less vulnerable to those sensations.
They also deadened fear. But he was used to fighting down the terrors that beset him. He’d done that all his life, as well.
The mountain, which took its name from the gray granite cap rock that rose above its pine-clad slopes and the surrounding Black Hills, stood near the Dead White Man Faces Mountain. It was the tallest in the Hills. It was held to possess great power.
It seemed as good a place as any to find the key to his destiny.
Hammerhand wasn’t sure he believed in all this mystic shit. Then again, he wasn’t sure he didn’t. For nuking sure he’d had to put up with the taunts and barbs of those smug bastard Absarokas in order to consult their well-known shaman.
After a generation or two of peace, the two nations, his Blackfoot Confederacy and the Crow, were back to an on-again, off-again war of mutual raiding and occasional battles. The only reason they hadn’t shot him on sight was that he was a known exile from his native Blood band, a wild child whose wickedness and ambition alike were too great to be constrained by tradition and stick-up-their-butts elders. But his judgment wasn’t trusted widely enough, even by other adolescent warriors, for him to raise his own war band and probe his inner self in any kind of way anyone on the Plains would pay attention to.
Painfully and painstakingly he made his way to the top. That had always been his strength, he reckoned: that he could act with precision or passion, as the need of the moment required. Mebbe both.
It was why he knew himself fit to rule.
The question was how.
And mebbe who. Those questions were what had brought him here: blasted out of his mind, freezing to his marrow and a hundred feet in the air up a cliff of granite made slick by blowing snow, cold enough to dangerously numb the fingers and toes that scrabbled and fought for holds every inch of the tortuous way up.
But Hammerhand persevered. He was good at that, too. That was another way he reckoned he was superior to the people who’d given him life: although they could endure almost anything, and had wizard survival skills, they had a tendency to fly off the handle at random moments. Not at something that required persistence in a physical craft—like skinning a chilled elk or even curing its hide for use in making clothing and lodges—but at anything abstract.
They didn’t have what it took to envision Empire and make it happen. They didn’t have the horizon.
Hammerhand did. That part of the vision he had. But he knew he was missing key pieces.
He could see barely past his fingertips when his arms were fully stretched out. For a moment, when through the whirling whiteness he glimpsed rugged gray with only more white beyond—just above his reach—his brain, altered as it was, couldn’t process what its eyes were showing it.
His body came to the rescue. Locked in “climb” mode, it commenced to haul his mass up the cliff again, fingers and toes seeking cracks and jutting icy gray stone. The image of the lip of the cliff resolved itself into his brain: the top!
Seeing a bright line of red and yellow halation following the outline of the rock-sky interface, Hammerhand let his mind ride shotgun as his body pulled itself onto the angled and uneven upper surface. Exercising the power of suggestion as much as his powerful will, he stood upright, bracing slightly against a wind, fierce now that it was unrestrained, that sought to bash him right back over the cliff to oblivion.
“I’m here,” he called into the storm. It seemed he could hear the individual impact of each tiny particle of snow, ice and grit as it banged against the lenses of his glasses.
He looked around and could scarcely see more than ten feet from the tip of his nose. The hilly, wooded country surrounding the peak was invisible.
And then, suddenly, it was before him: a masculine figure, as nude as he was and at least twice as tall, floating six feet above the wind-swept granite. Its every muscle was seemingly molded with great precision out of white light. The brightness of the faceless figure didn’t hurt his eyes. But the golden radiance that surrounded it dazzled him through his shades, making him blink and try to turn away.
He found that he could not.
“Hammerhand,” a voice said like thunder. “Kneel before me.”
“Who are you?” he demanded. He was determined not to let the...thing...see his fear. Even though he had the drug to deaden it, his knees were so loose he was only keeping himself upright by the force of his will.
“I am your destiny. Kneel before me.”
“I’d rather die standing!”
“It is not permitted,” the voice boomed. “Nor is disobedience. I am Fate.”
The willpower that held his knees locked shattered like glass struck with a hammer. His legs folded abruptly beneath him. It was all he could do to keep from going over backward on his buttocks.
Then, irresistibly, he felt his torso being winched upward, until he sat up straight. He could feel his muscles doing it, but not by his will, nor under his control.
“You see that resistance is futile, Hammerhand.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Only to give you that which you most desire, what you have come here to obtain, naked, freezing and electric.
“Now, hear me...”
The boom of the stubby shotgun barrel beneath the longer main barrel of Doc’s gigantic LeMat revolver beat the blast of Ryan’s SIG Sauer P226 by half a heartbeat. The man was already staggered by the charge of buckshot when Ryan double-tapped him at the center of mass, which was still more shadow than apparent substance.
The .44-caliber upper barrel of Doc’s revolver spit yellow flame and crashing noise. The man’s head snapped back and he crumpled into the snow.
“Offer accepted,” Ryan said, lowering his weapon.
“Maybe we should’ve tried to keep him alive,” Mildred said as Ryan cautiously approached the fallen man. She wasn’t doing it just to be contrary—although she was perfectly capable of that. She, like Doc, had been taken out of her own time in the distant past by science. But in her case the motivation was the opposite of Doc’s: doctors had put Mildred into cryosleep when a routine abdominal operation had gone terribly wrong, hoping that she could be cured sometime in the future.
“It might have been helpful if he could’ve told us what happened here,” she continued. “And who did it.”
Ryan began to see signs of what had inspired Doc’s original call-out: ruined buildings and scattered trash on the ground beyond the man they’d chilled. Some of that trash, he saw, was bodies. Much of it appeared to be body parts.
Ryan grunted. “Abstract knowledge doesn’t load many magazines,” he said.
“I’m a big fan of not getting my skull split by an ax,” J.B. commented.
Then
