Krysty lay on her belly on the east side of the low ridge’s crest, then crawled forward the last couple feet to the top.
“There he is,” Ryan said. He handed her the binos. The afternoon sun beat hot on her back.
“What’s he doing?” she asked.
“Haranguing.”
The others crept up, keeping low in cover and mostly silent. Jak was nowhere to be seen, but that was to be expected.
Below them the Blood forces and their tents filled up a broad bowl of a valley. “It’s like there’s ten thousand of them!” Ricky said.
“Their numbers are certainly intimidating,” Doc said. “How might he summon a force so immense out of the sparsely populated Deathlands, even after all he’s done and won? Far less feed for them.”
“I wonder that, too,” Ricky said.
“A mess of them are gathered to hear whatever he has to say,” Mildred remarked. Krysty handed her the glasses.
Recruits continued to flow to the charismatic leader in his current camp in a broad valley among the painted mesas and wind-swept gorges of the Badlands. Especially now that he had hold of a power that made him unbeatable, or seemingly so. The companions had infiltrated most of the way here by masquerading as followers.
The more distinctive of them—Ryan, Jak and Krysty—had disguised themselves with hats and dark glasses, plus clothing with a distinctly different look from what they usually wore. Feeling left out, Doc, Mildred and Ricky had dolled themselves up like landlocked pirates with colorful bandannas tied around their heads.
Even J.B. got into the spirit of things by swapping his trademark battered fedora for a somewhat less battered felt cowboy hat. Temporarily.
Ryan had judged their wag was not unusual enough to merit trying to disguise it or swap it for a different ride. And so it had proved. They had rolled within a few miles of the mustering point where Hammerhand rallied his growing clan to face his even-more-rapidly growing enemies with scarcely a look cast their way.
And the enemies definitely gathered, and big-time, if the rumors that flew among the prospective Blood recruits were even half-true. The Oglala out of Pine Ridge had raised much of the large and powerful Lakota Nation to strike down the upstart Hammerhand. Equally alarmed, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were said to be mustering against the renegade Bloods from the northwest. And some even claimed the coldheart bands of the farther eastern Plains, many fleeing the worsening conditions in the heartland, were forming an unlikely and undoubtedly unstable alliance to deal with the new threat growing east of the Black Hills.
Of course, with Mariah on his side, Hammerhand had little to fear, even from a number of potential foes that dwarfed anything likely seen in the Deathlands in recent times. That was why she and her friends had embarked on this desperate last-ditch mission.
It was Krysty who told the others that if Mariah’s power kept growing, as it obviously was, it could potentially cause as much destruction—or more—than skydark. Her heart had dropped at just how much traffic was heading the same way they were—people in wags, on horseback, even on foot. Ryan had said nothing about the numbers of coldhearts, adventurers and refugees with no place better to go who were flocking to Hammerhand’s side. But he did seem to hold his jaw more set than usual driving among them.
When they got closer, though, they slipped away into the wooded hills under cover of night. They ditched their disguises and cached the wag under dead brush that had collected in a narrow draw. Ryan intended to slip in on foot, to reconnoiter the camp and see the lay of the land.
He intended for them not just to do the necessary job, but to get out alive. Krysty prayed to Gaia that might be possible, but she had her doubts. It seemed to her that they were embarked on a suicide mission.
But there were no doubts that the job they meant to do needed doing.
Now they were no more than two hundred and fifty yards from the heart of the encampment. Krysty couldn’t hear Hammerhand’s oration, but every time he scored a point, the enthusiastic crowd’s response beat at them like surf.
“How could we get so close without getting spotted by patrols or sentries?” Ricky asked. “I mean, they know this terrain. It’s their home turf.”
“Not necessarily,” J.B. said. He took off his wire-rim spectacles, held them up to the bright blue sky and squinted critically at them before polishing the lenses with a handkerchief and sticking the glasses back on his nose. “Most of them are not from around here, most like.”
“Hammerhand, it is said, was born into the Blood branch of the Blackfoot Confederacy, in what once was Canada,” Doc said.
