The practice ground was outside the palisade, on a broad, flat stretch of meadow that had been trampled to gluey mud. A bad surface for comfort, but one which accurately reflected the sort of filthy conditions in which wars had been fought from time immemorial. There were fir posts set up at three-meter intervals around the perimeter; many of them had been burned in half.
Hansen was already pleased with his new armor. His displays were crisper by an order of magnitude than those of Villiers' suit, and the limbs moved in response to Hansen's movements without nearly as much lag time.
Of course, getting there and being able to see what he was doing were by no means half the battle.
No other warriors were on the practice ground, but Hansen and Malcolm had attracted a scattering of spectators, both freemen and slaves, on their walk from the hall. A female slave called an offer that Hansen didn't quite catch, but the laughter of the others hinted at the nature of the words.
"All right," said Malcolm. "Let's make sure we're both on practice setting, shall we?" The words had buzzing undertones as they reached Hansen through the speaker in Malcolm's helmet and the headphones in Hansen's.
The veteran's right gauntlet sprouted an arc. He turned and slashed. The weapon scarred a post to the heartwood but didn't blast it apart the way Hansen had seen trees disintegrated during the battle.
He could guess, but: "What's the codeword on your suits?" he asked.
"Huh?" Malcolm responded like a bumblebee. "Practice, of course. I thought that was standard everywhere?"
"Practice," Hansen said, then, "Cut." His arc sizzled into the post, cross-cutting Malcolm's mark to within a degree of perpendicular.
He smiled. Malcolm cut at his head.
Hansen hadn't expected the attack—my fault, his mind cursed as he threw himself backward and tried to raise his arc weapon to block Malcolm's. He didn't succeed in either attempt. Malcolm's arc slipped under Hansen's flailing guard and cut across his neck joint.
Hansen's armor froze. His display vanished and left him in blackness lighted only by the afterimages on his retinas.
He wasn't dead. He could feel his heart beating in claustrophobic fear.
"Well," demanded Malcolm's distorted voice, "reset your suit."
Ah. . . . "Reset," said Hansen, hoping that was the key word—though he was becoming increasingly impressed by the flexibility of the suit's artificial intelligence. Light dawned—literally. Hansen's display flooded him with images of morning. He saw Malcolm waiting a pace back, arms akimbo.
Hansen flexed his left gauntlet and cried, "Cut!" as he lunged. Malcolm shifted and slashed down at his attacker, but he hadn't been expecting Hansen to strike from the left. Hansen's thrust struck home at the veteran's hip joint.
There was a shower of sparks. Hansen's arc snuffed unexpectedly, but Malcolm's suit went dull and his empty gauntlet quivered to a halt in mid-stroke.
Hansen had fallen into a three-point stance. He pushed himself erect and backed a step, waiting for Malcolm to reset his armor. "Cut," he muttered, flexing his right hand to be ready for the next attack.
This was work, was heavy exercise. His armor weighed over a hundred kilos. Though that wasn't dead weight so long as it was powered up, inertia gave the suit the resistance of a brick wall for the instant before its servos took over the work from Hansen's muscles.
A long arc twinkled from Malcolm's gauntlet. In practice mode, the discharges were at only a fraction of war power, and interlocks cut off the weapon as soon as its touch had shut down an opponent's armor. It was at least as safe as fighting with buttoned epees, though no doubt accidents could happen.
And it was a good time to explore the capacities of the armor itself.
"Display energy levels," Hansen ordered, wondering what the artificial intelligence would make of the command—and delighted to see Malcolm's suit not as painted steel but as a mosaic in which the visual spectrum mapped electrical activity across the surface of the suit.
The arc sprouting from the veteran's right hand pulsed from indigo through violet. The gauntlet itself was a bright blue, while the remainder of Malcolm's limbs and torso rippled mostly in the yellow and green. The helmet peak was nearly orange, and another orange blotch wavered across the plastron generally at mid-chest level.
It looked like . . .
"Off!" Hansen said, and the hot spot on Malcolm's armor vanished as soon as Hansen's weapon did.
God almighty! Malcolm's artificial intelligence tracked Hansen's arc—and raised the defensive charge of the spot the AI thought most at risk.
The veteran's knee joints streaked orange as power fed to the servos. Malcolm started a lunge but Hansen, alerted by the display, drove forward to anticipate the attack. His left hand slid along Malcolm's right wrist and forearm, and his right hand speared toward the veteran's throat.
Forgot the arc.
"Cut!" and the crackle of harmless sparks ended almost as soon as they'd begun. Malcolm fell over as his circuit breakers tripped. His suit blurred into the dull red background.
Hansen stepped back and reformatted to standard optical display. He was taking deep, gasping breaths. His suit's air system strained between each wheezing exhalation to clear condensate from the displays.
The surface of Malcolm's armor quivered as the veteran reset it. There was no definable change from a suit that was powered up to cold one, but the difference in appearance was as great as that between a living man and a fresh corpse.
Malcolm rose to a four-limbed crouch but paused there. "How did you do that?" he asked.
"It's the display," Hansen explained. His suit's steel casing vibrated every time he spoke. "Look, let's stop this for a minute and I'll show—"
Malcolm gave a brief nod of his armored head. The spectators were turning their heads. Hansen turned also and saw the figure in gleaming black armor striding down the path from the settlement.
"Show me what you can do, stranger," the figure called.
Ordered. Small—as much shorter than Hansen as he was shorter than Malcolm. Wasn't in the battle the day before. A battlesuit of exceptional quality. . . .
"If you wish it, milord," Hansen said deliberately as the black figure stepped through the line of posts that marked the edge of the practice ground.
