"I don’t know," she answered. "If you’re a blood-consort, can you order the Mandasars to pull back? Tell them to let the guy go and fight another day?"
With so much musk in the air, I didn’t know whether anything could make the warriors retreat… certainly not some stinky-hume stranger they’d never seen before. But if this was the only chance to avoid a ton of carnage, I had to give it a try.
Swallowing my fear, I stepped out from the cover of the forest. "Hello," I called in a loud voice. Better to speak English than Troyenese — the warriors should understand, and so would Mr. Clear Chest. I didn’t want him panicking and ordering the Larry to fire… which he might, if he thought I was talking in Mandasar and giving the warriors a battle strategy.
"You don’t know me," I said as I walked toward the circle, "but you might know my name. I’m…" Edward York, I thought. But the words that came out of my mouth were, "Teeshpodin Ridd ha Wahlisteen." The Little Father Without Blame. Queen Verity had given me that title a long time ago; I hadn’t thought about it in years. But in the split second before I spoke the phrase, I’d lost control of my tongue again: back to being a helpless spectator while an unknown something walked around in my skin.
If you want the honest truth, getting possessed was a relief — I didn’t have a clue what I would have said next. Whichever spook or spirit kept slipping into my shoes, it was sure better at bossing around Mandasars than I was.
"Gentlemen," my mouth said, sounding all of a sudden more confident, breezy, and in control. "Pleasant though it would be to dance on a recruiter’s entrails, the price would be too high. At least for tonight. Don’t you agree?"
I glanced around the circle of warriors. The way they glared at me wasn’t much friendlier than their fury at Mr. Clear Chest; but they’d been too surprised to rip me apart in the first second, and now the spirit possessing me had momentum on his side.
Calmly, I stepped into the circle of the skimmer’s spotlights. The warriors looked back and forth between me and Mr. Clear Chest, their pincers whisking angrily. The threat didn’t faze the spirit possessing me; I kept walking forward, right up the tail of the nearest warrior until I was standing high on his back. The sheer nerve of doing that froze him in place — otherwise, he would have bucked me straight to the moon.
"There’ll be other nights and other recruiters," I told the Mandasars… but I kept my eye on the glass-chest man and his Larry. "If you all die now, who’ll protect your hives? No matter how much you want to spill this recruiter’s blood — and no matter how much he deserves it — as of this moment, you gentlemen are at war. War to save your homes, your hives, and your personal honor as warriors, keeping your heads clear to defend what is truly precious rather than becoming some recruiter’s brainwashed thugs."
The Mandasars growled at that. I took that as a good sign. "And when you’re at war," I said, "you don’t fight stupid battles. You pick your time and you pick your place, because you’re fighting for something that must not be lost. You act like true warriors serving an honorable cause, not fools who get into pointless brawls because you can’t control your tempers."
Off to my right, one of the Mandasars growled, "Fools? Fools we? Fools?"
Uh-oh, I thought. The spirit possessing me had gone too far. I could sense it in the face of every warrior there: fiery indignation at what had come out of my mouth. Musk surged up from the warrior beneath me, so thick I swear I could see it — a thin pheromone mist oozing out of his pores. It scared the willies out of me, but obviously not the spirit in command of my body. I could feel my head shaking sadly, as if I pitied the huge hulking warriors around me…
…then I ripped off my shirt and threw it in the face of the kid who didn’t want to be called a fool.
It surprised me as much as anyone else. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Clear Chest tense up, but he didn’t tell the Larry to shoot; by now, he realized I was his best chance for getting out alive. His gaze flicked from me to the warrior with the shirt over his face. The youngster was snorting angrily, pawing at the fabric with his weak upper arms… but by the time he’d pulled his snout clear, he wasn’t snorting so much as sniffing.
Sniffing at my sweaty shirt.
I jumped lightly forward, straight in front of more warriors — within easy reach of their claws. Calmly, cockily, the spirit moving my legs made me walk bare-chested around the circle of Mandasars, passing before each one in turn. They were all sniffing me now, jutting out their snouts, almost touching me with their nose spikes. None of them tried to get a whiff of my face, where there might still be queen’s venom; they were snuffling at my body, as if it had some amazing perfume they’d never smelled before.
I couldn’t smell it myself. Just the burning-wood odor everywhere, covering the natural stink of the stagnant canal, the trees all around, even my own sweat.
Like taking a walk in the park, I went around the whole circle. Zeeleepull was part of the crowd, on the far side of the clearing where I hadn’t recognized him before. Even he seemed surprised by whatever he smelled on me; I couldn’t understand that, considering that he’d got a snootful of queen’s venom when it was several hours fresher. But the spirit possessing me didn’t think anything was unusual — I walked past Zeeleepull no faster or slower than any of the others, till I’d finished a complete circuit of the assembled militia.
"Now," I said to them all. "Back up and let this shit of a recruiter go. He’s not worth any of our lives. This is the first action in a war… and it’s our enemy who’s running with his tail in the air."
I looked at Mr. Clear Chest. With the light coming from straight over his head, I still had trouble making out his features… but I could tell he was glaring at me in hate. His heart jerked fast beneath his plastic skin; his lungs heaved tight against his ribs.
Let him huff and puff, I thought. As long as he realizes there’s only one way to get out alive.
"Back up," I said again to the warriors. "Let the bastard leave."
Eyes glittering fiercely in the searchlights, every warrior slowly pulled back out of the clearing. I retreated with them, feeling shaky relief once I’d been swallowed by the shadows of the forest.
We all watched the recruiter grab hold of the rope ladder and climb quickly to the waiting skimmer. The Larry held its position, hovering three meters above the clearing till the man was safely inside the vehicle. That was the moment that scared me most — when the recruiter might send the Larry swooshing at us for a strafing run, just as a parting shot.
But it didn’t happen. The Larry spun its way laughing up to the skimmer, and disappeared inside.
For another moment, the clear-chested man stood in the skimmer’s dark hatchway: a shadowy figure peering out from the blackness. In that instant I saw a pinpoint of crimson burning in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser shining deep within his guts. I blinked, not believing my eyes… and when I looked again, the light was gone.
With a soft hiss of engines the skimmer zipped away, speeding off into the night.
All quiet in the forest — no sound but the night breeze rustling through the branches, starting to thin out the fumes of musk in the air. Then softly, in a whisper, one of the warriors murmured, "Teelu."
"Um," I said. Suddenly I was unpossessed again. Wondering how to tell a bunch of Mandasar kids they had the wrong idea what Teelu meant.
"Teelu," whispered someone else.
"Teelu." From the opposite side of the clearing.