Sparrow's arc weapons, optimized for range rather than flux density, cut through Morfari and his crew like surf hitting a sand castle.
The arc from the right gauntlet caught the android at pelvis level. Morfari's bones were black from their stiffening of carbon fiber, but his blood was as red as a man's. His torso collapsed forward. The volley gun blew a crater in the mud, a centimeter short of the dog's forepaws.
There were risks to any endeavor.
Sparrow swept his gloves left to left, right to right, simultaneously, completing between them the semicircle of his unprepared opponents. The powerpack of a Lomeri laser exploded, spraying the molten plastic stock in all directions. Rifle ammunition, detonated by the arcs' fluctuating currents, crackled in bandoliers.
The squabble among the lizardmen had diverted the Fifth Plane female at the crucial instant. She tried to bring her plasma weapon to bear on Sparrow. A whipping arc sawed through her massive body at belt level, cutting to the spine.
Incredibly, the woman managed to squeeze the trigger. Her toppling body swung the muzzle so that the saffron fireball engulfed instead the lizardman she had just disciplined.
One of the slaves wore concussion grenades alternating with knives on his cross-belts. Three of the grenades went off in quick succession. The multiple blast staggered Sparrow and turned the slave's upper body into a soup distinguishable only by color from the thin mud of the swamp.
Sparrow's ears rang. Between his legs, the dog's mouth opened and closed as if barking. The sound, if there was one, did not reach the smith's shocked senses.
Two lizardmen still moved, but that was merely galvanic response to the high voltage which had lopped their bodies apart. The stench—of voided bowels and body cavities ripped open by the arcs—quivered over the scene like a bubble of green putrescence.
Sparrow sank to his knees. The dog leaped around him yapping silently as she pawed muddy streaks onto her master's arms and shoulders.
The thumbs and forefingers of Sparrow's gauntlets glowed yellow; even the wrist flares had been heated to dull red. The smith tried to pull the overloaded weapons off with his hands. The heat and pain of closing his fingers to grip were too great, even for him.
At last Sparrow put his right hand on the ground. He stood on the gauntlet as steam spurted over him and the mud baked to terra cotta. He dragged his hand out of the metal by the strength of his arm. The relief was so dizzying that it was a moment before he was able to strip his left glove the same way.
The smith's hands were red and already beginning to swell. All the hair had been singed off them.
The smith laughed bitterly. He was used to pain, but he knew that pain didn't strengthen anything. Pain ripped a soul down to a desperate core in which the will blazed—if the will were strong enough.
Sparrow thrust his hands into the water, working his fingers into the mud past the horsetail roots. The cool fluids soothed his dry, throbbing skin.
Insects buzzed over the windrow of corpses. A pinkish slime overlaid the normal hues of the swamp. The arcs cauterized as they cut, but flash-heated blood ruptured vessels at some distance above and below the wound channels. Exploding ammunition, especially the grenades, did further damage.
Sparrow had butchered out mammoths. The aftermath of battle did not concern him; only the fact that he had survived.
He walked over to Morfari's body. The android lay face-down. His legs were beside the torso. The black-booted feet were planted firmly together, but the severed thighs splayed out to either side.
Sparrow rolled the body over. Morfari's muscles were rigid; the arms held their set as though they were welded steel. The smith wasn't sure whether that had something to do with the android's physiology, or if it was simply a freak result of high voltages blasting the central nervous system.
The dog, now confident that her master was well, sniffed the bodies. She bounced frequently as though threatened by some aspect of the cooling flesh. Sparrow could hear her barking again.
Morfari's mouth was drawn into a tight rictus. The lavaliere on his breast was undamaged. Sparrow let out the breath that he had held without realizing it. He needed the android's control device for the next stage of his mission . . . but in a wide-open battle that left a dozen dead, there was a limit to how much care Sparrow had been able to show.
The lavaliere hung on a ribbon of lustrous green synthetic. The material was non-conductive, which was lucky. Otherwise, the currents surging over Morfari's skin might have blown the circuits of the control device.
Sparrow activated the device in pre-set mode by keying one of the dozen buttons on its small control pad. A Lomeri corpse bent like a bow. The lizardman was dead, but his nerve pathways still passed the jolt of current which his slave collar applied.
So. The lavaliere was functional. More complex actions could be programmed through the keypad, but Sparrow had no need of those. What he needed . . .
He looked around him at mud and blood and stench. He would prefer a bench to lie on as he worked; but nothing outside the Matrix really mattered when the smith was working.
He lay down on the bank. The lavaliere was clasped in his huge right hand. The dog, familiar with the process, perked up her ears, but she didn't interfere with the smith's concentration.
Sparrow was a hunter and a warrior; and once, when he was a young man in the Open Lands, he had been a prince. Above all, and encompassing all, Sparrow was a smith. He slid into a state of half-sleep, half-hypnosis.
His eyes were open but glazed. The ball of the sun glowing through the mists swelled until its sanguine light filled all the universe. . . .
Sparrow's mind ranged the Matrix, searching through ideals without number, the basic substance of all objects existing in all times in the eight worlds of Northworld. Each a template, a mold from which a master smith could strike copies into matter in realtime.
