Harvest nodded. “The Whitesnake bounty on him is fifty gold.”
Jack grinned. “It all spends, no matter what the source.”
“It does indeed. You want half.”
Jack Duncan shook his head. “I want to cut you in for half. I happen to know that Zethus is investigating the death of his master. I also happen to know that he’s been hitting information brokers, lately.”
Harvest sneered. “So? I could hit all the information brokers as easy as you. Why should I give you half?”
“Because I can direct him here.”
Harvest chewed that over ruminatively. “Why not take him yourself?”
“I don’t think so,” Duncan replied mildly. “He’s a prepared, powerful, paranoid sorcerer. He’s ready for anything I try.”
Harvest spread his hands. “Why do you think I’d do any better than you?”
“Because you have a Spirit Tap. You can cut him off from his bound spirits. I send him here, he’ll be over-extended. You take him out, we split the bounty.”
Harvest cocked his head. “What keeps me from betraying you?”
Duncan chuckled. “I’m recording all of this through a Bank of Hours notary. It’ll be a legal contract. Even you won’t risk breaking a notarized contract.”
Harvest nodded slowly. “All right, then. When can I expect him?”
“I’ll let you know more when I know more.” Duncan stood.
Harvest turned his attention inward. If Duncan were to die, the money would be uncontested, even by the Bank of Hours. If Duncan didn’t expose himself, well then, killing the sorcerer would be an easy twenty-five gold …
I pulled out of the memory and nodded to myself. Harvest had a certain low animal cunning and damned good reflexes, but he didn’t strike me as being the brightest bulb in the box. Jack Duncan had given Harvest no information about the clone, so he obviously still considered the double-cross on Harvest. He was probably holding it back as his ace in the hole.
I had a feeling that Jack had set Harvest up according to plan, then added a few refinements of his own. After all, Harvest had taken Jack’s word that the Bank of Hours was recording their conversation. It would be easy for Jack to later ruin Harvest’s reputation and collect the reward: even if it were apparent that Jack had duped him, no one wants to use a stupid bounty hunter any more than they want to use a duplicitous one. In fact, a little duplicity can count as a benefit in that business. If Jack had played his cards right, he might even have skimmed twenty-five gold from Harvest, then collected the full amount when the dust settled, leaving Harvest hanging to pay the indemnity on the full amount. Either way, the money had been more important to Jack Duncan than I thought. Evidently, I had a higher opinion of Duncan’s sense of honor than he did.
On the other hand, I hadn’t trusted him as much as he’d planned. Though he’d done a good job of betraying me, the fact that I had survived would prove to be a fatal error. Fatal for him. Or so I hoped.
I thought about collecting my stash of driller worm spores before continuing on to where Duncan would be waiting for news, but I would have had to rid my stolen body of the plethora of gadgets tucked over and under Harvest’s loose clothing. That might make Jack suspect the ruse too quickly. I couldn’t afford that risk. Besides, in that plethora of lethal devices I catalogued at least three devoted to electronic counter measures, after shuffling quickly through Harvest’s immediate memories.
As I entered the sweeping grasslands around the shuttle, I wondered if some passerby had recognized the clone as me. As I walked toward my rendezvous with my betrayer in the body of my killer, I visualized a massive battle over the dubious prize of my bogus corpse. I hoped it would happen that way. I wished the other side bad luck impartially, and general confusion to the enemy, whoever that might happen to be.
I spotted the storm first. A small whirlwind, complete with arcing lightning bolts, ran erratically across the rolling hills. In the distance I could see the shuttle, floating uncloaked over the grass. I eased my way to the top of a nearby hill, where I spotted the small figure of a man running before the fury of the miniature storm. I saw the glint of metal rising from several sites then tumbling away in the grass, caught in a net of intersecting lightning bolts, and mentally ticked Jack’s monitors off my list. My plan seemed to be streamlining itself with every passing moment. As I watched, the storm ceased its purposeful course and began to disperse. Its quarry shambled to a stop. He stood bent over with his hands braced against his thighs, gulping air.
