<html><head><style type="text/css"></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///G:%5CUsers%5CRyx%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///G:%5CUsers%5CRyx%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///G:%5CUsers%5CRyx%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><style>  </style>                 “I am listening.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Justice.  Justice has been silenced for too long, it has come time for its voice to be heard.  The song of vengeance sings, and I am answering its refrain.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Here?” the lightbringer looked aghast.<o:p></o:p>                 “And now, for justice cries out for these men.” Malger jerked his head at the showman and his retinue of personal guards.<o:p></o:p>                 “State their crime, I am sure the Lord of Asi’el will listen.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Their victim is deceased, and cannot speak in her own defense.  My voice has long been silenced of the words that might bring her final justice.”<o:p></o:p>                 “You witnessed these crimes?”<o:p></o:p>                 “Personally, and very intimately.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Accuse as you will, Dreamwalker.” She waved her hand toward the showman with a small gesture.<o:p></o:p>                 “I beg only your restraint until I have finished the song, mistress, then justice is in your hands.”<o:p></o:p>                 “I will witness.”<o:p></o:p>                 Malger nodded solemly as he stepped around from behind her divan and bowed.  She did not know the manner of his justice, the music of his song.  She would, very soon, he knew.  He had little time to make his accusations.  Quickly he stepped past, out beyond the crowd, and caught the eye of the showman immediately.<o:p></o:p>                 “What manner of monsters are these, master of beasts?  They sing and dance, and except for the lioness, they are hardly fearsome.” He stepped forward another pace.  Immediately two of the bodyguards stepped forward to interpose themselves between Malger and Max though a good twenty feet separated them yet.<o:p></o:p>                 “Not all monsters are fearsome, minstrel.  Indeed, some are so comely that fear is the least of their dangers.” Maxamillian countered with a languid wave back at the wagon of performers.<o:p></o:p>                 “What of mink?”  Malger took two more paces and stopped, arms crossed over his chest.  The two guards held their ground three paces before their master, hands on the hilts of their long, heavy swords.<o:p></o:p>                 “Of mink?  Mayhap they are of my coterie of beasts.  Have patience and all shall be revealed.”<o:p></o:p>                 “All shall, indeed.” Malger countered, taking one step sideways as Max moved to progress onward.  Malger’s swift equalling pace forstalled him and brought a scowl to his face.  Sensing something was amiss the peasants began milling back, along with the aristocrats and their noble.  Only the lightbringer remained unmoved, flanked by her men at arms.  “Is she female?”<o:p></o:p>                 “What?”  Annoyed, Max glared at Malger, who stood a good foot shorter and was outmassed by easily a hundred well muscled pounds.<o:p></o:p>                 Malger was not cowed.  “The mink.  Is this one female?”<o:p></o:p>                 The violin went silent.<o:p></o:p>                 “This one?” Max scowled, his voice confused and wary.  “Why no, it happens that he is male.”<o:p></o:p>                 “What of the female?  You did have one, four years ago.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Five, actually.” Max crossed his arms over his chest, sensing finally where this was going.  He widened his stance and glared, taking a slow breath.  His bodyguards knew without looking that he was preparing for action.  “She was quite a spitfire.  She slipped her noose and escaped one evening.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Ahh, but it was not Maxamillian the magnificent she was escaping from, was it?” Malger took a step forward, his body loose.  The guards matched his forward step with one of their own, swords loosened in their scabbards.  Peasants began to murmur and retreat in earnest.  “Was it Moe, then?  Or was it Lew?”  Malger continued to stride forward confidently.  Swords whispered from leather as the bodyguards closed, but Malger did not draw his steel.  “Or don’t you even remember anymore?  One name was always the same, wasn’t it, Sideshow?”  Malger’s gaze flicked to the two guards moving inexorably nearer with cold looks of deadly intent on their faces.<o:p></o:p>                 “Nor are you innocent, Boqu.  You’re the hands that held her down?  You had yours, three times.”  Malger hissed with an angry, not very clearly human voice that the illusion’s magic could not entirely compensate for.  The bodyguard blinked and paused, unsure, glancing back at Max for a brief moment.  “And you, Lessan the Fist.  Four times for you, but she was never conscious for your drunken impotence.”  Malger’s hands dropped to the hilts of his swords, his gaze flicking back to the two guards still standing back at Maxamillian’s side.  “Varek the hand, strangling the consciousness out of her even after your inept brother in arms beat her senseless.  You were a randy buck in those days, I remember.  I count nine.”  Then across to the last confused bodyguard.  “You whose name I do not know, were not there.  I give you this chance to leave, and let justice know its own.  What of the other two?”<o:p></o:p>                 Max let out an incredulous grunt.  “Anel and Fassad?  They were with me then, too.  