” Merde ,” he hissed. Even to someone who’d spent all of his life in the swamps, the insects could be torture. There had been a woman in Moudongue, named Jenny, whose skin had carried a subtle odor that was irresistible to the hordes of biting insects around the bayous. Poor Jenny. She’d tried getting help from the local voodoo priests. Even gone to Mother Midnight and begged aid against the swarming skein of fluttering flies that always hung around her long hair and face. In the end, Henri recollected, Jenny had been driven insane. Clearly mad, she had run screaming into the splashing shallows of the nearest slime hole, tearing great bloody gouges in her face. No one who had watched the frenzy of her thrashing in the gray-brown ooze tried to help her. It hadn’t taken long for the sinister caymans, attracted by the disturbance, to slither from the banks.
Again there was an insect brushing at his hair, making him twitch with irritation.
He moved his head to precisely the right position.
De la Tour cursed fluently, slapping his hand to the point just below the right ear where the bastard moustique had stung him. Sharp and painful, where the big carotid artery carried the blood from the aorta to the brain.
In the darkness of the forest, the Cajun heard rain pattering on the leaf-mold around his worn boots. That was strange as it wasn’t raining. Somehow it was hard to concentrate on why that should be so peculiar.
It was definitely raining. Henri could feel rain soaking through the collar of his shirt on one side, running over his skin. Warm.
” Chaud ?” he muttered, puzzled by the heat, of the rain.
He felt his lips move, heard the faint whisper of his own voice. But all of it was happening a long, long way off. Happening to someone else.
With a labored slowness he reached up to touch the place where the insect had stung him, feeling for the lump of the bite. It wasn’t a lump at all. It was a tiny mouth, set in his throat. Pouting lips that intermittently spat blood into the night air.
The Cajun’s left hand, opened, and the musket dropped away to be caught by Ryan Cawdor before it could reach the ground.
Then the Cajun understood.
Through the murky slowness of his fading mind, he knew what was happening. He wanted to shout a warning to the others, busy at their ritual, but a hand, strong as a steel clamp, shut over his mouth, helping him as he felt his legs start to falter.
Ryan steadied the dying man, laying down the blaster with one hand, lowering the blood-splattered body to the earth. He actually sensed the moment that life departed.
The last cogent thought of Henri de, la Tour was that he had, shamefully, lost control of his bowels.
“Pays the debt, Henn,” said Ryan quietly, wiping his hands on the stubby grass that grew around the base of the trees.
IN SOME DOUBLE-POOR COMMUNITIES, out in the deserts, Ryan had seen ceremonies, sacrifices, hoping to bring some sort of fertility or rain or freedom from plague.
They’d all been poor, shoddy events.
This was different.
The air tasted of fear. Followed by Krysty Wroth, the one-eyed man picked his way with exaggerated caution, closing in on the fringe of stunted bushes that hid them from the fire and the people around it.
There were eighteen fourteen men and four women. All were naked to the waist, and sweat glistened on their bare flesh. What fueled the fire was rough-hewn logs, piled loosely in front of a broken block of concrete around eight feet long and four feet thick.
Spread-eagled on the makeshift altar was a huge boar, its skin pink in the light. A hemp cord was bound tightly around its long muzzle, muffling its shrill cries. It lay on its side, its legs and neck stilled with wire. Leaning against the stone rectangle was a long-hafted logger’s axe, its edge glittering orange.
“They going to kill it?”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Got to be. I heard of some crazies out west kill like this. Trader said he once seen them slitting the throat of a girl child.”