Hansen felt the shock of landing before he knew he was alive. The ground was solid enough to knock his breath away.
He could see again. He still existed—or existed again.
Hansen hadn't fallen far. In fact, he'd just gotten his feet tangled during the moment—or however long; maybe he didn't want to think about that—during which Diamond forced itself through the space of Hansen's being. The sun here was a little past midpoint.
He was on a forty-meter bluff, overlooking a considerable floodplain forested with scrub conifers as well as willows. The river which had carved the bluff was now an occasional glint through the trees a kilometer away. On the far horizon was a conical mountain from which trailed wisps of yellow vapor.
There was snow on the leaf mould and in the creviced bark of the trees around Hansen, but the air didn't seem particularly cold. A fieldmouse gnawed audibly nearby, rotating a pinecone with tiny forepaws to bring hidden seeds in range of the glittering incisors.
Hansen wasn't on Diamond. He could be quite sure of that, because riders carrying lances and crossbows were picking their way from left to right through the trees below.
A trumpet called from nearby to the right. A living creature out of sight on the left answered the horn with its own louder, angry echo. Two of the riders turned their shaggy, big-headed ponies and trotted back the way they'd come. Their fellows, perhaps a dozen of them, checked their weapons and resumed their careful progress through the trees.
Hansen looked at his laser ring. The stone remained as dull as it had been on Diamond, and even the metal had the false sheen of plastic.
The band crumbled as he tried to work the ring off his finger. He dropped the bits on the snowy ground in disgust.
One of the horsemen below took a curved trumpet from beneath his fur jacket, set it to his lips, and blew a three-note call.
Hansen sighed. He wasn't trained to survive alone in the woods. The sooner he brought himself to the attention of the men below, the better . . . though of course, 'better' might amount to a swift death instead of a slow surrender to cold and hunger.
"Don't be a fool, Hansen," squeaked the fieldmouse. "Swear yourself to my service. You'll never survive here without my help."
Hansen rubbed the trunk of one of the pines. The outer surface of the bark rasped as it ground away beneath the ball of his thumb, exposing the russet layer within.
"Mice talk here, then?" Hansen said conversationally. So long as he squeezed the treetrunk, he could keep himself from slamming his fist into it in frustration at this further madness from which he was now sure he would never escape. . . .
"Faugh!" the mouse said. "Such a form is useful when I visit the Open Lands. You might not even think me alive in your terms, Hansen."
The little creature tossed the cone aside. Half the scales had been nibbled into fibrous sprays. They looked like the blades of a turbine whose epoxy matrix had disintegrated under stress.
"I'm a machine," said the mouse, cleaning its whiskers with its paws. "You can call me Walker. On my plane of Northworld the sun is red, and even the shoals of horseshoe crabs which used to couple on gravel beaches have died. There is no life besides me and my fellows—if we live."
Another horn blew; a second group of horsemen rode into sight among the trees below. Several crossbows fired. The flat snap! of the bows' discharge sounded like treelimbs cracking under the weight of ice.
Men shouted. Hansen didn't see anyone fall, but the conifers hid most of the details.
He was shivering; perhaps it was the cold. "You're a time traveler, then?" he said to the fieldmouse. The beast's left eye was as dull as the ruby which had powdered like chalk as Hansen removed his ring.
"You still think in terms of duration, Hansen," Walker said. "Don't. This is Northworld."
He paused for a moment to lick the creamy fur of his belly in firm, even strokes of his tongue. "I'm from a different plane of the Matrix. There are—" the mouse voice took on a didactic singsong "—eight worldplanes of the Matrix, and the Matrix which is a world. But those who live in the Matrix are mad."
The riders on both sides were falling back. A riderless pony rushed to and fro among the trees, neighing and shaking cascades of snow from the branches.
Men on foot, stepping heavily with the weight of the full armor they wore, moved through the forest in a ragged array. They didn't appear to be armed, but whenever one brushed a low treelimb, wood and snow spluttered away in a blue crackle.
Similar pops of electronic lightning suggested that more armored footmen were approaching from the other direction, but the line of contact would be at some distance to the right of Hansen's present vantage point. He began walking in that direction, keeping a grip on saplings because he was paying less attention than he ought to the bluff's edge.
Walker hopped along beside him. "Swear yourself to my service, Hansen," piped the fieldmouse voice. "You're nothing and nobody without my guidance. But be warned: oaths have power on Northworld."
Scores of fur-clad horsemen like those who'd acted as skirmishers followed a few meters behind the ragged line of footmen. The latter's armor was painted in brilliant colors, no two patterns alike. Hansen estimated that there were about 150 men in the force advancing from his left, with only a third of them in armor; but the trees made certain counting impossible.
