"What's the stupid bastard waiting for?" muttered King Hermann to Crowl, the nearest of the warriors hiding with him; but as the king spoke, Platt reappeared at the door of the lodge and began to walk back with an exaggerated care not to leave footprints.
"Are you really going to let Platt live?" Crowl asked. Instead of the external speaker, he used the radio built into his battlesuit's circuitry. Platt, wearing only the ragged jacket and fur trousers in which he had reappeared at court, could not overhear them.
"As long as he's useful," Hermann said.
The party consisted of six warriors including the king; a dozen freemen with bows or spears; and almost a hundred slaves. The slaves had been necessary to carry the battlesuits the last three kilometers to the lodge so that the sound of baggage animals would not alert the smith.
The warriors knelt in their armor, flanked by the freemen. The slaves huddled a kilometer away, keeping as silent as possible. If the overseer told Hermann that the slaves had made any commotion while they waited, they would all be killed.
Platt the outlaw entered the lodge alone to determine whether or not the householder was present. A part of Hermann's mind whispered to him that the best result would be for Platt's body to be flung back out the door in pieces . . .
But the smith was absent.
"It's empty, majesty," said Platt, wringing his hands nervously. He dipped as though he intended to kneel on the mold of leaves and needles. "We can wait now, and when he returns, we'll have him."
"Well, when does he come back?" Crowl demanded. "I don't want to sit in this damned suit for the next fortnight."
"There's no way to tell, milord Crowl," the outlaw mewled. His voice had the same choppy, high-pitched timbre as that of the head-down squirrel complaining from a nearby tree trunk. "He may come back in minutes, or he may have just—"
"I want to see the interior," Hermann said abruptly.
Platt's face froze in a rictus. The king started forward.
"Milord!" the outlaw wailed, throwing himself flat on the ground as King Hermann's boot rose to crush forward with several hundredweight of armor behind it. "Milord, you'll leave marks and he's a hunter and he'll see and he'll, oh my lord we'll miss him!"
Platt was terrified. He knew that if the ambush failed for whatever cause, he would pay the price.
And he was right. A battlesuit's weight and the sputtering discharge wherever its forcefield touched a solid object left browned, deeply-impressed footprints on any surface but solid rock. If their quarry returned by daylight, he would have to be blind to miss the tracks.
The king sighed and stepped backward. Platt was scum, but he was cunning scum.
"All right," said Hermann, reaching for the catch of his armor. "I'll take this off."
"I'll go too," said Crowl.
The outlaw got up from the ground, dribbling flecks of forest debris. From the look in his eyes, he was doubtful about the safety of this course also.
But Platt knew there was no doubt at all as to what would happen to him if he tried to block his monarch's whim again.
The lodge had a breathy, lived-in-but-empty quality which worried Platt but only made Crowl's lip curl. Crowl hadn't seen the smith, moving with the power and arrogance of a bear.
King Hermann halted three steps into the long room. He was impressed despite himself by the unique objects scattered in careless profusion.
Crowl paused at the moving lights. He poked, then flailed his arms impatiently beneath them, trying to find the invisible pillar. "What in hell holds these up, Platt?" he demanded. Before the outlaw could answer, the warrior leaped into the air with his hands cupped.
"Don't!" Platt shrieked. "You'll—"
The air snapped like the popper of a drover's whip.
"YEOW!" Crowl bellowed. He came down in a crash, one hand gripping the other.
The air smelled of burned meat. The hole seared through the warrior's hand was as neat as could have been pierced with a white-hot wire.
The beads of light continued their slow, undimmed circles.
"—break something . . . ," Platt concluded.
The outlaw's voice trailed off. He maneuvered to put a tall silver spiral that sang like a waterfall between him and Crowl's angry reflex.
"Stop fooling around, Crowl," Hermann grunted, very possibly saving Platt's life for the moment.
The king stopped in front of the battlesuit. He fingered its lining of padded leather. It was a big suit, but Hermann was a big man himself. The jointed arms lifted and fell to his touch with a feeling of jeweled smoothness, as though inertia alone restrained the motion without any friction between segments.
