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with which he'd studded it connected properly.
I saw Peters avoid the swordsman's cut, stepping inside to parry with his club against his attacker's
wrist. Then he drove his massive right fist forward and upward. It was lost to sight of me then, blocked
by his assailant's body. But suddenly the man was raised above the deck, bending double while lofted,
blood spewing from his mouth. To my other hand, I saw Pfall fall back, blood upon his shoulder.
Then I had no attention for anyone's problems but my own, and I halted as my attacker's club was
swung at me like a bat. I dropped my guard and retreated rather than risk my steel against such a
juggernaut. He swung again, cross-body, and I retreated again, studying the way he moved, looking for
an opening.
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I heard Hans Pfall scream a heavily accented outcry and his blade rattled to the deck.
A flight of birds crossed over us from out of the northwest, cryingE-teke-lili! as they passed.
My attacker raised his club over his right shoulder, and with both hands swung it in a diagonal cut past
my chest. He laughed as I retreated again, and cried out. "You come to somethin', you gotta stop! No
more runnin'! I get you then!" and I could only nod politely and smile, for I had noted that his recovery
from a downward stroke was noticeably slower than from one which moved in a horizontal plane.
I heard Captain Guy's new attacker to whom Peters had turned his attention on dispatching his own
man commence screaming, as Peters had caught his wrist, jerked him forward and torn his ear off with
his teeth. While this was happening, the man Peters had knocked down with his thrown club began rising.
"E-teke E-teke Shit!" cried Grip, swooping by and defecating on Peters' attacker.
In the meantime, theEidolon jumped, as if we had actually been lifted bodily from the waves and I
could not but be reminded of my strange experiences while aboard the ghostlyDiscovery  and when
theEidolon came down, our speed seemed to have increased. I half-expected green fire to dance along
my blade.
Suddenly, it did. Had my thought summoned it? Did I possess some strange connection in this place
even stronger than memory with things I had touched in the past?
The tall crewman's eyes widened as the baleful gleam walked my weapon's edge. Yet he drew back his
club over his left shoulder, and he swung it again. Again, I retreated. But not as before. Recalling an
expensive lesson from a fancy-legged French fencing master who had once passed through town, I
retreated but a single step with my left foot, drew back my right in an enormous hurry, brought my saber
up, out, around and over, transforming it then into a point-weapon as I executed a stop-thrust which tore
into the man's upper arm before he could recover from his missed swing. Immediately, I withdrew the
point and executed a second thrust, to my assailant's throat. He took it properly.
I looked up then to see Peters throwing his unearred opponent against the one who had just risen. The
man whose chest he had smashed lay sprawled, leaking blood through his ears and nose as well as his
mouth. I glanced back, a precaution. The man whose chest I had cut open still lay beside the
companionway. He was not breathing.
Three of the six, then, were down, two were attacking Peters, and the final one was just withdrawing his
stiletto from a point somewhere below Hans Pfall's left ribcage. He turned his attention now to Peters,
who had crouched and extended both his hands toward the two men he had dealt with before who now
faced him again. Smiling, the burly man moved to assist them, swinging his club almost jauntily in his left
hand, knife in his right, low and near to his hip. As he passed the still form of Captain Guy I heard a
pistol's sharp report. The club slipped from his fingers and he dropped to one knee, left hand moving to
clutch somewhere at his midsection.
Above the eternal growl of the Symmes' Hole I heard the man say, "I thought you was dead!" Then he
dropped to his other knee and I could see past him to where Captain Guy still lay, back propped against
a bollard, a derringer in his right hand, a small smile upon his lips.
"You were wrong," the captain said.
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I advanced upon the two who faced Peters, one of whom had snatched up the saber dropped by the
earliest attacker. As he heard my approach, this one turned to face me. He bent from the waist and
extended the weapon out to his side, point angling back in toward me, his other hand fluttering
forward an obvious and cumbersome attempt to transfer knife-fighting technique to the larger weapon.
I strode forward almost contemptuously then. This was no problem for a trained fencer.
My heel struck a patch of bird feces and I slipped. Thus is arrogance occasionally brought down by the
lowly. My attacker was on me in an instant, trying to lay the edge of his weapon across my windpipe and
lean upon it. We both, of course, tried kneeing the other in the groin, and both successfully turned a thigh
against it. In that my right arm had gone high and then out to the side during my fall and that my opponent
now had a knee upon its biceps, I released the blade. I couldn't swing it from that position, and it was
just an added burden of weight. I brought the hand over quickly, getting it beneath his blade, where it
joined the other in holding the weapon back. Unfortunately, it was the edge that I was blocking.
Fortunately, it was not too sharp. Unfortunately, it was sharp enough. . . .
I felt it cut into my hands and he grinned as the blood began to run and drip upon my shirtfront; and he
breathed on me, which nearly proved my undoing. His teeth were in very bad condition.
I still heard the sounds of struggling from Peters' quarter. The ship skipped again, and theforte of the
blade ground heavily against my left palm. The Symmes' thunder came like some thousands of Niagaras
now, and from the awkward angle at which I lay I saw that far off to my left and high up in the sky a
great tower of mist and fog had grown up, drifting, looming, inclining toward us like an enormous
shrouded human figure, white as bone, snow, or the skin of a cadaver. . . .
I spat full in my assailant's face ungentlemanly, unsanitary, and not a thing I'd learned from the French
master; but rather a trick told me by a young British officer called Flash with whom I'd gone drinking one
night, described by him as so unnerving it had almost cost him his life in a duel. It had remained in my
mind as a particularly egregious breach of etiquette ever since. Fortunately, I am neither an officer nor a
gentleman, and it worked beautifully. He drew back sufficiently for me to grit my teeth and push, which [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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