Several horns called. Fifty or sixty equally garish armored men came into sight from the trees to the right.
A small gray bird, crested like a titmouse, landed on a branch beside Hansen. It rapped the seed in its beak three times to break it open. The bird's head flicked as it swallowed the kernel, letting the husk flutter over the edge of the bluff.
"That's the army of Golsingh the Peacegiver," the bird said, twitching its beak in the direction of the newcomers. "Those others there—" it bobbed in the direction of the force to Hansen's left "—they're Count Lopez' men, though he's bedridden and can't lead them."
Hansen looked at the bird. One of its eyes was bright; the other had the yellow, frosted look of weathered marble.
"My word always counts, Walker," Hansen said harshly. "I'm not giving it to you."
Lopez' mounted force suddenly sallied through the loose ranks of his armored footmen. Snow and dirt flew from beneath the hooves of the ponies.
When the riders were twenty meters short of leading clot of Golsingh's footmen, crossbows snapped on both sides. Several of Lopez' men tumbled from their saddles, but their own missiles were directed at the armored footmen.
It appeared to Hansen that the quarrels sizzled and dropped just short of the armor. Several, probably metal-shafted, vanished in showers of orange sparks.
A single footman stumbled, then fell backward in the snow. His heels drummed briefly. The fletching of a missile projected from his left armpit.
Walker made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound, as dismissive now as if he were in human guise. His beak sawed in the direction of the fallen man. "A hireling," the bird explained. "Shoddy armor; no chance at all."
He turned his one bright eye on Hansen. "But more chance than you have, Kommissar. Unless you put yourself under my control and direction."
Hansen gathered a blob of saliva on his tongue. He grimaced and swallowed instead of spitting.
Golsingh's lancers had also ridden through the loose array of their own footmen and were struggling with mounted opponents in a chaos of shouting and ringing metal. Hansen couldn't imagine how the fur-clad riders told one another apart after the first shock had mixed their lines.
The foremost group of Golsingh's footmen, twenty or so of them, broke into a stumbling run. Their leader was a huge man in red and gold armor. The nearest horsemen bellowed afresh and tried to disengage.
The man in red and gold pointed his right arm and splayed the middle and index fingers of his gauntleted hand. A blue-white arc snapped in a ten-meter parabola from the fingers with a noise like sawing stone. It touched three horsemen in a long whiplash curve, igniting their garments and cleaving away the head of one man as surely as an axe could have done.
Hansen was sure that at least one of the victims had come from Golsingh's side.
"That's Taddeusz, Golsingh's foster father," Walker said with another avian sniff. "The warchief as well. He thinks that war is for warriors, and freemen are more trouble than use."
Taddeusz and his clot of footmen—warriors—continued to pound forward. Saplings burst into flame when arcs touched them in broad slashes, but the freemen had spurred their ponies out of the way so that no more of them fell.
A gap was opening between Taddeusz' group and the nearest of the remaining friendly forces. A few other warriors began to trot from Golsingh's line, but they seemed motivated by personal excitement rather than a desire to hit the enemy as a coordinated force.
Taddeusz and a green-armored warrior from Lopez' army plodded together with a rippling crash of electrical discharges. They met in an alder thicket. Hansen couldn't see the moment of contact, but lightning swept the slender stems away in time for him to watch the Lopez warrior pivot on his right foot and fall.
There was a black, serpentine scar across the green breastplate. Smoke or steam oozed from the neck joint of the armor.
Taddeusz strode on. His arc was condensed to a quaver that reached less than a meter from his gauntlet. Another of Lopez' warriors cut at the war chief with an arc extended into a whiplash. It popped and sizzled, wrapping Taddeusz in its blue fire; clumps of snow puddled around the red and gold boots.
Taddeusz took a step and another step, each in slow motion as though he were walking in the surf. His opponent suddenly tried to back-pedal. He was too late. Taddeusz' right arm slashed, and the dense electrical flux from his gauntlet sheared into his opponent's helmet.
Circuits blew all through the damaged suit. Taddeusz blanked his arc for an instant, then snapped it back to life as he moved on.
His victim toppled. A wedge-shaped cut bubbled halfway through the sphere of the helmet, as though it had been struck by something more material than directed lightning.
A dozen fires struggled fitfully among the scrub trees. Sapless wood tried to sustain ignition temperature against the cold and snow.
Hansen moved sideways to keep Taddeusz in view. A crevice in the face of the bluff blocked him.
He cursed. It was three meters across. There was crumbling soil on the opposite side, but also saplings that'd provide handholds if he needed them.
A rocky, 70° slope jolted down to the embattled floodplain if he missed his hold.
Hansen jumped, knocking the saplings away with his chest as he landed a safe meter beyond them. A twig cut his cheek. He was beginning to feel the cold.
