02. Riders of the Winds (10 page)

Yeah,
Charley thought dejectedly.
If the great Boday lives to paint it. At least I don't have to worry that she's one of those artists who goes crazy. She was insane before we ever met her.

The canyon was growing dark, the shadows long, and still they hadn't come upon anything still living except for a few insects and some distant birds circling high in the ever-deepening blue sky. It was hot and quiet, so quiet that only the sounds of their own movement and the rush from the swift-flowing river broke the stillness in the land and air.

Suddenly the rocks to their right erupted with forms and fierce cries. Before either woman could even see who or what was there they were overtaken and pushed roughly to the ground. Boday gave a good struggle; as two pinned her arms she managed to twist and kick another in the groin, twist away, and start in fiercely on her attackers. Charley had no such skills and reflexes and not much strength left, either. They had her quickly pinned facedown and then her arms were roughly brought behind her and tied with some strong, tight cord, and someone else pulled on her hair to make her face come up and then slipped a noose over her head.

They had to work hard for Boday, but there were too many of them and they were too strong for her in the end, and she suffered the same fate in the end.

Charley tried to look up and see just who or what their captors were, but once she caught sight of them she didn't want to look anymore.

They were as ragtag a bunch of filth as she'd ever seen; smelly, dirty, in torn and rumpled clothing, and not a normal-looking one in the bunch. There were eight of them, all well armed and tough as nails. One was huge and hunchbacked, his face contorted, and he snorted and dribbled from his twisted lower lip. Charley instantly dubbed him the Hunchback of Notre Dame even if he didn't look much like a football player.

Another was tall, muscular, with a tremendous, flowing bright red beard and nasty, close-set eyes above a pug nose, but he walked real funny and his arms and hands—well, they weren't
normal.
Thick, blue-gray and shiny, the arms terminated in a really nasty-looking set of lobsterlike claws.

The others were no better. They had all been human once, but all now had very different and inhuman parts to them. One was a sort of cyclops with weird hands that had three thick, curved fingers like a claw machine at the fire carnival. Another had tentacles growing from his back, and still another had a face that would have looked better on a toad. In fact, after seeing them all, the hunchback looked very normal and comforting indeed.

Redbeard with the claws was obviously the leader. With both women tied and held down, he walked slowly up to them and looked each over.

"Well, now, this
is
a pretty catch, and all decorated nice and fine like, they's gift-wrapped or something. Who the hell are you, girls, and what in the name of the Nine Dark Hells are you doin' out here stark naked?"

Boday managed to look up. "Do you really think the designs are pretty? You are obviously a man of good taste to appreciate the handiwork of Boday!"

Charley groaned.

Redbeard turned to her. "And who might this Boday be?"

"She who speaks with you is Boday!" the artistic alchemist responded proudly, totally disregarding her circumstances.

Redbeard looked a bit taken aback by her attitude. "All right, Boday, so who else be you and why are you here?"

"We were flooded in a wagon train disaster, then taken by brigands who had their fun with us, then escaped to here only to be split up running from those dead men back there who stole what supplies we had. We seek our companions whom the men in black captured."

"These companions be men?"

"No, of
course
not! A young woman and two small girls."

"Weren't no females with
that
crew," Redbeard responded. "Your friends probably wound up in the clutches of that bastard crazy Duke. We got your horses, though, and your booty, and now we got you. Both of you now get up and shut up! We's goin' for a little walk. Them's good nooses on your pretty necks, now, so don't make no sudden moves or you'll strangle yourselves. Now, we don't want'a kill you or damage them pretty bodies, but Hooton, there, he's an expert at the science of the noose. A little jerk just so and he can shatter your voice boxes, and we don't need your voices. And any real trouble and he's got a way of fixin' them so you don't strangle all the way but just a little, so's you don't get so much blood to the brain. I seen 'em after a few hours of his treatment. You don't have enough sense left to remember what clothes was and you might needs some help feedin' yourself, but your bodies'll be just fine. So—shut up, do what you're told, and no tricks!"
Shit!,
Charley thought sourly.
Back into the fire again, and this time getting farther and farther from Sam. Damn! Damn! Damn! Why didn't we go to that governor? Damn you, Boday!
The horses were about a half mile farther down the trail, held a bit off the track and upwind so that they hadn't made a sound. Their own horses and the lone narga were among them, still loaded with stuff. Four more ragtag and deformed nasties held them, waiting. It seemed that Redbeard simply couldn't conceive of six uniformed men with no protection just marching in here, particularly past the Imperial Governor's turnoff. He'd been convinced that more were following behind, and he wanted to make very sure what he was up against rather than risk fleeing with the loot with soldiers in hot pursuit. Now, though, he felt his wait rewarded in a different way.

Neither Charley nor Boday was allowed to ride; Redbeard didn't trust them, even naked and tied, on the backs of their own horses. They walked along at a steady pace, trying to adjust so that those strangely tied nooses didn't have much chance to tighten up. The gang made all sorts of lewd and lustful comments about them but did not try to touch them or in fact do much of anything to them. Clearly Redbeard was an authority to be feared.

They reached a point where the river bent slightly, and two riders came forward and stopped at the water's edge, checking for something unknown. Then they rode right into the river, the horses sinking only slightly into the water, and came up on the other side with their riders not even wet.

"Now you, ladies, and don't slip," Hooton said in a low, menacing tone. "Right at this point it's right shallow with just sand and mud and small rocks there at certain times of day like now. Other times it's a killer. Just go on across."

