by James Axler
A dozen dark, wild-haired men dressed in loincloths surrounded them: Chichimecs. They were armed with the usual chronological grab bag of weaponry from clubs and spears to at least a couple of smokeless powderblasters. Two of the ambushers held a furious Don Tenorio by the arms as the copper-headed woman spoke tauntingly to him. Ryan blinked to clear the vision in his one eye, which still swam with big green-and-purple afterimage blobs. It seemed as if there were more marauders across the well of the half-drowned atrium.
With a gesture like an irate egret shaking out his wings, Doc broke away from the captor who held his arms. He jabbed another in the chest with the tip of his cane. “You have no cause to lay your foul hands upon my person, sirrah!”
The Chichimec stared at him more in shocked surprise than anything else. Then his dark face twisted in a rage-filled snarl. He grabbed the end of the cane and raised his own weapon, one of those flat clubs edged with jagged shards of volcanic glass, to strike Doc down.
Doc yanked back on the handle of his cane. The slim steel blade hissed free. The raider’s face sagged into a look of even greater surprise.
Like a striking serpent, the sword darted forward to bury itself in one of those dark staring eyes.
The Chichimec shrieked once and then fell bonelessly, dead on the instant. The marauder who had held Doc earlier wrapped his arms around him, trying to pinion them to his sides. It was too late; Doc had already managed to claw the bulk of his LeMat free. He turned sideways, thrust the blaster up under his captor’s chin and lit off the shotgun underbarrel.
The blast tore off the man’s face.
Ryan was already in motion. He rammed his elbow back into the gut of the man who held him on the left. Then he pivoted his hips to drive a forward elbow smash into the hinge of the jaw of the man clutching him from the right. The man uttered a strangled scream as his jaw broke and slid, horribly, a handsbreadth to the side. He was bastard tough. Even as he clutched his shattered face with one hand, the other raised an obsidian sword club to strike back.
As quick as thought, Ryan’s panga whispered free. He chopped it right down into the fury-and-pain-distorted face, splitting the skull to the bridge of the nose.
Ryan sensed motion behind him, launched a savage back kick without looking. The man who’d been to his left went backward over the rail. He screamed horribly as he landed on the busted-off handrail. The goresmeared raw end punched clean out his bare chest.
By that point there was a whole lot of screaming going on. Ryan had quick impressions. Jak’s right hand, ghostpale in the gloom, darted like a snake repeatedly striking as he threw his sharp little knives into eyes, throats, bodies, not caring that most of them wouldn’t do lethal damage. All that was needed was distraction, to spoil aim or to allow an ally to land a kill shot. Krysty’s hand whipped out, pressing the barrel of her Smith &Wesson blaster into the gut of a Chichimec, and fired twice. J.B. felled two captors with an overhand right and a hand-edge smash to the throat, then spun and sprayed Chichimecs on the opposite side of the well with an ear-shattering burst from his Uzi.
The wiry bodyguard had twisted himself free of the raiders who held him and hurled himself at his baron’s two captors. The four were down in a thrashing tangle in the doorway. The copper-headed woman, a tiny black blaster in her hand, was dancing around the tangle spitting like a cat in fury at not finding a clear target.
Ryan followed down the man whose skull he’d split to yank his silenced SIG-Sauer from the waist string of the dead man’s loincloth. He fell onto his side and rolled, momentarily unsure whether to chill the woman who had lured them into the trap or to try to find the Chichimec who had wound up in possession of the bodyguard’s longblaster. His brains had been rattled by the rap to the head. He wasn’t quite as razor-edge decisive as usual in combat.
The Chichimec who had appropriated the long-barreled FN FAL stepped up and slammed the steel-shod butt of its wooden stock against the back of the bodyguard’s neck with a sound like an adz splitting a log. That settled that. Ryan fired two sighing shots into the middle of his back. He went to his knees, then fell onto the still form of the scavvie he’d butt-stroked.