Lopez' men were closing on Taddeusz from all sides. A dozen or so of Golsingh's men still followed their warchief. They closed up and formed a circle as Lopez' resistance stiffened. Smoldering armor lay along the course they'd cut into the enemy, the detritus of their success.
You could get more organization by rolling two handsful of marbles together.
"Damned fools!" Hansen snarled. "If that's all they know about war, they oughta stick to knitting."
He wasn't aware that he'd spoken aloud until a red squirrel balanced on a branch above him took the half-gnawed hickory nut from its jaws and said, "They know that they are warriors and heroes, Hansen. Since you know nothing of Northworld, you must give your life into my keeping."
"Go away," Hansen said, restraining an urge to sweep Walker over the bluff edge.
He concentrated on the fight instead. He'd felt a fierce rush of anger—but he knew his emotion was directed at the butchery, the stupidity going on below.
Hansen was a craftsman, and controlled violence was his trade. The armies below were composed of murderous buffoons.
Two of Lopez' men moved against Taddeusz simultaneously. Taddeusz cut at the one on his right; the warrior tried to block the warchief's arc with his own. There was a moment of explosive dazzle and a shriek like that of bearings freezing up. The warrior attacking Taddeusz from the left slashed at the warchief's helmet.
Taddeusz stumbled. The opponent to his right staggered away. The man's red-striped armor had lost the sheen of electronic polish, but the fellow managed to run three steps before he fell. A pair of fur-clad freemen leaped from their ponies and started dragging the warrior to a safer distance.
One of Taddeusz' party leaped between the warchief and his opponent's descending stroke. Both warriors froze as their arcs crossed. Another of Lopez' men punched Taddeusz' defender in the side with an arc which blazed on entry and was still spluttering when a finger's breadth of it poked through the opposite side of the armor.
Taddeusz got to his feet. Only two of his men were still standing; both of them promptly fell under multiple attacks. The warchief cut low, severing the thigh of the nearest opponent.
Two of Lopez' men struck at Taddeusz from behind and the side. He spun, sparkling like a thermite fire but still moving with deadly precision. His short-curving arc carved through a helmet and the arm a desperate warrior had raised for protection.
Taddeusz extended his arc into a blue dazzle ripping a full three meters from his hand. He slashed it through the air as he turned and turned again, clearing the area around him. He was ringed by at least twenty of Lopez' warriors, but each time some of them moved to attack, the warchief's sudden movements sent them scampering away.
The remainder of Golsingh's army had begun to catch up with their warchief. Several of Lopez' warriors turned to meet the new threat. Hansen's nostrils wrinkled with the sharp bite of ozone, even at his distance above the fight.
There was something else. Something quivered on the verge of visibility across the battlefield. Black shutters opening, or a great crow splaying its wingfeathers between the sun and death below. . . .
But not quite.
A warrior in silver armor raised his right gauntlet toward Taddeusz, palm outward.
The warchief's arc lashed toward the man. Before the cut could land, an unconfined discharge leaped from the silver gauntlet to Taddeusz' chest.
The thunderous report sounded like a transformer exploding. Both suits of armor lost their luster. Taddeusz' arc-weapon shrank to an afterimage on Hansen's retinas. Lopez' men moved in for the kill.
The remainder of Golsingh's army, lead by a figure in royal blue, swept across the circle of their opponents. One of Lopez' warriors paused in the middle of a stroke aimed at Taddeusz and tried to run. Several others were struck down from behind.
Warriors began kneeling with their arms raised. Lopez' freemen hopped back onto their ponies and trotted away, harassed by Golsingh's horsemen.
Hansen noticed that the arc which touched the man in silver met no more resistance than it would from as sapling. It cut the warrior in two at mid-chest.
Walker tossed away the remains of his nut and sniffed. "The first rule of war," he chittered superciliously, "is never to fire a bolt. It takes minutes for your suit to build up power again."
Lopez' men were taking off their armor. The suits opened down the left side like gigantic clamshells. Each suit's arms and legs remained attached to the backplate, but the helmet and body armor split to allow the warrior access to his suit.
Dismounted freemen knelt beside Golsingh's fallen warriors. In some cases the victim was able to stand after he'd been lifted out of his armor.
Golsingh's baggage train arrived at the battlefield in a bedlam of trumpets and crackling brush.
"Well, I'll be damned," Hansen muttered.
"You'll surely be lost unless you put yourself under my protection," the squirrel retorted primly. "You would have joined Lopez' army just before the fight, wouldn't you? And where would you be now?"
There was a remuda of saddled ponies in Golsingh's train, but the baggage animals were elephants covered with long black hair. Their tusks had been sawn off close to the jaw and capped with copper bands.
