“I did set it on narrow! The…I tapped until it wouldn’t go down any more.”
“Wrong direction. Look at your dial.”
The blaster was on the widest possible setting.
“On the bright side,” said Patrik, “you’d probably have missed with a narrow beam. On this setting, you won’t make much of an impression on rock, but you can’t miss as long as the target is in front of you.”
Once she’d mastered changing the controls without looking, he had her fire at the rocks with various settings. Finally he sighed and told her to put the blaster away. “Gabrel wants you to have this just in case things get sticky with one of Mavros’ bunch, but frankly, I don’t think it’ll do you any good unless you reverse it and hit the guy with the butt – it’s pretty heavy, that might make an impression. Seriously, I recommend that you rack it back to the widest beam setting before you close and holster it. That way, if you do need to draw and fire, at least you’ll probably hit your target. Even if all you do is give him one hell of a sunburn.”
Isovel privately thought that having a chance to be the instructor was going to Patrik’s head. Surrounded by Gabrel’s men, she felt perfectly safe – now when had that happened? – and sure that Gabrel would be able to tamp down any rowdy behavior at his own base. She wasn’t going to argue with Patrik, though; if she stayed unobtrusive he might forget to take the blaster back, and it would be a handy thing to have with her on her solitary trek back to civilization. Just in case the villagers were right about greatcats.
When Mavros finally appeared, in late afternoon, Isovel gained a new appreciation for the art of fading into the background.
CHAPTER NINE
The first man to appear through the needle trees was such a caricature of a holodrama villain that Isovel was hard put to it not to laugh. Long greasy hair, a poorly trimmed beard covering half his face with brassy curls, wet red lips showing through the face fuzz. Dark clothes that looked as if he’d been sleeping in them for oh, about a month. Definitely not smartcloth. And… a very long knife with a curved blade tucked into his sash. Isovel suddenly lost all desire to laugh at him.
Which was good, because he spotted her immediately. “So! Gabrel is a clever man; he imports all the luxuries of home.” He leered at her. “I hope you share, friend Gabrel.”
“Citizen Dayvson is a prisoner of war, friend Mavros,” Gabrel said stiffly, “not a part of my team.”
“Maybe she would like to be part of my team.” Mavros stepped past Gabrel and put an arm around Isovel’s waist. “Why else do you keep staring at me, pretty girl?”
Isovel tittered and put one hand to her mouth, remembering when Gabrel had advised her to imitate a silly schoolgirl. This seemed like a good time to follow that advice. “Oh, do forgive me, Captain. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that you look exactly as I’d pictured a gallant guerrilla leader.” She opened her eyes wide and tried to look as if she were gazing up at him in admiration. It would have been easier if he hadn’t been a couple of inches shorter than her.
Mavros gave a gusty laugh. “You see, the little lady appreciates a real man, friend Gabrel.” He put both hands on her waist, lifted her into the air and set her back down a few inches farther away from him. “Later, pretty girl. First we men settle affairs between us. Then there will be time to party.” He jerked his head backwards at the men who’d been quietly filing into the clearing after him.
The man – boy? who came just after Mavros looked as if the Powers, having designed Mavros, recoiled and decided to make the exact opposite: slim and fair-haired, with very pale blue eyes set in an innocent-looking, almost childish face. He put one finger under Isovel’s chin and lifted it. “I’m the Angel,” he said in a voice as sweet as his face.
She jerked her head aside. “That’s a matter of opinion.”
His laugh was light and tinkling – and for some reason, it frightened her more than Mavros with his grabby hands. “No, dear, that’s my name. Angelos. Perhaps in time you’ll see how fitting it is.” He followed Mavros across the clearing.
“Angelos Thanatu,” Amari muttered beside her. “Angel of Death.”
Apart from the Angel, Isovel thought, Mavros’ followers were like blurred, sleazy copies of himself. Beards and long, wicked knives seemed to be popular. She wondered why so many of them were carrying heavy native-ware jugs.