“A camp this size usually gets sloppier about security than a smaller one anyway,” Ryan said. “Numbers kind of go to their heads.”
“There she is!” Mildred exclaimed, peering through the big binocs.
Krysty looked down at the distant platform, which seemed to be made up of planks laid over a foundation of big rocks, where Hammerhand held forth, and her heart sank.
“You sure that’s her?” Ricky asked, squinting.
“It is,” Krysty said. “I don’t need the glasses to tell.”
Even at two to three hundred yards, there was something unmistakable about the short, slight form. Maybe it was the way it held itself, at once fragile and defiant. The way the girl who had appeared to be dwarfed by Hammerhand’s massive frame was dressed could hardly have been more different from the way they’d always seen her. She wore a white dress with some kind of colored figuring on it, and her raven-wing hair hung unbound across her shoulders. It contrasted all the more sharply with the pallor of her face.
“She’s got a lot more hair than I ever would have thought,” Mildred said. “But yeah. That’s Mariah.”
Ryan peered through the telescopic sight of his Steyr Scout. “This is going to be easier than I thought.”
He snugged the forestock of the longblaster down in a clump of grass for stability and began adjusting his position as if getting ready to take a long shot.
“What are you doing?” Krysty asked in alarm.
“Getting ready to end this.”
“Hammerhand or Mariah?” J.B. asked.
“Mariah,” Ryan said. “Got no particular problem with Hammerhand.”
“He may have one after this,” J.B. said.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Now, everybody get ready to power out of here.”
Tears filled Krysty’s eyes. She blinked them clear. She would not look away. Is there a better way than to kill a little girl? she thought. Someone I was close to? Someone who trusted me?
If there is, why can’t I see it?
But she knew that Ryan, as hard as he could be, would never do such a thing himself unless it was a matter of life and death. She saw him inhale deeply, then release half the breath and hold it. Her own breath caught. She knew what came next.
“Up there!” Ricky cried as Ryan’s finger tightened deliberately on the blaster’s trigger.
Krysty looked up to see a red dot, bright even in the daylight, arc across the sky right over their heads.
* * *
RYAN KNEW IT had all gone to hell even before the bullet left his weapon.
The shot was easier than the one he’d taken at Hammerhand at Lone Calf to bring an end to the chances the inhabitants would hand over Mariah to him. He didn’t bother wondering how much misery and trouble everyone would have been saved had they actually just gone ahead and done so; that was passed. He had lined up the reticule, adjusted for range and wind on the girl’s chest and fired.
Even as the longblaster kicked up with recoil he saw the black cloud form instantaneously around both her and Hammerhand. She’d been practicing.
As he brought the longblaster back down with a fresh cartridge chambered he broke focus enough to look for what had excited Ricky—and alerted Mariah to the presence of danger.
“Fireblast!” He saw the red flare burning down the sky toward the near outskirts of the Blood encampment.
“Behind!” Jak called from down the slope from them.
“Cover!” Ryan ordered by reflex. He already had a good guess as to what had happened.
He spun. A mesa with steeper sides rose behind the ridge they had found for a vantage point. He knew at once that a Blood patrol had spotted them from there and fired the signal.
Lying on his back, he raised the longblaster as confused shouting broke out from the Blood camp. He swung the scope to bear on the mesa. It was slightly lower than their ridge and, by luck, had fewer rocks for cover.
A party of four warriors was hunched down. Ryan saw a lever-action longblaster in one man’s hands, a man with long unbound hair, a blue shirt and bare legs. Ryan quickly targeted him and fired.
The man jerked as dark spray flew out the back of his chest.
“Mildred, Ricky,” Ryan called, naming the two best distance shooters, “get fire on those bastards. Everybody else, form a perimeter, find the best cover you can and dig in.”
He followed his own orders. Thirty feet to his left a cluster of reddish rocks lay just shy of the ridge’s crest line. He dived into it, and laying down his blaster, began gouging at the ground with his panga.
As he did, he heard fire outgoing from the ridge, and the many-throated roar of warriors charging toward them from the massive Blood encampment.