Anel was a fool, and found a nest of bandits for us.  Fassad… well, he’s the mink I mentioned earlier.  A fool as much as Anel.”<o:p></o:p>                 Malger glanced to either side and nodded slowly.  “All, then.  Justice does not have to reach far.”  His swords, only half as long as the long blades carried by the bodyguards and single-edged to their double, whispered from their sheaths.  The guards tensed, adopting ready stances.  Malger paused, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and looked back to one side where he spied a nervous caravan guard standing with blade in hand watching him.  Others were approaching at a swift trot, he could see, having been warned by the retreating peasants.  “You tell Grimmarn that this is Justice, and not for you.”<o:p></o:p>                 “Justice?” Max barked a surprised laugh.  “Who are you, fop, to say anything of justice?  What do you know of anything?”<o:p></o:p>                 “I know pain.”<o:p></o:p>                 And so did Boqu, for he never saw Malger move.  One instant the minstrel was standing ten feet away with his swords at his sides.  The next he was right there, a pace away, swinging low and across with one blade while the other cut across and upward at Lessan.  Then he was falling, and a blaze of pain the likes of which he had never before comprehended was racing upward from what little was left below his left knee.  His blade fell from nerveless fingers, never raised, and Lessan was batted back by a flurry of blows he barely registered enough to parry.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p>                 Murikeer grabbed Vinsah’s upper arm in a steely grip and turned him away from the bear’s wagon.  “They’re all cursed, every one.”  He his voice was curt and no little frightened under the sudden anger that surfaced and suffused his face.  Vinsah staggered at the sudden wrench, startled by his young friend’s sudden shift in mood.  Not that he, himself, did not feel some dawning anger at the realization that the poor members of the menagerie had once been free people, and human, not so many years or even months ago.<o:p></o:p>                 “Muri, I know.  What are you going to do?” he asked as he staggered along trying to disengage his arm from the skunk’s solid grasp.  The sweet chords of a violin waltz filled the camp, piercing over the awed converse of the crowd not terribly far away.  Each wagon was separated by its neighbors by a good fourty feet, most of which comprised the long tongues to which each wagon’s team of eight horses was usually secured.<o:p></o:p>                 “We’ll soon see.  I mean to ask this Max fellow some very pointed questions, and see what magic he’s got to explain this.” Murikeer growled with a wave of his free hand to take in the surrounding circle of wagons.  He turned a hard look at Vinsah and then released his arm.  “You have not been at Metamor long, and I not terribly much longer in truth, but there are some events I know that you do not.  Some years past there was a very unsavory man who called himself Sideshow Lew who was reputed to be capturing animorphed keepers to people a traveling freak show.”  Murikeer led on as the crowd of peasants began to hastily back away from the wagon of dancing deer and violin playing… something.  Vinsah could not identify it, and Murikeer was not even looking.  “I was lead to believe that he had been run off, unsuccessful.”<o:p></o:p>                 Vinsah looked around helplessly and suddenly people were running past them, running away from the wagon.  The violin went silent.  To one side they could see a huge, garishly orange ape clinging to the bars of his cage looking toward whatever commotion was sending the peasants away.  Then a scream cut through the night, shrill and panicked and full of agony.  The retreat became an absolute rout as peasants scattered in all directions.  Vinsah and Murikeer dodged through the onrushing clusters.<o:p></o:p>                 Within moments all that remained behind was the Lightbringer and her retinue, and a small cluster of more richly dressed locals who had stopped when one of their member tripped over a wagon yoke.  Maxamillian was reeling and clawing at his face with one hand while a blur of motion danced first one way, then the next across the grass a few strides away.  One of the showman’s bodyguards lay on the ground and it was from his throat that the terrible shriek of agony issued.  A full throated roar accompanied that pitiable wail, coming from the direction of the lions’ wagon.  Then another, higher and shrill, from the orange ape.<o:p></o:p>                 Within a breath the whole menagerie was yelling and shrieking and bellowing with such a terrifying cacophony that Vinsah felt the hackles on the back of his neck standing rigid.<o:p></o:p>                 The two combatants swept off to one side, a smaller, darting form swirling about the taller man with a sharp skirl of steel on steel.  The singing shriek of steel on steel came to a denoument with the meaty noise of metal on flesh and a blade flashed through the air away from the tall, hard faced human.  In some alert corner of Vinsah’s mind he realized that a hand was still clutching the hilt of that sword, connected to a wrist but no arm beyond that.  The human let out a pained roar and backpedaled away from his asailant, clutching at the ruined stump of his right forearm.<o:p></o:p>                 In the moment of his assailant’s pause to seek another target Vinsah realized, though he somehow knew it well before, who that smaller human was.<o:p></o:p>                 “Malger!” he cried, but the sound came out a startled, animalistic squeak that hardly sounded like a name in his ears.