Nature awarded some days as premiums, Cord thought: fine springtime days generally, when the clean look of fresh country was all your world; days of that sort, passed in open wilderness, were not debited against the sum of your mortal time. There was a notion: Chase territory and live forever.
This had been one of those days, and Cord had spent it riding the stage road that bisected the grassland country of central Montana. The road connected the railhead at Custer on the Yellowstone with the steamboat port at Fort Benton on the Missouri, according to the map on the wall of the Windmill Bar in Livingston. The map was tacked above the cashbox, and Cord studied it over the popping bubbles of a mug of lager beer. He was feeling impatient anyway, so the map was enough to get him restless. He wondered how that open range country lay, and who would travel it. The answers turned out to be pretty grand—and hardly anyone.
He’d seen his last itinerant ten miles back, a jug-eared boy afoot and leading a goat on a nubbly rope. The boy said, “Howdy” to Cord’s greeting and “Over yonder” to Cord’s question, pointing across the grass to the squat outline of a lopsided soddy. “Ma’s a widder woman,” the boy volunteered cheerlessly. “I am what she has got.” When Cord gave him a silver dollar, the boy frowned and showed long brown teeth with a gap between the two in front. For some reason Cord felt embarrassed. “Well,” he said. “So long.” The boy frowned at the coin and did not look up.
Now, a couple hours later as the late spring sunset faded to barely color the crests of the mountains off west and cool night came on, Cord came up through the cut that the map in the Windmill Bar called South Gap. The moon, a few days shy of full, hung from cloudless sky to cast the faint outlines of dim shadows. By the road’s side a milepost, repainted not too long before, announced that a town called Enterprise was seven miles ahead. Maybe an hour’s ride, Cord reckoned. Enterprise would be the place to pass this night.
South Gap was a long shallow saucer in foothills cut with gully-washed breaks, most of the rivulets down to a muddy trickle as the season came toward summer. Cord pulled his bay gelding up to survey the lay of the prairie, the vast land washed white in the moonlight. The roll of the Little Belt Mountains stretched off to his left, the craggier frosted peaks of the Big Snowy Mountains to his right, the two ranges curving like open arms to encircle the great bowl of range called Bliss Basin.
Somebody had given it a good name. To Cord’s mind, in which country was lately an ongoing concern, this territory in the spring season was all anybody could want, open and green and fertile. Cord squinted to see it as it had looked to the first whites to ride this sod and thought it was not so different. The buffalo were gone, but the elk would still string down to water, and deer would graze the free grass in herds of several dozen. Yet Cord envied those first lonesome men. They got to see the fresh thing.
Cord scraped a kitchen match over his thumbnail and examined his new gold pocket watch: It was coming up to nine-thirty. The watch snapped shut with satisfying precision. It was the best you could find in this end of the world, a present from his partner, Chi. She’d bought it for him out of poker winnings a few weeks back, the second watch she’d given him over the years. The first had been shattered in some old fracas. Cord could picture the broken watch staring up at him but forgot the exact circumstance and wondered if such forgetting was a sign of too much easiness in his life. He replaced the watch carefully in his vest pocket, handling it as if the case were eggshell. He suspected he was one of those people not meant to own a watch but hoped that with deliberation he could beat that particular aspect of his fate.
Nine-thirty and he was miles from bed. In the old days that would have meant nothing, but now he’d just as soon sleep between sheets and under a roof, all things being equal. He thumped the gelding and descended the sloping road toward the basin floor.
A ways ahead, thick lashings of willow below towering cottonwood marked the winding line of a meandering creek. The stage road dropped in parallel to it within another mile or so, and pretty soon the brush hemmed around and canopied the dirt track. Cord had meant to be off the trail by dark, and now that it had come on, he wished he’d been a tad more rigorous in his planning. The gelding shied back when Cord nudged him into the first reach of deep shadow, and Cord didn’t blame him. Someone else was there.
The story had been vague and likely exaggerated, and the teller was an old greasy rider who looked to be heading for line camp, leading a packhorse loaded with a summer’s grub. The old man wanted to talk, storing up conversation against the next couple months of high-country isolation, so Cord smoked a cigarette with him. The story had to do with stock rustling and vigilantism in Bliss Basin.
Mobs were in that category of dark uncontrollable threats that Cord feared, and now, in the shadows and tickled by that fear, Cord felt angry. He was no outlaw these days, and this darkening road was a public artery. Any money in his pocket was fairly earned and no one else’s. There would be a public house in this Enterprise town, Cord decided; a town with a name like that ought to have amenities. He would have a drink of bourbon and a bed with linen in a room with a fireplace.
