Teal clapped his hands together. "I think I heard the dinner bell! Ladies and gentlemen, let's barbecue!"
Blade moved forward then, thoughts clicking. He paired with Lady. "Nice work," he said.
"You, too. I didn't know you could stop a full grown wolfrat in his tracks like that."
"Neither did I." He patted her waistband. "I hope you washed your hands."
She gave him a smile. "I'll let you lick my fingers clean."
"I knew it," he bantered. "You're still mad at me about the nester.''
The joy left her face. "Yes," she said quietly. She did not speak another word as they shared a warm, damp towel and were seated together at the long dining table.
Mosquito nets had been hung, big black spidery webbed nets to protect the diners. There were four massive tables and a scattering of small ones on the side lawn. The smoke from the pit barbecue hugged the ground like evening fog and even Lady's ire could not shake Thomas' appetite. It had been too long since breakfast.
Thomas looked up to see Art Bartholomew's warty face beaming across the table at him. "Sir Thomas! It's been a while."
"Not long enough," Blade responded.
Governor Irlene had accompanied Art to the table. She leaned forward on one elegant elbow awaiting the platter of meats which was being passed down and now looked in astonishment at Thomas. "You can't mean that."
The expression in the man's gray eyes flickered. "No doubt he does. We'd all like to put the massacre far behind us. I believe that unfortunate wedding is the last time Thomas and I met."
"You believe correctly."
If Art had taken offense, he did not show it. He had other interests he wished to pursue. "That trail led you to the College Vaults."
He knew well that it did. The discovery of the fabled underground society had been the talk of the Seven Counties for months. Thomas retrieved the meat platter as it was passed to him and held it for both Irlene and Lady to make their selections.
"The man who ran it, the dean, I think he called himself—do you think he was human?"
"Human," Art said, but what he meant was human, old human, pure human. Thomas watched as Lady picked out several choice cuts for him and then passed the platter down the table. Art Bartholomew's intense gaze had never left his face.
"I think," Thomas answered slowly, "he might have been. They kept their society closed. Even the eleven year plague seemed to affect them little."
"And he took the whole community with him," Art said. "All those people, out of spite."
"Yes." Blade did not elaborate. After the explosion, there had been a few prisoners, people Denethan's troops had absorbed quickly. The Mojave mutant community needed fresh blood more than the Seven Counties. Blade had let them go. His whole definition of humanity had been redefined by example of the dean, anyway. He saw in Art's face now an echo of past feelings.
Boyd, an elbow down from Lady, busy buttering an ear from the last of the corn harvest, said, "The eleven year plague passed us by entirely. What luck did you have down here?"
"Well enough," Lady said, smoothing her napkin over her lap. "We only had one unwanted pregnancy. We're letting that one run its course. Some mutations are favorable."
Her voice and unspoken accusation fell into Art Bartholomew's silence. The genetic engineering that scarred all their bloodlines was especially prey to the wild virus that cycled through their communities approximately every eleven years. It altered their aberrant DNA even more—wildly unpredictable and unwanted. Men and women affected chose sterility rather than pass on those aberrations. Plague babies were commonly abominations and were killed rather than suffer life. Lady had always been against that. "Life was life," she said. Who were they to judge its quality?
Again, Art chose to reinterpret the obvious. "Your county is indeed fortunate. We, too, got off lightly. Perhaps the virus is losing strength or perhaps we're adapting against it."
"That would be good news," Irlene said. She passed down the squat clay bowl of barbecue sauce. Its mustard and honey aroma along with other flavorings in the tomato blend perfumed the air. "Only one, Lady? Really?"
"Yes. We have hopes the plague is done this cycle."
"Can I make an announcement to that effect?"
Lady Nolan smiled brilliantly. "Ah," she said to Irlene. "Politics raises its ugly head."
The governor had the grace to blush. Lady added, "It would be premature. Perhaps when the candidates are promoted, we can make a statement."
