The Cliff Palace complex was utterly silent below the long black clouds racing across the face of the rising moon. Grant was fast and agile for a big man, darting quickly in and out of doorways, striding to the spots affording best cover.
A wide passageway led straight ahead, with a break in the walls on the left. The two men took positions on either side of the gap and scanned the area beyond it. A cloud whipped past the moon, and its lambent glow shone on the many-windowed fortress built into the canyon wall. The flat bottom was only a few dozen yards away, and they could see the many fissures in the stonework below it.
Studying it intently, they saw a narrow opening in the embrasure, a little less than fifteen feet above the floor of the courtyard. Hand- and footholds had been chipped into the rock, making a crude, almost invisible ladder. Because of a puddle of illumination splashed by one of the floodlights, they couldn’t risk a frontal approach. Kane and Grant crept away at an oblique angle, staying close to the shadow of the wall.
Kane knew the blastermen would concentrate their attention only on the terrain lit up by the floodlights, not in the murk beyond. They were confident they had the Magistrates outnumbered, outgunned and outfoxed. They were content to play a waiting game, for a few hours at least. Kane’s instincts and experience told him that he and Grant could slip past their defenses and end the game.
Their progress was achingly slow, since the alteration of moon glow and the edges of the floodlights spilled puddles of light in their path. They followed the wall into another roofless building. One entire side of it was a mess of broken masonry and clay. The pile of rubble spread outside, most of it butting up against the cliff wall.
The two men stopped to catch their breath, collect their thoughts and scan the terrain. Then carefully they moved forward, picking their way across the sea of rubble.
The crunch of a shard of adobe under Grant’s boot raised the hair on the back of Kane’s neck and sent a jolt of adrenaline surging through his body. He froze in midstep, weapon at the ready. Grant followed his lead, coming to a complete halt.
After a few moments, they moved again, not pausing until they were safe in the darkness beneath the overhanging bottom of the fortress. With infinite caution, they crept sideways, crouched to listen but heard nothing.
They reached the junction of the courtyard floor and the cliff face. Looking up along the embrasure, they saw the stone niches leading up to a hole. A light flickered feebly past the rim of the portal. Kane wasn’t sure, but he figured it to be lamplight. That seemed odd, since the fortress was obviously equipped with electrical generators.
Suddenly there was a faint sound from overhead, and a shadow shifted across the lamplight. Kane and Grant stepped back quickly, easing into a wedge of pitch-blackness. An armed man appeared at the portal, then began climbing down, the scuffed toes of his boots digging into the notches carved in the wall. He had a revolver strapped to his hip.
The guard dropped the last few feet and gazed slowly around. By the shape of his skull, the sloping forehead, the apparent lack of ears and the suction pads on his fingertips, Kane recognized him as a stickie, one of the most common of the mutant strains spawned by the nukecaust, though they had changed over the past century. No one really knew where they first appeared, nor was it certain what monstrous combination of genetic malfunctions had created them in the first place.
Supposedly none had been seen until the first couple of years of the twenty-first century. Then, like floodgates opening, sightings were reported from all over. He had heard that the first generation of stickies didn’t even possess mouths, much less ears, but that could have only been overblown fable.
Kane had only seen a few in his life, since they tended to give the villes wide berths. At one time, the stickies had been terrors of the Deathlands because of their psychotic love of mutilating norms and torching settlements. But the days of the great stickie clans were long over.