“You’re making my head hurt,” Mildred complained.
“You have,” Doc said in simpler words, “my best guess. Admittedly we appear to be betwixt a rock and a hard place.”
Krysty silently agreed and went on. The ledge ended abruptly. Without pause, it vanished right into the side of what looked like a sheer rise of fifteen feet or more.
She scoured the wall in front of her and on the right. Nothing was there.
“What’s wrong?” Mildred asked.
“Dead end,” Krysty replied. She looked over the ledge to her left, feeling the pull of vertigo. The flying snow vanished into the shadows that lay stretched against the mountainside. She couldn’t see the bottom.
“What about Jak?” Mildred asked.
Krysty shook her head, not feeling the albino teenager anywhere. “I don’t see him.”
Mildred scraped a foot across the stone ledge. “Awful damn slippery here.”
Doc came up beside them, one hand on the mountain behind as he balanced and peered over the edge. “Oh, dear,” he said in a quiet voice. “The poor lad.”
Chapter Three
Catching the lower limbs of an oak tree, Ryan climbed ten feet up. The branches shook, littering the ground with snow that fell from the green leaves, but none of the brushwooders took notice. Despite the wintry feel of the night and the snow, it was only early fall. The nukecaust had screwed up Nature’s rhythms a hundred years earlier, and the earthquakes and the active volcanoes in the area affected the weather, as well, seeding the air from dozens of radioactive hot spots.
Trader had talked about the strange atmospheric conditions hovering over the region. Ryan knew for a fact that farther north the land had turned to frozen ruin, and the volcanoes stretched in between, with some of them way to the south. With the volcanoes spouting rad-blasted waste into the air on a regular basis, anything could come falling out of the sky and he wouldn’t have been surprised. He’d stopped really smelling the sulphur stink hours ago, but he remained aware of it.
He nestled in among the boughs, gauging the strength of the pincer movement spread out around him with a trained eye.
His and J.B.’s efforts hadn’t gone unrewarded. The steady advance of the brushwooders had been broken, and a few milled around waiting for the rearguard to catch up. Word was evidently spreading up the line that a number of them weren’t coming. Ryan could see even the pointmen were holding their position some 120 yards away at the foothills that led to the steep mountain trail where Krysty and the others had gone.
Clouds scudded over the bright moon, laying patches of darkness over the broken land. But against the growing white islands of drifting snow, the brushwooders stood out as good targets.
Ryan didn’t intend to miss the opportunity to add to the confusion. He opened the case containing the bow and quiver of arrows. The three sections easily screwed into one another. Fitting the string was tricky while standing in the tree, but he managed.
Voices reached his ears now, letting him know the brushwooders were abandoning the stealthy approach.
The arrows felt heavy enough for proper chilling. He was more at home with a handblaster or the panga, which was an old friend, tried, trusted and true. But he knew his way around a bow. His father, Baron Titus Cawdor, had seen to the education of all his sons. The barony at Front Royal hadn’t been easily won, nor easily held. A knowledge of weapons had been necessary.
He nocked an arrow, drew it back to his ear and sighted through the opening between the branches. Releasing half a breath, he let it fly. As the arrow jumped from the bow the string twanged, but not loud enough to be heard from more than a few paces.
Less than forty yards distant, the arrow pierced a man’s inner thigh, and a primal cry of pain suddenly rent the chill air.
The man stumbled, bent double and hovered over the fletched end of the arrow. The other brushwooders stood frozen, wondering how one among them could have been wounded without sign or sound of an attack.