“You see, I am a good guest – I do not come empty-handed,” Mavros told Gabrel. “First you give us the weapons, then we celebrate our undying comradeship in mountain jack.”
Gabrel nodded very slightly. “I see you brought a lot of lightning jack.”
“Not too much for us,” Mavros boasted. “Any man who wants to travel with me has to prove himself by drinking half a jug of lightning jack. If he’s not still standing afterwards, we don’t need him, do we boys?”
A ragged chorus of laughs and snickers supported the claim. “Maybe you will not be standing after the celebration. Do not worry. I did not want you to join with my men anyway. Now, where are our weapons?”
Gabrel nodded towards the center of the clearing, where the uncharged blasters were set out, and Mavros stepped eagerly forward to inspect his new weapons.
Isovel moved backward, step by cautious step, while Mavros’ men crowded around the weapons. When she reached the cave she stopped, irresolute. Being out of sight seemed an extremely good idea; being cornered did not.
Nikos slipped towards her. “Go on in,” he said, his lips barely moving. “Get out of sight. Gabrel told me and Ravi to guard the entrance; nobody will get by us.”
The day had been warm, but under the shadow of the rocks Isovel felt almost chilly despite the protection of her smartcloth outfit. She lingered just inside the cave, trying to hear what was going on. Mavros was loudly unhappy about having to share out a meagre fifteen blasters among his nearly two dozen followers, and even more unhappy that the weapons were uncharged. “What am I supposed to do with these worthless pieces of shit, hit Harmonicas over the head?”
“They run on solar cells,” Gabrel said calmly. “It’s too late now to charge the cells, but if you put them out in the sunshine tomorrow they should give you full power by this time tomorrow.”
“And what if it rains, hey?”
“That,” Gabrel said, “is doubtless why the manual advises charging the cells to the full and recharging them at every opportunity. To prepare against a rainy day.”
There was a moment of tension during which Isovel held her breath; then Mavros decided to be amused. His great bellowing laugh was the cue for first his men, then Gabrel’s, to laugh also. He continued to complain about the paucity of weapons for some time, but there was no real force behind the complaints. When Gabrel offered to let some of his men stay for a few days and work the printer to make more blasters, he apparently found that funny too. Funny enough to make a seemingly endless chain of jokes about Gabrel’s men being workers and his men being fighters. At least Isovel supposed they were jokes, given that Mavros laughed loudly and applauded his own wit after each one. She couldn’t understand half of his allusions, and the bits she could understand weren’t funny.
After the ritualized bargaining, Mavros told his men to start passing around the lightning jack. He refused the offer of a meal first, saying that no man with any pride would eat sludge. Isovel rather thought that Gabrel’s men were too bright for that. Certainly he wasn’t encouraging the attitude; Amari, a quiet shadow in the dusk, brought bowls of sludge to the cave mouth for Ravi, Nikos and her.
It wasn’t that bad; they had no roast meat to add to it today, but a sharp, tangy sprinkling of some mountain herb gave even the sludge some flavor. And there was some of the local goat cheese crumbled on the top. And anyway, she would need strength for her escape later, and it really wasn’t that bad.
Really.
After a few rounds of lightning jack Mavros’ men started wandering around the clearing, either to prove they could still stand or to find a nice tree to reliev
e themselves against. Ravi and Nikos tensed whenever anyone came near the cave mouth, and Isovel kept one hand on her own blaster for an interminable period until the wandering died down. After that the “singing” started: off-key renditions of what she supposed were local popular tunes, with words that were – well, Isovel didn’t think that using those particular words so liberally was the acme of wit, but Mavros’ band clearly would have voted her down.
Mavros caught sight of Ravi and Nikos and bellowed at them to join the group, he didn’t want anyone cheated out of their celebration. “Go on,” Isovel urged in an undertone. “It’ll be fine. They’ve forgotten all about me, and anyway I’ve got this.” She patted the blaster, which was beginning to seem like her best friend rather than an ugly killing device.
