the window. Its surface was alive with opalescent fire, the light that cast fiendish highlights over his bearded face was blue-the same blue as the lightning-bolt that stabbed down outside as Zaranda watched.
Somehow the black-robed man was controlling the lightning with his sphere. Zaranda summoned the last bit of magic she had in her, preparing to send him a magic missile where it would do the most good.
A huge shadow loomed up before her, blocking her aim. 'Die, interloper!' it roared, and hacked downward savagely with a great double-bitted battle-axe, She rolled aside. The blade crashed down, cleaving valuable if dirty pelts. She came to the balls of her feet, crouching, Crackletongue held before her. The axeman turned to confront her.
He was tall, taller even than Shield. He had a mashed-in nose and dark eyes almost hidden beneath bushy brows. Black mustaches swept ferociously back across his cheeks to join with his sideburns, leaving his chin bare. He wore a steel cap, a mail hauberk like his men's, buckskin trews, and boots of some stout, scaled hide, possibly dragonet. His paunch was majestic. The heft of chest and upper shoulders was hard to judge, since he wore a black bearskin vest. Judging from the size of his bare arms, he was doubtless sturdy enough.
'You must be the one who calls herself Countess Morninggold,' he said, swishing the axe in the air one- handed before him-seemingly careless, inviting at-tack. 'Zazesspur will reward me mightily when I send them your head preserved in vinegar.'
'Cheapskate,' Zaranda said, trying to crane past him to get a clear shot at his wizard. Reading her intent, he kept shifting side to side with an agility that belied his bulk. 'Brandy works much better.'
'I doubt you're worth the cost, frankly,' he said in his oddly pleasant baritone voice. 'But you might provide some diversion if I don't kill you at once.'
Suddenly he held the axe's yard-long helve in both hands and was whipping the head toward her face with the sheer awesome strength of his wrists alone. The blow would have cloven her to the breastbone had it landed. Expecting such, she had read the signs in his body motions and threw up Crackletongue with her left hand bracing the back of the blade. Impact drove her to her knees.
At contact, the saber flared and crackled with lightning. Evil! Zaranda thought.
Immediately the big man retracted the axe for a follow-up, finishing stroke. Zaranda fell back, braced her-self with one hand, and stabbed with the other. The baron went tiptoe to avoid the thrust and jumped back, giving her time to scramble to her feet.
They squared off, feinting left and right, each trying to provoke the other to commit to an attack. Zaranda quickly sensed she was the more skillful, but he was quick as well as horribly strong, and her attention kept getting distracted by the desire to do something to interfere with the wizard at the window.
The combat continued thus, inconclusive, for what seemed like hours but was probably seconds. Then the baron, noticing the glances his opponent kept darting past him, growled over his shoulder, 'Ho, Whimberton! Leave off that play and make some magic so I can put this wench out of the way and deal with her minions myself.'
The wizard jerked as if slapped. Lowering the opalescent sphere with visible reluctance, he turned to Zaranda and began to gesticulate and mutter. Frantically, she tried to get a clear shot to cast her own remaining spell, but Baron Lutwill, grinning savagely, launched a fierce attack, forcing her to concentrate exclusively on keeping her skull unsplit.
Whimberton threw out his hand. The air seemed to congeal abruptly around Zaranda, freezing her in place. A holding spell! She fought back with all her will, but her exertions, magical and physical, had sapped her. In a moment, she was trapped.
The baron stepped back, leaned on his axe for a moment, admiring his magician's handiwork. 'Hmm. Since I didn't have to damage you at all, maybe I won't be so quick to separate your head from that lovely slen-der neck. After all, I can always collect the reward.' He turned away. 'Well done, Whimberton. Now you can get back to your games. But see you don't use up all the juice, or whatever it is that drives that thing.'
The mage smiled. 'It is dweomer, Lord, the stuff of all magic. Yet this object can be recharged merely by attaching it to the weathercock when a thunderstorm rages.'
The baron gestured airily with a hand. 'Whatever.' He turned back to Zaranda, began to caress her cheek. 'You know, this has interesting possibilities-'
A scream interrupted him. Zaranda could not move as much as her eyeballs, but she could focus vision past her captor, to the window where the mage had raised his sphere once again. He was surrounded by a swarm of tiny, indistinct things that seemed to shimmer with a faint light of their own. He beat at them, frantically, then began to slap at his face and robe, shrieking louder and louder, until he stumbled and fell back against the window.
Whoever installed the window had not worked up to the exacting standards of Tethyrian artisanship. It gave way at once. Window and mage fell out into the night, the latter trailing a thin dwindling scream.
The spell broke. Zaranda drove a knee into the baron's crotch. He bent over with a gasp and staggered back, but recovered almost instantly, and swung his axe horizontally.
Zaranda leaned away, going to one knee. Her free hand found a wolfskin. The axehead whistled by, a finger's width from her face. She flung the pelt over the baron's head and shoulders and stabbed her glowing blade right through it.
Again. And again.
At last, when for some time the only cries sounding within the chamber had been her own and the voices coming through the now-vacant window, she stopped and turned. Chenowyn stood in the doorway, face so pale her skin looked like a sheet of parchment and her freckles like drops of paint.
She flew forward to catch Zaranda in a wild embrace. 'You disobeyed,' Zaranda said, hugging her tight. Then, to her own astonishment, she burst into tears.
Despite the horror of seeing friends die and suffering magic attacks they were powerless to prevent, the young warriors were exultant. Even the wounded laughed and joined in the singing as the townsfolk car-ried them to the village on improvised litters.
That would pass, Zaranda knew. When the hot rush of victory died away, the despair that came after would be as hard for some to bear as the pain of sword cuts and spear thrusts. With the help of Farlorn's gold-glib tongue, Zaranda would help them through that ordeal as best she could.
When the time came. But meantime, after the wounded were taken off and the castle secured, in that breathless hour before dawn, Farlorn came to her, in an apartment she had chosen to take sorely needed rest.
And it seemed to Zaranda Star the most natural thing in the world to go into his arms, and surrender herself to the hunger that had been growing in her for long, weary months.
Ten volunteers died in the fight for the castle, including Osbard's daughter Fiora, blasted by a lightning bolt. Many more were wounded. So brutal was the battle that Goldie, released from the stables, forbore to complain about the indignities Farlorn had heaped upon her in the course of their masquerade.
But whatever the cost, they had won. And once the news of what had transpired reached Masamont, the villagers streamed forth to take up the casualties, bind their wounds, and bear them gently off to their own beds, where the local clerics could see to healing them.
What the wondrous rechargeable magic artifact Whimberton had used to such deadly effect was, Zaranda never learned. It had shattered on a paving stone beside its wielder.
Part III
22
'We are troubled,' the halfling in the maroon and purple gown piped.
Sitting in a simple chair in his eight-sided chamber at the top of the Palace of Governance, Baron Faneuil Hardisty turned away from a design sketch for his coronation robe and regarded his trio of visitors. They stood in a
