J.B. leaned over the teenager’s shoulders, nodding his agreement. “Yeah. Rain tells us that. But the track’s heavy used. Look at the boot marks, as well.”
“No gas buggies at all,” Ryan offered. “Only flatbed carts. Iron-rimmed wheels. Some ponies unshod. Wonder if they could be the Apaches?”
“Possible.” The Armorer looked around them, his head slightly on one side, as though he were listening for some divine message. “Might as well follow them.”
“Why not?” Ryan straightened and eased the blaster in its holster. “Just so long as we don’t run into the camp of these Children of the Rock.”
“THINK SOMEONE’S COMING.” Krysty had stopped at a point where the trail wound into a series of hogback ridges, with the trees pressing in thickly on both sides.
“Sure?” Ryan already had the SIG-Sauer drawn and cocked in his right hand.
She nodded, her sentient red hair bunched more tightly at her nape. “Sure, lover.”
“Norms or muties?”
Krysty considered the question for a moment, her green eyes squeezed shut. “Norms.”
“Many?”
A shake of the head. “Don’t think so. Few. But you know that I can never be…”
“Sure,” he said, finishing the sentence for her. “Yeah, I know.”
Jak cleared his throat. “Can hear something.”
“What?”
Ryan knew the albino’s hearing was sometimes uncannily acute.
“Bridle. Hooves.”
“Right. J.B., you, Mildred, Dean and Doc cover that side of the path. We’ll take this side. Keep under cover. Don’t make a move unless I do. Best nobody knows we’re in the area.” As the others began to move, he called out in a penetrating whisper, “But if we need to stop them, then we do it with extreme prejudice.” The old killing phrase from the long-gone, distant days before skydark came easily to him.
He crouched in the stygian blackness between two slender sycamores that had somehow seeded themselves among the ranging conifers, his blaster ready, his nerves strung taut.
From where he hid, Ryan could see some distance along the trail toward the north. The sound of a horse coming in his direction was louder, and he heard the soft snuffling of the animal’s breath, the noise of the harness and tuneless singing.
It was an old song that Ryan recalled one of the navs on War Wag One used to sing, claiming it was an ancient folk ballad from a hundred years before skydark and that it had at least a hundred verses. And he’d known all of them.
The quavering voice, coming toward them along the trail, could be either an old man or an old woman.
It didn’t sound like anything to fear.
Finally the singer appeared, sitting slumped on a sway-backed mule, barefoot, dressed in a collection of ill-fitting rags. It was an elderly man, with shoulder-length, greasy gray hair, tangled and knotted. He held the bridle loosely in his clawed right hand, seeming content to allow the animal to pick its own way at its own speed.
The current verse of the interminable song detailed a biologically impossible encounter between the heroine, Little Betty, and a well-endowed rattlesnake, in a cave filled with long-lost Spanish conquistadors’ gold.
Ryan eased his finger off the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. The old man was alone, apparently indifferent to the rest of the world, obviously unaware of any threat to his safety.
It might be worth stopping him and interrogating him about the local region, and particularly about the mysterious Children of the Rock.
Now the mule was almost level with where Ryan was hiding, and the rider still hadn’t even looked up, still droning on in a quavering voice.
Ryan made the snap decision to allow him to pass by unchallenged.
When the song stopped, the old man tugged on the reins, bringing the animal to a four-square halt. His head turned slowly toward the fringe of trees, seeming to drill directly at where Ryan was standing stock-still, barely breathing.
He risked a glance around the flank of the tree, seeing to his amazement that the man was stone-blind, his staring eyes both veiled with milky white cataracts.
“Who’s there?”
The voice was stronger, and Ryan noticed for the first time that the old man had a blaster tucked into a broad leather belt, a battered Ruger that looked like it had been used for everything from hammering fence posts to stirring mutton stew.