The Excalibur Alternative

-V-

The sentry outside the striped pavilion came to attention as Sir George approached. The baron nodded an acknowledgment of the man-at-arms' salute, then stepped through the open tent fly, unbuckled his sword belt, and placed the sheathed weapon on a wooden rack. A foot fell softly on the luxurious rug behind him, and he turned with a smile as Matilda stepped out of the huge tent's inner chamber. She crossed to him and rose on tiptoe, offering her lips, and he kissed her soundly.

"How went your meeting?" she asked, settling back on her heels as she broke the kiss.

"As well as any of the others," he replied with a shrug. "Which is to say it could have gone better, but it might have gone much worse."

"Timothy taught you to be much too philosophical as a boy, my love," Matilda said with a hint of severity.

"Strange that you should say so," her husband replied with a crooked grin, and reached out as one of the mechanical servitors provided by the demon-jester floated up with a goblet of fine wine. "My father said much the same, from time to time. Usually, as I recall, just before my arse made the acquaintance of his belt for some infraction or another."

"That," Matilda said, "doesn't surprise me in the least."

"I thought it might not." He took a second goblet from the tray atop the hovering metallic sphere and pointed with his chin at the pair of camp chairs flanking the chessboard on the table beside the pavilion's central pole. Matilda accepted the wordless invitation and sank into the chair facing the white pieces. An interrupted game was arrested in mid-progress, awaiting their attention, and Sir George hid a smile as even now Matilda took a moment to consider the board and—no doubt—her next move.

He paused long enough to plant another brief kiss on the part of her hair, then handed her one of the goblets, and took the facing chair. He stretched out his long legs before him, and leaned back, letting his eyes roam around the richly appointed tent.

The pavilion's fabric looked like the finest silk, but it wasn't. In fact, its fabric was even lighter and tougher than silk, yet far more efficient as an insulator. It billowed gently on the breeze blowing across the encampment, and he heard the strange, wailing songs of what passed for birds on this world through the thin walls. The scents which floated on that breeze had become familiar during the weeks the English had camped here, yet whenever he concentrated upon them, the subtle differences between them and what he would have smelled on Earth were only too apparent. He would have found it difficult to define precisely what those differences were, but their existence was undeniable, yet another reminder that men had not been born in this place.

He glanced back out of the open fly, past the sentry who stood with his back to the tent. A half-dozen youngsters went racing past, equipped with fishing poles and obviously headed for the deep stream on the west side of the camp. Edward was among them, and the baron nodded in approval as two of the younger men-at-arms jogged after them in full armor to keep an eye on them. He had no doubt that Edward would regale him and Matilda over supper with tales of the monster fish which had miraculously evaded him at the very last moment, or that the men-at-arms would solemnly attest to the escapees' enormous size. It was a pity that Computer had been forced to warn them that this world's fish were deadly poison for humans, but that had done nothing to diminish the ages old fascination water, fins, and scales had always exercised upon boys of Edward's age.

He watched the children out of sight, then returned his attention to the camp itself. From where he sat, he could see three more pavilions, each almost as luxurious as his own, set aside for the other knights of his company. Beyond those were still more tents, even larger although less luxurious, where his officers and sergeants shared their own quarters. And beyond those, stretching outward in concentric rings towards the palisade and earthen walls that rimmed the encampment, were yet more tents, each housing twenty men. At Sir George's forceful request, the demon-jester had provided separate, smaller tents for any man accompanied by his wife, and the unattached women and their children shared two large common tents which were carefully watched over by their own sentries every hour of the night and day.

Fires burned before several of the tents, although there was no real need for them, given the efficiency of the "space heaters" with which each tent was equipped. No doubt some might have thought that was silly, Sir George reflected. But it was also one more aspect of the way in which the English tried to pretend that they were not entirely adrift in time and space, and there was nothing at all "silly" about that.

Despite his lack of any readable expression, it had been obvious from the demon-jester's comments that he had been... perplexed by Sir George's request to establish an encampment outside the ship. In many ways, Sir George could understand his "Commander's" confusion, because comfortable though their tents were, they were still a considerable step down from the many marvels and casual comforts which had been available to them aboard ship. Yet even so, they contained marvels of their own which made even the lowliest trooper's quarters as luxurious as anything a crowned king might have enjoyed on Earth. And they also offered one absolutely priceless thing the ship couldn't: the illusion, however brief and fragile, that they were still free men.

His gaze flicked to the racked sword, and even as his right hand raised the goblet to his lips, his left hand fell to his side and touched the reassuring hardness of his dagger hilt. Aboard the demon-jester's ship, he and all of his men were prohibited from bearing arms at any time, aside from the blunted weapons used in training, and even those poor counterfeits had to be surrendered at the end of each training session. Nor was any human outside one of the training chambers permitted armor—or, for that matter, any object made of iron or steel—aboard the ship.

Here, it was different. To some extent, it had to be. Computer had selected the site for the camp with Sir George's assistance, and it was placed far enough from any of the native tribes here on the world Computer had finally gotten around to telling Sir George was called Shaakun to make an attack upon it extremely unlikely. Unlikely wasn't the same thing as impossible, however, and so, much as would have been the case in France, had the company ever reached it, weapons and armor must be kept ever close at hand. It was probably foolish, given the demon-jester's demonstration of their weapons' inefficacy against him, but having a good, honest sword or lance or bow to hand made men who had begun to feel like chattels walk once more like men.

It was unlikely the demon-jester understood them well enough to recognize that. Certainly the small, ridiculous-looking creature had demonstrated an unerring ability to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. Sir George sometimes wondered if his "Commander" had once read a treatise which explained what an officer was supposed to say and do to inspire his troops. He certainly acted like some clerk who had stuffed his head with book knowledge unfettered by any polluting contact with reality or experience! Yet if he had perused a treatise, it had obviously been a very bad one... or else one which had been written for some sort of creatures very unlike any man Sir George had ever commanded.

