“You. Go ahead and shoot.”

A ballista string whipped forward. There was a tremendous crack. A shaft hurtled into the air, a quicksilver sliver slicing into the distance. It did not follow a normal, gravity-defeated arc. It was still climbing when last it caught the sun.

“Two-minute intervals,” Shih-ka’i reminded. He entered the ready portal. Pan ku followed as soon as the portal permitted.

A minute later Shih-ka’i topped the dusty dune in the far desert. He faced westward, waiting for a silver sparkle to appear over the mountains. “Hsu Shen run into anything yet?” he asked.

“No, Lord. He’s halfway there.”

“Signal him to take a position where we can see him, then to wait. I don’t want him too close to target. Ah. Here it comes.”

He sealed his eyes, reached with Tervola-trained senses, touched the hurtling shaft. Another part of his mind found the stone thing. He etched a mental line from spear to target. “Coming down, men. Shield your eyes.”

The shaft hurtled toward the earth. Impact! Light-balls swarmed the touchdown point like a hundred round lightning flashes blasting away in rapid succession.

Shih-ka’i opened his eyes. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. He had missed by two hundred yards.

Roaring, rising heat sucked up dust from hundreds of feet around the impact point. A pool fifty feet in diameter bubbled and splashed like overheated water. “Warm your hands around that,” Shih-ka’i said. But his cockiness had fled.

He had missed. That could be no accident. He faced west again, watching for the next flash of silver.

He concentrated harder this time. He retained control till the moment of impact. And this time he felt the will resisting his own.

He opened his eyes. “Another miss!” But this time the first great upwelling of molten earth splashed the flank of the stone thing. He had brought the weapon in close.

“More power on the impression?” he asked the other Tervola.

One of the oldest, exiled by Lord Kuo, replied, “No, Lord. Range and impression felt perfect. It’s the targeting. Something is resisting.”

“Then I didn’t imagine that.”

“No, Lord. I suggest we all target the next one.”

“Absolutely,” Shih-ka’i said. “I want to see what happens when we get a direct hit.”

“It’s coming, Lord.”

Shih-ka’i felt for the shaft and found it. He drew his targeting line. His brethren came in. They made of the line a tube from which the missile could not escape.

The missile hurtled down. The will trying to shunt it aside failed. It struck. Shih-ka’i opened his eyes.

Gouts of molten rock had blown out of the stone thing’s haunch. “Dead on,” he crowed. “Dead on. Now we wait.”

They did not wait long.

“Is that someone standing on its head?” Shih-ka’i asked. He squinted, could not be sure. His eyes weren’t what they had been.

“Looks like two of them, Lord.”

“Curious. Can you tell what they’re doing?”

“No, Lord.”

A great angry bellow shook the desert. It filled the universe and rattled Shihka’i’s teeth in his jaws. Dust devils raced across the barrens, circling in panic. Shih-ka’i pictured this as the flight of frightened ghosts. He smiled at his own imagination. “Prepare to defend yourselves,” he ordered.