Copper hair flying, the woman spun to point her tiny black blaster at Ryan. He rolled to shift his aim point to right between her breasts, which even under the circumstances he noted pushed out the front of her olive drab blouse impressively. Not that Ryan had ever scrupled to chill a woman, however attractive, when circumstances called for it. But the real issue would be who was in position to get a shot home first…
For just a moment, two wild green eyes and Ryan’s single cold blue one locked each other above their gunsights. Then the woman went flying up and back into the air.
Ryan stared. There were very few occasions in his life when he’d been so taken by surprise by a twist of events that all he could do was gape. This was one.
A tentacle, dark-striated and slimy, held the woman around her rib cage, aloft above the water. Others waved in the air around her.
She screamed, not in terror but in evident fury. She fired the handblaster downward. It made little popping sounds that were almost comical and didn’t bother whatever monstrous mutie held her in the slightest.
One of the ambushers had grabbed up the fallen FN FAL. He rushed to the rail, aimed downward at the churning water from which half a dozen tentacles sprouted like sentient plant stalks, fired a burst. As usual, it was a bad idea to fire a .308-caliber rifle full-auto. The recoil walked the barrel straight up in the air and put him flat on his skinny ass.
The woman had thrown her useless handblaster away. “Macahuitl!” she screamed. “Macahuitl!”
Ryan wondered if it was a prayer or a curse. It was neither. One of the handful of Chichimecs still on their feet tossed her one of the obsidian-edged clubs. Then his face erupted in a gush of black blood and dough-colored brains as Krysty, far too much a woman of the Deathlands to fight fair, fired a shot into the base of his skull from touch range. He went down with his hair burning in reeking blue flames.
The marauder woman fielded the sword club deftly. She hacked it savagely down into the tentacle that gripped her below the arms. The volcanic glass, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel, half severed the leg-thick member. Greenish ichor spouted, covering her face and chest. The tentacle spasmed, hurling her through the air onto the catwalk on the far side of the atrium.
Holding his SIG-Sauer in both hands, and none too steadily for all of that, Ryan backed cautiously away from the rail. Another pair of tentacles plucked another howling Chichimec from the far side.
Ryan looked around quickly, trying to take stock of the tactical situation. It was, basically, battle over—at least, on this side of the well. Krysty stood with her back to the wall. Her sling was gone. Her left hand was splayed on the plaster as if for support, the right held her .38 warily ready. J.B. stood near her, prudently far back from the rail, Uzi ready and aimed out across the well in case either the monster or the raiders decided to take any further interest in the companions. Fortunately they seemed to be amusing one another more than sufficiently.
Doc and Jak were helping to disentangle Don Tenorio, drenched in blood from crown to knees but apparently unharmed, out from what remained of his two captors. Their bare backs looked like hamburger. He still clutched his green-steel Witness, whose slide was locked back on an empty mag. Ryan nodded approvingly. The baron or alcade or whatever he was might have been a scholar instead of a fighter, but when the caps were popping he’d given a game account of himself.
Ryan moved to Krysty’s side, slid an arm around her trim waist. She looked up at him. Her face was greenish pale.
“I guess Mildred was right after all, lover,” she said. “This was a bit too much exercise for me.”
She slumped against him.
“YOU AND YOUR COMPANIONS saved my life today,” Don Tenorio said. He held a goblet of salvaged brandy in his hand as he stood on the terrace of his headquarters gazing south across the lake to where
the smokies bled glowing molten stone. The sun had set. The sky behind the volcanoes was ashy-mauve. Overhead, the deep purple was pierced with stars.
Ryan sipped at his own goblet. It wasn’t the first time he had tasted such high-quality predark liquor. He was a baron’s son, after all. Still, he had to admit these scavvies did well for themselves.
The red tiles of the floor shifted beneath his feet. The corners of his mouth tightened. He wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with earth tremors, either, but these were so frequent it began to gnaw at a man’s nerves. He started to wonder if each little shake was all, or whether it was just the tune-up for a mighty blow.
“You did a pretty fair job saving yourself,” Ryan said.
Tenorio turned back, favoring his guest with a smile’s ghost. “Let us agree that you and your companions helped to keep me alive.”
Ryan shrugged.