Cord urged the horse into the tunnel of brush. He’d take dinner as well: he fancied pork chops, with the fat browned and curling at the edges, and that morning’s fresh bread with spring-cooled butter. Some dour Irishman’s red-haired daughter checked into Cord’s fantasy, serving up the meal on china plates chased with delicate blue veins. The girl had pale skin and a wise smile, and Cord was letting his mind drift toward naughty ideas and liking it when the gelding jerked up his head and spooked sideways.
Somewhere ahead horses were milling. Cord eased the gelding into the deeper shadow of the roadside and listened hard. An animal snorted wheezily and hooves tamped hard-packed dirt. More than a couple of men were talking in low hard voices.
Here was no business of his, Cord thought, no business and no trouble. He’d come on a string of roundup cowhands heading back to the wagon after some afternoon time in that town of Enterprise. They were likely getting ready to fort up in the abandoned soddy of some long-gone wolfer or road rancher.
Up ahead one of the riders laughed the kind of laugh that had more to do with another’s distress than with humor. No trouble, Cord thought again, at least none having to do with him. The problem was, though, they were between him and his pork chops. Cord stayed where he was and felt a fool.
Plenty of guns went off all at once, crackling rifles and deeper booming handguns. The muzzle flashes were angry red firefly lights up the trail. The gelding stepped backward and Cord jerked at its head with his left hand. His Colt had gotten into his right.
Up there, a voice rich and thick as tapioca shouted, “Cease fire!” But the volley of gunfire had already ended a few moments earlier, as conceitedly as it had begun. The stentorian voice called, “Sir—come out and face your judgment.”
Cord sat his horse with the Colt in his hand. The moonlight silhouetted the limbs of the cottonwood crisscrossed above him, but thick darkness showed down the length of the tunnel of branches. The thing to do here, looking at it judiciously, was turn back, make a cold camp somewhere, and pass on whatever else this night was selling. Trouble was, if he rolled out his blankets on the ground, he’d be so pissed off at the faceless bastards who buffaloed him that he wouldn’t sleep anyway. Just thinking about it now was getting him worked up. He was tired and going on up that road, and trouble belonged to the man who tried to stop him.
Cord holstered the Colt and drew his Winchester from its boot and held it ready across the fork of his saddle as he eased the gelding on up the road. Now he made out flickering flame, three or four small blazes, not a campfire but torches, moving and bobbing about. Cord climbed down off the gelding, looped the bridle reins around a clump of brush, and soft-footed along the roadside, an arm crooked up to keep branches from slapping him in the face. About fifty yards on, the road opened into a clearing, and there a wondrously odd and frightening sight confronted him.
Cord stared at the mounted band, and a quick chill washed through his marrow. He knew they were men but did not know what sort and so thought of headless specters and was frightened despite himself. After a moment, though, he made out what he was looking at. Instead of a hat, each man wore a hood of loosely draped black cloth, fastened around the forehead with a leather thong and cut with eyeholes. Each was draped in a long gray duster, like some Jayhawker. There were near to a dozen, some horseback, a couple afoot. Four carried flaming pitch-knot firebrands.
Then Cord saw that one man was hoodless and sat distinct from the others. Heavy-boned and stocky, he rode a tall wide palomino horse. His shoulders were broad and his features thick-ridged, and dense dark hair flowed over his shoulders in wavy tangles. A wide black leather belt was cinched over the blue-serge-and-brass-button uniform jacket of a Union captain. A holster depended from one side of the belt, home to a Colt single-action New Army revolver, and opposite hung an officer’s scabbard. The big man held a long heavy saber aloft, where the torchlight drew flashing reflection from its wide blade.
Cord crouched on one knee at the edge of the clearing, holding the rifle and wondering what he figured to do with it. Across the opening, beyond a hard-packed dirt yard, was a plank-and-sod cabin set by a little gravel-bar rill in the creek. This was a rough and temporary sort of camp, without sign of husbandry or accommodation—no kitchen garden, chickens, wellhead, or wash-line, only a rude post-and-pole corral close by the cabin, in one of its corners a crude little shed open on two sides, a storage shelter for a few sacks of grain or a wagonload of hay. Six haltered horses ran loose in the corral.
“Damn you!” the big man shouted, a tremolo rippling along the base of his huge voice. Black powder smoke drifted in the night, and the rough-plank door of the soddy was splintered in the middle and half ripped from its leather hinges by the volley of gunfire. “May God damn you for a thief!”
