“My word always counts, Walker,” Hansen said harshly. “I’m not giving it to you.”
Lopez’ mounted force suddenly sallied through the loose ranks of his armored footmen. Snow and dirt flew from beneath the hooves of the ponies.
When the riders were twenty meters short of leading clot of Golsingh’s footmen, crossbows snapped on both sides. Several of Lopez’ men tumbled from their saddles, but their own missiles were directed at the armored footmen.
It appeared to Hansen that the quarrels sizzled and dropped just short of the armor. Several, probably metal-shafted, vanished in showers of orange sparks.
A single footman stumbled, then fell backward in the snow. His heels drummed briefly. The fletching of a missile projected from his left armpit.
Walker made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound, as dismissive now as if he were in human guise. His beak sawed in the direction of the fallen man. “A hireling,” the bird explained. “Shoddy armor; no chance at all.”
He turned his one bright eye on Hansen. “But more chance than you have, Kommissar. Unless you put yourself under my control and direction.”
Hansen gathered a blob of saliva on his tongue. He grimaced and swallowed instead of spitting.
Golsingh’s lancers had also ridden through the loose array of their own footmen and were struggling with mounted opponents in a chaos of shouting and ringing metal. Hansen couldn’t imagine how the fur-clad riders told one another apart after the first shock had mixed their lines.
The foremost group of Golsingh’s footmen, twenty or so of them, broke into a stumbling run. Their leader was a huge man in red and gold armor. The nearest horsemen bellowed afresh and tried to disengage.
The man in red and gold pointed his right arm and splayed the middle and index fingers of his gauntleted hand. A blue-white arc snapped in a ten-meter parabola from the fingers with a noise like sawing stone. It touched three horsemen in a long whiplash curve, igniting their garments and cleaving away the head of one man as surely as an axe could have done.
Hansen was sure that at least one of the victims had come from Golsingh’s side.
“That’s Taddeusz, Golsingh’s foster father,” Walker said with another avian sniff. “The warchief as well. He thinks that war is for warriors, and freemen are more trouble than use.”
Taddeusz and his clot of footmen—warriors—continued to pound forward. Saplings burst into flame when arcs touched them in broad slashes, but the freemen had spurred their ponies out of the way so that no more of them fell.
A gap was opening between Taddeusz’ group and the nearest of the remaining friendly forces. A few other warriors began to trot from Golsingh’s line, but they seemed motivated by personal excitement rather than a desire to hit the enemy as a coordinated force.
Taddeusz and a green-armored warrior from Lopez’ army plodded together with a rippling crash of electrical discharges. They met in an alder thicket. Hansen couldn’t see the moment of contact, but lightning swept the slender stems away in time for him to watch the Lopez warrior pivot on his right foot and fall.
There was a black, serpentine scar across the green breastplate. Smoke or steam oozed from the neck joint of the armor.
Taddeusz strode on. His arc was condensed to a quaver that reached less than a meter from his gauntlet. Another of Lopez’ warriors cut at the war chief with an arc extended into a whiplash. It popped and sizzled, wrapping Taddeusz in its blue fire; clumps of snow puddled around the red and gold boots.
Taddeusz took a step and another step, each in slow motion as though he were walking in the surf. His opponent suddenly tried to back-pedal. He was too late. Taddeusz’ right arm slashed, and the dense electrical flux from his gauntlet sheared into his opponent’s helmet.
Circuits blew all through the damaged suit. Taddeusz blanked his arc for an instant, then snapped it back to life as he moved on.
His victim toppled. A wedge-shaped cut bubbled halfway through the sphere of the helmet, as though it had been struck by something more material than directed lightning.
A dozen fires struggled fitfully among the scrub trees. Sapless wood tried to sustain ignition temperature against the cold and snow.