along the ground, his progress rapid as stalking would allow, to get behind whomever was approaching. The flash of a bit of metal or a careless, unplanned movement caught his eye. The Islay stood and shouted, "Stop, fellow!" Standing as well, the stranger whirled to face him, kicking up dead leaves about his ankles in the effort. A wild, fearful expression widened his mouth and eyes, distorting his features. It was the look, the senior Robret thought, of a surprised and hunted creature. Yet, if the fool were still here in this place of ambush, metric hours after his intended victims and their vehicle had escaped the manmade avalanche, if he were the one who had thrust upon the draywherry only minutes ago, why should he be surprised? Without delay, the Islay raised right forearm to left shoulder in a diagonal gesture termed, in sporting circles, the "salute." More practical than courteous, it covered the torso with the weak, secondary pressor-field surrounding the long axis of his thrustible. A deep breath calmed him. He meant to take this unaccountable incompetent alive, if such was possible. "In the Ceo's name, surrender now to me and live!" "Die, slutspawnf" The shout was weaker than the ugly words it carried, desperate, high, and strained. Ragged and dirty in the ringlight, his foe mirrored the salute with little grace, straightening his weapon-bearing arm in preemptory attack. Where the Islay stood, seven paces off, he could hear the fellow's breath rasp, frantic, observe his knuckles whiten where they wrapped about his thrustible's yoke, and knew he faced a villain frightened badly or worse schooled. In a vague way he was aware—these thoughts occupying less than a heartbeat—of the scarlet designator beam where it splashed upon his chest, wavering as the man's arm trembled from terror or exhaustion.
Disdaining the protective field about it, the Islay, too, straightened his arm before his opponent's thumb could twitch, gave the safety a squeeze across the yokefront, saw the spot of his own laser spring to life where he had known it would, upon those whitened knuckles, and, without awaiting this confirmation, thumbed the trigger. Great energies, invisible in themselves, flared harsh in the meeting. The air
between the men roared protest, sparked with ionization, as thrust met thrust, canceling in a blinding flash.
"Again I say, surrender in the Ceo*s name!'*
"And I say —/" The assassin's voice chopped off. Again kinergic beams annihilated one another. The Islay's almost instinctive blink saved him from the dancing blue afterspot in his eyes which is the beginning of the end for a thrustiblist. The merest instant passed which seemed to him an hour. Before he was aware of having made the decision, he turned his wrist inward, downward, heedless of the designator as before, and thumbed the trigger.
Dealt a glancing blow upon the right hip, the bandit spun, responded by loosing a kinergic bolt even as he staggered backward against the bole of a tree, and fell with a thump upon a bed of dead leaves. He followed with yet another bolt as he struck the ground.
The Islay cau^t the first thrust in midair with an answering burst, the second upon the field of his upturned axis as he rotated his arm for another thrust. Downed or not, the fellow was better than he had guessed, becoming more so as he calmed himself and gained more confidence thereby.
Crimson filled the Islay's eyes a moment. Headthrust coming, something inside him warned. He ducked, hair ruffled by disrupted air about his head.
Suffering disadvantage, since he wanted the man alive, while the man labored under no such constraint, the Islay let loose a third time, almost in the same instant as before, anticipating another thrust from the supine bandit. He thrust at the foot the fellow was attempting to get under himself. The foot whipped out from under the man and in that moment he lost what self-control he had regained, answering with random windmill thrusts at the Islay while attempting to scrabble backward for the cover of a fallen tree.
"Die! Die! Die! Dier
Hurried by a thing the practiced fighter fears most, an unlearned, flailing, desperate, and therefore unpredictable opponent, the Islay was pressed to defend himself: block in fourth, parry and reply from sixth.
A thunderclap! Pain sang the length of the Islay's left arm
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as bark exploded from a tree beside him. The standing remnants of its trunk steamed in the ringlight. Riposte, riposte, riposte. The tortured air between the men smelt of ozone and of §-field-scorched leaves. One hellish, invisible beam at a time, one desperate burst after another, the Islay met and canceled the flurry of red-fringed energies the bandit threw at him.
