Desperate Measures/Part 7

Alecto fired at one of the diving, winged monstrosities, but between her loss of the Force and the dark her aim was off, and she missed. Worse, the flash had drawn their attention, and three more black shapes circled against the dark sky. She managed to duck against the rock wall, wobbling for balance in a crouch, and the attacking beast's claws scraped the stone where her torso had been. She shot it in the underside, but it simply flapped off with a ululating shriek, and one of the circling ones dove for its own turn.

Sliding on the path which was not even wide enough for them to walk side-by-side and was angled more sharply than the escarpment that had brought them here, Kal-Di was shooting two-handed from a crouch, trying to dig one boot in enough to hold himself steady, but the slope kept throwing off his aim too. When one of the things dove for him, he holstered up, scrambled up the slope on hands and knees, then whirled around in a blinding flash of blue. By the time Alecto had blinked away the glare and understood what he had done, the monster was screeching and rolling down the cliff, one of its wings shorn away.

"Put that away!" she snapped, spitting a rain-wetted strand of her re-growing hair out of her mouth. "The glare attracts them!"

"Because we're doing so well with blasters!" he fired back.

Alecto was fortunate the things shrieked, because she was so focused on Kal-Di that she almost missed the next attack. As it was she only barely dodged, and the impact of a wing on her shoulder almost sent her plummeting. She wheeled her arms, shifting her weight with wide eyes. Kal-Di slid back down sideways, throwing out an arm across her abdomen and flattening her back against the rock face. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she got her heels back under her as Kal-Di turned the lightsaber on and off, the instantaneous burst of blade lancing through the beast's ribs. It screeched furiously, clawing its way up the rock face as it flapped its wings experimentally.

"Oh, kriff it," Alecto hissed, and took her lightsaber out to swipe at an attacker too.

Rarely had her loss of her powers maddened her quite so much. With their Force senses restored, she and Kal-Di could have balanced on the slippery, sloping rock path indefinitely and carved apart as many of the wretched airborne monsters as Kai Latra cared to throw at them. Without their powers, though, they lacked that critical sense of where the weightless blade was at all times, and they could only chance straight stabs or the most obscenely telegraphed slashes without running the risk of injuring each other or themselves.

Then again, with the Force, they wouldn't have needed lightsabers. Alecto could have crushed their ribs in on their organs like vices, or fried them out of the air with lightning, and even Kal-Di could surely have flattened them against the cliffside.

If wishing for her powers back would make it so, Alecto would have been re-powered many times over the last month. She would have to make do. She planted a hand on one of Kal-Di's thighs to push him up the cliff path faster; his foot dislodged a rock that bounced back and whacked her in the forehead, and she cursed.

One of the flying monsters landed on the path ahead of the Jedi, folding its wings to fit, snarling at Kal-Di. He activated his lightsaber and rose into an ungainly, wobbling Makashi stance, saber hand forward, flicking as far as he could without committing to a lunge. The monster snapped its jaws, swiping a paw experimentally. Alecto leaned around Kal-Di's legs, drew her pistol with her free hand, and shot the thing twice in the face. It didn't have the good manners to topple off the cliff, but merely collapsed, dead, on the path, forcing them to scramble over its carcass.

"These things are huge!" Kal-Di called back.

Alecto crawled over one collapsed wing twice the beast's length and substantially longer than she was tall. It had far too many teeth and long, sharp spines; some corner of Alecto's mind wondered whether Kai Latra had twisted some local creature or imported stock for this one. "Good, they're bigger targets!"

A sharply slanted slope was simply not made for a fighting retreat, even with one shooting while the other climbed. A dive bomb nearly took off part of Kal-Di's face; as he hugged the gravel, shaking at the near hit, he called, "What do you have on your equipment belt?!"

"Grenades!" Alecto barked back, taking a shot at a diving creature and forcing it to abort its attack with a shriek. "I think we've got enough problems without a rock slide, don't you?"

"Anything else?"

"Got a code panel you need decoded?!"

He kept climbing after that, slashing when he could, but his pauses to allow her to catch up grew more frequent, and his aim got progressively worse; she could tell he was suffering the same fatigue that was burning all four of her limbs. Eventually he started cutting himself handholds in the rock after all, but he hissed each time as the plasma beam spat rock debris back up at his face. Once his foot slipped, but Alecto caught it and snugged it back into the toehold he had cut.

