I looked downslope one morning and saw a young army headed my way, twenty-five men and as many jackasses, loaded down with packs and bamboo. I told Thai Dei, “I don’t like the looks of this. That’s Loftus, Longinus and Cletus all at the same time.” Not to mention Otto and Hagop, whom I had not seen for a while. “When them three all clot up together you can bet something is up.”

Thai Dei looked at me like he wondered if I really thought he was dim enough to think they were off for a picnic. He remembered the brothers from Dejagore and probably understood their obsessions better than I did.

Something was in the wind, though.

I went down to meet them.

“Hey!” Clete hollered, waving. “It’s the hermit prince.”

“What’re you guys up to?”

“We heard you set up your own kingdom over here. We come to see its wonders.”

“Looks like you’re here to invade me. What is all this shit?” I couched the question in the language of the Jewel Cities.

“Field trials for a new toy. We been playing with it in the cellars of the castle.”

“Hnh?” Could there be a real reason that the Old Man still kept most of Overlook off limits? “I hope it’s good to eat.”

Longo snickered. “This wouldn’t be too tasty, Murgen. But it’ll be fun to dish out.”

Thai Dei scowled. Left out again. Too bad. He was with the Company but not of the Company. As I lived with Nyueng Bao without being Nyueng Bao.

“The way you guys are grinning I got to figure, whatever it is, it’s got a lot of gears and levers and does something entirely decorative with a reliability quotient of ten percent.”

“O ye of weak faith. Clete, you ever seen a sourball as negative as this guy?”

“He just don’t understand engineering.”

“I understand engineering fine. I don’t understand engineers. What’re we doing?”

“Field tests,” Clete reminded me. “We applied a little engineering to Lady’s fireball flingers.”

“Range, accuracy, power, Murgen,” Loftus enthused. “Velocity. All areas where we thought there was room for improvement.”

Absolutely. The fireball throwers would do a man a lot of damage but you practically had to stick him with your pole to make sure you hit him.

All this foreign yammer brought Uncle Doj around to poke his nose in. Which did him no good. But he would figure it out quickly enough.

Longo said, “You got a nice field of fire here, Murgen.” He waved toward the mountains. Miles of nothing lay between us and the evergreen forest. His arm swung around to indicate Overlook. “And a nice measured range down that way.” Men were out there setting some kind of survey stakes already.

Guys up close started working double-time, dragging stuff off the pack animals. Cletus grabbed a bamboo pole. “Your basic bamboo. The kind Lady turned out until we brought our thoughts to the table.”

Clete popped off a few fireballs in the general direction of a couple of gossiping crows. The crows laughed. The fireballs wobbled into the distance, ran out of momentum, drifted to the ground, faded away. “Can’t hit shit. Except shadows. Unless you walk right up to what you want to burn.”

Longo interjected, “We made her believe that since soldiers would be using the bamboo to work other targets whether she liked that or not they ought to be able to hit whatever they’re aiming at.”

Loftus said, “She’s spent time around soldiers. She understands how they think.”

I sneered. “She’s been screwing one for five years. She ought to have a clue.”

Clete grabbed a bamboo pole with black bands around it. “This’s a cute little number.” He nodded to his brothers. They picked up similar poles. Each brother pointed his in the general direction of a crow. Clete said, “Do it.”

They cranked. Fireballs flew. Black feathers exploded, floated around smoldering. More fireballs darted out. It did not seem to matter whether the guys aimed well or not. The fireballs hunted their targets down however desperately they darted and dodged. Just the way they had hunted down shadows.

Clete leaned on his pole. “That ought to take care of the spy problem.” His brothers remained alert. Longo picked off a clever little devil trying to sneak off at low altitude, whipping between boulders in turns so tight it lost wing feathers every time.

A ball of violet fire closed in at four times the crow’s best speed.

Poof!

“Now there’s a trick I can appreciate,” I said.

Likewise Thai Dei and Uncle Doj and the guys of the thin desperate line at the Shadowgate. Jaws dropped. Rudy swore, “Fugginay! I want me one a them mudsuckers.”

I asked, “You got a special problem with crows?”

Rudy asked, “It only kills crows?”

Cletus averred, “I suppose we could set them to knock down most anything. But the more targets you want to specify the more complicated your logistics is gonna get.”

“That’s not why you’re here,” I guessed.

“That was just to clear the area.”

Longo said, “We wanted something guys like us could appreciate.”

Loftus added, “Considering that we’re not likely to bring in a lot of recruits anytime soon, while Taglios can come up with as many as they want.”

There was a growing faction up north, these days, who wanted Taglios to pretend that the Company had gone its way. We were headed for Khatovar when we came to Taglios. There was nothing to keep us from going there, now. If everybody held real still and stayed real quiet we might lose interest and head on down the road.

While I talked to the engineers Otto and Hagop erected several trestle tables. These acquired decorative vises and tool collection place settings. Racks rose behind the tables. Their companions began stacking bamboo tubes in those. “Big bastards,” I said. Some were fifteen feet long. Some were four inches in diameter.

Clete said, “Big and brutal. Careful where you point that damned thing!” A soldier was trying to get a bead on a crow speeding south. He was not worried about people dumb enough to get between him and his target. “What we wanted most was increased accuracy and velocity. A little extra oomph at the other end would be a nice plus, too. Hagop.”

Hagop took a twelve-footer with a three-inch bore, striped red, locked it into a vise. He sighted down its length. He tapped gently with a hammer, shifting his aim slightly. “That boulder out there that looks like One-Eye’s hat.” He armed a complicated bamboo spring mechanism.

I did not think the boulder looked much like a hat. It was a good four hundred yards away. Three soldiers with standard bamboo launched a dozen fireballs before one got lucky and painted a lime glow along one edge.

“Usual problem. When you finally do get a hit you don’t do much damage. Unless it’s people. Go ahead, Hagop.”

Hagop triggered his pole. There was a frying bacon sound. An intense orange ball crossed to the boulder too fast for me to follow. It hit dead center. A lance of fire blew out of the rock for fifteen seconds. I felt the heat.

The boulder shifted position slightly, pointing its tail of fire farther downhill.

The fireball popped out the other side of the rock like a pimple’s core squirting.

“Shit!” said I. “And double shit! That fucker must be ten feet thick!”

Clete said, “A three-inch ball will run at least fifteen feet into the kind of stone we have around here, Hagop, see the silver character that looks like the rune for Fate?” He pointed at Overlook. There were thousands of characters on the wall. I did not understand which one he meant. Neither did Hagop.

“Tallest line of characters. Middle of the target. Looks like a flagpole trailing two pennons to the right, next to something like a three-lined pitchfork.”

“All right.”

I found it, too.

“Go ahead. Snipe away when you’re ready.”

I protested, “That’s over three thousand yards! Closer to four. He’ll be lucky to hit the wall.”