ACrucible of Time

by neetha Napew

  Before they could even begin to draw breath, the blade was back, the needle point striking Fast Silver Hand just below the rib cage, driving upward and across, Doc giving his wrist the classic duellist's twist as he pulled the blade down and out.

  The young Apache's guts spilled to the grounds. The man had only time to take a staggering half step backward before the blade, swifter than a striking rattler, had lunged a second, mortal time.

  Bear Cub Running gasped at the sudden, shocking cold chill that spread through his lower body, burning like fire into his chest and lungs.

  "He has—" he said, but his throat filled with pounding arterial blood and he began to choke on it, aware of it frothing from his open mouth, dappling brightly down across his naked chest.

  Doc stepped back, panting as though he'd just run a swift quarter mile across a plowed field, watching the young men as they sank to their knees, like ruined marionettes, faces shocked, eyes protruding from red-rimmed sockets.

  "I am sorry, boys," he said, infinitely gentle. "I did not want it this way."

  There wasn't going to be any need for a second strike at either of them. The lines were down, and life was a handful of pumping, failing heartbeats.

  They fell simultaneously, Bear Cub Running rolling onto his back, sightless eyes staring up at the waving branches of the nearest sequoia, his hands clenched at his sides. His companion lay on his right, fingers moving slowly through the dirt, the nails snapping, his teeth grinding together for a few seconds before death closed everything down.

  "I am truly sorry, boys," Doc repeated.

  He was genuinely grief stricken, though his heart told him that he had done the right thing. It had so clearly been their lives or his. Doc stooped and wiped the blood-slick blade in the loose earth.

  THE HUNTING PARTY from Hopeville found the bodies less than half an hour later.

  "Neat killing for a sick old man," one of them said, examining the corpses.

  "That cane of his held a sword," Owsley said, spitting bitterly into the face of the nearest of the corpses. "Should have taken it away from the old bastard. Stupe of us!"

  "Think he did this on his own, Brother?"

  Owsley spun, nearly biting off the younger man's head in his anger. "Course! Think the Blessed Jesus Christ came down with a cross and a switchblade and gave the old stupe a hand? Bodies are still warm. Can't have been chilled more than an hour ago. Likely less."

  He spit again at the dead Apaches, then led the way at a fast trot along the path toward the still smoldering ruins of Mom's Place.

  RYAN SAT on the stoop of the cabin, his head thrown back, soaking in the morning sunshine, welcoming its warmth among the towering, dank trees. Behind him, Jak and Dean were sleeping on their beds. J.B. and Mildred were sitting in the matching chairs, on either side of the blackened fireplace, talking quietly. And Krysty was still lying unconscious, under a pair of striped blankets.

  In the past hour there had been some improvement in her condition, and her breathing was steadier.

  Mildred had been puzzled by the bleakness of her condition. "Not really like anything that I ever encountered before. Having to utilize the Gaia force has completely drained her resistance. But it's not just physical. Krysty almost seems to have lost the will to live."

  And there had been nothing to do for her, other than the usual methods of life support: keeping her turned so that she didn't suffer from sores, making sure that she drank some liquid by dabbing at her parched lips with a damp cloth of torn linen.

  Wolfe had looked in once, standing in the doorway of the cabin, silhouetted like an etched shadow. His good hand fondled the stump of his amputated arm, his dark eyes locked to the motionless body of the redheaded woman on the bed.

  "She is very beautiful, is Sister Wroth," he said so quietly that only Ryan heard him. "Such a shame that… It could, with Jesus' will, have been different" A small smile played on the cold lips. "But we have little choice in the road that we walk, Brother Cawdor. So little choice."

  "That's bullshit, Wolfe. We all have choice. All the time. You pick the road to walk, because that's the one you want to travel along."

  Wolfe shook his head and walked away, leaving the friends together.

  The community resumed its normal morning life, with cooking and washing going on, the mongrel dogs snapping at one another in the dust, the double-armed sec men patrolling, all of them on triple alert.

  And there was still no news of the escaped Doc Tanner.

