by Dana Fredsti
The bounty hunters mounted up. Shanks tied their leash to his saddle horn. Blake noticed all three riding-lizards had saddles and panniers—not refurbished horse gear, but ones that appeared to be specially made and fitted. He thought about the time it would take to domesticate, and then outfit, such animals.
This place raised so very many questions…
With a gentle kick to its sides, Rockwell urged his mount forward and the party headed off. Beyond the thicket the land opened into a wide swath of prairielands that extended to the horizon. It was going to be a long walk.
“Rockwell, tell me something.”
“What might that be, Mr. Blake?”
“Where are we, and how far have we got to walk?”
The big man and Shanks broke into laughter.
“Look at that, now, you really don’t know, do you? You fellows are lost! What happened, the stork just up and drop you here?” Blake said nothing. Rockwell’s sharp eyes looked for an answer, but when none came, he replied, again with that mischievous kidding-or-serious glint in his gaze.
“Well, sir, I’ll tell you. As the crow flies, we are some two hundred sixty miles due east of the Garden of Eden itself.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It surely is, and if you head west by northwest just a little further than that, you’d come to Adam-ondi-Ahman, the very altar whereupon Adam and Eve made sacrifice unto the Lord, after their expulsion from paradise.”
It was Blake’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose this place goes by any other names?”
“Hell’s bells! Ain’t you just bound and determined to make me utter that god-cursed name out loud, aren’t you?” Rockwell spat. “Well, sir, afore the Lord let loose his righteous vengeance upon it, this here was Missouri.”
Blake nodded. Finally, he had at least a vague idea of where they were.
“And where are we going?”
“That-a-way.” Rockwell pointed east to the horizon. Cam and Harcourt’s eyes widened. They were just as baffled as Blake.
What the hell is that? he thought, staring at the silver arch off in the distance.
Something growled to their left, a low and guttural sound.
35
At first, mist from the volcanic pool obscured the half dozen shapes striding out from the pines. Great, shaggy, half-human figures, some armed with hooked spears. Black eye sockets in ursine faces. Monsters of nightmare walking in broad daylight.
Good lord! Nellie thought. Werewolves? Her mind reeled in disbelief. No, were-bears.
The women stared, transfixed with fear as the silent bear-warriors slowly fanned out around them. As they moved closer, however, she could see that they were just men—sturdy, thick-set and squarely-built, with prominent cheekbones and high foreheads. Four bowmen in bearskin hoods and capes, sporting bushy beards and dark, unruly long hair, with long knives in carved wooden scabbards tucked into their belts. Two younger ones, wearing dark blue headscarves in place of the hoods, carrying hooked spears.
Beneath the cowls, the bowmen’s tanned skin and unruly brown hair matched the bearskins they wore.
“Shamo yan!” their leader growled.
Nellie stiffened, swiping the tears away from her eyes, trading anguish for fierceness. Snatching up the arrow at her feet, she held it straight out in a challenge. Behind her, Hypatia grasped her arm.
“Stay away,” she growled, putting all the steel she could into each word. “I’ll not hesitate to put this straight through the eye of the first man-jack who dares lay so much as a little finger on either one of us.”
The bear-men neither changed their savage expressions nor replied. The points of their arrowheads gleamed bright and sharp. If any of the archers loosed an arrow from this distance, he would not miss. Wet, freezing, and naked, Nellie stared them down.
“Shamo isam,” one of the others said, sounding dubious. The leader cocked his head. Lowering his bow, he set it on the rocky ground, plucking the arrow free. Then he straightened up and held it out, mimicking Nellie’s stance.
Nellie didn’t take her eyes off him. His beard and hair were shot with silver, his eyes deeply set, under long and shaggy eyebrows. She realized with some surprise, that his eyes and hers were nearly the same shade of gray-green.
Abruptly he knelt and placed his arrow to the ground, point out.
“Irankarapte,” he said quietly. Nellie waited for her language implant to translate, but nothing was happening. Either it was malfunctioning, or this tongue wasn’t one of the one hundred and fifty in its repertoire. She could only stare, uncertain if this was an offer to parley or a new threat.
