He took up the bulls-eye and clicked the shutter open. They went out the back door, into a farmyard with a strong smell of chickens and ducks, past a muddy pond and into a barn. Several milch-cows mooed from their stalls, and a pair of big white-coated oxen with brass balls on the tips of their horns. Their huge mild eyes blinked at the light, and then went back to meditatively chewing their cuds. The cart they hauled was pushed just inside the door, its pole pointing at the rafters; tendrils of loose hay stuck down through the wide-spaced boards of the loft. Towards the rear of the barn were stacked pyramids of crates, one type long and thin, the other square and rectangular.
Arturo opened one whose nails had been pulled. “Enough of us know how to use these,” he said, throwing John a rifle.
It was the standard Imperial issue, but factory-new, still a little greasy from the preservative oil. A single-shot breechloader, with a tilting block action and a spring-driven ejector that automatically tipped the block down and shot the spent cartridge out to the rear when the trigger was pulled all the way back. Not a bad weapon at all, in its day, and it could still kill a man just as dead as the latest magazine rifle. The smaller crates were marked AMMUNITION 10MM STANDARD 1000 ROUNDS.
“Two hundred rifles, and revolvers, blasting powder, a small printing press,” Arturo said.
“Where were you planning on hiding them?” John said, looking around at the set peasant faces, underlit by the lamp Arturo had set down on the packed earth floor of the barn.
“The sheep pen. Under hard dung, six inches thick.”
“Good idea, for some of them,” John said, easing back the hammer of the rifle. The action went click. “But you shouldn’t put more than a dozen in one place. Nor should any one of you know where the rest are. You understand me?”
Arturo seemed to, and his daughter, possibly a few of the others. John went on.
“You know what the Chosen penalty is for unauthorized possession of weapons—so much as one cartridge, or a knife with a blade longer than the regulations allow?”
“A bullet?” one of the peasants asked.
“Not unless they’re in a real hurry. Generally, they hang you up by the thumbs and then flog you to death with jointed steel whips made out of chain links with hooks on them. Small hooks, about the size of a fishhook, and barbed. I’ve seen it done; it can take hours, with an expert.” Silence fell again.
“You want to frighten us?” one of the men asked.
“Damned right,” John replied. “You’ll stay alive longer, that way; and hurt the Chosen more.”
Watch out, lad—you want to get them thinking, not terrorize them, Raj said. Time enough for realism when they’re committed.
Arturo nodded thoughtfully. “We will have to organize . . . differently. Nothing in writing. Small groups, with only one knowing anyone else, and that as little as possible.”
Good. We don’t have to explain the cell system to him, at least, John thought.
Although the idea of the Fourth Bureau getting its hands on these amateurs . . . needs must. If nobody fought the Chosen, they’d win. That meant you had to accept the consequences.
“And then,” Arturo said, “when we are ready—when enough are ready to follow us—we can start to hurt them. Blowing up bridges, picking off patrols, perhaps their clerks and tallymen, sabotage. We will have some advantages: we know the ground, the people will hide us.”
“You’ll have to strike fairly far from your homes, though,” John said.
“Why?”
“Because the Chosen reprisals will fall hardest on the location where guerilla activity flares up. You strike away from where you live, and it kills two birds with one stone; you get the people who suffer the reprisals hating the Chosen, and you protect your base.”
Arturo tilted the lantern to shine the light on John’s face. That emphasized the structure of it, the slabs and angles.
“You are a hard man, signore,” he said. “As hard as the Chosen themselves, perhaps.”
John nodded. “As we all will need to be, before this is over,” he said. Those of us still alive.