Art cut his brisket slices neatly. He speared a chunk and looked up at Thomas. "If the plague appears to be leaving us, perhaps now is a good time to schedule a salvage run to the Vaults. Surely the explosion couldn't have destroyed everything."
Though the other diners had been engaged in lively conversations of their own, this drew their notice. Thomas felt the pressure of their attention. This is what they had come to, so hungry for any crumb left behind no matter how corrupt. And yet, he'd known that some day he'd be asked to go back to the College Vaults. He had unfinished business there. But not yet. He wasn't ready yet. He and Lady had nearly died there, not once, but twice.
"No," he said. "Not everything, but I think the timing for such an expedition should be considered. Those foothills can be treacherous in rainy season. Maybe next spring, after elections."
Art's face never changed as he swallowed the whole chunk of meat on his fork. Then he speared a second bite and that one he chewed. "But you agree an expedition is called for?"
"Yes."
A victory was a victory, no matter how small. Bartholomew relaxed. He never saw the next blow coming.
"I understand the nester I executed today came from your corner of the counties. How did the water situation get out of hand in the first place?''
"What do you mean?"
Thomas shrugged. He took a slice of freshly cooled bread and used it to butter his corn with. "I mean that nesters don't readily foul water. It sounds to me as though you have a range war threatening to blossom under your nose."
Bartholomew's position concerning nesters and water was well known. He'd threatened many times to cut them off despite the policy of the Seven Counties. "If they needed water," he bit off, "they'd scarcely be poisoning it."
The cattleman from Santa Barbara let out a laugh that was too loud. "Thomas, you've got a mind like a coyote, but the councilman has you there. If you've been hinting he's been too busy politicking to help run his county, you've got him. But damnitall, man, as you said yourself—even a nester knows better than to poison water. He deserved what he got."
"Oh, there's no doubt of that," Thomas said deliberately. "I Read the truth in him."
There was a sudden pallor to Art's warted expression. He sat back in his chair, sucking his teeth for bits of meat. He met Thomas' expression silently. Blade merely smiled and began to eat his corn. There was nothing like the implication of a Protector's powers to strike fear in an ordinary man.
Lady and Irlene took up the gap in conversation, comparing a new herbal compress for headaches. Comfrey was said to work wonders. Thomas ate in relative silence, his thoughts on Two-handed Delgado who was ramrod-ding Boyd's herd for him, and Boyd, and Art Bartholomew. No nester would readily poison the only water that was available to him. Unless it was already bad.
Your eyes, your truth.
"You haven't been listening to me," Lady said, placing her hand gently over his.
Thomas looked up suddenly. "No," he said. "I haven't." "I asked if you were headed back to Char—to the school after you finish the circuit.''
"They've requested my help in promoting the candidates, so I guess I'll have to."
Governor Irlene smiled. "No rest for the wicked, eh, Thomas?"
"It appears not." He stood. "I've been on the road since before dawn and I think, ladies and gentlemen, I shall call it a night. Judge and Mrs. Teal, the meal was excellent and so was the company.''
Judge Teal gazed at him somberly. There was a hint of disappointment i
n his nod. Thomas pushed his chair out and left the diners, weaving his way through the other tables. He skirted the splash of blood which marked the wolfrat's fall.
The edginess which had driven him all night suddenly had a name to it, and that name was justice.
"Thomas!"
He stopped for Lady. She was slightly out of breath when she caught up with him on the pathway between the bathhouse and the stables.
"You'd have thought I asked you to marry me, the way you left the table."
"Did you? I wasn't listening."
"No, dammit." She brushed her ash brown hair from her temple. Both eyes, brown and blue, looked angry. "You're not going back to the school."
"No." How she knew, he wasn't sure, but he thought that even without a Protector's Intuition, she would have seen it in him.
"Where are you going and what are you going to do?"
"I'm taking the nester's body back to his clan. I think there's something going on that we don't know about, and we should."
She stood in a flicker of moonlight. She said nothing until he asked, "What do you think?"
It was then he saw the tears of regret in her eyes. "I think," she forced out, "that you're doing too little too late." With a swirl of skirt, she left him alone in the night.