“Nep kusu e’pas wa e’ek ya?” he said gruffly.
“I can’t understand you,” she said, trying to keep her voice firm. He frowned.
“Ku’ye itak e’eraman?”
“Yaytupare,” one of the others cautioned. Without taking his eyes off of Nellie, the leader reached out behind him.
“Inaw,” he said. His fellow quickly lowered his own bow and pulled something out of a small woven knapsack, slapping it into the leader’s open hand. It was a small white wooden rod, no bigger than a ruler, one end carved with a luxuriant tuft of shaved curlicues, reminding Nellie of the silk on a head of corn.
The leader held the shaggy baton out in front of him. Fearing it was a scabbard for some hidden blade, Nellie kept her grip on the arrow as he cautiously stepped toward her.
“Stay back!” she snarled, but the man did not. Instead, he gently tapped at her arrow, almost as if blessing it.
“Ay ama yan,” he murmured softly. “Wen nupur, kaske a’kus eaykap.”
“Inaw wa Kamuy Renkayne,” the other men said as one. The leader continued to circle the two women slowly, almost leisurely, wielding the baton. He made no move to attack or touch them, and appeared unmoved by their nudity— though he seemed to be examining them closely, all the same. He seemed especially interested in their hair, eyes, the backs of their hands and forearms.
Finally, he brought his baton up slowly toward the back of Nellie’s neck.
“See here!” she bristled, ready to stab him, but he held up a hand, and then gently pushed back the slick strands of wet hair with his baton. The long spirals of wood shavings tickled as he inspected the back of her neck, as though expecting she might be hiding some sinister mark of witchcraft.
Gently, he did the same to Hypatia, who clung to Nellie’s free arm but allowed the indignity. His inspection concluded, he backed away and turned to their piles of clothes. After shaking the baton over them for a moment, he lifted one of the parkas, admiring it.
“Those belong to us,” Hypatia said with aristocratic command.
The bear-man held it up and turned to her.
“Tanpe niste wa pirka na,” he said. He dropped the parka and then slipped the baton into his belt, next to his long knife. Taking both hands, he pulled off his bearskin cloak, and hissed something to his second, who quickly doffed his own cloak as well. The two came over and held out the bearskins to the women.
“Are they trying to trade their coats for ours?” Hypatia wondered aloud.
“Ghost of a chance,” Nellie scoffed. “Keep your smelly old capotes to yourselves!” She shook her head angrily.
The men looked taken aback.
“Eani teyne,” the leader said. It sounded as if he was scolding them. “Somo méekot yan.” He pointed to them, and waved a hand all around. The second man pantomimed shivering from cold, and toweling off, and tried to hand over his cloak again. Somewhat abashed, the two women nodded their understanding. They reached out and snatched the bearskins. Nellie took her arrow and clenched it in her teeth as she dried herself with the thick pelt.
The two warriors stepped back while they toweled off and then hurriedly dressed again. Nellie was disconcerted that none of the men took their eyes off them as they did. It wasn’t that they were ogling them in a lustful manner, but more like she and Hypatia were prey animals that they did not wish to esca
pe.
Once dressed, she clutched the arrow tightly again.
As they handed back the bearskin cloaks, she noticed beautiful embroidery on the men’s headbands, coats, armguards, and boots. Graceful slender white lines in curves, swirls, and points, hems ringed with linked parentheses of thread forming little hedge-rows.
Who are these people? She had guessed they had landed in Yukon or Alaska now, but surely these weren’t Esquimaux or some northern Indian tribe—their faces weren’t dark enough, their hair too brown. Could they be some ancient tribal Europeans?
After this small kindness, would these rugged men let them go?
She wondered what Hypatia was thinking. If they did let them go, would she run away and leave Nellie to her own devices? Furtively, she glanced over to read any clues in her companion’s eyes, but Hypatia’s face was a mask. How could she have been so thoughtless and reckless? She was no… what was the word? She could barely stand to even think it.
A sapphist. A lesbian.
The leader interrupted her frantic, galloping thoughts.
