“Don’t think,” Kane says. “Just ride. GO!”
They put their heads down and ride low-slung and taut. Hard. Fast. Determined. All three together. They come quickly to the strip of land and they jump. In seconds. Adam blinks and sweats. The far side is a blur. He powers upwards, vaguely aware of the lip coming.
He feels the jump. Senses the gulf beneath him. He looks down. The fall is sickening. His stomach lurches. He thinks about Sadie. Wills her up and over.
He sails. Then down he comes. Fast as a flung stone from a Voddenite sling. He sees ground. It comes at him. Out of nowhere. The byke smashes into the earth. Brutal force. Front wheel first. Air punches from his lungs.
He pulls the handlebars and shifts his weight, but the byke goes under him. He flies. Waits for the impact. Pain hits like a lightning shock. And darkness claps down. A wall of black iron.
He sits bolt upright. A searing pain tears through his hand and his ankle. Something sharp strikes the back of the head and he spins round. A branch, protruding from some kind of structure, rope-lashed and covered in tarpaulin. Lit by candlelight. The air smells perfumed—oil or incense. It’s hot and close. His heart hammers and his mouth is dry. He licks his lips and breathes, light and fast.
Then he senses movement. Adam swings about and blinks.
In the vague light, at an open flap door, stand three figures. There’s an otherworldly strangeness about them. The air seems to shift in the tent.
The foremost figure extends a hand.
“GET BACK!” Adam yells in a hoarse voice. “I’m warning you. Stay back or I’ll…I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” The figure with the offered hand steps from the shadows. Most of his face is hidden in darkness. But eyes are visible, gleaming yellow in a band of flickering candlelight.
“Kane.”
“That’s what they call me. Took your time coming around.”
Adam scrambles back, feeling for his sling. “Who are these people with you?”
“These people are my people.”
“But who are they?”
“Nakoda. Who else?”
Total fear knifes through Adam. “SADIE!” he yells, top of his voice.
Kane holds up his hands. “Take it easy. She’s safe. I told you. They’re my people.”
The figures bend their heads and vanish through the low door, without a sound.
Adam stares after them. “Your people?”
“That’s right,” Kane says.
“Then you’re a cannibal.”
Kane grins. “Yep. That’s it. A cannibal. Should’ve carved you up long ago.” He pulls out Nate’s knife. Then he steps forward and the polished ceramic gleams. Adam shrinks back, but the yurt branches tip his head forward.
Kane laughs and pockets the knife. “Watch yourself.”
Adam launches to his feet. A sharp pain lances his ankle and he howls and reaches down to feel the swelling. His fingers probe a sticky green substance.
“Poultice,” Kane says. “Chopped-up leaves mulched with spit. For the pain and bruising. You came down pretty hard. Damn lucky it’s only the ankle.”
Kane hands him a calabash of water. Adam wants to bat it away, but his thirst is a wild animal. He stumbles upright and reaches for the calabash. He drinks and he drinks, until Kane rips it from his hands.
Adam wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and looks at Kane, who doesn’t seem to be carrying any injury at all. Then looks at his left hand. Fresh bandages cover the wound. He raises the hand and sniffs the bandage. It smells of grass and woodsmoke. There is no pain.
“Nakoda have got powerful meds,” Kane says, watching him. “They stitched it up.”
Adam looks at him.
“You should see that jump,” Kane says. “You remember?”
Adam shakes his head.
But he does remember. Fragments. Powering into the jump at full tilt, low on the byke. Compressing his body deep into the lip. Pushing his byke upwards and backwards, exploding into the air at the final moment. His body high and extended on takeoff. Weight. Then weightlessness. Beneath him only darkness. Then smashing into the ground. And nothing more.
Kane tosses Adam his riding suit and Adam dresses with his back to him. Together they duck through the tent flap door and emerge blinking into a spectral haze. The air is still thick with dust and eerie in the predawn gloom. Blurred figures drift in the half-light.
