"Nothing to talk about," a gravelly voice answered. "Unless maybe you come out and let me end things fast."

"You mean shoot us in cold blood?"

"Blood is always warm, boy. Or boiling hot."

"I'll show him hot," the Caryatid muttered. She'd finally got her match lit. The flame jumped to the ground and scampered across the sand. As soon as it rounded the corner of the boat, a shot rang out. The Caryatid, watching her thimble-sized blaze in Annah's mirror, said, "Hah! Missed, you bastard."

"Going to waste ammo on miniature fires?" I called to Xavier.

"I have dozens of rounds," he laughed. "The Ring just smuggled a big shipment from Rustland."

"Bet we have more matches than you have bullets."

"I'll take that bet," Xavier said. "And the price of the wager is your life, you stupid-heh?"

A sudden roar. Oberon's voice. "Assassin!"

"Rush him!" Impervia yelled.

My feet hit the sand as a rifle shot fired.

Impervia and Pelinor moved faster than me; they were already racing up the sand as I rounded the edge of the jolly-boat for my first glimpse of the situation.

Oberon had got within ten meters of Xavier: coming in from the left, taking cover behind the dockside salting house. I don't know whether Oberon had already begun his final charge when Xavier saw him, or if Xavier caught sight of Oberon first and the big lobster had no choice but to race in headlong; either way, both sides must have acted almost simultaneously. As Xavier brought round his rifle, Oberon must have shouted, "Assassin!" in the hope that a lobster-demon's bellow would make the gunman miss.

Oberon's strategy worked. Xavier fired but the bullet went wild, zinging into the salting house wall. Before Xavier could correct his aim, Oberon had crossed the gap: claws set at a perfect level to disembowel his target. A normal man wouldn't have dodged in time… but Xavier was the sort who'd been brawling since boyhood, and despite his seventy years, he was still fast and slippery. As Oberon galloped forward, Xavier feinted one way, then leapt the other. The big lobster couldn't adjust quickly enough; he plowed into the hourglass shrine, knocking it off its supports with a thunderous crash.

Xavier swung his rifle around for another shot. Oberon had plenty of fight left, despite hitting the shrine like a battering ram; but the demon's pincers had stabbed deep into the shrine's pine timbers, and he couldn't pull them out.

Stuck. Trapped.

Xavier laughed as he took half a second to draw a bead on Oberon's face. Pelinor, running fast in front of me but nowhere near fighting range, hurled his cutlass at Xavier, end over end like an unwieldy throwing knife. He couldn't have expected it to do damage-just ruin the gun's aim. No good: Xavier evaded the sword with a casual sidestep. Staring straight into Oberon's eyes, he tightened his finger on the trigger… at exactly the same instant Oberon thrust his head in Xavier's direction.

Leading with the spike on his nose.

I doubt if Oberon intended to hit the rifle muzzle. Instead, I think Xavier realized the danger of that nose-spike coming toward him, and he tried to block the spike with his gun. His trigger finger was still squeezing, even as the spike and rifle made contact: exactly as the point of the spike caught the barrel's mouth and jammed its way into the hole.

Back in OldTech times, guns rarely exploded. Nowadays though, when firearms are built from OldTech blueprints but without OldTech metallurgy-no fancy alloys, no computerized quality control, just a single steelsmith muddling away with hammer and anvil to get something that sort of maybe looks right-these days, a rifle barrel with its end plugged tight by a nose-spike is the next best thing to a pipe-bomb.

As Dreamsinger would say, "Boom."

The rifle barrel blew itself apart in a shower of shrapnel. Oberon was thrown back, his face a lacerated mess. Chestnut-brown fluid spurted from gashes where steel fragments had sliced through his carapace into the tender flesh beneath. The brown fluid must have been blood; there was a devastating amount of it.

Xavier's blood was red, but it flowed just as freely. The explosion had slashed the right side of his face where he'd been sighting up the shot… but it had also blown wads of debris into the upper part of his torso, perforating the old man's leather jacket in a dozen places. The damage was far more extensive than one would expect from a single bullet; the initial charge must have detonated the rest of the gun's ammunition, blasting apart the breech where Xavier had it nestled under his arm. Slivers of wood and steel stabbed straight into the man's chest cavity… not to mention flaying his hands to bloody pulps.

When Impervia reached the scene, she kicked the rifle's shattered remains out of Xavier's blood-smeared grip… but it was an empty gesture. The gun would never fire again, nor would Xavier pull another trigger. He was wheezing with untold damage to his lungs, and the right half of his face looked like chopped meat. Still, he managed a vicious smile with the half of a face he had left.

"Went out fighting," he whispered. Impervia crouched beside him, not to offer help but to pat him down for weapons. Xavier went on talking as she roughly pulled a knife from a sheath at his ankle. "And I killed a Spark Lord," he whispered. "That must be worth something, yes? Tell everyone…" Cough. "I killed a Spark Lord."

"Which Spark Lord?" Pelinor asked.

"That Dreamsinger." Another cough, this one bringing up blood. Xavier spat it out and turned proudly toward Pelinor. "Shot her clean between the eyes. You saw, yes?"

Pelinor stared back confused; so did I. Impervia stopped searching for weapons and leaned into Xavier's face. "Fool. The person you shot wasn't Dreamsinger-it was Gretchen Kinnderboom. A vain woman, but harmless. Killing her was no great victory."

"Gretchen?" Xavier's face puckered with confusion. "I wouldn't kill Gretchen. She's… beautiful…"

I groaned, understanding at last. When Xavier had seen Dreamsinger last night, she'd been disguised with Kaylan's Chameleon; so what had the Spark Lord looked like in his eyes? What sort of woman did he lust for?

One like Gretchen. Whom he'd spied on with his telescope. He fantasized about Gretchen, and when he looked at Dreamsinger, that's who he saw. Maybe not an exact look-alike-maybe overlaid with features from other women he'd known over the years. But close enough if you were looking at someone a good distance offshore. And when he saw Gretchen wearing sorcerer's crimson…

He'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. And my clothes were now spattered with the blood and brains of a woman I once (might have) loved.

Bending over, I snarled into Xavier's face, "You didn't kill Dreamsinger, you killed the real Gretchen. How does that make you feel?"

I never got an answer. I hope he lived long enough to realize he wasn't some great Spark killer: just a stupid man who'd murdered a woman he found beautiful. But I'll never know if my message got through. By the time I'd got out my last word, Xavier was dead.

Oberon was dead too. Pelinor tried to help the big lobster… but there was no way to staunch the bleeding or repair the damage from metal shards gouging Oberon's brain. His pincers clutched convulsively, clack-clack, clack-clack, in some kind of postmortem reflex; Pelinor had to keep back for fear of getting sliced in two. But Oberon had already stopped breathing, unable to draw air through the mutilated mess of his mouth.

After a minute, the brown blood stopped flowing. It began to cake. The claw-twitching continued but with longer gaps between each clench.

Clack… clack.

Clack.

Clack.

Pelinor looked away, brushing his eyes with his hand. Impervia stepped over Xavier's corpse and went to kneel beside Oberon. "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritae Sanctae…"