“Fire opal,” Madame Maigris said. “Supposed to have come from a land to the far south, beyond the edge of the known world. Whatever the fuck that means.”
“I believe that it might mean Terra Incognita Australia, ” Doc ventured. “Or Australia, as it was more commonly known. A small mining town called Coober Pedy was one of the centers of the opal trade.”
“It’s unusual.”
“Take it. Go on. Don’t want nothin’ for it. Supposed to have power against witches and all.”
“You do much trading here?” Ryan asked, helping Krysty to fasten the catch of the pendant around her neck. “Doesn’t seem too lively.”
“Some says we do and some says we don’t. I calls it a matter of fucking opinion.”
Baptiste cackled with laughter. “The rest of the world says we don’t and she says we does. If you call such a matter of shitting opinion.”
“Shut it,” his wife said, but there was no venom in her voice and she seemed to have become suddenly tired and bored. “You got what you wanted, outlanders. Mebbe you should be hittin’ the trail again.”
“Be interested in meeting this Family you talked about,” Ryan said, standing between Baptiste and the door.
The woman sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “You see the Family and they’ll probably be real triple happy to see you. And your friends.”
“Get many strangers?” Jak asked.
“No. Off the main highways.”
“Guess it’d be like a lot of villes.” Mildred was admiring her crucifix in a fly-specked mirror with a round pewter frame. “Some welcome new blood. Some don’t.”
There was a sudden stillness in the shack, as though the angel of death had swooped by, low overhead.
The woman stared at Mildred, her eyes wide, jaw gaping. She half lifted a hand to point, then let it drop. Her husband had half risen from his chair, waving the blaster around in an uncontrolled, spastic movement.
“Blood,” she stammered.
“What’d I say?” Mildred looked quickly around at her friends, the rows of beads knotted into her hair whispered and clicking like the far-off sound of billiard balls.
“You been sent? That it? You all been sent by the Family?”
Baptiste nodded at his wife, a thread of spittle drooling from his parted lips. “You got it woman. They be spies for the Family. Sent here!”
“Nobody sent us.” Ryan’s hand had dropped to the butt of his SIG-Sauer P-226. Something had happened that he didn’t understand, but the shotgun shack seemed brimming with a strange, hesitant, unspoken menace.
“So you fuckin’ say!” The woman took a couple of steps toward the door, her head turning from side to side like an enraged walrus, peering out into the morning. “You brought other Family spies to take us into that dark house.”
“We’ve never seen the Family,” J.B. protested. “Never been here before.”
“Let’s go,” Ryan said to the others. “Best we leave before there’s blood spilled.”
“More blood speech,” the old man screamed in a hoarse, cawing voice.
Madame Maigris was skipping from foot to foot as if she were in a child’s game. “You get out. Tell nobody nothing and nobody does nothing.”
“We’re going.” Krysty reached out a hand. “Sorry if we’ve upset you.”
But the fat woman drew back with a horrified expression on her face, as if Krysty had offered her a white-hot branding iron to embrace.
“Get the fuck away, fire bird!”
There was a sudden disturbance toward the back of the shop as Jak knocked over one of the trays of totems. As it fell, a corner ripped away a length of filthy curtain behind it, showing a crude wall painting.
A naked man had been nailed upside down to a cross, patches of red daubed on his hands and feet and over the genital area of his body. Hooded figures stood around him, one of them kneeling by the bottom of the crucifix, holding a copper bowl in one hand and a sharp silver knife in the other. Its edge touched the man’s throat, opening up a torrent of crimson that was flooding into the bowl.
Everyone stopped moving and stared at the fresco, held by its animal power, by the atmosphere of brutish violence and terror that emanated from it.
“Sorry,” Jak breathed, the single word hanging in the silence like a forgotten promise.
Madame Maigris stared at her own right hand, watching the fingers crabbing across the countertop toward the filthy scattergun.
“It’s obscene,” Mildred whispered. “Sort of a mix of senility and childishness.”
“Shouldn’t have seen it,” Baptiste said, his face now seeming completely sane and wise.