Moving through a camp of about a dozen yurts are a people Adam has never seen. The men have naked torsos and their bodies are lean and toned, painted with an ocher mud. Their heads are covered—some in feathers, others in wide-brimmed hats. Their arms are ringed above the elbow with golden bangles. Slung on their shoulders are long, hollow-looking pipes made from a dark wood. The women are clothed in robes, and also wear elaborate headgear—feathers and hats. They look just as fierce as the men. They too carry the yard-long pipes on their backs.
Adam blinks and stares. “What are those things they’re carrying?”
“Blowpipes. Dead quiet. Shoot over two hundred yards. Lethal at sixty.”
Adam shakes his head. “Hell. Wonder what Nate would’ve made of all this.”
“Hi,” a voice says behind him.
He swivels round fast. Finds Sadie smiling at him. She has a bandage wrapped round her head with a dark bloodstain on her temple.
He reaches out instinctively. “You okay?”
She pulls back a fraction. “I’ll be fine.”
Kane glances at Sadie. Looks at Adam. “Get the shaman to look at your hand again.” He points northeast into the dust. “We should ride at sunrise. Through the pass yonder.”
He moves among the Nakoda. They greet him as he passes, holding up a hand, palm forward, ghostlike in the gloom. Kane returns each greeting. He makes his way to a group of young men, no more than shadows, putting up a yurt on the vague outskirts of the encampment.
Adam watches him and shakes his head again. “This is madness.”
“They’re nomads,” Sadie says.
“They’re savages!”
“I thought so too, but…they have this ability to heal….” She presses her fingers to the bandage on her head, then juts her chin at his hand. “How does it feel?”
“Sadie, you’re nuts! Haven’t you heard the stories?”
“I know. I flipped out too. Went berserk. Yelled at them. Kane had to hold me down. And then she came, the Nakoda woman. Kane calls her the shaman. You look at her and—”
“They eat human flesh!”
“I’m just as scared as you. I am. But, I don’t know…something tells me we can trust them. They’re not dangerous. They’re just…different. Maybe all those stories were lies.” There’s an edge in her voice. As if she’s trying to convince herself as much as reassure him. Her eyes are filled with wonder, but also fear.
Adam says nothing. He watches the Nakoda. The men carry stacks of rope-lashed branches, clay pots, wooden bowls of berries and roots. The women sit on square wicker mats, whittling the long blowpipes on their knees. Fashioning needle-thin darts from the hard stems of desert wintergrass.
Something catches Adam’s eye. Moving from one yurt to another, a woman shepherds a small group of hatless children, hurrying them along. The children are like all children—laughing, screeching and fighting as they go. But they are different too. Adam stares. He’s certain he isn’t dreaming.
Each child’s head is covered in swirls of hair. Long hair. Just like the Watchers.
Before he has a chance to say anything, they have vanished into a hut and a woman arrives and positions herself in front of him. As though by magic.
Jade-green eyes. A face smeared with ocher. High cheekbones. She wears a man’s wide-brimmed sun hat frayed at the black rim, hiding her hair. She is old. Older than Old Man Dagg by some margin. She extends a hand. On her finger, a black smudge of ash. She points to Adam’s mouth and opens hers. Her teeth are stained red.
Adam freezes.
“She wan
ts you to open your mouth,” Sadie says.
“I don’t think so.”
“The ash is medicine, Adam. It’s good for the hand.”
“You need,” the woman murmurs.
Before Adam can do anything, she clamps her hand on his wrist and pulls him forward. He feels heat rush through him. He opens his mouth, without meaning to, and she brushes her finger on his tongue. Then she’s gone and he’s left standing, mouth open, tasting bitter ash on his tongue.
He grimaces, spits and spins round. But she’s nowhere in sight. “Who was that?”
“Her,” Sadie says. “The shaman. Kane says she can read the future.”
Adam shakes his head. He watches Kane helping the young men and he can’t help feeling irritable. “Kane says he’s one of ’em. Says they’re his people. But he doesn’t look like ’em. Not at all.”
“The shaman told me a story about him.”
Adam looks at her. “What story?”
“She said they found him. In a river. Half drowned. She said they took him in.”
“Half drowned? Not likely. I’ve seen him swim.”