<o:p></o:p>                 “Malger!” Murikeer’s cry was startled and angry, but not as surprised as the priest’s.  Vinsah took two steps, raction being to interceed and stop this carnage, but a sudden grasp caught his arm and hauled him up short.  “Vinsah, no!  Don’t go near him!”  Murikeer snarled, then staggered as one of Grimmarn’s guards  collided glancingly against him as he belted past before either of them could avoid the impact.  Vinsah grabbed at Murikeer as the soldier spun and staggered then regained his feet and charged on into the fray.  Other guards were converging from all directions, swarming toward Malger as the bloodied minstrel sought another target.<o:p></o:p>                 Two soldiers reached Malger at the same moment, both darting in together and laying out with their slender, double edged shortswords.  Each had a small buckler and a helmet, but little else by way of protection.  Malger snarled at the first, a sound that was alien to the face that spat angrily at them.  Malger struck the lead soldier’s blade with such resounding force that he knocked it from the man’s fingers.  It spun toward the second guard with a flash of sunlight off of polished steel.  The soldier reeled up short and threw his buckler out to knock the flying sword aside with a curse.  Malger was beyond them before either could recover.<o:p></o:p>                 “Eli’s blood, he’s gone mad!” Vinsah quailed as they watched the minstrel weave through the tightening knot of soldiers like a snake through tall grass.  Murikeer released his arm and began striding purposefuly toward the one unmoving cluster of humans sitting still and calm in the sudden sea of chaos surging around them.  The lightbringer’s face held an expression of startled horror, her large jaw hanging in surprise yet she made no motion to release her men at arms into the fray.  All four of them had their swords out and at the ready, great curving single-edged blades of a shadowy black steel that drank in the fading afternoon sunshine.  The heavily muscled man who had been pulling her divan held a massive hammer in one thick hand as easily as Vinsah might hold a dinner knife.<o:p></o:p>                 “Stay back, Vinsah.  Whatever this fight is, it is not yours.  Get out of the way.” Murikeer said back over his shoulder, pointing toward the cluster of faces at the far side of the wagon circle.  Commoners and horsegrooms, wagon tenders and drovers from the commoners’ camp, standing around gawking in horrified shock at the unfolding carnage.  Vinsah found his feet moving despite himself, retreating from the battlefield.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p>                 “Boqu of the staying hands, who held her arms and wrapped her head in a blanket!” Malger cried, without rhythm nor note, a bestial shriek of unbottled rage.  His arm carried his blade with so much force that it sliced completely through the man’s lower leg as easily as it might through a reed.  Boqu never moved to defend himself, his head never turned.  He stood as shocked still as a garden topiary until the first touch of the pruning blade shortened him by a stalk.  His heavy sword fell and then man followed it down; one with a dull thud of steel hitting grass, and the second with a terrified shriek of mindless agony.<o:p></o:p>                 The violent strike drew a fan of blood down the length of his blade, spraying from the tip as the arc continued across and upward, painting a vivid red line across the side of the wagon ten feet distant.  Blood splashed as well across the chin of the startled bodyguard to Max’s left and across the showman’s face in a streak of bright red.  Max staggered back with a gasp and horrified cry, pawing at his eyes with one hand as the blood blinded him.  His shoulders thumped against the wagon and suddenly there were other hands pawing at his face and throat.  The deer, who only moments before had been dancing a sedate waltz, had dropped to their knees and reached through the bars of their prison to grasp at the head of their gaoler.   The doe grabbed a fistful of golden blonde hair and yanked is head back painfully.  If she’d had a knife or a blade of even the most dull sort his throat would have been a target far too easily cut, but she lacked any tools and could only dig the hoof-like fingers of her other hand into the flesh of his vulnerable throat.<o:p></o:p>                 Such delicate hands, so graceful and articulate, but the strength in them was horrifying.  Beside her the buck helped, digging fingers under Max’s chin and wrenching his head to one side.  Behind them stood the striped Addax, her violin hanging from one slender hand as she witnessed the carnage with wide eyes and backturned ears.  With a spastic motion she wrenched a string from her instrument, the sound of cracking wood and tortured music a distant twang against the cocophany.  Pushing her way toward the bars she tried to wrap the violin string around the showman’s throat but the quartet of grasping hands thwarted her murderous intentions.<o:p></o:p>                 The guard to Maxamillian’s left happened to spy the action from the corner of his eye as Varek moved forward to meet the minstrel that knew far, far too much.  Refen the guard’s name was, and he was new blood, only two years out of the Academy of Steel in Whitestone.  But he was no more innocent than the other three.  Why then had the minstrel offered him parole in whatever vengeance he had sought to reap?  Had the minstrel only known the mink, the archer that Max’s group had waylaid some five years past intending to place her among his retinue?