The beasts would've been mammoths, if Hansen were standing on Earth a million years before . . . and very possibly they were mammoths here on Northworld—whatever nightmare Northworld turned out to be.
The animals were guided and accompanied by a hundred or more men on foot—but certainly not warriors. Whereas the freemen were dressed in furs, not infrequently picked out by streamers of bright cloth, this lot looked like so many bales of dingy rags plodding through the snow.
Hansen looked at the squirrel. "Servants?" he said.
Walker flicked the brush of his tail. "Slaves," he replied.
Most of Golsingh's men were getting out of their armor also. Pairs of slaves attended each warrior and carried the empty suits to bags of rope netting hanging from the flanks of the mammoths.
Hansen was shivering uncontrollably. He looked at the slope, wondering whether he could climb down directly in his present state or if he needed to find a gentler descent.
The warrior who'd worn the royal blue armor stretched as he stepped clear of his suit, then walked over to join Taddeusz. The warchief's armor had for the most part regained the luster it lost when the bolt of raw energy struck it. There was a black star-burst in the center of the gold and scarlet plastron.
"King Golsingh," Walker said. "He has dreams, but he's too soft to make anything of them."
Slaves were stripping the corpses of warriors; no one seemed to pay any attention to the handful of dead freemen. Birds were already circling the battlefield. The corpses of Golsingh's men were laid over a pile of faggots sawn by the few warriors still wearing their suits. Lopez' men lay where they'd fallen.
All the armor, damaged as well as whole, was loaded onto the mammoths who stamped angrily and hooted at the smell of blood. A score of Lopez' warriors had been captured. They were herded together, under guard by freemen, and watched the proceedings with evident disquiet.
It wasn't going to get warmer on the bluff, and the drop wasn't likely to become less steep. Hansen lowered himself over the edge, keeping a grip on a treebole until his boots found purchase. So far, so—
"You're a fool," the squirrel chittered. "They'll pay no attention to you. Or worse."
Hansen glanced over his shoulder. Warriors were mounting the ponies brought on leads, and the line of mammoths was plodding off in the direction from which it had come.
Taddeusz and Golsingh were arguing. The warchief shouted an order. One of the warriors still wearing armor stepped toward the line of prisoners.
One of Hansen's boots slipped. He dropped a step, then slid twenty meters in a half-controlled rush.
Hansen didn't have to be watching to know what the vicious sizzle of an arc weapon meant. Because the captured warriors had no helmets to muffle their voices, their screams were clearly audible. Crows called in raucous answer.
Halfway down the slope, a fair-sized pine grew in a crevice. The bluff below that point was at a fairly safe angle. Hansen let himself slide, angling to catch the tree and hoping that Diamond hadn't rotted the tough fabric of his coveralls the way it had his weapons.
It was a near thing in another way: he almost slid past the tree. The bark tore his palms as he grabbed and the shock strained his shoulder muscles, but those were small prices to pay for not fetching up against the granite outcrop twenty meters further down.
Bits of rock pattered as Hansen clung to the tree and panted. Golsingh had just mounted his pony. He said something to Taddeusz and pointed toward Hansen.
The pyre piled with the corpses of the winning side was ablaze and beginning to roar. The bodies of the captives smoldered on the snow. Birds were landing on them.
Taddeusz shouted a series of orders. A pair of lancers rode toward the warchief. The warrior who'd just acted as executioner halted in the process of getting out of his armor.
Hansen dropped to the plain in a series of calculated hops, knoll to rock to clump of trees stunted by periodic flooding.
He flexed feeling back into his hands, but he'd never been much good without weapons. Anyway, if it came to a real fight, he was more meat for the crows.
"Lord Taddeusz!" Hansen shouted. "Lord Golsingh, I'm a traveler from a far land, drawn to your excellence."
He hoped the locals here spoke Standard. The colonists of course had . . . and the folk of Diamond, albeit accented . . . and the mouse/bird/squirrel that called itself Walker, for whatever that was worth.
The clear solidity of the sky and trees pressed in on Hansen. If all this was real, then what was he?
"Who are you, then?" Golsingh called in Standard, walking his pony a few strides closer to Hansen.
The beast sidled, presenting its left shoulder to Hansen as it advanced. The king frowned and tugged at the left rein, turning the pony's head without straightening its approach.
Golsingh was of average height, though he looked small next to his warchief. Taddeusz might better have mounted a mammoth than the pony which struggled beneath his weight. The king's neck and hands were well-muscled, but his swarthy face had a fine bone structure. Hansen got the impression of a slight man who had trained himself to athletic prowess.
Whereas Taddeusz was a bear . . . and Nils Hansen was a hound, with flat muscles and a hound's utter disdain for the way cats play instead of killing.