“Paye’an,” he said firmly, waving his hand for them to come along. Nellie turned to Hypatia, who reached over and took her hand without a word.
36
“Saber-cat,” Feeds-the-Crows said, the only words he had uttered so far. He showed no more concern than pointing out an interesting rock. Harcourt turned and gasped at the sight of the hunched sabertooth stalking out from the grass, barely a stone’s throw away, its yellow eyes fixed on him.
“Oh, bloody hell.” Shanks, absently chewing on his thumbnail, snapped out of his woolgathering long enough to vent a curse.
“I see ’em,” Rockwell answered without alarm, nonchalantly pulling out a pistol. “Go on, git!” He fired a warning shot just over the beast’s head. It let out a loud, defiant snarl that showed off its foot-long canines, then turned and bounded away.
Other than that brief encounter, their party suffered no further difficulties as they trudged across open country. Every so often they came across a man-made artifact deposited by the Event—a truncated stretch of modern sidewalk, or a lone streetlight standing in an ocean of grass. Sometimes a sudden rise or drop in elevation hinted that they were crossing the subtle boundary to a new shard. Still, apart from the ruins and the occasional dried-up prehistoric swamp, virtually all the shards they crossed were prairielands, so there was little telling them apart, no matter how many years—or millennia— actually separated them.
Blake’s attention kept being drawn to the mysterious silver arch ahead. It was just over a low rise, perhaps a klick or two away and twenty, maybe twenty-five meters high. After walking that kilometer, however, it seemed no closer, and appeared to be considerably bigger, maybe even twice as tall as he’d first supposed.
With the afternoon sun falling, the prisoners and their captors laid eyes on the leaden waters of the Mississippi River, and took in their first full view of the arch. He was wrong, Blake realized, stunned at seeing it soaring so high above them, bigger than Big Ben—at least twice as tall, he guessed. Sunset made the steel gleam, like firelight on twin scimitars.
“Kammneves gwrug a’horn,” Cam murmured in reverent wonder. Sign-of-rain, of iron forged. “An iron rainbow.” He turned to Rockwell. “Did your gods raise it up? Did they entrap the rainbow inside it?”
The big man frowned at the young heathen’s ignorant blasphemy.
“No one knows who built it,” he declared. “Though surely some lost race of mighty men or angels constructed it out of steel, or better. There’s them that say there was once a way to get inside it, though that secret’s lost now.” He shrugged away the thought. “Well, we paid our respects.” He cocked his head to the north, toward a great stone fortress on the banks of the river.
“That’s where we’re headed.”
* * *
The aftermath of a battle greeted them at the gates to the fortress. From the looks of things, a hungry predator, some species of carnivorous dinosaur, had tried to tear into the gates to snack on the juicy little mammals inside, and had been repelled.
It lay on the ground, an ugly iron harpoon protruding from its skull as teams of butchers in blood-splattered aprons worked on the carcass, swiftly carving up tons of fresh meat while fending off opportunistic crows. To Blake’s eye, they appeared to be of varied ethnicities, dressed in a mix of styles ranging from early pioneer times to perhaps Harcourt’s era. The party’s arrival provoked no reaction from the butchers, completely occupied with the task at hand.
He was impressed by the ingenuity of the fortifications. The Event had taken away nearly all of the city, leaving behind roughly five or six city blocks square. From where they were standing it was clear that the boundary cut straight through the nearest block. What had once been multi-story tenement buildings now formed the outer wall, with the excess bricks and timbers cannibalized to fill in the gaps left by streets and alleys. Sentries armed with Tommy guns and rifles patrolled the wall alongside Civil War-era cannons, some converted to fearsome-looking harpoon guns.
Half of a stone bridge extended across the river before abruptly terminating. The half that remained had been turned into docks for a dozen small rivercraft and one large steamboat. Men were unloading cargo and tending to boats and fish traps.
Rockwell led his captives straight up to the gates and to a barred porthole set in the middle of one of the big iron doors. A metal plate slid open on the other side, and a guard peered out at them, eyes narrowed in suspicion. With a cursory glance at the new arrivals, he slammed it closed again. The heavy doors opened with a groan. Weathered and chipped lettering painted on nearby brick walls welcomed them to Laclede’s Landing.
