That earned him some chuckles. Nineteen swallowed hard and looked to One for assurance. The kid had promise, and Jacques hoped he would last the night. He touched his earwig. “Right. Just got the word from Oschous. Shift.”
And hardly did the words leave his lips than the clearing was empty. A fern trembled where Nineteen had inadvertently brushed against it. Then it was still. Jacques smiled. They were good boys. Then, he too, stepped into the woods and vanished.
Ravn Olafsdottr had never seen a man as rattled as Domino Tight. Even for one so recently resurrected, he seemed unnerved. He crouched behind the old shippers and rasped, “They’ve come. They’re here.” But who had come and who was here he did not clarify.
“That was good work you did behind their lines,” she told him. “I assume it was you that scattered the mums and got the taijis potting them.”
One of the defenders behind the shipper was a lyre. “Good to see you quick, boss,” he said, but the Shadow hardly reacted.
This was not the Domino Tight that Ravn remembered from the disaster relief work on Nanq’ress. That had been a man quick-witted and cool.
So why not assume he remained quick-witted? “Who is here?” she asked him. “Has another Shadow joined the play? The Riff? Surely not Gidula! He is too oold to play at these games.”
His answer, if any answer had been forthcoming, was forestalled by Ekadrina Sèanmazy, who tossed an incendiary onto the rooftop of the south extension. The fire nests failed to interdict it and the resulting explosion wiped out four of the remote guns that Ravn had planted up there. The screens went dark and she could no longer see through their eyes or fire their weapons. The others nests, being farther back, had escaped, and she switched rapport to them, expecting Epri to launch an assault behind the explosion. “He better be right quick aboot it,” she murmured, “for the roof is to catch fire.” Then she toggled Oschous. “Black Horse, two taijis have entered the south annex ground floor at the far end. That zone is no longer interdicted.”
“So noted,” said the Fox.
“Has our mutual friend decided yet whether the fight is his to wage?”
“He is a remarkably stubborn man.”
Ravn made a face. What game was Donovan playing? It seemed sheer lunacy to her. If they lost this fight, no one would pause to ask him if he were neutral. Perhaps Gidula had been right all along …
At that point, the trident struck the attackers from the rear. It seemed to Ravn that a third or more of the attacking force fell silent, and the mums ceased to exist as a coherent force. Epri’s boys on the roof had begun aiming fire to their rear; and Ekadrina, on the verge of following her magpies into the annex, whirled about.
“Oh, well struck, Jacques!” cried Oschous over the link. “Let’s close the trap.”
Ravn acknowledged and told her task force to move forward, enfilading to the left to take advantage of the mums’ collapse. There were trenches—employed perhaps by mechanics to work on the undercarriage impellers of old ground trucks—and the magpies slipped into them, one by one. Ravn switched her fire nests to remote so she could work them while she shifted location. She shook Domino Tight. “Let’s finish this.”
“He—he’s on the roof!”
A glance showed Epri being evacuated by his boys and the roof of the annex beginning to smolder with thick black billows. “There’s no one on the roof.” Ravn switched her fire nests to automatic so they would take down anyone who moved toward them. Unlikely, now that the roof was igniting, but other fights won had been lost at the last because something unlikely had been tried.
“No! He is on the roof.”
Ekadrina Sèanmazy was at the far end of the annex, firing toward her rear. Ravn swung a long arm strapped to her back and aimed through the scope. A long shot, but not impossible. Her finger trembled on the trigger, stroking it, then withdrawing. Big Jacques had claimed Ekadrina for his own, and honor required that she refrain; yet, honor was not all that kept her finger from the trigger. She rather liked the Long Tall One and she grieved over the state to which the Lion’s Mouth had fallen. It was one thing to play the game by maneuver, shifting the sheep, seizing positions and offices. Quite another to betray one another. After the issue was settled, would Prime ever be able to reassemble the Lion’s Mouth? Would there be a Purge, as in the far old days? Would there be years of ambush and murder by die-hards of the losing side?
If the Revolution succeeded, there might not even be a Lion’s Mouth afterward. And what would it be like to be an orphan?
Ekadrina Sèanmazy spun three-quarters about and fell to the ground. But in the fall, she rolled, and moved into a shadow—and was gone. Moments later, Big Jacques appeared; but he was not so foolish as to appear completely. Ravn saw him only because she expected to see him and knew where to look.
But of course Ekadrina expected the same, and Big Jacques recoiled from a bolt that flashed across his dispersal armor; and he too, vanished.
Tridents began to appear in the spaces previously occupied by mums, and had linked up with the mixed bag of magpies Ravn had sent out. The taijis were backed up against the burning annex, safe from the rear only in that their rear was become an inferno.
“Another one!” cried Domino Tight.
Irritated beyond measure, Ravn Olafsdottr started to reprimand him, but bit her words short.
A man stood in the angle between the two annexes. Hard muscled and hard eyed, wearing body armor of a strange and ornate kind that seemed to glow in a sullen ruddy color, enclosed by sparkling lights, he turned slowly and surveyed the battle space with a studied contempt. His eyes seemed to pick out each combatant individually.
Fire in the battle space had died off while taijis and tridents, black horses and yellow lilies, assessed this new arrival and wondered who it was and what he portended. No one fired at him, for it was not clear which side he intended, and something about his appearance, so suddenly and so indifferently in the very midst of the battle space, indicated a level of power not lightly to be aggrieved.
Then he laughed, and his laugh was like the booming of a cannon, and he lifted to his shoulder a tube. And he turned and fired into the tridents who had taken the mums’ positions.
An eye-searing flash blossomed and spread linearly to left and right, followed moments later by the sharp clap of an explosion. Simultaneously, a casing flew from the tube.
A missile of some sort. “Foul!” she heard Oschous say. “The chapters forbid the use of military-grade weapons.”
The man in the marshaling yard must have heard, because he laughed, and his voice boomed over the links. “How can there be rules when men murder men?” And he pulled another missile from his belt—it was about a forearm long—and fed it into the tube and fired again: this time toward the guardhouse.
But the tridents there had wasted no time. The fates of their brothers near the auxiliary building had been all the warning they required, and they had already melted into the brush beyond. The rearguard and the black horses in the main warehouse directed fire on the newcomer from their own weapons and from the prepositioned remotes and submunitions. But the golden cage of fireflies that enclosed the man simply flickered more brightly and neither bolt nor pellet penetrated to wound him.