“Leave the blaster,” Ryan warned, his own automatic now clear of the holster.
But the fingers kept moving, while the woman looked down at them, face blank, as though she were observing someone else’s hand.
“Let’s get out of here, lover,” Krysty said, touching Ryan on the arm. He noticed out of the corner of his good eye that she had drawn her Smith amp; Wesson 640. “Seriously bad feeling here, lover.”
“Sure.”
JOHANNES FORDE had become tired of waiting and had left Dean to watch the team. He moved silently up to the tumbledown shack, drawing both his Navy Colts, the sunlight glittering off the mother-of-pearl grips.
He jumped straight in through the doorway, landing with a jingle of spurs. “First man to reach for his shooting iron gets on the fast track to meet his Maker!”
The shout and the sudden appearance of the stranger gave the striking mechanism of total chaos the feather’s-weight push it needed.
Madame Maigris snatched up the shotgun, pointing it toward Krysty.
Ryan squeezed the trigger once on the SIG-Sauer, but he was pushed off-balance by Baptiste and he knew instinctively that he’d missed the woman.
He swung a hasty punch at the cackling old dotard, glimpsing the double-barreled flintlock pistol very close to the side of his head.
There was a burst of dazzling light as Baptiste fired the blaster, the flash in the pan sending grains of fire into Ryan’s right eye.
Into the good right eye.
Things got dark.
Chapter Eleven
The darkness was total, and no dreams invaded Ryan’s unconscious mind, no characters from his past who rose gibbering from their temporal graves and clawed their way into the heart of his blackness.
There were colors, swirling around like gobbets of oil paint dropped into a basin of clear spring water, and specks of diamond brightness. But the patterns were displayed against an enveloping shroud of sable velvet.
” coming around”
The voice was somehow being projected from the top of a sky-scraping, star-toppling cliff that fell stark and sheer into a mighty cavern.
Ryan could hear it echoing inside his skull, bouncing from bony wall to bony wall.
“me, lover?”
A riding wave of nausea forced stinking bile into his mouth, making him cough.
“Help him to sit up, or he might choke before he comes around properly.”
It was Mildred talking. Ryan recognized her voice. What he couldn’t work out was what had happened to him. There was a throbbing pain behind his temples that seemed to have its source above and behind his right ear.
“Is he all right? Those scorch marks”
For a few beats of the heart, Ryan slipped back out of consciousness into the dark. Then he was sitting up, supported by someone’s arm around his shoulders, still feeling sick, aware that he had another pain, a burning sensation in his good right eye.
“I think that he’s back with us. Ryan, my dear fellow, can you hear me?”
Ryan’s tongue felt as if it had been hand knitted, five sizes too large for his mouth. “Hear you, Doc.”
“Might be concussed,” Mildred said. It wasn’t a question, so Ryan didn’t need to speak.
“You all right, lover?”
“Fine.”
But he knew that he wasn’t fine. He was a long way short of fine.
To remove the blackness, Ryan had opened his good right eye. He knew that he’d opened it.
But the blackness was still there.
Chapter Twelve
“A deserted house.”
“Where?”
“On the edge of the ville.”
“Who knows we’re here?”
“Nobody.”
“Sure nobody saw us?”
“I’m sure.”
“Feels cold and damp.”
“It is. But most of the roof is on, and it looks like someone lived here for a while. Some of the broken windows have been shuttered, and the back and side doors have both been barricaded. There’s remains of a fire.”
“Don’t light it!”
J.B. patted him on the arm. “Relax a bit, Ryan. We aren’t virgin stupes.”
“Yeah, I know that” There was a long, long silence between the two old friends. “Just that”
“I know, Ryan.”
“Mildred there?”
“Up the stairs. Keeping watch.”
“How about food?”
The Armorer cleared his throat. “Jak and Dean are going out scavenging a little later.”
“Tell them to be careful and” He laughed quietly. “Being blind makes you stupid,” he said. “Course they’ll be careful. What’s the time?”