Ravi hesitated. “Go! D’you want to give them an excuse for a fight?” Gabrel’s men were outnumbered more than two to one. On the other hand, their blasters were fully charged and functional. Brawling would be a gamble, one Isovel suspected Gabrel had ordered his men not to take as long as they could maintain a superficially friendly relationship with their undesirable guests.
Not that her urging was all that generously motivated. She’d been on tenterhooks, wondering if she could get rid of her protectors before people started coming into the cave to sleep. Now, as Ravi and Nikos reluctantly joined the “party,” Isovel retreated to her niche and spent agonizing minutes trying to punch her two pillows and a spare blanket into something that looked like the shape of a sleeping woman. Hurry, hurry, before they come back…Haste makes waste; if I don’t make this look good I might as well not bother trying to get away…Any minute now, Gabrel will send someone else over to guard the cave…
Finally, she achieved a blanket-covered shape that should be enough to fool a casual observer. As long as nobody brought solar lamps into the cave. They generally didn’t do that at night, just felt their way in and wrapped up in their blankets. And on a dry night like this, with a fire in the clearing, most of them would sleep outside anyway.
***
Ten steps from the cave’s mouth, inky blackness replaced the fitful light from the dying fire in the clearing, and Isovel drew a breath of relief. So far, so good: nobody had shouted at her to come back, and now she was concealed in the darkness. A good thing she’d slipped away before moonrise; her pale green smartcloth tunic would shine like a beacon in the moonlight. Best to be as far away as possible before that happened.
It was just like those tense moments inside the cave: Hurry, hurry now warred with I can’t even see my feet, let alone where I’m stepping. As soon as she was well along the path through the needle trees, Isovel knelt and made sure she was following the cable line. I hope they remember all those hints I dropped about wanting to know the way to the creek. And don’t think about the perfect trail they’ve given me with this cable.
That was before she got to the part where Gabrel’s men had gotten serious about disguising the cable. Now she slowed even more. Take a step; kneel; feel for the cable under dead needles and dirt; take another step. At least I’m not at risk of twisting my ankle, traveling at this speed. But by the time the moon rose she was desperate to move faster. She’d never get to the river at this rate. And she was going to have to leave the cable and double back to it, because here it ran under a pile of boulders that spilled on down the mountain. All right, how hard could this be? I’m going downhill, away from the cable. When I can work around the boulders I’ll go back uphill. It’s really not possible to get lost.
True, finding “uphill” was harder than she’d thought; she started on two trails that seemed to offer good chances to backtrack, but one of them died in a hopeless tangle of dead trees and vines and the next one paused on a slight saddle and then ran back down into a ravine. I don’t remember a ravine coming down. Well, I suppose the path on that side of the boulders didn’t cross it.
When she did find a good place to work her way uphill, it didn’t feel quite right. She wasn’t going straight up the hill, she was forced to angle across at a slant. Impossible to tell, this far from the boulder slide, exactly where she would pick up the cable again.
Where the moonlight shone through the trees, it lit up every slight irregularity of rocks and earth in sharp chiaroscuro. Isovel stopped and treated herself to a deep breath when she saw the shadow of the rod-straight cable running across the hillside. Several deep breaths. She’d earned them.
After another hour of sweaty, aching struggle up and down the mountainside, she was beginning to wonder if she’d imagined that line of shadow. She hadn’t picked up the cable again. Maybe that hadn’t been the cable, she should have felt it instead of just looking, maybe it was the only branch in the forest of needle trees that had grown perfectly straight.
Back braced against a cliff that cut off any more exploration in what she thought was the right direction, Isovel wiped her face with her sash and reconsidered. She could keep stumbling up and down hill with no good idea of her direction. Not good. She could wait until morning and renew her search for the cable. Not much better.
Or… Now that she wasn’t walking or panting, the small sounds of the forest were more noticeable. And there weren’t many of those; a passing breeze sifting the tops of the needle trees, the skittering of some small nocturnal animal that had thought better of investigating this large crashing two-legged invader, and… the trickle of water. Isovel licked dry lips.
