Her eyes had virtually no color, just a tint of pale yellow to the irises. Those eyes, small in a twice-scarred face, roved her surroundings without appearing to move. Her bronze-colored features were what men would call handsome, rather than pretty. Not that she lost sleep wondering what men thought of her looks. Her hair was the red of rotting berries and hacked short. Another scar was visible across the rear of her skull, a line of white in the red.

It had cut through her helmet, a blow from a hulking swordsman, a death stroke. She had tumbled over the battlefield ground, rolling back onto her feet, and everything she saw then was a roaring blackness ... everything except the face of the giant as he clomped toward her. She had snatched a throwing knife from one of her boots and launched it. It entered his gaping mouth, skewered his tongue, and poked its barbed tip out of the back of his throat. She'd never learned who had carried her away from that field. She had woken in a surgeon's tent, her scalp being sewn.

No beds, no aisles, just mounds. The boy picked his zigzagging way nimbly, into darkness that now only hinted at the human shapes on the floor. She was alert.

One stirring heap, on her right, blanket rocking back and forth, rhythmically, too steadily—a step away, the boy passing it...

She pivoted. One boot heel came down on the right upper arm, just above the elbow. She drove the toe of her other boot into the mound's side, a toe reinforced by a wedge of iron under the kidskin. A rib broke under the blanket.

If it was just another mud-brained addict, the proprietors wouldn't care.

In the dark, low and ahead, she heard, "No sword." Which the hisser evidently thought meant she was weaponless. So be it.

She delivered another kick, one that would immobilize the lungs for a while, and hopped off. She caught only the vaguest glimpse of the boy vanishing, but where he'd been there was now a charging figure. Blade in fist.

Brute attack. It might have worked in the daylight, where the victim would see the armed shape looming and lunging and then freeze in fear. It might have worked here, in this stinking dimness, against someone who didn't have a decade of combat experience.

She snapped her left hand outward, fingers stiff and spread. The sound of sliding metal rang on the

foul air. The weight of her glove was redistributed.

Her right hand jabbed forward and punched the hand that held the knife, a hard painful shot, distracting the charger. But it was her left hand, of course, darting and singing a few thin notes of metallic mayhem as it shot through the air, that did the job. The two prongs—fine, solid, as sharp as anything she ever carried—were extended from the back of her fist. They each tore away a patch of her attacker's face. She did all this during another pivot that got her out of the way of the pouncing, bleeding, screaming figure that hurtled past and onto several of the mounds.

Into a crouch, sinewy legs splayed. Her hooks dribbled. The figure under the blanket to her right was gasping in excruciating pain.

Noises ahead still. The one who'd hissed 'Wo sword." Maybe there were others. Her charger was still screaming on the floor behind her, high-pitched, sounding nearly insane. She must have hit an eye. Stupid Isthmuser.

Her right hand flipped a blade up from her boot. It was a flat, thin slab of hammered metal, with no hilt. Made for throwing. Her fingers balanced it. She was holding her breath, listening to the dark, waiting to see what followed.

The boy reappeared, a little grey smudge in the robe he wore, a smooth face that would be inscrutable even in the best light. In some other part of the cavernous room foot-steps retreated, stumbling. The mounds, even those the charger had blundered onto, remained silent, making only their irregular twitches and jerks.

Radstac slotted the throwing knife back into her boot, but kept her glove's prongs extended. The specialist who had made the contraption had lived in a village nearby her home city of Hynсsy. He was a middle-yeared man, and he was dying, consumed from within by a corruption that ate the meat of him, leaving him a sack of yellowing flesh. He couldn't move about without the assistance of others, and so chose to rarely move from the worktable where he had invented her glove. She had envisioned the device, had struggled to explain it. It had, after all, come to her in a violently vivid dream of combat and so wavered in her mind.

The man had listened, eyes serene and protruding from a shriveling face. She talked, describing the imagined weapon she wanted this man to make. Every time she ran out of words, he made her carry on, until she was hoarse, until her vision of the dream device smeared into nonsense. Then he took her money, sent her away, called her back on the day he had promised to, and presented her with the glove. She had stayed on in that quaint little village for the two additional days the man needed to die. She wanted to attend the funeral rite. She had also entered his house by night to satisfy herself that nothing about the glove's workings had been committed to paper. She needn't have worried. The craftsman had never drawn a design in his life.

Radstac stared at the boy's dim outlines, letting herself breathe again, the breaths even and calm. She nodded and, leaving the blood-wet prongs extended, followed him farther.

SHE HAD DONE the smart thing by coming north for this war. She was a mercenary, and here was a great opportunity for work. The economical thing—next on her list of personal statutes—would be to find herself inexpensive lodgings. That could wait a watch or two, though.

She peeled the gummy, deep blue leaf away from its wax paper, bit away a third of it, and returned the rest to a secret pocket beneath her leather armor. The initial sensation was a profound ache in her teeth. Addicts—the truly lost ones, like those living underneath blankets in that users' den—had their teeth professionally removed or worried them out themselves one by one. They sucked their mansid leaves, occasionally gummed food, and avoided the light.

Weaklings.

Radstac clamped her molars together as the discomfort peaked and passed. She paused to lean on a wall, propping herself carefully, staying on her feet as the wave of gravity struck. She was pulled, compressed, elongated, resettled. Like the ache to her teeth, it passed. Equilibrium restored. Improved.

The street around her started to make sense.

She pushed off, walking her prowling walk. Petgrad was well populated, and its streets didn't seem to

tire. Some distance ahead, towers loomed. Squared shafts of stone and mortar, capped with decorative top pieces of metal. They were impressive, she admitted. No point in denigrating this city unnecessarily. She was here to sell her sword. With luck, she would soon be defending this place against... who was it? ... Yes, the Felk.

They were the aggressors in this; so went the news that the traders had brought back to the Southsoil. Radstac preferred fighting on the side of the antagonist, but here that was impractical. The city-state of Felk—and even the newly captured Felk territories—were simply out of easy reach. She had come to Petgrad by buying her way onto a wagon of like-minded Southsoil mercenaries who'd heard the sweet call of war. She'd made no friends during her travels, though one night she had fairly raped the wagon's hired driver, a bashful blond lad who'd shed his trousers at knifepoint, then done everything else quite willingly—and enthusiastically.

The aroma of war was on the southerly wind. Those Felk were sweeping southward. It was war like she had never seen in her lifetime. War as the Isthmus hadn't known it for hundredwinters, if ever. No feud this, no petty strife. The Felk had absolute conquest in mind. Any fool could see that.