“That’s not all. The river where they found him runs through Providence.”
“What were they doin near Providence if this is their land?”
“Like I said, they’re nomads. They move between territories.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, you remember the story. A fire swept through the town—”
“Yeah. I know. People died. Their Warlord blamed the slaves.”
“He didn’t just blame the slaves. He killed them. He took them—men, women, children—took them down to the river. He chained them and he drowned them. All of them.”
“I remember. In Providence River. A river that runs with gators.”
Sadie looks at Adam. Her voice lowers. “They say it was a bloodbath. The gators took Kane. They sunk their teeth into him and they dragged him down.”
Adam says nothing. He remembers the scars on Kane’s body.
“Nobody knows how, but somehow he escaped,” she continues. “Only him. The Nakoda found him downstream, days later. They found him torn to shreds. Half dead, they say…Only the medicine woman says he wasn’t half dead, he was all the way dead.”
Adam swallows hard. “What? That makes no sense.”
“The Nakoda have magic,” Sadie says. “Maybe they brought him back.”
“Back?”
“Back from the dead.”
Adam looks at the medicine woman. She wears the same wide-brimmed sunhat. A bead necklace on her neck, tight to the throat. Her eyes, in the shade of her hat, are green and piercing. Her high cheekbones are still smeared with ochre mud and her teeth are stained red with betel-nut juice.
They are sitting in her yurt, examining his left hand. It looks freakish, unwound from the bandage. Like some insect with half its legs torn off. It looks lopsided. What it doesn’t look like…is his hand. Not the way it was. Not ever again.
Dark stitches thread the red skin at the first knuckle of the absent thumb. Adam stares at the wound in stunned silence.
“I see a Rider,” the woman says, treating the tender skin, smearing on a green paste with light touches. A pungent, grassy smell fills the yurt. She doesn’t look at him when she speaks.
“What Rider?” Adam asks, flinching, not from pain, but the expectation of pain.
“He rides through the desert, chasin demons. His ride is a silver one and his heart is black. In the shadow of the devil hill, he will come to see himself.”
“What else do you see?” Adam asks.
“Here for blood. Three dark Riders. In single file. One byke white. One red. One black. The one on the white byke throw his face down. Three meet three. Then comes hell.”
The woman floats her fingers over his hand, hesitates, then lifts a clean bandage and begins to wrap the wound carefully.
“The sun is high. Shadows fat and short. Three Riders remain. They go a new way. Across a black plain to the end of ends.”
She splits the bandage and ties the two tails. Then settles back onto her seat.
Adam turns the bandaged hand, surprised by the lack of pain.
The woman leans forward and punches a finger into the air. “I have seen what you have done and what you will do. But beware. You run towards what you seek to escape.”
Adam glances up and sees the silhouette of Kane standing in the doorway, watching.
“What does that mean?”
She looks at him and her eyes seem distant. Then she grins and throws her hands into the air, as though absolving herself of all meaning. “Bad wind comin” is all she says.
He wants to ask her more, but he can see in her eyes the conversation is over.
They are back on the road, taking a track worn smooth by the Nakoda. The dust fog still hangs and they can see no more than ten yards. They ride through a strange landscape, where green, fat-leaved plants rise up into the air. Tall succulents, drawing water from the earth. They stand like sentinel spirits in the haze, guiding the Riders on their way.
They enter a grove of trees where the ground feels soft and spongy. Adam looks down, sees a tangle of vines and roots. An invasion of moss, thick enough not to be ripped by their churning wheels. A spore cloud floats up. A chittering of insects and birds.
He rides close to Kane.
“This place,” Adam says. “It’s…”
“Different?”
“Not what I thought. The people…even the plants…It’s all—”
“Forget the shaman,” Kane says. “She fixes to put your mind in a twist for the sheer game.”
“It’s not her. It’s…something else. Something I saw.”
Kane turns his head, looks at Adam as he rides.
Adam glances at the weird ground under his byke, at the green succulents with their daggerlike leaves. He looks back at Kane. “They had long hair. Just like the Watchers.”
Kane turns away. “So what?”
