"Let me in your world, Pia!" he cried.
She pulled away. "Look! The fire mist! Oh thank you, good Morwenna!"
He saw it, a rose pink paled by nearer flame, washing lazily against the black cliff edge of Lundy Forest. It grew, boiling up over the barrier in places, spilling through the gap, and the great, agonizing chord of music muted and dwindled. The flame-perimeter began shrinking and still the fire mist grew, staining the night sky north and south beyond eye-reach. The song became a mournful wailing and the soldiers in the garden moved forward for the mopping up.
"Pia, I've got to go down there. I've got to see a stomper close up."
She was trembling and crying with reaction. "I think they'll be too busy to mind," she said. "But don't go too far in ... Flinter."
He ran down the stairs and through the unguarded gate toward the fought-over area. Wounded men were being helped or carried past him, but no one noticed him. He found a stomper, blaster-torn but not yet dead, and stopped to watch the four-foot tripart beak snap feebly and the dark wings writhe and clutch. The paired vertical eyelid folds rolled apart laterally to reveal three eyes under a single triangular conjunctiva, lambent in the flame-shot darkness. Soldiers passed unheeding while Cole stood and wondered. Then a hand jerked violently at his arm. It was Morgan.
Morgan wordlessly marched him off to a knot of men nearer the mopping up line and pushed him before Garth Bidgrass. Sweat dripped from flaring eyebrows down the grim old face, and over a blistered right cheek. A heavy blaster hung from the old man's body harness.
"Well, Mr. Cole, is this data?" he asked dourly. "Have you come out to save stompers?"
"I wish I could have saved men, Mr. Bidgrass. I wanted to help," Cole said.
"Another like this and you may have to," Bidgrass said, less sharply. "It was close work, lad."