The master of all smiths could strike copies: Sparrow alone.
Nothing changed visibly in the swamp where Sparrow's body lay, but crystals within the control device shifted their electronic pathways. A chip now resonated in tune with the smith's brainwaves rather than those of the android, who was slowly reaching equilibrium with the ambient temperature.
Sparrow blinked twice as his mind returned from the Matrix. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, forgetful of the swollen flesh and the mud in which he had cooled it. The gritty shock brought him fully alert. He rose to a scene from a hotter Hell than Northworld's.
Dimetrodons—not a pack but rather a score of individuals lured by the reek of slaughter—swarmed over the recent corpses. A huge male, easily four meters long and a half tonne in weight, stood on the chewed remnant of Morfari's body and threatened the smith.
Sparrow's dog, snarling like a saw in knotted wood, stood between her master and the reptile's ragged jaws. She snapped every time the dimetrodon's tongue lapped the air. The big carnivore twitched out with a clawed forepaw, but the bitch dodged its clumsy blows easily. The dimetrodon was so disconcerted by the violent opposition that it didn't use its weight and scaly hide to brush past the dog.
Sparrow got to his feet. He was dizzy. His skin was cold and clammy in reaction to the time his mind had spent in the Matrix, but the swamp's oven temperatures and saturated humidity covered him like an avalanche of sodden clay.
The dog noticed that her master was up. She continued to snap and snarl at the monster. Her leg braces flashed like knives in the bloody sunlight.
There was an easy path of retreat along the stream bank. The other dimetrodons were wholly occupied with carrion, including the smoking carcase of their own fellow killed by Morfari's gang. The nearest beast would lose interest when its intended meal moved off with mammalian quickness.
"Dog!" Sparrow called. "Come away, you bloody fool!"
The carnivore lunged. The dog met the motion instead of retreating. Her canines scored two long gouges across the dimetrodon's snout.
"Dog!" Sparrow shouted, but the bitch's blood was up. If he tried to drag her off by main force, the carnivore would take them both while they struggled. The gauntlets lay beneath the dimetrodon trampling feet, and even the thought of donning them again made Sparrow's punished flesh crawl.
He drew the knife from his belt sheath. It had a broad, 30-cm blade with a single edge and blood grooves to keep the suction of flesh from binding the steel during deep cuts.
Sparrow moved within a meter of the dimetrodon, then paused while the monster switched its attention from the dog to the dog's master. As if this were a planned maneuver, the dog leaped in and tore at the dimetrodon's ear hole. The dimetrodon snapped sideways with a wobbling undulation of its backfin.
Sparrow stepped forward. He slammed his knife home to the hilt in the dimetrodon's neck. Reflexively, the smith tried to throw his left leg astride the creature's back as his right arm ripped the knife downward against the resistance of flesh and scaly hide.
The sail blocked his motion. The tip of a spine jabbed his knee, and the creature's foreclaws tore the sandal straps and the flesh beneath. The reptile's stricken body writhed; Sparrow let the motion fling him away.
The dimetrodon waddled off, spewing blood and arping. The knifehilt wobbled in a wound that pierced the beast's throat and gaped to the breadth of the smith's own huge hand.
The injured animal blundered into one of its fellows which was snuffling at a lizardman's disjointed foot. With the suddenness of a trap springing, the second dimetrodon clamped its jaws on the other's neck wound. Three more of the big lizards immediately piled into the slaughter, ripping huge chunks out of their injured fellow.
Sparrow's dog turned and began to whine in delight as she licked her master's hand. The dog's rough tongue felt like a rasp against the swollen flesh.
Sparrow picked up the lavaliere, which he had dropped to draw his knife. He hung the ribbon over his own thick neck. The control device rode higher than it had on the android, who was classically proportioned except for his extra set of arms. That shouldn't make any difference to the unit's operation.
The killing frenzy directed at one of their own kind had dragged most of the carnivores twenty meters through the swamp before the victim finally collapsed to be devoured alive. They left Sparrow free to examine the cattle guard's paraphernalia.
Morfari's skimmer had been knocked over, but it appeared to be essentially undamaged. The vehicle was a control column on a circular plate a meter in diameter. It generated an electromagnetic field in the surface over which it rode and repelled that field by one of identical polarity in the plate itself.
The whole unit weighed only thirty kilograms or so. Sparrow righted it easily.
One of the knives scattered in the kill zone among the charred equipment and bits of meat—the dimetrodons were messy eaters—was the length and width at the hilt of the blade Sparrow had carried. The cattle guard's weapon was double-edged and tapered to a sharp point, but it fit the smith's sheath snugly enough.
Sparrow kept the knife. The rest of the weapons and equipment, including the arc gauntlets, he left for mud and the tannin-bitter waters to reclaim.
He touched the skimmer's controls. The little vehicle wobbled obediently.
"C'mon, dog," Sparrow said. When the animal stepped onto the plate with him, he reached down and tousled her ears again. "You're not so bad to have around, you know?"
The dog barked. Sparrow rolled a handgrip, and the skimmer slid off toward the bower of Princess Mala, deeper in the swamp.