The gatekeeper motioned them in with a jerk of his thumb. The man fit the very image of a Prohibition-era mobster. Built like a linebacker, unmistakably Italian, his slick black hair gleamed beneath a sharp fedora. He was dressed to kill in suit and tie, even brandishing a Tommy gun. Something, however, didn’t look quite right. It hit Blake a moment later.
The man’s suit and tie were made of buckskin, dyed black.
The newcomers passed through a short tunnel just long enough to box in any attacking troops. Murder holes dotted the surface above them and on both sides. No flaming oil or crossbow bolts assailed them, so they passed through the open inner gates without ceremony, and entered the fortress-city.
* * *
Inside the high walls, the lively sounds and smells of a crowded city filled the air. What had once been blocks of brick-and-cast-iron factories, warehouses, and rows of tenements now formed the infrastructure of a gangster’s paradise. The reptilian mounts padded down cobblestone streets lined with grogshops, gunsmiths, gambling dens, bars and brothels, and literal dens of thieves.
The stink of the place boasted a unique bouquet. Coal-fire smoke and the tang of industrial sweatshops blended with the fishy stink of the muddy riverfront, and open tavern doorways reeking of alcohol and spittoons. On the streets hung the smell of unwashed crowds and the droppings of horses and riding-lizards, of gunpowder and spilled blood.
Gutters ran with an unusually pungent stench. More pleasing aromas came from skillets of frying salt pork in the cook-house kitchens, warm bathwater and soap, the lures of perfumed women.
The cramped city bustled with commerce of every kind— mostly disreputable. Traders, fur trappers, and pimps made deals and hawked their wares. Amateur gamblers rolled the bones on corners while adventurers and con men prepared to hunt prey, and feral dogs and tiny dinosaurs the size of chickens ran wild in the alleys.
The intersection of two main streets had been turned into an improvised arena, wooden posts wrapped in barbed wire. Inside the crude ring, two bare-chested men were fighting with claw hammers, presumably to the death. The onlookers waved their bets, roaring with every blow. Further down the block, a smaller but well-heeled crowd gathered before a wooden stage, while a line of manacled men and women each waited for their turn to be auctioned off.
Ignoring the entertainments, Rockwell and his partners kept going until they reached the steps of a solid, imposing building and hitched up their mounts. A pair of intimidating bruisers dressed in snappy 1920s fashion stood guard out front, armed with Thompson submachine guns. The somber edifice boasted a line of tall brick archways and above those, two levels of high stone pillars supporting the topmost bay and a peaked roof. Engraved letters were carved into stone.
U.S. Post Office and Custom House
The inside was resplendent with marble flooring, crystal chandeliers, and Corinthian columns, along with high windows, and wide oak desks and tables. An impressive candle-lit lounge bar dominated one side of the lobby, staffed by a bevy of cocktail girls. Additional well-dressed, heavily armed gangster-types kept watch from every corner of the room. Four of them flanked a bespectacled clerk dressed in a smart waistcoat and sleeve garters sitting at the main desk.
“Not so fast.” A pair of guards stepped forward as they entered, one raising a hand to stop them. “Check yer mohaskas.” Rockwell and his men handed over their firearms. Feeds-the-Crows started to pull out his tomahawk, but the guard waved it off.
“The hatchet’s fine, Tonto. Just keep it stowed.”
Rockwell waited until the clerk waved him forward, and then approached the main desk. Shanks removed his hat respectfully as he and Feeds-the-Crows led the three prisoners up behind. The clerk eyeballed them.
“So what do you have for us today, Rockwell?”
“Three bounties for Boss Giannola, Mr. Alphonse. Caught them not two hours ago.”
“That right?” The clerk peered over his bifocals at the cargo. “These three got names?”
“Call themselves Blake, Cam, and Harcourt. The big one says he’s a sergeant. I figured ’em for some holdovers of Egan’s Rats.”
