My work caught up, I meandered toward the main encampment. My head was stuffy and my mood sour. The cool, dry mountain air was not as invigorating as it should have been.

I found the temper of the men as sour as my own. Below, Harden’s forces were moving.

Part of winning is a downdeep certainty that, no matter how bad things look, a road to victory will open. The Company carried that conviction through the debacle at Lords. We’d always found a way to bloody the Rebel’s nose, even while the Lady’s armies were in retreat. Now, though... The conviction has begun to waver.

Forsberg, Roses, Lords, and a dozen lesser defeats. Part of losing is the converse of winning. We were haunted by a secret fear that, despite the obvious advantages of terrain and backing by the Taken, something would go wrong.

Maybe they cooked it up themselves. Maybe the Captain was behind it, or even Soulcatcher. Possibly it came about naturally, as these things once did...

One-Eye had trooped downhill behind me, sour, surly, grumbling to himself, and spoiling for a row. His path crossed Goblin’s.

Slugabed Goblin had just dragged out of his bedroll. He had a bowl of water and was washing up. He is a fastidious little wart. One-Eye spotted him and saw a chance to punish somebody with his foul mood. He muttered a string of strange words and went into a curious little fling that looked half ballet and half primitive war dance.

Goblin’s water changed.

I smelled it from twenty feet away. It had turned a malignant brown. Sickening green gobs floated on its surface. It even felt foul.

Goblin rose with magnificent dignity, turned. He looked an evilly grinning One-Eye in the eye for several seconds. Then he bowed. When his head came up he wore a huge frog smile. He opened his mouth and let fly the most godawful, earthshaking howl I have ever heard.

They were off, and damned be the fool who got in their way. Shadows scattered round One-Eye, wriggling across the earth like a thousand hasty serpents. Ghosts danced, crawling from under rocks, jumping down from trees, hopping out of bushes. The latter squealed and howled and giggled and chased One-Eye’s shadow snakes.

The ghosts stood two feet tall and very much resembled half-pint One-Eyes with double-ugly faces and behinds like those of female baboons in season. What they did with captured shadow snakes taste forbids me tell.

One-Eye, foiled, leapt into the air. He cursed, shrieked, foamed at the mouth. To us old hands, who had witnessed these hatter-mad battles before, it was obvious that Goblin had been laying in the weeds, waiting for One-Eye to start something.

This was one time when One-Eye had more than a lone bolt to shoot.

He banished the snakes. The rocks, bushes, and trees that had belched Goblin’s critters now disgorged gigantic, glossy-green dung beetles. The big bugs jumped Goblin’s elves, rolled them right up, and began tumble-bugging them toward the edge of the cliff.

Needless to say, all the whoop and holler drew an audience. Laughter ripped out of us old hands, long familiar with this endless duel. It spread to the others once they realized this was not sorcery run amok.

Goblin’s red-bottomed ghosts sprouted roots and refused to be tumbled. They grew into huge, drooling-mawed carnivorous plants fit to inhabit the crudest jungle of nightmare. Clickety-clackety-crunch, all across the slope, carapaces broke between closing vegetable jaws. That spine-shaking, tooth-grinding feeling you get when you crunch a big cockroach slithered across the slopes, magnified a thousand times, birthing a plague of shudders. For a moment even One-Eye remained motionless.

I glanced around. The Captain had come to watch. He betrayed a satisfied smile. It was a precious gem, that smile, rarer than roc’s eggs. His companions, regular officers and Guards captains, appeared baffled.

Someone took up position beside me, at an intimate, comradely distance. I glanced sideways, found myself shoulder to shoulder with Soulcatcher. Or elbow to shoulder. The Taken does not stand very tall.

“Amusing, yes?” he said in one of his thousand voices.

I nodded nervously.

One-Eye shuddered all over, jumped high in the air’ again, wailed and howled, then went down kicking and flopping like a man with the falling sickness.

The surviving beetles rushed together, zip-zap, clickety-clack, into two seething piles, clacking their mandibles angrily, scraping against one another chitinously. Brown smog wriggled from the piles in thick ropes, twisted and joined, became a curtain concealing the frenzied bugs. The smoke contracted into globules which bounced, bounding higher after each contact with the earth. Then they did not come down, but rather drifted on the breeze, sprouting what grew into gnarly digits.

What we had here were replicas of One-Eye’s horny paws a hundred times life size. Those hands went weed-plucking through Goblin’s monster garden, ripping his plants up by the roots, knotting their stems together in elegant, complicated sailor’s knots, forming an ever-elongating braid.

“They do have more talent than one would suspect,” Soulcatcher observed. “But so wasted on frivolity.”

“I don’t know.” I gestured. The show was having an invigorating effect on morale.. Feeling a breath of that boldness which animates me at odd moments, I suggested, “This is a sorcery they can appreciate, unlike the oppressive, bitter wizardries of the Taken.”

Catcher’s black morion faced me for a few seconds. I imagined fires burning behind the narrow eyeslits. Then a girlish giggle slipped forth. “You’re right. We’re so filled with doom and gloom and brooding and terror we infect whole armies. One soon forgets the emotional panorama of life.”

How odd, I thought. This was a Taken with a chink in its armor, a Soulcatcher drawing aside one of the veils concealing its secret being. The Annalist in me caught the scent of a tale and began to bay.

Catcher sidestepped me as though reading my thoughts. “You had a visitation last night?” The Annalist-hound’s voice died in midcry. “I had a strange dream. About the Lady.”

Catcher chuckled, a deep, bass rumble. That constant change of voices can rattle the most stolid of men. It put me on the defensive. His very comradeliness, too, disturbed me.

“I think she favors you, Croaker. Some little thing about you has captured her imagination, just as she has caught yours. What did she have to say?”

Something way back told me to be careful. Catcher’s query was warm and offhand, yet there was a hidden intensity there which said that the question was not at all casual.

“Just reassurances,” I replied. “Something about the Stair of Tear not being all that critical in her scheme. But it was only a dream.”

“Of course.” He seemed satisfied. “Only a dream.” But the voice was the female one he used when he was most serious.

The men were oohing and ahing. I turned to check the progress of the contest.

Goblin’s skein of pitcher-plants had transmogrified into a huge airborne man-of-war jellyfish. The brown hands were entangled in its tentacles, trying to tear themselves free. And over the cliff face, observing, floated a giant pink face, bearded, surrounded by tangled orange hair. One eye was half closed, sleepily, by a livid scar. I frowned baffled. “What’s that?” I knew it was not any doing of Goblin’s or One-Eye’s, and wondered if Silent had joined the game, just to show them up.

Soulcatcher made a sound that was a creditable imitation of a bird’s dying squawk. “Harden,” he said, and whirled to face the Captain, bellowing, “To arms. They come.”

In seconds men were flying toward their positions. The last hints of the struggle between Goblin and One-Eye became misty tatters floating on the wind, drifting toward the leering Harden face, giving it a loathsome case of acne where they touched. A cute fillip, I thought, but don’t try to take him heads up, boys. He won’t play games.