She shook her head and smiled faintly. "He has a dark, poetic power. He is what he is, just like the stompers. I feel ... not hate, not even fear ... a kind of dread."
He stroked the back of her hand and she pulled it away.
"An old song runs through my head," she went on. "A prophecy that Grandfather Stomper cannot be killed while outworld blood pumps through any heart on the planet. I feel like my own enemy, like ... like your enemy. You should not have come until next Gorbals. Flinter, stay away from me!"
He talked soothingly, to little avail. When they parted he said heartily, "Forget those silly prophecies, Pia. I'll look out for you."
Privately, he wondered how.
Cole sat beside Pia and across the food-laden table from General Arscoate, a large pink-faced man in middle life.
"It's an old and proven strategy, Mr. Cole," the general explained. "When Hoggy Darn starts we will harass the enemy from the air in all but one of the fourteen sizable open spaces in Lundy Forest. That one is Emrys Upland, the largest. They will concentrate in Emrys, more each night, until the climactic night of peak frenzy. Then we come down with all the men and women we can muster and we kill. We may go on killing stragglers for years after, but Grandfather Stomper will die on that night."
"Why not kill from the air?"
"More firepower on the ground. I can only lift ninety-four flyers all told. But I will shuttle twenty thousand fighting men into Emrys in an hour or two on the big night."