His potshots across the lot into the taijis had begun to annoy the latter, and more than a few were wondering if the mums had switched sides. It was not unheard of. Someone shouted an insult and one of the mums, not yet realizing what was happening on his right flank hollered back. A slug from the black horses entered his open mouth and exited the back of his head.
“Nicely shot,” said Domino Tight over Oschous’s link.
(“Who said that?” demanded Oschous’s voice. “Who’s on my links?”)
Domino resumed link silence, for he had seen the object of his desires. He had deduced from the survival of only five of his fifteen magpies that the ambush behind the Mountain Dragon had been but one in a set of coordinated strikes. And there stood Pendragon Jones, who had orchestrated it. He was behind the guardhouse, shielded from the fighting, but directing his flock over his link.
A Shadow uses his emotions, Domino remembered his one-time master, Delator Landry, saying. He does not let them use him.
Domino Tight withdrew his blade to nub position. He took great calming breaths; grew cold inside. The key to creating a future, my magpies, the Landry had said, is to have a clear vision of it. What you imagine, you can achieve. And so Domino imagined Pendragon dying; as in fact having already died. His fate accomplished, his body lies on the ground, bleeding out. Yes, and he must know before that end whose hand it had been that had launched him on the unreturning journey. That knowledge must be the last thing to fade from those eyes on the blood-soaked ground.
Next, he envisioned a change-path from his present state to the imagined future state, though this took less time to complete than to describe: penultimately, he must do thus; antipenultimately, this. And before that, so. Mentally, he worked his way backward from Pendragon’s cold, dead body to the present.
Domino Tight had always been fast and ferocious. With his exoskeleton assisting, he moved swiftly, avoiding the grass, dancing from construction block to tumbled construction block, moving ever closer to Pendragon’s position, remaining outside the man’s line of sight by sheer habit. When he landed on the ground two arm’s lengths from his target, he stepped on a strew of crispies.
At the crunch, Domino did not hesitate, but leapt high and to the side. But Pendragon did not fire at the sound. Instead, he squinted about—and fixed on Domino. “There you are,” he said with a touch of petulance, “and about time. Yes, yes, I can see the quiver in the air. I told you those things weren’t perfect. Your darling Epri is pinned down on that rooftop…” He pointed to the edge of the warehouse extension. “The Trident preplaced submunitions and booby traps up there. If Epri can reach the main roof, he can drop cluster bombs through the ventilation shafts into the warehouse where the rest are cowering.”
Domino Tight did not think that anyone was cowering. The return fire was too crafty, too focused. He followed the pointing arm. Yes, there was Epri on the rooftop, sheltering behind an air regenerator with three of his own magpies. A remote-controlled fire center had him neatly interdicted. He could neither advance nor withdraw.
“I entreat you, Lady,” said Pendragon, more politely if a bit peremptorily, “to act posthaste.”
Domino Tight stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Pendragon. When he was within arm’s reach, he pulled the Cloak away and pressed the nub of his knife against the man’s belly. “So I shall,” he said, and extended the blade to maximum.
Dispersal armor was well and good against energy weapons, and its thixotropic properties made it useful against moderate velocity projectiles. But for bladed weapons, the Shadows liked to say, you may as well wear cotton.
The blade squeezed between the threads of the armor and shot through Pendragon. He spasmed, arched backward. The blade exited high from his back, and Domino saw the incredulity in his eyes. “But … you’re dead,” he heard the dead man say. Then he nubbed the blade and Pendragon Jones crumpled to the ground.
“Those reports,” Domino told the corpse, “were greatly exaggerated.”
He had seized the man’s link from his hand as he fell and now spoke into it, modulating his speaker to imitate Pendragon’s voice. “Mums! Fall back!” he said. “We are betrayed!”
At this, the right flank of the assault began to dissolve, as the magpies there in swift obedience to their master’s voice began to withdraw. But Domino Tight saw one of the fighters with Ravn fall and he aimed a bolt at Epri on the roof. Epri, caught from an unguarded quarter, spun and fell.
Domino Tight saw a shimmering in the air on the rooftop, like a heat ghost.
Ah, that is what Pendragon had meant! He blinked his eyes as Tina Zhi had taught him and the whole vista faded to gray scale in which one solitary figure stood out. It was the woman that Tina had shown him, Jimjim Shot, and she was bending to tend to the wound that Epri had sustained. With her left hand, she maintained an inaccurate harassing fire on Olafsdottr’s squad.
The woman was bilateral, then, but not a trained fighter. The Mayshot Bo, Tina had told him, dealt with control of the arts, as the Gayshot Bo dealt with the control of technology. He took aim at her.
He did not fool himself. He knew he was about to fire on a Name. But then, what was this rebellion about if not overthrowing the Names? Why quail at this? Was it only long conditioning that held Those persons sacrosanct?
No, it was a sin to mar such perfect beauty. The lenses by which he saw through her Cloak revealed all. There was not a blemish upon her.
Automatically, he calculated distance and adjusted the power on his dazer so that it would burn, but not kill.
“Do it,” he heard Tina Zhi’s voice say. Disconcertingly, that voice came through his own lips. “Before she can take the quondam route.”
Domino Tight sucked in his breath. His arm wavered, then steadied.
And then Jimjim Shot stood up and away from Epri and stared directly at him, and her eyes were the red of flame. She saw him and saw his lust and saw his hesitation, and her lip curled in contempt, and she raised a weapon that Domino Tight did not recognize.
And Domino Tight shot her in the face.
The scream unnerved the battlefield, for it seemed to come from nowhere. It was a scream of surprise and anger and pain; and both sides in the firefight hesitated, creating for a moment a simulacrum of truce.
Inside the warehouse, where Oschous Dee Karnatika directed the defense, the fox-faced Shadow took a report from Ravn, who was outside and under desperate straits. “Oschous,” she said, “the mums are withdrawing. There is confusion on their right. I thought I saw someone fall from behind the guardhouse. Could have been Pendragon. And three or four of his boys that I had marked, they haven’t moved in a while.”
“That might be tactical,” Oschous warned her.
“Might be, but I think one of ours is out there behind their lines. Someone took a couple shots at Epri up on the roof, and it wasn’t us. Do you think one of the boys in the sniper’s nest survived?”
“I don’t think,” Oschous told her. “I count the dead. But … The iron’s hot, however the fire was blown.” He switched links to Big Jacques’s channel. “Jacques? It’s time.”
Domino Tight watched the Beautiful Name scream and clutch at her face, and he wept that her beauty had been destroyed, for it was more a desecration than an honorable blow. Over the mum link, he heard Magpie Two Pendragon rallying the remainder of his flock. They would learn the deception soon enough. Number One Pendragon was undoubtedly making his way to the guardhouse to verify in person the order to withdraw from the fight. That made this a place not to be.