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main one leaching into the horse and moved up the blade.
    “No sir, you shall not have my damn sword either!” spat the Duke in cold fury as he jerked at his blade, snapping it cleanly two-thirds of the way down, where the darkness met the untainted metal.
    CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK . He heard the sound of rifle fire from across the street. He took one last despairing glance at his horse—now darkness all the way to its heaving neck. The horse lashed its head from side to side in panic, as if it were drowning in the rising tide.
    The Duke ran to the sound of the guns.
    He slid around the corner of the taxi, kicking up a flurry of snow, in time to see the two soldiers firing into the Stone.
    The Old Soldier spun and then put up his gun as he recognized the Duke.
    “All I could think of doing, sir,” he panted. “Not a blind bit of good.”
    There was another shot as the Young Soldier reloaded and pumped a new round into the Stone, to no discernible effect.
    “Save your ammunition,” barked the Duke.
    The horse’s frenzied shrieks suddenly stopped dead. There was a beat of silence. They heard a snort and the sound of hooves slowly clopping nearer, then a single hoof pawing the ground.
    They turned slowly.
    The horse stood behind them. The bronze horse had become a black horse, from the bottom of its hooves to the tip of its ears.
    It seemed bigger.
    Black smoke drifted from its eyeballs.
    The Old Soldier raised his rifle.
    The Duke reached out a hand and slowly pushed the gun aside.
    “No,” he said simply. “I don’t know what in Hades this is, but I know a fight when I see it, and I know this kind of battle will be close work, blades not bullets.”
    The Dark Horse pawed snow backward as its sable eyes smoldered at them.
    “And I intend to start by getting my damn horse back.”
    “That’s not your horse, not anymore. . . .” said the Old Soldier.
    “Looks black as the devil’s horse,” added the Young Soldier.
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said the Duke. “Some bloody devil, anyway. Whatever was in the Stone has got out.”
    He looked at the horse, at the strip of blackness joining it to the Stone. The tendril was thinning out, as if the darkness in the Stone were nearly all gone. And as the flow of darkness dwindled, so the split in the Stone was closing up.
    “What do we do?” said the Old Soldier.
    “Warn people,” said the Duke. “You go now; go fast and don’t look back. Warn them so they can try to find a way to put whatever this cursed genie is back in its damned Stone.”
    “Right,” said the Young Soldier. “You heard the man, off we go. . . .”
    The Old Soldier wasn’t in such a hurry to leave. “What about you, sir?”
    “Me, sir?” The Duke smiled and looked from the horse to the split in the Stone. “I don’t know. But I think we must stop that crack from closing, or we shall not have even a sword’s-breadth of hope left. . . .”
    The Old Soldier knew what he was going to do the instant before he did it, and greatly to his credit tried to jump between the Duke and the Stone.
    “No, sir!” he shouted.
    The Duke sprang past the Old Soldier and plunged his sword into the crack in the Stone, right up to the hilt.
    There was another silent detonation, and a great blast of heat pulsed out of the Stone. The horse reared high on its back legs and snorted in rage, and the Duke . . .
    The Duke melted into a frozen gout of bronze. The only thing left to show of him besides a curve of liquefied metal was his hand, still clenched unflinchingly to his sword handle, the blade of which was held fast by the crack.
    The two soldiers looked at each other. The young one opened his mouth to speak.
    The old one just grabbed the boy by his shoulder and ran.
    Behind them, the Dark Horse pawed the snow and felt new power in its limbs, recalling how it felt to move, because the darkness had remembered one of the ways it had walked the earth all those aeons before its imprisonment.
    It had