Then, without warning, he hauled himself up and out of sight. Startled, Alecto clambered after him as he laid down a more thorough pattern of covering fire that scattered three creatures that had been banking toward them from as many angles. A fourth swooped low under the fire, coming out of its dive right at her.

"Kal-Di!" she screamed without thinking. She released one handhold to reach frantically for her blaster as teeth and claws streaked right at her. A horrific memory of the Abattoir seized her for one instant before Kal-Di threw himself flat against the rock and slashed his blade, taking off the monster's head and its extended paws in one blow. Momentum carried its heavy body into Alecto, and she slammed into the rock face, snarling in pain and dangling by one hand. Kal-Di seized the sleeve of her jacket and pulled on her arm until she could hoist herself up.

He had found a little outcropping, perhaps five meters across; it jutted a meter into the river, which thundered past. Alecto forced herself to stand on shaking legs and lay down cover fire while the Jedi panted and struggled up to his hands and knees. He looked up and sighed. "Damn."

Alecto risked a glance; Kai Latra's 'Palace of Happiness' was still hundreds of meters up. Worse, she could see more of the winged things circling the castle's towers. "We're not gonna make it all the way! They'll pick us off."

Kal-Di made it to his knees, drew his blaster, and fired. "We could hold here and thin the flock."

She knelt at his side, shoulder-to-shoulder but oriented away to minimize overlap in their angles of fire. "The way they're dodging we'll run out of blaster gas first!"

He did not bother suggesting lightsabers; they would either have to spread far enough that something could get between them or risk slaughtering one another on a wild stroke. Instead, he asked, "Wasn't there supposed to be a back door?"

Alecto started; in the chaos of the attack and the innumerable close calls, she had forgotten their original strategy. "Hold them off!"

Leaving him to it before he could object, she ran to the spur of rock in the river and looked up. For a moment she saw only the dark cliffs shadowed by the high castle, but finally she spotted a lip jutting out from the cliff that looked distinctly sentient-made.

"Got it! Here!"

He backed toward her, still shooting; at one point he barked "Oh for Force's sake, just die!" Eventually, though, his boot bumped into hers and he turned. "Where?"

She pointed, then drew both blasters, firing them for scattering rather than effect as he peered up into the darkness. It took him longer, but at last he nodded. "I see it."

He dug around in his own Jedi equipment belt before drawing out a grappling hook. Alecto's eyes widened. "You can't be serious. It has to be a hundred meters!"

"The cord's rated for a hundred and fifty. The liquid reserve—"

She shot over his head at a Sithspawn; he flinched. "I know how it works!" she snapped. "You expect to climb a hundred meters after climbing this? Even if these things weren't after us every meter of it?!"

He grimaced, then drew and shot past her shoulder; she heard a shriek. He looked back up, studying the cliffs, looking up at the castle, gazing at the monsters in the sky…

"If you've got a brilliant plan, now's the kriffing time!"

"I've got a plan, but I don't about—" He fired off out of her field of view. "—brilliant. Do you trust me?"

"No!"

"Do you have a plan?"

She growled. "The back door was my plan, it's your turn!"

"Then pick out the biggest one of these things you can see and bait it down here!"

"Bait it?"

"Shoot at it, but don't hit it! Just get it down here!"

At this rate, Alecto privately thought, she might be more likely to hit it if she wasn't aiming for it. As she scouted, she heard Kal-Di firing his grappling hook, but it crunched off rock far closer than she expected. Resisting the urge to check, she finally fixed her eyes on a Sithspawn that seemed a little bigger than the other survivors and opened fire around it. Some of those nearby took hits, and a few which didn't dove down in attack, forcing her to shoot to kill. Once a monster swooped down on them from the side and Alecto had to dive, tackling Kal-Di around the knees to get him to ground too. Rolling up immediately, she reacquired her target and resumed her bait fire, and at last it dove.

"It's coming!" she called. "Whatever you're going to do, do it fast!"

"Let it land!"

"What?!"

"Trust me! Let it land here!"

Alecto hated taking it on faith, but there was no time for lengthy explanations. The rain dripped into her eyes and plastered her hair to her head as she fired around the thing, keeping her shots close enough to be bait but far enough to miss. She waited until the last possible second, then threw herself sideways. The Sithspawn landed hard, unable to brake completely before it slammed into the rock face. It shook its head repeatedly, disoriented.

