by RW Krpoun
Sundae slammed her chest into the shoulder of a surprised pony, sending the smaller beast staggering back, and Derek leaned over to jam the muzzle of his Spencer into the rider’s chest as the creature failed to retain its seat. As he pulled the trigger he saw that what he had first thought was a fur vest was actually the creature’s chest, and that the hand that had grabbed for the carbine’s muzzle was long and delicate, the fingers and palm longer in proportion than a Human’s.
Then he was past, levering a fresh round into the chamber and cocking the Spencer; unlike the Henry or Winchester weapons the Spencer had to be manually cocked. Up ahead a rider hurled something that hit him hard enough on the shin to bring tears to his eyes; cursing he fired, levered, cocked, and fired again. The slackness in the next levering told him the carbine’s tube was empty, and he shoved the carbine into its saddle scabbard as he drove his spur-less heels into Sundae’s ribs, crashing his horse into his foe’s mount, hitting the smaller pony broadside.
The rider desperately hit him with a quirt, raising a bleeding welt across his lower right cheek and neck as it fought to get free of its falling mount, but Derek was past being deterred-while normally a friendly and reasonable man Derek had an inner core of red-hot rage which erupted only rarely, but always spectacularly when it did. Pulling his Le Mat he shot the rider five times in the face and neck, missing four more times as Sundae and the pony struggled for clear footing.
Wheezing in the dust, he holstered his empty revolver, becoming aware of a rumbling that could be clearly heard over the gunfire. Fred galloped by yelling something about the buffalo and Derek urged Sundae after him, catching up the lead rope of a pack pony his latest victim had been leading as the Scav/Alienist cantered past the animal.
Following Fred he emerged into blessedly dust-free air a few hundred yards later as the big Scout/Hunter directed them to a hoof-torn depression a hundred yards across, a muddy, scummy pond at its center. Moments later Shad and Jeff cantered up alongside them, Jeff dragging a bundle.
“Well, that sucked beyond all expression,” Shad observed, twisting gingerly to examine the blood seeping through his shirt. “I emptied every weapon I had halfway into the fight. I’m going to have to rethink my weapon load-out. What the hell happened? One minute we were in a firefight, and the next we were hauling ass.”
“The buffalo spooked from the shooting and smell of the blood,” Fred explained as he reloaded his revolver. “Did anyone get a look at what the hell we were fighting?”
“They weren’t Human, that much I got,” Shed holstered a reloaded Colt and drew the other. “Is this a buffalo wallow?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s a buffalo wallow?” Derek asked, thumbing cartridges into his Le Mat.
“A place where bison roll around to grind off parasites and loose hair. They like to use the same spot, so a herd literally digs a big, wide hole like this. Looks like there’s a spring here, which is probably why they started using it.”
“A bull nearly got me,” Jeff observed, dismounting and walking over to examine Shad’s side. “I’m naming my gelding Dancer because he did a sort of a side-step jig to get us out of the way. Looks like you took some buckshot, Shad. Hold still.”
“What’s that you’re dragging?” Fred asked.
“One of the enemy, but not by choice, it got a lariat around my bedroll. I shot it off its pony, but it must has gotten the rope tangled around its arm. Do me a favor and cut it loose, would you?”
“Derek, what’s that on your leg?” Fred pointed.
The Scav/Alienist leaned over and looked. “Huh. Looks like…a bolo. I knew I had gotten hit, but I thought it was a rock or something. Lemme borrow your knife.”
“Well, that’s a shirt I won’t be wearing again,” Shad observed, buttoning up its replacement as he joined the others. “So what were we fighting?”
“Some breed of Goblin or Orc,” Derek said thoughtfully.
The corpse was worse for wear, but when alive it would have stood a bowlegged five foot three, with arms and legs which were a bit longer in proportion to the torso than a Human’s. It was covered with a short, thin, mousy fur, and wore tight cloth beeches and soft leather boots. Its face was broad and creased like a chimp’s, with a pug nose, large, wide-set eyes, and tall bat-like ears; its teeth were that of a carnivore, set in a heavy jaw.