She could go down to the creek and follow it to the river. Too bad she’d laid all those clues that she meant to go by the creek. She particularly regretted the trail of white stone chips; hard for anybody to ignore such a blatant attempt at marking the path. Oh well, maybe they’d decide that she was feinting, being so obvious about the creek path in order to distract them from the cable. Wait a minute, wasn’t that what she had been doing? Isovel shook her head. She was much too tired to explore the complicated layers of bluff and double-bluff. She’d just have to find the creek and hope she reached the river before anybody found her.
Her tortured calves and ankles protested as she set off again, this time angling downhill in a slightly different direction. She must have gotten really turned around; she’d never have thought the creek was this way. But the water sounds were louder with every step. Isovel thought longingly of cold, clear snow-melt water, and moved a little faster.
The creek was narrower than she remembered it, rushing through a water-carved canyon in stone. Could she possibly have come upon it upstream of the camp? No. It had to be a downstream rocky outcrop that had constrained it like this. Isovel lay down on the rocks and cupped her hands in the stream.
It wasn’t the most efficient way to get water, and her hands were icy before she’d drunk her fill, but the snow melt was delicious. You could bottle this and sell it in Harmony. Maybe she’d suggest that business plan to… somebody… after the war was over. Right now she needed to get up again and follow the creek downstream… in just… a moment…
She woke suddenly, her whole body startling at some sound. It was morning, and not dawn, either. How long had she slept? She was cold and stiff from sleeping on the bare rock. That had been stupid. And she’d lost precious hours… Isovel pushed herself up into a sitting position against the complaints from joints and muscles.
A swishing sound, like a foot sliding over dry needles… was that what had startled her? Slowly Isovel raised her eyes to scan the steep face of the hill that sloped down to the opposite bank of the creek.
Jesse. Oh, this is not good. This is so not good.
“Wakey-wakey, sleeping princess!”
Isovel scrambled awkwardly to her feet. At least she would face Jesse standing. “You win. I’ll come back with you.” She spread her hands out, open, and hopefully concealing the lumpy pocket that dragged her tunic out of line.
“You wish. Girl, you’ve no idea how lost you are. I could just walk away now and leave you to starve in the wilderness.”
Isovel glanced at the creek.
“W
hat, you think following that will help you? Stupid city girl. You went over the mountain and down to the wrong creek.”
His words rang true. She’d felt she was going in the wrong direction. Even in the moonlight, this creek had looked nothing like the wide, placid one where she’d bathed daily.
But what of it? Following any running water must lead her to the river. All she had to do was… get the blaster out… and… Gabrel will never forgive me if I kill Jesse. It’s my duty to escape. We’re at war. People get killed. Why couldn’t those idiots have stolen a stunner printer? I can’t do this. I have to do this.
She shrugged, tried to seem too tired to care about being recaptured. It wasn’t much of a reach. “Whatever you say. I won’t give you any trouble, I’m much too tired.”
Jesse scrambled down the hillside, grabbing saplings to keep his balance, and Isovel grabbed the blaster out of her pocket. Never point your weapon at something you’re not prepared to burn. She used both shaking hands to bring the blaster up and swung to follow Jesse’s progress down the hill. Never slide the safety off unless you’re ready to burn your target. She slid the safety off.
“Stupid little girl. You won’t use that, you’re a Harmonica, you don’t have the nerve.” He was almost near enough to jump the creek. Isovel closed her eyes and fired.
Jesse’s boots struck the rock on her side of the creek and Isovel opened her eyes, startled. I can’t have missed at that range… can I?
“You can’t even aim it,” Jesse said conversationally, twisting her arm up behind her back until her numbed fingers released the blaster. “You shouldn’t have done that, Harmonica. I can’t be killed. Your people already took their best shot at that but I lived.” His voice dropped to a hoarse, raw whisper. He sounded like a man who’d torn his throat raw with screaming. It terrified Isovel. “Burning in the sun, my back burning, flies buzzing on the raw wounds. And watching my Raychel being hunted down while I hung on the flogging post.”
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 10
