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Chapter Four (#ub18e15a3-49f5-5127-bb39-c3d0e91705c6)
Chapter Five (#u97385bbc-626c-52b1-b593-995bc41b5c9e)
Chapter Six (#ue8ed7b66-ace6-5025-9218-39a18f612aba)
Chapter Seven (#uf04517f8-a974-5868-b37d-a5177dcd9dd1)
Chapter Eight (#u1a28cc90-6205-5adb-82bd-c8e0ce484f1a)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Away across the night the great paired mountains spewed arcs of orange fire. Their fury could be felt as well as heard, a continual mutter of thunder, punctuated by blasts that pained Raven’s ears. If the fury of the old gods wasn’t soon appeased with the blood and souls of the evildoers, so the priest Howling Wolf said, that pillar would grow to hide the heavens, choke sun and moon and stars, plunging all beneath into gloom. It had happened once before, during the time legend called the Great Skydark.
Only this time, Howling Wolf said, the dark would never end.
Reflected hoops of orange, distorted and wavering, were the only hints that a great lake lay like a discarded obsidian mirror between the fire mountains and the hogsback ridge behind which the horde was camped. Although the eyes of the man named Raven were no longer so keen close up as they had been in his youth, his far vision remained to justify his name. If he didn’t gaze toward the flame fountains for a time, he could just make out tiny fugitive glimmers of light closer at hand, here and there down in the valley, and even in the rotted corpse of the dead city itself, which lay in the lake like a broken giant sprawled facedown in the pond that had drowned him.
Dead no more. Men once more crawled like maggots among the great bones of metal and stone and pale glass.
Screams beat like the buffets of the wind at Raven’s bare bronzed back. In the great encampment captives were being cut and burned in sacrifice to the ancient gods. When the wind blew one way, it stank of sulfur; another way, and it reeked of blood and fear and charred flesh.
At such times Raven chose to walk away from the camp when he could. He was a hunter, a warrior, living in a land devoid of mercy; had he ever shrunk from the most brutal necessity he would never have lived long enough to take a man’s name. It was the necessity of such cruelty he questioned.
His absences from the rituals of offering didn’t please the priest or his acolytes. They had dropped hints that Raven, of all people, should display more piety. He ignored their threats. For he of all people they dared not harm—not the flesh and blood of the very one whom Howling Wolf said the old forgotten gods, so thirsty for blood and pain, had sent to save the people and all the world.
Over the cries of terrible anguish, he could hear the priest’s voice, knew the sense of the words even though he was not close enough to actually hear them: once more the wicked seek to probe the lost evil secrets, to wake the dark powers that once devastated the world. They would revive the city, which forsook the gods and mocked the sky with its haughty towers. If we the chosen do not stop them, the wickedness they unleash this time will destroy the world utterly.
And so it might be, he thought. It was certainly true that the valley in which the lake lay was green and fertile despite the frequent shaking of the earth and the lethal clouds that sometimes flowed over it from the fire mountains. Likewise was it true that the high country where the people had dwelt time out of memory was becoming uninhabitable, racked by alternating drought and terrible storms that blew down from the lands of death to the north, with their strange hissing rains that could melt the skin from a man’s bones. The people and the dwellers in the valley had coexisted, not always in peace: sometimes they traded, as often they raided one another. It didn’t escape Raven that in exterminating the people of the valley for their presumption and wickedness, the true folk could insure their own survival. Indeed, Howling Wolf’s preachings made sure the fact escaped no one.
So this great endeavor, so great that it joined not only true folk and witches but the very beasts of the wasteland, wasn’t just good: it was necessary. But as he leaned on his flintlock, in the night between fires, Raven’s spirit was troubled.
He glanced back at the camp. Not all the shapes dancing black against firelight were fully human. It was strange to see true men and witches together, except linked in deadly combat. But in many ways that was one of the least strange of the changes that had come.
And maybe the strangest of all was the boy.
