were men who came from a time before that, and had skills that could hew things of beauty out of ugly, harsh rock. That speaks of some power, some knowledge. And that’s still in there, K. It ain’t good, and it’s always done nothing else but attract its like.
“The dark ones—be they a kind of power or gods and demons—have always protected the canyon. Through the days of skydark and right till now. And whoever lives there is evil. If not to start with, then it’ll soon infect them.
“And that’s where they’re going, K. Into the heart of darkness and into the palaces of light. Remember, my baron, that not all light is good. The light that came with the nukes wasn’t good. Mebbe this is that kind of light.”
K was frustrated. He turned away from the old man, not wishing him to see the confusion that was written on his face. This talk of gods and demons was shit. But evil, real tangible evil that could infect a man, running from man to man like a disease. That was something he understood only too well. The palaces were places of legend. The legends were swathed in shadow, like the physical stones that hung over the canyon edge, protecting the palaces from the elements, just as they always had.
Hiding them from prying eyes—all but those of the most questing.
All but those, he hoped, of the ones he had sent to discover the truth.
Chapter One
Heat—dry and oppressive, unrelenting, bore down on them with every step the companions took. It was the kind of heat where, if they had any sense, they would seek out any shelter they could find and wait for the sun to sink in the sky, and the cool of night to start sweeping across the plain.
But the companions could only do that if they had time. And that was the one thing they were sorely lacking. There was no time for them to waste. The group they were trailing was obviously used to traveling in such conditions, and moved swiftly across the blasted and scorched plain. Swiftly enough to set a punishing pace.
“Oh, that we could have had the use of a wag,” Doc bemoaned in a voice that was cracked and parched, both by the dry atmosphere and the effort of an enforced march in such conditions. “Even a gas-guzzler…a mere wooden effort on wheels, powered by nothing more than the power of a mule would have satisfied me. But no, we are to be denied even that Spartan comfort in the search for our prey. How, pray tell, are we to be in a fit state to face them when we eventually confront them when we have had to suffer such unendurable conditions?”
“Doc, if they were unendurable, you would have bought the farm, and I wouldn’t have to listen to your interminable complaints,” Mildred countered in a voice that was as dry as Doc’s. Albeit that she had preserved hers by holding her peace for what seemed to be far too many miles while the old man moaned and droned on, his voice like the drip of water wearing away at her patience. At that, the fact that it made her think of water at a time when they were preserving theirs and putting aside thoughts of slaking their ravaging thirst was something that only served to increase her irritation.
“All I am trying to point out is that the baron may be rewarding us well for our endeavors if we achieve our goal, but he has not exactly given us the tools with which to finish the job.” He paused for a moment, his head cocked in thought, much to Mildred’s relief. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last, and before she had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief he had started again, albeit on a different tack.
“Strange, but by the Three Kennedys, that phrase strikes a resonant chord deep within the caverns of remembrance! Perhaps it was something that one of the three blessed ones themselves uttered at some point. Or some such personage, one who shared an exalted position similar to that—”
He was cut short with a sudden action. Mildred, realizing that his sudden ramblings, now that they had veered from the simple grumblings of before, presaged a descent into the kind of temporary madness that blighted his life—and therefore by extension hers and those of her fellow travelers—turned and slapped him across the face. Hard. She was about five yards from him, just in front, and so to achieve this action she had to spin and then take a step back that added to the momentum of her swinging arm. She caught the old man with a full and open palm.
In the quiet of the arid and deserted plain, with no sound from the others beyond the muffled padding of boots on hard-packed sand, the blow sounded large and shocking. Doc’s head snapped on his neck, his eyes wide with shock and his jowls shaken by the impact of the blow. It resounded so loud in their collective silence that the others stopped to turn and face Doc and Mildred.
For a moment Doc stared blankly into Mildred’s face. From his expression she couldn’t tell if he would cry, yell, hit her or pass out.
He did none of those things. Instead, a slow grin spread across his face as he held a hand up to his stinging cheek.
“Madam,” he said slowly, “there must be other, and perhaps better ways in which to bring a man back from the brink of the abyss. But I would doubt if there are any that would have such an immediate effect. Do you know, for a moment there I could hear myself and found it quite hard to credit the things that were coming from my mouth. It is very hard to describe, as though one is separated from oneself and observing from a distance. To be back in a place where the mind and body occupy the same place is a pleasure. Even if—” he added, looking around “—it is such a place as this.”
The others had stopped to watch, taken aback by the sudden explosion of violence in Mildred’s behavior. Doc’s mumbling moan had become little more than a background sound to them, marking and punctuating each footfall. In truth, each of them was finding the going tough, and to waste time on the disjointed grumbling of the old man was more effort than they felt they could spare.
Now, almost forced into a halt by the turn of events, it became obvious that they had become mechanical in their actions, and for the first time in several hours under the baking skies they stopped to look at one another.
“He’s right about the wag, though,” Krysty said in a voice ravaged by the climate and by the lack of water. “At least we could have made some kind of shelter for the worst of the day.”
Ryan shook his head slowly. To speak was a great effort, so he used his words sparingly. “Can’t get too close. They’re on foot. Too much risk of them seeing dust clouds if we used wheels.”
Jak sniffed. “Get too far, lose touch.”
J.B. cast a long glance into the far distance. Toward the horizon, it seemed as though the vista in front of them was devoid of life. Only toward the edge of land and sky, where the two met in an indistinct haze, was there anything that could in any way be construed as signs of life. Even then, the specks that moved in the sealike mirage of wavering light might have been nothing more than phantoms of imagination. Following the Armorer’s gaze, Ryan could barely focus his only functioning orb on them. If he was honest, he knew they were real only because he had been tailing them for so long, and in an area about thirty miles back where there had been some jagged outcrops that jutted savagely from the earth to provide some kind of cover, he had been able to get close enough to take stock of the enemy.
“Should have taken them then,” J.B. murmured, as though able to read the one-eyed man’s mind.
Ryan allowed a grin to crack the previously grim set of his jaw. J. B. Dix had traveled with him for so long that each man knew the other’s way of thinking.
“You know why we couldn’t do that,” he said simply, for the Armorer, as he was also known, was only too well aware.
