of his choice, feel his hilt go warm and pulsing in his hand. He really did
not like to take unfair advantage. The iron sword glowed pink like a baby’s
skin or a just-born day. Then it began to react in his grip. The grey’s
reins, wrapped around the pommel, flapped loosely; he told it where he wanted
it with gritted words, with a pressing knee, with his shifting weight. One hawk
-mask had a greenish tinge to him: protected. Tempus’s sword would not listen
to such talk: it slit charms like butter, armour like silk. A blue wing
whistled above his head, thrown by a compatriot of the man who fell so
slowly with his guts pouring out over his saddle like cold molasses. While
that hawk-mask’s horse was in mid-air between two strides, Tempus’s sword
licked up and changed the colour of the foe-seeking boomerang. Pink, now, not
blue. He was content to let it return its death to the hand that threw it. That
left just two.
One had the thief engaged, and the youth had drawn his wicked, twenty-inch
Ibarsi knife, too short to be more than a temporizer against the hawk-mask’s
sword, too broad to be thrown. Backed against the Lily Garden’s wall, there was
just time for Tempus to flicker the horse over there and split the hawk-mask’s
head down to his collarbones. Grey brains splattered him.. The thrust of the
hawk-mask, undiminished by death, shattered on the flat of the long, curved
knife Shadowspawn held up in a two-fisted, desperate block.
‘Behind you!’
Tempus had known the one last hawk-mask was there. But this was not the boy’s