  J.B. stood by the window, glancing down at his wrist chron. "My guess would have put them alongside him an hour or so back. Unless he's gone to earth and they missed him."

  "The old fool wouldn't have the sense to conceal himself," Mildred commented, her voice hiding her concern and the depths of her love for their friend. "Probably completely forgotten by now that he's supposed to be running and hiding." She shook her head. "God help him."

  THE SMELL OF KEROSENE and burned wood still hung in among the pines, overlaid with the sweet-sour scent of roasting meat. Doc tried to breathe in and out through his mouth to avoid inhaling it, knowing that he was now coming very close to his destination.

  The wind was rising, and the sky had grown dark in the past twenty minutes. Clouds swept in from over the Cific in the west, blackening like old pewter, banking with silvered edges, forming a solid mass that drowned out the cheerful sunlight, killing all of the shadows.

  Doc shuddered, turned up his collar and looked back behind him along a section of the winding trail that ran straight for a quarter mile or so. There was no sign of the pursuit that he knew would inexorably be coming after him. A coughing fit hit him, making him double over, hawking spittle on the side of the path. He noticed that it was still flecked with bright crimson blood from the straining.

  As Doc stood, fighting for breath, he suddenly saw a strange apparition. A large white Persian cat padded along the roadway toward him, emerging from the undergrowth. What was odd was that it wore a neat red silken ribbon around its fluffy throat, decorated with a tiny pair of silver bells that tinkled softly as it closed in on the old man.

  "Hello, puss." He knew he should be moving, though it had momentarily slipped his mind quite why. He had to be somewhere for some reason or other. But the cat was singularly beautiful, reminding him of a kitten that he and Emily had once owned.

  What had its name been?

  "Ozymandias," he said, smiling broadly, showing the animal his set of excellent teeth. For a moment it hesitated, then walked right up to him, rubbing its arched back against the stained knee boots.

  He stooped and stroked the Persian, feeling oddly pleased as it purred and pushed harder against him, its golden eyes closing in delight.

  "You're a beauty, you are, indeed, Ozymandias," he said, totally forgetting that he was a man on the run. "A truly fine fellow!"

  The woman's voice startled him and made him jump. "He is a she, and her name is Lucretia. And I wonder what your name is, my fine fellow?"

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Owsley was breathing hard, like a hound dog on a hot trail, urging his companions to a fast run through the forest.

  "Come on! Got to track down the old fucker, quick as we can. Get back with him."

  "Brother Wolfe said dead or alive," one of the sec men panted. "Dead be easier."

  "Less sport."

  Another of them, trailing, laughed wheezily. "Could have some good sport with the redhead bitch."

  They were very close to the ruins of the abandoned eatery, near to where a narrow side trail forked sharply to the left up the hillside, meandering off among some particularly tall trees.

  "Hold on here." Owsley doubled over, leaning against the bole of a massive, fire-scarred sequoia. Sweat ran down his chest, darkening his shirt. His face was flushed, heightening his poor complexion.

  "Must be close, Jim," said the youngest of the men in the sec patrol. "Don't want to lose him now."

  "My guess is that he'll likely be holed up i
n the burned-out buildings," another man suggested.

  Owsley coughed and spit in the rotting pine needles. "Don't want to risk overrunning him. Know what his boot heels look like. Brother Waits?"

  "Yeah?"

  "See that dark patch ahead of us? Looks like there's some seepage, clear across the track. Go check that the old bastard's still heading that way."

  The sec man, as skinny as a picket fence, with dreadful sores clustered around his toothless mouth, nodded. He crossed himself and pattered quickly off, pausing and stooping, straightening, then looking again.

  "Well?" Owsley yelled. "Trail there?"

  "Nope."

  "No?"

  "There's no sign."

  They all went and looked, ranging round, making sure that their prey hadn't skirted around the damp patch of earth, among the bordering woods. But there was no sign at all of the distinctive marks of the old man's worn boots.

  "Think he's backtracked on us? Heading toward Hopeville behind us?" one of the men asked, angrily fingering the butt of his revolver.

