Loftus said, “She’s spent time around soldiers. She understands how they think.”
I sneered. “She’s been screwing one for five years. She ought to have a clue.”
Clete grabbed a bamboo pole with black bands around it. “This’s a cute little number.” He nodded to his brothers. They picked up similar poles. Each brother pointed his in the general direction of a crow. Clete said, “Do it.”
They cranked. Fireballs flew. Black feathers exploded, floated around smoldering. More fireballs darted out. It did not seem to matter whether the guys aimed well or not. The fireballs hunted their targets down however desperately they darted and dodged. Just the way they had hunted down shadows.
Clete leaned on his pole. “That ought to take care of the spy problem.” His brothers remained alert. Longo picked off a clever little devil trying to sneak off at low altitude, whipping between boulders in turns so tight it lost wing feathers every time.
A ball of violet fire closed in at four times the crow’s best speed.
Poof!
“Now there’s a trick I can appreciate,” I said.
Likewise Thai Dei and Uncle Doj and the guys of the thin desperate line at the Shadowgate. Jaws dropped. Rudy swore, “Fugginay! I want me one a them mudsuckers.”
I asked, “You got a special problem with crows?”
Rudy asked, “It only kills crows?”
Cletus averred, “I suppose we could set them to knock down most anything. But the more targets you want to specify the more complicated your logistics is gonna get.”
“That’s not why you’re here,” I guessed.
“That was just to clear the area.”
Longo said, “We wanted something guys like us could appreciate.”
Loftus added, “Considering that we’re not likely to bring in a lot of recruits anytime soon, while Taglios can come up with as many as they want.”
There was a growing faction up north, these days, who wanted Taglios to pretend that the Company had gone its way. We were headed for Khatovar when we came to Taglios. There was nothing to keep us from going there, now. If everybody held real still and stayed real quiet we might lose interest and head on down the road.
While I talked to the engineers Otto and Hagop erected several trestle tables. These acquired decorative vises and tool collection place settings. Racks rose behind the tables. Their companions began stacking bamboo tubes in those. “Big bastards,” I said. Some were fifteen feet long. Some were four inches in diameter.
Clete said, “Big and brutal. Careful where you point that damned thing!” A soldier was trying to get a bead on a crow speeding south. He was not worried about people dumb enough to get between him and his target. “What we wanted most was increased accuracy and velocity. A little extra oomph at the other end would be a nice plus, too. Hagop.”
Hagop took a twelve-footer with a three-inch bore, striped red, locked it into a vise. He sighted down its length. He tapped gently with a hammer, shifting his aim slightly. “That boulder out there that looks like One-Eye’s hat.” He armed a complicated bamboo spring mechanism.
I did not think the boulder looked much like a hat. It was a good four hundred yards away. Three soldiers with standard bamboo launched a dozen fireballs before one got lucky and painted a lime glow along one edge.
“Usual problem. When you finally do get a hit you don’t do much damage. Unless it’s people. Go ahead, Hagop.”
Hagop triggered his pole. There was a frying bacon sound. An intense orange ball crossed to the boulder too fast for me to follow. It hit dead center. A lance of fire blew out of the rock for fifteen seconds. I felt the heat.
The boulder shifted position slightly, pointing its tail of fire farther downhill.
The fireball popped out the other side of the rock like a pimple’s core squirting.
“Shit!” said I. “And double shit! That fucker must be ten feet thick!”
Clete said, “A three-inch ball will run at least fifteen feet into the kind of stone we have around here, Hagop, see the silver character that looks like the rune for Fate?” He pointed at Overlook. There were thousands of characters on the wall. I did not understand which one he meant. Neither did Hagop.
“Tallest line of characters. Middle of the target. Looks like a flagpole trailing two pennons to the right, next to something like a three-lined pitchfork.”
“All right.”
I found it, too.
“Go ahead. Snipe away when you’re ready.”
I protested, “That’s over three thousand yards! Closer to four. He’ll be lucky to hit the wall.”
“Ready.”
“Do it.”
Bacon fried. An orange ball left the bamboo pole. It took less than three seconds to reach Overlook. I would not have been able to follow it had I not been standing behind Hagop. A flash lit up the whole countryside when the fireball hit the spells protecting the wall. It struck right where Hagop aimed it. The target rune appeared slightly discolored once the glare waned.
“Oh, my!” said I. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj yammered at one another. They had no need to understand our quacking to see the potential.
“We figure a ball will run out at least fourteen miles before it loses all its momentum,” Clete said. “By then it won’t have much more energy than a regular ball and won’t be much good for anything but killing shadows and general destruction anymore.” He patted the tube Hagop had used. “This was our prototype. It’s sighted in. We got to do all these others now. Which is why we come up here.”
Hagop and Otto replaced that pole with another not yet marked. Otto gave the back end a half twist. A complete, tray like section came off. Two guys from Lady’s factory packed the tray with something that looked like potter’s clay, then seated a big black rubber marble in that. Hagop put the tray back into his toy, fiddled with the triggering mechanism, asked the engineer brothers, “You guys satisfied with the way this thing is laid?”
All three squatted. They bickered. Hammers tapped. They argued. Then they, Otto, Hagop and the factory people all assumed particular positions and stared at Overlook.
Bacon crackled. An orange fireball hit the air. A thousand yards out it began to drift to the left, then downward. It hit ground short of the wall. Fire gouted into the air for fifteen seconds. So did bits of stone and sod.
All seven observers began combining observations on a chart. Bickering steadily. They took the tray off the pole and peered through. More notes went onto the chart. That eventually passed into the hands of a specialist who used some of the arcane tools to machine the interior of the pole.
The brothers moved to another pole. Their accomplices had a dozen set up for testing. They repeated the process over and over. Some poles put their fireballs on target first try. Some missed badly. The worst got discarded right away. No sense wasting time on those. There was still a need for less accurate shadowslappers.
Once a pole went through its rework it got tested for consistency. An alphabet of arcane marks in various paints went on to tell the soldiers what quirks the weapon retained.
Otto seldom says much but during his lunch break he observed, “Lady’s really got the power back, now.”
Hardly anyone even suspected the truth. Those who did were not prepared to believe it.
“How many of them things you going to work?” My guys had stopped getting any work done. They were hanging around watching the fireworks like a bunch of big kids.
Clete said, “We brought fifty in this batch. We hope we can come up with twenty reliables out of those. Everything goes right, we’ll start work on some really big stuff; boy, will the Tals be surprised.”
I could imagine what these new fireballs would do to men’s bodies. But I suspected that scything through legions was not their purpose. And my suspicion was confirmed next afternoon.
Lady herself came to inspect the twenty-six pieces the brothers had found acceptable.
The woman seemed emotionally drained, yet did show a bounce that said part of her life was going well. She and the Old Man were finding free moments to be something other than Captain and Lieutenant. I was pleased for