“Ugly bastard,” Jeff commented. “He have anything on him?”
“A knife, a cross between a throwing axe and a bolo, and a rock on a pendant,” Fred point to the items set to the side. The throwing weapon was a pair of double-sized axe blades made of boiled and formed buffalo horn connected by braided horse hair.
“Doesn’t look like it should work,” Shad observed. “That knife we can sell, based on my skill knowledge. I wish someone had thought to take Humanoid Lore.”
“There is a hex on it to make it throw-able,” Derek announced. “That’s not just a rock, it’s a placet, a material that accepts magic easily and can be used to transfer a hex. It likely has some minor hex on it right now, probably a bug bane, but I could use it to imbue something, say a coin. Then Shad uses his skill to inset the coin into the grip of a revolver, and the hex would affect every bullet fired by the weapon. It couldn’t be a huge improvement, but it won’t wear out and you can stack as many as you want.”
“Very cool,” Jeff nodded. “But I would like to take this opportunity to point out that something on the load of that pack pony you captured is moving.”
Fred sliced the ropes holding the squirming roll of buffalo hide to the top of the pack saddle with his brass-hilted Bowie knife, and the hide roll fell to the ground, discharging its contents, which turned out to be alive.
“Cool!” Derek exclaimed. “A Satyr.”
Blinking up at them was what appeared to be a young boy with olive skin and yellow eyes, except that he had bestial legs terminating in uncloven hooves, wearing what could only be described as a green cloth jock strap.
“Looks to be about ten,” Jeff mused offering the youth a hand up. “The artists always draw them with delicate little hooves, but his look like they belong on a pony.”
“Not split, either,” Shad observed. “Derek, see what else you captured.”
The boy seemed to be pleased to see them, and asked them a question in a language they did not understand. “You know, we had it easy in the Prison: everybody we were inclined to talk to used the same language,” Jeff commented.
“You’re the teacher, you work out what you can,” Shad shrugged. “That fight was a complete cluster, but I got one probable and one possible kill. What about you guys?”
“Same,” Fred said.
“Two confirmed,” Derek said from where he was digging through the pack saddle. “One was muzzle to flesh.”
“One confirmed, maybe a couple possible,” Jeff said, offering the boy his canteen.
“Anyone get a count of the total? Neither did I, but they took a pretty good hit; I bet they don’t follow us. Fred, stand watch just to be safe. As soon as Derek gets the loot tallied and Jeff sees if the kid can tell us anything, we’ll make tracks,” Shad decided.
Jeff and the boy engaged in a lively round of sign language, pantomime, and drawing in the mud. Shad watched them without interest until Derek came over. “Four tanned buffalo hides, about sixty pounds of pemmican, a lot of really strong horsehair rope, and about sixty pounds of this,” he passed the Shootist a fist-sized rock that appeared to have been smoothed by water.
Shad hefted the stone. “Pretty. Light, too. Why are they lugging it around?”
“I’m not sure, but I would guess its raw material for magic. Hexes seem to be tied to physical objects, and every race seems to be using their own approach. Class knowledge needs a trigger to bring it to the fore so I don’t have all the details, but it’s a safe bet this group was either raiding for or harvesting the stone. They probably had a lot more than one pack pony.”
“Then this is valuable to them,” Shad tos
sed the stone back. “I’ve got zero Appraise knowledge off it, though. We’ll hang onto it. Jeff, wrap it up, we need to get going.”
“What did you learn?” Shad asked as the Talons rode out of the wallow, the boy perched behind the Jinxman.
“His name is Uttle, more or less. His race is called Sivlic, and he has seen Men before. He couldn’t give me the name of the creatures we fought, but they are from the Horde, he knew that word. They captured him three days ago, and he expected to be dinner when they made camp tonight. North of here is a road that leads to a Human town to the northeast, but he’s not clear on distances. His family are northeast of the town, and visit it to trade.”
“North it is, then.”
“I can’t believe I rode a horse with the reins between my teeth!” Derek grinned at the Shootist.