  Owsley could barely contain his anger. "Only other place he could have gone is up the spur. That madwoman with all the cats lives up yonder. Could be he's gone there."

  But the side trail was hard and stony, not carrying any tracking marks. A six-year-old Mescalero child could have followed Doc, but it was beyond the ability of any of the Children of the Rock.

  "WHAT'S THAT?" the toothless man said. "Sounds like a steam engine."

  "Sounds like it's underground, close by." Owsley steadied himself against the tree. "Dirt's shaking like—"

  "Earthquake," the youngest sec man said in a surprisingly calm, conversational tone of voice, as if he were commenting that the coffee was brewed.

  "What's that?" Jak said, leaping agilely from his bed, looking around, his ruby eyes wide-open.

  J.B. moved quickly to the doorway. "Feels like a shaker on the way."

  A row of old predark bottles on a shelf began to rattle and jingle, and dust fell from between the hand-hewed rafters of the roof.

  On her bed Krysty stirred in her blackness and suddenly opened her eyes.

  "Hey, lover," Ryan said. "Might be a good idea to move out of here."

  "WHAT IN THE NAME of perdition is that roaring noise?" Doc asked.

  "My loved ones have been restless for days. I should have known they sensed something in the air."

  Maya Tennant sat in her rocking chair, unperturbed by the quake that shook the land all around her trim little cabin. Her hands were folded in her lap and supported a brace of tabby kittens, which were just a couple of her forty-seven feline companions.

  "You get many tremblers up here, ma'am?" Doc asked, sitting on the stoop, his knees drawn up uncomfortably close to his bony chin.

  She put her head to one side. "I've lived here for…let me see now. Twenty-seven years since my dear husband, Albert, passed away. And we shared twenty excellent years together. So, close on fifty years since I came hear as a teenage gal. In all that time I can count the bad quakes on the fingers of both hands. Perhaps as many as twenty."

  "Is this a bad one?"

  The roaring noise had risen to a howling crescendo and was now beginning to fade away. The trees around the hut were stopping their quivering, and the dust was settling once more. And the cats were becoming quiet again.

  Maya smiled gently. "If I may say so, Doc, the things that we perceive when we're younger don't always look the same when we grow a little older. If you take my meaning."

  "Indeed I do, ma'am, indeed I do."

  She stared out into the wilderness around, and Doc stared at her.

  By her own admission Maya had to be closing in around seventy. But she was a remarkably handsome woman. Tall and slender, she moved with the easy grace of someone half her admitted age. She had dropped a kerchief and stooped to pick it up, as limber as a young girl. Her hair was as fine and white as Jak's, tied back in a neat roll at her nape.

  Maya was wearing a midcalf-length skirt of patched denim, with a dark blue blouse with long sleeves. Her feet were cased in a fine pair of handmade sandals with long thongs that tied just below her knees.

  She carried no weapon, but Doc had noticed there was a small silver whistle on a red ribbon around her throat. Seeing him looking at it, she smiled.

  "My way of passing messages along to my family," she said. "They can hear me calling them a good couple of miles away on a still day."

  The kittens on her lap began to play-fight, cuffing each other with their tiny velvet paws.

  Doc laughed with sheer delight, the fact of his pursuers almost totally gone from his wavery memory.

  "Now, Romulus, stop trying to bully little Remus," Maya said, like an indulgent mother. "Doc, you said about there being some of those crazies from the Children of the Rock coming this way after you."

  "By the Three Kennedys! I had nearly—"

  "The cats will carry warning if there's strangers around. Just tell me a little of what's been going down, so I can decide on how to play the cards." She carried on rocking. "Sounds like the quake's passed on. Only thing is…" She hesitated a moment.

  "What, ma'am?"

  "Way the felines are still skittish, I have an uneasy feeling that we've just experienced something of a preshock. Could be a much bigger one lurking just around the next corner. Best be ready for that and all."

  Josiah Steele came by a few minutes later, to make sure they were all safe after the earthquake.

  "Young Penny Boot broke a wrist when a cupboard came off the wall on top of her. Not serious."

  "We're fine. Don't know how Doc got along, out in the woods on his lonesome."

