surprisingly powerful sprint.
The trio of Dark Helms advanced menacingly, swords ready in their hands-and the three Holdoncorp vice presidents abandoned all notions that these were crazed fans in homemade costumes. Every movement made by the men in black armor told anyone watching that they were killers, cold-eyed fighting men who knew very well how to use their blades, and daily swung them with brutal efficiency.
Vice President Legal Morton Morton Herkimer the Third completed his assessment of the situation, came to his judgment, and acted with his usual brisk efficiency.
He whirled around, jowls quivering, clapped one hand to his face to hold his glasses firmly in place, and was sent flying by a bone-shaking smack from the moving edge of the door he'd planned to flee back through.
On the other side of that door, Rusty Carroll smiled thinly. He'd shoved the massive thing with perfect timing, and was now dragging it to a halt so he could haul it back open again.
Vice President Finance Sheldon Daumark Hollinshed stared at Rusty, his already florid face going fire-engine red. Before he could wave his arms in his favorite windmilling wind-myself-up-into-a-towering-rage-for- maximum-show tactic and boom forth demands and commands, however, a storm of gunfire and shouting erupted behind the Dark Helms.
Mase's Ground Floor Security men had arrived, and were firing at everything that moved, and bellowing at the walls, floor, ceiling, and nearest wastebasket to 'Get down! Get down! Get down NOW!'
Three of those everythings were the other three Dark Helms, and a fourth was the lorn.
The lorn, swooping and darting above the cubicles where everyone could see it, was riddled with semi- automatic fire in less time than it took Mase to draw breath to shout again. It flapped, sagged, flapped more weakly, and crashed down heavily inside a cubicle.
The Dark Helms, who figured out how to throw chairs and computers in that same catching-breath moment, and who saw that these new arrivals were a real danger, responded with swift ruthlessness. All manner of objects were hurled, cubicle walls were toppled, and swords and daggers were thrown and thrust with desperate speed.
As bullets laced ceilings and smacked into windows and pillars in all directions, men started screaming in agony, or fleeing-and they weren't men in medieval-style armor.
As he saw one man crash face-down on the floor and slide to sprawled stillness, blood beginning to flow from under him like a lake, the Executive Vice President of Holdoncorp went white. He turned to dash back through the open door into the Inner Sanctum-but one of the three Dark Helms, now facing him from only a few strides away, plucked out a dagger and threw it so deftly that it passed under both of Jackman Quillroque's expensive shoes, and upended him as if he'd been a kids' television cartoon character encountering a banana peel.
He rolled over to sit up in uncustomarily undignified haste, panting in fear-and stopped, staring at two very sharp-looking sword points that were almost touching his nose.
'W-what do you want?' Jackman Quillroque stammered up at the two men behind those swords, his eyes wild behind his half-glasses and his expensive silk tie caught over one hairy ear.
'Who here has worked on Falconfar, or
'Uh, well, ah aha, everyone here at Holdoncorp
Jack Quillroque was infamous in industry circles for his 'We can break you!' bluster, but a sword swung viciously at your neck is a very telling argument. Moreover, it's an argument that seems unimpressed by, and even impervious to, bluster at all.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Amteira Hammerhand came to a grim, panting halt atop a mossy boulder somewhere deep in the Raurklor, and admitted to herself at last that her father's murderer had gotten away.
Cauldreth Jaklar, Lord Leaf of Ironthorn until this morning, and priest of the Forestmother, could be anywhere in this forest, this deep green wilderness of soaring trees and endless gloom and damp, moldering leaves underfoot. Anywhere at all, and it stretched away from her in all directions larger than any kingdom.
He'd escaped, Falcon curse him, and she knew of no way to find him. After all, he was a priest of the Forestmother, and he was deep in the greatest for-
Wait. That was it. That, or nothing…
Jaklar himself had told her to always pray to the goddess in the forest and in her own bare skin-except for the little bit of it she covered with a mix of a little of her blood, some drops of dew or water from a forest pool, the same amount of tree-sap, and a pinch of forest earth.
Well, so she would. Find the sap and the water, bring it right here to this rock, strip, and kneel here to pray.
She would pray to the Forestmother to deliver Cauldreth Jaklar into her hands, so she could slay him for killing her father and betraying the House of Hammerhand-for that serpent must long have been slyly scheming to weaken Hammerhold and deliver its rule into his hands…
Amteira laid down her sword and reached for the first and easiest buckles of her armor.
'Do this,' she told the air around her fiercely, 'and I'll believe in you and serve you more fervently than he has ever done!'
Her words seemed to echo away across vast distances, in a sudden, deep silence.
All around her, the forest seemed to be listening.
The Executive Vice President of Holdoncorp flung himself desperately down and sideways, reacting faster to a situation than he'd done for some time.
However, he kept his life at that moment not because of that shrewd strategy, but only because Rusty Carroll-who'd just ducked under the hard-swung blade of the third Dark Helm, and sprinted through the closing Inner Sanctum door-delivered a hearty kick to the backside of the Dark Helm seeking to decapitate Quillroque, as he passed.
In Rusty's wake, all of the Dark Helms leaped after him, the fallen vice president forgotten. They were now intent only on getting through that door before it could be closed in their faces.
The security chief had already ducked past the other two vice presidents, but the Dark Helms dodged no foe. Viciously they hacked aside the large and florid form of Vice President Hollinshed-who was already toppling, arms windmilling wildly, over the fallen form of the Vice President Legal. Yet that obstacle, and their own collisions with each other as they converged on the diminishing opening at the open end of the door, delayed them long enough that only one managed to thrust his sword past the door-edge to keep it open.
And that was the man Rusty Carroll promptly emptied the roaring contents of a handy fire extinguisher up under the helm of.
The Dark Helm convulsed and roared, trying to claw off his helm as his sword fell clattering to the floor-and Rusty launched a roundhouse kick to the man's throat that slammed him into the other two Dark Helms beside him.
Then, stepping on the fallen sword and kicking it back behind him into the Inner Sanctum, Rusty dragged the door closed, threw its heavy bolt-and lunged at the nearest fire alarm. The firefighters would probably end up butchered as ruthlessly as Mase's and Sam's men, but cops would come with them, and-
'Carroll,' the President of Holdoncorp snapped, from where he stood frowning in the door to his office, golf putter in hand, 'kindly enlighten all of us as to what's going on.'
Rusty scooped up the sword, hefted it in his hand, and glanced from it up at the supreme boss. The look on his face made many of the white-faced secretaries standing at the doors of the various offices of the exalted flinch back from him. He brandished the sword.
'See this, sir? It's real, right? Well, there are six
'You're joking, surely-
Rusty burst past the President, heading for the back stairs as fast as he could run. 'Back to my post, in