His mouth twitched, on the very verge of a chuckle, as he recalled the ludicrous speech with which the demon-jester had announced to the company that, as a reward for its defeat of the Thoolaas, it would be permitted to camp outside the ship and all of the other humans, including their women and children, would be awakened from stasis to share their tents with them. If the "Commander" had had an ounce of common sense, he would have confined himself to that bare announcement and let Sir George worry about exhorting the troops to perform equally well the next time. But he'd been unable to do anything so sensible, and so the company had stood in ordered ranks for almost a full hour while the demon-jester's piping voice blathered on about their "heroic bravery" and "matchless puissance" and "selfless devotion to our guild." Only the ferocious glares of their officers and one or two bloodthirsty threats muttered from the corners of Rolf Grayhame's or Dafydd Howice's mouths had prevented outright laughter from sweeping the ranks. Sir George hadn't blamed the men at all, but he'd been vastly relieved when the demon-jester finally finished and his air car carried him back to the ship. Their "Commander" would not have reacted well if he'd realized how his "loyal and courageous warriors" actually regarded his bombastic speech.

But perhaps the baron wronged him. It was entirely possible that the demon-jester wouldn't have been concerned in the least. After all, what did a superior being such as himself care for the crude and ignorant amusement of such primitive barbarians?

"You have that thinking-about-other-things look again," Matilda told him, and he gave his head a brief shake and returned his attention to her.

"Forgive me, my love. I was merely recalling the `Commander's' inspiring speech following the battle. I wish you hadn't missed it."

"I, also," she said, but she shot him a sharp-eyed glance as she spoke, and he shrugged. No doubt she was right to worry, for he had allowed a bit too much of his true opinion of that "inspiring speech" to color his tone. Computer seemed able to hear them at almost any point in the encampment; certainly he had demonstrated that he could hear them at any point within their tents and pavilions, and that suggested he was monitoring all of their conversations just as Sir George was certain he did aboard ship. The baron, Father Timothy, and Sir Richard between them had discovered four or five places within the confines of the encampment where Computer didn't respond when called upon, and Sir George had made careful note of where those places were, but he wasn't prepared to risk any injudicious conversations even there. The fact that Computer seemed not to hear them when they called for his attention was no guarantee that he truly couldn't.

On the other hand, Sir George was coming to the conclusion that whatever translated the demon-jester's language into English and his own words into whatever it was the demon-jester spoke did as poor a job of translating his emotions from his tone as it did of communicating the demon-jester's to him. Again, that was not a conclusion he intended to put to the test, but he was honest enough to admit that his control had slipped more than once in conversation with his "Commander," and the demon-jester seemed not to have noticed a thing on any of those occasions.

"But to return to my original question," Matilda went on, "how did your meeting with the `Commander' go?"

"Things are proceeding much as I predicted they would," he told her with another shrug. "The Laahstaar and Mouthai continue to rant and rave and demand the rejection of the `Commander's' terms, not to mention our own bloodthirsty extermination. Computer has done a remarkable job of eavesdropping upon even their inner councils," he went on, arching one eyebrow, and she nodded vigorously to show she'd understood his hint, "and it seems certain that the senior chief of the Laahstaar sees our defeat as the means whereby he will be able to replace the Thoolaas as the royal tribe. From what he's been saying to his subchiefs, the senior Mouthai chieftain will undoubtedly suffer a fatal accident at the height of their battle against us, because the Laahstaar have no desire to see their authority weakened and diluted as that of the Thoolaas was."

"How very homelike," Matilda murmured with a slight smile, and Sir George nodded.

"It does rather remind me of Scottish lairds or Irish `kings,' " he agreed. "Especially since the Mouthai appear to be planning something similar for the Laahstaar."

"Oh dear." Matilda shook her head. "It seems dreadfully unfair for such innocents to find themselves in your toils, my love."

"Not my toils," Sir George corrected. "The `Commander's.' I'm merely an advisor, much as Computer. The final decisions, of course, are entirely his."

"Of course," she said quickly, and her expression was contrite. Indeed, it might have been a little frightened, and Sir George reached across the chessboard to touch her cheek lightly. Matilda, he knew, was concerned that the demon-jester might regard a subordinate who was too competent as a threat. Given the strange-looking little alien's ruthlessness and contempt for his unwilling human troops, there was little doubt in her mind—or Sir George's, for that matter—that if any one of them did become a threat in the demon-jester's eyes, that person would die quickly.

Sir George understood his wife's fears, and he wasn't about to discount or ignore them, yet he had become more and more convinced that it was virtually impossible for the demon-jester to conceive of any circumstances under which Sir George or any other human could pose a genuine threat to such a superior and civilized being as himself.

Oh, he took endless precautions to assure his own security and that of the ship. No human could open any of the hatches or doors which would have permitted them to move beyond the portion of the ship to which they were confined. None of them were permitted weapons aboard ship, and the armed wart-faces who watched over them there (and who, Computer had finally informed Sir George, were properly called Hathori) were a constant reminder that disobedience or rebellion meant death. Even here, in their isolated encampment, a full score of heavily armored, ax-armed Hathori wandered about, or stood glowering from the small hill above the camp upon which a "landing shuttle" from the ship rested. The English weren't unarmed now, and after what they'd done to the Thoolaas, even creatures as stupid as the Hathori obviously were must have realized that they could be killed any time Sir George or his men took it into their heads to kill them. But that was fine with the demon-jester. The Hathori weren't truly there as jailers; they were there as an alarm or a forward picket. If any of the humans were so foolish as to attack them, the demon-jester's vengeance would be sudden and complete, and they knew it as well as he did.

Yet for all those precautions, or perhaps because of them, the demon-jester never truly believed that any of his barbaric, unwilling mercenaries could truly threaten him. Even if they'd tried to, his precautions would surely thwart any rebellion, and because of that he was far more casual and careless about what those humans might be thinking or doing than Sir George would ever have allowed himself to be in the other's place.

Not that it was likely to make a great deal of difference in the end, of course, because however routine they might have been, the demon-jester's security measures were effective. Dangerous as it was even to let himself dream about it, Sir George had been unable to keep himself from searching daily for any means by which he might escape or overthrow the demon-jester, and so far he'd found absolutely nothing to suggest either might be possible. It was the more galling because it was only the demon-jester's "technology" and the unswerving loyalty of Computer which made that true. Without those advantages, the demon-jester, his ship's crew, his Hathori, and probably even the perpetually silent dragon-men would have stood precious little chance against Sir George's veterans. But he had those advantages, and the baron was not about to let himself forget that.

"Meanwhile," he went on in a tone of determined cheer, "the tribes which favor accepting our—or, rather, the `Commander's'—terms seem to be falling into line. Two of them have made their minds up already and sworn everlasting fealty and perpetual loyalty to the `Commander' and the guild." He rolled his eyes, and Matilda covered her mouth with a hand to stifle a giggle. "At least four others appear to be strongly inclined to the same direction, and Computer and the `Commander's' mechanical envoys are negotiating with still more."