  The sec man shook his head. "I have to reckon that you could be hearing some bad news in the next two or three hours. Once that coldheart Owsley and his gang get back to the ville. They won't likely be taking prisoners."

  "Is Wolfe planning to chill us all?" J.B. asked, sitting on one of the beds, holding Mildred's hand.

  For a long moment Steele didn't reply to the question, then he cleared his throat, looking all around him. "Not for me to try and guess."

  "But if you were a gambling man," the Armorer said, "then you wouldn't give good odds on survival."

  Steele stared at him, stone-faced. "No odds I could offer you at all."

  Suddenly J.B.'s usual icy control snapped, and he jumped off the bed, coming right at the sec man. "You stinking bastard! I'll rip your lungs out!"

  Steele hastily drew his blaster and jammed it into the advancing man's stomach. "Hey, just back off," he shouted, his voice thin and high and frightened.

  Ryan quickly came between them, brushing aside the Hawes Montana Marshal .45. "No need for this," he said quietly. He placed a hand on his old friend's shoulder, looking him in the eyes, unable to see the true expression behind the glittering lenses of the spectacles.

  "All right. Dark night! But I hate…" He turned away, ignoring the threatening blaster.

  Ryan also turned away, but his eye had been caught by something glittering brightly on the lapel of J.B.'s coat. The little rad counter was a clear and unarguable red. Not orange. Not reddish orange.

  Full red.

  THE WIND that had dropped, oddly, during the quake, was suddenly rising again, setting up with a real menace, shaking some of the largest branches on the huge pines all around Maya Tennant's little cottage.

  "Could be in for some darned unpleasant weather," the woman said, one hand absently stroking the kittens.

  "Hold up the pursuers, mayhap. Indeed, I have a scintilla of hope that the quake might have deterred them from chasing me any farther."

  "Not if it's those Children of the Rock, Doc. All the years I've been here, they've been sniffing around and causing trouble. Kidnapping little ones from the Mescalero who arrived here a few years back. Nothing but anguish. They leave me alone, though that miserable one-armed son of a bitch, Joshua Wolfe, tried to have me burned as a witch about three winters ago. Failed. I went up to t
heir poverty-hill ville and defended meself against their charges. Challenged them to burn or hang me."

  Maya gave a throaty laugh. "Course he backed off."

  Doc leaned back, blinking as the wind blew dust into his pale eyes. "You think it likely that the villains will attempt to follow me?"

  "Guess so, Doc." She stood suddenly, brushing the little tabbies from her skirts. She stared across the small kitchen garden, with its neatly tilled rows of vegetables. Coming toward them was a very large ginger cat, stalking between the cabbages, tail held high like a bright orange beacon.

  "Here comes Mehitabel," Maya said. "Way she's moving tells me that we're about to have us some company. Best go get hid where I showed you, Doc."

  KRYSTY WAS SITTING UP sipping at a bowl of oatmeal with some wild honey stirred into it. She was still very fragile, but the draining effect of using the Gaia power to save her life was gradually wearing off.

  She had sat and listened while Ryan took her quickly through everything that had happened since she became unconscious, explaining why it became necessary for the ailing Doc to flee from Hopeville.

  "Couldn't you have tried…tried to get at the weapons? Mebbe it would have been easier. Safer?"

  Ryan had argued against that idea, pointing out that Wolfe only needed a feather of an excuse to set in the balance to justify murdering them all. And the odds were way too long against them. It was just a question of waiting a while longer.

  Now the wind was rising, making the flames of the big central fire tear sideways in streaks of red and orange, rattling a loose shingle on the roof.

  J.B., as taciturn as ever, stood and peered out through the dirt-smeared window. "Some folks putting up storm shutters," he observed.

  Dean was on his bed. "Cover for escape?"

  Ryan nodded. "Possibly. Need to be a sight worse than this. Now, if there was to be another shaker, then it might give us a chance."

  OWSLEY LED his sweating men up the narrow side trail. To his frustration they hadn't been able to find any definite tracks of the old man, but he felt confident that they had trailed him down to the cottage of the mad old cat woman.