by James Axler
“Of course there is,” Krysty said. “We’re a team, family.”
Rage rose within him—and warred with the love he felt. For a moment he couldn’t speak. What he had to say got jammed tight in his throat, like a crowd trying to flee a burning building through a single doorway. I fought so long and hard to keep us together! he wanted to shout. But alive, fireblast it! Not as chills!
“It’s settled, Ryan,” Mildred said in as hard and flat and definite a voice as he’d ever heard the woman use.
“Shit,” he said. “Then I guess we better get ready to die a lot.”
From off to the north came a strange scream, like a brass-throated droid in mortal pain.
Chapter Three
The terrible blare resolved itself into a melody of sorts in Krysty’s ears.
“A bugle?” Doc asked in tones of wonder.
Instantly the volume of fire coming their way slackened.
“The blackguards flee!” crowed Doc, who was looking west along their backtrail. Kneeling next to Mildred and J.B., aiming her snub-nosed handblaster down the rutted road, Krysty glanced quickly over her shoulder. Though the scene was turning to an overall gray blur shot with light patches of still-falling snow, she saw localized whirlwinds of paler gray, clearly kicked up by slavers retreating rapidly to the cover of the far trees.
Yellow muzzle flashes still flickered from up ahead. Ryan’s Steyr longblaster boomed. Someone screamed. Krysty saw a violent spasm of shadow as the recipient of the heavy 7.62 mm bullet threw up his hands and fell.
From the left, more people burst onto the trail from the trees to the north, stumbling down a short steep bank like an avalanche. Krysty aimed at the nearest. It was a long shot for her short-barreled .38; she hoped someone else would take the shot if the shooter turned his longblaster toward her companions. But she was ready to try.
The figure stopped in the trail and swung his weapon back. Even though he was no more than twenty-five yards ahead, Krysty couldn’t tell what it was, or anything about the wielder other than that he, or she, seemed to be dressed in black, as many of the slavers were.
“No shoot!” Jak yelled.
Krysty froze. The fact that the hot-blooded Jak was crying out a warning against violence was fully as shocking as the ambush.
The others held their fire, too. She sensed Doc and Ricky, who had been covering their backtrail, wheeling to look east.
A giant shadow burst from the bank in an explosion of snow-dust like smoke. It had four legs and a strange protrusion from its back. Then, as the shape descended to the road, it resolved in Krysty’s astonished eyes as a horse with a man on its back.
The man had a long, curved sword, and he slashed down at the kneeling slaver with a brutal stroke across the face before the other could shoot.
As the slaver fell, the horseman was silhouetted in a sudden dancing flare of orange light. Sound hammered Krysty’s ears. He was shooting some kind of longblaster full-auto down the trail with his left hand.
He turned and charged away from the companions. Another pair of riders erupted from the left to follow. Already a tumult of shots and shrieks was blowing out of the enemy blocking force eastward.
“Did I just see some cavalry guy kill another guy with a sword?” Ricky asked. The youth’s normally olive face seemed to have turned a shade not much darker than the snow around them, which now seemed to glow with its own light in the last vestiges of dying day. His dark eyes were huge.
“It would certainly appear so,” Doc agreed, straightening and dusting off the sleeves of his long-tailed frock coat.
“Get down, stupe!” Ryan hissed.
Doc did. But he turned a mild, complaining, deceptively old-looking countenance to Ryan.
“But you saw them dispatch those slaver devils smartly!” he protested. “Surely the enemy of our enemy is—”
“Our enemy’s enemy, and not one other thing,” Ryan finished sharply. “You ought to know that by now. Mebbe things were different back in the Middle Ages where you come from, but these days, it’s pretty much bastard versus bastard, wherever you go.”
“Ryan! You know perfectly well I was born during the reign of Victoria Regina—”
“Yeah, he does,” Mildred said. “Step back off the trigger there, you old coot. Ryan’s yanking your chain.”