From a distance, voices shouted. His foot slipped, putting him upon his back like his opponent. He had been distracted by flashes from across the roadcut. Young Robret had found prey upon the opposite slope. This was no moment to be worrying about his son, who would acquit himself or not.
He felt a shocking blow to his upraised, vulnerable knee, heard a shout of triumph from his enemy. Attempting to raise his thrustible to ward off* a killing thrust, he found he could not move his arm. His sleeve was entangled in an upthrust tree root. Scarlet flashed before his eyes once more.
As he struggled to free his arm, something within Robret the Islay began to prepare itself for death.
Chapter X: At THE Precipice
The night was black and splashed with crimson.
Lacking other illumination—nothing in this dark wild place existed for a lampwand to give glowing to, even had one been stowed by providence aboard the wherry, which it had not—young Robret had discovered he might pick a path along the crumbling edge of the roadcut by squeezing, from time to time, the safety-bar at the yoke's edge of his borrowed and unfamiliar thrustible.
"This way, I think." The young man pushed between two thick and thistled bushes, his tone somewhat uncertain, for although he had been bom and bred to issue orders, he had never before commanded something which was not quite human. Morven*s grim, nameless Oplyte servant plodded
wordless behind him, never acknowledging his orders (although obeying them without fail), contributing nothing to the task they shared in theory except the noise of ragged breathing and the thump and gravel-clatter of occasional stumbling.
To be fair to the unfortunate creature (Robret was in no position to appreciate how only a son raised by his father might have thought such a thing), it was a steep way they followed, never intended for the passage of human, or semi-human, feet. The soil had been turned by whatever energies had brought the roadcut down upon them and was still loose in places, threatening to slide at a footstep, even, he thought, at a sneeze. Rocks and boulders which long ago had found a kind of neutral buoyancy within the earthy medium they floated in now lay upon the surface, ready to trip the night-blind and unwary passerby. Not for the first time did Robret wish for something other than the ankle-length dress boots which might have seen their proper milieu at some play-party of Lia's, but by no means here, upon a broken trail thousands of klommes from the light and warmth of home.
Somehow, Robret wondering how to manage even as they managed it, he and his companion made it to the top, stood at the edge and looked down. He might have been looking into a well of ink. He knew his younger brother and the Nasai-Ulness bodyguards were down there, as he knew his father was upon the other side, but he could neither see nor hear them. Now what should he do? His father had been un-specific instructing him, saying it was an unspecific task they had before them. They were to^ook for traces of whoever had conceived this deed. Their greatest fortune (and much the most unlikely, considering the amount of time since the attack suffered by the draywherry) would be to find one of the culprits and bring him back alive to be interrogated.
Another designator flash told him nothing. He had hoped, in truth expected, to discover footprints in damp soil or other indication of recent human presence. In this he was disappointed. Save for the grooves left at the summit by whatever tool had drilled the rock for explosives, he had found nothing to indicate any thinking being had been here since the plan-
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et had first coalesced from interstellar gases. Even without
conversation over it, he knew his father, having himself hammered out the Bargain which had given Skye four decades of tranquility, lent small credit to the notion that woodsrunners, with no reason anyone could offer in support, had risen again to harry their conquerors. But who else would have done such a thing?
Of a sudden he sensed motion in the low trees a few measures to his left, away from the roadcut. Unused to carrying a weapon or thinking about using one, he shone the designator toward the spot—and cursed himself for betraying his position. In answer, the bizarre, dizzying sensation of a near-miss passed round and through him as he flung himself upon the ground.
The Oplyte behind him was less lucky. Robret heard a grunt, accompanied by an uglier implosion as the beam struck the creature full in the torso. A child of his culture, Robret knew it was like being upon the receiving end of a huge timber sluicing downstream in white water from the Islay logging fields. A revolting gurgling noise—the sound of death, he somehow knew—was followed by a silence even more terrible. The metallic scent of blood fresh-spilled came sharp to the younger Robret Islay. He discovered that his stomach was in rebellion and, with some diflftculty, quelled it.