“Apparently riding is a universal skill to our classes. And yeah, that is definitely bad-ass, especially for a guy who has a man-crush on Kevin Bacon.”
“Bite me.”
“Not to change the topic from your questionable sexual preferences, but why exactly do we have guns? Amid said the better stuff has to be created by magic. The Tek weren’t carrying any at all, and the Horde types we just fought didn’t have repeaters, thank the Lord. Any class-based insights?”
“They must have come in with a banished group-Amid said some people got sent here instead of the Prison, and there is greater leakage between the Realm and Earth,” Derek mused. “But you said these are all stuff from the 1870s. Who used magic in the 1870s?”
“Indians,” Shad said after thinking on it. “The Ghost Dances by the Plains Indians were supposed to bring back the bison, resurrect the dear departed, make bullets no more dangerous than the rain, and destroy the whites.”
“I saw that movie-Wounded Knee was in the 1890s,” Derek objected.
“Well, Wounded Knee was far from the first place they tried the dances,” Shad turned in his saddle to check their back trail. “It was where things with the dance turned bloody. I seem to recall that there were accusations that their dances were different than elsewhere, but I could be wrong. Anyway, except for the Sharps the guns we’re carrying were the top of the line for decades. Most were redesigned to fire smokeless powder when it came out. And the reason the Sharps wasn’t kept around was because it was designed to kill bison, and the herds were gone by 1880. Without the buffalo there wasn’t anything in North America that warranted that size of a round.”
“So you think it was the Ghost Dances?”
“I don’t know. I recall that there were Indians who claimed they had magic that would catch musket balls as far back as the mid-1600s. The Boxers in China had sects who claimed they could do the same thing, and I think the colonial forces in Africa encountered groups that thought they had stuff that would work the same way. And US forces fighting muslims in the Philippines before World War One, too. Maybe the initial claims were real but before they could get the stuff into play they were banished; no one kept real close tabs on indigenous populations back then.”
“Maybe the lives of the earlier groups that got banished inspired their neighbors back on Earth,” Derek suggested. “You know, endless bison, magic that stopped bullets, all that.”
“Could be.”
“Man, I can’t believe we’re here. This is like the 13th Warrior meets The Wild Bunch,” Derek grinned.
“Great, pick two movies where few of the protagonists survived.”
“You know what I mean.”
“What I know is that I’m going home, and Heaven help any local that gets between me and that destination. I lack your sense of wonder, Derek; this is just another combat deployment, long after I thought I was done with soldiering.”
“Well, I like to see the wonder in it, it helps me get through it all.”
“What works for you is valid,” Shad nodded. “Maybe you’re the lucky one. You know, you might be able to get a Sivlic girl. From behind they’re sort of goat-like: the best of both your worlds.”
Derek shook his head and shot him the finger.
As the Black Talons rode across the plains they were struck by the sheer volume of wildlife. Besides buffalo there were groups of antelope, both North American Pronghorn and several African types, herds of wild horses, and groups of mule deer, the latter the most shy of all. Wolves, coyotes, jackals, and hyenas could be seen lurking around the herds watching for the weak or careless, and at their second night camp Fred found the tracks of a mountain lion.
Fred shot a yearling buffalo calf on their second day to supplement their rations, a subtraction from a herd that was so large that none noticed its demise.
Late in the afternoon of their third day they reached a heavily-rutted track that ran northeast-southwest, and turned northeast.
“Helluva road,” Shad observed to Fred. “The best you could say about it is that you won’t get lost.”
“Gotta be rough on wagons,” Fred nodded.
“Napoleon retreated from Moscow on better roads than this,” Jeff mused. “And he lost his army doing it.”
“We never get sent anywhere with real infrastructure or decent toilets,” the Shootist shook his head. “We’re three for three in that regard. “
“I don’t want to have to listen to your theory about the effects of modern plumbing technology on the issues of the Middle East again,” Jeff warned. “I had to listen to it at least once a week for an entire tour.”
“I hope it didn’t spoil the war for you.”
“No, the brass did that.”
“Not as many buffalo around here,” Derek observed, deliberately changing the topic. “Just a couple small clumps in the last hour.”