With the men still on their feet aiming along the trail where the trio of horsemen had vanished in the gloom—except for Jak, who cautiously and characteristically was covering behind them with his Magnum handblaster—she turned her attention to Mildred and her wounded lover.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Bad.” Mildred’s face was set like a statue’s in a grim look. A tear rolled down her right cheek but she was clearly holding her emotions in check. “I got the holes blocked—the bullet blew through but didn’t leave a huge exit wound. That’s a blessing, anyway. But—”
She shook her head. More tears drew tracks down her ashen cheeks to join the first in turning into icicles.
“I’m afraid if he doesn’t get some kind of medical attention fast, he’s a goner. I’ve done all I can.”
“Someone’s coming out of the trees to the north,” Ricky reported tersely.
“Good eye,” said Ryan, who knelt behind a tree peering over the top of the long-eye relief scope set atop his Scout rifle. “Now, you keep your finger easy on the trigger until we know whose side they’re really on.”
“Other than their own, of course,” said a voice that was cracked like a heavy clay pot that had fallen off the shelf onto stone. It broke into coughing.
“J.B.!” Mildred shrilled. “Don’t try to talk!”
The Armorer had regained consciousness. Of a sort. He patted Mildred’s hand and offered her a smile, which might have been reassuring, a little, anyway, if there wasn’t still blood leaking out both ends of it down his chin. Then his eyelids fluttered and closed.
Krysty caught herself before she gasped aloud. She realized he was still alive; his chest was heaving seriously in the unconscious battle for breath.
“Easy,” Ryan repeated.
Krysty looked up. People had walked onto the road seventy or eighty feet ahead. They were dressed in white parkas with the hoods up, and mostly white pants. Some turned and knelt facing Ryan’s group, holding longblasters—pointing their way, but with muzzles down. Not quite aiming at the strangers, but making it clear they could, triple-quick. Behind them she saw other people carrying what could hardly be anything but spears, about eight feet long.
The firing had died down to nothing. The stillness seemed as sudden as a gunshot, and so deceptively complete it was almost hard to believe what a horrific tumult had been raging a few breaths before.
Tall dark shapes resolved through the falling snow, which had begun coming down faster but in smaller flakes. Krysty heard a horse snort. The white-hooded men blocking the road pulled away to either side without taking their eyes off Krysty and the rest of the companions. A tall man on a black horse rode into clear view. He had a long face made longer by a black Astrakhan wool hat, broad cheekbones, dark beard and pale eyes that pierced even through distance and gloom. He carried his saber in his right hand and a bugle in his left. A short but obviously two-handed weapon was slung across a chest that looked massive from the bearskin coat that covered it. The blaster was a Krinkov submachine gun.
Behind him, winged out slightly to one side, rode a slimmer man with brown bangs hanging out from beneath an old Red Army-style winter cap. Krysty felt a bit of a shock as she saw the red star burning from the middle of it. To the other side rode a young woman holding a lever-action longblaster in one hand. She wore the same type of cap. Her hair looked little, if any, darker than Jak’s; the white locks streamed down over the shoulders of her parka.
“Who are you?” Ryan called out.
The big man in the Astrakhan laughed. “I am Baron Ivan Frost,” he called in a cheerful boom. “And inasmuch as this is my domain, I believe that question rightl
y belongs to me!”
“Fair enough,” Ryan said. He stood, lowering his rifle, and stepped out into the path.
Krysty let go a long breath. She felt tension slide out of her shoulders. Her own intuition matched Ryan’s warrior instinct: these people weren’t hostile.
If they were, her mind reminded her, they’d have stood off and let the slavers take us down before they made their move.
“I’m Ryan Cawdor,” he said.
“What is your business in Stormbreak?”
“Surviving. Trying to keep out of the hands of these nuke-sucking slavers.”
The baron nodded. “And the rest?”
“My companions,” Ryan said. “And begging your pardon, we’ll be short one triple-fast if my wounded man doesn’t get help soon!”
The baron gestured with his saber. The sec men on foot started moving forward, lowering their weapons.
