Heh. Koli was caught off-guard. Badly off guard, in fact. As was I, although I think it's awesome, and Koli less so (even his hallucinations are ugly once you realize that the catapults with parsnips and gnomes bit was a hallucinatory reliving of some of the worse moments of the Giaskan siege...). I never in a million years would have guessed the assassin, nor some of the other twists.