"And the other side?" Matilda asked.

"It seems likely that the Laahstaar and Mouthai will be able to attract more of the local tribes than we will," Sir George admitted with a shrug. "Computer and I are still attempting to make some sort of estimate of what that will probably mean in terms of numbers when we finally bring them to battle, but the situation is still too unresolved. At the moment, I would estimate that we and our allies will be outnumbered by something like three to two. It might be somewhat higher than that, but not, I think, by too much."

"That seems quite a large enough advantage for them," Matilda said tartly, and he smiled.

"I would prefer for the advantage to be on the other side myself," he acknowledged. "Especially since the Laahstaar, at least, seem to have taken what happened to the Thoolaas to heart. They'll be much more cautious than the Thoolaas were, I think... or they'll attempt to be, at any rate. It's always easier for a commander to decide to be prudent and cautious than it is for him to convince his troops to be the same, though. Once battle is actually joined, it's the troops who matter, and these creatures are so accustomed to charging to the attack that I think it will be next to impossible for any chieftain to convince them to adopt a defensive stance.

"But whatever the size of the force they manage to put together in the end, they'll definitely need some weeks to hammer out questions of command, organization, and precedence. It will be worse than putting together an English army, love, though I never thought I would hear myself say anything could be worse than that! And while they're busy getting themselves sorted out, Rolf, Walter, and I will be busy sorting out our `allies.' By the time we have their dart-throwers properly trained and massed to support our archers, I feel confident that we'll be able to handle whatever the Laahstaar and Mouthai can put into the field against us."

"But with what losses among our own folk?" Matilda asked softly, and her glorious blue eyes were dark. Sir George smiled at her as reassuringly as he might. He knew she was genuinely concerned about the possible loss of any of their men, but he also knew who her greatest fear was reserved for.

"Men die in battle, Matilda," he said quietly. "Even with allies among the natives, it seems likely that some of our men will die in this one. But not many, I think." Her eyes burned into his, and he met her gaze steadily. "I am speaking the truth, love," he told her. "Before we faced the Thoolaas I hadn't fully realized just how good the new armor and weapons provided by the `Commander' truly are. The most poorly armored of our footmen are as well armored as any knight serving under King Edward in France, and all of our horse are better armored than any one I ever saw on a field of battle on Earth. Our weapons are superior to those of the natives, and so is our training, and I'm confident that our losses will be low, unless some evil chance leads to our complete defeat, and that seems most unlikely."

"I know that here," she said, touching her forehead. "But here—" she touched her breast "—confidence comes harder. You're a good husband and a good man, George, and I love you. Yet I think sometimes you don't really understand how hard it is to watch the one you love ride into battle and know you cannot ride with him."

"Probably not," he agreed, reaching out to cup her cheek once more. "I understand enough to know how little I envy you that burden, though," he went on, "and I would do anything I could to ease it for you. Yet the choice of whether or not to ride off to war is even less mine here than it was in England, and at least we know that our `Commander' regards us as a `valuable asset' to be expended as sparingly as possible." He smiled and reached for a lighter note. "And you won't be shut of me so easily as all that, My Lady! Even if I were to fall, the Physician and his arts would be like to restore me to you, anyway."

"That isn't the funniest jest you ever made, George," she told him, and his smile faded before the look in her eyes.

"You're right," he said. "It wasn't. Forgive me."

"Oh, of course I do, foolish man!" she said, reaching up to capture his hand and squeeze it firmly. "And it was foolish of me to take it wrongly, when I know you meant it only to reassure. Yet..."

Her voice trailed off with something very like a shudder, and Sir George's hand squeezed hers back while he nodded in understanding. The demon-jester had been correct; eleven dead men had been returned to them from the Physician, and the company's reaction to that uncanny fact might have been disastrous. The baron suspected that only the warning the demon-jester had so casually given him had prevented the troops' reaction from being even worse than it was, yet it had been bad enough.

The resurrected men themselves had no memory of what had happened to them from the moment they were struck down. Not any clear ones, at any rate. They'd been slow, almost stupid, for the first day or so after their return—in some ways like men who had drunk too much wine, and in others like some shambling parody of one of the demon-jester's mechanical devices. It had been difficult for them to recognize their own names when they heard them, and their efforts to reply to questions had been clumsy and wandering, like those of someone whose wits were wanting.

All of the wounded who had been treated by the Physician had recovered from their injuries with miraculous speed. Few of them had any truly clear memories of how their wounds had been healed, but the one or two who did spoke of being shut into a close-fitting crystal cabinet which enveloped all but their heads and which had filled rapidly with something very like the cleansing vapor of the ship's communal baths. But this vapor had been different—stronger, denser, almost like a liquid rather than a gas—and it had burned and tingled as it flowed over them. It hadn't been pain, they'd all agreed, with varying degrees of certainty. It had only been... different. A sensation they couldn't truly describe, and which Sir George hoped he could avoid discovering from personal experience.

Yet whatever it was, and however it worked, it had left its mark upon the wounded men, for the portions of their bodies which had borne the wounds had emerged a deep red in color. Not the color of blood, but rather the deep, lobster-like shade of Englishmen foolish enough to expose their skins to the blazing sun of Spain or the Mediterranean. Yet for all of its darkness, there'd been no pain, no sensitivity to the touch, and the red shade itself had faded quickly over the next day or two.

Their eleven Lazaruses had been the same shade of red, but they had been red all over, and the color had faded much less rapidly. Logically, Sir George supposed, that should have been reassuring, especially to men who'd carried the same tint upon their own skins as a result of wounds which they had survived, but it hadn't been. Instead, it had only added to the sense of supernatural dread which seeing dead men walking had evoked in almost all of his troopers.

No, he thought. Be honest. That dread had been evoked not just in his troopers, but in himself, as well, despite the demon-jester's forewarning. Things might have turned ugly indeed, he conceded, if not for Father Timothy. Thank God he'd been wise enough to take the priest aside and warn him the instant he could! Timothy had been no less shocked than he was. In fact, his shock was probably worse, for he had always been taught—and taught others—that miraculous cures and healing were gifts from the power of God, and no one could ever have mistaken the demon-jester for one of the Lord's saints!