“So what? Don’t you see? They live off the land, but they’ve got meds no one else has. My hand…I don’t feel a thing. And that shaman woman, she’s older than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Maybe so. It changes nothin.”
“It changes everything.”
Kane turns his head, straightening. “What’s on your mind? Something else is eating you.”
Adam feels a prickle of goose bumps down his arm. He blinks in the red glare of Kane’s sun goggles. “I know,” he says. “I know how you got them cuts and wounds.”
Kane looks at him. His eyes darken. “We’ve got a Race to win.” Then he pulls his throttle and churns away.
—
They come to the edge of an escarpment. The ground is rocky again. They skid to a stop and feel the wind lift. A northeaster blows here—the Banshee—and they watch the dust unfurl, revealing a salt pan shimmering in the heat. Across the pan they see a crew of Riders, their silver dust plumes scattered by the wind. Beyond them stands a towering structure, warping in the heat.
“Looks like an abandoned launch pad,” Sadie says. “Badland is full of them.”
Adam nods. “S’pose they wouldn’t let us get close to a working one. Too dangerous.”
“For them or for us?” Kane says.
Sadie looks at him, then at Adam. “You ready?”
“Guess we’ll find out,” Adam says, glancing at his hand. But Nakoda medicine is strong. The pain is no more than a dull ache. He remembers hearing somewhere that if a person loses a leg, or a hand, or even just a finger, they still feel it, long after it’s gone. Something about nerve endings. It makes sense to Adam. He can still feel his thumb, if he thinks about it.
With a crazed and primitive howl, Kane kicks down his gears and tears away from them, hurtling down the dirt slope. Adam and Sadie give chase. Their wheels blur and dirt churns. They dice each other, riding head down and hell for leather.
The trail opens out onto a flat stretch of ground. They ride hard over it, sending up three plumes of dust behind
them, like vapor trails from a rocket. Then they come to a skidding stop.
In the dust ahead, the pack of Riders warps and floats.
“Bad guys or good guys?” Adam asks.
Kane gazes at them, unperturbed. “No difference.”
There are four Riders, close together. Their alabaster skin shines in the sun.
“Deads,” Adam says.
Kane nods. “Don’t look at ’em. Don’t acknowledge ’em. Ride past and say nothin.”
He throttles and flies straight towards them…and past them. Close. He doesn’t look at them as he passes. They turn and stare. But they do nothing to stop him.
Adam waits. He can hear Sadie breathing next to him. Kane keeps going into the haze.
Adam and Sadie slide past the Deads. Slowly. They give them a wide berth. Adam keeps his head fixed on Kane’s byke, up ahead in the dust. He senses the Tribe near. Feels the weight of their eyes. Then something in him—some dumb curiosity—causes him to turn. He looks at them. The Deads stare back.
Gold goggles. Plum-colored lips. Skull and crossbones tattoos. Pale skin, despite the sun. They don’t make a sound. All they do is stare. Four of them. Battered and bloodied. Blackwater Trail has exacted a heavy toll. They do not look in the mood for a fight. They look exhausted.
Adam wonders how he and Sadie must seem to them. As broken, no doubt. He gives them a slight nod. He doesn’t know why. It just happens. Maybe he feels a fraternity. A brotherhood. It’s a mistake.
One of them veers out from the group and begins to haul them in. Steadily at first, just a slight adjustment to his line, then with more speed and at a more direct angle. He makes a low-throated sound, like a dog calling out to its mate.
Sadie looks now. She glances at Adam. Looks back.
All four Riders jerk their throttles and gun at them. Frantic, Adam looks ahead. But Kane is gone in the dust. He knows they can’t outride them. The gang’s angle is too steep coming in at them. Escape is impossible.
Adam and Sadie reach the same conclusion in the same instant. He senses that. Sadie is first to react. She floors the Sandeater and pulls her handlebars hard left, jacking the byke into a massive turn. Her momentum carries her and she leaps, almost cartwheels, from the byke. She lands on her feet and guides her machine to a churning stop in front of her. The byke is between Sadie and the Riders. In the same instant, she removes her sling.
Stone Rider Page 15