After they had dined together, the alcade had asked if he might speak to Ryan privately on the terrace. Ryan had agreed, but reluctantly. By mutual consent, he led the group. If he gave orders, the others followed them. But they were a team, a family. He wouldn’t, except under emergency conditions, take any decision affecting the group without consulting them. And he disliked anything that even smacked of dealing behind the others’ backs, of cutting them out of the loop.
But, provisionally at least, he trusted Tenorio. And just listening to their host speak his piece wouldn’t chill anyone.
“It was already my pleasure, that you should be my guests so long as you pleased. It was and is my hope we might be able to establish some kind of trade relations with the north, although it will be a good many years before such becomes practicable. If ever. But now I owe you a mighty debt of gratitude.”
He sighed and set the goblet down on a table next to the half-full decanter of salvaged cut-crystal. “Despite these things, there is a favor I am compelled to beg of you.”
Ryan set his own goblet down. “Within reason, you got it.”
“You may or may not find my request reasonable. I want to ask you to act as my emissary to Don Hector.”
Ryan regarded the smaller man a moment. Immaculately turned out in a collarless cotton shirt and light blazer, Don Tenorio bore no resemblance to the bloodstained apparition that had helped him support an unsteady Krysty on their rapid retreat from the ambush site in the derelict building.
“I’m not sure what kind of a reception we could expect from your neighbors, Don Tenorio,” Ryan said. “They weren’t too friendly to us the first time our paths crossed. And today I don’t think we helped their cause much, spoiling their attempt to snatch you and laying waste to a squad of their commandos.”
The raiding party had been dressed and armed as Chichimecs. But they had all been human, and while none was fat, they had all been visibly better fed than the half-starved marauders who had besieged Ryan and his friends in the mechanic’s garage in the abandoned ville. The final proof had been the scavvie woman who had first lured them into the trap and then fought the unknown mutie monster’s tentacles not with panic but with tigerish ferocity. Tenorio knew her as Felicidad Mendoza, daughter of Don Hector’s sec boss.
“I still can’t quite understand that play of theirs,” Ryan said. “Mebbe they could have passed as a group of Chichimec raiders who had slipped in. And then they send in somebody as distinctive-looking as that woman—somebody known to you and your sec people. Pretty much seems to undo the whole purpose of a ruse.”
Don Tenorio shrugged. “There may have been aspects to their plan that remain hidden from us.”
A score of Tenorio’s own sec people, led by Five Ax, had gone into the building after Tenorio and Ryan’s party had escaped. They had taken no prisoners; they’d found no one alive inside. They had recovered the body of the wiry bodyguard, neck broken by the buttstroke from his own rifle, and ten fake Chichimec bodies. None was that of Felicidad Mendoza. They had dumped a few pounds of dynamite wired up with underwater fuses into the atrium in hopes of dealing with whatever was living down there. How successful that had been nobody knew; no mutant chunks had floated to the surface after the depth-bombing and none of them had felt like diving in for a closer look.
Ryan didn’t blame them.
They hadn’t, however, left in a hurry. The Jaguar Knights even recovered six or seven of Jak’s throwing knives from dead raiders. It was mostly a matter of convenience, since Jak could file the things from suitable bits of scrap metal in a surprisingly short time. But he had been pleased, since you really couldn’t have too many of the weps. Ryan had been surprised they had bothered. But the scavvies seemed to have it as a point of pride—pundonor, they called it in Mex-talk—that once they were inside a building nothing would drive them out short of imminent collapse.
“Also,” Don Tenorio said, “Señorita Mendoza, while a fierce fighter and utterly without fear—as we ourselves witnessed today—has also a reputation for being…How do you say? Somewhat precipitous. ‘Rash’ perhaps is the word.”
“It’ll do.”
“Under Don Hector the only honor and status to be gained by women is won by bearing children. Despite that, and despite the iron discipline Hector clamps upon his people, there seems to be no controlling Felicidad. Some even say she, even more than the gross beast who is her father, is the author of the terror by which Don Hector increasingly rules his folk.”
“You make the prospect of a visit seem mighty attractive, Don Tenorio.”
