The Game - Laurie R. King [148]
And then something odd happened. Before he could fire, the man seemed to flinch, then duck. He raised his hand as if to shade his face, and seemed to glow briefly in the bright mid-day sun. Then Nesbit’s gun went off, and the guard fell backwards.
There was no time to consider the meaning of the man’s peculiar gesture; the maharaja was fast closing in on Nesbit, his long spear in deadly position, the Arab’s ears forward: only one thing to do. I hammered my heels down, pulling the thin knife from the top of my boot; the broken, bloodied spear on Nesbit’s wall in Delhi flashed through my mind. Nearly the end of my career.
The prince saw me shift direction and responded instantaneously. His spear swung up to the place where I would be when my horse collided with the Arab, eight feet of steel-tipped bamboo against my own five inches of blade. There would be no throwing the knife underhanded and behind me—all I could do was try to avoid his blade, shoving it forward and crashing into the shaft or jumping at him the instant before it impaled me. I slipped my boots free from the stirrups and braced for the impact, cringing from the approaching razor.
And then the world flared in a soundless explosion, blinding me for precious moments before moving on. Frantically I blinked, but in that instant the two horses came together, the maharaja’s spear sliding between my body and the bay’s mane as my knee smashed into the prince’s. Without thought, I clamped my right hand onto the bamboo shaft and stabbed out with my left; before the horses leapt apart, I heard the man gasp.
The two horses veered away from each other the moment the pressure on their reins permitted, but I couldn’t understand what had happened. My dazzled vision confirmed that I had the spear in my right hand and a blood-smeared knife in my left, but where had the silent explosion come from, a flash like the sudden burst of a—a looking-glass! I’d suffered that blinding flash before.
Bindra.
The white stallion was pounding off north nearly as fast as it had come, its rider’s left hand clapped over a bleeding right biceps. Holmes was circling back at a gallop, Nesbit was bending to examine his leg, and I brought the bay to a halt and stood in the stirrups to search every bump and shrub, but not until the boy repeated the mirror trick did I find him. Bindra saw me, and rose from his hiding place half a mile away, the ladies’ compact in his hand, grinning hugely.
But that was not the end of the surprises. A few hundred yards beyond the boy, a light-skinned man in monastic robes stepped out of the beginnings of the forest, carrying in his hand some dark shape that could have been a short spear, but which I thought was a rifle. After a minute, he swung it up to rest across his shoulder, which I took as confirmation. And soon he was close enough to recognise: Kimball O’Hara.
All our chicks come home to roost.
Nesbit finished strapping his belt around his thigh and accepted Holmes’ arm to pull himself onto the gelding. But Bindra paid us no mind. Instead, he turned and flew across the ground towards the man with the rifle, leaping into O’Hara’s arms so that the monk staggered back. The sound of their laughter reached us through the still, hot air, and I kicked my mount into a canter until I was even with Nesbit.
“Who the hell is that boy, anyway?” I demanded, but the handsome, somewhat battered face just grinned at me. “Did you arrange for him to be at the horse-seller’s? Is the brat one of yours?”
“Oh no, not mine. I didn’t even know for certain that he existed, although I had my suspicions. No, I’d say the boy belongs to what one might term an earlier régime of Intelligence.”
As we approached, O’Hara’s free hand rested on the boy’s shoulder; our close-mouthed