At once Kal-Di leapt onto its back, ignoring its indignant shrieks. He had a length of grappling cable in his hands, looped on itself repeatedly, and he threw it over the creature's head, jerking it into the thing's mouth. As it reared and bucked, Kal-Di extended a hand back. "Get on!"

Alecto's mouth fell open. "WHAT?!"

"NOW!"

There was no time; the thing spread its wings, and Alecto knew she had to either risk all but certain death holding out on the outcropping alone or gamble on Kal-Di's insane plan. Holstering up furiously, she caught his hand and he wrenched her up onto the Sithspawn's back. He had wrapped his legs around its neck, but there was no more neck for her; she wrapped him in a constricting bear hug under his arms, trying to hook her boot heels over his thighs.

Kal-Di pulled on his makeshift bridle, and the Sithspawn shrieked and launched itself into the sky.

Though she doubted even Ondar Vargh could have tortured the confession out of her, Alecto could not remember a time since she was eight years old when she had been more terrified. The Sithspawn banked suddenly and with no apparent warning or plan. It rose ever higher above the earth, its fellows shrieking and swarming around it only meters away. The only thing separating Alecto and a horrible death on the rocks now hundreds of meters below was a Jedi Knight who was shaking like a vibroblade from the effort of holding onto their mount.

"WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!" she screamed over the roar of wind and the din of a dozen shrieking Sithspawn.

"I MUST HAVE MISPROGRAMMED ITS NAVICOMPUTER!" he bellowed back. He allowed just a little slack so he could flick his reins experimentally, and the Sithspawn tucked its wings and plummeted into a nearly vertical dive. Alecto's legs unhooked from Kal-Di's thighs and trailed in the air behind her. They both screamed.

"I'LL KILL YOU FOR THIS, KAL-DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"

As the river came back in sight Kal-Di pulled hard on the reins; Alecto tried to brace her knees on the creature's back so she could add her pull to his shoulders'. It rose out of its dive and soared up the river's length; it could have dipped its hind legs into the stream. Tirien pulled harder and it climbed, and at last Alecto saw the landing point. Seizing the Jedi's jacket in a death grip with her sword hand, she pointed with the other. "THERE!"

He tugged the reins and the creature banked, flapping for altitude. For one, heart-stopping moment Alecto was certain they were going to slam right into the cliff; she wondered if the impact would kill her outright, or simply paralyze her so she could fall and drown in the river instead. But the monster flapped its wings to brake, banked hard to correct, and slammed down on the lip of the landing platform.

The thing hit the ground hard and its two riders were launched free. Kal-Di went rolling side-over-side all the way across the docking platform, smashing into the far wall some fifteen meters away. Alecto managed a tidier landing, though she had to do four somersaults before she could pitch into a bad handspring and finally touch down on her feet. She whirled around, her vision blurred, and her stomach heaved. She drew anyway, though four Sithspawn swam in front of her face and her guns pointed in random directions no matter how hard she tried to keep them still.

"Don't shoot it!" Kal-Di groaned.

Alecto looked at the sound of his voice; he was hard to make out in the dock, which seemed to have turned on its side. He distracted her long enough for the Sithspawn to shriek, turn around (bumping into several things itself), and finally fling itself out into the night, clearly keen to be as far from them as possible.

"The flare," the Jedi said; he sounded woozy too. "It attracts them…"

After a moment Alecto's sluggish mind caught up enough to understand. She holstered her guns, though it took her a few tries for the left gun, then sat down and held her head steady, waiting for her vision to catch up to her. Eventually the room stopped vibrating and the multiple images coalesced back into one.

Kal-Di crawled over on hands and knees, wobbling as he did so. Alecto drew her fighting knife and pointed it at him in rage. "That…that was…"

"…by a wide margin, the stupidest thing I have ever done," he agreed, stopping out of range and sitting back on his heels. "But it worked."

The inescapable logic of that did nothing to improve Alecto's mood, but she sheathed her knife and looked around. A Gossam-sized, single-seater spacecraft sat before them. Alecto's seasoned pilot's eye saw at a glance that it was built for speed rather than fighting; useless in a battle, but ideal for fleeing while a battle was going on nearby. "I knew it. I knew it.  I told you he'd have a back way out!"