Two of the hooded men stood before the crippled door, roughly gripping either arm of a third man. This one had the short neat figure of a jockey; he was a tight little fellow carrying no extra flesh at all. This man wore a baggy yellowish union suit. His feet were bare, his dirty hair bushy and uncombed, and the weeks’ worth of whiskery stubble decorating his cheeks was shot with gray.
“Looks like you’re fixing to do the job for Him,” the little man said calmly.
Cord cast back into the past and came up with a name: Wilmer Blewin, known as Wee Bill. Cord was unsurprised to recognize the little man: The outlaw world was like a village, populated by no more than a few hundred people, and when you had lived in it as long as Cord had, you came to know your fellow townsfolk. Blewin was more of a visitor than a permanent resident, a now-and-again burglar and once-in-a-while robber who filled out his time with some legitimate work, mostly having to do with the stock-growing industry.
Then Cord remembered another man, Wee Bill’s old partner, and scowled in the darkness, remembering as well some old personal trouble. Cord forgot the partner’s name, or perhaps chose not to recollect. By then the man with the saber was shouting out another curse, and Cord came back: There was plenty enough trouble here and now.
Cord had never heard of Wee Bill doing any man killing, nor any other hanging crime. But here in this place, Cord smelled hanging’s imminence.
The daft-looking old soldier with the saber jabbed his weapon at Wee Bill. He roared again, roared like a bear might, for the satisfaction of making the noise. It seemed to calm him for a moment, and he lowered the saber.
“Examine those horses,” he growled, staring malediction at Wee Bill Blewin.
Here were the greasy cowhand’s phantom night riders, in the flesh and ready for lynching. Cord stood there in the shadows tasting the rankness of foolish violence.
A man got down and shoved through the narrow gate into the corral, stepping in among the horses. “They’re branded,” he announced. “Every damned one of them.” He ran his hand over a flank. “Some kind of Circle C, looks like.”
“Does anyone know it?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Another man rode forward. “We know what we’re about.”
Could be Wee Bill had been doing some horse stealing somewhere, but Cord was not much taken with the idea of instant justice, especially in the hands of these mobsters. He knew he could not just go on crouching there in the night chill with his legs cramping up, waiting for the hand of God to intercede, and searched for ideas. He was shifting his weight when someone touched his back with a rifle barrel.
Cord froze, but the barrel jabbed painfully into his kidney anyway. “Been watching you since you stopped on the road, looking this way and that, deciding.” Cord felt breath on the back of his neck. “You made a bad choice.”
Cord put his rifle on the ground and raised his hands. The Winchester snaked back and away. “Now we stand up,” the man behind him said. When he did, Cord caught a glimpse of the man’s black hood. A moment later, Cord’s Colt ceased to make weight on his right hip.
Another hooded man rode up the track leading Cord’s horse and another. The man behind Cord tossed the Winchester up to his buddy, who leaned back and slipped it into its scabbard.
“Captain Bliss!” The man jabbed Cord again, pushing him toward the clearing.
The big man with the saber turned and frowned in the light of the burning flares.
“Take it easy with that goddamn rifle,” Cord said.
This bought him a little snap of a pistol barrel against the back of his head, a sharp hard knock designed for pain but not to put him down. “How’s that again?” The man behind him sneered.
Captain Bliss watched them come into the clearing. Wee Bill Blewin grinned at Cord, nodded, and said, “I’ll be dipped.”
“Your partner returns,” Bliss announced with satisfaction.
“He ain’t no pard of mind,” Wee Bill said neutrally.
“An acquaintance, perhaps,” Bliss said. “A colleague.”
This was starting to move in dangerous directions, Cord thought. Bliss stared at him. “I Know you,” he said.
“No, you don’t.”
“My man,” Bliss said. “As there is no duly sanctioned law in this basin, it falls to those who claim the country as their own to promote order. I do what I must for peace.”
“You got odd ideas about what constitutes peace,” Cord said.
“Rustling finds no haven here.” Bliss peered down at him. “Nor does outlawry.” He smiled with satisfaction. “I have arranged with the territorial attorney in Helena to send all Wanted posters to my attention. Your face has graced several, Mr. Cord.”
“There’s a break for us.” The right sleeve of one man’s duster was empty and pinned up at the shoulder. “Once we hang him, we can sleep easy, knowing we done the law a good turn.”
