He pointed at the unmoved Malachi.
"I wouldn't lock one of you, armed as you are, with him, unarmed, in an unlighted room, and give a second's hope to the chance of seeing you alive again."
He paused, while the gunmen cringed before him.
"Three of you cover the Commandant," he went on at last, quietly. "And the other two watch our religious friend here. I'll - " he smiled softly at them, "undertake to try to defend myself against the Maran."
The aim of the pistols shifted obediently, leaving Walter uncovered. He felt a moment's pang of something like shame. But the fine engine of that mind of his, to which Ahrens had referred, had come to life; and the unprofitable emotion he had briefly felt was washed away by a new train of thought. Meanwhile, Ahrens had looked back at Obadiah.
"You're not exactly a lovable sort of man, you know," he told the Friendly.
Obadiah stood, unawed and unchangeable. Fanatic against fanaticism, apostate to the totalitarian hyper-religiosity of the Splinter Culture that had birthed him, the Friendly loomed almost as tall as Ahrens. But from that point on any comparisons between them went different ways.
Face to face with the obvious necessity now of his own death to protect the boy he had tutored - for Obadiah was no fool and Walter, from fourteen years of living with the Fanatic, saw that the other had already grasped the situation - Obadiah was regarding the terminal point of his life neither with the workmanlike indifference of Malachi, nor with the philosophical acceptance of Walter, but with a fierce, dark, and burning joy.
Grim-countenanced, skull-featured and lath-thin from a life of self-discipline, nothing was left of Obadiah in his eighty-fourth year but a leathery and narrow lantern of gray-black skin and bones. It was a lantern illuminated by an all-consuming inner faith in his individually-conceived God - the God who in gentleness and charity was the direct antithesis of the dark and vengeful Lord of Obadiah's Culture, and the direct, acknowledged antithesis of Obadiah, himself.
Oblivious now to Ahrens' humor, as to all other unimportant things, he folded his arms and looked directly into the taller man's eyes.
"Woe to you," he said, calmly, "to you, Other Man, and all of your breed. And again I say, woe unto you!"
For a second, meeting the deep-sunk, burning eyes in that dark, bony face, Ahrens frowned slightly. His gaze turned and went past Obadiah to the gunman covering him.
"The boy?" Ahrens asked.
"We looked… " the young man's voice was husky, almost whispering. "He's nowhere… nowhere around the house."
Ahrens wheeled sharply to look at Malachi, and Walter.
"If he was off the grounds one of you'd know it?"
"No. He…" Walter hesitated uncertainly, "might have gone for a hike, or a climb in the mountains…"
He saw Ahrens' brown eyes focus upon him. As he looked, without warning the dark pupils of them seemed to grow and swell, as if they would finally fill the whole field of Walter's vision. Again, the emotional effect of the strange voice and commanding presence rang in his memory.
"Now, that's foolish of you," said Walter, quietly, making no effort to withdraw his attention from the compelling gaze of Ahrens. "Hypnotic dominance of any form needs at least the unconscious cooperation of the subject. And I am a Maran Exotic."
The pupils were suddenly normal again. This time, however, Ahrens did not smile.
"There's something going on here…" he began, slowly. But Walter had already recognized the fact that time had run out.
"All that's different," he interrupted, "is that you've been underestimating me. The unexpected, I think some general once said, is worth an army - "
And he launched himself across the few feet of distance separating them, at Ahrens' throat.
It was a clumsy charge, made by a body and mind untrained to even the thought of physical violence; and Ahrens brushed it aside with one hand, the way he might have brushed aside the temper tantrum of a clumsy child. But at the same time the gunman behind Obadiah fired; it felt as if something heavy struck Walter in the side. He found himself tumbling to the terrace.
But, useless as his attack had been, it had distracted at least the one armed guard; and in that split second of distraction, Obadiah hurled himself - not at either of the gunmen guarding him, but at one of those covering Malachi.
Malachi himself had been in movement from the first fractional motion of Walter's charge. He was on one of the two still holding pistols trained on him, before the first man could fire. And the charge from the gun of the other passed harmlessly through the space the old soldier had occupied a second before.
Malachi chopped down the gunman he had reached as someone might chop a flower stalk with one swipe of an open hand. Then he turned, picked up the man who had missed him, and threw that gunman into the fire-path of the discharge from the pistols of the two who had been covering Obadiah - just as the remaining armed man, caught in Obadiah's grasp, managed to fire twice.
In that same moment, Malachi reached him; and they went down together, the gunman rolling on top of the old man.
From the level of the terrace stones, lying half on his side, Walter stared at the ruin his charge had made. Obadiah lay fallen with his head twisted around so that his open and unmoving eyes stared blankly in Walter's direction. He did not move. No more did the man Malachi had chopped down, nor the other gunman the ex-soldier had thrown into the fire from his companions' pistols. One other gunman, knocked down by the thrown man, was twitching and moaning strangely on the terrace.
Of the two guards remaining, one lay still on top of Malachi, who had ceased to move, and the other was still on his feet. He turned to face Ahrens and cringed before the devastating blaze of the Other Man's gaze.
"You fools, you fools!" said Bleys softly. "Didn't I just get through telling you to concentrate on the Dorsai?"
The remaining gunman shrank in on himself in silence.
"All right," said Bleys, sighing. "Pick him up." He indicated the moaning man and turned to the gunman on top of the silent figure of Malachi.
"Wake up." Bleys prodded the man on top with his toe. "It's all over."
The man he had prodded rolled off Malachi's body and sprawled on the stones with his head at an odd angle to his body. His neck was broken. Bleys drew in a slow breath.
"Three dead - and one hurt," he said as if to himself. "Just to destroy three unarmed old teachers. What a waste." He shook his head and turned back to the gunman who was lifting the moaning man.
They think I'm already dead, too, then, thought Walter, lying on the flagstones.
The realization came to him without much surprise. Bleys was already holding open the french window so that the wounded man could be half-carried inside the library by his companion. Bleys followed, his finger still marking a place in the volume of Noyes' poetry Walter had originally been reading. The french window closed. Walter was left alone with the dead, and the dying light of day.
He was aware that the charge from the void pistol had taken him in the side; and a certain feeling of leakage inside him confirmed his belief that the wound was mortal. He lay waiting for his personal end and it grew in him after a moment that it was something of a small victory that neither Ahrens nor the surviving gunman had realized he was still alive.
He had stolen several minutes more of life. That was a small victory, to add to the large victory that there was now no one from whom the lightning of Bleys' multi-talented mind could deduce the unique value of Hal. A value that, since it was connected to a possible pressure climax of the ontogenetic energies, could be as dangerous to the Other Men as they would he to Hal once they realized he might pose a threat to them.