"Not 'milord,' you fool!" the figure's harsh mechanical voice snarled. An arc sprang from the right gauntlet.
"Display energy levels," Hansen murmured. The figure before him shimmered in cold blue. This was going to be . . .
"Yes, milady," he said aloud. "Krita."
Instead of striding toward Hansen, Krita's hand twisted and shot her arc across the four meters separating them. He didn't have time to think about defense before his displays went dark and left him with his own moist breath.
"Reset," Hansen muttered. "Cut."
He spread his fingers, giving him a broad fan of spluttering discharge. Krita waited, spurting and shrinking the weapon vertically from her right hand. At its peak, the discharge fountained ten meters in the air.
A very good suit indeed.
Hansen stepped forward. Krita's weapon lashed down at him. He caught the blow and shrank his own arc to a tight ball as he took another step—
The arc from Krita's left gauntlet slashed across his knees.
Falling in a dead battlesuit was very similar to being rolled off the porch in a garbage can. It wasn't likely to be fatal. . . .
"Reset. Cut."
Default setting on Hansen's display was standard optical. He didn't bother to switch it over to show energy levels; Krita's battlesuit operated at such a high order that there'd been no significant change in the display when she attacked.
Although—
Hansen rose to a crouch and lunged forward as if to tackle his opponent around the knees. He thought that by leading with his helmet, the focus of his electronic armor, he might be able to get close enough to use his own arc effectively.
A contemptuous sweep of Krita's hand swatted him down. His scalp and the back of his neck tingled, even at the arc's reduced charge level. Hansen grounded face first.
He squatted. His display was fuzzy. He wiped the faceplate of his helmet with his steel palm.
Blobs of mud dribbled from his gauntlet like raindrops blowing across the windshield of a moving vehicle. His display cleared. The suit's electronic defenses worked on fouling; they just took a little time.
Krita laughed. She stood three meters from Hansen with her hands on her hips.
Hansen had cut his chin, and he thought his nose was bleeding.
"Cut," he said, flexing his right hand. He snapped the long arc across his opponent's ankles.
Mud hissed away as steam and dust. Krita laughed again, without moving.
"Off," Hansen said and lifted the palm of his left gauntlet toward the woman's throat as he charged.
At this range, a bolt might or might not have been effective enough to end the duel; one had, after all, shut down Taddeusz' battlesuit under similar conditions. Krita'd probably watched Hansen kill Zieborn; certainly she'd had an opportunity to finger the hole the stranger burned through Zieborn's armor and life. . . .
The threat shocked her into a defensive response: limbs rigid, arc weapons shut down; her AI concentrating all the suit's energies on the point the bolt would strike.
There was no bolt. Hansen hit the woman with a crash like anvils meeting, gripping her by both wrists. Even at this range the black battlesuit was probably proof against Hansen's arc—
But his mass and the momentum of his rush carried her backward a half-step until Hansen twisted and threw her over his knee. Krita skidded a meter in slick mud, her limbs flailing.
Hansen stepped back and let his arms hang at his sides. There was no way he could prevent Taddeusz' daughter from taking whatever revenge she chose, but by standing braced he could at least keep from falling over again when she tripped out his circuit breakers.
Krita got up. Her suit streamed mud as if she were under a firehose.
Black fury. . . .
She turned and stamped back toward the palisade. One of the fir posts was in her path. Instead of changing direction, she lashed out with an arc that exploded the base of the post into blazing splinters. A patch of mud hardened to scorched adobe.
Malcolm split his armor and twisted his torso free. "My, my, my," he murmured, watching Krita go.
Hansen opened his own suit also. The outside air turned his sweat into a cold bath. His breath rattled through his open mouth; he hoped his nose wasn't broken.
"My, my," Malcolm repeated. He looked at Hansen. "You know," he said wonderingly. "I think you deserve each other."
"Why wasn't she fighting?" Hansen asked. "You know, yesterday?"
Malcolm looked at him oddly. "Women don't go to war," he said. "Not . . . not here." His face hardened. "Not anywhere I want to be, either."
Hansen withdrew his arms from the battlesuit and massaged his shoulders. The woman in black armor had disappeared into the palisade.
"That's a waste," he said, though it wasn't quite what he meant; and anyway, he wasn't sure what he meant. Cultural factors didn't make a lot of sense here on Northworld—or anywhere else Nils Hansen had been or heard of.
"North has his Searchers," Malcolm said, "and if it were in our Krita's gift, she'd be one of them, you bet."
"Searchers?" Hansen said.
His mind was suddenly back in gear. While he fought Krita, he'd been locked into the notion that only the next microsecond mattered. "Searchers. That's the—black shutters opening and closing? During the battle yesterday?"
"Black wings, yeah," Malcolm agreed, wary again. "Some people say that, I've heard. Nothing I know about myself."
His mouth quirked in a false smile. "Nothing I like to talk about much, to tell the truth."
So there was a way to North . . . maybe.
Hansen thrust his hands back through the armholes and prepared to close his suit over him again. "All right," he said. "Let's get to it. There's a lot I need to learn about this suit before I use it for real."
Malcolm laughed. "Well, you don't have very long to manage that, do you?"
Hansen started to pull the clamshell shut. "Eh?" he said as he strained against the dead weight of the armor. It gave slowly, pivoting like the door of a cell across his view of Malcolm.
"Didn't you know?" called the veteran's voice. "The Lord of Thrasey defied Golsingh also. We'll be—"
Hansen's suit slammed shut. His display flickered to life, and the conclusion of Malcolm's statement buzzed with static.
"—fighting him in three days."