Hansen’s display overloaded with the intensity of the sizzling arc and blacked out. The weapon made a sound like a crow laughing. Its negative image forced itself inexorably toward Hansen’s eyes like the tongue of a dragon.
He braced his right hand against Zieborn’s armored neck and pushed, with no effect on what the warrior was doing. If Hansen twisted away and tried to run, his opponent’s arc would extend and cut collops from the back of Hansen’s flimsy suit. So—
Receptors crackled and a quadrant of Hansen’s display went dead. The edge of Zieborn’s tight weapon had touched Hansen’s helmet.
“Shoot!” Hansen cried. The jolt left him blind, deafened, and tingling all over as if he’d been living in the heart of the lightning.
But Zieborn’s snarling arc hadn’t come through his helmet, destroying Hansen’s eyes with a metallic plasma even before the electricity itself converted flesh to traceries of carbon.
Hansen reached down to his left side, forcing his suit unaided against the friction of all its powerless joints. He tugged the catch open, then pulled the plastron away from the backplate. Sunlight flooded in.
So did the smell of burned flesh.
There was a babble of voices, angry or amazed in tone, but Hansen didn’t bother to process the words until he’d struggled free of the armor. Being trapped in the suit with its ventilation system and all receptors as dead as so many bricks was a more claustrophobic feeling than he had expected.
But Zieborn was dead too. His suit had lost its luster, and in the center of its neck joint was a hole no larger than a worm bores in an apple. Smoke drooled from the hole and from the louvered vents beneath the arms. That was why the air smelled like a bad barbeque.
The other two armored warriors waited impassively, but a freeman pointed his crossbow at the center of Hansen’s chest. The quarrel had a four-lobed steel head.
“Put that fucker down or I’ll feed it up your asshole!” Hansen snarled. The menace of his voice slapped the freeman back a pace, lifting his weapon as his mouth fell open.
Hansen’s suit and his opponent’s remained frozen and upright where they stood. A chickadee fluttered by so close that a wing brushed the hair which sweat plastered to Hansen’s head. It lighted on top of Zieborn’s helmet and said in a tiny voice that only Hansen seemed to hear, “The second rule of war is that in war, there are no rules.”
“Lord Gol—” Hansen said. His voice broke. His throat was dry, dry as bleached bones.
“Lord Golsingh,” he said, “I claim a place with you.”
“We know nothing of this—” Taddeusz said to his king with a face as red as a wolf’s tongue.
“And I claim,” Hansen continued in a rasping, savage voice, “the armor of this man I killed in fair combat.”
“We know,” said Golsingh to his foster father, “that he can fight.”
The king looked down from his pony toward Hansen and went on, “Your first request is granted . . . Hansen, wasn’t it?”
Hansen nodded. He wondered if he was expected to bow.
“Your second request is not granted,” Golsingh continued with a cool, vaguely detached expression. “Zieborn’s armor goes to his eldest son, as is proper.”
Hansen felt his face harden. He’d learned the importance of good equipment here, if he’d learned nothing else this day.
“But I think you’ve proved your right to a suit of comparable quality from the loot we took from Lopez,” Golsingh went on. He glanced toward the curve of his retainers.
“Get him a horse, someone,” the king snapped imperiously. “And get this gear loaded up. The women are probably worried about what’s going on.”
A pair of slaves pushed forward with a saddled pony, perhaps the one Zieborn had ridden until he was ordered to deal with the intruder.
“Oh,” Golsingh said, “and bring Villiers’ suit as well. It doesn’t seem to have been as valueless as we’d assumed.”
Chapter Eight
One of the human servants held up a mirror of polished ice. Fortin checked the set of his saucer hat, adjusted the brim slightly, and stepped into the discontinuity around which the central hall of his palace was built.