Fortunately, Timothy had been given the better part of two days to prepare himself. He'd spent the vast majority of that time in prayer and fasting, seeking divine guidance, and when he emerged from his vigil, his eyes had been calm and confident. When all of the troopers had shrunk back from the returned men, some making signs against evil or even, in one or two cases, reaching for weapons, Timothy had rounded upon them like some broad shouldered, white-bearded bear of God. The power of his voice when he denounced their fears and exhorted them to accept God's miraculous acts, however bizarre the circumstances under which those acts had been accomplished, would have done any true bear proud, and the frightened soldiers who'd cringed before the inexplicable had looked unmistakably like small boys who had incurred the wrath of an irate tutor as the priest's familiar, homey thunder broke upon them.

Yet for all that, there was still that lingering sense of the uncanny. The unspoken question—fear—of whether or not the men who had returned to them were truly the ones who'd been taken from them in the first place. Were they the same men? Or were they changelings? The same flesh but animated by... something else?

Sir George truly believed Timothy was right. Of course he did! After all, God could act through whomever He chose, even a demon-jester who was a parody of anything upon His Earth. But still...

"I trust Timothy," he told Matilda firmly. "If he says these resurrections are miracles of God, to be accepted as such, who am I to argue with him? Yet even though I trust him and believe he's correct, my emotions have yet to catch up with my faith and my intellect, I fear." He smiled at her. "You aren't the only one who continues to find the entire affair uncanny, My Lady! If I didn't find it that way, no doubt I wouldn't be so clumsy as to try to turn aside my own concerns with an ill chosen jest."

"I fear we will have a great many other equally `uncanny' things to which to adjust before we're finished," she told him, giving his hand a final squeeze. Then she released it, and leaned back in her camp chair, sipping from her goblet.

"You've always had a gift for understatement, my love," he told her wryly, and she snorted.

"Say rather than I've always had a gift for blurting out the first thought to come into my head, and you'd be closer to the mark!"

"Hardly that, although it has occurred to me upon occasion that your father probably had no idea what he was about to unleash upon an unwary world when he encouraged you to learn to read."

"Oh, I think he had a very clear idea what would happen," she told him with a chuckle whose sadness had dimmed as passing time dulled the knifelike edges of her loss. "I think he was more than pleased to have a daughter to spoil as his youngest child, and I don't think he worried himself too much over the handful he was about to bestow upon whatever unfortunate husband he finally found me!" She snorted again. "In fact, he probably thought it was only fair that whoever wed me wind up with a wife as hardheaded as his own!"

"Now there you're probably absolutely correct," Sir George agreed, and it was his turn to chuckle. But then his chuckle faded into something softer and warmer as he let his eyes rest upon his wife.

He knew how unhappy she was to have been able to bear only one child. She'd miscarried twice before Edward's birth, and lost two more children after that, and the thought that she was barren, unable to provide him with the additional heirs needed to safeguard the succession of his hard-won lands and titles, had been both her greatest regret and the cause of her greatest sense of failure. Well, Sir George shared her sadness, just as he had shared her grief with each child they'd lost. And, yes, he too had spent sleepless nights, especially when some childish ailment had left Edward feverish and restless, worrying over how many hopes and plans, how much of the future, resided in one fragile child. There were so very many ways a child could die before attaining his majority, and every one of them had gone through the baron's mind at one time or another.

Yet for all of that, he had never once seriously considered taking another woman to his bed to bear the additional sons and heirs many another noble would have considered absolutely essential. He was only human, and here and there, especially when he was in the field, far from home and feeling his loneliness and mortality, there had been moments of temptation. Strong moments, some of them, for he was a vigorous man, and one women had always found attractive. But they'd been only moments, never more than that. Some of his peers had made jokes about his chastity and fidelity, but only his closest friends had dared to do so to his face, for Sir George Wincaster had a temper, and very few men had ever desired to meet him with a weapon in hand.

For the most part, though, there had been an edge of begrudging admiration in the humorous comments that had come his way—the admiration of men who saw someone doing something they themselves could never accomplish... and which, despite a nagging suspicion that they ought to want to accomplish it, they had no true desire to emulate. Yet the truth was that it had never been that difficult for him. Partly that was because he was a man who took his sworn word seriously, and what oaths had he ever sworn more solemnly than the ones he'd taken upon his wedding day? But much as he would have liked to believe that it was his iron sense of honor which had kept him true to his wedding vows, he knew there were two other reasons which had at least as much to do with it. One was the fact that, in all his travels, he had never met a woman he found more beautiful than the one who had consented to become his wife. But the second, and by far the more important, was that however unmanly some might think it, he loved his wife more than he loved life itself, or even his honor. He could be as clumsy and as maladroit as the next man. He could hurt her with thoughtlessness, or carelessness. He could even, however fleetingly, be angry with her, and lash out with hurtful words when he was. But the one thing he simply could not do was to knowingly and deliberately betray or hurt her. That he would die before doing.

Something of his thoughts must have showed in his expression, for Matilda's eyes softened, and he inhaled deeply as her beauty smote him once again. Not everyone, he knew, would have called her beautiful. She was tall for a woman, taller than many men, with a strong nose and chin which spoke all too accurately of a strong-willed, stubborn character. Just as many would have considered her overly tall, she had broad shoulders for a woman and long, strong fingers, not the dainty, white hands of a "proper" noblewoman, and she moved with the athletic stride of a lifelong horsewoman. Her gowns had always seemed too confining for someone with her energy, and the magnificent golden spill of her hair was too often confined in a tight bun which kept it out of her way as she lost herself in one of her precious books, or her daily journal, or the endless sketchbooks she had filled since her father imported an Italian drawing master when she was thirteen. She had an oval face, and a figure so slender that at twenty-nine she might well have been taken for someone ten years younger... and any denizen of Castle Wickworth could have added that she had the Devil's own temper. Yet they would also have told anyone who asked that it was a temper which was roused by injustice or falsehood or acts of unthinking stupidity, not one born of vindictiveness.

Not a wife for everyone, Lady Matilda Wincaster... but the only imaginable wife for him, and a brief, icy chill went through him as he realized yet again what a deadly weapon the demon-jester had to use against him, if ever the creature realized it.

"You have that look again," she told him.

"Do I, indeed?"

"Yes, you do. And in the very middle of the day, too," she said primly.

Sir George glanced out the tent fly. The dim sun of Shaakun was sliding towards the west, already half entrapped in the uppermost branches of the spindly trees on that side of the encampment, and he looked back at his wife.

"It's well past midday," he disagreed calmly.

