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the once proud, invincible Horde of the Death dropped helmets, weapons and
armor, broke, and fled toward their flaming homes. September was trying to get
Hunnar's attention. The knight finally calmed down enough to listen.
"Your tane-Anst did his job well, what? Will he have enough sense to watch for
those who escape?
They're scared and many are weaponless, but hysterical humans, and prob-ably
Iran, have little regard for their own lives. Makes for difficult fighting."
"Tane-Anst is a good soldier," said Hunnar thoughtfully. "He'll take care to
keep his men together."
Finally Ethan stood and had a look at the retreating snob of surviving nomads.
"This tane-Anst only took about six hundred men with him, Skua. Won't they be
badly outnum-bered by these?"
"No group of well-organized, disciplined soldiers is ever outnumbered by a
mob, Ethan. Remember that."
Ethan turned and looked down into the harbor again. The ice was literally
blotted out by a vast array of twisted, broken furry forms and a small lake of
rapidly freezing blood. Hunnar came up to him. The knight was trembling now
and Ethan thought he saw a little of what September had meant reflected in
Hunnar's face. After hundreds of years of helpless genuflection, reaction to
what he and his people had done today was beginning to sink in.
"The Landgrave watches from his rooms and can see well for himself what has
been wrought this hour," said the knight, his voice slightly shaky. "I go to
give him official word of his troops
... and to remind him of his promise to you, my friends. Will you come?"
"No, this is your moment, Hunnar," said September.
The knight exchanged breath and shoulder clasps with both of them, then
departed at a run into the castle. September strolled to the edge of the
parapet and looked down into the harbor. The fighting had degenerated into a
bloodcurdling mopping-up operation, with Sofoldian soldiers and militia
ex-amining each corpse and methodically slitting the throat of any who lived.
"It may not be a gesture of the morally highest," he began, "but for better or
worse, by introducing gunpowder here we've brought a whole new kind of warfare
to dais decidedly bellicose people. And you know?" He turned and glanced at
Ethan. "Try as I might, I can't convince myself we've done a bad thing."
"Bad or not," replied Ethan drily, dabbing at his cut cheek, "it's always one
of humanity's first gifts, isn't it?"
There was a ball to end all balls in the great castle that evening. It served
to cover the fact that many of Sofold's finest young men had passed to the
Warm Regions that day. Sadly, the brave and methodical tane-Anst had been
among them, felled as he personally led a squad in pursuit of just one more
fleeing raft.
At least three quarters of the barbarian fleet had been burnt or captured,
together with a province's ransom in ar-bor, weapons, and treasure. And those
ships which had es-caped had not departed overcrowded.
To everyone's intense disappointment, Sag-yanak had been among the successful
escapees.
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The Scourge's power, however, was forever broken. From a near god, the Death
had been reduced to simply another an-noying pirate, whose strength had been
scattered with the wind.
By way of partial compensation, the head of Olox the butcher was prominently
on display atop a jeweled pike at the dinner table. It was joined by the
crania of assorted com-panion warriors.
The little knot of humans sat in an honored position, far up the table near
the Landgrave himself.
But they'd seen too much blood to fully enter into the merriment of the night.
Only September, sitting next to him, seemed able to throw him-self into the
spirit of the occasion with honest gusto.
Ethan stared curiously across the table at Hellespont du Kane. One of the
wealthiest men in the arm. Yet he still wore the same expression Ethan had
observed hack on the Antares, the day they'd had their private destinies
inextri-cably altered by a pair of indecisive kidnappers. Nor was his appetite
affected. He downed. a delicately carved slice of roast with the same
precision he doubtless employed in the finest restaurants of Terra or Hivehom.
Ethan felt an urge to put a fist in that robotic face. For a wild moment he
thought du Kane might really be a clever robot, and that the flesh-and-blood
du Kane was somewhere else, perfectly comfortable except for a mild upset at
the loss of one valuable piece of machinery. It would explain several of the
odder things about the industrialist.
But no. He may have been robot-like in some respects, but he was definitely
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