He had been different from the first: no child of the people had ever been so pale. He was different, and so by ancient immutable tradition he should have been taken into the desert and left beneath the spines of a maguey. There either the coyotes and vultures would take him, or the witches would find him and take him in, raise him as one of their own, for indeed that was where the witches sprang from, the sons and daughters of true men who had been born tainted with difference and so had to be cast out.
But no one could bring himself to do the ancient duty: expose the boy to his fate. For anyone who looked upon him, unnatural though his appearance was, was instantly filled with a vast sense of well-being and love. Those at whom he smiled would sooner hurl themselves into a live lava flow than allow the least harm to befall him. He had such power, though never spoke a word.
As time passed the child grew larger, although his form altered little: he maintained the proportions of an infant. It became obvious that he could somehow control the very feelings of those around him. In time they would learn that this power extended not only to true men but to witches and even wild beasts.
By not exiling him as a newborn the people had in effect judged that his difference wasn’t a taint, wasn’t a mark of evil, as it was with witches. Therefore he had to be holy. He was a gift of the heavens, that much was sure. But to what purpose? None could say.
None until the boy was ten summers old and the tall, gaunt man who covered his head and shoulders in the skin of a great wolf had appeared out of the south. He had taught the people the meaning of the gift. When he spoke in his deep, compelling voice, with the blood of sacrificial victims glistening on his cheeks in the firelight, few could doubt the truth of what he said.
But Raven was among those few.
The boy’s father, Two Whirlwinds, had never recovered from the shock of seeing what he had sired. Despite the people’s judgment that the child was holy, he had felt shamed, tainted himself. He had begun to drink too much maguey wine, and when the child was two summers old had been surprised, dismembered and devoured by a pack of giant javelinas. Raven, elder brother to the boy’s mother, had assumed the role of father. It was a role he welcomed. From the very first, it seemed, there had been a special bond between the two. It took no mystic power to make him love the child as if he were his own.
And so, though he was little given to fruitless questioning, he wondered.
If it were all true, if the boy had been sent by forgotten gods to restore to the people their ancient glory—a glory that not even the eldest of the people had witnessed, nor even heard tales of, but that Howling Wolf assured them was their birthright—why hadn’t Raven, who raised the boy as a father, known of it before the strange priest came?
Chapter One
Long white hair streaming behind him, the young man ran through the woods. On the matlike floor of dead needles his combat moccasin boots made little more sound than morning mist flowing between the straight boles of spruce and fir. He was short and slight of build, and expertly dodged around potentially noisy patches of scrub oak, dry-leaved and prone to rattle in the early spring, nor did he brush against low-hanging tree boughs. Yet the fact he moved so quietly, despite the fact he ran flat-out, and even when he vaulted a low snaggle-toothed arch of dead fallen tree, seemed somehow almost supernatural.
That the skin of his face was as white as his hair did nothing to dispel the ghostly illusion. Nor did his eyes, narrowed with exertion, that gleamed red as shards of ruby. But ectoplasm wouldn’t take scars like the ones that seamed his narrow feral face and pulled the right-hand corner of his mouth upward in a hint of perpetual grin. Nor was there anything the least bit insubstantial about the chrome-plated steel of the .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster he clutched in his right hand.
As swift as a deer he moved and as silent as a thought. But his hunter’s heart, virtual stranger to fear, felt it now. Because as fast as he was, he was whipped by the dread certainty he couldn’t move fast enough to save his friends.
“THE BOY STOOD on the burning deck,” the gaunt old man declaimed in a voice of brass.
“How come,” asked the stocky black woman clad in an olive-drab T-shirt and baggy camou pants, “I’m the one who usually winds up elbow-deep in deer guts whenever we get lucky hunting?”
J. B. Dix, known otherwise as the Armorer, grinned at her around the carcass of the young whitetail buck that had been strung from a sturdy tree limb by its hind legs. Morning sunlight glinted off the round lenses of his steel-framed spectacles. “’Cause you’re the doctor, Millie. You wield a mean scalpel.”
She flipped him a gory bird.
“The boy stood on the burning deck,” the old man said, even more loudly. He had the air of a man trying to jar something loose from memory’s grasp. He was tall, with lank gray-white hair that fell to his shoulders. He wore a calf-length frock coat that had seen better days and cradled a Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun in his twig-skinny arms.
