The Last Guardian (12 page)

The thunder of hooves sounded from the street, and a large group of riders came hurtling into sight. Shannow opened the window to see the body of a beast being dragged in the dust behind two of the riders and a large crowd gathering. The horsemen pulled up their mounts, and Shannow was amazed to see the bloodied beast rise up on all fours and then lurch to its hind legs.

It ran, but a rope pulled it up short. Two shots exploded, and gaping wounds appeared on the creature’s back. Several more of the onlookers produced guns, and the beast was smashed from its feet. Shannow left his room and moved swiftly down the stairs. On the street beside the Traveler’s Rest was a store, outside which stood several barrels and a stack of long wooden ax or pick handles. Lifting one of them, Shannow walked down into the milling group of riders and stopped before a bearded man on a black horse. The pick handle slashed through the air to hammer into the man’s face; his body flew back over the saddle and hit the ground, raising a cloud of dust. Shannow dropped the club on the rider’s body and, taking hold of the pommel of the saddle, vaulted to the stallion’s back.

There was silence now as Shannow eased the horse past the stunned riders. He tugged on the reins, turning the stallion to face the group.

“When he awakes, point out to him the perils of stealing a man’s horse,” Shannow told them. “Make it clear to him. I will leave his saddle with the hostler.”

“He’ll kill you for this, friend,” said a young man close to him.

“I am no friend of yours, child. Nor ever will I be.”

Shannow rode on, pausing only to glance down at the dead beast. It looked almost exactly as Shir-ran had in those last days—the spreading lion’s mane, the hideously muscled shoulders. Shannow touched his heels to the stallion’s flanks and cantered down to the stables, where the hostler came out to meet him.

“I’m sorry, Meneer, but I couldn’t stop them. There were eight … ten of them. They took three other horses that weren’t theirs.”

“Who were they? The thieves?”

“They ride for Scayse,” replied the man, as if that answered everything.

Shannow dismounted and led the stallion into the stable. He stripped the saddle from him and flung it in a corner; then he groomed the horse, rubbing the lather from him and brushing the gleaming back.

“It’s a fine horse,” said the hostler, limping forward. “Must be seventeen hands. I’ll bet he runs like the wind.”

“He does. What happened to your leg?”

“Timber cracked in the mine years ago. Busted my knee. Still, it’s a damn sight better living above the ground than below. Not so much coin, but I breathe a lot easier. What was all the shooting?”

“They killed the lion they captured,” Shannow told him.

“Hell, I’d like to have seen that. Was it one of them man-demons?”

“I do not know. It ran on its hind legs.”

“Lord, what a thing to miss! There ain’t so many as there was, you know. Not since the gates vanished on the wall. We used to see them often in the spring. They killed a family near Silver Stream. Ate them all, would you believe it? Was it male or female?”

“Male,” said Shannow.

“Yep. Never seen no females. Must be beyond the wall, I reckon.”

“Does anyone ever go there?”

“Beyond the wall?” queried the hostler. “No way. Not ever. Believe me, there’s beings there to frizzle a man’s soul.”

“If no one goes there, how can you know?”

The hostler grinned. “No one goes there
now
. But five years ago there was an expedition. Only one man—of forty-two who started out—got back alive. It was him that told about the sword in the sky. And he only lived a month, what with the wounds and the gashes in his body. Then, two years ago, the gateways vanished. There were three of them, twenty feet high and as broad. Then one morning they were gone.”

“Filled in, you mean?”

“I mean
gone
! Not a trace of them. And no mark of any breaks in the wall. Lichens and plants growing over old stones like there never was no gates at all.”

She knew the problem and could see the results. Yet she was powerless to change the process … just as she had been powerless to save her son. The woman known as Chreena prowled the medi-chamber, her dark eyes angry, her fists clenched.

One small Sipstrassi Stone could change everything; one fragment with its gold veins intact could save Oshere and others like him. Little Luke would have been alive, and Shir-ran would still have been standing beside her, tall and proud.

She had searched the mountains and the valleys, had questioned the Dianae. But no one had ever seen such a stone, black as coal and yet streaked with gold, warm to the touch and soothing to the soul.

She blamed herself, for she had carried her own stone to this distant land and had used it to seal the wall—one great surge of Sipstrassi power to wipe out the gates that would have allowed man to corrupt the lands of the Dianae. And then she had made the great discovery—man
had already corrupted them … back before the Second Fall.

The people of the Dianae. The people of the DNA. The cat-people. There had been mutants and freaks in the world for hundreds of years. Chreena had been educated to believe they were the result of the poisons and toxic wastes that littered the land, but now she was beginning to see the true wickedness that was the legacy of Between. Genetic engineering had gone rogue in a hostile environment. New races were birthed; others, like the Dianae, were slowly dying.

The priests here believed that the Changes were gifts from heaven. But they were happening more frequently, with whole families showing signs of reversion.

Chreena’s anger rose. She had seen the books and the records back at the home base. Many diseases of the Between Times had been treated by producing bacterial DNA and using it in commercial production. Insulin for diabetics was one such. Food production had been boosted by inserting genes for growth into pigs and cattle—promoter genes, they had been called. But the Betweeners had gone much farther.