Hansen smiled, and he probably shouldn't have, because Taddeusz said brusquely to a freeman, "Kill him!"
The man lowered his lance and clucked to his pony. Hansen continued to walk forward. A short pine tree just ahead and to his right was the best shelter available. He'd run for it when the lancer charged, but until then—
"Stop!" Golsingh shouted to the freeman. Hansen halted also, unwilling to look as though he were disobeying a royal command.
"Taddeusz," Golsingh continued, "remember that I am your king."
"Excellency," replied the big man, "I'm just—"
"The battle is over," Golsingh snapped. "I am king, and I will give the orders now."
Taddeusz nodded in contrition. "I apologize, my son," he said. "I had only your safety in mind."
Golsingh smiled. "As always, foster father," he agreed, nodding back to the bigger man as a mark of honor.
Both men had enveloped themselves in fur cloaks and caps when they took off their armor, so it was hard for Hansen to judge their ages at twenty meters' distance. Golsingh was probably in his mid twenties, Taddeusz two decades older. The warchief's weathered complexion and grizzled russet hair would look much the same when the man was in his sixties, but the brutal force he'd displayed during the battle suggested a lower limit to his age.
Or else Taddeusz had been Hell itself on a battlefield when he was in his prime.
"Lord Golsingh," Hansen said, "I'm a, ah, a warrior who's come from the far reaches of—" why not? "—Annunciation to, ah, join Your Excellence."
"Is this a joke?" said Golsingh, looking at his foster father with a puzzled expression. One of the slave attendants who huddled as they awaited their masters' pleasure began to laugh.
A crow glided from a treetop and landed nearby on the one corpse the victors hadn't bothered to strip: the warrior whose armor hadn't stopped a crossbow bolt. The bird cawed in amusement, fixing Hansen with its one bright eye.
"Yes, he's probably Lopez' buffoon looking for a new place," Taddeusz said. He added in dismissal—no longer angry, because the intruder was no longer worth his anger, "Go back to your master and tell him to have himself at Peace Rock within a tennight or we'll burn him and everyone else in his miserable village alive."
Taddeusz and Golsingh both wheeled their ponies.
Hansen's face went flat. "If you're looking for a buffoon," he shouted to the riders' backs, "then you could start with the fool who led your right flank into that half-assed charge. It was god's own luck he didn't lose you a battle you should've had on a platter!"
The horsemen drew up; Taddeusz' pony stutter-stepped as the warchief twisted to look over his shoulder. The freemen lifted the lances they'd laid crosswise on their pommels for carriage.
"I'll handle this, Excellency," Taddeusz said.
The wall-eyed crow danced from one foot to the other on the dead man's chest, clicking its beak in mockery.
"I tell you I'm a warrior!" Hansen said. "I can help you more than you imagine in planning your next battle."
"You lot," Taddeusz said, pointing to the four slaves. "Serve him out."
He nodded to Golsingh again. "Come along, Excellence," he said. "We don't want to fall too far behind the column. You never know what's lurking in these woods."
The horsemen trotted off together, spurning clods of mud and snow behind them. The slaves, drawing single-edged knives from beneath their rags, moved toward Hansen.
"A warrior has armor and attendants," cawed Walker. If the slaves heard the words, they gave no sign of it. "What do you have except your own foolishness, Kommissar?"
The riders were out of sight among the trees. "Look," Hansen said to the slaves. "This isn't your problem. Why don't you guys just wait a few minutes—"
The nearest of the slaves rushed him.
Hansen scampered back. The knife looked dull, but its wielder slashed with enough enthusiasm to manage the job if he got close enough.
"Look," Hansen called, "somebody's going to get—"
"I git his boots!" the slave cried to his fellows. All four of them were plodding after Hansen at the best speed their rag-wrapped feet could manage on the slushy ground.
Hansen jogged in the direction Lopez' surviving freemen had retreated. Only his mind was cold now. The defeated men had scattered equipment as they fled, and—
A shadow sailed past his head with a caw and a snap of its wings. It landed on a fallen branch ten meters ahead, then hopped so that its black beak was toward Hansen.
Walker's claws rested not on a branch, but rather on the stock of a crossbow. . . .
"You don't deserve help!" the crow called as it sprang airborne an instant before Hansen snatched up the weapon.
"I don't need help, Walker!" Hansen snapped as he turned to face his pursuers.
And that was true enough. He would've found something. Though maybe not this crossbow, a little off the track he was following and half-buried in snow. . . .
The slaves paused doubtfully when their victim turned to face them.
"Naw, it's all right," said the one in the lead. "It ain't cocked, and anyhow, he don't have arrows."
Hansen lunged, smashing the speaker in the face with the crossbow's fore-end, then using the tips of the bow to right and left like a pickaxe to the chests of the next two slaves. The second stroke caught only rags as the target leaped backward, squawling in justified terror.
