hand-hewed by himself from a ship's mast.
Stiggur whooped with delight. The clockwork beast stood stationary above them. Gull could have reached up and touched its beamy belly. Above, goblins squawked as their spikes thudded into seasoned wood or clanged off sheet iron flanks. The deadly pointed rain missed the humans.
The cook's boy looped the whip over his shoulder, grabbed a knee joint, and scampered up the clockwork beast's leg and withers like a monkey.
Gull barked for him to stop, but the boy crowed, 'They're past!'
Indeed, the stiff wind had pushed the sausagelike balloons out of range, over the wagon circle now. Goblins howled with rage, fistfought in blaming each other. One old bald goblin, in stupid rage, stabbed upward and pierced the balloon, which wheezed like a teakettle as the crew screamed. When the bag split, they hurtled into the densest patch of brambles and stone swords.
Stiggur yelped, laughed like Gull, and yanked a lever. Instantly, the articulated cone eyes of the clockwork beast blinked. A huge iron-shod hoof came off the ground. Towser's bodyguards took a step back, mouths gaping. The boy crowed, 'I'll get 'em, Gull! I'll squish 'em!'
But square in the path of the stamping beast, colors gushed like a fountain. Armored and armed, appeared Helki and Holleb.
Stiggur shrilled, yanked, turned the wooden beast and promptly crashed into the bramble wall. The centaurs had already skipped nimbly aside. They saluted Gull with their feathered lances. Spotting the boggled bodyguards, they trumpeted their war cry, leveled their weapons, and charged.
The woodcutter felt a stab of satisfaction that choked him. It'd been his nagging that made them gird for war again…
But they still needed to organize a defense! They had plenty of help, but had to get out of this pocket! If those blue barbarians trapped them here, they'd be slaughtered.
Morven plucked a steel spike from the ground. 'I can stave someone's hull with this! Who's for hitting?'
Gull cast about. Clashing and thrashing, Stiggur fought with his levers to free the clockwork beast from the bramble wall. Unable to back out, the boy elected to drive forward. Huge wood-and-iron limbs shredded brambles and snapped stone spears. As the construct and its rider disappeared through the rambling wall, Gull couldn't help. Stiggur had opened yet another gap.
'You'll have a snootful in a moment!' Gull shouted over the noise. 'That shout was-Greenie! Hold up!'
But lost in her own world of newfangled magic, his sister went on whispering and waggling her fingers.
A roar answered her.
A pair of humpbacked grizzly bears big as hayricks winked into being thirty feet away. One of the shaggy brown animals roared, snapped slavering jaws full of long white teeth, looked around for something to bite.
And spotted Gull and company against the monolith.
The woodcutter gulped. He never knew his sister had touched grizzly bears!
But why did they turn this way…?
Then he realized.
Greensleeves couldn't control any of these creatures.
They'd attack whatever they liked. Including him and his sister.
In a flash, Gull saw the problem.
Towser, with years of training and experience, had learned to control whatever he summoned. Laid on each being, magical or not, was a geas, a compulsion to serve the wizard. Thus Towser could summon the darkest monster and point it at an enemy, himself immune from attack.
But Greensleeves had neither training nor years. Whatever she conjured did as it pleased. The badgers, befriended, had chosen to defend her.
But these grizzlies…
Suddenly they had too much 'help.'
The bigger bear, the male, kicked its back legs to gather speed, rolled at them like a boulder from a mountaintop.
'Greensleeves!' shouted Gull. 'Something to stop it!'
His sister saw the charging bear, threw up her hands, bleated.
An upwelling flare of multicolored light, a rapid barking and woofing, and suddenly nine husky gray timber wolves, thoroughly fuddled, spilled across the altar.
They thumped at Greensleeves's feet, tumbled against the monolith and bounded away, dumped on their rumps in the path of the grizzly bear.
Instinctively protecting his pack, one huge wolf leaped at the grizzly's face. With gleaming fangs it latched onto the bear's muzzle. The bruin half reared to bat it away. The wolf kicked scrabbled for footing in the grass, yanked to tear flesh and pull its opponent off-balance. Other wolves nipped at the bear's flanks, but the rampaging female smashed amidst them, bowling them right and left.
'Rabid wolves to stop hungry bears?' rasped Morven. 'That's an improvement?'
Gull only shook his head. 'Badgers, I'd seen her play with! Deer! Wolverines, even! But I never imagined she'd touched-'
He turned at a snarl. Atop the monolith perched a tawny mountain lion. It clung with razor claws. White whiskers bristling, ears laid back, it screeched a challenge to this indignity.
A louder roar distracted the fighters. Yelping, howling, leaping, screaming, a horde of blue-painted, white- haired, tusked barbarians gathered at the gap in the crazy bramble walls.
And charged.
CHAPTER 18
'Fall back!' shouted the woodcutter over barbarian screams. He caught Greensleeves's arm, plucked at Morven's, all while juggling his axe. 'We need cover!'
'There ain't no cover!' Morven yelled. He turned the air blue shouting sailors' oaths at the oncoming barbarians.
Gull didn't argue. They couldn't fight an army. Dragging his companions on tiptoes, he backpedaled around the monolith till it rose like a wall on their left.
Near the altar, the bear-wolf fight sent fur pluming into the air. Five wolves tumbled and snapped at the grizzly bears, more snarling than fighting. The male grizzly batted a wolf, rushed and trampled over him, then whirled. Gull could have touched the bear's tail.
But at the barbarians' rush and shout, the dogfight split apart. Yelping wolves shot across the warriors' front line and vaulted through the thin brambles. The grizzlies bowled after them and bashed straight through stone spears and vines.
Nothing protected them now, thought Gull.
Threescore blue barbarians ran five abreast. They cheered, lusty and proud, some garbled the name of a war god, loudly enough to hurt ears. They laughed as if going to a holiday instead of slaughter. Gull and his companions would be mincemeat.
Dashing all the way into the pocket behind the monolith, a second's glance showed they were trapped.
The bramble-sword-wood wall was still a solid barrier, thirty feet thick here, that halted abruptly at the cliff's edge. Roots and branches stuck into space. Gull had vaguely hoped they might run around the monolith, since it didn't sit on the very lip of the bluff. But rocks higher than his reach were piled against the back of the dark cone, possibly to prop it, a jumbled line of them some twenty feet long. Given time, they could boost and climb over: but they had no time. Squinting into the setting sun, Gull found the cliff edge dropped sheer thirty feet to surf-swept boulders.
There was only twelve feet of space between the monolith and bramble wall, yet they had nothing to plug the gap, for Stiggur's clockwork beast was still fetched up in the brambles. The boy yanked at the controls. Levers clicked, pulleys raced, gears clashed, but the construct was mired in vines. Gull wasn't sure it would make a barrier anyway.
