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Hammerfall

Cherryh C. J. (EN)

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HAMMERFALL

Caroline J. Cherryh

The Gene Wars 1

EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1.1 HTML

March 8, 2003

Re-proofed & re-formatted by

nukie

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EOS

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

East 53rd Street New York, New York 10022

Interior design by Kellan Peck

ISBN: 0-06-105260-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cherryh, C. J. Hammerfall / C.J. Cherryh.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-105260-4 I. Title.

PS3553.H358 H35 2001

813.54-dc21

00-047621

First Eos hardcover printing: July 2001

Eos Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries,

Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A. HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Printed in the U. S. A.

FIRST EDITION

Chapter One

^ »

Imagine first a web of stars. Imagine it spread wide and wider. Ships shuttle across it. Information flows.

A star lies at the heart of this web, its center, heart, and mind. This is the Commonwealth.

Imagine then a single strand of stars in a vast darkness, a beckoning pathway away from the web, a path down which ships can travel.

Beyond lies a treasure, a small lake of G5 suns, a near circle of perfect stars all in reach of one another.

This way, that strand says. After so hard a voyage, reward. Wealth. Resources.

But a whisper comes back down that thread of stars, a ghost of a whisper, an illusion of a whisper.

The web of stars has heard the like before. Others are out there, very far, very faint, irrelevant to our affairs.

Should we have listened?

—The Book of the Landing.

Distance deceived the eye in the lakht, that wide, red land of the First Descended, where legend said the ships had come down.

At high noon, with the sun reflecting off the plateau, the chimera of a city floated in the haze, appearing as a line of light just below the red, saw-toothed ridge of the Qarain, that upthrust that divided the Lakht from the Anlakht, the true land of death.

The city was both mirage and truth; it appeared always a day before its true self. Marak knew it, walking, walking endlessly beside the beshti, the beasts on which their guards rode.

The long-legged beasts were not deceived. They moved no faster. The guards likewise made no haste.

“The holy city,” some of the damned shouted, some in relief, some in fear, knowing it was both the end of their torment and the end of their lives. “Oburan and the Ila’s court!”

“Walk faster, walk faster,” the guards taunted them lazily, sitting supreme over the column. The lank, curve-necked beasts that carried them plodded at an unchangeable rate. They were patient creatures, splay-footed, towering above most predators of the Lakht, enduring the long trek between wells with scant food and no water. A long, long line of them stretched behind, bringing the tents, the other appurtenances of their journey.

“Oburan!” the fools still cried. “The tower, the tower!”

“Run to it! Run!” the junior guards encouraged their prisoners. “You’ll be there before the night, drinking and eating before us.”

It was a lie, and some knew better, and warned the rest. The wife of a down-country farmer, walking among them, set up a wail when the word went out that the vision was only the shadow of a city, and that an end was a day and more away.

“It can’t be!” she cried. “It's there! I see it! Don't the rest of you see it?”

But the rest had given up both hope and fear of an end to this journey, and walked in the rising sun at the same pace as they had walked all this journey.

Marak was different than the rest. He bore across his heart the tattoo of the abjori, the fighters from rocks and hills. His garments, the long shirt, the trousers, the aifad wrapped about his head against the hellish glare, were all the dye and the weave of Kais Tain, of his own mother’s hand. Those patterns alone would have damned him in the days of the war. The tattoos on the backs of his fingers, six, were the number of the Ila’s guards hehad personally sent down to the shadows. The Ila’s men knew it, and watched with special care for any look of rebellion. He had a reputation in the lowlands and on the Lakht itself, a fighter as elusive as the mirage and as fast-moving as the sunrise wind.