Kane caught a glimpse of Le Loup Garou thumbing back the locks of his pistol, trying to frame his head in the sights. Kane drew back as the twin barrels belched flame and smoke, spattering the boulder with lead. He crouched lower, knowing that making a break for the gorge would be dangerous. He could be riddled before he made a dozen yards. A crude single-shot muzzle loader could chill him just as effectively as an autobl aster.
Le Loup Garou shouted a fierce command. Kane hazarded a quick look around the base of the boulder and saw a Roamer, ragged garments flapping around him, racing toward his position, flintlock rifle at his shoulder.
Kane pressed the Sin Eater’s trigger, and the round caught the Roamer in midstride. With a wild screech, he staggered, jackknifing at the waist. He crashed headlong against the opposite side of the bullet-pocked boulder.
The Roamers sprinted for cover outside the mouth of the gorge, unnerved by Kane’s uncanny marksmanship and the deep-throated reports of his pistol. Still, they were too infuriated to engage in a complete retreat. They pulled their neighing, stamping horses out of the zone of fire, for which he was relieved. He had no stomach for shooting animals, especially horses.
Brigid’s voice, tight with worry, filtered from the trans-comm at his shoulder. “What’s going on?”
“They don’t want to leave,” he replied. “Stand by. I’m going to make a run for it.”
Kane sprang up and dashed into the gorge. As soon as he showed himself, he heard an angry howling burst from the throats of the Roamers. He was a swift runner, but the loose and treacherous rocks underfoot prevented him achieving his full speed.
Mushy pops echoed up and down the canyon, and gravel gouted all around him. Glancing back, he saw Le Loup Garou running around the boulder., discolored teeth bared in a grimace. Smoke dribbled from one of the bores of his tap pistol. Well over a dozen of his band, men and women alike, followed him, pounding close-packed between the gorge walls. They triggered their flintlocks as they came, their pace spoiling their aim. The high canyon walls magnified the gunfire, making it sound as if an entire battalion fired volley after volley.
Still, Kane heard a little whump of displaced air as one ball passed close to the right side of his head, fanning his cheek with a swirl of cold air. He returned the fire with his Sin Eater, knew he missed and didn’t try again.
His eyes sought out and located the cleft high in the wall where Grant had planted the charge. Into the trans-comm, he shouted, “Light it!”
Brigid’s voice, crackling with tension, responded, “You’re too close!”
A bullet plucked at the sleeve of his shirt. He shouted again, louder, “Light it!”
With an earsplitting, teeth-jarring crack the block of C-4 erupted in a flash of orange flame and white smoke. The concussion shoved him stumbling forward, but he managed to maintain his footing. Kane risked an upward glance. The air went on shivering with the echoes of the explosion as ugly black fissures spread out in a spiderweb pattern around the cleft. Then the entire cliff face appeared to be in motion. It tottered, seemed to suspend itself in midair for a long moment, then toppled.
As it fell, it sheared away the softer ledges beneath, breaking them apart. A seething avalanche of roaring rock slabs and dirt cascaded along the steep face of the cliff, augmenting its bellowing fury with tons of stone torn loose by its rush. Great crags and shards came raining down.
A thousand tons of granite and shale thundered down into the gorge floor, boulders skipping and bouncing. Dimly, above the grinding rumble and crash, Kane heard the screams of Roamers as they were crushed and buried beneath the falling cliff.
A boulder almost the size of the Hotspur rumbled end over end past him. Kane sprinted madly toward a jutting shelf of stone projecting five feet above the ground. He ducked as a small rock no larger than a pumpkin hurtled over his head and smashed itself into five pieces against the blacktop road.
He bounded at the ledge, clawed at the rim and heaved himself atop it to huddle in a shallow depression beneath an overhang. Before a whirling dust cloud obscured his vision, he saw a wave of shattered stone sweeping across the floor of the gorge to crash like tidal surf against the base of the opposite cliff. The impact sent black cracks zigzagging through the wall of rock, triggering new falls.