"Not by more than an hour, at the most," she replied. "And what about Edward?"

"He and his cronies won't be back from their current fishing hole for hours," he said confidently.

"Perhaps not. But he's not the only one likely to come searching for you, now is he?"

"No, but he is the one most likely to manage to come bursting in unannounced."

"Oh, and so you can be confident Father Timothy won't drop by to discuss Elisabeth Goodthorne's latest indiscretion? Or that Sir Richard and Walter won't decide that this is the very evening you need to decide how to reorganize the mounted men-at-arms? Or Rolf and Dafydd won't—"

"No, but I can be confident that if I tell the sentry to inform any or all of them that I am... otherwise occupied they'll leave us in peace," he told her with a slow smile.

"Shocking! I am shocked that such thoughts could divert you from the requirements of your duty, My Lord!"

"Blame it on those garments our `Commander' has provided you, and not on any weakness on my part," he suggested, and she laughed like a flurry of silver harp notes. He supposed a proper husband should still find the tight-fitting, one-piece garment horrifyingly immodest and forbid his lady wife to display herself in public so revealingly clad. But the truth was that that shockingly immodest garment suited her tall, slender shapeliness amazingly well. Not all the women attached to the company were equally fortunate, although by now all of them had been forced to more or less adjust to it, since they had no option. But Sir George had decided, after a deplorably easy tussle with his conscience, that this was one innovation of the demon-jester's with which he wholeheartedly agreed.

"And what, My Lord, did you have in mind to occupy yourself with, if I might ask?" she demanded.

"Of course you may ask, My Lady," he told her with a grave courtesy only slightly undermined by the twinkle in his eyes. "However, I believe, all things being considered, that it would probably be simpler for me to demonstrate rather than attempt to explain."

"Would it indeed?" she purred.

"Oh, yes," he told her softly, rising and walking around the chessboard towards her. "Indeed it would."

"It seems a bit different today, M'lord."

"A masterful understatement, Walter," Sir George said dryly.

The two of them stood side-by-side beneath Sir George's banner and gazed outward at the moblike "formation" of the combined tribes led by the Laahstaar and Mouthai.

It was a large, sprawling formation. Computer had provided Sir George with regularly updated estimates of the maximum size of the force the native alliance could put into the field, but as the baron gazed out over that surging sea of hostile, four-armed warriors, he wondered if Computer had gotten his sums straight this time. According to Computer's current tabulation, the eight tribes which had come together, after a fashion, under the leadership of the senior war chief of the Laahstaar counted a total of approximately forty-one thousand warriors, of whom perhaps three-fourths could actually be brought to any field of battle. That should have meant that the maximum Sir George, his men, and their own native allies, led by the Sherhai, Naamaal, and Tairnanto tribes, could face would be some thirty-one thousand.

At the moment, it looked to Sir George as if at least twice that number of broad-footed natives were busy trampling the purple-bladed grass into dust as they headed for his own position. No doubt anxiety was making him count at least some of them more than once, but it still looked like an enormous force.

Well, of course it does! he told himself. The bastards are twice our size, after all. No wonder it looks as if there are twice as many of them!

"Well, M'lord, I'd best be getting over to Sir Richard." The master of horse looked at his commander for a moment, and his smile was crooked. "Do us all a favor, and try not to get yourself killed," he suggested.

"I was planning not to," Sir George replied. "My wife would never forgive me if I let that happen."

"With all due respect to your lady wife, M'lord, it wasn't her I was thinking about just now," Skinnet replied. "I was thinking what a right mess this would be if someone else—" he jerked a surreptitious thumb in the direction of the air car hovering overhead "—was trying to hold this carnival together."

Sir George glanced upward at the air car, and grunted something between a laugh and an exasperated sigh.

"I take your point," he told his henchman. "Now take yourself over to Sir Richard and see to it that he doesn't let his enthusiasm get the better of him!"

"Don't you be worrying over that, Sir," Skinnet assured him. "Sir Richard and I, we've come to understand each other. And if we hadn't, his squire and I certainly have." The tough old veteran chuckled nastily. "If I thought we'd need it, I'd have had someone take a wee knife to his saddle girth last night."

"You're an evil man, Walter Skinnet!" Sir George scolded with a grin.

"Aye?" Skinnet seemed to consider for a moment, and then tossed his head in an armored man's equivalent of a shrug. "No doubt you're right, M'lord. Still and all, they say as Purgatory isn't all that bad a place. And think of all the dukes and earls I'll have to keep me company!"

He laughed again, and then he and his gelding trotted off towards the mounted human force clustered about Sir Richard's personal standard. Sir George would have preferred to be over there in Satan's saddle himself, but he couldn't. Officially, the army of natives about him had been assembled by the demon-jester. It was even possible that the demon-jester himself actually believed that, but Sir George and all of his troops knew better. It was the baron, working through the translating offices of Computer, who'd truly put that army together. And it was also the baron to whom everyone in that army, natives as well as humans, looked for command.

Some of the friendly tribes shared generations of mutual enmity, with blood feuds as tangled as any Scottish clan might have boasted. Common need and the scent of advantage to be gained might have brought them together temporarily, but the mere thought of finding themselves under the command of one of their cherished enemies would have been intolerable. Sir George, on the other hand, was the chosen field commander of the "godlike" demon-jester, the strange, alien champion whose vastly outnumbered troops had completely destroyed the Thoolaas' power and killed almost five thousand of their warriors for the loss of only four of his own. He knew they considered him almost as uncanny as the demon-jester himself, and that sense of awe, coupled with the fact that he came from outside their customary quarrels and struggles, made him an acceptable leader when none of their own could have been. All of which meant he had to be right here, in the center of his line, where the most senior chieftains could see him and where he could see them—and the unfolding battle—clearly.

Personally, he could have done without the role of champion or the responsibilities which came with it, but he'd had no choice but to accept them both. And so he'd spent the last month (as nearly as Father Timothy could calculate it) combining the warriors of the three principal tribes allied with the demon-jester and the smaller bands of their vassal tribes into an army that, as of this morning, counted nineteen thousand natives and his own English. It hadn't been a simple task, yet in some ways it had been far easier than he had anticipated. The native leaders were as treacherous, scheming, and unscrupulous as the leaders of any feudal army Earth had ever boasted, but they had nowhere near the experience at translating their treacherous schemes into success. Sir George hadn't spent the last fifteen years of his life rising to command in the feudal armies of England without learning to deal with much more capable plotters. The graduate of a far more sophisticated school, he'd played the various combinations skillfully off against one another.

