Goblin looked, too. He shook his head to lessen the beer buzz. “We’ll have to think about that.”
“What are you doing, One-Eye?” I was beside him now. One-Eye indicated the spear proudly. “Little something I’ve been working on in my spare time.”
“It’s ugly enough.” Nice to know he could do something useful without being told.
He had begun with a black wooden pole and had worked it for a lot of hours. It was covered with incredibly ugly miniature scenes along with writing in an unfamiliar alphabet. Its head was as black as its shaft, darkened iron finely traced with silver runes. There was some color on the shaft, too, although so fine as to be almost invisible. “Very nice.”
“Nice? Sigh. You heathen.” He pointed. Loftus looked. So did I.
Shadowspinner’s party, sadly depleted, surrounded by swarms of pink sparkles and mocking crows, was getting close.
One-Eye snickered. “This here is my Shadowmaster blaster, bastar’!” He howled. He must have put away a lot of that beer. “Nothing he couldn’t stop on a lazy afternoon, but this ain’t no lazy afternoon, is it? Loftus shoots, this stick won’t be in the air five seconds. That’s all the time he’ll have to figure out what’s coming and what to do to unravel the spells that are there to keep him from turning it. And look how busy that asshole is already. Loftus, my man, get ready to carve you a big victory notch on this thing.”
As anybody with any sense does, Loftus ignored One-Eye. He laid his weapon with an artist’s care.
One-Eye babbled, “Most of the spells are designed to penetrate his personal protection, counting on him not having time to do anything actively. Because I wanted to concentrate on piercing one point in a passive...”
I shut him out. “Goblin. Any chance this will work? The runt’s not exactly a heavyweight.”
“It’s workable, tactically. If he really worked that hard on it. Say One-Eye is an order of magnitude weaker than Shadowspinner. That really only means that it takes him ten times as long to get the same work done.”
“An order of magnitude?” So that was One-Eye’s problem.
“More like two orders really, probably.”
He lost me. And I didn’t have time to wring an explanation out of him.
Loftus was satisfied he was leading his target perfectly, he had the range, whatever. “Time,” he said.
28
“Loose,” I suggested. The ballista offered its distinctive thump. Silence spread along the wall. The black shaft darted across the night. The occasional spark floated behind it. One-Eye said five seconds of flight. The truth was more like four but they took forever.
There was ample firelight to illuminate the Shadowmaster. Shortly he would disappear behind one of the enfilading towers. He stared back at the hills as he rode. Those bizarre riders out there were on the plain now, daring someone, anyone, to answer their challenge.
I gasped.
Widowmaker carried the Lance. The standard itself was not apparent but that was the lance on which it had ridden from the day the Black Company left Khatovar. Every single Annalist has kept close track although the reason for doing so has been forgotten. I focused on Shadowspinner in time to see One-Eye’s treasure arrive.
Later Goblin told me Spinner sensed the threat as the missile hit the peak of its arc. Whatever he did then, it was the right thing. Or he was lucky. Or a higher power decreed that this was not his night to die.
The spear changed course by scant inches. Instead of striking Shadowspinner it hit his mount’s shoulder. And ripped through the beast as though it was no more substantial than air. The wound glowed red, flickered. The red spread. Shadowspinner bellowed in rage as the animal threw him. He fell in a heap, lay there twitching long enough for One-Eye to start nagging Loftus about hitting him with a barrage of regular shafts, then he scuttled off like a crab to escape the stallion’s pounding hooves.
I recognized that animal then. It was one of those magically bred monster horses Lady brought south with the Company, out of her old empire. They vanished during the battle.
The horse screamed and screamed.
A normal animal would have perished in moments.
I stared at those two riders out there. They walked toward the city slowly, offering their challenge. Now I could see that they, too, were mounted on Lady’s stallions. I told Goblin, “But I saw them killed.”
One-Eye grumbled, “We got to check this boy’s eyes.”
Goblin said, “I told you before, that’s not Lady. You look real close, you can see differences in the armor.”
The troops were seeing that. There was a stir among the Taglians.
“And you don’t know about the other one? What’re they talking about over there?”
“No. It could be the Old Man.”
Sparkle went to see why the Taglians were excited.
Shadowspinner’s horse collapsed but continued screaming and kicking. Wisps of greenish steam rose from its wound. That continued to grow. The beast’s death was a long time coming.
The sorcerer would have died more slowly and gruesomely still had One-Eye’s shaft struck home.
Sparkle came to say, “They’re all excited because that armor is an exact match for some goddess named Kina in her battle avatar. That’s the way she’s always portrayed in paintings about her war with the demons.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, only that Kina was some sort of death goddess in these parts.
I wondered when the Shadowmaster would snipe back at One-Eye.
“He won’t,” Goblin assured me. “The moment he gave it attention enough to be effective those two out there would cut his legs off.”
I watched Shadowspinner limp out of sight.
His embarrassment spurred his soldiers to increase their efforts again. Somebody would pay for his indignity in pain. Understandably they preferred that we pick up that tab.
Some of them seemed to recognize the Lifetaker armor, too. I heard the name Kina shouted more than once below the wall.
“Thai Dei. Time for a message to your grandfather. I want to bring part of my force through his area so I can help drive the southerners out of the city.”
The Nyueng Bao stepped out of the shadows just long enough to listen. He stared at those riders, troubled. Then he grunted, descended to the street and trotted off into the night.
“Listen up, people. We’re going to go save our fearless dick-head leader. Bucket...”
29
I stepped into a dark alleyway, planning to set up shop behind a southern company with Goblin to do his hoodoo on them. And it was like I stepped off the edge of the world, into an abyss without bottom. Like some great psychic flyswatter slapped me down into the void. Goblin barked something in the instant it took to go but I did not understand him.
I had that moment to feel seasick, to be bewildered, to wonder who had ambushed me with what sorcery, and why it seemed to twist me like a wet rag being wrung out.
Had Mogaba taken his treachery to another level?
30
Something had hold of me. It pulled so virulently there was no resisting it. I lost track of who I was and where. I knew only that I was asleep and did not want to wake up.
