In Crecca’s opinion, unasked for and unexpressed, the Magus had done it to himself by insisting that One-Eye and his son sit in the tent where he could watch them die with the farmers. And he had done it to the rest of the carny by insisting that the looting begin before the mass chilling was over. The Magus had been obsessed with the idea that in the case of Bullard everything had to happen quickly, the ville cleaned of its extra large cache of valuables, the bodies buried and the caravan moving on, all before a bunch of new travelers along the long, dry road wandered onto the scene and complicated things.
If Crecca knew nothing of biology, from his life experience roving through the Deathlands, he had acquired a fine grasp of what made people tick. It didn’t take much to realize that the Magus took an unholy pleasure in playing the puppet master. The steel-eyed monster’s idea of fun was diverting and deceiving the doomed suckers in the gas tent while his crews stripped their humble cabins of furnishings, clothing, tools, food, utensils, weapons and ammunition, and tore up floor- and wallboards looking for other predark treasures. The Magus had assigned twenty-five rousties to this task, supervised by Furlong.
Dividing the force had been a big mistake, but it was understandable.
The carny had run this operation successfully so many times that once the crowd was seated, the canisters in position and exit guards in place, all the rest seemed a sure thing. The tent was Kevlar and couldn’t be cut or torn with anything less than a blowtorch, and there were armed rousties to seal off the only way out. The Magus hadn’t even considered the possibility of a mass breakout of his intended victims, so he hadn’t been prepared to defend against it. Nor had he considered the consequences to follow with all the ville sec men alerted, and everyone older than twelve years packing a blaster, and the good folk of Bullard catching the rousties in the act of looting their cabins and storehouses.
Given the switch in odds, which was suddenly three to one against the rousties, and the fact that these farmers had trained to defend themselves and had been successful doing so in the past, it was no surprise to Crecca that the whole thing had gotten way out of hand in a hurry.
Some of the carny crew had been chilled in the tent by Cawdor and his bunch, which left another twenty or so to guard the wag convoy. And that was before the shooting from the ville folks started. There was no way of telling how many rousties were still alive. Certainly not enough to beat back the farmers. In which case, the best Crecca and the carny survivors could hope for was to exit Bullard with whole skins. Which meant abandoning pretty much everything to escape, and doing it before they were overrun.
As the carny master finally wrenched free the bent bolt, it occurred to him that even now the Magus was jerking his strings, making him act against his own interests. And that there was nothing he could do about it.
Once the cover to the servo was off, the Magus attacked the leads to the microminiature nuke battery that powered the unit. The ruined device couldn’t be replaced; there was no spare on hand. A new one needed to be machined from titanium bar stock, something that couldn’t be done in Bullard. Or anywhere else in Deathlands that Crecca knew about. There weren’t any functioning precision machine tools readily available. Even if there were, no one was alive who could figure out how to run one. In the present, all the Magus could do was shut off the unit. When the connection to the battery was broken, his calf muscle relaxed, but without the servo to coordinate its movements, the half-steel leg was just so much deadweight.
The Magus didn’t seem worried. One leg or two, he always managed to get away. Jumped dimensions or time traveled, or whatever it was that he did.
To get himself a new servo made, Crecca thought as he hurried to the salon’s rear window, mebbe the Magus would jump backward in time, to before the nukecaust.