Krysty heard Mildred growl, “Ricky! Can it.”
Looking sheepish, the youth let his own longblaster slump back again to point at the ground.
A young woman followed the sec men. She dismounted a few feet away and went swiftly to J.B.’s side. She nodded to Mildred, then leaned in to look at him.
“Make a travois, fast,” she directed the sec men. “The outlanders tell the truth.”
“You have done us a service, Ryan Cawdor and friends,” the baron announced, still sitting astride his big black horse. “You helped guide us to these wretches—and thinned their ranks for us. I thank you and extend the hospitality of my home. Can the man be moved?”
“I believe so, Baron,” the woman called.
“If he doesn’t, at the least, get inside quickly,” Mildred said, “he’ll die. So he needs to be moved.”
“Then we shall go. I fear that, with the travois, you have an hour’s journey to my home. I will ride ahead to tell my healer to prepare for your wounded friend.”
J.B. stirred and murmured something inaudible. Mildred patted his hand.
“Hang in there, baby,” she whispered. “We’re among friends now, anyway.”
Krysty saw her glance quickly at Ryan, who stood by holding his longblaster in patrol position. He had a neutral look on his face.
“Or at least, not enemies.”
Chapter Four
J.B. floated in a strange pale fog shot through with bright red flashes of pain.
When they hit, the first thing he was aware of was the endless struggle to breathe. And cold. And jostling.
And the smell of...horses?
His eyes tried to open, but couldn’t. Dark night! he thought. I can’t breathe, and now I can’t see?
He set his jaw. At least that didn’t hurt. Any extra. He willed his eyes to open.
The lids broke free like scabs. Instantly tiny cold needles stung through the blur in his vision.
Snow!
It came back to him then, in a sick, cold flood, what had happened. Did the slavers catch us? he wondered frantically. Did we lose? Where are my friends? Are they all still fit to fight? Or triple-screwed-up like me?
He became aware of the odd rhythm with which his whole body was bouncing, and the intricate muffled drumbeat pattern running through it like a bass-line through a melody. He wasn’t the artistic type, and was even less musical, but those were the only words he found that would do the job, so he used them.
His vision sharpened and cleared as he blinked away the snowflakes falling. He saw the tail of a horse between the familiar scuffed toes of his boots—he was lying on his back, it turned out. Rolling his eyes left and right, then craning his head back on the sling he seemed to be lying on, he realized two more horses were tight behind to either side, both with riders, both looking like shadows in a white swirl in the dark.
The slavers hadn’t had any horses. They didn’t seem the type. He caught a vague memory bubbling to the surface of his foggy brain—sense impressions of a bugle calling, and the slavers falling back in panic.
So, he reckoned, these people beat the slavers. Did they rescue us—or capture us?
It was all too much. Though they moved at a brisk walk, like a trot but smoother, seemingly to combine speed with gentleness, the fact was that every little impact sent a fresh stab of pain like a knife blade through his chest. As did every attempt to breathe.
Consciousness started to fade. That was probably best, he knew. But he still fought to hold on to it as long as he could. He never was a man who knew when to quit. Nor a boy—that was the only way he’d survived in a brutal land where the weak got no breaks except for their bones: he just plain hung on and didn’t quit—
But the blackness won again.
* * *
JUST WHEN MILDRED thought she couldn’t stagger another step, they saw a yellow glow through trees made ghostly by snow loading down their boughs and falling lightly now. The pain in her legs from trudging through deep snow and sheer fatigue was so all-encompassing and yet so sharp it sometimes overwhelmed her grief and fear for J.B.
“We’re almost there,” Lucas said. He was a young man with a clean-shaven face who seemed to be in charge of the ten-man sec crew that was escorting Ryan and his party through the woods in the wake of the horses carrying J.B.’s improvised travois. Between the darkness and the fur lining of his parka that completely rimmed his features, that was as much as Mildred could tell. He seemed uncommonly cheerful for a sec man, although that might have been elation at seeing off the slavers so readily.