The crossbow weighed over ten kilos, combining a meter-long hardwood stock with a stiff steel bow. Anybody who doubted Hansen was armed with that in his hands was a fool and a—
Hansen buttstroked the man with the broken face, knocking him over the body of his fellow. The other two slaves were running. Hansen ran after them.
—dead man.
"Oh, you're a fine warrior to fight slaves!" Walker cried. "Are you proud of yourself, now?"
Hansen stopped. His legs were trembling, and he could only breathe in great sobs.
Walker was right. There'd been four of them . . . but trash like that wasn't what he'd trained for, lived for.
Hansen began walking back toward the battlefield, getting control of his adrenalin-charged muscles by moving them. When he was sure the surviving slaves were gone for good, he dropped the bloody crossbow.
The suit of abandoned armor was still where it had fallen. The crow lighted on it as Hansen approached.
"I can show you where a fine suit, a king's armor, can be had," Walker said. "Do my will and I'll reward you."
"Will this work?" Hansen demanded.
He knelt beside the body. The casing appeared to be mild steel, though there had to be complex electronics within. There was a single large catch, directly beneath the crossbow bolt projecting from the left armpit.
"Badly," Walker cawed, hopping to a sapling so slender that it bobbed beneath the crow's weight. "You won't dare face a real warrior in flimsy junk like this."
The helmet was a featureless ball. From a distance, Hansen had assumed there were concealed eye and breathing slits. He'd been wrong.
"Don't tell me what I dare," Hansen said. He released the sidecatch and flopped the suit open.
The man within had voided his bowels as he died. The stench hung in the cool air like a pond of sewage.
Hansen pulled the dead man from the armor with as much dignity as his need for haste and the corpse's stiffening limbs permitted.
The warrior had been old, with a pepper-and-salt moustache and only a fringe of hair on his head. The bolt was through his lungs, and he'd hemorrhaged badly from his mouth and nostrils. At least they were much of a size, Hansen and the dead man. . . .
"How do I make it work?" he grunted as he lifted the body clear.
Walker stopped preening his lustrous, blue-black feathers for a moment. "The suit powers up when it closes over a man," he said disinterestedly. "A living man, that is. But you're a fool to trust yourself to it, Hansen."
Hansen clucked in irritation. The suit could be stood empty on its spread legs—the warriors he'd watched had stripped in an upright position—but the piece was too heavy for Hansen to lift alone. It'd better have servos to multiply the effect of its wearer's motions.
He braced his hands on the edges of the thorax armor and thrust his booted feet into the leg openings simultaneously. They put their pants on one leg at a time . . . , he thought with a grim smile.
The armor still stank. He lay back in it and fitted his arms into the arms of the suit. It'd stink worse in a few minutes if Hansen died in it also; and the smell would matter just as little either way.
"Walker!" he said. Would he be able to speak and hear with the suit closed up? "How do I make it throw an arc?"
The crow cocked its head. "Point your fingers and say 'Cut,' " it said. "Spread them wider to lengthen it."
Artificial intelligence controlled, then. How did you get AI and crude feudalism together? "And to fire a bolt?"
"The first rule of—"
"Bird!"
"Caawk!" Walker said. Then, "Point your palm and say 'Shoot.' "
Hansen closed the armor. When the latch clicked, a display lighted in front of his eyes and tiny fans began circulating the foul air.
He got up. The visual display was streaked with raster lines and seemed to be compressing 180° into the width his eyes would normally allot to ninety.
"Reduce field fifty percent," Hansen said automatically, before his conscious mind could remind him that this crude unit might not have verbal controls—or any controls at all.
The forest expanded to normal width and depth—a narrow window on the world, but the best display for walking.
Fast walking, if he could manage it. He had a lot of time to make up.
He took a step, then another, and raised his pace into a clumsy jog. There was enough delay in the suit's response to Hansen's movements that he thought at first he was going to topple. The dynamic rigidity of the joints was just great enough to save him from that embarrassment.
All exposed points of his body began to chafe. The armor was lined with suede at some points, with hide at others, and for some of its area with cloth scarcely better than the rags in which the slaves were clothed.
Hansen could feel a finger of cold air below his left arm, where the arrow-hole marked the suit. He didn't think he'd have to worry about arrows, though—
But that reminded him. As he clumped along, following the muddy, surprisingly narrow, track the mammoths squeezed into the bottom land, he thrust out his right arm, pointed his fingers, and said, "Cut!"
An arc—blacked-out on Hansen's display—sizzled from his gauntlet. It licked a small pinetree into resinous flame.
Hansen fell on his face. When his suit shot out the arc, the legs didn't have enough power remaining to drive him at the speed he expected.