“Buffalo do not gather in ‘clumps’,” Jeff shook his head.
“Bite me-you know what I mean.”
“What is it with buffalo? You get a murder of crows, a congress of owls, a pride of lions,” Fred mumbled. “What do bison get?”
“Not sure,” Jeff admitted. “I’ve always meant to look up what a group of hyenas is called.”
“The US media establishment,” Shad advised him.
“You need to learn some new jokes.”
“You need to learn that I’m not joking.”
“Smoke ahead,” Fred pointed. Looks like its to the left of the road.” He glanced at the sun. “Less than an hour to sundown.”
“Too small to be the town,” Shad mused.
“Go around or keep going?” Fred asked.
Shad checked the sun. “Keep going, but pick up the pace-if it goes sour I want enough light to fight by.”
“Odds are it’s just travelers,” Derek pointed out as they urged their horses onward.
“Which is why I want to go past,” the Shootist nodded. “We’re still pretty damned ignorant about what is going on. Anything we can learn will help.”
The smoke turned out to be coming from a campsite; a half-dozen ox carts with six-foot wheels and high ground clearance were parked in the road, while tents and the grazing oxen were out on the prairie. The camp was neat and orderly, and as the Black Talons drew closer a dozen men trotted out to meet them, each carrying a five-foot-tall shield faced in buffalo hide with the fur outwards, armed with a long spear, a fistful of short stabbing spears, and a mace. They smoothly formed a skirmish line and advanced at a slot trot, their long spears leaned back against their right shoulders.
“More black people for you, Derek,” Shad pointed out. “They look like Zulus.”
“I don’t know what Zulus look like, but if Zulus were able to look real tough I’ll say they nailed it,” Fred conceded, loosening his Sharps in its saddle scabbard.
“Don’t forget to compliment them on their crops, Jeff,” Shad grinned.
Uttle stood up on the pack saddle and hallooed at the top of his lungs, and the line of warriors halted. After a moment an older man stepped away from the left end of the line and advanced towards the riders. Shad motioned Derek to lead the pack pony to the front, and soon Uttle and th
e man were in an animated if broken conversation. The man obviously only had a few words of Sivlic, but Uttle was working overtime on gestures and pantomime.
Finally the man held up a hand to shush the excited boy and walked over to face Shad. “I am Sanobi, leader of my clan, the Green Wave Celts.” To Shad’s ears Sanobi had a slight sing-song accent.
“Shad, war-leader for the Black Talons,” the Shootist gestured towards the others. “We are mercenaries new to this area and traveling to a town to look for employment.” He pointed to the northeast.
“Uttle has told me of your courage in rescuing him from the Hobgoblins. We are great friends of the Sivlic and deadly foes of the Horde, and would welcome you to share our fire and food this night.”
Shad glanced at the others. “We would be greatly honored.”
“What do you guys think?” Shad whispered as the Black Talons picketed their mounts and the captured pony.
“They seem to like Uttle and vice-versa,” Derek jerked his chin to where the boy was animatedly talking to several women. “If they were going to jump us you wouldn’t think they would do it in amongst their women and kids when they had an opportunity to fight away from camp.”
“We’ve learned what it was we killed,” Jeff pointed out. “We’re already better off than we were.”
“They called themselves Celts,” Fred muttered. “Obviously that word means something radically different here.”
“I’m betting these guy’s ancestors came here directly from Africa,” Shad agreed. “Still, they seem friendly enough, but be ready for anything.”
Sanobi did not stand on ceremony; the Black Talons were waved to seats around the primary fire, around which were seated the adult males save for four on sentry. Younger women promptly served the meal before retiring to their own repast around a different fire, while the children, Uttle included, had already been fed and were now involved in a complex game drawn on the ground.
The meal was excellent: pots of a thin beer, a stew of what Shad guessed was buffalo, potatoes, and green peas in a heavy gravy, and rounds of fresh hot flatbread the Green Wave used in lieu of silverware. He and Derek avoided the beer, and Jeff drank sparingly, but Fred imbibed freely.