Which left the last one, closest to the bathroom and the main entrance, to Titus and Mervyn.
Dean had gone sneaking around before retiring and come back to report that the brothers’ dormitory was like an animal’s den, filled with dried branches and skins of beaver, wolf and bear. The remnants of innumerable cooking fires were in the center of the room, which contained only two beds.
“Looks like all their kin lived there once,” the boy had said. “Stinks so much their bodies might still be rotting away in there someplace.”
The smell came wafting out as Ryan padded by.
But nothing moved.
SHAVING WITH COLD WATER was almost as uncomfortable as Krysty had warned. The steel blade seemed to catch and scratch, and the plastic one-use container of foam gave only a feeble dribble of watery white slime.
The air was cool, smelling strongly of the cooking fire. Ryan had glanced into the entrance hall of the redoubt, seeing the pile of glowing embers, which stood six or eight feet high, giving silent testimony that Titus and Mervyn tended not to remove ashes from old fires.
Beyond the smoking pile was an open space, littered with bits of unidentifiable scrap metal, animal bones and a ragged heap of damp material. And then there were the huge floor-to-ceiling sec doors, their paint dulled and scarred.
Ryan finished shaving, rubbed his hand over his stubble-free chin and dashed several handfuls of icy water into his face, blinking at the shock.
“Better,” he whispered.
He looked up at himself in the discolored mirror, seeing the tight lines around his eyes and mouth. Not for the first time he could glimpse his father in the mirror.
Something moved behind him and he spun, facing the twin muzzles of the two Magnum revolvers held steady in the hands of Titus and Mervyn. They stood together in the doorway, less than twenty feet away, separated from him by another row of waist-high basins.
“Fireblast!” Ryan glanced at the sheathed panga resting on the third basin along the line to the right.
“Guards of the Redoubt present and defending,” the brothers snapped, their voices in perfect unison. “Protect redoubt against outlander enemies.”
“We aren’t enemies. Been through all of that, haven’t we? You agreed that we weren’t enemies.”
There was a mad chill in the brothers, their eyes narrowed with suspicion. They were fully dressed, and Ryan guessed that they probably hadn’t even been to bed at all that night, waiting together in the semidarkness, whispering their plans to each other.
“You going to shoot me? Then go along and shoot the others in their beds?”
The question made them turn and stare at each other, and Ryan realized that Titus and Mervyn hadn’t actually done all that much strategic organizing.
“We’ll chill you all,” Mervyn said, sounding and looking doubtful.
“Shoot me now and the noise of the shot’ll wake the others, and they’ve got the weaponry to take both of you out of the game without raising sweat.”
Titus giggled. “But you’ll be dead.”
Despite being a credible triple stupe, the man had put his finger unerringly on the one weakness in Ryan’s argument. Posthumous revenge wasn’t a great idea.
Though, as Trader had sometimes commented, it was ultimately better than no revenge at all.
“There’s you and me in mirror,” Mervyn said. “Haven’t seen us in lots of time.”
The brothers stared vacantly at their reflections, smiling their identical idiot smiles, heads to one side at the same angle, the barrels of their blasters edging away from Ryan.
Lot of times you had no chance.
Sometimes you glimpsed a part of a chance.
Ryan took it.
He dived to his right, reaching for the hilt of the panga, his feet slipping on the wet tiles so that he nearly fell short. But his fingers just grabbed enough, pulling the knife off the basin, still sheathed.
But Titus and Mervyn reacted much more quickly than he’d guessed and the bathroom filled with the thunder of the big .44s, shattering glass and the ceramic basins.
Their speed of reaction had tugged away his only chance, and Ryan realized that bloody death could be only a few seconds away.