Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

the murderers is death-- but we're the only ones who have the right to appoint the executioner! We're the ones who have to make sure the sentence is carried out!"
    "Yes! Yes!"
    "They let my brother die in the agony of the descolada! They watched his body burn from the inside out! Now we'll burn that forest to the ground!"
    "Burn them! Fire! Fire!"
    See how they strike matches, how they tear up tufts of grass and light them. The flame we'll light together!
    "Tomorrow we'll leave on the punitive expedition--"
    "Tonight! Tonight! Now!"
    "Tomorrow-- we can't go tonight-- we have to collect water and supplies--"
    "Now! Tonight! Burn!"
    "I tell you we can't get there in a single night, it's hundreds of kilometers away, it'll take days to get there--"
    "The piggies are right over the fence!"
    "Not the ones that killed Quim--"
    "They're all murdering little bastards!"
    "These are the ones that killed Libo, aren't they?"
    "They killed Pipo and Libo!"
    "They're all murderers!"
    "Burn them tonight!"
    "Burn them all!"
    "Lusitania for us , not for animals!"
    Are they insane? How can they think that he would let them kill these piggies-- they haven't done anything. "It's Warmaker! Warmaker and his forest that we have to punish!"
    "Punish them!"
    "Kill the piggies!"
    "Burn!"
    "Fire!"
    A momentary silence. A lull. An opportunity. Think of the right words. Think of something to bring them back, they're slipping away. They were part of my body, they were part of my self, but now they're sliding away out from under me, one spasm and I've lost control if I ever had control; what can I say in this split second of silence that will bring them back to their senses?
    Too long. Grego waited too long to think of something. It was a child's voice that filled the brief silence, the voice of a boy not yet into his manhood, exactly the sort of innocent voice that could cause the brimming holy rage within their hearts to erupt, to flow into irrevocable action. Cried the child: "For Quim and Christ!"
    "Quim and Christ! Quim and Christ!"
    "No!" shouted Grego. "Wait! You can't do this!"
    They lurch around him, stumble him down. He's on all fours, someone stepping on his hand. Where is the stool he was standing on? Here it is, cling to that, don't let them trample me, they're going to kill me if I don't get up, I have to move with them, get up and walk with them, run with them or they'll crush me.
    And then they were gone, past him, roaring, shouting, the tumult of feet moving out of the grassy square into the grassy streets, tiny flames held up, the voices crying "Fire" and "Burn" and "Quim and Christ," all the sound and sight of them flowing like a stream of lava from the square outward toward the forest that waited on the not-so-distant hill.
    "God in heaven what are they doing!"
    It was Valentine. Grego knelt by the stool, leaning on it, and there she stood beside him, looking at them flow away from this cold empty crater of a place where the conflagration began.
    "Grego, you self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, what have you done?"
    Me? "I was going to lead them to Warmaker. I was going to lead them to justice ."
    "You're the physicist, you idiot boy. Haven't you ever heard of the uncertainty principle?"
    "Particle physics. Philotic physics."
    " Mob physics, Grego. You never owned them. They owned you. And now they've used you up and they're going to destroy the forest of our best friends and advocates among the pequeninos and what will any of us do then? It's war between humans and pequeninos, unless they have inhuman self-restraint, and it will be our fault."
    " Warmaker killed Quim."
    "A crime. But what you've started here, Grego, this is an atrocity."
    "I didn't do it!"
    "Bishop Peregrino counseled with you. Mayor Kovano warned you. I begged you. And you did it anyway."
    "You warned me about a riot, not about this --"
    "This is a riot, you fool. Worse than a riot. It's a pogrom. It's a massacre. It's baby-killing. It's the first step on the long terrible road to xenocide."
    "You can't blame all that on me!"
    Her face is so terrible in the moonlight, in the light from the doors and windows of the bars. "I blame on you only what you did. You started a fire on a hot, dry, windy day, despite all warnings. I blame you for that, and if you don't hold yourself responsible for all the consequences of your own acts, then you are truly unworthy of human society and I hope you lose your freedom forever."
    She's gone. Where? To do what? She can't leave him