Chapter 3
No one protested when he took the nester's body. The counties had mounted a guard, but people had been drifting in and out of the courtroom basement all afternoon and evening to view it and the guards seemed to think it was about time someone took the exhibit off their hands. The basement cold room had kept the corpse in fairly good condition, but Blade had no hope that it would stay that way on the journey. He swaddled it, putting fresh herbs and flowers in the wrappings to preserve it as well as he could. A travois would be the best method of transporting it, but his gelding wouldn't pull a cart and Blade thought he might object to dragging the travois. So he bought a burro, signed the credit chit in the judge's name, packed it, and left.
Nester clans stayed close to the ruins, where they scavenged a way of life, and were left alone by the survivors who'd cast them out. They camped in the foothills, above flooding, where it was easier to pool water safely during the rains. But the dry spring and summer months always drove them back to the Seven Counties for clean, reliable water. Even a nester wasn't in a hurry to die from tainted water.
As DWP, Charles Warden had made an art of water testing and purification. He could predict with uncanny accuracy which basins would be safe to reservoir in and which would not. That knowledge had died wth him because most of his papers and journals had been carried off as well. Though Thomas had gone all the way to the College Vaults in search of his papers as well as for vengeance, he'd failed. But the common sense Charlie'd taught—runoffs or basins located near old garbage dumps were never to be touched—would live on after him. He'd finally managed to convince the nesters as well, though the treaties between them were chancy at best and what one clan held to, the next would not.
Blade knew a few of the favored runs, but not all of them, and he'd not found a fetish or totem on the nester's body to tell him which clan he'd come from. So all he had was his brief conversation with Two-handed Delgado to point his way. From Delgado's comments, this nester had probably been a scrub rancher—he could haunt the ruins all the way from Claremont to the fringes of Orange County, or anywhere in the foothills and dry valleys between. A nester might herd goats or sheep or even chickens in the foothills.
Outside the city boundaries of what had once been Santana and Orange, he pointed his gelding's head east, toward the Prado Dam. The canyon run into Corona County and then the deserts beyond was a flood plain. Although it appeared the cities had been built the length of the pass and up into the foothills, there was little left now but broken foundations and few of those. The seasonal torrential rains of December and January had carried away the last traces of civilization. On the other hand, providing you had a fair weather eye, the plain made a good area to graze and run cattle.
Both Harley and the burro protested the lateness of the hour and the darkness of the path Blade took. Harley, named for the venerable motorcycle which could still be utilized if gasoline could be found and if it was in good enough repair, was a stubborn, short in the front, wide in the rear chestnut whose intelligence could sometimes be questioned. But he was indefatigable and even though he moved reluctantly out of the fringes of Orange County, the horse's umbrage was not based on tiredness.
Rather, it came from coyotes and wolfrats.
Blade saw the predators, too. With a rattle of tall grass and dried eucalyptus leaves, coyotes, moonlight catching an occasional flash of their dun or green eyes, slipped past them nearly unseen. He could hear their yips from the foothills and ledges above him. Sand and pebbles sifted down on Blade from time to time. Coyotes were circumspect hunters. He didn't fear them unless he had an injured animal and the smell of easy prey became too tempting. He figured they had winded the corpse he freighted, but the meat wasn't fresh and the human smell daunting. The burro flicked his shaggy ears back and forth, neat little black hooves clopping obediently behind Harley's ground-eating pace.
Blade took his rifle out of its sheath under his left knee and checked the chamber. He had a general vial in place, a bullet that would explode in a fire flash when shattered. It wasn't lethal, but startling. It would scare off most predators. He resheathed the rifle but didn't snug it all the way in. Harley pulled at the bit, protesting yet again their pilgrimage into the darkness.
Thomas stroked the gelding's neck. The horse calmed under his touch. He knew what he was doing.
This time.
