[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

lights moved out there.
A band of southerners sent out earlier returned at a gallop, half their number
missing. They flew as though devils worse than their boss were after them.
They dared ride the way they did only because Stormshadow had been obsessive
when she leveled the plain and because there was light from the city.
Fires were burning. Only a few so far, but fires.
Sparkle told me, "They're pulling out down below."
I leaned over and looked. Nobody tried to pick me off. Maybe they thought I
was another ghost.
Sure enough, the Shadowlanders were going, leaving us all those wonderful
grapnels without ropes, for us to dump on our "maybe we can use these someday"
pile.
One-Eye said, "Guess we can put up our swords and go back to our tonk games
now."
Overlooking the fact that Dejagore was being invaded elsewhere, I observed,
"This is the second time you've come out with that silliness. What moron is
going to play with you? Can't be anybody that dumb still alive." One-Eye
Page 33
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
cheats at cards. And he cheats badly. He gets caught every time. Nobody will
play with him.
"Hey, Murgen. Listen. I've reformed. Really. Never again will I dishonor my
talent to . . . "
Why listen? He's said it all before, countless times. The first thing we do
after we swear a recruit into the Company is warn him not to play cards with
One-Eye.
A party of Shadowlanders withdrawn from my sector headed for the hills. They
all had torches. It looked like the Shadowmaster himself might be driving
them.
"Cletus! Longinus! You guys far enough along that you can drop a barrage on
that crowd?" The brothers were repairing their engines as fast as they could.
Two were ready, cocked and loaded. Not much of a barrage. One-Eye asked, "Why
do that?"
"Why not? We might get lucky. And can we piss off Shadowspinner more than he
already is? He's already vowed to kill us all."
The ballistas thumped. The shafts they hurled did not hit the Shadowmaster.
Distractedly, he replied with a spear of energy that dissolved several cubic
yards of wall far from any of my guys.
The racket from across town kept getting louder. Some seemed closer than the
far wall.
"They're inside," Sparkle said.
"A lot of them," Bucket agreed. "This could get to be a big cleanup job." I
liked that positive thinking.
I shrugged. Mogaba liked to keep the cleanups for himself and the Nar and
their Taglians.
Fine with me. Mogaba can eat all the pain he can swallow.
I really wanted to take a nap. This long day just kept getting longer. Oh,
well. Soon enough I would get to sleep forever.
A short while later I got word that small groups of southerners were in the
streets murdering anybody they could catch.
"Sir?"
"Sleepy. What's up, youngster?" Sleepy was a Taglian Shadar we swore into the
Company just before I decided to take up this pen. He always looked like he
was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He also looked like he was about
fourteen years old, which was possible. He was paranoid in the extreme,
apparently for good reason. He was a good-looking youth. And pretty boys are
fair game amongst Taglian men of all three major religious groups. The
Stranglers use their more attractive sons to lure victims to their deaths.
Different land, different customs. You may not like them but you do have to
live with them. Sleepy liked our ways better than his own.
"Sir," he said, "the Nar aren't trying to keep the southerners from heading
this way. They don't bother them at all anymore after they get through and off
the wall as long as they don't head into Mogaba's barracks area."
"Is that deliberate?" Bucket asked.
Someone muttered, "Now ask a stupid question."
"What do you think?" One-Eye snapped. "This is the last straw. If that
bigheaded, self-important dick shows his face around here . . . "
"Save it, One-Eye." This was hard to accept. But I could see Mogaba being
capable of channeling the enemy our way so as to resolve questions of
precedence inside the Company. His morality would allow him to picture it as a
brilliant solution to several problems. "Instead of standing around bitching
about it how about we do some thinking? Best way to fix Mogaba would be to
shove his plan up his ass, no grease."
While the others tried to manage that difficult exercise -- thinking -- I
questioned Sleepy more closely. Unfortunately, he could not add much but the
general routes the southerners were using to push deeper into the city.
You couldn't blame the Shadowlanders. Most soldiers of most times jump at the
Page 34
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
chance to go where resistance is weakest. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]