lead in your craw,” growled the dark one. Suddenly the blunt pistol was in his hand. “Pass it over, and the bag too.”
Hull scowled from one to the other. At last he shrugged, and moved as if to lift his bag from his shoulders. And then, swift as the thrust of a striking diamondback, his left foot shot forward, catching the dark one squarely in the pit of his stomach, with the might of Hull’s muscles and weight behind it.
The man had breath for a low grunt; he doubled and fell, while his weapon spun a dozen feet away into the dust. The light one sprang for it, but Hull caught him with a great arm about his throat, wrenched twice, and the brief fight was over. He swung placidly on toward Norse with a blunt revolver primed and capped at his hip, a glistening spring-steel bow on his shoulder, and twenty-two bright tubular steel arrows in his quiver.
He topped a little rise and the town lay before him. He stared. A hundred houses at least. Must be five hundred people in the town, more people than he’d ever seen in his life all together. He strode eagerly on, goggling at the church that towered high as a tall tree, at the windows of bits of glass salvaged from ancient ruins and carefully pieced together, at the tavern with its swinging emblem of an unbelievably fat man holding a mammoth mug. He stared at the houses, some of them with shops before them, and at the people, most of them shod in leather.
He himself attracted little attention. Norse was used to the mountainies, and only a girl or two turned appraising eyes toward his mighty figure. That made him uncomfortable, however; the girls of the mountains giggled and blushed, but never at that age did they stare at a man. So he gazed defiantly back, letting his eyes wander from their bonnets to the billowing skirts above their leather strap-sandals, and they laughed and passed on.
Hull didn’t care for Norse, he decided. As the sun set, the houses loomed too close, as if they’d stifle him, so he set out into the countryside to sleep. The remains of an ancient town bordered the village, with its spectral walls crumbling against the west. There were ghosts there, of course, so he walked farther, found a wooded spot, and lay down, putting his bow and the steel arrows into his bag against the rusting effect of night-dew. Then he tied the bag about his bare feet and legs, sprawled comfortably, and slept with his hand on the pistol grip. Of course there were no animals to fear in these woods save wolves, and they never attacked humans during the warm parts of the year, but there were men, and they bound themselves by no such seasonal laws.
He awoke dewy wet. The sun shot golden lances through the trees, and he was ravenously hungry. He ate the last of his mother’s brown bread from his bag, now crumbled by his feet, and then strode out to the road. There was a wagon creaking there, plodding northward; the bearded, kindly man in it was glad enough to have him ride for company.
“Mountainy?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Bound where?”
“The world,” said Hull.
“Well,” observed the other, “it’s a big place, and all I’ve seen of it much like this. All except Selui. That’s a city. Yes, that’s a city. Been there?”
“No.”
“It’s got,” said the farmer impressively, “twenty thousand people in it. Maybe more. And they got ruins there the biggest you ever saw. Bridges. Buildings. Four—five times as high as the Norse church, and at that they’re fallen down. The Devil knows how high they used to be in the old days.”
“Who lived in ‘em?” asked Hull.
“Don’t know. Who’d want to live so high up it’d take a full morning to climb there? Unless it was magic. I don’t hold much with magic, but they do say the Old People knew how to fly.”
Hull tried to imagine this. For a while there was silence save for the slow clump of the horses’ hooves. “I don’t believe it,” he said at last.
“Nor I. But did you hear what they’re saying in Norse?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“They say,” said the farmer, “that Joaquin Smith is going to march again.”
“Joaquin Smith!”
“Yeah. Even the mountainies know about him, eh?”
“Who doesn’t?” returned Hull. “Then there’ll be fighting in the south, I guess. I have a notion to go south.”
“Why?”
“I like fighting,” said Hull simply.
“Fair answer,” said the farmer, “but from what folks say, there’s not much fighting when the Master marches. He has a spell; there’s great sorcery in N’Orleans, from the merest warlock up to Martin Sair, who’s blood-son of the Devil himself, or so they say.”
“I’d like to see his sorcery against the mountainy’s arrow and ball,” said Hull grimly. “There’s none of us can’t spot either eye at a thousand paces, using rifle. Or two hundred with arrow.”
“No doubt; but what if powder flames, and guns fire themselves before he’s even across the horizon? They say he has a spell for that, he or Black Margot.”
“Black Margot?”
“The Princess, his half-sister. The dark witch who rides beside him, the Princess Margaret.”
“Oh—but why Black Margot?”
The farmer shrugged. “Who knows? It’s what her enemies call her.”
“Then so I call her,” said Hull.
“Well, I don’t know,” said the other. “It makes small difference to me whether I pay taxes to N’Orleans or to gruff old Marcus Ormiston, who’s eldarch of Ormiston village there.” He flicked his whip toward the distance ahead, where Hull now descried houses and the flash of a little river. “I’ve sold produce in towns within the Empire, and the people of them seemed as happy as ourselves, no more, no less.”
“There is a difference, though. It’s freedom.”
“Merely a word, my friend. They plow, they sow, they reap, just as we do. They hunt, they fish, they fight. And as for freedom, are they less free with a warlock to rule them than I with a wizened fool?”
“The mountainies pay taxes to no one.”
“And no one builds them roads, nor digs them public wells. Where you pay little you get less, and I will say that the roads within the Empire are better than ours.”
“Better than this?” asked Hull, staring at the dusty width of the highway.
“Far better. Near Memphis town is a road of solid rock, which they spread soft through some magic, and let harden, so there is neither mud nor dust.”
Hull mused over this. “The Master,” he burst out suddenly, “is he really immortal?”
The other shrugged. “How can I say? There are great sorcerers in the southlands, and the greatest of them is Martin Sair. But I do know this, that I have seen sixty-two years, and as far back as memory goes here was always Joaquin Smith in the south, and always an Empire
