'Perhaps Lord Cromis would prefer to speak for himself, eh?'

He offered them his brief little smile.

'You understand that I have many things to occupy my time. Battle will be joined within a week, and fifteen thousand men out there rely on me. If you could -'

He made an apologetic gesture.

'I have been advised of no airboat landings recently. If you could give me the meat of your message now, perhaps we could discuss an answer later?'

'I am not a courier, Lord Waterbeck,'said Cromis. 'My purposes are military, and may be embarrassing to us both.'

'I see. I've never run into you in the city, my lord. Our haunts must be different. Each man to his own, hm?'

He stood up and extended his right hand across the table, palm up.

'You will have some identification provided by Her Majesty, I take it?'

'I began my journey with such proofs,'said Cromis, aware of how foolish he must sound. The man was giving him no help at all. 'But due to a failure of my own, they were lost. However, the Queen will vouch for me. I suggest you dispatch anairboattothe-'

Waterbeck laughed. He sat down. He shook his head slowly. 'My dear man,'he said. 'My dear man. I might be addressing a simple adventurer. Or even, though I am most reluctant to suggest it, a Northman. I cannot spare an airboat merely to check the credentials of every wanderer who comes in here with a mysterious – and unexplained – proposition.

'If you wish to fight, well then, I will sign you on; but I cannot even listen to whatever it is you propose without some concrete, immediate proof of your identity.'

Birkin Grif scowled hideously. He leaned over the desk and put his face close to Waterbeck's. He hissed:

'You are a damned fool, or you would use different words to a Methven. At least isten to what we have to say. Lord Cromis led the sea-fight at Mingulay – and won it, too- before you were able to lift a practice sword -'

Waterbeck got to his feet.

'There is an official recruitment booth a few steps away from here,'he said quietly. 'I do not wish to hear any more of this.'

Later, they sat on the tailboard of Tomb's caravan, watching the dwarf as he made final adjustments to his peculiar device.

'He knew,'said Grif. 'He knew why we were there. He sensed it.'

'You cannot tell that for sure. He was within his rights, if shortsighted. I did not have the ring, and even with that to ease the way it would have been a difficult meeting. He would have resented our command.'

Grif made a chopping motion in the air, both hands locked together. He spat into a swirl of dust raised by the wind.

'He knew, all right. If he'd heard us out, he'd have been forced to dispatch that boat.'

Tomb the dwarf chuckled obscenely. He put down his tools and wiped his hands on the back of his leggings.

'Watch this here,'he said. 'When I've got this thing together, I'll visit Lord Waterbeck. I'll cut his onions off. I'll slice them thinly with my axe.'

He had spread the immense skeleton on the ground, so that its legs stuck straight out and its arms were set close to its sides. Now, he lowered himself gently down until he lay supine on its cold bones.

He slid his feet into the stirrups on its thighs, and tightened the metal straps round his ankles. A complicated harness fastened his upper body into its rib-cage.

'A cold embrace,'he said.

He positioned his hands so as to reach certain levers that projected from the bones above its elbow-joint. Its jawless skull he hinged forward to fit over his head like a helmet. He lay there for a moment, strapped to the thing like a man crucified on a tree of insane design.

'I power it up now,'he explained. He worked levers. A low, distinct humming filled the air. A smell of ozone reminded Cromis of the airboat disaster at Balmacara. 'Ah,'said Tomb. He manipulated studs and switches.

The skeleton twitched its huge steel bones.

Tomb sniggered.

He moved his arm, and a fleshless metal hand rose into the air. It made grasping motions. It flexed its fingers.

Tomb bent his legs, and came 'slowly to his feet. He was eleven feet tall.

'Where's my chopper?'he said. And, having found that weapon, he broke into a grotesque, capering dance, swinging it round his head in ecstatic but deadly figures of eight; lifting his new legs high to display them; pointing his nimble silver-steel toes.

'I'll shorten them!'he screamed, the wind whistling through his mechanical limbs. He ignored the helpless, delighted laughter of his friends. 'I'll cut the sods!'He didn't say who.

'Beautiful!'he crowed. And he stormed off, a gigantic paradox suspended on the thin line between comedy and horror, to test his machine by completing a full circuit of the encampment under the amazed eyes of fifteen thousand sensible fighting men.

Neither the Methven nor their tiny force of brigands ever signed up officially with Lord Waterbeck's army. His estimation of the Moidart's rate of progress toward Duirinish proved to be a little optimistic. An hour before dawn the next day, ten airboats bearing the sigil of the Wolf's Head and Three Towers howled over the northern ridge, their motors in overdrive.

Cromis was to be haunted for the rest of his life by his failure to understand how a general could become so concerned with the administration of his men and the politics of his war that he neglected the reports of his own reconnaissance corps.

Cromis was asleep when the attack began. In the soft, black space of his head a giant insect hovered and hummed, staring gloomily at him from human eyes, brushing the walls of his skull with its swift wings and unbearable, fragile legs. He did not understand its philosophy. The ideographs engraved on its thorax expressed a message of Time and the universe, which he learned by heart and immediately forgot. The whine of the wings deepened in pitch, and resolved itself into the monstrous wail of the Moidart's aircraft.

Birkin Grif was punching his shoulder repeatedly and yelling in his ear. He stumbled up, shaking the dream from his head. He saw Tomb the dwarf scuttle out of the caravan, fling himself on to his exoskeleton and begin powering up. All around, men were shouting, pointing at the sky, their mouths like damp pits. The noise from Waterbeck's camp was tremendous; fifteen thousand simultaneous inarticulate cries of anger and fear.

He strapped on his sword. 'We're too exposed!'They could do nothing about it. Long, fast shapes gyred above them, dim in the light of false dawn.

Evil red flares lit the valley as a section of the attacking squadron located Waterbeck's airboat park and began to bombard it with barrels of burning pitch and large stones. The remainder of the fleet separated and shrieked low over the encampment, dropping their loads at random to panic men and horses.

A detachment of Waterbeck's troops began firing one of the only three operative power-cannon that remained in the kingdom, its pale violet bolts flaming up like reversed bolide trails against a dark sky.

Grif harried his men. Between them, they regained control of the horses.

Despite the efforts of Waterbeck's own airboat men, two machines were destroyed – their spines broken, their ancient energies earthing away – before the rest of his meagre wing hurled into the sky. The energy cannon ceased firing immediately they were airborne, and the battle moved away from the ground.

Two boats, locked together and leaking strange pastel fireflies of released energy, drifted slowly over the encampment and vanished behind the southern ridge. Cromis shuddered:

small dark shapes were falling from them, soundless and pathetic.

'Had I made a different choice, I might be up there now,'murmured Tomb the dwarf, looming up out of the red glare of the pitch fires. He sounded almost wistful.