Chas was taking his own step forward and waving his hands in the launching of his own spell-work; suddenly, though, he tripped over something unseen, felt a solid blow to his belly that threw him energetically up and forward, and found himself doing an exuberant cartwheel head-over-heels directly into Romm V’Nisa’s iron chest. Romm saw him coming and tried to throw him past, but in the event was reduced to futile if flamboyant cursing as they went down in a heap. Down the block, the forces of the Hand, who were if nothing else well-trained, decided they had received enough of a go-ahead to begin their assault.
Down the block and up in Shaa’s flat, the Great Karlini was staring at Haddo with a crazed expression on his face. “You did what?” he howled.
“Thought I help need we would,” said Haddo, unapologetically. “Initiative took I.”
“This is it, Haddo! You’re fired!”
“If I were to make a suggestion,” said Wroclaw, “it would be fight first, fire later. They are breaking down the door and in another few seconds will be on the steps.”
Behind the barricade at the end of the block, Tildamire Mont watched as her brother Jurtan, muttering “I knew it!” under his breath, swung himself over the roadblock and tore down the street in a flailing run, made erratic because he was simultaneously fumbling out his replacement harmonica from his inside pocket. She was still listening to that savage cry that hung in the air; listening, and thinking how strangely familiar a sound it was. “So, what do you think?” the Crawfish was saying behind her. “Should I rush in?”
“First thing you do is put these on,” Eden Shaa told him.
“What’s this? Earplugs?”
“That’s right,” said Eden. “Here, Tildamire, these are for you. Your brother’s about to play, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Tildamire. “I -”
“Mash them up in your fingers first,” Eden instructed, watching lights flare down the street. “I’ve got rubber trees out on the estate - you’d be amazed at the things you can make out of rubber. There now mumml mumml mum-”
They were amazing, Tildamire decided, as she wedged the second plug in her other ear and noticed the level of sound from outside drop virtually to nothing. Now had the Hand made the same sort of preparations?
Philosophically speaking, all battles involve more than their share of confusion. Still, Shaa had to admit that this one was shaping up to be exceptional in its level of chaos and muddle per capita. “Call off the attack!” he was yelling, in a convincing imitation of Gadol V’Nora’s own officious roar, as he slipped across the lawn of the building across the street from his own, having vaulted its hedge just as his short-term refraction field flickered and collapsed.
“No!” roared the real Gadol, from somewhere back in the street. “Attack! Attack! Kill them all, the lying -”
Ah, there they were. Shaa crammed his own earplugs into place, feeling quite satisfied that he had had the foresight to have Eden messenger them over before he’d left for the Running, settling the second one within his auricle just as the bleat of a insane reed instrument drifted to him over the hedge. His vision fogged and then settled. Using a convenient plaster lawn flamingo as a footstool, he raised himself to eye-level over the top of the hedge. What he saw was Jurtan Mont, standing in front of the building containing his flat, tootling on his harmonicum one of his cockeyed paralytic airs. Jurtan was weaving from side to side to avoid being cast asunder by the crowd of surrounding Hand-thugs who were tottering, reeling, vomiting, and heaving themselves at Jurtan in an attempt to bring him down to the ground with them and crush him beneath their weight. They were having no success. Indeed, enough of the Hand members were already chewing the dust that Jurtan was doing his dance half on the ground and half on their backs.
Jurtan’s biggest hazard at the moment was evading the rain of troopers who were dropping from the trees and falling backward from their storming-ladders. Even the howling berserker who had started this mess by anointing himself a tree-dervish had fallen silent, and the foliage was no longer being wracked by the whirling scythe of his sword - no, wait, there was that bellow again after all, although quavery this time and without power, more of a collapsing screech really, and then the screecher himself made his appearance, launching himself with a mighty-thewed leap from his tree-perch toward the upper-floor front window of Shaa’s flat. It was amazing he was still even conscious under the force of Jurtan’s onslaught - but even though nominally awake, he was clearly not unaffected, judging by the weaving stance he took on the branch prior to leaping out, and the way he seemed to lose track of what he was doing halfway through his trajectory in the air. Instead of reaching for the window frame and using the finger-hold to flip himself through the glass into the living room, he hit the wall below the window head-first and slid down the facade through the awning above the front door and thence onto the stoop.
The man was not alone there. Just before his arrival, a knot of Hand-folks had come rolling down the interior stairway and back out onto the porch themselves, followed closely and doubtless propelled by Shaa’s long four-person sofa. Accordingly, the screeching man was fortuitously spared from splitting his head open against the slate paving by the cushions of this same sofa; Shaa could hear the sproing of its tortured springs across the street and through his earplugs.
That much was probably empathy, though. There would need to be plenty of empathy to go around. Shaa was willing to spare an additional helping for Jurtan Mont, who had followed the appearance, flight, and downfall of the maniacal berserker with a gaze of as much open-mouthed astonishment as he could muster given that he was still persistently piping on his instrument. Jurtan’s expression was not merely one of surprise, it was one of confounded recognition, for the psychotic brawler was clearly, if without obvious explanation for his presence, Jurtan’s father, the former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain.
Down the block, coming carefully toward the carnage from the direction of the barricade, were the fallen Lion’s other offspring Tildamire, Shaa’s own sister Eden, and, making a show of escorting while leading his horse, Lemon, the Crawfish. Shaa let himself out of the garden through the front gate and approached them. “What do you want to do now?” the Crawfish lip-spoke at him.
Shaa shrugged. “Round them up, I suppose,” he mouthed back. Jurtan had now turned around and spotted them. Jurtan’s predominant expression at the moment was one of confusion floating perhaps atop a sea of horrified dread. His confusion seemed to deepen when he saw them all ambulatory and apparently none the worse for wear; no one had informed him of their experiments with earplugs. Shaa caught his attention, pointed at his own ear and made screwing-in motions; then, observing Jurtan’s bewilderment growing rather than being relieved, made a wiping-away forget-it gesture followed by patting the air downward in an attempt to get him to reduce the fervor of his playing. Wait a minute - Jurtan didn’t have earplugs, he could hear. “Turn it down a little,” Shaa yelled at him.
Eden had produced a coil of rope; Eden never went anywhere without rope. She and Tildamire had begun to busy themselves with binding the moaning, barely sensible Hands. As Shaa moved aside to let them work, he noticed that the Crawfish’s horse, and Eden’s next to it too for that matter, were not unoccupied. The Crawfish’s steed had two bodies slung across its back, with a third slumped over Eden’s. The three leaders of the Hand had already been wound securely with cable and apparently bonked over the head for good measure. Shaa sidled closer and fixed the lolling, upside-down eye of Gadol V’Nora with an affable expression. “Now,” he said to Gadol, “about that alliance.”