The impact jarred Teldin to the bone. He couldn't see straight; the world was spinning crazily. With an effort, he rolled back to his hands and knees, just in time to see Vorr come at him, take a short leap, and lash out with his foot for Teldin's head. Teldin never felt the blow.
*****
Vorr fell to his knees and rested there, panting, for several minutes. It had not been the most challenging fight he had ever had-the fight with the zwarth on Spiral still had that honor-but it had been exciting nonetheless. Teldin had put up a surprisingly good, if brief, fight, mostly because he obviously had so little formal combat training that he could do things to catch a better opponent off guard. Not the best fight, but a worthy one. Vorr was satisfied.
A glance at Teldin's fallen body brought a brief surprise: Teldin had now assumed his original shape. The cloak must not work when its owner was knocked out or dead, Vorr thought. I should be jealous that I can't use something like that, Vorr thought with a smile, but then, I don't need it.
A moment later, Vorr had reached Teldin's side. The human was unconscious. The boot to the head had almost killed him, but his neck had not broken; taking Vorr's own shape had saved Teldin at the last moment. The scro general sighed, then reached down for Teldin's cloak. He touched the material. It felt real. Carefully rolling the human over, Vorr touched the lion-headed clasp of the silver necklace, then tried to undo it.
It came open in his hands.
Vorr pulled the cloak free and stood up. Now he had the real cloak, and Usso had nothing at all. Or did she? What exactly had happened earlier? He looked down at Teldin, then dropped the cloak by Teldin's side. He should finish the job with Teldin and the giff, then move on and find some food. Perhaps he could signal someone from the fleet later, if he could avoid the pyramid ship.
He had just started to reach down for the black fork when he saw a tiny female figure only thirty feet away. Vorr blinked. It appeared to be a young human or elf girl dressed in dirty, smeared clothing that once had been bright and colorful. Her thick black hair was mussed and wild. She was carrying some sort of stick.
Vorr rubbed his eyes briefly, then looked again.
'My sensei is going to hate me for this,' said the little, black-haired female.
Bracing herself, Gaye pulled both triggers of the harpoon-bombard at the same time.
Usso was halfway up the ladder out of the cargo bay when everything changed. A blast of wind suddenly stirred the air in the cargo deck, then arose to an ear-splitting roar. At the same moment, the pyramid tilted, as if its internal gravity had shifted slightly-then the gravity was gone.
Suddenly weightless, Usso clutched the ladder's iron rungs in numbing-cold terror. If there was no gravity when the pyramid reached the gravity field of the Herdspace sphere, that meant the helm was abandoned-or destroyed.
The cloak! She suddenly recalled that she could use the powers of the cloak to control the pyramid. She reached back with one hand to grasp the soft fabric as she prepared to concentrate and activate the cloak's powers.
Her hand closed on nothing. The cloak was gone. Her hand flew to her throat but found no silver chain and clasp. It was as if the cloak had never existed. That wasn't possible. She knew it. The cloak must have fallen off. There was no time to retrieve it now. She had to get to the helm.
Usso reached the top of the ladder leading into the helm room barely three minutes later, having had to polymorph herself into a spider at one point to cross a ceiling to the next ladder. The pyramid was apparently rotating slowly in free fall, heading for the ground of Herdspace at hundreds of miles an hour. Against the roaring from the cargo deck Usso could hear the screams and curses of the scro and ogres below as they left their quarters on the lower floors of the pyramid to tumble about helplessly in the stony rooms and corridors.
The door to the helm room had been broken open by someone with reasonably great strength. Usso froze when she saw it. Vorr? Was Vorr alive and here in the pyramid? Impossible! It took all her willpower to keep from fleeing down the ladder. How could he have gotten aboard?
Trickles of blood ran down the sides of the hatchway from the floor above. Usso readied a spell, one hand gripping the ladder rung until the metal dug into her hands. Forgetting all caution in her panic, she stood up on the ladder and looked into the room.
The bloodied face of Admiral Halker looked back at her from the floor by the hatch, one sleeve of his armor snagged by a metal staple in the floor. Someone had cut his throat. Blood trailed across the floor around him in long streams.
She raised her shocked gaze. Beyond Halker's pale green face was the helm-what was left of it. Someone had hacked at it with an edged weapon, either a sword or axe, and it was in ruins. Both arms were missing from the chair, and the back was split in two. Splinters rattled across the walls and floor.
Without a helm, the pyramid was going to hit the ground so hard that nothing larger than gravel would be left, scattered across the bottom of a crater hundreds of feet deep and wide. Usso knew she had to flee the pyramid at once. She might still have the time to polymorph into a bird before-
Someone grabbed her by her long black hair and pulled her off the ladder with a single jerk. She screamed from the sudden pain and felt a powerful arm clutch her to a muscular chest. Whirling, she looked into the face of her assailant. Vorr, it must be Vorr.
But it wasn't Vorr.
Her assailant was a human male of indeterminate age, tall and broad, with short, curly blond hair. His face was contorted with the effort of holding Usso with one hand while clutching a metal hook on the wall behind him with the other.
'Now it's your turn to lose a ship,' he said as the room slowly spun through the air.
*****
Things hadn't made any sense to Aelfred Silverhorn since that first night on Ironpiece. He had already planned to go with Teldin Moore to avenge the loss of his ship, the
Worse, he had done things he could not understand. He found himself compelled to set up a signal light in the rear of the ship, next to the jettison, and send messages to the scro chasing them. He would forget about it while he was awake, but his dreams were thick with terror, and before awakening every morning he knew he had been up and about in his sleep, carrying out his task. No one had known what he was doing. Everyone had trusted him completely.
Over time, he pieced together an image of his taskmaster. It was an undead thing, he knew, but he knew little more. He suspected it was part of the scro fleet. He had some mental image of a pyramid-shaped ship, probably the one he'd seen off Ironpiece. He knew it was hopeless to fight his compulsion to betray his friends-so he stopped worrying about it. Instead, he planned his revenge.
It was Sylvie's death that had freed him. As he knelt in the grass beside her body, he had felt the chains of the compulsion melt from his soul like ice in the sun. It must have been the stress, he thought. He was overcome with guilt that his unwilling behavior had brought on her death. She had been his best friend, his anchor to his new life in space. He could not put all the blood back into her body. He could only leave her behind and find someone on whom to vent his fury.
Aelfred had watched as the elves who had killed Sylvie died themselves. The elves' killers, however, had come down to earth right afterward-in a giant pyramid ship.
It had been easy to rush forward through the burning wreckage-easy, perhaps, given that he had ignored the burns and injuries he had suffered on his run. He had made it aboard the pyramid just before it left for good, climbing on as it rested above the ground for a moment. It had taken a long while to find an upper hatch and climb inside. No one was home, as far as he could tell, so he had gone looking for the helm. He'd heard the helms on
