“And the engines you hear.”
“Yeah.”
“Couple of hours to dawn. What can? This Mardy festival, I heard of things like this. Some backwood villes where they pick a boy and let him do what he wants. Eat and drink what he wants. Fuck anyone he wants. For a special day each year. Then they slit his throat for the promise of a good crop. I wonder if”
Krysty left his side, padding to her clothes. “Best get moving.” She dressed with an elegant haste, tugging on her boots.
He joined her, polling up his trousers, then fastened the buckle on his belt and checked his guns. Moving silently to the door and inching it open, he peered around the edge of the warped frame. He saw nobody out there. Yet his sixth fighting sense told him that the whole of Moudongue was bristling around them.
“I’ll wake the others?”
“Yes. I’ll wake Doc.”
J.B, came instantly to full awareness, the gun probing out into the darkness, his eyes open. “What? Trouble?”
“Men on the move. Holding knives. Krysty thinks she hears swampwags, far off.”
Lori came awake, trembling a little like a frightened fawn, eyes glistening. “What?”
“Trouble,” said Krysty, matter-of-factly.
Ryan knew from previous experience that Doctor Theophilus Tanner wasn’t the quietest of men when it came to being roused from sleep. He knelt beside him, cautiously extending his right hand and clamping it across the old man’s jaws, holding the mouth shut. Simultaneously he hissed into Doc’s ear, “It’s Ryan. Keep still and quiet.” Doc jerked and struggled, his hands scrabbling to free himself, but Ryan was far stronger, holding him down on the floor. “Fireblast, Doc! Wake up, will you? Keep quietthere’s danger.”
Only when Doc was finally still did he release him. The old man sat up, rubbing his face. “Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor, but you have a grip like a poacher’s trap. What ails you now?”
Krysty answered him. “We’ve seen men moving around the huts with cold steel in their hands, Doc. And I heard engines, miles off.”
“What about Finn?” asked J.B., standing at the window, flattened against the wall, squinting out. “He’s with that giant whore.”
“Where?”
Lori answered. “Saw big woman and Finn. Go to house with picture of bird on door.”
“A white cockerel with a red band about its neck,” exclaimed Doc. “Three down from the long hut where we all danced.”
In a couple of minutes everyone was fully dressed and armed and ready. Ryan once more looked out of the shuttered window where J.B. had been keeping watch.
“Anything?”
“No. Thought mebbe I heard a noise, along to the side, by the river.”
Ryan eased out of the hut, keeping in the dark lake of shadow and peering into the surrounding forest where the Armorer had said he’d heard something. It was difficult to tell, but there could have been the faintest light of a fire. A dim red glow, but he couldn’t have sworn to it.
J.B. joined him. “What d’you figure?”
“Get out. I reckon we should make for that township we saw. West Lowellton. This Baron Tourment runs Lafayette. Keep out of that ville. I figure we’ll lose if’n we try and fight these Cajuns in the mud. Better we get into some ruins and make them play on our patch.”
“‘We go and get Finn?”
Ryan nodded, slowly. “Yeah. You take Doc and Lori and go get him. I want to see what those bastards are doing by the river. I’ll take Krysty. Meet you out where the trail narrows. Get to the far side of that and cover the path.”
J.B. nodded and turned to go back inside the hut, then paused. “Chill the big woman?”
“‘Course,” replied Ryan.
ALL THE NOISES of the Atchafalaya Swamp were oddly muted.
Ryan led the way, with Krysty a silent shadow at his heels. There wasn’t a light showing in the whole ville, but ahead of them they now saw that a large fire was lit deep into the curtain of the mangroves. The wind was drifting eastward, toward the ville, so they could smell the scent of the burning wood.
“I hear a drum. Muffled, slack kind of noise,” said Krysty. “Beating slow and even. It’s ’bout in time with a heart.”