The hardest part had been keeping the demon-jester at arm's length while he did it. The baron still was far from clear about why the demon-jester and his guild were bothering with this world in the first place. So far as he could tell, the locals had absolutely nothing that should have attracted merchants who commanded the demon-jester's marvels and "technology," and even if they did possess some unsuspected treasure, the demon-jester's roundabout way of going after it seemed particularly stupid. There had to be some reason for the mysterious guild to be involved here, even if Sir George couldn't imagine what that reason was, but if the guild was determined to control trade with the natives here, why not simply move in with their superior weapons? A small force armed with the fire weapons the dragon-man guards carried could easily have defeated an army far larger than the one currently headed in Sir George's direction... even under the demon-jester's inept command. Well, perhaps not with the demon-jester in command, he amended. After all, the demon-jester had raised military incompetence to a level of art not even a Frenchman could have rivaled.

That incompetence had become glaringly apparent the instant the demon-jester began attempting to assemble the coalition of native leaders Sir George had warned him would be required. In fairness to the demon-jester, at least some of his maladroitness probably stemmed from the fact that he'd never anticipated that such an alliance would be necessary, but that was part of the problem. Obviously, he had expected Sir George and his company to deliver a quick, salutary drubbing to the local potentate, following which he would dictate terms and speedily depart. Unfortunately, there had been no local potentate—not in any meaningful sense, at any rate—and even if there had, the severity of the "drubbing" the Thoolaas had received had completely broken their power. Apparently, it had never occurred to the demon-jester that, as a long-term policy, shattering the military capabilities of the people who were supposed to enforce one's terms upon their fellows was a self-defeating proposition.

The more Sir George had watched the demon-jester in action here on Shaakun, the more puzzled he'd become. Even leaving aside the matter of why someone with the weapons and capabilities the demon-jester possessed should require the services of swordsmen and archers, there was the question of how the demon-jester could be so incompetent at using them now that he had them. It was as if he'd begun this entire effort, from the moment he first stole the English from their own world, with only a vague, theoretical notion of just what he intended to do. For all his invincible assumption of superiority, he seemed to be learning as he went... and it was painfully evident that he was not an outstanding student.

In some ways that was good. As long as he was willing to allow someone who did know what he was doing (like one Sir George Wincaster) to get on with the practical management of the campaign, the consequences of his incompetence could be minimized. And the discovery that he required Sir George's insights and political skills as badly as he required the baron's military talents might well work in the English's favor. It certainly was working that way at the moment, at any rate, although it was also possible that it could turn into an additional danger for Sir George personally in the future. No wise general wanted to find himself completely dependent upon someone else to whom his troops looked as their true commander, and more than one such "indispensable" man had been put aside or quietly murdered when his personal stature became a threat to his superiors. On the other hand, from the beginning, the demon-jester had been completely contemptuous of the possibility that his army of stolen Englishmen could ever be a threat to him. It followed from that towering confidence that he could never visualize any way in which that army's devotion to its original commander could ever threaten him, either, and Sir George devoutly hoped that nothing would change the demon-jester's mind in that regard.

Whatever might happen in the future, though, it had been up to Sir George and Computer to identify the factions and ambitions swirling amongst their "allies" and to manipulate them to the demon-jester's advantage. And so they had, the baron thought, standing atop the ridge line at the center of his position and looking up and down the front of his combined army.

His line stretched for the best part of three quarters of a mile in either direction from where he himself stood, much further than he could have liked, despite the fact that he'd held out almost five thousand warriors as a reserve and that his main formation was as much as twelve ranks deep at what he expected to be the critical points. That was one reason Skinnet and Sir Richard were operating as a detached command on his right. Sir Bryan Stanhope, with Dafydd Howice looking over his shoulder to keep him out of mischief, had another small force of cavalry on the left, while Rolf Grayhame and Sir Anthony Fitzhugh commanded the archers in the center. Splitting his cavalry that way reduced its effectiveness, but it also let him use the detachments to stiffen the resolve and discipline of his more questionable native contingents.

Yet the dispersal of his horse was the least of his worries at the moment, for he was about to do something no human commander in history had ever done: exercise direct, personal command over an army of twenty thousand... men. Even attempting to control such a huge force would have been futile on Earth, but Sir George enjoyed certain advantages no Earth commander ever had. Computer's "overhead imagery" could watch over the entire battle with an eagle's eye, and Computer's reports would keep him updated on its course with an accuracy no scouts' reports could hope to equal. Even better, Computer could speak to him or to any of his subordinate human commanders here on the field just as easily as he could in their encampment, and he could relay orders and questions faultlessly.

Sir George wished he had thought more closely about all of the implications of that before his first battle against the Thoolaas, but he'd considered them at length since then. And he'd also come to the conclusion that he'd probably been right not to unsettle his men by adopting too much of the demon-jester's "technology" in that battle. But he'd worked with it in training exercises with them since until they were completely comfortable with it, and the fact that he no longer required trumpet signals or couriers to control his troops completely changed the nature of war. There would still be any number of things which might go wrong, but watching an entire army disintegrate from the confusion of orders gone astray wouldn't be one of them. Better yet, his ability to communicate orders instantly to any one of his subordinates turned his entire company into an extension of his own brain. He was in a position to enjoy a flexibility and sureness in execution such as no human field commander had ever known.

The inclusion of so many natives tended to dilute that flexibility to some extent, but the demon-jester's "communication relays" helped even there. There weren't as many of them as Sir George could have desired, but they had been distributed to all of the principal chiefs and most of the subchiefs, and Computer could use them to relay Sir George's translated orders to his native levies. For some reason he couldn't quite unravel, Computer had seemed a bit uneasy over that when he first proposed the idea. It wasn't anything Computer had said, but Sir George had come to recognize the reticence Computer fell back upon when one of his own questions obviously touched upon information the demon-jester had decided he was not to have. At first, he'd thought it would simply be rejected out of hand, but then Computer had changed his mind (or the demon-jester had overridden his reluctance), and Sir George wondered what could conceivably have caused Computer to hesitate even briefly. That ability to communicate quickly and surely was an absolutely priceless tactical advantage, and as one of the "god devices" the "Commander" could provide, it had also helped to cement the locals' acceptance of the demon-jester as at least semidivine.