"And you were right," Kal-Di admitted, struggling to his feet. "Kai Latra's getaway ship?"

"Good bet."

He took his lightsaber hilt in hand. "Cripple it, do you think?"

It was such a Sith idea that Alecto favored him with a smirk. "Every once in a while I like the way your head works, Tirien, but no. We might need it to get back to the Scourge."

He was clearly smart enough to realize the obvious—a ship built for a single Gossam might fit one of them squeezed in, but would never carry both—but he merely nodded, returning the lightsaber hilt to his belt. "Now what do…do you hear music?"

Alecto frowned, but when she walked behind the ship, putting it between her and the river, she could hear it too—low, sepulchral tones and high, sharp ones, all of them echoing down into the dock. "Horn of some kind?"

Tirien listened a moment, then shook his head. "Nalargon, I think."

Alecto shrugged. "If you say so. Let's go."

She found a curving staircase leading up, each step cut into the rock but floored with a slip-resistant deckplate. Approaching triggered a motion sensor, apparently intended to be activated from the other direction; an attendant droid straightened, its photoreceptors lighting up, and said, "Welcome, Master. Your vessel is…you are not my Master!"

Its cleaning and maintenance arms flailed in alarm; Alecto shot it in the head without stopping.

The faint sounds of nalargon grew louder as Alecto mounted the stairs, though she had to recover her balance more than once; stairs suited to Kai Latra were both too narrow and too shallow to be comfortable for her, and Tirien scuffled in her wake too. The corridor at the top was a little taller, though barely wider, and the organ music had grown much louder, but it dead-ended after a few meters. A body space behind her, Tirien asked, "What now?"

"There must be a secret passage," she whispered back, patting the walls. She could not pull out one of her own hairs to check for a breeze, since she could barely see her own hands, let alone a single hair; she was left to hold her hands over the walls, hoping her rain-soaked skin would catch a crevice.

A discordant chord came from the other side of the wall, and a section of wall swung in with a faint click. Light flooded the tunnel; Tirien and Alecto were still staring at one another when the music cut off for a second and a high voice from the next room said, "Aaagh, dammit!"

He resumed playing, a complex melody, but Alecto's eyes had narrowed, and she mouthed to Tirien, Kai Latra.

His eyes widened briefly, but then he controlled himself, nodded, and drew his blaster, switching it over to stun. Alecto did the same, though the idea of taking the betrayer alive made her blood boil. Tirien gestured, and she led the way into the next room. The Jedi bumped into her almost at once, because she had frozen just past the concealed door.

She felt like she had walked into a cathedral, complete with a columned arcade running the length of the cavernous room on either side. Blind arcades were patterned into the walls; it was the pillar of one of these which had swung into the secret passage. Creeping to one of the arcade columns, Alecto looked up and saw the vaulted ceiling towering over her, adorned with mosaics and frescoes of battle, bloodshed, and monsters, as well as more arcane designs Alecto recognized vaguely as Sith sigils and glyphs, though she could only decipher one or two. Every surface Alecto could see was gleaming black nuummite, streaked with brighter colors that made the entire chamber look like a meteor shower in a moonless night. Candlelight from grotesque sconces far out of reach set planets and distant stars in the reflective surface.

In the apse not ten meters away, Kai Latra sat at a nalargon with a double row of key pads. He was entirely dwarfed by the instrument, the grandest Alecto had ever seen. The shortest pipes were still meters above his head; the tallest were wider than Alecto was tall and reached up into the ceiling. The façade of the nalargon above Kai Latra's head was gleaming onyx carved into the snarling face of a rancor; elsewhere in the dark steel of the instrument Alecto saw battle hydras; five pipes emerged from the mouth of a leviathan, whose tail surfaced again as the stand of Kai Latra's chair; a carved Massassi statue on either side of the stand was on hands and knees in worship of the musician; and throughout the construction, three onyx terentateks held pipes in their poison claws. Nuummite and durasteel affectations streaked with red metal swept around the entire, asymmetrical behemoth like infernal winds bearing cursed souls to perdition.

