Crash.
Through the continuing racket of music and dancing from elsewhere in the apt, a rending noise. She jolted back to awareness of the rest of the room. With the terstrength he had used to catch and lift the hundred-kilo deadfall on her apt door, Madison had seized a table with marble top and stainless steel legs and was engaged in tearing it apart. When one of the welds rehim he spun and slammed the whole thing against the wall. The marble shattered and a chunk of concrete fell to the floor. A leg came loose and he raised it overwith a howl. The man labeled vernon cringed and moaned out of reach.
Looking alarmed, Mikki cracked the whip and this time took aim for Madison’s neck.
The steel table-leg intercepted the lash in the air and it coiled around like a constrictor, Madison moving his head back without moving his shoulders, like an Indian temple dancer, just as far as was necessary for the tip of the lash to miss his right eye. He jerked, and the handle of the whip leapt from Mikki’s sweaty grasp.
Bold, almost pleased, as though recognizing a worthopponent, the one called Putzi who was the tallest and most muscular dived for the shattered table and himself wrenched free another of the legs.
Madison stripped the coil of the whip off his own weapon and threw it. Lyla’s hands went up to the level of her ears and she heard the sound of her own fingers clapping over into the palms. The force of that throw was unbelievable, and he hadn’t even drawn his arm back behind his shoulder. But the balled-up whip drove Putzi off his feet and left a continuous red pattern across his chest and belly, as though he had been struck with an old-fashioned wicker carpet-beater, a kind of sketch for a three-leafed clover.
“I’m getting out of here!” cried the one labeled Hughie. Mikki reached for him and caught him by the hair, swinging him around.
“Get him down and quiet him, you crazy fool! Want to have a kidnapping charge around your neck? You brought him here; you stay and face the consequences!”
“But you told us to go bring in a mixed-race couple!” Hughie whimpered.
“Shut up and grab that table-leg!” Herself, Mikki dived to retrieve the whip from its entanglement with the moaning Putzi’s limbs.
One inch from her outstretched hand a chunk of marble, fist-sized, smashed and spattered her face and body with little stinging fragments like midges. She looked up slowly to see Madison grinning at her, incalm. Adjusting her balance, she drew back-and snatched the table-leg up, tossing it not to the still frightened Hughie but to Vernon, who caught it and charged Madison with it lifted in a killing swing.
“An thou’lt match me at the quarterstaves, thou’lt earn thee a cracked skull for thy pains,” Madison said in a clear voice, and countered with such a violent riposte that Vernon’s fingers sprang open and his weapon flew through the air to crash ringing against the far wall. The naked girl behind Lyla uttered a cry of delight and clapped her hands.
Quarterstaves.? Lyla blinked and shook her head. For one moment there she had seemed to see not the black room with the gray walls and the half-red half-green sun, but a forest clearing with a brook across it, and men with long wooden poles disputing the passage of a broad flat log laid between the banks.
But the room was still here and the vision of the sunny glade was gone.
Recovered, furious, Putzi was running to catch up the metal table-leg, the best weapon visible, while Mikki was turning her back cautiously and heading for the far end of the room.
To make himself a shield, Putzi clutched at a light chair with a strong plastic seat and held it lion-tamer fashion, advancing on Madison. The knee retreated a little, tempting his attacker to make the first move-and shot out his arm to snatch down one of the floor-to-ceiling drapes that covered all the windows, stamp on one edge of it and with a bulge of muscles rip the heavy velvet so that he had a conveniently sized portion in his left hand.