May you rot in hell! she thought. Suddenly she smiled. Because, of course, they
were
rotting in hell. Their disgusting world had been swept away by the power of nature, like blood washing the pus from a boil.

And yet it had not affected the core of the infection—man himself: the ultimate carnivore, the complete killer. Even now they warred among themselves, butchering and plundering.

The spell of the land was at work. Colossal radiation levels, toxic wastes in the air they breathed—all coming together to create abnormally high levels of aggression and violence.

The circle of history spun on. Already man had rediscovered guns and had risen to the level the world had known in the middle 1800s. It would not be long before
they took to the skies, before nations were formed and wars spread.

Slowly she climbed the stairs to the observatory platform. From there she could see the streets of the city and watch the people moving about their business. Farther out she could see the farmlands and the herds of cattle. And away into the distance, like a shimmering thread, the wall between worlds. She could almost hear man beating upon it, venting his rage on the ancient stones.

Chreena transferred her gaze to the south, where heavy clouds drifted over the new mountains and the Sword of God was hidden. She shivered.

A sudden storm broke in the east, and she swung to watch the lightning fork up from the ground, the dark thunderclouds swirling furiously. A cold wind screamed across the plain, and she shivered again and stepped inside.

The city would withstand the storm, as it had withstood the First Fall and the terrible fury of the risen ocean.

As she turned away, she failed to see a glimmer of blue within the storm, as if a curtain had flickered in the wind, showing clear skies amid the lowering black clouds. At the center of the blue shone the golden disk of a second sun so that, for no more than a heartbeat, two shadows were cast on the streets of the city.

12

T
HE
RIDERS
DISMOUNTED
and gathered around the fallen man. His nose was crushed, and both eyes were swelling fast; his upper lip was split and bleeding profusely. Two men lifted him, carrying him from the street to the sidewalk outside the Jolly Pilgrim.

The owner, Josiah Broome, took a bowl of fresh water and a towel and moved to join them, kneeling beside the injured man. He immersed the towel in the cool water and then folded it, placing it gently over the man’s blackened eyes.

“It was a disgrace,” he said. “I saw it. Unwarranted violence. Despicable!”

“Damn right about that,” someone agreed.

“People like him will ruin this valley even before we get a chance to build something lasting here,” said Broome.

“He stole a horse, goddammit!” exclaimed Beth McAdam, before she could stop the words. Broome looked up.

“These men were hunting a beast that could have devoured your children, and they took the first mounts they could find. All he had to do was ask the man for his horse. But no. Men like him are always the same. Violence. Death. Destruction. It follows them like a plague.”

Beth held her tongue and walked back into the eating house. She needed this job to swell the funds she had hidden in her wagon and to pay for the children to remain at the cabin school. But men like Broome annoyed her.
Sanctimonious and blinkered, they saw only what they wished to see. Beth had been in Pilgrim’s Valley for only two days, but already she knew the political structure of the settlement. These riders worked for Edric Scayse, and he was one of the three most powerful men in Pilgrim’s Valley. He owned the largest mine, two of the stores, and, with the man Mason, the Traveler’s Rest and several of the gambling houses in the east quarter. His men patrolled the tent city, extorting payment for their vigilance. Any who did not pay were guaranteed to see their wagons or their belongings lost through theft or fire. In the main Scayse’s men were bullies or former brigands.

Beth had watched the beast dragged in and shot down, and had seen Shannow recover his horse. The man who had stolen it was bruised but alive. Shannow could have asked for its return, but Beth knew the chances were the man would have refused, and almost certainly that would have led to a gun battle. Broome was a dung brain of the first order. But he was also her boss and in his own way a nice man. He believed in the nobility of man, felt that all disputes could be settled by reason and debate. She stood in the doorway and watched him tend the injured victim. Broome was tall and thin with long, straight sandy hair and a slender face dominated by large protruding blue eyes. He was not an unhandsome man, and his manner toward her had been courteous. He was a widower with no children, and Beth had scrutinized him carefully; she knew it would be wise to find a good man with a solid base so that she could ensure security for her children. But Broome could never fulfill her requirements.

The injured man regained consciousness and was helped to a table. Beth brought him a cup of Baker’s, and he sipped it.

“I’ll kill the whoreson,” he mumbled. “So help me God, I’ll kill him!”

“Don’t even think like that, Meneer Thomas,” Broome
urged. “What he did was appalling, but further violence will not eradicate it.”

The man pushed himself to his feet. “Who’s with me?” he asked. Two men joined him, but the others hung back. Thomas pulled his pistol from his belt and checked the loads. “Where’d he go?”

“He took the stallion back to the stable,” said a short lean man.

“Thanks, Jack. Well, let’s find him.”

“Please, Meneer …” began Broome, but Thomas pushed him aside. Beth eased her way back through the kitchen and out into the yard, then hitched up her long skirt and ran behind the buildings, cutting through an alleyway and onto the main street ahead of the three men. At the end of the street she saw Shannow talking to the hostler in the doorway of the stable. Quickly she crossed to him.

“They are coming for you, Shannow,” she said. “Three of them.”

He turned to her and smiled softly. “It was kind of you to think of me.”