Nobody mentioned the pathetic nature of this effort.
Whether the makeshift weapons would ultimately help to advance their cause or not, at least they were doing something.
Chapter Eleven
Flanked by a small group of stickles. Lord Kaa and Rogero had crawled to a hilltop vantage point within a half mile of the Willie ville defensive berm. Nestled in the black hollow of the valley below, Baron Elijah’s township twinkled in outline. Yellow points of light defined its perimeter, its height, its breadth. There were so many torches burning, it looked as if the whole ville had been set on fire.
“The norms are expecting us to pay them a visit tonight,” Lord Kaa said. He spoke with his lips almost touching die side of Rogero’s head, to make sure that his officer would hear his words and understand them. “Baron Elijah only lights his ville like that when he suspects an attack. Word of our victory in the south must’ve spread up the toll road ahead of us. It’s a safe guess that every one of Elijah’s sec men is standing watch at the barricades, with blaster in hand. Won’t they all be disappointed when dawn comes and we still haven’t shown ourselves?”
Rogero made a soft, whimpering sound. As the stickie watched the distant flames, its fingers clawed furrows in the dirt
Kaa understood his paladin’s need, and the needs of
the other members of the recce party. The sight of fires in the valley excited them and kindled an urge to wreak mindless havoc. Kaa knew that if he hadn’t been there to help them contain their enthusiasm, the stickles1 primal blood lust would have taken over Rogero and the others would have rushed down into the light and hurled themselves upon the ville’s walls, dying point-lessly there under the baron’s concentrated blasterfire, dying in an attempt to satisfy what could never be satisfied: their species’ thirst for violence and slaughter.
The piebald lord reached up and carefully peeled back the lids of his third eye. All the stickles on the hilltop jerked as one, called to attention by some invisible puppet master. They saw not through their own eyes, but through the dead white, glistening orb in their leader’s forehead.
With infinite patience, in a series of carefully constructed mental images, Kaa showed them the tactical situation. He showed diem groups of their fellow stickles already in position, concealed at various points around Willie ville’s perimeter. He explained that no ^matter what the baron did, they were in complete control of the battlefield; there was no escape from their wrath, no survival for the norms inside the ville. This night the baron would stew in his own fatty juices, pacing the halls of his palace like a prisoner, waiting for an assault that wouldn’t come. His sec men would go without sleep. By daybreak they would have lost confidence that a real enemy even existed. By noon of the following day, after eighteen hours of full combat
alert and no hint of a foe, they would be mentally and physically drained, and even easier to defeat.
Kaa expected the baron to send morning patrols outside the berm, patrols that, when the time came, would be quickly and quietly taken care of. They would simply vanish. The baron never committed his sec men to outside night sweeps. He and his colony of norms had always counted on the barrier to secure them against the forces of darkness, and relied on the perimeter’s stationary blasterposts to concentrate and control any would-be attackers.
Night had always belonged to the muties.
They were about to expand their sphere of influence.
Having made his point, Lord Kaa placed a calming hand on top of his paladin’s head. Rogero’s hairless scalp was clammy with sweat, its eyes as dead and emotionless as polished black stones. Kaa pulled the side of the stickie’s flabby face close to his mouth. “There will be victims yet tonight,” he assured Rogero. And with detailed mind pictures he gave the recce squad a foretaste of the banquet of pain that was to come.
The stickles pressed their faces into the dirt, demonstrating their gratitude and subservience.
The lord of the mutants pinched his third eyelid shut and picked up his treasured M-60 machine gun. He had named it “Joyeuse” after the fabled enchanted sword of Charlemagne. A blind scalie witch had decorated the blaster for him, painting it with neon spells against
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