"Did he make this suit?" Hermann wondered aloud.
"He must have done, majesty," Platt said, wringing his hands again. "And all this, must have made them because how else would they be here, one man and no baggage train?"
Crowl drifted across the hall to stare at a construction of gears and pivoting levers. Its purpose was beyond the warrior's imagination. He kept his hands thrust firmly through his back, though at intervals he withdrew the injured member and pressed it against his belly. The cauterized hole did not bleed.
Platt bent over the pile of scrap and ore beside a bench. He prodded with the point of his long knife. At the core of the heap was a section of tubing decorated with lightly-etched flowers.
"You see his work?" the outlaw said. "Have you ever seen a smith who could make this?"
"Toys," King Hermann grunted. "But this . . ."
His hand ran over the battlesuit's surface, a finish as smooth as that of a pool of black ice.
The king stepped back to see the armor complete. His eye caught a wink from the floor between the boots; he bent to retrieve the mirror. "What's this, do you suppose?" he asked.
Platt was covering the object in process more or less the way it had been when they arrived. "Oh, that's another wonderful thing, milord," he said, lifting a last pebble of ore onto the pile. "It shows you the owner, wherever he is."
"No it doesn't!" Hermann snarled; but as the king spoke, the reflective metal suddenly cleared into a vision as sharp as that in a diamond lens.
Platt looked over his shoulder and frowned. "That's not the smith . . . ," he muttered.
The mirror showed a scene in the royal hall. Princess Miriam sat at leisure in a chair inlaid with ivory and gold. A slavegirl teased out her long hair, and ladies in waiting played a soothing trio for lute, recorder, and solo voice.
"I just wondered what Miriam was doing, and there she is," the king murmured in an awestruck tone.
"Truly a marvel, majesty," Platt said in nervous approval. "Like all the objects here, treasures beyond imagining, just as I said."
Hermann stared into the mirror, which now showed his sons. They were in the palace kitchen. Bran tipped a ladleful of hot broth down the back of a scullery maid sleeping in a corner.
"But perhaps we should, ah . . . ," the outlaw murmured, "ah, go back into concealment so we don't lose our prey?"
The miniature image trembled again. Each scene had its own internal light, so even in the gloom of the lodge's interior the intruders could see every detail of the smith who strode through the forest, seemingly unaffected by his load.
"He's a mean-looking one," the king muttered.
"Stella said to chop him," Crowl said as he joined the other men at last.
"That's a whole stag," Platt said, unable to keep bitterness at the smith's strength and ease out of his tone. "That's a hundred kilos dressed out—besides what else he's carrying."
"And if he's carrying it like that," King Hermann said in sudden decision, "then he's probably coming home. We'd best get into position."
The mirror blanked suddenly into a circle of polished bronze again. The king hung its carrying loop around his neck.
Platt paused halfway to the back door of the lodge. "Ah . . . majesty?" he said.
"Well?" Hermann snapped.
Crowl was in the doorway. The tone of the king's voice turned the warrior around, his face tense with the chance he would be called on to finish Platt.
"Are you . . . milord, ah, going to take that mirror with you now?" Platt blurted in an agony of indecision.
"Yes," said King Hermann.
His lips pursed. "It's—" he went on with a hint of doubt, "—just one little thing, after all. He won't notice it, and . . . Anyway, we'll be waiting."
"Yes, majesty," the outlaw said, bowing and mopping in terror. "Yes, of course, majesty."
But instead of leaving immediately, Platt hopped back to the work in progress. His fingers poised for a moment. He removed a piece of flint no larger than a pea and carried it across the room to the battlesuit.
"What are you . . . ?" King Hermann said in wonder.
Platt set the chip of flint carefully in the joint of the lower hinge of the frontal plate.
He gave a great sigh as he straightened. "Now . . . ," he said.
The polished surface of the battlesuit reflected his relief.