Devil's Vortex (15 page)

Chapter Nineteen

A yellow light winked from the top of the next low mesa south of where Hammerhand crouched with most of his war band beneath the pale arch of the Milky Way.

“Here they come,” Hammerhand murmured in satisfaction to Eagle Claw. “Right on schedule. Right into our laps.”

He felt additionally gratified that his people had done this all on their own, without the help of any of Trager’s whitecoat magic, although now more of the whitecoat’s high-tech gifts would be brought into play.

“Be ready,” he said softly. Eagle Claw passed the word.

The twisty intertwining gulleys weren’t deep in this part of the Badlands, maybe ten, fifteen feet, nor were their sides steep, which was strike.

Then again, thanks to the good scouting his people had put in this night, they’d had some leeway to pick their engagement ground. Hammerhand knew from experience, both his own and that of warriors who, when they talked, he listened to. He might have had trouble as a kid listening to his elders and his parents, but then, they so seldom said stuff he wanted to hear...

He pulled the pin from the gren he held in his right hand.

“Got your piece ready?” he asked Eagle Claw.

“Yes.”

The first horse came into view. It was ridden by a bare-chested young man, who carried a spear hung with eagle feathers that bobbed to his mount’s trotting gait. Like most Plains ponies, these were unshod. Shoes were unnecessary on this soft sand anyway.

The warrior had dark streaks painted down his cheeks like tear tracks from his eyes. That signified aggression. So did the butt of what looked to Hammerhand to be a lever-action longblaster jutting over his right shoulder for easy access. There were some dark patterns painted on his buckskin, as well, but the raiding party was down where even the starlight had trouble reaching, and Hammerhand could make none out.

A second horse, dark in color, trotted behind his. The seventeen young men and a few women who followed him, single file toward Hammerhand’s hidden vantage point, all led a single remount. The single-file thing meant they’d paid
some
attention in warrior class; it was intended to make it hard for even a skilled tracker to figure out their actual numbers. And from what little Hammerhand could see from the darkness and the angle, none sported a hand painted on their face to signify they’d beaten a foe in melee combat. Or wanted to claim such.

It might have had any number of explanations, but it suggested strongly to Hammerhand that they were all good little traditionalist weenies, eager to show their allegiance to the ancient ways, even those that dated years before skydark.

Yeah, he thought. The Oglala elders don’t know about this raid.

That made things tricky. But then, Hammerhand was triple tricky himself.

The silent procession approached the mesa on which Hammerhand and his main group waited. The enemy showed no sign of seeing anything amiss. They’d have had to have an eye in the sky to have much chance of doing so, because only Hammerhand was even the least bit visible from below, and that was only as much of his head as he had to poke up to watch them come through a long clump of grass. The leader moved to his left, indicating they intended to pass that way when the gulleys forked around Hammerhand’s minimesa.

But they weren’t going to pass. Not if he and his Bloods had anything to say about it.

“Fire,” he ordered without turning his head.

He heard the pop and waited until the red flare reached the height of its arc, almost directly above the little marauder column. Then he pitched the gren right in front of the lead rider.

The flare’s red glare illuminated surprised, upturned faces. And then the horses began to rear and whinny in fear as grens rained down from the surrounding heights, to both sides of them, as well as directly behind.

It was already too late for them.

* * *

“M
AY
I
TALK
 
with you for a bit, Mariah?”

The girl put down the bundle of dried scrub brush she had gathered for the morning cook-fire. “Sure, Krysty,” she said. “What about?”

The redhead glanced at the others. They sat around the bonfire conversing in low voices. They had bought some fine smoked-elk haunch that afternoon with the grudging yet complete payment they got for purging the bean field of monsters—if purging it of many bean plants, as well. For people who lived as they did, a fine, full meal was a celebration—and something to celebrate.

She reached for Mariah’s hand. “Walk with me a bit.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Mariah put her hand in Krysty’s. It was cool and dry.

“Where to?” the girl asked.

“Outside camp a ways.” Krysty laughed softly. “I guess we don’t have much to be afraid of, do we?”

