Even such a rudimentary firearm in the hands of Le Loup Garou would have earned him an immediate termination warrant, had Grant still been a Magistrate.
He lifted his gaze beyond the mounted people. On foot behind them staggered six women and four children. Stark naked and tethered to each other by thick leather collars and lengths of rawhide, they made a chain of human misery. All of them were copper-skinned with the flowing, jet-black hair of Indians.
A pair of Roamers marched beside the stumbling captives, urging them along with curses and strokes of long whips that raised blood-edged welts with every flail.
Grant ground his teeth, no longer wondering at the presence of the raiders. They had attacked the Indian settlement, and the captives were either the sole survivors or those they were able to steal. Despite the loathing he felt for the Roamers, he almost hoped the first possibility was the case. If not, then Sioux and Cheyenne warriors would be on the coldhearts’ trail. If they were, the Roamers’ route through the Darks was not arbitrary or whimsical. They hoped the superstitious regard in which the Indians held the mountain range would discourage pursuit.
Grant knew very little about the culture of the few scattered Indian bands living in the hinterlands, but he didn’t think that a tribal taboo would prevent the warriors from rescuing their women and children.
Stowing the binoculars, he screwed the detonation cap back into the explosive block, then began picking his way carefully down the cliff face. His fingers gripped cracks in the stone, and rivulets of gravel started beneath his boots, rattling and clicking. The descent was more difficult than the ascent, and not for the first time he wished Domi were with them. Nimble and strong, she could climb like a scalded monkey.
He huffed and puffed and swore as he clambered to the gorge floor. He dropped the last ten feet. Brigid and Kane were there to meet him.
“What the hell are Roamers doing out here?” Kane demanded harshly.
An inch over six feet, every line of Kane’s supple, compact body was hard and stripped of excess flesh. His high-planed face held a watchful expression, as did his narrowed gray-blue eyes. His thick dark hair was tousled, and his left hand pushed through it impatiently. He kept his right hand, his gun hand, free. His holstered Sin Eater was strapped to the forearm.
Brigid said, “They’re wanderers, like gypsies were supposed to be. They can be anywhere.”
She was tall, full breasted with a willowy, athletic figure. A curly mane of red-gold hair spilled over her shoulders and upper back, framing a smoothly sculpted face dusted lightly with freckles across her nose and cheeks. The color of polished emeralds glittered in her big eyes.
Grant massaged his sore shoulder muscles and worked his stiff fingers. “There’s a reason why they’re in this particular spot. They’ve got Indian prisoners taken from the settlement. They’re probably hoping to throw warriors off their track in the mountains.”
A few years older than Kane, a few inches taller and more than a few pounds heavier, Grant was a very broad-shouldered man. A down-sweeping mustache showed jet-black against the coffee brown of his skin. Beneath it, his heavy-jawed face was set in a perpetual scowl. Like his companions, he wore dark trousers and a shirt of tough whipcord.
“I think it’s Le Loup Garou’s little social club,” he added.
Kane’s eyes flickered in recognition of the name, and he sighed in angry exasperation. “Why can’t anything be simple?”
Grant ignored the query, assuming it was rhetorical. He nodded toward the mouth of the gorge. “We can’t let them through the pass. The road leads only to Cerberus.”
Tersely Kane replied, “There are too many to fight. So that leaves the time-honored tactic of the bluff.”
Brigid raised a skeptical eyebrow. “How do you propose we run a bluff on twenty barbarians?”
“Not we,” answered Kane. “Me.”
Grant groaned. “Here we go. Don’t you ever get tired of making up shit as you go along?”
Smiling crookedly, Kane opened a pouch on his belt and removed a small oval of black plastic. He extended a thread-thin antenna and pointed it toward the cleft above them.