whole length of the caravan. He jumped from his high seat and fell, clutching his wounded leg. Scrambling up painfully he saw Parradan Smith already out and running for the fallen glider, holding a freshly cocked weapon upright over his head as he ran. Burnbright had turned and was racing back toward them, looking terrified.
“Anybody hurt?” Smith shouted, leaning against the cart as he tried to stanch the flow of blood down his leg.
It was some moments before he could get a coherent answer. Luckily, he had been the only one to sustain a wound. One of the Keymen Smiths had been slightly stunned by a bolt striking his steel pot-helmet, deflected by its wide brim; another shot had ricocheted and hit Keyman Crucible sidelong on his upper arm, leaving a welted bruise the size of a handball. Lord Ermenwyr was unharmed, but his luggage was struck through with a dozen bolts at least, and he had leaped from the palanquin and was screaming threats, in surprisingly full voice, at the remaining gliders, now only distant specks on the horizon.
“So much for his being a vampire,” Smith muttered to himself. He was binding up his leg with a rag when Parradan Smith approached him, his face stony.
“You’d better come see this,” he said.
“Is he dead?” Smith inquired, limping forward. The other man just nodded.
The glider was certainly dead. His neck had been snapped when his aircraft crashed, and lay at a distinctly unnatural angle; but it was obvious he’d been dead well before the impact. His quilted flight suit was torn and bloody in a dozen places.
“Damn,” said Smith.
“Those are my bolts,” said Parradan Smith, pointing out a scatter of small black-centered wounds. “Custom-made. Those two would be yours, probably.”
“You’re a lucky, lucky man,” Lord Ermenwyr told the corpse, coming up to stare at it balefully. “If you were still alive, after what you’ve done to my best shirts—well, I wouldn’t want to be you, that’s all.” He prodded the body with his boot. “No weapons. I suppose he was the one designated to drop the incendiary device.”
“Probably.”
“Good job Nursie nailed him before he managed it.” He poked at the man’s left arm, from which a big barbed steel projectile protruded.
“So these are hers too?” Parradan Smith pointed at two others, one in the dead man’s right leg and one between his ribs.
“Yes. They’re designed to take down elk.”
“And these are mine, and these are Caravan Master’s, so—” Parradan Smith stooped and pulled three feathered darts from the body. “Who the hell fired these?”
Lord Ermenwyr’s eyes widened, seemed, in fact, at the point of starting out of his face.
“I’d be careful with those, if I were you,” he said faintly.
They were little tubes of cane, tipped with what appeared to be thorns and fletched with small curling green feathers.
“Poisoned?” inquired Smith.
“Aren’t all darts that mysteriously appear out of nowhere smeared with deadly poison?” said Lord Ermenwyr. Parradan Smith tossed them away.
“Do you know who fired them?”
“No!”
“Well, somebody fired them,” said Smith. “What I’d like to know is, what was this one trying to do? He and his friends?”
“Trying to kill me, obviously,” said Lord Ermenwyr.
“Have you enemies, my lord?”
“Dozens of them,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “And they’re nothing to Daddy’s enemies. In fact, I wouldn’t put this past Daddy. He’s never been fond of me.” His rage had burned quickly down to ash, and he was pale, beginning to shake.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Master,” said Balnshik, appearing behind them suddenly. She looked over the battered corpse with a cold eye. “You know perfectly well that if your lord father had wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now.” She stooped and pulled her steel points from the body. Some of the clothing tore as she retrieved the last one, and Smith leaned forward with an exclamation.
“Look, he’s got a tattoo!”
“So he has.” Balnshik glanced down at it. “One of those nasty little assassins’ gangs, isn’t it? There you are, Master, you see? Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about?” cried Lord Ermenwyr, his eyes bugging out again. “When I might have been riddled with boltfire and burned into the bargain? By the Nine Hells, what do you think’s worth worrying about?” His voice rose to a scream. “You’re going to let me die in this horrible featureless wilderness and I’ll have no tomb, not even a proper funeral—”
He broke off with an oof as Balnshik seized him and threw him over one shoulder.
“You’ll have to excuse his lordship,” she said. “It’s time