by James Axler
None of them felt all that hungry, though Ryan insisted that everyone eat as much as they could handle. "Might be the last food for some time," he said. "Depending on when we make the jump and where it takes us."
Outside, they had been able to hear the noise of the preparations for the two sacrifices, though Jehu had politely insisted that they shouldn't leave their quarters until they were sent for.
After the brief meeting on the shore of the lake, there had been no further sign of Michael. The tall blond leader of Quindley had told Ryan that the teenager was with Dorothy. "Which means that he is also with us."
"Not an outlander, Jehu?"
"No, Ryan. Michael is neither one thing nor the other. But within a day or so he may have completed his choosing and will speak with Moses."
That was all they knew.
"Now," JEHU ANNOUNCED.
The ville was in semidarkness, with only an occasional torch burning smokily in wall brackets. They followed the blond figure through the narrow, twisting lanes, until they reached the larger open area directly in front of the conical thatch of Moses's own dwelling.
It seemed that everyone was there, standing in solid blocks the little children, shepherded by a few of the teenage girls, then the older children, all silent, as though they were overawed by the occasion, and around three sides stood the rest of the young people.
Though there were ripples of movement, Ryan wasn't aware of anyone actually speaking. He looked around, his eye turning to the roof of the temple of Moses. At first, because of the shifting orange glow from the torches, he wasn't entirely sure of what he seemed to be seeing. Then he concentrated, his sight accommodating to the gloom.
There was an opening in the dense thatch of reeds, square, with light glinting off glass. Behind it there was the pale blur of a figure, though it was quite impossible to make out any details. But Ryan realized that Moses was present, watching the proceedings through his own window.
"Over here," Jehu said, pointing to a space in the front row, to the left of the square. "Then you can both see and be seen. Watch and be watched."
"Where's Michael?" Dean asked.
"There." Jehu pointed with one hand toward the mass of people on the opposite side.
Ryan looked as well, thinking he saw the tentative wave of a hand among the crowd, but it wasn't easy to be certain. He half waved back, then thought better of it.
"Wait," Jehu said. "You see that some of us carry our blasters with us. You must not interfere with what must happen. You understand?"
Ryan nodded. "Sure. It's your party."
"And you can cry if you want to," Mildred whispered mysteriously.
"No talking, please." Jehu lifted his right hand over his head in a signal to someone standing on the opposite side of the square.
Immediately there was the sonorous, slow beating of a slack-skinned drum, so deep and resonant that it seemed to echo through the marrow of the bones.
The shuffling stopped, and there was a total silence from the young people, a quiet so intense that everyone heard the far-off, mournful cry of a hunting wolf.
Krysty slipped her hand through the crook of Ryan*s arm, and he could feel that she was trembling with the growing tension of the ritual.
Jehu was still by them, his face turned upward, staring with wide eyes at the inconspicuous window in the roof of Moses's stone-built home.
Ryan looked up and saw a tiny flicker of light, no brighter than a firefly. And then they all heard the familiar voice, echoing around the ville.
" Welcome to the time of pleasure, a time for which there is a season. A time to be birthed and a time to take the long road that winds not."
"Sounds to me uncommonly like a nickel-and-dime TV evangelist preacher who has unfortunately swallowed a compendium of quotes."
Jehu turned and hissed angrily at Doc. "You live on borrowed time, oldie! Hold your words!"
Moses was still talking. "Each of you dwells well here in our home of Quindley. Outside is plague and the dark angel of death, escorted by the pale riders. To live outside the ville is only a worse, longer way. Do you want that way, brothers and sisters of the ville?"
There was a great roar of "No!" from all around.
"Five and twenty is the number and five times five shall be the sacred counting."
Mildred was beside Ryan, her voice so quiet that it didn't reach the ears of Jehu. "Four and twenty shall be too little and six and twenty too much and seven and twenty shall be right out," she breathed.
"As the day has its measure and the year its turning, so shall each of us have a span allotted. Not a doubtful, troubled time, rife with worry. But a time that we know. We know truly of our coming in and our going out and the grace that lieth with us at exit and entrance."
The crowd was sighing, tike the wind through a grove of tall beeches. Ryan felt a deeply uneasy prickling at the base of his spine at the strange, almost hypnotic power of the man who watched over them.
"What is the reward of those who tread the righteous path, brothers and sisters?"
"Light and life" was the chorused reply.
"And what shall be the lot of those who transgress against the word of Moses?"
"Darkness and death!"
Ryan's right hand had slipped down onto the cool butt of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer, without his even being aware of the movement.
"How shall they enter that darkness, brothers and sisters? How?"
This time the shout was deafening. "Through the flame, Moses, through the flame."
"Oh, Gaia!" Ryan whispered. "Look."