<o:p></o:p>                 Max was beyond considering that as the world began to gray at the edges and he found that, no matter how he twisted or how he pulled at the arms grasping his throat, he could not break free.  Then Refen’s blade swept across and slammed with a loud metallic cry against the steel bars less than an inch over his head.  The hands retreated a heartbeat before the steel rang and Max was already falling, his knees buckling under him.  The blade passed so close that, even as he fell, blonde hairs fell about his face, neatly severed by the razor honed blade of his hired sword.  The showman crawled a short distance before springing to his feet and taking his measure of the situation.<o:p></o:p>                 Refen was caught in a struggle with the two deer now, having freed his employer.  The buck held his forearm while the doe struggled with his hand, holding the crossguard of his sword to prevent him from dropping it out of their reach.  The violinist had looped her makeshift garrotte around his arm and hauled at it so savagely the thin metal strand cut deep into his flesh, eliciting a horrified cry of pain.  He releaxed his sword and punched at the buck with his free hand desperately.<o:p></o:p>                 Varek faced the minstrel now, alone but for the guards closing in from all sides.<o:p></o:p>                 All around them the menagerie shrieked and bellowed, roared and screamed, and shook their prisons.<o:p></o:p>                 The peasantry were gone, lit out of the camp and forest as fast their feet could carry them.  They would run until they could no longer hear the hellish chorus of death and rage that seemed to echo from every corner of the valley.<o:p></o:p>                 <o:p></o:p>                 The minstrel brought down Boqu with a single blinding lunge and slice, and moved on to Lessan.  To his credit at least Lessan had seen the attack coming and managed to get his own blade in position quickly enough to prevent himself from being gutted.  The swarthy southlander staggered back under the blinding fusellade of slices and jabs from the smaller man’s short blades.  None of the blows was individually powerful, but they came with eye straining speed, changing techniques in mid pattern and throwing the academy trained swordsman into confusion.  In one instant the swords were extensions of the minstrel’s hands, sweeping across and around, up then down, each time ringing from the sword interposed between them and Lessan’s flesh. “Lessan the fist, who in his drunken impotence could only manage violence!” the minstrel was yelling with such force that his voice broke and growled, beyond human in its power and anger.  “Four times you sent her into darkness, but I can only send you once!”  <o:p></o:p>                 The minstrel switched his attack in an eyeblink, pummelling Lessan’s parrying blade rather than trying to seek his flesh beyond its defense.  With each blinding sweep of the twin blades came the shrill ring of steel on steel.  Brightly colored tassles whipped and stung, criss-crossing in front of Lessan’s face in a dizzying flick of motion as the blades, folded back along the minstrels forearms, harried his parries and drove him back inexorably, pace after pace.  His hands moved like the swift punches of a pugilist, backed by the unyeilding shafts of steel bracing his arms, held up in a ready block as the enraged musician wove back and forth in front of Lessan like a demented snake.<o:p></o:p>                 Sensing a momentary opening the taller man lunged forward to press an advantage but the serpentine minstrel wove his upper body to one side in an acrobatic twist that no human could have ever accomplished without wrenching his spine.  A sword flashed, up and over, converted from mantis to butcher in a single overhand sweep that brought down and across behind Lessan’s thrust.  Steel bit through the heavy leather gauntlet protecting Lessan’s wrist, through flesh, and finally the bone within so smoothly it hardly slowed the blinding chop.  With the preturnatural speed of adrenaline and the sense of his own doom, Lessan knew the moment of his failing as soon as he thrust forward.  He could only watch in horrified slow motion as the blade bit through his arm to send his hand and wrist spinning away with his sword.<o:p></o:p>                 Then the pain blossomed behind his eyes and he could think of nothing beyond that.<o:p></o:p>                 The minstrel was gone before he collapsed to the ground, but he cared not a whit.<o:p></o:p>                 “Varek the hand!” Malger bellowed and shrieked in that half human voice.  One of Grimmarn’s men stepped in between the minstrel and his target, sword at the ready.  Malger made a feint with one sword, and the man parried, only to find Malger’s fist coming in to connect solidly with his nose.  Cartillage snapped and the man reeled back, clutching his suddenly bloody nose with his free hand.  The man maintained his sword, but fell back, unable to fight on, and Malger ignored him.<o:p></o:p>                 “Varek the hand, strangler and thief of light!” Malger accused again, striding around the pain blinded guard.  “Nine times!  In those long days, nine times your evil touch stole the light from her eyes so that there would be no claws, there would be no teeth to thwart your inept advances.”  Varek’s eyes were wide, his ears ringing with the accusations.  In some distant corner of his mind not occupied with the deadly movement of the minstrel’s blades there was cold humor.  Only nine?  Who was this one that the troubador wailed on about, that she had only known him nine times?  There had been that many females alone, twice that; and males too.<o:p></o:p> </div> </div> !DSPAM:4c393ff0157161804284693! </body></html>