He'd been fourteen the first time he'd ridden out into the night. He'd left behind his fate, he'd thought, and gone in search of a killer, a nester raider, who'd broken all treaties and cared nothing for the fragile balance of the Seven Counties. It wasn't his job to go for the man's bounty, but he'd taken it upon himself anyway. He'd only been known as Thomas then, for a Protector generally took his last name from his mentor. It was an easy, convenient way of identifying the training as well as the abilities of the Protector. Lady Nolan, for example, had the healing skills a Nolan was famed for. She could also TK, Fetch or Throw, and she could Project imagery fairly well.
When he was fourteen, Thomas had found all his abilities broken. He could never be a Protector as his mentor had been killed in an assault by the Mojave mutants. Thomas bore the blame for that death though Gillander had literally moved Time itself to save the Palos Verdes community and the offices of the DWP from Denethan's attack.
He'd driven the boy away, sent him for help, a spindly, vague, sometimes vain and silly old man who wore suspenders gleaned from In-City, their elasticity as spent as his own life. And though Thomas had gone and warned Charles and the troops of a night raid, he'd never forgiven himself for leaving Gillander to die. Neither, apparently, had the old man. He haunted Thomas from time to time.
Thomas had not been able to return to study under another tutor. The powers of ESP had forsaken him, blocked by trauma, and would not open up no matter how coaxed. All because one old man had taught him a tremendous amount about life, how fragile and precious it was, and not one whit about how to kill to protect it. Not how to protect life from raiders like Denethan and the nester he tracked. In revolt, Thomas turned in another direction. The man he rode out to find and bring back to county justice had known, it was said, a hundred ways to kill a man.
The first and quickest way, Thomas found out, was to take him In-City. The treachery of the ruins and its predators he learned to avoid the hard way. He found the Butcher a thorough teacher—every time Thomas avoided a trap, he learned a lesson. The Butcher taught him not only the many ways a man could be killed, but also about the nesters and their clans. He learned how they staked their territories and marked them with fetishes, how they hunted and thought . . . and hated.
In the end, he'd caught the nester and avoided being contaminated by In-City, and h
e'd learned how to protect the fragility of life Gillander had taught him to love. He returned to the Seven Counties, took his last name from his weapon of preference, a blade, and became Charles Warden's executioner. His Intuition bled back into him slowly until he also became a full-fledged Protector, no longer denied his destiny.
He was tied to the ruins now, as marked by them and Butcher as by the scar that quirked his brow. But the creature which had done that was another story altogether.
Thomas reined to a halt now. He stroked his brow in remembrance as he looked over the broken road sketchily illuminated by a three-quarter moon. Chasing after the Butcher had changed him irrevocably, more than anything he'd ever encountered in his life, even training as a
Protector. He'd gone back to the ruins time and time again, gleaning them, taking instruments with him that warned of the radiation and toxicity so that he took no more chances than necessary. It was a risky harvest, but never riskier than the night a beast had risen on two legs out of the dark, claws slashing across the camplire at him.
Wards laid down by the Protector had not swayed him nor had the fire. The claws that swiped across the corner of his eyebrow could have taken his head off at the neck if the creature had been so inclined.
It had vanished even as blood had filled the sight of his left eye. Shaking, he had sat down by the fire he'd so carefully constructed, and tried to staunch the flow. He'd been marked—marked as the creature's own—without warning or omen as to its meaning. He might have been a god or he might have been signed as prey. He still didn't know, nor had he ever seen a creature like that again. It resembled nothing in the realm of his experience, as used as he was to the results of genetic engineering and mutation.
Years later he'd been marked again, in the sea, but that debt he had paid, and though the teeth marks on his right wrist worried him from time to time, the dolphin goddess who'd scarred him demanded nothing of him. Those markings and those experiences had changed him forever into something he had not foreseen. The dolphin had been a mystical experience. He swam with her now and then when he returned to the coast. Her turquoise and silver beauty paced him above wave and below, for he was one of the few survivors left unashamed of his gills or their ability to take him where man was no longer meant to go. He would never forget the day Charlie had gone under the knife to have his gills cut out.
Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall Page 4