“Those posters are from another time,” Cord said. “I’m not wanted for a damned thing.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Getting annoyed,” Cord snapped. “You give some thought to what you are about. They hang murderers in this territory. There is law—”
“I am the law,” Bliss barked. “I read its letter and invoke its spirit. I rule in this basin.”
“Sure enough,” the man behind Cord said. “His Highness the Emperor Bliss.”
“Shut up,” Bliss ordered. He shook his head. “Do nothing, sir,” he said to Cord. “We will see to you after our primary business.” Bliss aimed the saber at Wee Bill Blewin. “You, sir, are a rustler.”
“Says you,” Wee Bill answered with fair calmness. He was showing some sand, dragged out in the night and facing death in his underwear. He was slow to surrender his dignity; in this coolness Cord read innocence.
“Do you claim to own these horses?” Bliss demanded. “I will see your proof.”
Wee Bill spat in the dirt. “That so?” He glanced over at Cord and winked. Cord drew quick breath against the gun barrel hard in his back.
“You rustled them.”
“No,” Wee Bill said, looking Bliss right in the eye. Bliss returned a look hard as blade steel.
“You are determined to murder me dead,” Wee Bill said. “Nothing I can say nor do will change that.”
“You got that part reckoned right.” The speaker, astride a black horse, was disguised as the others in the night rider’s uniform of hood and duster, but he stood out for his size: his bulky mass was nearly a match for Bliss’s. He rode a horse big enough for him, with three white-stockinged feet. Cord noted his boots—he’d seen the like before: of heavy stiffened black leather, with big brass buckles on the saddle straps and blocked-off toes that were likely lined with sheet steel. These were fighting boots, designed to give the wearer the edge soon as the brawling started, and to inflict maximum bone-breaking damage as it progressed.
Bliss leaned in the saddle and said something in a low deep voice to the man in the fighting boots. The man laughed. Bliss jerked angrily away from him, shook his head. The other man laughed again and twisted around in the saddle to look over Cord. Behind the hood’s peepholes, the man’s eyes sparkled in the torchlight; he looked like something carved for Halloween, and Cord thought of the Headless Horseman in the boys’ tale.
The man at Cord’s back said, “Guess how you end up?” Cord started. He had not thought it through that far, had not credited the perverse notion that a nighttime ride could lead to the end of a rope. But they figured him for Wee Bill’s partner—or not, maybe only a passing rider who’d already seen too much to be left alive … it came to the same thing. The darkness of real anger began to fall over Cord’s eyes. Jesus Christ—it was too pointless: hung dead for bad timing …
“Hey now,” Cord said.
Bliss pulled his horse back, stared down at Cord. “Bind him,” Bliss said.
The rifle barrel stayed hard into Cord’s back while someone tied his wrists with a bit of rope, jerking the knots tight. Cord’s eyes watered.
“I told you to be still, sir.” But a faint tinge of regret had crept into Bliss’s tone.
Cord’s captor said, “Let’s go take in the show,” in Cord’s right ear. The gun came away from Cord’s back, but then the man jerked up hard on his bound wrists, pushing Cord forward and levering pain from his shoulder joints.
Bliss had forgotten him. He stared down at Wee Bill Blewin from a great calm distance. “Now sir, is the time to speak in your defense.”
Wee Bill worried at his lower lip with his teeth, as if considering how to tell it. “Them horses ...”
“Yes?”
“You hear of Albert Canaday?” Wee Bill asked. “Runs maybe eight hundred head of cows and horses near Buffalo, Wyoming?”
“No sir,” Bliss rumbled. His voice, when calm, sounded like a storm beyond a far mountain range.
“This Canaday has sold them horses to a Rocky Boy Indian, name of Petey Greentree, up on Milk River. Me and my partner is hired to trail them up there.”
Bliss cocked his head toward Cord and kept his eye on Wee Bill. “This man,” he declared.
Wee Bill looked around. “Anyone got a smoke?” he asked.
“Where is your partner?” Bliss demanded.
“Went into town.”
“What the hell?” the man in the square-toed boots growled. “We come here to do business or to powwow?”
Bliss said to Wee Bill, “You can produce a bill of sale?”
For the first time, uncertainty colored the little man’s features. “My partner’s got it.”
Bliss’s bushy dark eyebrows furrowed in a deep V, but the rest of the men burst into laughter. Wee Bill smiled as if in on the joke. “You do mean to string me,” he said softly.
“Save yourself.”
Wee Bill snorted.
“Name your partner—if he exists.”
Wee Bill seemed to consider the offer. “I guess I won’t,” he said.
“We shall do what we came for,” Bliss announced.
