While the blue show ran, Shai Khe gathered his fallen henchman under one arm and Caracene under the other. With effortless ease. He raced toward the river, each step a longer one than the last. He did not stop because water lay in his way.
Water flew as if from huge hammerblows each time one of his feet hit. Rider was reminded of a skipping stone flying in reverse. Shai Khe's last bound to Henchelside was fifty yards long.
The easterner headed for the smuggler. And that pushed Rider into a tight moral bind.
The man he had left unconscious could ruin everything. He had but to tell his story. If Shai Khe was not totally suspicious already, finding his bridges burned before him.
Rider considered alternatives and discarded them. Each was self-defeating, requiring the expenditure of so much sorcerous energy that Shai Khe would be alerted anyway. The choices were two. Let Shai Khe be warned. Or work a small magic and close a man's mouth forever.
There was no choice, really. Shai Khe was a shadow intent on poisoning millions of lives. He could not be allowed to escape just to avoid taking the life of his minion.
Necessity made the thing no more pleasant.
Rider reached through the web and, as Shai Khe bounded aboard the smuggler, snapped a blood vessel in the airshipman's brain, behind the bruise left by the thrown block.
XXXIII
Shai Khe's feet hit the deck of the ship. He cursed, dropped his burden. A glance told him his man was dead. He whirled, began arcing a fireworks show toward the east bank.
Su-Cha decided it was time he absented himself from the sorcerer's company. To go on meant ever-increasing danger. And it was unlikely that Shai Khe would ever be less attentive than he was at the moment.
His intent was to slip over the side behind Shai Khe, hit the water, become a porpoise, and swim as if sharks were after him.
Rider saw Su-Cha begin to move, guessed his approximate intent.
He would never make it. A sorcerer of Shai Khe's attainments never became so angry or so distracted he failed to notice the movement of people around him.
Rider cooked up a little golden firework of his own.
This quite needless bombardment, which threatened to demolish the district, hinted that the easterner was fishing for a reaction anyway.
Su-Cha was not expendable. Neither were the people of the district.
Rider stepped out and delivered his apple-sized golden ball in one smooth motion. It streaked across the river. Halfway over it looked as if it would miss the smuggler by fifteen feet. Three quarters of the way over it began to slide to the right. In the last fifty feet it jumped.
It impacted upon the ship. Light flared. Timbers flew. A third of the smuggler burst into flames.
Mocking laughter and a volley of blue fireworks were Shai Khe's responses. He had won the roll, drawing Rider out.
Rider noted that Su-Cha was in the water.
He plucked another golden ball out of his left hand and hurled it. This one streaked straight toward Shai Khe. Another followed an instant later. Then another. The first died a hundred yards from the blazing ship, the second fifty. The third almost reached the easterner.
Shai Khe grabbed his surviving airshipman and bounded away, in leaps as long as those -he had taken when he crossed the river. He trailed wicked laughter.
Rider's golden balls pursued him, through every twist and turn of his flight through Henchelside.
"Wondered when you were going to turn up," Chaz said, coming to stand beside Rider and glare at the burning ship.
"You played too long a bet," Rider admonished gently. "You'd all have been dead if I hadn't."
"I know." The barbarian was not the least chagrined as he added, "We didn't expect you. Glad you showed, though."
Others began leaving cover. Even a few residents began looking out to see if the storm had passed.
General Procopio lumbered up. "Good show! Eh? What? Got the beggar on the run. What next?"
"First we dig the woman out of the warehouse," Rider said.
Chaz gaped. "But ... The sorcerer. He carried her off with him."
Rider chuckled. "That was Su-Cha again. He ought to be turning up any second, hungry enough to eat one of us." He was talking to the barbarian's back.
"And after Chaz saves Caracene? What then?" Greystone asked. The scholar looked exhausted, physically and emotionally.
"Then we loaf down to our yards and take a short airship ride." He peered across the river.
Shai Khe was no longer visible, but his progress could be traced by the fireworks he tossed off as he went.
"He's going to turn into a ghost again in about two minutes."
"Maybe. But this time I know where he will do his haunting."
XXXIV
"Caracene!" Chaz bellowed. The interior of the warehouse was a ruin. Spears of sunlight stabbed down through dust almost too thick to permit breathing. He stepped past an eastern airshipman groaning beneath rubble which buried his legs.
"Caracene!"
"Here." The woman's voice was feeble, like the mewl of an injured kitten.
She was all right. Just shaken and dirty, looking as if she had been dragged twice around the chariot course at the coliseum. Chaz's concern weakened the moment he saw her safe. Then he recalled that she had started out a witch in apparent alliance with Kralj Odehnal, and only later had she melted into the sort of woman to whom he was more accustomed.
Shai Khe was clever and savage. She might be the sorcerer's ultimate piece to be played. Chaz felt he was not as clever as Rider or Greystone. He was more likely to stumble into something unpleasant. So he was a little cool, a little distant, as he helped Caracene to her feet.
She was not so cool. She threw her arms around his neck and clung tightly, shivering like a captive rabbit.
Rider chose a larger ship this time, one intended to survive the rigors of battle. Greystone argued for speed.
"Speed will not count in this," Rider said. "Survivability will. We're coming up to the faceto- face, where Shai Khe cannot duck us anymore. If it doesn't go our way, we want to be in good shape for getting out alive."
"You really think ... "
"In an hour we'll see. He'll have to surrender or fight." Rider looked directly at Caracene.
"Will he fight, knowing you are with us?"
Outside, one of the ground crew shouted that the airship lines were ready to cast off.
Caracene's gaze became evasive.
Rider repeated the question.
"He would fight," she admitted. "He cannot back down. Not for anything. He is totally committed."
Rider nodded. He surveyed his companions. "This is what we've worked toward ... I have to warn you. It could go sour. This is as great a wickedness as has ever arisen. Does anyone want out?"
"Silly question," Chaz grumbled. "What I want is to get my hands around his throat."
Everyone else nodded.
"Take your stations, then. Tell them to cast off."
It was a bright, clear day. The Bridge was a broad blue highway running to the horizon. Its face was dotted with fishing boats and merchantmen. Rider viewed that traffic with concern.
Someone down there could get caught in the middle.
"Shroud's Head," Preacher announced. He was steering the monster airship while Rider prepared for what was to come. "Battle stations, everybody."
Chaz sat Caracene in a seat usually reserved for an airship's commander. "You stay put till I tell you otherwise. You hear?"