“I was a cryogenics researcher, for God’s sake, John, not a surgeon,” the black woman said. “Much less a veterinary pathologist.”
J.B. smiled. “Well, I reckon you know what you’re doing.”
“You might as well make that crazy old coot you’re trusting with your shotgun there do the gutting, since he’s entitled to call himself ‘doctor,’ too,” the woman said, ignoring the gibe.
J.B. doffed his fedora and scratched at his scalp. “You got training in cutting up folks. You told me so yourself. Everybody in med school did back in the day. Mebbe you just missed your calling.”
Mildred Wyeth, M.D., glared at the little narrow-faced man. “Yeah. Maybe I should have become a cutter instead of a researcher. Then I could have been rich, had a big house in the ’burbs, a nice docile hubby, two-point-five kids, a shiny new Caddy every year.” She looked thoughtful, scratched at her cheek with the very tip of her thumb, as if maybe if she did it gingerly enough she wouldn’t get gore on her cheek. She failed. “And then of course I’d’ve died while at the operating table instead of having a nice experimental cold-sleep pod on hand, to get slipped into for a snug century or so.”
“I’m glad you pulled through, Millie,” J.B. said quietly.
“Yeah, well at times like this I’m almost glad, too, even if I am stuck on shit detail. A little peace and quiet is doing us all a world of good. And bagging some good game without any taint of mutie doesn’t hurt, either. Sometimes it seems we’re in danger of getting too dependent on what we can scavenge from the redoubts or scam out of the villes. Woman does not live by century-old MREs alone. Or at least this woman doesn’t.”
“The boy stood on the burning deck!” the old man almost shouted.
“‘Eating peanuts by the peck,’” Mildred said.
The old man blinked at her.
“That’s the next line, Doc,” she said. “Trust me.”
“Quoth the raven,” Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner said in a deflating kind of way, “nevermore.”
“And here I thought he was okay these days,” Mildred muttered, shaking her head as she returned to her grisly work.
“Doc,” the Armorer said with gentle firmness, “don’t go wandering off into neverland, now. We need you to keep a sharp lookout. Not had a whiff of anything menacing, two-legged or more, norm or mutie, in three whole days. And that very fact itself makes me uneasy.”
The old man nodded. His eyes seemed to have gained focus. “You are quite correct, John Barrymore. It’s when the illusion of peace and safety seems most perfect that danger draws nigh.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said bitterly. “Any state less than constant screaming terror just isn’t natural.”
J.B. nodded. “They don’t call these the Deathlands for nothing.”
RYAN CAWDOR LAY on the ground, with his bare feet planted in a lush mat of fallen Ponderosa pine needles, long and gracefully curved as sabers, held together at the bases in clusters of three. The freedom afforded by temporary safety, to take his boots off and feel untainted nature beneath his soles, was an almost erotic pleasure.
Krysty Wroth, the most beautiful woman of the Deathlands—and not just in her mate’s single prejudiced eye—lay on the ground beside him. Both were gloriously nude, enjoying a moment of closeness and solitude after an hour of lovemaking.
He marveled in the sight of her, her white skin given a faint golden luster by the sunlight filtering through the trees. He would never tire of her, could never imagine tiring of her beauty, her vitality, her untamable spirit.
Both of them were alert to their surroundings, knew from the soft forest sounds that no immediate danger threatened. Both also knew the interlude could last but moments, that they would need to pick themselves up and square themselves away too soon, because as Mildred had just observed, unheard by them, peace and safety were unnatural states in the Deathlands, unstable as an isotope of plutonium.
All the same, the Deathlands had taught them to make the most of any and all such moments they could tear out of the grim, potentially lethal fabric of their daily lives. He stroked her cheek. They kissed. “Time to go, lover.”
With a sigh of regret the lovers stood.
Ryan picked up his Steyr sniper rifle and stood guard, unself-conscious of being buck-ass naked, while Krysty dressed without either hurrying or dawdling. Then she took temporary possession of the longblaster while he got his clothes on.