“I figured,” Wee Bill said, almost amiably, “starting about when you blew my door in and rousted me out of bed.” He looked around at the hooded men. “Wish there’d been a little more warning, give me time to pull on my britches at least.”
“Proceed,” Bliss called out.
“Anyway,” Wee Bill said, “soon as it begun, I could see clear through to the end.” He reflected. “Though I will say that knowing how it comes out don’t make it easier to live through.”
But Bliss had backed his horse away, and no one was listening to Wee Bill now except for Cord.
“You and you.” The man in the fighting boots picked out two men. “See if there is anything we can use in that cabin.” He looked around at the others. “You-all know what to do.”
The night riders moved with concert and precision now, as if they had drilled at the payoff to this drama or played it out enough before to have it down pat. Two men rode around to the side of the corral, bent in the saddle, and worked one of the fence rails loose from either end. Raising it over their heads, they propped it across the six-foot space between the cabin’s flat roof and the top of the wall of the open-sided feed shed. It formed a crossbeam maybe eight feet above the dirt yard.
Two men came out of the cabin: one carried a lantern, the other a tin can of coal oil.
“No!” Bliss said. “Do you wish to burn down this basin?”
“Just this rustlers’ roost,” the man in the fighting boots said. “Look around.” The soddy was surrounded by bare yard on every side. “This ain’t grass-fire weather anyway,” he went on. Before Bliss could object further, he barked orders: “Couple of you get them horses out and down the road apiece. We don’t want them spooking on us.”
A hangman’s noose had already been fashioned in the thick hemp rope that another man flung over the rail. He took several turns of the loose end around his saddle horn, backed his horse so the loop hung about head-level off the ground. Across the corral, mounted men got the last of the horses out and moved them down the dirt track, careful to keep them well away from the torch fire.
The men flanking Wee Bill had his little wrists tied up tight and were hustling him over beneath the beam. No one made jokes now or spoke at all as a man settled the rope over Wee Bill’s head and around his neck, jerked ragged stray strands of his hair out of the way, slipped the knot up tight under his right ear. The night riders had come to see the life choked out of a man while he hung kicking like a frog, and now it was about to happen. The hangman backed his horse another step to make the rope taut and pulled Wee Bill erect but not quite off the ground. The mob watched in awed silence, fascinated at the fragility of life and their power to stop it cold, easy as smashing a watch with a hammer. Faces shined brightly in the irregular light, impassioned at the forbidden sight of death, and relieved: It was not them. The little man’s mortality was not theirs, so from his death they drew some dark, half-formed, perverse reassurance of life. They were of that sort.
Cord felt sick.
Wee Bill rose on his toes to take the pressure off the rope.
“Wait one minute.” Cord’s voice sounded tight, as if the rope girded his own throat. He spoke louder. “One goddamned minute.”
Someone snickered, and someone else said, “Getting ready to piss his pants,” but for the moment they were watching him. Bliss frowned with distaste, raised his saber high over his head. “Prepare to carry out justice,” he ordered, and the moment was broken.
“You are in one hell of a hurry to murder,” Cord said desperately.
The man with the kerosene began splashing it over the wood facade of the soddy, tossed what was left onto the shed.
“Lock him up,” Cord pressed. “Check his story, find this Canaday ...”
“There is no Canaday.” Bliss’s fervor was rising, and Cord felt that at this moment all of this business tottered on an edge, below which lay abyss. “There is no bill of sale. There is only this rustler, his crime and his condemnation, and God’s mercy on his soul.”
But Wee Bill had awakened to this last slim chance of salvation. “What he said.” He jutted his chin in Cord’s direction. “There are ways you could learn if I am smoking you.”
“We came for hanging,” the man in the fighting boots insisted.
“Listen.” Now, finally, Wee Bill was pleading.
“Do him.” There was threat and command in the voice of the man in the fighting boots, and Bliss heard it and the message it conveyed: He could exercise his authority or have it seized. Bliss stared back from under his thick eyebrows and brought the saber down in a broad sweep.
The hangman jerked hard on his reins and his horse raised up its head, snorted, and abruptly backed away several surprised steps. Wee Bill was jerked off the ground so quickly and violently his head banged against the beam. The hangman held his horse and Wee Bill’s weight fell against the rope’s tension. That did it: his neck snapped, and he was hanged.
The hangman walked his horse forward, and Wee Bill’s corpse collapsed liquidly to the dirt. A rich stink rose from him. Someone worked the rope from his neck. A bit of blood flowed between Wee Bill’s lips. Another night rider was crouched beside him; when he rose and stepped away, Cord saw the placard pinned to the front of Wee Bill’s union suit: HORSE THIEF.
