Ice Dragon

They moved cautiously, slipping from one patch of cover to another. As they moved farther forward, they began to hear voices, soldiers calling to one another as though they were shouting across a noisy barroom. The Conciliator soldiery, it seemed, might not be as professional as they looked. Or perhaps they were just more nervous facing their own people, who might fight back, than when they were slaughtering Treduki with nothing better than arrows and muskets to fight with. Well, he was going to justify that nervousness.

As they rose from behind a line of flowering shrubs, Blade saw a soldier amble into the middle of the clearing they would have to cross to get to the next bit of cover. Leyndt raised her beamer, but Blade shook his head. They were getting close in, and the crackle of a beamer would alert the other soldiers certain to be within earshot. He watched the soldier closely, saw him wander over behind a tree, open the clasp of his trousers and pull down his fly.

Before the soldier could get any farther with his business, Blade covered the space between them in three strides, rammed his fist into the man's stomach, and finished him off as he toppled with the butt of the beamer across the back of the neck. A moment later Blade realized that he had made a nearly fatal mistake, for whether as a trap or merely as a precaution, another soldier on the far side of the clearing had been covering his victim.

He felt the air turn hot above his head and the beam-crackle tore at his ears. All that saved him was the other man's eagerness, which made him fire high. Blade felt his beamer buck in his hands as the other's second shot chopped it into two pieces like a butcher chopping sausage. Then Blade whipped both arms forward in quick throws, hurling the halves of his beamer at the soldier. They were clumsy missiles, but heavy enough, hard enough, and moving fast enough when they hit to do the job. The other man's beamer spun out of his disabled arm, and as he bent to retrieve it Blade's hurtling foot took him under the chin so hard it seemed to Blade the man's head would fly from his shoulders and soar through the air like a football.

Blade snatched up the weapon and motioned Leyndt forward into cover. She came at a run, and they both huddled flat on their stomachs under the bushes while shouts and ru

In a lull in the shouting Blade and Leyndt shifted their hiding place to another grove farther from the bodies of their latest victims and hit the ground again as the uproar redoubled. Apart from their lack of skill, Blade also doubted if the Conciliator soldiers were sufficiently numerous to conduct a bush-by-bush search of the rear while still maintaining their cordon.

But to his surprise he suddenly heard the soldiers' shouting pick up again, each man relaying a call on to his neighbor. Unmistakably, undeniably, the shouts traveled around a large circle. He and Leyndt were inside that circle. His military background was quite enough to fill in the details of what would happen next. With a defined area to search, the soldiers could look under every bush and up into every tree, burning anything suspicious. If the men in the circle were sufficiently far apart, he and Leyndt might have a reasonable chance of breaking through to safety. But no matter how tight the circle was, he knew their chances of breaking through it were bound to be better than their chances of survival inside it.

He and Leyndt began to move slowly toward the shouting. The shrubbery they were hidden in stretched some thirty feet in the right direction, providing good cover that far. But closely packed branches had to be wriggled around and through, with crackings, gruntings, and tearing of skin and clothing. Outside, the circle of shouting continued. Was it contracting? Blade heard the unmistakable and unwelcome crackle of a beamer, then saw ahead the daylight at the end of the shrubbery. He crawled forward the last yards and carefully peered out. Two soldiers stood on either side of a tree, so close it seemed they could look him in the eye if he raised his head a little more. Beyond the tree they flanked the woods thickened again. But between Blade and the men was twenty feet of completely open space. And as the shouts went around the circle again, Blade heard them respond to a call from close off to the right, and pass it on to be answered from close to their left.

He and Leyndt might use the distraction trick again. But even if they could take out the two soldiers facing them, as many as four more might have clear fields of fire. Unless he could get to such close quarters that the others might not be willing to risk hitting their own comrades by firing. Blade had seen the beamers in action enough to know that they were questionably accurate beyond about forty yards.

He turned and prodded Leyndt gently in the shoulder to get her attention and told her the situation and plan. Again she nodded, but this time her grin was almost impish. She was begi

There was no room for Leyndt to wriggle out of her poncho, but it was by now so badly torn by the bushes that she was able to simply rip it off. Then she licked her lips and pushed herself forward and out. Blade saw the soldiers gape as she appeared, without loosening their grip on their beamers. But for a moment their eyes were entirely on Leyndt, and in that moment Blade hurled himself forward.

The soldiers did not gape at him, however. The one closest to Leyndt grabbed her by the hair and jerked her down on the ground after him; she screamed and fell with a thud, sprawled across the soldier. The other one ducked behind the tree before Blade was halfway across the open space.

Then the air crackled over his head and beside his feet as the two flanking guard teams fired, missing him by so little that he felt the heated air sear his skin. He cut hard to the right to throw their aim off, ducked low to avoid the beam of the soldier behind the tree-then heard another scream from Leyndt.

The soldier holding her was now kneeling over her, both his knees slammed down hard on her arms, immobilizing them and grinding them painfully into the ground. On her bare shoulder was now a small charred patch-still smoking. The soldier glared with a combination of anger, hatred, fear, and lust in his eyes that revolted Blade, and snarled, «All right, you bastard! Next time I take off her ear. Time after that-«he gestured rather than speaking. Blade stopped and stood motionless as the soldier from behind the tree stepped into view and ordered him to raise his hands over his head, then called out to his companions.

They came ru

The soldiers stripped Blade, tied him to the tree, slapped him around enough to open a cut in his lower lip and make his face feel like a bad case of sunburn. They then turned to Leyndt, still pi