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much more disquieting.
The windows were curtained, but some daylight had penetrated prior to the
incantation. Now, though, it was as if all light was forced from the room save
the glow in the braziers and a single candle in the center of the pentacle.
They were in darkest night and a bone chill had taken over; Springbuck
couldn t suppress the conviction that they had somehow left the room and
arrived elsewhere, in a place where it was beyond his ability to orient
himself or apprehend reality.
Gabrielle threw her hands over her head and her entire body began to glow
with a blue light that pulsed and flickered.
An amorphous shadow rose amid the runes, expanding from the floor in a manner
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which struck the Prince as unwilling. He had the distinct impression that it
was listening to the chanting, that it scrutinized him briefly and then
ignored him, and that it received instructions with a hateful resentment.
Gabrielle and the scholar were silent now, though the woman still radiated
the eerie aura and gave the appearance of being in a trance. Andre changed his
tone from a chant to a steady, placid mode of speech. Springbuck thought that
he assumed the attitude of a schoolmaster assigning a complex task to a
defiant and not-terribly-bright student.
Without warning the darkness rolling within the pentacle was throwing itself
from one side of its invisible confinement to the other, straining to break
free and destroy the mortals in the room. Andre spoke a syllable of duress in
a voice fearsome and completely unlike anything Springbuck had heard from him
before. The thing within the pentacle was instantly quiet.
Andre issued a last instruction and, with an almost vocal snarl, the being
was gone. Light and warmth returned to the chamber.
Andre stepped from his spot to recover Calundronius and Springbuck noticed
that he was bathed in sweat and that his pudgy hands trembled badly.
Well, asked the Prince as Gabrielle began to reorder the room, where is
our defender? Where is this fabulous metal war machine?
Van Duyn, extinguishing a brazier, replied, Our . . . unwilling benefactor
has gone to arrange for its transportation here. It wouldn t do to have the
contraption materialize in this room, so Andre specified that it be brought to
the meadow outside the castle. If it s moving when it arrives here, it could
do damage within the confines of a room or the bailey.
The scholar and the wizard hurried off together to watch for the fruit of
their handiwork, chattering importantly in the way of experimenters
everywhere. Springbuck shifted his attention to Gabrielle as she bound up her
hair with rawhide throngs.
She came to him where he stood nursing his wrist and there was much, much in
the glances they exchanged.
I I knew that you and Edward would come to conflict, knew it in my heart
when I first saw you, she told him, her eyes still holding his. She took his
injured wrist between cool, elegant hands.
Not hurt seriously, she decided after exploring it gently with her
fingertips. The pain will leave it soon.
They stood quite motionless so, for a moment.
His gaze was first to fall away.
I suppose we should be on the ramparts with the others, he murmured,
Her hands left his and he was immediately sorry he had spoken. He would have
continued, for there were more words that he wished to say to her, but he was
forestalled by a staccato blast from the distant meadow.
PART II
APC
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Chapter Seven
We will ride em, we ll collide em, and we d drive em straight through
hell. We re the Chosen Few who ride the APC s.
From APC s, an unofficial song of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regt., U.S.
Army
The metal monster forged along to the squeaking and clanking of full-track
treads, the reddish dust of the anhydrous dry season spuming behind it, doing
maybe forty-per on the flat, straight road from Phu Loi.
If we were in a convoy, thought Gil MacDonald to himself as he stood in the
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