Suddenly everything had become very clear-the need for the willow branches, the call for the flames, the path to the endless darkness for those who had gone against the word and laws of Moses.
The drumbeat became even slower, ceremonial and ponderous, like the steps of a giant.
Or the beating of a huge, diseased heart.
The two victims appeared, surrounded by an honor guard of the tallest young women in the ville, all carrying rifles at the high port.
The outlander rapist was first, naked, hands tied behind his back. His head was sunk on his chest, and he shuffled his feet as be walked, not seeming to be aware of where he was or what was happening to him.
Heinrich, the renegade youth who had cho sen to try to defy Moses and his laws, followed close behind. He walked with his head up, looking scornfully from side to side, once spitting at someone who whispered something from the crowd.
The eagle eye of Moses missed nothing. "Let us have silence and dignity, brothers and sisters of the ville," he called from his thatched aerie.
Dean pulled at his father's sleeve. "What are those things for, Dad?" He pointed at a pair of large cages, roughly the size and shape of a man, made from tightly bound, narrow strips of willow, being carried by a number of men from the ville, toward two stout wooden stakes that were driven into the ground beneath the watching Moses.
Ryan didn't answer for a moment, though he knew the answer. "You'll see," he whispered.
The older man, whose tongue had been torn from his mouth, kept making choked, gobbling sounds. He stumbled as he was tied first to the stake, then the wicker cage was strapped into place around him. One of the younger women poured some clear liquid all over him and the woven container that held him. The pungent smell drifted across the square.
"Lamp oil," J.B. said.
"They going to burn him, Dad?"
"Yeah. Both of them, Dean."
"Bastards!" The word was spoken loud enough for Jehu to hear him. The blond man turned and glowered at the boy.
"You could've joined us, boy. You know that. And you turned your back."
I Wouldn't join you if you offered me all the jack in Deathlands!"
Ryan patted his son on the back.
Now it was the turn of Heinrich to be imprisoned.
Though he had seemed fairly passive, the sight of the stake and the wicker cage brought on a violent and futile rage. He pulled himself away f
rom the young women guarding him and kicked out at them, buying himself a few moments* breathing space. He stared wildly around him, looking toward the hidden figure of Moses.
"Don't do this to me, friend!" he shrieked, his voice cracking with mortal terror. "Spare me this ordeal. Let me go free and I'll never come back to Quindley again. I swear it. Show me mercy, I beg you."
"Silence him, sisters!" ordered the sonorous voice of the hidden Moses.
"It can't be wrong just to be old!"
The word died away as the nearest woman brought the butt of her rifle around in a crushing blow to Heinrich's groin. He doubled over, flat on his face in the trampled dirt, his cries turning to a feeble, helpless mewing. His whole body convulsed as he vomited.
"I regret that I have no wish to bear witness to this most barbarous performance. I shall return to our quarters with anyone who wishes to accompany me."
"You were warned, oldie!" whispered Jehu, starting to bring the barrel of his own blaster around toward Doc. But he stopped when he found himself staring down the gaping muzzle of Ryan's SIG-Sauer, with J.B.'s Uzi nudging him in the ribs.
Doc smiled. "A little violence is a wonderful thing, is it not?" He raised his voice toward the roof of Moses's temple. "Carry on with your bloody ritual, but you carry on without me!" He turned on his heel and began to walk back toward their quarters, pushing an angry young man out of the way with the iron ferrule of his sword stick.
"Think I'll keep you company, Doc," Mildred called, striding after him.
It crossed Ryan's mind as a vaguely interesting fact that the two members of their group who couldn't face the brutal chilling to come had both arrived in the living enamel house of Deathlands from earlier, perhaps more civilized, predark times. He also wondered what Michael was feeling, across the far side of the square, in the gloom.
"Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"Mind if I go after Doc and Mildred?"
"Course not."
"You staying with Krysty and J.B., Dad?"
"Guess so."
The boy nodded. "See you hi a while."
Ryan half turned to watch the slim, lithe figure of his son picking his way through the darkness after Doc and Mildred.
"Best for him not to watch this, lover," Krysty said, taking his arm.
"I guess so." Jehu stood watching them, frozen in an impotent rage at their betrayal of one of the most important of the ville's rituals. "You keep looking at me like that, Jehu, and you'll miss the main event behind you."
"You speaking to me, oldie? You speaking to me?"
"Must be," Ryan replied, "You're the only one here."
Just for a spaced heartbeat he thought the pony-tailed youth was going to go for him, and his finger took up the first pressure on the P-226. But then Jehu managed to regain self-control and ostentatiously spun to watch the ceremony.
Both men were bound inside the cages of thin, strong osier branches.
The scent of the oil was strong in the still night air, filling the nostrils with its rank odor. The drum had stopped its beating, and the watchers were motionless. Ryan listened carefully, and it seemed as though the entire world beyond the fortified walls of the ville was holding its breath.