She huddled under the weight of two packs, hers and J.B.’s. His weapons were being toted by others—Krysty had his shotgun, Jak his Uzi. Ryan had looked a question at her when she hoisted the second pack but said nothing.
My legs are strong and my back is sturdy, she thought. It’s the least I can do at this point.
“It’s right up ahead,” sang out another young sec man.
They came to a wide road that led through the tall conifers. Immediately they turned right. You’d have to have a better direction-sense than Mildred did to have any clue which actual way that was. She guessed even Jak might find it a challenge. At least a bit—even though he was about as far out of his element as she was, here in the snowy dark Northeast. Bayou-born-and-bred as he was, he seemed to have little difficulty coping with any environment in which he found himself.
They turned to walk in single file down the road, with sec men in front and bringing up the rear. Whatever Ryan thought of that arrangement he kept to himself; he was a man who lived by the principle of picking his fights, and this was a poor one however you looked at it. Anyway, so far as Mildred could tell, the arrangement was as advantageous from the viewpoint of her party’s survival as any other. Despite her years awake and abroad in this harsh new world, she was no tactician yet. Ryan was. So she was content to follow his lead in such matters.
It had kept them alive, time and again, under the most impossible circumstances.
To keep her mind from straying back to J.B.’s open wound and the prospect that he might have reached the end of his road, she studied Ryan. Or, rather, his back. He walked at the front of his companions, barely bowed by the weight of his backpack and Scout longblaster at all. She knew that, as much as she loved J.B., his state had to be hitting Ryan harder. They had been best friends for years, since they met while J.B. rode with the enigmatic Trader. They had known each other, saved each other countless times, long before they ever met any of the others. In some ways, the Armorer was closer to Ryan even than his soul mate, Krysty.
Whatever came, Ryan preferred to meet it with head high and eyes—eye—ever-moving.
Krysty walked close behind Ryan. Her hood was down, allowing Mildred to see that her prehensile hair was curled into a tight cap on her head. Krysty wondered what their friendly sec men escorts would say when they noticed that little phenomenon; right now, they seemed too stoked to spot the fact they had a mutie in their midst.
Then came Ricky, J.B.’s apprentice, the group’s newest member. Of all of the companions, he felt closest to
J.B.; the Armorer and he were kindred spirits, born tinkerers and gun nuts. He was trying hard not to cry. And not succeeding very well, to judge by the sheen of frozen tears on his pale olive cheeks, even in the faintest of light, every time he turned his head left or right.
Mildred had a few of those caked on her own cheeks, as well. More than a few.
After her came Doc, twirling his stick with the concealed sword and humming an absentminded little tune to himself. She was too spent and miserable to snap at him to knock it off.
Last walked Jak, sharp features grim, his eyes alert and ever-active. He didn’t like being chained to the group, any more than a guard dog liked being chained in a yard. It wasn’t his role; it didn’t accord with his restless spirit. His style was to be a ghost, escorting the others unseen, always patrolling for enemies—something for which his albino pallor ironically suited him in this snowscape.
But Ryan had told him to fall in, so he had.
The wind picked up. Mildred heard a strange rushing roar.
“There it is,” Lucas called. “The castle.”
Mildred looked up. Her first thought was that the place sure wasn’t making any effort to hide—perched, as it was, forty or fifty yards ahead on a glistening dark crag of rock, swept bare of snow by the wind that had commenced to howl and cut. It had plenty of windows, and yellow light seemed to glare out of each and every one of them, like a dozen lighthouse beacons calling out, Here we are! to the ill-intentioned.
Beyond it was a darkness only relatively lighter than the damp black rock and the structure itself between the golden-gleaming windows. Mildred could only tell it was a sky full of clouds by the fact she saw no stars.
She smelled saltwater.
Her second thought was that it didn’t have to hide. It wasn’t hard at all to see why they called it the castle.
She could see little detail in the darkness. The glare from the windows made it harder, not easier, to make out detail. She had a sense of looming walls, a steep pitched roof and great solidity.