Kai Latra played with virtuoso's skill; Alecto wondered if he was using the Force to make up for having only three fingers on each hand. The melody was rich and haunting, rebounding off the vaulted ceiling, sweeping through the arcades, and cascading up a wide staircase at the opposite end of the chamber. Alecto found herself drawn to the sound even as it made her shiver, like a contemptuous gaze from a man she desired but could never have. It wounded her, but she could not tear herself away, and above her the Sith glyphs were glowing…

Tirien swatted her on the arm, hard, and Alecto started. The Jedi was staring at her, looking both shaken and alarmed, and she suspected he had not had the same reaction to Kai Latra's music. The booming sounds called to her still, but she nodded to show she was back in control. Tirien returned her nod and tipped his blaster muzzle toward the organ's stand.

Alecto fingered the guns on her belt, but frowned as she snuck another glance. Kai Latra seemed totally absorbed in his music, swaying as his little fingers danced over the key pads, but he was still ten meters away across open ground. Alecto couldn't see anyone else in the enormous room, but even if that appearance wasn't deceiving and Kai Latra didn't have a few Sithspawn waiting to pounce on command, that still left two Forceless infiltrators against a Sith Lord who could actually use a lightsaber for more than swatting flies.

She gritted her teeth, but raised a hand, shaking her head. Tirien stared at her as if she'd lost her mind and jerked his head in Kai Latra's direction, but Alecto shook her head again, glaring at him. He glowered back, but braced himself against the pillar to wait.

Kai Latra kept playing; Alecto distracted herself by counting to a hundred in Anzat in her head, then trying to construct basic sentences from the vocabulary she'd learned. When she ran out of words, she ran through lists of the Sith Lords who served the seven Sith Overlords, the foremost representatives of the Five. After that it was the Jedi Council and the key targets among the Order; she smirked to herself as she ran across Tirien's name in her list and glanced his way. His lips were moving soundlessly; he seemed to be distracting himself as well, and she wondered if he was going through the same exercise and whether he had yet come upon her name.

At last Kai Latra's somber, haunting hymn came to a close, the notes hanging in the air long after they had been played. Alecto pressed herself up against the pillar out of sight, waiting until she had heard Kai Latra's quick little footsteps pass by; she risked a quick peek and saw him heading for the staircase at the far end of the cavern; as he passed, candles snuffed themselves out in his wake and darkness overtook the chamber. The organ glowed faintly in the gloom.

She sensed Tirien's proximity in a way that had nothing to do with the Force. "He's alone and unprotected," he whispered in her ear. "This is our best chance to overpower him."

"Too far, and too big a room," she whispered back. "One missed shot and he knows we're here, and he's too far away to be sure of the shot. Trust the assassin, Tirien—wait for the perfect shot instead of rushing into one that's just good."

He made a face, but reholstered his blaster. "Let's go."

They darted from pillar to pillar, but crossed the nave more slowly, not wanting to draw Kai Latra's attention if he looked back. The precaution was wasted; the Sith Lord strode off without a backward glance, whistling to himself. The wide steps were Mirialan-sized, at least, and they curved enough to allow Alecto and Tirien to hang back just out of view. At one point a second staircase curved down in another direction, and Alecto caught a powerful reek of dried blood from it, but Kai Latra kept ascending. They passed a turbolift, too—apparently Kai Latra's way down when he didn't want to bother with the stairs.

"Whoooa-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!"

Tirien jerked to a halt. "What in blazes was that?"

Alecto wasn't sure, though she had an unfortunate suspicion. She had only encountered such a creature once, years ago, and it hadn't sounded quite the same, but that wailing screech was hard to forget. Sure enough, when they came to the top of the stairs she saw the largest Ugnaught she had ever seen looking on while Kai Latra hugged the snout of a green, fang-filled mouth big enough to swallow him whole.

She threw herself to one side of the doorway arch while Tirien ducked behind the other, sneaking slow, cautious glances.

"I feed Cuddles, Master."

"I see that! Did you eat all your snacks, Cuddles?"

"Rrwhooooooa…"

"That's my special boy! Go wait in the lab, Uggie."

"Yes, Master."

Tirien risked another glance, then settled in to wait; since Alecto had vetoed an assault on Kai Latra alone in a wide-open space, he knew better than to bother pitching an assault on Kai Latra and his pet monster. They stood on either side of the door, Alecto mapping out contingency plans in the event that any guards—or, for that matter, Kai Latra—came back down the stairs, until finally she heard Kai Latra whistling to himself again before calling, from a greater distance, "No, no, stay Cuddles. If they haven't found my escapees, maybe you'll get another treat!"

