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shield ye couldna bring tank nor mouse through."
He nodded, and turned to go.
"Take Sam with you," Keighvin added. "There was enough ordnance flyin' about
last night ye'll need four hands, an' he can tell ye the full of the story."
And that was definitely toned as a dismissal. Tannim's liege he was not, but
the young man knew that the Sidhe's terseness was caused by pain, and not the
arrogance of a nobleman. They walked out to the lighted perimeter, with Tannim
stopping long enough to pick up a couple of chisels to dig bullets out of
trees with, from the silk-lined tool locker where steel implements were kept.
A half-dozen other humans prowled the grounds already, most of them sporting
stained bandages, but none of them were mages. They were looking for bullet
holes by eye alone; digging the steel-jacketed rounds out, and marking the
hole with a splash of paint. Others were wrapping the Pinball bars in their
special silk sheathes and shoving them down into the fence-posts. Someone with
her face obscured by a bandage-Dottie, he recognized after a confused moment-
came up and handed him a can of paint and a brush.
"Glad you're here now and not earlier," she said. "I just sent Fred home and
you're the best mage we've got. Fred found all the easy ones; we know there's
more out here, but they're probably buried in the dirt or twenty feet up in a
tree."
Tannim nodded, a little relieved. He wouldn't have been any use, earlier. The
presence of the other rounds would have obscured the ones that were harder to
find.
"If you find something in a tree, dig it out, and slap this stuff on it real
good," Dottie continued tiredly. "There's fungicide, wood-sealer, and growth-
hormone in it. The least we can do is make sure the poor trees have a fighting
chance after the way we damaged them."
"Are you all right?" Tannim felt impelled to ask.
"What, this?" she replied, touching the bandage. "Just a graze. Bled like hell
and hurts worse, but I'm good for duty."
Unspoken-that there were plenty who weren't. Tannim nodded again, and as she
turned back to her own task of putting the Pinball bars to bed, unfocused his
eyes and reached into himself for the spell that would let him detect any
amount of iron and steel, however small.
Sam asked quietly, "Uhm, lad, can you call up any of your friends to help?"
Tannim absent-mindedly sniffed the paste, and closed his eyes. "No . . . no,
Sam. I'm not going to call in any favors for something we can do ourselves."
We may need them later.
While Sam waited in silence, he gathered power from inside himself, chanted in
a mechanical drone to set the spell in place, then triggered it with a hissed
syllable only Chinthliss would have recognized.
There was a bullet not ten feet from him-straight up. It didn't take a prophet
to predict a lot of climbing tonight.
"So," he said, waving to Sam to follow him and handing the older man the paint
and brush to hold as he climbed the tree, "tell me what went down."
Sam took a visible breath, and began.
The tiny office was too small to contain Aurilia's rage. "You fool," Aurilia
stormed at Vidal. "You empty-headed witling. I told you that I had a plan,
that it involved the child-whores, especially Tannim's chosen slut; why
couldn't you wait until I got the girl here?"
Vidal Dhu glowered and sulked, but Niall stood behind Aurilia, radiating cold
anger, and finally Vidal deflated, slumping down into his seat. "I thought it
would be better to act directly," he muttered. "I thought that if we left the
girl out on the street, anything could happen. She might decide to return
home, she might decide to go into one of the shelters, she could even get
herself killed being stupid."
"And you nearly got her killed!" Aurilia snapped. "Now you've frightened her;
she'll be twice as wary as before! You've undone everything I built, in a
single moment of genuine idiocy!"
"Maybe not," Niall rumbled thoughtfully. She turned to stare at him.
"How on earth can you say that?" she asked. "This-man-sent out a stupid human
to kidnap the girl. He died trying to coerce her, and she was so frightened
she ran, the gods only know where! You say he hasn't undone everything I
worked towards?"
"Think a moment, child," Niall replied, as she chafed at being called a
"child." "The girl has been affrighted, it is true. She may keep herself from
the street for some time, it is also true. But you know who one of her friends
is. And it seems to me that if she were offered a chance of employment that
appears to be safer-at least, safer in the light of the attempted kidnapping-
than whoring on the street, she may well take it"
Aurilia licked her lips thoughtfully. It was true, she did know the boy called
"Jamie." It would be easy enough to find him in the course of a night. And if
she offered him another "movie job," not only for himself, but for a female
friend, he might bring in the girl. The ploy might not work the first time,
but if Aurilia made it tempting enough, and added offers for other friends,
sooner or later, she'd get Tannim's protégé, especially when the "movie work"
was mild bondage, some sado-eroticism with only the trappings, not the
actuality, or perhaps a staged "satanic ritual" before the cameras; nothing
that would frighten them. It would mean a delay in her plans-for she had
expected to go directly to where the girl was, and make the "movie offer" in
person, but it wouldn't be too great a delay. Right now if anyone or anything
approached the girl directly except her trusted friends, she'd bolt-and
Aurilia wasn't certain she had the resources to try and catch a fleeing child
without complications.
"I'm going to explain what I have in mind clearly this time," she said
waspishly to Vidal Dhu, "so that there will be no mistakes, and no ill-advised
attempts to anticipate the capture. I will find the boy I used in the party-
film. He knows the girl. I will offer him more work, work for himself and a
female friend. If he brings the girl in the first time, well and good-if not,
we will be patient. We will offer him another night of work, this time with
two females, and ask him if he has any more friends. Eventually, especially
after we gain their trust, the girl will come of her own accord."
"Then we send Keighvin Silverhair a special little tape, or perhaps some
pictures," Niall rumbled in satisfaction. "But-do we bring him here? That
could be dangerous-this place is full of the kind of machinery and creations
of Cold Iron his humans use so well. Even if it is on our own ground-"
Aurilia shook her head. "No, we will let him think that we have the children
on our ground, Underhill. He will bring humans and Cold Iron weapons there
trying to thwart us. We will ambush him, but more than that, we will portray [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]