With only sound to guide him, a sense he had never before used in this manner, Robret pointed his forearm in what he imagined was the correct direction and tensed both thumb and fingers at the same time, not waiting for the glow of his designator to give him away. He heard a crash, as if the trees had taken the brunt of his thrust. He rolled, in order not to be where his enemy now knew he was, and unleashed the energies of his weapon once again. A hoarse scream echoed across the mountaintop, twisting something deep and vulnerable within him. Was this what it felt like to do injury to another being? A form, no more than silhouetted in the mist-lit darkness, crashed from the foliage, staggering as if it could neither see nor think. Before Robret could catch the fellow's trouser leg (this close did he pass by Robret's face) he felt the fabric slip through weapon-encumbered fingers and heard, more than saw, his wounded assailant pitch over
the precipice and, with another scream, hurl himself into the depth of the roadcut. Perhaps he only imagined the dull thud of the impact far below.
All at once no time was left for imagining. Another series of crashes, more purposeful, headed toward him. Wishing he could suppress the designator altogether (such a contingency had been provided for in the weapon's design, but Robret's sketchy lesson had not included this usage), he thrust again and again at the noise coming toward him, rolling, ducking unseen and perhaps unreal energies being thrown at him in return.
Another squirm and nothing remained to squirm upon. Having heeded not where his rolling and dodging carried him, Robret discovered with a start that he lay across the soft, broken lip of the roadcut, ankles hanging in dark empty space over a drop of hundreds of measures. Sweat sprang with the odd sensation of a million pinpricks over every siemme of his skin. If his life had afterward depended upon it, he could never have decided whether it was the sweat of fear or of relief. He began to crawl forward.
Sudden impact lifted his body from the damp ground where he lay near the perilous edge, and dropped it back again. Behind agony-hazed eyes, he had the fleeting thought it had been like being struck by a pillow traveling several hundred klommes per hour. Yet this, too, was a near miss, else he would not have been able to think at all. He heard the sound of running feet. With the greatest effort, against a mass of bone and muscle moving all too slowly for his racing fears, he raised an aching, injured arm and squeezed the yoke.
In the air before him, brightness seared the night as beam met destructive beam in mutual cancellation. Robret had the presence of mind to make a second thrust quickly. Again annihilation flared.
Upon his third squeeze, darkness reigned. He heard a muffled groan, a crash, rose to his knees and thrust in the same direction again. This time his opponent's answering blow seemed to catch him square in the chest. He was thrown backward, over the edge, somehow twisted his body in midair and slammed both arms and elbows against the yielding, near-vertical surface before him. Soil and gravel sleeted
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by his face as he clawed in the dark for a hold in crumbling earth. Dirt ripped through his fingers as he fell.
Angry and frustrated, Arran ground his teeth. At that, it was better than crying, which was what, in truth, he wanted to do and dare not. Instead, he slumped behind the steering pedestal, keeping a sullen back to unwelcome others, his father's and stepmother's guests, and stared into the featureless ring-lit night through the damaged and now inert fabric of the draywherry. The guests—in this despairing moment he discovered himself thinking of Morten and the others as "Greasylocks and the Three Bores"—were blabbering among themselves and paying him no attention. After all, he was only a child.
Only a child! Perhaps he was the youngest of his father's sons, a mere twelve, but had he been assaulted, insulted, thrust at, as Robret and Donol had been, any the less than they in the attack upon the draywherry? Would he have died less dead? Did he not also share a right—a duty—to take part in the defense of his father's position upon this planet?
"Stay you here." His brothers had each taken him aside— the command had not even come from his father!—adding, as a patronizing afterthought, "Watch over our stepmother and the Drector and Lady Nasai-Ulness."
Very well, (his demand was silent, of no one in particular), with what? He had not even thought to bring his almost-useless walther-weapon, although he could blame this oversight upon no one but himself. Live and learn. Old Henry always said. He would never make such an idiot mistake again!
For a long while Arran gazed in unseeing resentment into the darkness surrounding them. Curious, he thought as he began to calm down, how neither his father nor his brothers had mentioned watching over Morven, paralyzed though the Shandeen was. Somehow he did not seem the sort who required it of anyone. The grotesque entity which pushed him about in his chair seemed more a decoration—in poor taste, Arran thought—than a necessity.