"Rrrrrrrrrrggghrrrroooow…"

Tirien whispered over the sound of stamping claws, "What is that thing?"

"An acklay," she breathed back. "It's nearsighted, but if you get close it'll rip you apart."

He allowed himself a long look this time, studying the terrain. "How do we get past it?"

Though she controlled herself from reminding him that she had never been to Kai Latra's castle, she was growing tired of coming up with all the answers inside. Where was the vaunted Jedi leadership? "Tell you what—you get a good running start to distract it, and while its head is following you, I'll sneak past it!"

"Okay," he said seriously, "but how're you going to deal with its other heads?"

She blinked. "What?"

He tilted his head toward the room. Alecto looked and felt her jaw drop—Kai Latra's acklay had three heads. Its distinctive scream had sounded off to her because it screamed in triplicate. Now that she looked, she could see he had mutated it in other ways too; it had horns on its crested head, spikes and spines on its armored shell, and a proportionately longer and broader body, with studier legs, to compensate for its extra heads.

Alecto could only shake her head in blank, disbelieving astonishment. "Only Kai Latra…just what an acklay needed, to be deadlier…"

The acklay was stomping around its chamber, apparently willing to obey Kai Latra but disappointed to be left behind. One head was screaming at the ceiling while another was staring up the stairs; the third was nuzzling on the ground, straining as far as it could with the other two pulling the other way, in search of any last morsels of food. Obviously the three heads could operate independently of each other; so much for Tirien serving as a distraction.

"You said it's nearsighted," Tirien offered. "Enough that we could just hug the wall, and move slowly…?"

"Unless Kai Latra upgraded its eyesight, too," Alecto grumbled; it was the sort of thing the mad Gossam would do. "And if it does see us, we're trapped against the wall."

"If it does, we split and run different ways," he suggested. "Even with three heads, it only has one body; it can only chase one of us."

"Gonna be a rough night for that one."

"Better plan?"

There had to be. "What about that turbolift we passed?"

"Do you trust it not to require ID?"

Now that he mentioned it, Alecto rather suspected Kai Latra's private turbolift might be rigged to ask for identification only after the rider was inside, and to punish those who weren't Kai Latra. She sighed. "We could just kill it?"

"If he's put this much attention into it, I assume blasters aren't going to make a dent, and even if we can get close enough to lightsaber it, I'm guessing the guards are trained to know what its normal screaming sounds like. In my experience, 'I've just been maimed with a lightsaber' screaming sounds…abnormal."

Alecto rolled her eyes, fighting a grin; realizing that left them only his plan made it a quick victory. "Fine, the wall. But try not to make any noise; I've had enough Sithspawn for one night."

She had to give it to him; for all his faults, the Jedi was brave. He led the way without hesitation, sliding along one blood-spattered stone wall, drifting to a halt when he paused rather than stopping abruptly, keeping his eyes on the acklay. Alecto followed, considering a run over to the opposite wall and following it around the other way, but that plan died almost immediately; she saw the room on the other side of a curved section of wall ended in a pool, which stretched out of sight and around a bend. She remembered belatedly that acklays were supposed to be aquatic in their natural habitat; did the river perhaps flow into an underground lake as well as continuing to the bay? Not that Kai Latra wasn't mad enough to have just built his favorite pet a swimming pool on a whim…

They were following the wall toward the staircase when it happened. Though she and Tirien moved quite silently, the nearest head suddenly looked in their direction and snarled. Alecto knelt to make herself smaller; Tirien slowed his pace gradually before stopping. The acklay's beady little eyes stared their way for a long time, and each second felt like an eternity; Alecto was conscious of the rainwater sliding down her back and pooling at the base of her spine. Then the acklay's head lost interest and looked over its shoulders, perhaps considering a swim.

Tirien took a cautious step.

Without warning, the far head ducked under the other two, glared right at them, and screeched. A second later all three heads were pointing their way, the acklay was reorienting its body, and it loosed its triple scream.

"Whoooa-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!"

Tirien sighed, Alecto swore, and Cuddles the acklay charged.