Amusing, yes? he said in one of his thousand voices.

I nodded nervously.

One-Eye shuddered all over, jumped high in the air again, wailed and howled, then went down kicking and flopping like a man with the falling sickness.

The surviving beetles rushed together, zip-zap, clickety-clack, into two seething piles, clacking their mandibles angrily, scraping against one another chitinously. Brown smog wriggled from the piles in thick ropes, twisted and joined, became a curtain concealing the frenzied bugs. The smoke contracted into globules which bounced, bounding higher after each contact with the earth. Then they did not come down, but rather drifted on the breeze, sprouting what grew into gnarly digits.

What we had here were replicas of One-Eyes horny paws a hundred times life size. Those hands went weed-plucking through Goblins monster garden, ripping his plants up by the roots, knotting their stems together in elegant, complicated sailors knots, forming an ever-elongating braid.

They do have more talent than one would suspect, Soulcatcher observed. But so wasted on frivolity.

I dont know. I gestured. The show was having an invigorating effect on morale.. Feeling a breath of that boldness which animates me at odd moments, I suggested, This is a sorcery they can appreciate, unlike the oppressive, bitter wizardries of the Taken.

Catchers black morion faced me for a few seconds. I imagined fires burning behind the narrow eyeslits. Then a girlish giggle slipped forth. Youre right. Were so filled with doom and gloom and brooding and terror we infect whole armies. One soon forgets the emotional panorama of life.

How odd, I thought. This was a Taken with a chink in its armor, a Soulcatcher drawing aside one of the veils concealing its secret being. The Annalist in me caught the scent of a tale and began to bay.

Catcher sidestepped me as though reading my thoughts. You had a visitation last night? The Annalist-hounds voice died in midcry. I had a strange dream. About the Lady.

Catcher chuckled, a deep, bass rumble. That constant change of voices can rattle the most stolid of men. It put me on the defensive. His very comradeliness, too, disturbed me.

I think she favors you, Croaker. Some little thing about you has captured her imagination, just as she has caught yours. What did she have to say?

Something way back told me to be careful. Catchers query was warm and offhand, yet there was a hidden intensity there which said that the question was not at all casual.

Just reassurances, I replied. Something about the Stair of Tear not being all that critical in her scheme. But it was only a dream.

Of course. He seemed satisfied. Only a dream. But the voice was the female one he used when he was most serious.

The men were oohing and ahing. I turned to check the progress of the contest.