When he was ready she handed him back the rifle with a smile. “Better get back to camp, lover,” she said. “Don’t want the others to think we’re ducking the dirty work…”
Her voice trailed off. Ryan had cranked the bolt on reflex on getting the blaster back, pulling it back so as to lay an eyeball on a comforting gleam of brass in the chamber, just a sliver, because he knew from bitter experience that an unexamined blaster was always in the worst possible condition.
Because the forest sounds around them—the squirrel cussing them out from up the tree and the Steller’s jays yammering at each other from the scrub—had gone as still as the grave.
Chapter Two
“Coldhearts!” Jak Lauren yelled as he burst through the scrub oak at the foot of the clearing where Mildred worked and the others watched. “Mebbe thirty, riding hard!”
“Shit!” Mildred said.
Instantly, Doc tossed her J.B.’s Smith & Wesson longblaster and unleathered his cumbersome LeMat percussion pistol.
Mildred’s hands were still encased in gloves of gore when she fielded the M-4000. She winced. J.B. was going have a fit when this was done. She preferred her own target-grade ZKR 551 .38-caliber handblaster, but unlike Doc Tanner, she wasn’t nutty enough to waste time swapping for it when the hammer came down.
Instead she threw the shotgun to her shoulder just as three riders burst out of the patch of mountain oak hard on Jak’s tail. One of them swung a club that looked like a baseball bat with nails driven into it, the heads snipped off at a bias to create a bristle of lethal spikes. The albino youth dived facedown into the tan grass and the horses thundered past him.
“Bastards!” Mildred yelled. She aimed the front sight right for the middle of the fleshy black-bearded face of the man who’d dropped Jak and pulled the trigger. The blaster bucked and roared; the face disappeared in a spray of red blood and white bone chips.
But the physician’s pang of grief was wasted. As canny and feral as a wolf, Jak had gauged the swing and dived to avoid it. He reared up to one knee and blasted off three shots from his Colt Python. A brown-haired coldheart with ochre stripes painted across his hatchet face threw up his arms in a spasm as one of the 158-grain Magnum rounds blew one of his vertebrae into powder, then carried on with the aid of bone-splinter shrapnel to pulp his heart and lights. A remade Mini-14 with a broken stock went spinning away as his horse reared and dumped him over its croup.
The third rider charged straight for J.B., a long black queue of hair with finger bones braided into it flapping like a pennon behind and blazing away with some kind of booming revolver. He had no more luck firing from a galloping horse than most did who tried such a double-stupe stunt. The Armorer coolly reached down, picked up his Uzi and held down the trigger one-handed. Copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs punched holes in the rider at the buckskin-clad thigh, walked their way up his filthy plaid flannel shirt, tore out one side of his jaw and poked a hole through one cheekbone. That rider went down, the horse screaming and veering off into the brush to get away from the terrible flame and noise that had gone off in its face.
Jak pelted upslope, stepping on the still-writhing body of the man he’d shot. “Ryan! Krysty!” he shouted. “Where?”
J.B. and Mildred looked blankly at each other.
RYAN STOOD with his rifle butt against his shoulder but the barrel depressed, seeking targets. The telescopic sight severely restricted the shooter’s field of vision. He didn’t want to be lost in the scope when an attacker appeared from a whole different angle. Krysty was beside him, her .38 Smith & Wesson model 640 in hand. It wasn’t an ideal weapon for a fight in the woods, even with undergrowth cutting down engagement range. Still, it beat a knife to hell.
The clearing they were in was much smaller than the one a hundred paces or so away, not far downslope from the entry to the redoubt where they had left their comrades to butcher the carcass of the deer Ryan had shot that morning. They heard crackling in the brush, glimpsed large shapes between the trees. Horsemen, Krysty mouthed to Ryan.
He nodded. Neither fired. Against a known enemy, ambush was mere good sense. But unless you were a stone coldheart yourself you didn’t shoot at strangers on sight. Enemies were plentiful enough as it was without going out of your way to manufacture more in the persons of vengeful survivors.