It was an unpleasant balancing act, shallow though it was. The mud and rocks were slippery, the muck just under the surface felt just awful, and while it wasn't all that bad for Boday, tall as she was, it wasn't all that shallow for Charley at just a little over five feet tall. She felt tense, and the noose pulling at her throat all the way, and when she made it to the other side she gave a gasp of relief.

The others now followed without any trouble, and then the whole group turned not farther up but rather to the left, back the way they'd come. They went back down perhaps a thousand yards, then reached a rocky outcrop that seemed so solid that it blocked passage along that shore. A rider reached up and did something that couldn't be seen in the gloom, and the rock seemed to shift and the earth to shake a bit, and when it was done there was a narrow passage revealed in the rock itself. It wasn't wide enough for more than one horse and rider at a time, single file, and it seemed to go on for an eternity in near-total darkness.

They emerged for a moment, the lack of river noise meaning that they were now well away from the river, and the last man in the gang rode through, then stopped, and again did something that caused the same rumbling and the fissure to close with a nasty-sounding finality. It was a good way to escape if you needed to block pursuit, Charley realized. Even if you were tricked and they tried to follow, they'd be crushed along the way. Still, the mere fact that Redbeard had waited showed that they didn't want to have to rely on that trick. Ignorance on the part of their enemies that the passage even existed was far better long-term protection than just using it as a means of escape.

They went down a bit into the rocky jumble of the Kudaan landscape, hurrying a bit because of the growing darkness. Here and there they shouted some strange words and were answered by others, showing that this trail was well guarded. Charley's heart sank. Even if, somehow, she escaped this crew, how the hell would she ever get away, elude all of those guardians who knew the territory perfectly, and survive? These were dangerous men; fugitives holed up in the Wastes and living a different and primitive kind of life beyond the reach of any law. Men with no place to go, nothing to lose, and with nothing at all to hold them back.

Now, at last, a great glob of total darkness loomed ahead, and they suddenly stopped. Hooton, the toad-faced one, slid off his horse and came up to them. "Now you just walk right in front of me," he told them, "and keep your neckwear slack."

It was a tunnel of some sort—no, a cave. There was a blast of cool air coming from it, and as they entered they descended, although they couldn't see a thing. Hooton, however, could, and he kept giving them quick directions.

"Turn left. That's right. Ten paces forward, then left again. Fine. Now ahead until I tell you to stop. Now—right turn."

It went on for some time, made no easier by the fact that some of the mounted horses were ahead of them and leaving the usual horse droppings.

Within several minutes, neither Charley nor Boday had any idea of where they were or how they'd gotten there. It wasn't merely one cave, it was a network of interlocking caves going off in all directions including down, and between the darkness and the differences in the dark tunnels only one who knew exactly where he or she was and, perhaps, could see or read the hidden markings, would find their way in—or out.

Suddenly all was noise and light. It was the lights of thousands of torches rather than anything in nature, and the reverberant cacophony of great numbers of people and animals. The scene seemed to go on and on below them. Charley could see only the lights but the noise and smells were overwhelming. She realized that they had now entered some grand cave on the order of the Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns or even bigger. A giant cave, far underground, that held not tourists but a town.

This, then, was the outlaw capital, the seat of the unholy of the Kudaan Wastes. No wonder the worst could hide out here! No power could find such a place except by treachery, and the system didn't really care enough to even attempt that sort of thing anymore.

They moved now down into it, into a throng of people, animals, changelings, and creatures, the discards of Akahlar. Boday was entranced by the vision, so much so that she seemed to forget her own situation. The cave was
enormous,
and it seemed to go off in the distance a tremendous way. On the floor of it were buildings, marketplaces, bazaars, a tremendous life energy that knew no day or night; a town with few laws and few limits that was a continual now, without regard for yesterday or tomorrow.

They, however, could not explore it. When they reached a central square, Hooton turned them abruptly and led them to a squared-off building that seemed made entirely of glass that was inches thick. Two guards, huge and somewhat piglike, nodded and grunted and then gave way, and a jaillike door was unlocked and opened. Hooton then carefully removed the nooses, untied their hands, and while they were still rubbing their raw wrists they were rudely shoved inside, so that both of them landed sprawling on a hay-strewn floor. The door clanged shut behind them, and .the sounds of the great room became terribly muted.

"That swine!" Boday hissed, and managed to roll over and come to a sitting position. "Are you all right?"

Charley groaned, then managed to sit up and nod, feeling her neck. God! It
still
felt like she had a rope around it! She tried breathing hard through her mouth and tried to get hold of herself. Then and only then did she take stock of the cubicle.

It was small enough for her to see all of it, if a bit blurry, and beyond she could see the lights and activities of the city beneath the ground. It wasn't very big—maybe six feet by six feet, give or take, filled with a rotting straw floor that, when you dug down in it, led to an unpleasantly sticky cold stone floor. Over in one corner was a foul, rusted chamber pot, and in another a clay jug of water that had a bit of scum on top. Boday went over to it, frowned, stirred it with her finger, then tasted it.

"It
seems
all right," she said dubiously, then sighed. "And it is all we have." Still, she stared at it. "As an alchemist, Boday would suspect that this
_{dying
of thirst, and what difference can it make now anyway?"}

_{was
bad, barely drinkable, but it dissolved the bread enough to make it edible. The cheese wasn't so bad—all cheese smelled yucky anyway—if you just scraped some of the mold off with your nails first.}

_{Mistress, I be Shari. How may Shari serve Mistress . . . ?}

_{By the gods, they've captured one of Boolean's simulacra!}

_{most
useful! Can I have a starting bid, please?"}