“We’ve got Jak on guard,” Mariah said seriously.

“That’s true.”

They were camped out in a low draw near a streambed, with cottonwood trees on both banks. It had rained in the afternoon, after they’d finished their unexpectedly bizarre extermination job. Now the air was fresh and cool, the grass was damp slick underfoot and the sky had begun to show patches of stars, bright through cloud.

A wolf howled. Other voices joined it. From somewhere down the small stream rose a derisive chorus of coyote yips, as if challenging their bigger, more formidable cousins.

Krysty led the girl to the top of a low rise and sat on a fallen tree. The branches were bare and the dirt and clumps of sod had fallen away from the roots, leaving them bare, like a frozen tangle of worms. She patted the bole. Mariah sat beside her.

“Thank you for what you did today,” Krysty said, measuring her words as if they were a handful of flour from an almost-empty bin. “You were a big help to us. We wouldn’t have been able to clear out that nest without you doing what you did.”

Even in the darkness it seemed the girl’s eyes gleamed with happy excitement. She nodded vigorously, making her pigtails bob.

“I’m so happy I can help,” she said.

“I’m surprised, though. I thought you were reluctant to use your power. That it hurt to do so.”

Ryan had not put her up to this. She was asking out of her own genuine concern for the girl. She cared about Mariah...more than was probably good for her. But she had seen the troubled way her mate had looked at Mariah, off and on since the bean-field fight.

Krysty’s lover was a man who seldom felt conflicted. To him, survival was both an imperative and its own justification. At least in most ways. And Mariah had greatly enhanced his and his companions’ chances of survival on several occasions during their brief time together, when she hadn’t outright saved their lives.

Mariah bit her lip thoughtfully. “Well, yeah. I was. I didn’t like it. It scared me...that I scared other people. And it still hurts.

“But then I was able to help you. And I felt better about using it, in spite of the pain. It made me feel good. It made me feel as if I was worth something.”

“I see.”

“But it isn’t just that. When I was able to burst through that roadblock, I felt powerful. It was the first time in my life that I felt anything like it. I wasn’t hurting anybody with my power, or even anything. But then today—”

She sighed and shuddered. “It felt wonderful to do that. Even though I was chilling creatures. Even babies. They were wrong, just like you said. They don’t belong here. And mebbe that’s not their fault. But they had to go.”

“That’s how I size it up, too.”

“So are you scared of me?”

“A little.”

Instead of looking downcast the girl smiled and hugged her. “I like you, Krysty. You’re always honest with me.”

“I try to be.”

“So tell me something else. Honest.”

“You sure you want to ask it?” Krysty asked.

For a moment her smooth brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Oh. You’re thinking I won’t like the answer. But I want to hear it anyway. I promise I’ve heard worse.”

Krysty had to smile. “Fair enough. Ask away.”

“Why do you want me with you? Why are you so nice to me? I mean, the others aren’t mean. Even the ones who still think I may be a danger to you, like Mr. Dix and Jak. They don’t call me bad names and try to hurt me. So that’s better than most people. But you—you seem to really like me.”

“I do, Mariah.” She reached up to stroke the girl’s hair. Her heart broke at the way she at first flinched.

“So, why?”

“Well, first, I like you because you’re, well, likable, I guess. You have a good heart despite your hard life. I admire you for that.”

But still, I wonder—does the dark cloud reflect something within your soul? But not even a person as open as Krysty thought being honest was the same as saying
everything
she thought.

“But it’s as if I look at you and see hope. It’s your innocence. If you can keep that in spite of everything—well, mebbe it means the world isn’t doomed to just sink deeper and deeper into ruin and misery until it just dies. And mebbe there’s hope for
us
.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes I feel as if we’re just doomed to wander aimlessly forever, doing whatever it takes to survive.”

“But you do a lot of good! You help people. You helped me.”

Krysty exhaled, making a sound that was half sigh, half moan. “It’s largely by accident. I have to be honest. I guess that by not deliberately preying on people, we wind up...kind of better than average for the Deathlands.”

