Bruno looks where Radmer is pointing, and where the black of forest meets the deep, dark blue of sky he can just barely make out an avian form atop the cone point of one of the trees. Its beak is raised up toward the stars, its wings outstretched.
Thwat? Thwat?
“Is it dangerous?”
“No,” says Radmer, “but its wings are laced with nerves so sensitive… well, people say it can read minds.”
“Ah. I see. And can it really?”
“I’m not sure. They do seem to know when they’re being hunted. Try pointing a weapon at one; you’ll find it gone before you’ve even finished thinking. For the princes of the Second Dynasty, to bring home a live thrat was considered the ultimate quest. The logic being, it would only come to you if there was genuine kindness in your heart—a thing that couldn’t be faked.”
“And did they?”
“Eh?”
“Come to these princes. Did a prince ever capture a thrat, and become a king?”
“Once,” Radmer says distractedly. “King Minor of Daum. He was a really good guy. Funny, and very strong. Tried to make a sort of lie detector out of it, but it looked so sad in its cage, he finally released it. It’s still on the family crest, though.”
“All right, so,” Bruno says, beginning now to lose patience, “if this bird is harmless, then why are we so tense all of a sudden?”
ThooRAT! ThooRAT!
“Because it drinks the blood of corpses,” Radmer says evenly, his eyes on the blank wall of forest. “With a taste for adrenaline and the stink of fear, it’s the harbinger of battle. In the opinion of that bird, Sire, someone is about to die.”
“Oh. Well.” Bruno’s weapons are of the usual sort: a sword and pistol, some glue bombs, and a stout metal rod for, in theory, holding an enemy outside of sword-thrust range. He takes quick stock of them, and finally draws the pistol.
Just in time, as it turns out; the robots burst through the trees, swarming across the road like a troupe of whirring, clicking ballerinas. Before he knows it, Bruno is firing wildly, then firing more carefully as a robot engages a Dolceti just a few meters away from him. His bullet misses its target—the iron box on the side of the robot’s head—and clanks off its superreflective neck without leaving a mark.
Then the glue bombs are flying, splattering in sticky masses that trip and snare the robots but slide right off human flesh. And the guns are popping, and the swords and clubs are swinging, and the air foils are flickering in the darkness. Men call out to each other, and Bruno finds himself face-to-face with a robot attacker. He’s fought robots before, and feels no particular fear as he whirls the iron bar into play and strikes for the side of the thing’s head. The box! Hit the box! But his aim is as worn-out as the rest of his ancient body; he misses by inches, and he senses the blow wasn’t hard enough anyway, to do more than dent the metal.
He isn’t afraid, no, but he’s disappointed. The robot’s sword is coming around now, and he has no way to block it except by throwing an arm up over his head. Will it be enough? Will he live to see the Stormlands, or the ancient city hidden within? Will he not confront the mistakes and misdeeds of his past?
The razor-sharp sword strikes his arm with the force of a pile driver, shearing right through the skin and the outer layer of fibrediamond and cutting into the muscle beneath. He feels the bone chip, and his strength is insufficient to keep the sword from continuing downward, to ring painfully against his Imbrian army helmet. The shock leaves him dazed, but a part of him is swinging the bar around anyway, with all the strength his good arm can muster. It isn’t much, but it pushes the robot back for a moment, delaying the final, killing blow.
And then Zuq is there with a hard body slam to the robot’s impervium hull, and Bordi is ducking beneath the whirling sword blade and stabbing directly into the box with the diamond tip of an air foil. The robot tries to dodge, to parry, but the void in the middle of the weapon simply baffles it. The point digs in, punching through the thin sheet of iron, and the robot is falling away in a kind of seizure.
And that’s it. The battle is over. The ground is littered with twitching robots and severed robot limbs.
“Ako’i!” says Bordi, looking at Bruno with considerable alarm. To someone else he says, “Throw a tourniquet around that shoulder! Lose the arm, not the man!”
“Excuse me,” Bruno tells him, collapsing down onto his rump. A tourniquet won’t help, he wants to say. The arm isn’t severed, just mauled, and what it really needs is to have the edges of the wound sewn back together. His body will do the rest, knitting skin and bone and muscle with better-than-human efficiency. The fibrediamond will not grow back, alas, and the bone is unlikely to heal perfectly around its dented brickmail sheathing. He’ll have a permanent scar, a permanent ache. But with proper first aid, amazingly enough, he and his arm will both survive.
He can’t get the words out, though, because his pain receptors are functioning perfectly, and no matter how wonderfully reinforced his skull might be, the brain inside it remains a fragile pudding of delicate bioelectric tendrils. It’s also reinforced, and not given to internal bleeding, but just the same he’s dazed, torpid. His bell has been rung.
Fortunately, Radmer is there in another few seconds, and takes charge of the medical response. Bruno watches with dizzy detachment as a needle and thread are worked through the injury, lacing it together. His eyes are inspected with lights, his reflexes tested.
“You’ll live,” Radmer pronounces finally. “But it’s going to hurt for a day or two.”
“Noted,” Bruno says muzzily.
“You’re going to have to ride, I’m afraid. If we carry two on a treader, it’ll slow us down.”
“I understand. I’ll muddle through. These… these Dolceti are very fast, aren’t they? The best fighters in the world.”
“You didn’t fare so badly yourself,” Bordi says, with some grudging cousin of admiration. “I thought they’d killed you. The moment that robot stepped in front of you I said to myself, ‘That’s it. He’s dead.’ But you actually hit the thing, twice.”
“It was in my way,” Bruno said, trying to make a joke of it. Then, more seriously, “Has anyone got some water? Fighting really takes it out of you. I’ve lived a long, long time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite this thirsty before.”
Someone hands him a bottle, and he drinks from it greedily, trying to slow the rasp of his breathing so he won’t choke. Finally he says to Radmer, “So there. Your thrat-bird was wrong.”
“Not at all,” Radmer says grimly, pointing to a heap on the road which Bruno had taken for a pile of oil-stained rags. But on closer inspection he can see the “oil” spreading in a pool, and a pair of pointy boots sticking out of the heap. It’s Parma, the mission mother. Minus the top of her head.
“Sloppy,” someone notes, in tones of mild embarrassment. “You can see she was half a step too close.”
Chapter Nineteen
in which a great gulf is spanned
The long night just keeps on getting cooler, and as the road climbs higher and higher into the thin mountain air, the last traces of Imbria’s temperate winter fall away. Not all of the Dolceti had started off the journey in riding leathers, but before setting off from the scene of the battle they’d all zipped up, and before long they were stopping again to throw vests and parkas over the leathers, and mitten-tops over the fingers of their gloves. Progress slows, and slows again as the slipstream turns to icy daggers.
“Cold enough?” Zuq asks Bruno at one point, and in his addled state, with his face half-frozen beneath a muffle of soft cloth, Bruno can only manage a grunt in reply.