Sir George, a good Christian for all of his faults, was just a bit uneasy at passing off the demon-jester, of all creatures, as "divine." The fact that he himself enjoyed something of the status of an archangel in their eyes bothered him even more, but not nearly enough for him to consider foregoing the advantages it offered. After all, he consoled himself, none of the natives had ever heard of Christ, so either they were all doomed to Hell anyway, or else a merciful God must have made other arrangements. And if He had, then it was most unlikely that anything Sir George could do would upset them.

He chuckled, eyes still on the steadily approaching enemy force, at the thought... and even more of Father Timothy's expression when he'd shared it with the priest. Oh well. No doubt Timothy would come up with a suitable penance eventually.

Then he shook the thought aside. The enemy was coming on much more slowly and deliberately than the Thoolaas had, but they were still drawing close enough that it was time to leave off his woolgathering and focus his attention on the matter at hand.

The opposing force was less of a mob than he'd first thought. It still boasted nothing he would have called discipline, but now that it was approaching, he could at least see what its commanders had had in mind. Two massive columns, each over a hundred warriors across, were headed roughly for the center of his own line. There must have been eight or nine thousand natives in each of those columns, and another four or five thousand had been detailed to cover the columns' flanks. The rest of the force, a solid mass of dart-throwers, was positioned between the columns, and he grimaced at the sight. There were at least seven or eight thousand of them, and this time the natives had been careful to adopt a formation which would not inhibit their fire.

Their intention was clear enough. They planned to deluge the center of his own force with javelins as they closed, then slam those twin columns through his shaken and decimated ranks like a pair of battering rams. As tactics went, it both had the virtue of simplicity and made the maximum use of their superiority in numbers. True, there was very little subtlety to it, but in Sir George's experience, subtlety was a poor substitute for overwhelming strength, anyway.

On the other hand...

"The Tairnanto are becoming restless." Computer's tenor voice was as emotionless as ever as he spoke in Sir George's ear. "Some of their subchiefs are pressing for permission to attack."

"Tell Chief Staramhan to remind them of the plan!" Sir George said sharply.

"Acknowledged," Computer replied calmly, and Sir George reached into the front of his bascinet to rub his nose irritably. All he needed was for his "allies" to revert to their normal tactics at the last moment!

There was no doubt in his mind that they would have done precisely that if left to their own devices, even though they must have known that the disparity in numbers would have led to inevitable defeat. They were even more like the French than he'd thought, in that respect, and only his "archangel" status had permitted him to break them, even imperfectly, of that gallic impulsiveness. Unfortunately, he couldn't be certain that they would remain broken of it.

He swung himself into the saddle and took his reins from Snellgrave. For a moment, he considered riding down the line to Staramhan's position to make his point in person, but he banished the temptation. It would take him several minutes, even on Satan, to get there, and those were minutes he could not afford to waste. He had a much better view of the approaching enemy from here than he would from Staramhan's location on his left. Besides, riding over to quell one trouble spot would only ensure that he was out of position to deal with any others as they arose. Better to rely upon Computer's ability to relay his commands and stay where he was.

This relying on superior communications took some getting used to, he thought with a snort. He must remember not to let old habits betray him into casting away the advantages they bestowed.

The enemy force's pace was increasing. They were still too far away for him to make out individual voices, and even if he'd been able to do that, he would have been unable to understand what they were saying. But he didn't need to be able to hear individuals or to understand the natives' language to know what they were shouting. The deep, guttural rhythm of a chanted war cry rolled back along the lengths of the columns, the war drums thudded harder, louder, faster, and the entire mass of the opposing army accelerated quickly.

There was a new note to their war cries, one of what he rather thought was contempt. They were jeering at his own troops, taunting them for standing their ground rather than charging to meet them as proper warriors would. A small stir went through the ranks of his own army, but the chiefs and subchiefs stilled it quickly, and Sir George permitted himself a nasty smile as his formation settled back. His allies were holding their ranks after all, and that meant the oncoming natives were about to discover how much more dangerous than warriors soldiers were.

The enemy moved from the long, steady lope with which the natives normally covered ground into a full run, hurling themselves forward, and Sir George felt himself tighten internally as a cloud of javelins went up from their dart-throwers.

"Shields now, Computer!" he shouted, and all along his formation, the large, rectangular pavises he had introduced went up like protective roofs.

The baron's native allies had protested vociferously when he first introduced the concept of shields. None of them had liked the idea of giving up half of their hand-to-hand weapons for what was basically a useless piece of wood. But he'd insisted, and when he demonstrated the reason for his insistence, much of the protest had faded into silence. There were still reservations, but they were prepared to give the concept a try... especially when Computer reported to them the number of dart-throwers the enemy had managed to amass.

Now the slender javelins came sleeting down like lethal rain, and Sir George heard the rattle and thud as their bronze heads slammed into the interposed shields. Screams went up as some of the javelins found a home in flesh and bone, but the vast majority of them were intercepted and bounced harmlessly aside or embedded themselves in the shields.

The rain of fire from the enemy dart-throwers seemed to hesitate for a moment as the unprecedented shields blunted their attack, and Sir George smiled again. Pavises were more common at Earthly sieges, where they were used to protect archers against return fire, than in the field. But that was because human archers required both hands to use their bows, and so each pavise had to be held by someone else or else mounted permanently in place on a supporting framework. The natives of Shaakun, on the other hand, had four arms each, and so they could shield themselves and still have two hands free for weapons. They might have felt under-armed compared to someone with weapons in all four hands, but they seemed to be getting over that, Sir George thought. They were shouting just as loudly as their foes, now, and most of what they were bellowing sounded like insults directed at the enemy dart-throwers.

The rest of the enemy army howled furious war cries and lunged forward, but Sir George had expected that. As the twin columns came on, he barked another order, and his own dart-throwers sprang into action. Because they, too, carried pavises, their rate of fire was lower than that of their opponents, but despite the smaller total size of his army, Sir George actually had more missile troops than the other side did, for he'd recruited them ruthlessly from every tribe. It hadn't been easy, because the locals were as prejudiced in favor of hand-to-hand combat as French knights were, which explained the low proportion of dart-throwers he had initially observed. The combination of javelins and throwing sticks was the customary hunting weapon of Shaakun, and most of any tribe's warriors had at least some skill with it, yet they stubbornly insisted on meeting their enemies one to one.

Sir George had solved that problem by being even more stubborn than they were, and in the end, over half his total native force consisted of dart-throwers. Many of them had insisted upon bringing along axes or flails as backup weapons, but each of them also had at least one full quiver of javelins, and now they sent a lethal cloud of darts back at their enemies.