The calm, gentle voice of Moses drifted down over them all like a layer of warm, silken honey, making the double murder a perfectly reasonable thing to happen.
"For betraying us and all our brothers and sisters, the sentence shall be..."
"Death!" The word wasn't shouted. It was breathed with a religious awe from dozens of throats, making Ryan's hair stand on end.
"Lover?"
"Wait," he whispered.
"Something's wrong," Krysty said.
"Where? The chilling you mean? Course it's-"
"No. Something else." Her head turned wildly from side to side, her brilliantly fiery hair seeming dulled in the smoky dimness of the square.
"What?" He looked around, but there wasn't a sight or sound of a threat.
Not a sight.
Not a sound.
"No sound," he muttered. The forest by the lake was totally quiet, quite bereft of the usual nocturnal range of bird and animal noises.
"Light the fires," Moses shouted, breaking Ryan's intense concentration for a moment.
"No!" The scream from the tortured Heinrich split the blackness.
Two of the smallest children stepped forward, each holding the hand of an older girl, each holding a blazing torch in their other hand.
"Yes, my dears," Moses called from on high.
The wicker baskets caught fire at once, blazing with a truly ferocious intensity, a golden light that shaded into orange and crimson in the shimmering air above the two cages.
"Gaia help their passing and make it fast," Krysty said.
"Breathe hi the fire and they're dead in seconds," J.B. observed, the flames reflected off the lens of his glasses, veiling his eyes.
Many of the watchers had fallen to their knees, hands pressed together, faces radiant in the glow of the twin fires.
One of the dying men had begun to scream. Ryan thought it was Heinrich, but he couldn't be sure. Whoever it was kept twisting in his bonds, as the fire consumed.
There was the smell of roasting meat, and, barely audible above the piercing cries, the noise of sporadic gunfire, with a bright blaze beginning near the main gates into Quindley. Yelps and shrieks of hatred and anger emerged from the darkness beyond the causeway.
"Got company," J.B. said. "Sounds like the stick-ies have come calling."
Chapter Thirty-Two
All the pieces of the jigsaw locked instantly together in Ryan's mind. As he ran toward the causeway, SIG-Sauer ready, J.B. on his right hand and Krysty on his left, his combat memory was ticking off the clues he'd ignored-the figure seen among the trees during the ill-starred fishing expedition; the smoke that they'd glimpsed, dismissed by Moses as being just beaver hunters; the smell of the fire when he and Krysty had bumped into Michael and Dorothy.
But above all, and Ryan cursed himself for having let it pass him by, was the unnatural silence out there among the tall pines, a silence prompted by the lurking, slinking presence of the mutie enemy.
He was aware of the panic and chaos behind. The young people of Quindley screamed and shouted, two or three of them discharging their blasters uselessly into the night sky. Ryan thought he also heard the voice of Moses, struggling to try to make itself heard over the bedlam, and failing.
Still soaring above it all, like a soul in the bottom circle of the inferno, was the endless screaming of Heinrich.
As they drew closer to the main gates of the ville, the noise of voices grew louder and the fire grew brighter.
"Thrown pitch on it and set it alight," J.B. panted. "No bastard guards at all."
"One on top, coming over," Krysty yelled, stopping and drawing a bead on the ragged figure that clung to the large spikes that decorated the wooden doors.
Ryan and the Armorer ran on, hearing the faint snap of her 5-shot Smith & Wesson double-action blaster, seeing the stickie throw his arms wide and topple forward, hanging by his knees to the gate.
The surging mass of Moses's people were on their heels, surrounding and passing Krysty before she could begin to run again.
"Lookout towers, both sides," Ryan shouted, pointing with the SIG-Sauer. "You take left!"
The beechwood ladder was well made, and he ran up it with the agility of a great cat, hardly having to steady himself, reaching the narrow walkway that ran around the inside of the high defensive walls of the ville.
He peered cautiously over the side, toward the causeway below, seeing the stickies' fire reflected in the dark, sullen waters of Shamplin Lake.
On the opposite side of the gates, J.B. also looked down, his Uzi at the ready.
There were black, sticky gobbets of tar stuck to the timbers, burning with a smoking yellow flame. Dancing outside were no more than half a dozen stickies, three of them struggling to raise a crude siege ladder ag
ainst the wall just beneath Ryan. There was ample light, and he aimed the powerful 9 mm handblaster and fired three times, killing the trio of muties, two of the corpses flailing lifelessly into the cold water on either side of the causeway.
"Something wrong!" J.B. shouted, his clear v oice breaking through the hubbub around them.
Ryan was already being jostled by some of the young men and women, Jehu right at his shoulder, all of them shooting wildly down at the surviving stickies.
