For a moment he drew the slender sword to his eyes, making out the ornate lettering No me saques sin razon; no me envaines sin honor . His dry lips moved and his shallow breath whispered into the stillness. “Draw me not without reason and sheath me not without honor.”
The Le Mat was back in his right hand, the hammer cocked over the buckshot round.
Judas was still restless, his head turning between the back entrance to the building and the stall where Doc was hiding.
KKYSTY KNELT by a trim apple tree, laying her right hand on the rough bark. Her fiery sentient hair was bunched at her nape, packed as tightly against her skull as possible, a sure sign that something was seriously wrong.
She closed her green eyes for a few seconds, trying to concentrate on the “feeling” power of Gaia, the Earth Mother. The air around her seemed to throb with a terrible tension. There was a movement somewhere around her. But it could easily have been the camp of the fladgies, their fires flickering, ruby-bright, out across the desert.
“Careful, Doc,” she said quietly.
A FIGURE GHOSTED OUT of the darkness, deep black against the blackness, right in front of Doc’s crouching figure. It was so sudden and so silent that it took him by surprise, and he nearly squeezed the trigger on the Le Mat. But his better judgment asserted itself, just in the nick of time, preventing him from firing the gun.
Instead he stood and thrust with the rapier, wrist and arm straight as a die, aiming slightly upward, feeling the needle tip slide between the protecting ribs on the left side of the intruder’s body.
It was a perfect, clean kill.
The man dropped to the floor like a sack of meat, shrouded in cotton rags, the only sound in the barn a faint sigh, almost of disappointment.
Doc withdrew the blade, stepping confidently out into the open space between the stalls, aware only of the sudden restlessness of the animals, disturbed by the hot reek of freshly spilled bloodto find himself confronting a second assailant who stood ten feet away, holding a long-hafted hatchet.
At that frozen moment, Doc remembered one of tbe Trader’s sayings that Ryan had often repeated to him. “Pull the trigger too soon and you’ll probably be fine. Pull it too late and you’ll probably be dead.”
But the three and a half pounds of steel, lead and gold remained unfired. “Move and I’ll fill you full of holes,” Doc said, his voice dry and croaking.
“No, unbeliever,” said the cold voice from behind him, along Judas’s stall. ” You move and I’ll fill you full of fucking holes.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“But they haven’t harmed anyone?”
“Not yet.”
The speaker was an old woman, bent double, hands knotted with arthritis. “Don’t mean they won’t.”
Ryan nodded. “True enough. But you reckon there’s less than a dozen stickies out in the woods?”
“We never counted more than eight,” the leader of the small community replied.
J.B. shook his head. Melting snow dappled the shoulders of his worn leather jacket, misting the lenses of his glasses, darkening the fedora. “Only eight. All of them grown men, or some women and children?”
There was a silence.
Ryan’s guess had put the population of the small ville at around sixty souls. It was set just north of the old line between Oregon and Washington states, to the east of the Columbia River. The highway was in reasonably good condition, seeming little traveled. According to J.B.’s map, the blacktop should bring them to the crossing of the Snake in a few miles.
The last part of the journey had been relatively uneventful, despite diminishing weather. Twice their progress northwest had been checked by vicious flurries of snow and temperatures that had dropped savagely to twenty below, making the eight-wheeler occasionally difficult to handle on ice-sheathed tracks. Once it was only the remnants of an iron fence that kept them from sliding over a two-hundred-foot drop.
There had been the usual detours to avoid quake-riven trails and a couple of hostile villes that had shown willingness to resist all outlanders. But even the occasional high-powered hunting round did no damage to the armasteel of the wag. Ryan and J.B. ignored these sporadic attacks, not even bothering to return the desultory firing.