The arc continued to lash the leaf mould into sluggish fire. How did he— "Stop!" Hansen shouted. "Quit!"
The weapon cut off.
Hansen didn't see Walker as he got up again, but from the closeness of the voice, the crow must have been sitting on his shoulder as it said, "A better suit would not have done that. A royal suit, like that which I offer you as my servant, could strike with both hands and still run faster than an unarmored man."
"I'll manage," Hansen said.
He began to jog again, then broke into a measured trot. He was flaying the skin from his knees, shoulders, and jutting hip bones.
He'd worn hard suits before, but rarely—and even less often in a gravity well. Motors in the armor's joints carried the weight and drove it in response to Hansen's muscles; but the muscles had to initiate the movements, and there was always a minuscule delay. He felt as if he were trying to run in a bath of soap bubbles—except that soap bubbles wouldn't've galled him.
Hansen concentrated on each next stride. His display fogged with his gasping exhalations. He didn't notice that the trail was rising until he broke out of the trees and saw, on ground that rose still higher across a swale, a palisaded village from which rose the smoke of scores of hearths.
The riders and mammoths of Golsingh's train straggled across the low ground, halfway down and halfway up the other side. A freeman at the rear of the line blew his curved horn furiously, pointing toward Hansen with his free hand.
Three of the warriors around Golsingh and Taddeusz at the bottom of the swale began getting into their armor.
Hansen slowed cautiously. He visualized himself skidding on his faceplate toward the men he wanted to impress; the image diverted some of his tension into a laugh.
A thought occurred to him. He centered the arming warriors in his display and muttered, "Visor, plus ten."
Hansen's helmet immediately gave him the requested magnification. The images were fuzzy, but he could see that the warrior donning the red-silver-blue armor was an octoroon, and that all three were powerful fellows of about Hansen's own twenty-nine years.
"Resume normal vision," he said, sucking his lips between his front teeth as he considered the situation.
This armor was crudely built, but it had a surprising range of capacities. Hansen was fairly certain that the warriors who'd struggled so clumsily in battle didn't know or didn't care about most of the things their suits could do. That gave him an advantage.
God knew that he was going to need one.
"Lord Golsingh!" Hansen shouted as he strolled toward the waiting army. His armor quivered with the amplified sound of his voice. "I came here to serve you. If there's no place in your service at the moment, then I'll empty one for myself!"
Hansen didn't know anything about the culture of Northworld—but he knew organizations and pecking orders. He'd failed at the start with this lot because they didn't respect him. He wasn't going to fail again because of a lack of arrogance.
After all, it wasn't as though arrogance didn't come naturally to him.
The three warriors had their armor on, now. The suits were painted in patterns of black and silver; red, silver, and blue; and lime green with a phoenix emblazoned in gold on the plastron. All three men were big, and their armor was of obviously high quality.
As opposed to what Hansen was wearing: a piece of junk which had once been striped orange and blue, but which now was marked more by rust than by paint.
The shaggy line of mammoths continued slog onward, but horsemen as well as most of the slaves began to collect at the bottom of the swale. It was the only place for a kilometer in any direction where there was enough flat, clear space to serve for a dueling ground.
Hansen walked on, matching his pace to that of the baggage train. The mammoths moved deceptively fast, covering two meters with each slow stride. Their droppings steamed in the mud, offering Hansen's lungs a tang of crushed hay.
Golsingh's army waited for Hansen. Most of the riders had dismounted, though the king and Taddeusz still sat on their ponies, looking over the heads of the three warriors in brilliant armor.
"That's Villiers' suit," somebody announced. "He's stolen Villiers' suit off his body."
"Cut," said Hansen. An arc spurted at an angle from his right hand. His fingers adjusted its length to quiver just above the muddy ground. He continued to walk forward against his suit's greater resistance.
"Villiers never did anything right," another voice guffawed. "Not even die."
"Lord Golsingh," Hansen shouted twenty meters from the armored warriors, "I challenge whatever champion you choose for a place in your service."
Taddeusz turned to Golsingh. "This is a slave," the warchief said.
"He's dressed as a warrior," Golsingh responded, quirking a smile at Hansen. "And of course he boasts like a warrior." The king had short, curling hair and a down-turned moustache. "I think he deserves to die like one."
Taddeusz shrugged. "Zieborn," he said. "Kill him."
The warrior wearing a phoenix stepped forward. A long arc sprang from his right gauntlet and swung toward Hansen in a curve.
Hansen stopped dead. He squeezed his right index and middle fingers together so that the arc at their tip shrank to a coating like St. Elmo's Fire, the greatest flux density of which his suit was capable. He felt a tingle in his right arm as he blocked the attack, but it was Zieborn's arc which failed momentarily with a pop.
