Malcolm smiled at him. "That's all?"
Horace grinned sheepishly. "As a matter of fact, you made me a little nervous too," he admitted.
"And me," Will added."And I know how most of the illusions are done."
"Well, you're one up on me," Horace told him. "Everything came as a wonderful surprise as far as I was concerned."
" The demon face in the fog – and the giant warrior – they were your normal projection illusions, weren't they?" Will asked Malcolm.
Horace snorted. "Normal!" he muttered under his breath.
Malcolm ignored him and replied to Will's question. He was justifiably proud of the technology he had created to form the illusions, and he couldn't help preening just a little.
" That's right. The fog serves a double purpose. It gives me a kind of screen to project on, but it also dissipates and distorts the projections so they're never seen too clearly. If MacHaddish had got a clear look at them, he might have seen how crude they are. The suggestion is all important. The viewer tends to fill in the empty spaces for himself, and usually he does a far more terrifying job than I could."
"The lights in the trees I've seen before too," Will continued. "After all, we use them when we're signaling Alyss. But the flying face – the one that nearly hit you – how did you manage that?"
"Ah, yes, I was quite pleased with that one. Although it nearly brought us undone. Nigel and I spent most of the afternoon rigging that. He's only seventeen, but he's quite an artist. It was nothing more than a paper lantern with the face inscribed on it in heavy black lines. We mounted it on a fine wire that ran across the clearing. It was invisible in the dark. The idea was it was supposed to swoop down, then disappear into the trees opposite."
"But it… just seemed to fly apart into sparks," Will said.
Malcolm nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, that's another little chemical trick I learned some years back. A combination of sulfur and saltpeter and…" He hesitated. Proud or not, he wasn't willing to share all the details with them."And a bit of this and that," he continued."It creates a compound that burns fiercely or explodes if you contain it."
"It was very effective," Horace said, remembering how the red shape had swooped out of the sky, flashed across the clearing, then dissolved into a shower of flame and sparks in the treetops. "I think it was the final straw for MacHaddish."
"It nearly gave the game away," Malcolm replied."As I said, it flew lower than we had expected and nearly hit me. That would have tangled me up in the wires and might well have set my cloak on fire. If MacHaddish had seen that happen, he would have seen through the whole thing."
"It's often the way," Will said. "Failure is just a few seconds away from success."
" That's true," Malcolm agreed.
Orman had listened patiently as they dissected the events of the previous night. Now, he thought, it was time for a few details. "So what's the situation?" he asked.
"Not good," Horace said. "There's a war party of two hundred Scotti clansmen assembled on the other side of the border, and they'll be here in less than three weeks."
"So we have to take Macindaw before they get here," Will put in.
Orman, Xander and Malcolm all nodded. That much was obvious. It was Horace who added a jarring note to the conversation.
"And we're going to have to find an extra hundred men to do it," he said.
24
"What about a night attack?" Will asked. "Could we get away with fewer men that way?"
Horace shook his head. "We still need the numbers to keep the defenders guessing. Night or day, it doesn't make a difference. We need more men than they do."
They had been discussing the problem since the meeting in Malcolm's cottage had broken up early that morning. But so far, there was no sign of a solution. The two friends had decided to ride back through the forest to a point where they could study the castle, to see if there were any weak points in its defense.
They left their horses a few meters back from the forest edge and proceeded on foot. As Will had done when he had attempted to rescue Alyss, they approached from the eastern side, moving along the road where it passed through a slight depression – deep enough to conceal them from the castle ramparts. As the road angled up and reached a crest, they sank to their knees. The grim castle stood a little under two hundred meters away. Will was reminded of a crouching, waiting monster.
He picked sourly at a clump of dried, frozen grass thrusting up through the snow.
"Do you have to be so negative?" he said. "Sometimes it helps if you keep your thinking flexible."
Horace turned slowly toward him. It was a deliberate movement that was familiar to Will.
"I'm not negative, and I'm not inflexible," Horace said. "I'm just facing facts."
"Well, let's face some others," Will suggested.
"You can't ignore facts just because you don't like them, Will," Horace said, his irritation showing. "The fact is, siege work is a very precise, very ordered science. And there are rules and guidelines that have been laid down after years of trial and error and experience. If we are going to besiege a castle, we will need more men than the defenders. Not less. That's a fact, whether you like it or not."
"I know, I know," Will replied, irritated in his turn. "It's just I feel there must be more to it than merely saying we need three times as many men as the defenders."
"Four times," Horace put in.
Will gestured in annoyance."Four times, then! And then we will win the battle. It leaves any innovative ideas or stratagems out of the equation and reduces it to numbers. What about ingenuity and imagination? They're part of a battle plan too, you know."
Horace shrugged. "Your area. Not mine."
And that was the problem, Will knew. People looked to Rangers for innovation and ingenuity when it came to planning a battle. But he had been wrestling with this problem since Horace had arrived from the south, and he was no closer to a solution. Some Ranger he'd turned out to be, he thought bitterly.
Perhaps the most infuriating part of it all was that he had a feeling that there was an idea floating around in his subconscious, hovering just out of reach. It had been triggered by something that he had seen or heard in the past few days, but for the life of him, he couldn't put a finger on it. It only made him feel more inadequate.
"Well, we know one thing," Horace said."If we do attack them, it won't be from this side."
Will nodded. There was too much open ground to cross. Once their force broke cover from the forest edge, they would be in full view of the castle.
An attack from this side would have no element of surprise about it. By the time the attackers reached the walls, they could well have lost a third of their number to the defenders' crossbows.
Horace, as if reading his mind, took the opportunity to reinforce the point he had been making earlier.
"Another reason why we need to outnumber them," he said. "We could lose a lot of men attacking across open ground like this."
Will nodded gloomily.
"All right," he said. "Point made."
He looked up at Alyss's tower window, half closing his eyes in the effort to focus. The heavy tapestry that was used to keep out the wind had been drawn back, and the window formed a black rectangle in the gray stone of the wall. Then he thought he saw a flash of white, as if someone had just passed close to the window. It could only have been Alyss.
"Did you see that?" he asked. Horace, who had been studying the drawbridge and gatehouse, glanced at him curiously.