Still, the settlement was over a hundred miles away, according to Lakesh, and in the years since the nuke-caust, the Indians had ascribed a sinister mythology to the Bitterroot Range. Because of their mysteriously shadowed forests and deep, dangerous ravines, they were known as the Darks. Most people, white or red and otherwise, gave the mountains a wide berth.
Squinting through the eyepieces, Grant caught a flicker of movement. Swiftly he tightened the focus and the microbinoculars’ 8X21 magnifying power brought the distant details to crystal clarity. He stared, dumbfounded. A troop of people mounted on horseback rode up out of a declivity in the grasslands. They advanced purposefully toward the entrance of the gorge.
He estimated at least twenty of them, most riding in a single file, but with a few spread out in flank. Armed with blasters, long, clumsy flintlock affairs, the riders also carried swords, pikes and battle-axes strapped to the saddles of their mounts.
As they drew closer, Grant made out their harsh, strong features, hair ranging in color from dark to fair to brindled red, the men with drooping, leonine mustaches. They wore a complicated arrangement of garmentsvests covered with metal wafers, sky blue shirts, baggy breeches that were either checked or striped or polka-dotted. Long, beribboned cloaks trimmed with fur hung from their shoulders.
Their headgear was no less eclecticred scarves, turbans, broad-brimmed leather hats decorated with feathery plumes and dangling foxtails. The women wore skirts slit at the sides above the thigh, and their unruly mops of hair were bound up with rawhide thongs. Necklaces of painted bone and wolves’ teeth banded their throats. In fact, all of them, men and women alike, had the bearing and feral expressions of wolves.
A lean man riding point caught Grant’s attention. His dark, shoulder-length hair showed a stippling of silver, and his face was deeply creased with lines of suffering and the scars of combat. A strip of wolf pelt encircled his broad, deeply furrowed forehead. Beneath a drooping mustache, the grim slash of his mouth had a lupine quality to it. His black eyes, under bushy dark brows, were like chunks of obsidian.
Grant let a slow, disgusted breath hiss out between his teeth. Lowering the binoculars, he gently disengaged the detonation cap from the plastique, unpock-eted his trans-comm and pressed the button to open Kane’s channel.
His partner’s voice filtered out of the palm-sized radiophone. “You set?”
“You might say that,” Grant replied, softening his deep, rumbling voice. “We’ve got company. Roam-ers.”
He easily pictured the expression of incredulity crossing Kane’s face. “Roamers? You sure?”
“It’s a safe bet they aren’t Mormons.”
“How many?”
“Looks to be about twenty,” answered Grant, “though there are a few stragglers on foot.”
“Arms?”
“Home-forged muzzle loaders. Blades and axes. The usual.”
The small comm unit transmitted Kane’s deep sigh of irritation. “Come on down, then. You’ve planted the C-4, right?”
“Right, but I’d rather not patch it in to the proximity detonators with the Roamers around.”
“That,” said Kane grimly, “depends on the Roamers.”
Grant pocketed the trans-comm and squinted through the eyepieces of the binoculars again. As a general rule, Roamers were dangerous only to isolated outland settlements. Outlaw nomads, they used resistance to ville authority as a justification for their raids, murders and rapes. Inasmuch as they stayed as far away as possible from the villes, Grant often wondered who they thought they were fooling by paying lip service to a political cause.
As he focused on the man riding point, a memory from a Magistrate briefing a couple of years before ghosted through his mind. He attached a name to the face of the manLe Loup Garou, the Wolfman, chieftain of the most vicious Roamer band in the western Outlands.
Hanging by a looped thong from his saddle horn was a curiously shaped handblaster. Though Grant was familiar with all types of gunspredark and postdark it took him a moment to identify the pistol as a tap-action flintlock, or an imitation. A double-barreled weapon, it featured a design that allowed one lock to fire each barrel in turn.
Seeing such an archaic blaster didn’t surprise him overmuch. One of the first priorities the drafters of the Program of Unification had set for themselves was the disarmament of the people. Still, books and diagrams survived the sweeps, and self-styled gunsmiths continued to forge weapons, though blasters more complicated than black-powder muzzle loaders were beyond their capacities.
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