The bigger, better-armed warrior boomed a curse. He stepped forward with his arc-weapon ablaze again, shortened to the length of his forearm.
"Off!" Hansen ordered his own AI and lunged toward his opponent with all his suit's power concentrated on movement.
Zieborn must have expected Hansen to back-pedal—or flee, subliminally thinking of the armor as the poor excuse for a warrior who'd worn the suit most recently and died in it. Golsingh's champion swiped horizontally.
Hansen was already within his opponent's guard. He grabbed Zieborn's right wrist with his left hand, shouted "Cut!" to his AI, and carved upward in a shower of sparks from belly to throat.
The painted phoenix sputtered away from the armor in a gout of ash and gold leaf. The underlying metal pitted but did not burn.
Zieborn's electronic armor was proof to the worst punishment Hansen's arc could deliver; and the other man's arm was forcing his weapon toward Hansen's face.
"Off!" cried Hansen and shifted his suit's full strength into his grip on Zieborn's right wrist.
Hansen had survived because he was very quick and—when he had to be—very strong. He was very possibly stronger than the king's champion now, just as he'd out-thought the man and jumped into a clinch before the other could respond.
And it didn't matter, because the crucial factor was the amount of power available to the armor—not to the human muscles within the suit.
Hansen's display overloaded with the intensity of the sizzling arc and blacked out. The weapon made a sound like a crow laughing. Its negative image forced itself inexorably toward Hansen's eyes like the tongue of a dragon.
He braced his right hand against Zieborn's armored neck and pushed, with no effect on what the warrior was doing. If Hansen twisted away and tried to run, his opponent's arc would extend and cut collops from the back of Hansen's flimsy suit. So—
Receptors crackled and a quadrant of Hansen's display went dead. The edge of Zieborn's tight weapon had touched Hansen's helmet.
"Shoot!" Hansen cried. The jolt left him blind, deafened, and tingling all over as if he'd been living in the heart of the lightning.
But Zieborn's snarling arc hadn't come through his helmet, destroying Hansen's eyes with a metallic plasma even before the electricity itself converted flesh to traceries of carbon.
Hansen reached down to his left side, forcing his suit unaided against the friction of all its powerless joints. He tugged the catch open, then pulled the plastron away from the backplate. Sunlight flooded in.
So did the smell of burned flesh.
There was a babble of voices, angry or amazed in tone, but Hansen didn't bother to process the words until he'd struggled free of the armor. Being trapped in the suit with its ventilation system and all receptors as dead as so many bricks was a more claustrophobic feeling than he had expected.
But Zieborn was dead too. His suit had lost its luster, and in the center of its neck joint was a hole no larger than a worm bores in an apple. Smoke drooled from the hole and from the louvered vents beneath the arms. That was why the air smelled like a bad barbeque.
The other two armored warriors waited impassively, but a freeman pointed his crossbow at the center of Hansen's chest. The quarrel had a four-lobed steel head.
"Put that fucker down or I'll feed it up your asshole!" Hansen snarled. The menace of his voice slapped the freeman back a pace, lifting his weapon as his mouth fell open.
Hansen's suit and his opponent's remained frozen and upright where they stood. A chickadee fluttered by so close that a wing brushed the hair which sweat plastered to Hansen's head. It lighted on top of Zieborn's helmet and said in a tiny voice that only Hansen seemed to hear, "The second rule of war is that in war, there are no rules."
"Lord Gol—" Hansen said. His voice broke. His throat was dry, dry as bleached bones.
"Lord Golsingh," he said, "I claim a place with you."
"We know nothing of this—" Taddeusz said to his king with a face as red as a wolf's tongue.
"And I claim," Hansen continued in a rasping, savage voice, "the armor of this man I killed in fair combat."
"We know," said Golsingh to his foster father, "that he can fight."
The king looked down from his pony toward Hansen and went on, "Your first request is granted . . . Hansen, wasn't it?"
Hansen nodded. He wondered if he was expected to bow.
"Your second request is not granted," Golsingh continued with a cool, vaguely detached expression. "Zieborn's armor goes to his eldest son, as is proper."
Hansen felt his face harden. He'd learned the importance of good equipment here, if he'd learned nothing else this day.
"But I think you've proved your right to a suit of comparable quality from the loot we took from Lopez," Golsingh went on. He glanced toward the curve of his retainers.
"Get him a horse, someone," the king snapped imperiously. "And get this gear loaded up. The women are probably worried about what's going on."
A pair of slaves pushed forward with a saddled pony, perhaps the one Zieborn had ridden until he was ordered to deal with the intruder.
"Oh," Golsingh said, "and bring Villiers' suit as well. It doesn't seem to have been as valueless as we'd assumed."