Despite the fact that the other side's dart-throwers could use all four arms, and thus could maintain a considerably higher rate of fire, the contest was brutally uneven. Sir George's missile troops swung their pavises aside and exposed themselves only when they actually launched one of their own javelins. Their targets, on the other hand, were totally unprotected, and the oncoming columns began to slow as the warriors in the lead ranks stumbled over the javelin-sprouting bodies of their fellows.

Half of Sir George's dart-throwers concentrated on the heads of the columns. The other half sent their javelins directly back at the opposing dart-throwers, and the enemy's fire faltered as the lethal shafts showered down upon them. The air was clotted with javelins, war cries, dust, and the shrieks of wounded and dying natives, and Sir George strained his eyes to see through the dust of thousands of charging feet.

"Computer! Tell Rolf to concentrate on the right-hand column!"

"Acknowledged," the passionless voice responded, and a moment later something twanged like half a thousand discordant harps. There were far fewer human archers than native dart-throwers, but their rate of fire was higher, their range was longer, they were more accurate, and the heavier armor the demon-jester's "industrial modules" had provided them with was almost completely proof against the incoming javelins.

Their arrows slashed into the right-hand enemy column, the one which had been least disordered by the fire of Sir George's dart-throwers, and the consequences were immediate. What had been a steady tide of casualties became a flood, and the entire column stumbled to a halt in a tangle of dead and wounded bodies. It hung there for a moment, the decimated survivors of its lead ranks standing shocked and confused, knee-deep in shoals of writhing bodies, and in that moment it was lost. Sir George had seen it on a dozen other fields—the instant when the belief that victory was within one's grasp suddenly transformed itself into the conviction of defeat—and he recognized it now.

The column hung on for a few more moments, wilting as the terrible waves of arrows and javelins slashed through it, and then, suddenly, it disintegrated. It didn't fall back, didn't retreat. It simply... came apart. One moment it was a solid mass of warriors; the next, it was a fleeing mob of individual refugees, each seeking his own safety in flight.

"Tell Rolf to shift to the dart-throwers!" Sir George barked. "And instruct Walter and Sir Richard to advance their wing and take the Mouthai flank guard from the right. If they can, I want them to circle completely around to the enemy's rear and come at them from the back!"

"Acknowledged."

Sir George heard Computer's acknowledgment, but he hardly noticed. The right column had been shattered and driven into flight, but the left one was still coming on. He would have preferred to rake it with arrows as he had the other, but the attackers hadn't hit the exact center of his line. He'd placed his archers there to receive the assault, but the way the enemy had slipped to Sir George's left meant his bowmen were concentrated too far to his right, and a slight rise would have shielded the oncoming natives from much of Grayhame's fire. Better to throw the longbows' weight into completing the destruction of the enemy's missile capability and let his allies, stiffened by Sir Bryan and his armored foot and horse, deal with the column.

Javelins continued to slam into the oncoming natives up to the very last moment, and the dreadful weight of fire tore huge holes in their formation, but they came on anyway, carried by their battle frenzy and howling their war cries. The rows of pointed wooden stakes and the thickly-seeded caltrops which had been strewn among them slowed the attackers, but still they came on. The warriors in their lead ranks absorbed stakes and caltrops alike with their own bodies, as their predecessors had absorbed the javelins, and at last the survivors were able to close with their foes.

But Sir George's waiting allies were more than ready for them. Unlike the charging column, they were unshaken, and they scented victory in the blood. They'd taken their own losses from the javelin exchange, but those losses, however painful, were a pittance compared to what they might have been. What they would have been without the pavises their human commander had insisted they use. Even the most stubborn among them realized that, and they also knew their enemies were already more than half broken.

Many of them discarded their shields, now that it had come down to the melee. The dart-throwers dropped their throwing sticks and snatched up axes, and Sir George heard a gleeful howl go up from his allies as they hurled themselves to meet what was left of the left-hand column. The enemy's dart-throwers might have taken advantage of the sudden disappearance of the shields which had so blunted their own attacks, but they were no longer capable of taking advantage of anything. Those of Sir George's native troops who weren't part of the melee continued to hammer them with javelins of their own, but it was the steady, pounding rain of clothyard shafts which truly broke them. It wasn't even that the arrows were more accurate or more destructive than the javelins flaying their ranks. They were more accurate and destructive, but that was almost beside the point. What truly mattered was that they were the emblem, the symbol, of the strange, two-armed demons who had completely changed the way war was supposed to be.

The right-hand column had already disintegrated. Now the dart-throwers began to follow suit, shedding individual warriors, first in trickles, and then in floods. For all their courage, the tribesmen lacked the discipline to stand under the vicious pounding, and the entire dart-thrower force came apart in turn.

The left-hand column was still in action, but its front was splintered and broken. Almost half of the total attacking army had already been driven from the field, and the flattened, blood-slick grass was heaped and mounded with the bodies of warriors who would never again be driven from any field. The conviction of defeat was upon the column, and as more and more of Sir George's allies swarmed forward to meet it, it found itself enveloped and outnumbered. The column formation which had given it so much weight as it charged forward now hamstrung its ability to defend itself, for those at the center of the formation could only stand there, unable to advance or retreat, while their more numerous enemies cut their way inward from both its flanks.

And then Sir Richard Maynton and Walter Skinnet completed their enemies' ruin. The handful of human cavalry were an armored spearhead of steel, the wicked tip of a sweeping charge of over three thousand of their native allies, almost as fast on foot as the humans were mounted. The charge had swept out to Sir George's right and then, at his relayed orders, hooked back and in, sweeping around the troops the enemy had put out to cover his left flank to take what was left of the dart-throwers in the rear and then thunder onward into the rear of the one remaining enemy column.

Sir George watched that column fly apart, like a bag of meal thrown into the air on a heavy wind. It shattered into thousands of individual, fleeing warriors, and he knew the battle was won. It was not yet over, for there were still thousands of enemies upon the field, and some of them would stand and fight to the death. His allies would lose many more warriors before they swept up all the pieces, and his own men would take casualties, as well. But the outcome was no longer in doubt, and he allowed himself the luxury of a brief, fervent prayer of thanks.

Then he opened his eyes once more, straightened his shoulders, and nodded to young Snellgrave.

"Let's be going," he said, and sent Satan trotting forward to join the slaughter.