A delighted grin spread across my stolen face. It looked to me as if the White Wolf held the shuttle and my body. Jack Duncan had underestimated the Legion, and by underestimating the Legion, he had underestimated me.
I pulled myself upright and strolled down to where Duncan stood. “Having some trouble, Jack?” I called down to him.
He whirled, saw me, and relaxed. “Harvest. I hope you have good news for me.”
I cocked my head. “Why, Jack? Are you having a bad day?”
“Don’t try to be funny, Harvest. It doesn’t suit you. Is the sorcerer dead?”
“Oh, I killed him, sure enough.” I stepped to within arm’s length of Duncan and stopped.
“Shit! Why is his Legion still guarding his body?”
I shrugged.
Duncan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you all right, Harvest? Did he do anything to you? Are you going to be straight for this? If you still have the Spirit Tap, we should be able to do this. I’m going to need your help to take command of my ship again …”
His voice trailed off as I tossed the crushed Spirit Tap to the ground at his feet. “Jack, I wouldn’t trust you with command of a rowboat in a storm sewer.”
He scrambled back, one hand darting toward the pistol on his belt, his eyes wide and full of fear. He had begun to suspect, I think, almost from the first. He had either wanted to be sure that Harvest’s body had become a vessel for my psyche, or he really hadn’t been able to believe that his plan had failed.
I’ll give Harvest one thing: the man had been a killing fool. His reflexes had become so hardwired that I didn’t even have the opportunity to think about it. Out came the pistols, then the hushed sound of the double report as they bucked in my stolen hands. Jack Duncan fell like an empty suit. He never fired a shot.
I remember Jack telling me once that before he’d taken to wandering the Roads, he had been the man responsible for taking down one of the most famous criminals of his time and place—a man named John Wesley Hardin. The fact that Jack had tracked him, located him, pointed him out to the law, and never came into direct contact with his target always struck me as the most interesting aspect of the tale.
I suppose I should have taken the hint from that. Jack Duncan had been just a little too smart and a little too slippery to ever be fully trusted.
I left that as my contribution to Jack Duncan’s epitaph, turned my back on his corpse, and walked steadily toward the shuttle. I came across a trail of broken machinery, fragments of the monitors Jack had used as his escort. They would have worked well enough as bodyguards against someone like Harvest, but they hadn’t a prayer against the White Wolf’s localized storm.
I saw another weather anomaly rising as I approached the shuttle. I stopped, cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, “It’s me, dammit! Wolf, stand down! At the least, come out here and check me out!”
The tiny whirlwind continued to build, looming over me, but it didn’t move any closer. With some difficulty, fighting the same reflexes of the conjoined psyche that had let me use Harvest’s body as easily as I had, I extended my senses, and saw the Bright Angel and the White Wolf.
I sagged in relief. “Angel. When contact with the Legion vanished, I thought the Spirit Tap had been too much.”
“It almost was too much,” she responded mildly. “If we hadn’t been stretched out along the contact line, and if the White Rose hadn’t pulled me in, I don’t know that I would have made it back so easily.”
<
br /> The White Wolf’s tongue lolled insouciantly. “You don’t look like you’re feeling yourself, today.”
“Funny.” I weighed them with my eyes. “How’s my body doing?”
“Ugly as ever,” the White Wolf said cheerfully. “Rose has everything in hand. We were a bit curious, though. With the Spirit Tap, we didn’t know how you had fared. We only knew that you hadn’t died, for we were still bound.”
“When did Jack tip his hand?”
Before me, the whirlwind diminished and collapsed in upon itself as the White Wolf let his controlled power bleed away. Harvest’s hair stood erect on his/my forearms and bristled on his/my scalp with the static electricity overflow from the collapsing storm. Bright Angel shook her head. “He didn’t. As soon as Harvest made his move and I escaped, the others knew that Jack had betrayed you. The White Wolf struck before Jack did.”
“Good.” I said it more forcefully than I had intended. Dying had put me on edge.