Smiling, Mariah shook her head. Krysty found the girl’s shift from her former perpetual gloom almost disconcerting.

“Well, we’d better get back to the others,” Mariah said, hopping to her feet. “We don’t want them to freak out when they find out we’re gone.”

Krysty laughed. “Oh, they know, for double sure,” she said, standing up. “You don’t think that much gets by Ryan or J.B., do you?”

“I guess not.”

Suddenly she wrapped both arms around Krysty’s waist and pressed her cheek between Krysty’s breasts in a fervent hug.

“Thank you so much,” the girl said. “You’ve helped me change the way I look at myself. And—everything!”

“I’m glad, honey,” Krysty murmured, stroking the back of the child’s head and feeling actually kind of awkward. The pigtailed, black-clad girl—whom she had settled on believing was about twelve or thirteen—might have been tweaking her maternal instincts, as Ryan had more than half hinted at on more than one occasion. That didn’t mean Krysty felt comfortable playing the
role
of mother. Even a little.

But that wasn’t what made her frown pensively as she gazed over the top of Mariah’s head at her lover and friends gathered laughing around the little fire.

She was thinking, But have we done you any favors by making you see things differently?

And have we done
us
any favors?

* * *

H
AMMERHAND
 
STOPPED
 
THE
 
buckskin mare thirty yards short of the outskirts of the Lakota camp.

“What do you want here, Blackfoot?” challenged the chief, who stood waiting for him with his senior warriors flanking him. All cradled longblasters and looked grim.

The tall, spare man with the gray braids hanging down to either side of a breastplate made of linked bones was Marion, chief of an important Oglala band. He had clearly gotten word of the young renegade Blood’s approach, as Hammerhand had known he would. His own scouts had enabled him and the small group he had led into the Pine Ridge area to evade observation most of the way, but the last couple miles he had known that wouldn’t work.

You told me what I want to know by being here and ready, old man, Hammerhand thought.

Marion’s black eyes bored into his. His posse was openly staring at the decorated horse. They might not know the name of every kid in the cluster of tepees on the low, sloping hilltop behind them—kids who were notably absent from view, as were the normal late-morning activities of the women—but they nuking well knew every horse claimed by their band on sight. Plains-riding nomads were all the same.

“I’ve got something that belongs to you,” he called back.

“And what is that?”

For answer Hammerhand half turned on the horse’s bare back, lifting the stubby-barreled blaster he’d stuffed under his camo-clad right buttock before riding into view of the camp and thrusting it skyward with a fluid motion and firing a flare into the sky.

Before turning back he ostentatiously stuck the empty break-action flare pistol back between the bare skin of his side and the waistband of his trousers.

“Now we wait,” he said with a smile.

He let the buckskin drop her head to grass in the long grass of the natural ramp up the side of the hill. Then he crossed his hands on the point of his horse’s neck where it met its back and sat there smiling at the Lakota elders.

The stoic act was a sham, mostly. He knew that; he was a Plains warrior himself. The people of the nations could be as outgoing as any random bunch of white-eyes, but they never wanted to give anything away in dealing with outlanders. Even ones with whom they nominally had no beef—the way the Oglala had none with Hammerhand’s bunch, wild men and women though they were.

Ah, but you were looking, Hammerhand thought as the elder warriors behind Marion began to surreptitiously fidget. The big boss stayed a statue. It’s why you’re here.

Patience was not a core element of Hammerhand’s nature. In large part that was why he was here, instead of being a good little warrior drone back among the Blood Nation of his elders. But it was a skill he had learned, being brought up a hunter. It served him well, too.

Gradually a crowd began to gather, respectfully ten yards or more back from the senior delegation. They were mostly fighters, men and women, none too young to carry a blaster, none too old. They had been told to expect shooting to happen once Hammerhand’s approach was signaled by their pickets. Now curiosity was getting the better of them: why wasn’t anybody blasting this upstart renegade?

It took ten whole minutes to find out, during much of which Hammerhand was laughing inside. Sometimes deferring gratification was totally worth it.