In similar circumstances, a simple matter of unconscious reflex, Arran's idle thoughts would have turned his head round to look upon their object. He experienced no such
reflex now. And noticed it. What was it seemed so dire about his new stepmother's father? The fellow was an utter cripple in an age of limb and nerve regeneration which witnessed few such, and upon this account, Arran thought, to be presumed quite harmless. Not wanting to be watched watching, Arran did observe the man now, but by courtesy of a reflective dial-cover upon the pedestal.
Morven hunched where he had earlier been seated by his inhuman servant, now gone with the younger Robret, dark eyes agleam as he related some esoteric and theoretically amusing item of Monopolitan palace plottery to the others. His wheeled chair depended upon so many—what was the word Old Henry used?— electromagnetical devices, it would not function within the draywherry's enveloping §-field, and had been folded iipon itself and set to one side.
Animated as it may have sounded, the adult discussion was conducted, at least by one participant, without the usual gestures and gesticulations enthusiasm might have been expected to engender. Morven's useless arms had been crossed for him at the thin white wrists which lay before him in his lap. Beneath the light blanket upon which his hands rested, his ankles were not crossed, yet the feet dangling at their ends lay upon the deck in an angular, uncomfortable-looking position, almost as if they had been.
Oddest of all was the man's face, which added much to the mystery of his menace, for Morven possessed altogether the fairest male countenance upon which Arran had ever looked, in drama or in real life. Pomade-tressed he mi^t have been, the boy thought (with broader generosity of spirit than he had earlier exercised), following fashions presently in vogue within the imperium-conglomerate. Still, the man was no sick-sallow, sunk-eyed, thin-lipped, pinch-nosed creature of indeterminate gender such as disgusted Arran of late in Mistress Lia's dramathilles, or like this chronic inebriate Nasai-Ulness. That he w
as sire to the beautiful Alysabeth was no mere guessing matter. After his own sinister manner, he was quite as beautiful as she was.
And beautiful she was, albeit somehow like an ancient ceramic doll. Arran shifted in his chair to observe her in his makeshift mirror. Hers was a distant and intimidating aspect. He felt unbalanced, awkward in her presence, cold-
sweaty, tongue-tied, stammering if not altogether speechless. He always sensed that he was being judged. And convicted.
This was a different sensation from the grinning self-consciousness Mistress Lia sometimes evoked in him. That feeling warmed his cheeks, the back of his neck, his ears. While it, too, was embarrassing (although he somehow understood, in his precocious sophistication, that embarrassment in the female presence is a natural state for boys his age), at the same it was, beyond question, pleasant, even exhilarating. Although he was in essence a farm child, long since acquainted with the biological facts of life, he wondered now if this warm feeling was what his brother Robret felt about Lia and why he was going to marry her. Arran could think of many worse reasons.
Aware that his thoughts had wandered, Arran realized in the same moment that he had answered the question which he had earlier asked himself. Whatever it was he felt in Alysabeth Morven Islay's presence, whatever dampened his hands, made the blood stream cold within him, it was this which kept him from looking direct upon her father. Of a sudden, Morven stared straight at him—rather, at the dial-face where he must have known his own to be reflected—and sent a leering wink at the boy. Arran looked away, his heart pounding with unnameable terror.
At about the same instant that Robret fils and Morven's Oplyte achieved the violated crest of the roadcut, Donol and the creatures borrowed from the Nasai-Ulness found themselves picking a careful path through rubble in the silent darkness halfway along that portion of the greenway sliced through the mountain ridge. With startling abruptness, the hazy, ring-lit, star-filled sky was filled with annihilative flashes upon both sides, and with the gut-clenching sound of screaming. Before Donol or his inhuman companions could react, the hiss of falling earth came rushing, growing louder, lower every second, until it was a bass roar with undertones more felt than heard. It was punctuated by a nearby thump. And another. The roar became a hiss again, afterward a trickle, until about them only silence remained.
Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 9