“I am sorry. I must speak candidly, my friend. Please believe me when I tell you that I believe the risk to you in serving as my representatives would be slight. Don Hector does live by a code of honor. And he has always respected flags of truce in the past, even after relations between us began…to grow difficult.”
“Why send us, then, instead of some of your own people?”
Don Tenorio frowned thoughtfully, fingered his chin, went to gaze again at the volcanoes. The sky was black now, but for a blue band behind the mountains to the west.
“To make a fresh start, I suppose. To try to reopen meaningful communications. We have never been truly friendly, his people and mine, since he began to consolidate the villages of the valley. With the coming of the Chichimecs down from the north, he has grown insistent that all the valley should be united under his rule. He has subjugated independent villages. He has even suggested that he might consider himself compelled to subjugate us, as well. This we would resist.
“We do not emphasize warrior skills as he does. Despite the fact that my personal guards are highly trained, and enjoy styling themselves Jaguar Knights in response to Hector’s corps of Eagle Knights, my security forces under the good Colonel Solano are small indeed. But most of my people, as you are aware, go armed. And the city would be a hard place to take from us by force. In truth, I don’t think Hector could do it, for all his peasant conscripts and sec men and even his Eagle Knight elite.”
As he spoke, he seemed to wander, his voice growing quiet. He shook himself and turned back to Ryan.
“Any conflict between us can only strengthen the hand of the destroyers from the north. My people will never accept Hector’s methods, much less his rule. Why does he have to reign over us? We would cooperate in any way. We could to fight off the invaders. It makes no sense—”
He shook himself again, as if to break the spasm of a futile debate Ryan sensed he had held with himself many times before. “I do not expect you to plead our case to Don Hector. What I want is for you to see if you can get him to talk with us—with me, again.”
The volcanoes rumbled like far-off thunder. Out onto the terrace came Colonel Solano himself, Don Tenorio’s own sec chief. He was a tall, lean man with a neat mustache and sharply creased khaki clothes that, while not actually a uniform, looked quite a bit like one. With a brisk, professionally neutral nod to Ryan, he went to the alcade and bent to speak quietly in his ear.
“It seems a new element has arisen,” the baron said as the colonel quickly left. “Don Hector has sent hi
s own emissary across the causeway, an Eagle Knight under a flag of truce. He has brought an invitation, with a guarantee of safe passage, for you and your companions to visit Hector in his current headquarters on Chapúltepec.”
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
“Don Tenorio and his people have served an invaluable function,” the tall, strapping man said in a rich baritone voice. “Yet they cannot be permitted to continue obstructing amid growing crisis.”
“And how exactly are they obstructing, if you don’t mind my asking, Don Hector?” Mildred asked.
It was a warm morning, not really hot, as was frequently the case in the valley. Though the sun was halfway up the sky, the earth and air still smelled of the rain that had fallen the latter half of the night. Fresh. Clean rain, Ryan thought. No chem taint.
He looked to Krysty, who stood near him, arms folded, face shaded by her hat. She smiled.
A man could get used to that. Clean earth, clean air, clean water. A man—and his mate—might be able to settle here. Get some kind of life going.
He almost laughed out loud at his own fanciful nature. Allowing himself to wander into such spun-sugar wishfulness—here in the midst of what might or might not be an enemy camp, with a horde of enemies, human and mutie, just over the northern horizon and bearing down. Mildred was right. The strain of constant road, constant danger, was grinding on them. The bearings in his mind were getting worn.
Out on the beat-down field in front of and below them, thirty nearly naked young men performed calisthenics, practiced combat, unarmed or with old-time weapons, or unarmed defense against melee weapons. They all looked, near as may be, like the companions’ host: tall, even for men from the north where the travelers hailed from, copper-skinned, muscular, with long coarse hair the color of spun anthracite. Not clones, but almost might as well have been.
A trio of young men in the fanciful headdresses and the funny-looking partial armor the companions had seen before stalked among them. They were apparently officers or cadre. One of them, Ryan was pretty sure, was Two Arrow, who had led the patrol that had tried to capture them in the sacked ville. He kept flicking glances up at the top of the hill where his cacique and the visitors watched from. The glances didn’t seem overly friendly.
