Talon had spent most of his life noticing things and deciding not to mention them, and he had become, over a lifetime of practice, very good at both halves of it. He noticed that the sergeant's hand was already moving before the mist had finished closing. He noticed the small hard sound, flint on steel, and the little flash under the scaled palm, and which way the palm was turned. He noticed that the block coming out of the parapet was not coming at him at all. It was going past him, low, at the shield wall, at the place where a man called Dunne had been standing all evening with a bad knee he had not told anybody about. He took Dunne by the belt and pulled, and Dunne came off his feet and went down behind him, and the block arrived where Dunne had been. It did not find Dunne there. It found a shield. Talon had not had a shield in his hand. Nobody had been standing next to Dunne with a shield. There was simply, where a man had been half a breath before, a shield, standing up on its rim on the walkway, and the block went into it with a noise like a door slammed in a cathedral and stopped. He noticed that. He decided, out of a lifetime's habit, not to mention it, even to himself. Then he noticed that he had decided it, which was new.
RSK: Huh.
The sergeant came out of the white at a walk. Up close he was very large and smelled of low tide, and the bronze-coloured scales along his forearms had the dull, flaking look of a thing kept too long out of the water it was made for. He had the short iron rod in his left fist. He touched it with his right, almost absently, and the flash came, and the rod left his hand at Talon's head.
Talon was not there. He had been moving since the hand came up, in the particular unhurried way of someone who had watched a great many people decide things a moment before they did them. The rod went through the space where he had been and he heard it hit something behind him, something that rang, and when he looked there was a bucket on the walkway, upturned and dented, rocking. There had not been a bucket. He was nearly sure there had not been a bucket.
RSK: You're not fighting me.
TLN: No.
RSK: You're tidying.
TLN: Somebody ought to. You've made an awful mess of the wall.
The sergeant laughed, a short wet sound in his thick throat, and put his hand on the parapet again, and again, and again, three flashes like a man striking matches, and three blocks came out of the wall at three different men in the white. Talon got to two of them. He had the first man down and the second by the collar before he had decided to move at all, and both times the block came through where the man had been and found something waiting for it. A broken spear shaft, lodged upright in a crack in the stones. A coil of rope, which exploded into fibres and did very nearly the right job. The third block took the third man in the hip and put him down on the walkway, swearing, and Talon heard him swearing and knew from the quality of it that he would live, and did not let himself feel anything about that yet. That was the bitter part, if he had been asked. He had not been asked. Whatever came to take the place was never the thing he would have chosen. It was close. It was usually close enough. But it was a shield when he had not wanted anything in particular, and a bucket when he would have liked a wall, and a coil of rope when a man's life depended on the rope being a good deal more than rope, and he had been living with that his entire life without once thinking it was worth looking at directly. A chipped cup for a good one. Somebody else's glove, a size wrong.
The sergeant had stopped. He was not looking at Talon. He was looking along the parapet, slowly, from one end of it to the other, with the same expression he had worn coming up the cliff path, the look of somebody pricing a thing.
RSK: Eleven.
TLN: Sorry?
RSK: I've had eleven out of that wall. I count. I always count.
He walked along the walkway a little way, with his rod back in his fist, which Talon noticed and did not like. Talon had not seen him pick it up. Talon had seen it hit a bucket fifteen feet behind him and stay there. He looked. The bucket was still there, rocking a little less. There was no rod beside it.
RSK: Nine holes.
TLN: Perhaps you missed two.
RSK: I don't miss. Eleven stones out. Nine holes in the wall. Where'd the other two holes go?
Talon looked along the parapet, because he had been asked, and because it was a fair question, and found that he did not know. There were nine gaps in the old grey stone where the sergeant had fired blocks out of it. There should have been eleven. In two of the places he would have expected a gap, the wall was whole, and the stone in it did not match. It was darker, and smoother, and very slightly the wrong shape, and it sat in the wall with the particular unconvincing confidence of a thing that had arrived somewhere very recently and was hoping nobody would ask.
RSK: I don't like sums that don't come out.
TLN: Nor does a friend of mine. You'd get on, I think. He'd want to know where the holes went as well.
RSK: And where did they go?
TLN: Heh, I won't tell.
The sergeant looked at him for a long moment, and then smiled, which was a good deal worse than the laugh.
RSK: Annoying piece of shit.
He put his palm on the parapet again. The boy came out of the mist on his left. He was the nineteen-year-old whose mother was on the road south, and he had lost his spear and found another one and was coming back toward the wall with it, the way the men at Harlow's Reach had been coming back toward the wall for two years, and he walked directly into the line between the sergeant's palm and the parapet. Talon saw the hand turn. He saw the flash. He took the boy by the arm and threw him, and the boy went, and the place the boy had been was not empty for any time at all. Talon was in it.
The block took him in the left shoulder and the side. He felt something give in the shoulder that ought not to have given, and the walkway came up and hit him along the whole length of his body, and for some seconds he did not know which way the sky was. Then he did. He was on his back on wet stone with the mist above him, white and close and moving, and somewhere off in it there was the sound of the sea. Very much nearer there was somebody dragging himself across the walkway on a bad knee, and a hand on his good shoulder, and a voice, Dunne's, saying his name over and over in the tone of a man who had said other men's names like that before and had not always been answered.
DUN: Pryce. Pryce. Look at me. Get up, lad. Pryce.