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sprang.
    * * * *
    On the valley floor Francisco Navárez shouted desperately at his remaining men. The mercenary troop was cut to vulture feed, the handful left screaming madly against certain death. A final volley of pistol shots raked the cavalry line before them, throwing the knights into disarray. The critical moment.
    Half the Austrian troops watched the drama on the hillside, briefly ignoring the doomed bunch in the ravine. Navárez fired his pistol and flung it aside, lurching out from behind the carcass of his horse and wrestling astride another screaming animal. With a wave he directed any left alive to follow him up the dusty slope in a frenzied dash for life.
    A swarm of arrows dropped men to his right and left as he clenched teeth and eyes, clinging low, cursing deep within his chest. He spurred the frothing animal upward at a stumbling gait. His last impression of the valley was a terrifying glimpse of a musket company advancing on the double. He had no way of knowing whether any survivors followed, hugging tightly, as he was, the neck of the shuddering horse that clumped over churning shale as if through dream-mist. A roaring bellow preceded the first fusillade of gunshots.
    Then, the thuck! of torn flesh and a scream of shock and pain. The horse fell from under him. Navárez plummeted head first over the dying animal’s crest and cracked his chin on the baked shale, stunning him. He crawled forward a few feet, raised up on hands and knees. A searing pain shot through his leg. Two horsemen plunged past him as he collapsed. Then another. Heedless to his weakly raised appeal for help.
    Desperate. Strangled by the certainty of death.
    His eyes refocused, and a hundred yards to the right through a veil of dust and swelter, he witnessed an act of magick: A circle of swordsmen, blades flung to heaven, died in the space of a breath by a flash of silver sorcery.
    * * * *
    The chilling thunder of the muskets nearly cost Gonji his life.
    His parry was slow and imprecise, and the harrowing pass at his ribs lost him positional advantage. But then urgency electrified practiced reflexes. A flick of his left wrist slapped the attacker full in the face with the seppuku blade, sending him spinning, whining in pain.
    Gonji spun into a crouch against the hacking whiz above his head and caught the blow hilt-tight on the killing sword, enabling him to throw the second man backward on leg power alone. A low whirling parry-slash deep inside a third downward cut ripped open an attacker’s belly. The man lurched forward with a ghastly moan, clutching his abdomen, as the samurai’s licking swords hammered back two blades with an outward spread of his arms and crashed into the two men’s sides with the crossing return. One foe yanked sword and buckler into the sky in mortal agony, but the second’s hauberk had withstood the slash of the short sword. The Austrian stumbled back a pace, righted and charged, howling ferociously. Gonji’s leaping turn away from the plunging sword landed him a scant six inches from the spearing lunge of the leader, whose ugly red welt now ballooned the left side of his face.
    For a frozen instant of time, the samurai was a dead man. Knifing steel poised to skewer back and belly. But such a slice of life would beckon only a fool to bet the odds.
    Gonji never stopped moving, executing a quicksilver spinning pass. The first whistling slice of the Sagami sang cleanly through the welted man’s steel, casting the broken end skyward. The short sword’s backswing deflected the rear lunge, and like a fan blade Gonji continued around with the longer katana , slicing through mail and flesh. A blind stab delivered under his armpit—and the leader’s mouth gaped, behind him.
    He still clutched the broken sword as he died in his tracks.
    And Gonji was off at the run, a downed warrior’s moaning receding in his ears. He waved the scattered mercenaries up the hill with a broad gesture, calling for them to cling close