I stepped past them and into the shuttle. My body remained as I had left it, sitting in the copilot’s seat. I let Harvest’s shadow slide across my body’s shoulder and made the jump back to my old mortal shell. Harvest’s body, without me to maintain it, collapsed to the floor of the shuttle. The hunger of the Fae Shadow Hound, though sated, moved with me from body to body. I opened my eyes, settled back into the feel of my native flesh with a sigh of relief, and unstrapped from the seat.
“What next, oh Master?” the White Wolf inquired with mock solicitude.
I stooped and stripped a couple of handy items from Harvest’s corpse. It still breathed, the heart still beat, the autonomous nervous system had not yet wound to a close, but no one was home, or would ever be returning home. I had consumed him, after all. All that had been Edward Harvest had become my own. The body he’d left behind qualified as a corpse. It simply hadn’t yet figured out how to stop living. “If the enemy’s not thoroughly confused by this time, nothing will confuse them. While they’re in disarray, I think it’s time to investigate Corvinus’s research.”
I ambled out through the grassland, past Duncan’s corpse, and retrieved my stash of driller worm spores. I turned my back on that place and the dead men who slept in it. I set my feet on a Way that would take me to the Shepherd of the Trees. I needed the heart of stone for the next step. With that fragment to guide me, I could search for a Way that would take me as far as I needed to go.
CHAPTER XXII
I DELIBERATELY chose Ways where the traffic would be anywhere between light and nonexistent—preferably nonexistent. So when I crossed paths with a traveler, and a familiar traveler at that, I felt some measure of surprise and concern. I kept my distance. I didn’t want the driller worms to awaken prematurely, hungry for any gadgets Vayne might have concealed.
He had stopped in the Road to wait for me. He did not smile. “Zethus. I am pleased to see that reports of your death were premature.”
“Knight Commander Vayne. What brings you out this way?”
“I had thought to have a conversation with a bounty hunter. Jack Duncan. I heard that he might have been involved in your death.”
I smiled. “He was. He made some bad decisions. He won’t have the opportunity to make them again.”
Anthony Vayne cocked his head. “Ruthless of you, Zethus. You’re changing.”
“Not really. I’m just adapting. Being hunted tends to purify a man’s goals nicely.”
“You’re still hunting for Corvinus’s killer.”
It hadn’t been a question, but I nodded anyway.
“Be careful.”
I lost my smile. “I’m particularly careful these days.” I stepped nearer. “Don’t worry about me. I’m close now. I know why Corvinus was killed. Pale had that much right. He was killed because of what he was working on. I just need a little more time, and a little more information, and I’ll have the proof I’m looking for. Enough proof for me, at any rate.”
Vayne’s eyes narrowed. His face hardened. “Are you pursuing the Raven’s research?”
“A bit further,” I admitted. “But I don’t plan on going all the way with it. It sounds too dangerous.”
“It’s proved to be fatal to him already. You could drop it all, you know. Leave CrossTown behind.” He studied my face as he spoke.
“No I can’t.” My face had become a mask.
He sighed. “I know.”
I laughed suddenly. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve made it this far. I’ll see this thing through to the end.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He softened the words with a melancholy smile. “Do you want company?”
“No.” I said it slowly. “You’re a well-known associate of mine. And you’d be missed if you were gone too long. You must have had one hell of a time losing all of the surveillance that had to be on you as it is. No reason to take any unnecessary risks.”
“Suit yourself.”
I gave him a lopsided smile. “I usually do.”
“You always have.” He walked past me and faded into a haze of directed possibility.
I continued along the Way I had chosen, thinking about how long I had known Vayne. When I had first crossed over on the back of an errant WanderWay in pursuit of a fleeing spirit, I had been reduced to surviving on the fringes of CrossTown, eking out a living as a sorcerer, but without the knowledge of the Ways needed to earn a true place in CrossTown society—and without the knowledge to return home. I met Vayne then, pulling him out of a particularly nasty situation involving a ghost, a bell, and something that looked like a black dog but wasn’t.
