had hidden in a woodlot-come out late in the first year, and started a small place of his own, before the Protector's men arrived.

"We didn' fight much," he said bleakly. "Too many of them. And they promise to protect us against Eaters and bandits, get us seed and tools, at first it sound pretty good. Then-" He touched his neck where the collar had left raw patches and calluses.

His friend Jeff Dawson had been a high school student in a Portland suburb-and as he confessed, lucky to end up in one of the Protector's labor gangs rather than driven out to die with so many others. He'd come to Gervais as part of a group sent to help construct the castle, and stayed as a general worker around the place.

"But I wasn't going to take it forever," he said. "And then there was Crystal."

That, evidently, was his sister, who was sixteen or so and strikingly pretty, with wide blue eyes and long tawny-colored hair; she looked a little younger than her age, and she was shorter than Juniper would have expected from her brother's six feet.

She'd have been about seven or eight when the Change came, Juniper reminded herself. Probably undernourished since, which would limit her growth. And she can't be as much of an i

"She was working in the castle," Jeff said. "That bastard Mack, he started sniffing around her."

He flushed and his hands clenched into fists on the table. Juniper raised an eyebrow, though she'd heard rumor and reports. Jeff couldn't speak; it was Miguel who went on:

"Malo, that one. Bastardo. He don't just bother girls, he hurt them. The Baron, he don't give a damn."

Why am I not surprised? Juniper thought.

So far it wasn't an unfamiliar story; they'd had hundreds of similar refugees. But:

"But Crystal brought us something," she said softly. "Something important. Important enough for Baron Liu to come after it in person, with such a small escort, as if keeping it all quiet was important to him. Very important."

Sam handed her the papers. They were bound, making a bundle about the size of a hardcover book, but the spine was held with steel post-and-clamp fasteners, allowing leaves to be removed or added. She riffled quickly through it; mostly columns of numbers, written in a small neat hand-someone from Arminger's own chancery, at a guess, and they might be able to identify who from the fist.

"Sam?" she said.

"I'd wager it's an Altendorf substitution code," he said. "The numbers'd refer to the pages, to lines, and then letters within the lines. They're a right nightmare to decode if you don't have the book, because if they're careful they don't even give things away with word frequencies- the and and and bumf like that. I'm no code breaker, but I do know enough to recognize that."

He leaned over and turned the book to the back pages. Her lips shaped a silent whistle; those were maps. Maps of the central and southern Willamette, and the coastline-one of Newport was very detailed, with all the post-Change corrections, and that was the coastal town closest to Corvallis. It had a good pass over the mountains, too. A final foldout map covered the whole of western and central Oregon as far as Umatilla, with copious notes in the same frustrating columns of numbers.

No convenient arrows and dates. Pity the buggers aren't that stupid. All this tells us is that they're up to no good.

And there was a printed sheet of numbered paragraphs in the back cover of the booklet. There always was, in the Protector's publications intended for his overlord cadre.

Number One read: If I capture my worst enemies, I will not stand over them gloating and boasting and telling them all the details of my secret plans and then keep them alive for torture in an escape-proof dungeon. Instead I will just kill them instantly.

For the first time the girl spoke, in a soft shy voice. "I was in the Baron's office, hiding in a closet-I knew we were going to run that night, and I wanted to steal some of the new silver money." A flash of anger: "He owed us all of it and more!"

Then she licked her lips. "And then the Baron and: and Mack came in, and they talked, and he put this in the desk, and locked it. When they left, I came out and took it."

Juniper's eyebrows went up. "I thought he locked it?" she said.

Crystal smiled, and reached into her blouse. She was wearing something like a housedress cinched over culottes, ragged with her trip through the brush but looking as if it had started out much better than what the others of her party wore. When her hand came out, it held a small sack of soft leather, held closed by a thong threaded into eyelets around the top. That chinked with a musical and-literally-silvery sound as she dropped it on the table.

"I had a copy of the key. He put it down where I could reach it, weeks ago, and I had Jeff copy it."

Jeff gri

Juniper sipped her mead and thought. Then Crystal cleared her throat. "When the Baron was talking: he said something very strange." Juniper nodded, and the girl went on: "He said it all depended on the Tayz Maniacs."

"Tayz Maniacs?" Juniper said, puzzled.

"And the Brits."

Brits I understand, but what are: wait a bit. Take out his accent and his sense of humor – so-called. She'd always had a good ear for regional patterns of speech, and Eddie Liu's was purest New Yawk, without even a trace of Cantonese; his mother had been American born of remote Polish ancestry. What would it sound like if Liu said it?