“Fire ’em up?” One of the torch men looked around and blinked, the first violation of the silence that had descended on the clearing.
“Not just yet.” It was the man in the fighting boots, and he was looking at Cord. Bliss stared fervently at the body and did not seem to hear.
“Your turn,” the man behind Cord said, and pushed him forward.
Bliss jerked his head up. There was possession and ardor in his dark coarse face, and something that could have been madness. “Now then sir,” he said, and closed his mouth, as if he had lost the thread.
“Forget that shit,” the man in fighting boots said. “We got to string him, whatever.”
“Is that so?” Bliss said dangerously.
Cord listened to them talk about murdering him and tried to marshal his thoughts into a search party for solutions. He had faced plenty enough deadly situations and walked away whole, mostly because he kept his head and did not give up, partly because he’d had some luck. But right now no plan came to mind because none existed, and luck had gone south at the last fork.
“Listen close, old man,” the man in the fighting boots said. “Figure out whose balls get squeezed if we let this hombre live. Whose name does he know, whose name and whose face?” He laughed. “How do you like it, Captain Mallory Bliss?”
“You cur,” Bliss said.
“Sure,” the other man said amiably.
Cord heard agreement in the murmurs of the other men. “We already hung four of these bastards this week,” one said. “Another ain’t gonna hurt.”
“We finish up,” the man with the lantern said, “then get outside a drink of whiskey.”
One good idea, Cord thought desperately. There was a path out of this madness, and all he need do was discover one good idea for finding it. Hands prodded at him and walked him forward and got the coarse stiff rope over his ears. As it passed before his eyes, Cord thought he saw where one turn of the hemp was wet and dark with Wee Bill’s blood. It settled around his neck, the knot tight against his jugular.
Cord saw Bliss, staring back at him up there horseback, his dark eyes blank and bottomless. To one side, a man whirled the lantern around his head, whooped, and flung it into the soddy door. The lamp disintegrated in an explosion of glass and a splash of liquid flame that washed the front of the cabin. A rider threw his torch into the old dry hay on the floor of the shed. Fire climbed its wall.
The hangman stepped his horse back. Cord tensed the muscles in his neck, tried to make them hard as iron against the crushing pressure. Strands of the rope prickled his flesh like needles. Above him, the fires had reached either end of the beam over which the rope was dangling. The insistent pull lifted Cord’s bootheels from the hard-packed dirt. He stumbled, and the rope held him upright and dug into the softness beneath his chin.
A horse squealed at the fire and pawed the ground, kicking up gravel. Cord felt bits of it against his pants leg. The hangman pulled his horse back and Cord stood on toe tips, twisting at the rope’s end. The fire enveloped the walls to either side, seared at him, toasting his skin red. Above, flames walked along the beam to a meeting where the rope hung. The hangman laughed, and the rope jerked sharply.
Cord’s windpipe closed up, and he was lifted part of the way clear of the ground, and then he was hanging free and could not breathe at all. He swung in the air and heard the fire crackling and men calling out and horses blowing, all against the roar of blood pounding and rushing in his ears.
The blood had colored his vision as well, or perhaps it was the fire, but when Cord glimpsed Bliss, it was through a crimson veil. Involuntarily, Cord swung backward at the rope’s end. Bliss jerked away from another man, slashed wildly with the saber at Cord. The blade swept past Cord’s eyes, flashing blood-red in the firelight, and came around again backhand to meet Cord’s body as he swung forward.
Someone cursed. The blade passed over Cord’s head and the rope jerked hard. He saw men struggling above him, saw the saber’s blade cross his field of vision another time; the rope twanged once more and let him down. Cord fell, crumpled hard to the ground; loose rope puddled atop him.
Still he could not breathe; the noose was vise-tight around his windpipe, and he could not draw air past it or get his hands out from behind to loosen the rope’s coil. Sweat burned his eyes. It was like drowning in lava …
Above Cord, the fire-weakened beam crackled and tore. He looked through the sweat, and fire was raining down in his face. He tried to roll free but could move hardly at all, so the flames came down all around him and very close, enveloping him in their scorching heat. He felt burning pain but dimly, dully because numbness was taking over, starting at his closed throat and racing everywhere through his body.
Cord closed his eyes. For just a moment he saw red fire still, but then it winked out and was replaced by a long tunnel of cool blackness. Cord lunged forward and escaped into it.