When Vayne found that I had no desire to return home without the ability to find my way back to CrossTown, he introduced me to the Raven, who happened to be a Master of the Ways, among other things, and who also happened to be in need of an apprentice. Vayne had known me almost as long as I had lived this new life, over fifty years in subjective time, according to the numbers of rejuvenation treatments I had taken since then. I had no idea how long it had been for him, but he hadn’t changed much in all that time.
I had though. I’d seized the opportunities open to me. I’d cleaved unto CrossTown’s myriad offerings. I’d embraced immortality, at least in the small pieces I had been able to grasp thus far. I had held on to my skills and training as well as I had been able, though even I had begun to wonder about that. My habits were well known. My Legion had been used at least once to attack me.
I had been a sorcerer since I’d left my home and my brother and took to the Road, herding spirits instead of beasts, making my way by my will and my wits rather than my back. I had never thought of my captive Legion as anything but a set of tools to be used. But I had been perhaps more badly shaken at Bane and Shadow’s defections than I wanted to admit to myself. I had come to know them. What had seemed only right, in all the time before the Legion had split, now raised a taint of foulness in my mouth.
Sapienta had said nothing good about her late master. Why did that surprise me? Why did I care?
What would I be without them? If I continued to embrace change, what would I become? When would I lose myself in the changing? Even then, I could not help but wince as I thought of the longing I had heard in Bright Angel’s voice when she spoke of freedom. Could I continue to hold them? Particularly if I held them only out of the fear that letting them go would mean losing my grip on my own past, and on myself?
Deep in thought, I hadn’t traveled far when I felt the Way twisting, reverberating with sudden movement. I paused, extending my senses, for a moment wondering if Anthony Vayne was returning to tell me something, when I parsed out at least four different sources closing in on my location. I seized the reins of possibility and fled through the most devious routes I could find, toward more populated Ways where I could lose myself among myriad travelers. I didn’t move quickly enough, however, or they were more prepared than I had expected, for wherever I went, it seemed that more pursuers appeared.
As I fled I cursed the luck of it. Obvious
ly Vayne had not been as free of surveillance as he had thought. I only hoped that he had not traveled so far that he had no inkling of my situation. I had a feeling that I would need all the help I could get. I sought out my store of driller worms, just in case, and eased a handful into my closed fist.
Probes came crawling down the lengths of the Ways, isolating and tracking me. The probability waves of my hunters converged toward me. The probes increased. As I felt them crawl closer, long and sinuous and decidedly reptilian in aspect, the hairs on the back of my neck stirred in atavistic reaction. I had a good idea who my hunters were, and that didn’t make me terribly happy. They would be motivated.
Then one of my adversaries managed to intersect my path and I understood for the first time how devoted the Whitesnakes had become to taking me down. As I had suspected, they had sent their own out after me. From the lightly striated robes, this boy appeared to be a high acolyte or a wandering priest. He raised clawed hands and gestured, but the White Wolf broke his forking lightning strike into sputtering fragments. I felt every hair on my body stand upright as I caught the Whitesnake’s gaze and cut his will off from his body.
He swayed, the vertically slit pupils of his inhuman eyes wide and unseeing. Two more came into view then. I sent Blade after the first. The second raised a pistol. I threw my handful of driller worms at him. They exploded in midair, long, thin shapes elongating to coil down over the pistol with hungry eagerness. Two more snaked inside his robe. Evidently he’d been carrying more gadgets. He forgot all about me. He dropped the pistol and started dancing around, shucking the robe.
I grinned. Then I heard a soft report and felt a sensation akin to a swarm of ants biting me all over the surface of my back.
I yelped and turned to look behind me, but my legs had acquired the consistency and firmness of whipped cream. I fell, my clouding vision filled with the sight of another Whitesnake in a dark robe holding a long-barreled pistol in his hands and smiling. I recognized the weapon as a tranquilizer gun. I had a moment of despair. They had decided to take me alive.
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