Stone dead.
The rest of the chillers kept coming, as if the danger hadn’t sunk in yet.
Ryan aimed low and fired again.
His second target had to have realized he was in trouble, as he slowed a fraction of an instant before the firing pin snapped. Instead of running into the arc of the speeding bullet and meeting it square mid-chest, he met it square midshin. His right leg buckled under him, the long bones shattered and he sprawled on his face in the road.
The others took cover then, scurrying behind the boulders on either side of the road.
As Ryan cycled the Steyr’s action, he was hit from behind by an intense blast of heat and another wave of rolling thunder. He looked back to see that the strange clouds had already reformed in the middle of the pool and were rushing toward him, pushed by the hot wind. As the yellow, snowlike substance began to fall over the lake, Ryan rushed to Dean’s side. The boy still stood like a statue, seemingly as dead as one of the stripped trees. Ryan was trying to scoop him up into his arms when the spore blizzard swept over them, making a rattling sound as it bounced off the earth, and off his head and shoulders.
Ryan took a breath.
And he smelled flowers.
A billion flowers.
It was as if he had been dropped into fields of ripe blossoms that stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. The concentrated sweet perfume overloaded and short-circuited his nervous system.
No longer aware of the flurry of bullets zipping past him, Ryan dropped the Steyr muzzle-first into the mud.
With the enemy longblaster controlling the short stretch of road leading up to the summit, Crecca and crew had had no choice but to bust brush. After the carny master split the rousties into two groups, they circled through the trees from opposite sides of the road, coming out on the flat bit of table rock that was the mountain’s peak.
Cawdor and company were nowhere in sight.
Peering over the edge of the summit, Crecca saw their quarry, by now already a good distance away, down by the shore of the little lake. He paid no attention to the clouds, nor to the thunder and lightning. He immediately dispatched six of his chillers to go after the bastards. He kept the best long-range shots with him, and ordered them to fire, but sparingly, from a prone position along the peak, this to keep Cawdor and the others pinned along the shore.
Even though the carny master was expecting the longblaster to bark again, when it came, he flinched at the boom. Out the back of one of the rousties on the road beneath him came a puff of red mist. His shredded lungs and heart gusted from a fist-sized exit hole, spraying over the side of a boulder. The big-bore rifle slug exploded against the sandstone.
Before Crecca could react, before the other men on the road could react, the longblaster spoke again. A second chiller was hit in the leg and fell to the ground. The rousties ducked for cover as the wounded man crawled after them, screaming. Then the sharpshooters Crecca had lined up along the summit resumed firing, with gusto, at the man behind the dead tree. The roar of their weapons drowned out the thunder from below.
Crecca saw Cawdor drop his weapon. The carny master completely misread what was going on beside the lake. Because all of the companions were standing still or were down, he thought they’d given up, that they were surrendering.
“Stop!” he shouted at the men on either side of him. “Stop firing!”
They obeyed, albeit grudgingly.
“But we’ve got ’em cold!” one of the rousties complained. “We can cut ’em to pieces from here!”
“The Magus wants Cawdor and his son alive,” Crecca told the man. “He’s made big plans for them. Do you want to tell the Magus how you spoiled his fun?” The chiller’s face blanched, and he shook his head.
Truth be told, Crecca wanted to take them alive, too. He intended on doing some serious, prolonged, but nonlethal ass-whipping before he turned them over to the whims of old Steel-Eyes.