All the Cutters except the Seeker formed into a column, quick-timing down the night-empty street in a harsh clatter of leather and hobnails on pavement. The Corwinite priest stayed a moment and raised his arm until it pointed at the two Dunedain, where they should have been invisible in the blackness. ?There-is-no-escape-for-one-they-have-touched.?

Mary nodded.?Uh-oh,? she said, very softly. ?I know what uh-oh means,? Ritva replied.?It means we?re fucked .? A tile grated under a foot behind them, where the grapnel holding their climbing rope was hooked into the roof?s gutter. ?Kill,? the High Seeker said.

Then he turned and walked after the troopers of the Sword of the Prophet. The two Dunedain whirled, as the trio of men swung up onto the edge of the roof. Curved knives gleamed in their hands, and the moonlight glittered from the steel and from eyes empty of humanity. Those eyes blinked in perfect unison. They weren?t Seekers, just Corwinite soldiers of the Sword, but something of the red-robed magus was there in those blank faces. A nullity that was less than emptiness, one that hungered for existence and hated it at the same time.

It?s as if they?re contagious, somehow.

Ritva had a sudden flash of memory. Long ago she?d been on her belly behind a fallen fir tree in the mountains east of Mithrilwood, watching a pair of scrub jays feeding their nestlings. Something had made her turn her head, and a rattlesnake as long as her forearm had been there, behind the same sun-warmed log. It had turned its long patterned head and looked into her eyes. Looking into the eyes of the Church Universal and Triumphant?s men was like that…

Except that she had a feeling that if their eyes stayed locked long enough the same reptile gaze would be on both ends. ?Varda and Manwe aid me!? Ritva said. Then:?Im suu ei thiach men!?

Sweat suddenly drenched her, but she felt better: I fart in your general direction might not be as dignified as a call on the Lord and Lady, but it helped.

Beside her Mary was still, motionless with something beyond Ranger training, as if she was once more in the Seeker?s grip as she had been that day the eye was cut out of her head. The bow in Ritva?s hands came up. If she had thought about the action it would have stopped, but she forced her mind not to consider it. Ten thousand hours of practice had graven the movement into brain and bone and muscle, as much as breathing or walking. There was the slightest creak, as yew and horn and sinew bent and flexed and stretched. ?Kill,? they whispered through identical smiles, their voices overlapping so that the sound was a sibilant blur:?Kill/kill/kill/ Kkkiiiillll.?

And attacked. Their movements were jerky, but perfect and unerring on the irregular surface of the curved tiles. Behind them something moved, planes of shining jet that receded into infinity, as if constructs greater than worlds squeezed down to interact with the tiny space of the planet, of this rooftop in one place and time. The soot-covered laurel-leaf arrowhead touched the cutout through the riser of her recurve, right above the black-gloved knuckle of her left hand. The fingers on the bowstring seemed locked, but she breathed out and let the waxed linen cord roll off the pads.

Snap.

The string lashed at the bracer on the inside of her left forearm. Ach ingly slow, the arrow began its flight; she could see the way the fletching rippled, and how the slight curve in the fashion the feathers were set to the cedarwood made the whole spin as it flew. She couldn?t be seeing it move; the distance was less than thirty feet, and the shaft would be traveling at two hundred feet per second. In this darkness it should be a blurred streak at most.

The central attacker?s body flexed loosely as the point approached, as if he was moving backward even before it struck. When it did he swayed like a whip being snapped, and looked down for an instant at the narrow thirty-inch shaft transfixing him just beside the breastbone.

He?s not going to stop, Ritva knew.

Then he did, but the fixed smile on his face did not alter as blood run neled out his nose and hung in threads from his lips. ? Not-yet-to-rule-so-many,? he said.? Soon. We-will-be-abroad-and-loose.?

And collapsed forward. The others continued their herky-jerky advance. Ritva bounded back frantically, her soft elf-boots gripping at the roof ridge as she dropped her bow and the longsword hissed out in the two-handed grip. ?Lacho Calad!? she cried.

There was a wheeze of relief in it too, for Mary was moving as well, the ball and hook whirling on the ends of the length of fine chain she unwrapped from her waist. ?Drego Morn!?

Her sister completed the Ranger war cry. Flame Light! Flee Night!

TheSwordoftheLady

?Sure, and I don?t think your Majesty should be unguarded,? Rudi said, shifting uneasily with the prickling feeling along his spine.

Kate Heasleroad came back into the room at that instant, and Rudi breathed a sigh of relief, at least in the privacy of his mind. Her husband looked at her with annoyance, as if he?d been hoping she?d stay in the nursery. And he?d been dropping very pointed hints that Odard and the Mackenzie should leave, once his genuine interest in the conversation about heraldry had died.

And not hinting that Matti should leave, Rudi noted. Sure, and it will be a great inconvenience if I must snap the man?s neck after all the trouble we?ve gone to, conciliating him. Still, better than leaving it for Matti to do. Hmmm. Given surprise we could probably cut our way to the docks… ?Tommie?s sleeping soundly now, darling,? Kate said.?Annette?s with him.?

These rooms were part of the Emergency Coordinator?s chambers; in the terms Matti?s people used, where the Count of Dubuque usually had his apartments, that worthy being turned out now for his liege-lord?s convenience.

Or his lord?s convenience and his own inconvenience, he thought wryly, nodding pleasantly at Kate.

One of the ways Sandra Arminger dealt with difficult vassals or ones she suspected of disloyalty was to visit them. With the whole court in train, until the hospitality drove them to the brink of bankruptcy, swallowing the resources that might otherwise be spent seditiously. The best part of that jest was that they couldn?t do anything but profess delight at the honor and spend on feasts, tournaments and entertainers as if money were water. Juniper Mackenzie had been heard to say that Sandra knew more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in a bucket of cream.

Rudi didn?t think Anthony was bright enough to come up with that idea on his own, but…

But it is interesting to see that another ruler could stumble on something of the sort by accident. I?ll have to be keeping that in mind, if Edain is determined I?m to be High King.

He tried to make the thought light, as if it was a joke, but he had a sinking feeling that was what the Powers-some of them, at least-really had in mind.

And I was afraid of the burden of being Chief of the Mackenzies alone! Hmmmm, though. A High King of Montival would have to visit about much of the time, wouldn?t he? With so many different peoples, and them separated by wilderness and of such different customs and Gods and laws, he?d have to show himself. But not so as to be a burden

… unless there was some bad and wicked person of note that called for it… later, later. ?And a charming young lad your Tommie is,? Rudi said, with a smile that was sincere enough.

Children that age usually were, like puppies or kittens; it was how they made people put up with the nuisance and hard work they entailed. Rudi hoped the boy would have a more normal childhood than his father, and come out of it more of a man-not to mention more of a ruler.