But then again, mebbe he didn’t. The looks on the four faces—or the three who
had
faces, or enough to make anything of—left no doubt the rending and the tearing and the flaying and the eating had taken place while they were still alive. The stink of rotting meat was thicker than the buzzing fly-clouds that surrounded the tortured chills.
At her other elbow Angus said, “They made the mistake
of complaining too loudly about being worked to death digging scavvy out of the cave-in to make Mathus Conn a richer man,” he said. “Some of Potar’s snitches heard, and Conn decided to make examples.”
“Conn loves to make examples,” Alfie said, straightening and wiping the back of his mouth with his hand. His tone was almost normal. Wymie guessed he was trying to act as if the vomiting episode had never happened. “First one to get that treatment was Henry Harkens.”
“He questioned Conn one too many times,” Angus said. As the hotheaded Alfie had taken Mance’s place protecting her, Angus had taken over as chief adviser for Dorden Fitzyoo. That smelly old bag of wind and farts Vin Bertolli didn’t count, even though Wymie was still sad he’d died. “He always was a loudmouth.”
Conn had moved his personal tent and those of Potar, Frank and a couple of this other—Wymie didn’t want to think “chief toadies,” but couldn’t quite stop herself—progressively farther away from the main camp as his army grew, and closer to the dig site where the outlanders had gone to ground. The crosses had been pounded into the earth beside the path between the encampments, on the outskirts of the larger one.
“I heard that Conn had started crucifyin’ the outlander coldhearts’ accomplices and leaving them for the others to eat,” Wymie said. “I never saw it before.”
Maintain, she told herself. You owe Blinda that. Just hold it together. Do what you came to do. You didn’t know these people. Or—not double well, anyway. They weren’t your blood.
“Conn never says it’s for talkin’ back to him,” Alfie said, “but so far it always seems to be the ones who do that get ratted out for collaboration.”
He shook his head. “Wymie, you need to take back command. Conn’s dirty. No more than a stoneheart himself!”
“It might prove more easily said than done,” Angus said.
It was Wymie’s turn to shake her head, more emphatically than Alfie had, and with a different meaning to it.
“I don’t want power,” she said. “I just want justice for poor murdered Blinda, is all.”
“You really think you can talk Conn into changin’ course?” Angus asked.
“I don’t rightly know, but it’s what I come here intendin’ to do.”
“But why would he listen to you?”
Alfie growled low in his throat. Wymie waved him off with a quick hand gesture. Angus had a point, she knew. Conn had taken completely over right away, and nowadays seemed intent on following his own designs. It was exactly what she meant to talk to him about.
At last she tore her eyes away from the scene of frozen suffering. She had punished herself enough. She didn’t even know what for. Only that she had had to.
She gave her two companions a smile. “And while I don’t
want
to be in charge of this shootin’ match,” she said, “I reckon a power of people’d feel double relieved to see me do so. And mebbe that gives me leverage.”
* * *
“I
SMELL SULFUR
,” Ricky said, at just about the same time Doc stated, “By the Three Kennedys—brimstone!”
“Hold up,” Ryan commanded, raising his hand for emphasis. “We don’t yet know if there’s danger. Jak, come with me.” He headed toward the cave mouth.
“Air warmer,” Jak announced, still hunkered like a cautious animal by the hole.
Ryan felt the truth of that on his face as he came up to where the albino squatted. The sulfur stench was clearly perceptible.
“Doc,” Ryan said, making a summoning gesture with two fingers of his right hand and not looking back. He could see the characteristic glows from down the passageway, which descended more steeply than any they’d traversed so far, that showed the coamer workers had been busy with their baskets of glow-moss.
“They must have whole huge farms devoted to that stuff,” he muttered. “And how the hell they keep the bastard stuff charged is a mystery to me.”
“It is likely by exposing it to sunlight that spills into sinkholes and cracks that lead to the surface,” Doc said, approaching Ryan.
Ryan cocked a brow at him. “You started reading my mind, Doc? Wouldn’t think you could’ve held back a mutie trait from us for all these years.”
The old man smiled wanly. “Simple deduction. We are all curious about the moss. I could see traces of its illumination from below as I approached. And inasmuch as we know they farm those singularly unappetizing giant-insect larvae for food, your muttering made it abundantly obvious what was on your mind.”
“Ace,” Ryan said, with an open grin. “So either I’m transparent, or we should start calling you Sherlock. I read stories about him when I was a kid.”
“I cannot claim such acute powers of observation, I am afraid.” He frowned in concentration as he sniffed at the air, his nostrils flaring. “It is indeed a strong sulfurous odor that emanates from the tunnel.”
“Does the cave run through some kind of deposit, you think?”
Doc gingerly touched the wall by the opening, then slid his hand around the rippled yet glossy surface into the passageway.
“It is not just the air that is warmer,” he said. “The stone itself is perceptibly warm to the touch here. More so than any we have encountered before.”
He took his hand away and looked at Ryan. “It appears clear to me that we are near a magma tube.”
“Magma?” Ricky asked, joining them. The others had apparently decided that, if the unknown monster that had the cannie queen and her awful children so upset was about to spring out of the tunnel and eat their faces, it had not just Ryan but Jak fooled. Ryan hadn’t specifically rescinded his order to halt to anyone but Doc, but it was clear this wasn’t one of those situations where absolute obedience was called for. “Isn’t that like lava?”
“Lava’s what you call magma that’s come out of a volcano,” Mildred said. “What? I read a book, too, you know.”
“How likely is it to bust out on us?” asked the ever-practical J.B.
Doc shrugged. “It has not so far. Of course, much depends on whether its presence is a recent development.”
Ryan’s ears perked up. He could hear the doubt and worry creep into Doc’s voice as he thought aloud.
“Here, guys,” Ricky said. “Listen to this. ‘Unfortunately problems have arisen with our power supply. Owing to ill-advised and irrational allocation of all the rumored fusion-power generators to other Totality Concept projects, we are forced to make do with geothermal energy extractors as our primary power source. And for
some unknown reason that frightful harridan McComb insists on hogging more than her share for her bizarre glass tubes and vat farms.’”
He looked up from the diary. “Do you want me to see if there’s more about the lava? Er, magma?”
“We get the gist,” Ryan said. “So, not recent.”
“Well, in geological terms—” Doc began.
Ryan waved him to silence. “Yeah. In geological terms the dinosaurs were recent.”
“But we’ve—”
“There’s been magma around since sometime before the Big Nuke. That’s enough to reassure me we’re not about to get a sudden bath in it or anything.”
“So do we continue down, lover?” Krysty asked.
“The operative word being
down
,” Ryan said. “Sure. It still seems our best shot to find this thing. So off we go.”
Mildred hung back. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she said.
“If you haven’t had a bad feeling about
everything
since you woke out of cryosleep,” Ryan said, walking down the slope without looking back, “you haven’t been paying attention.”
* * *
“W
YMIE
!” M
ATHUS
C
ONN
exclaimed, rising from his folding chair outside his command tent. “What a pleasant surprise to see you.”
With an effort, he winched his face into a smile and stepped forward with hand extended as Wymie stepped into the yellow circle of campfire light. Angus, her right-hand man, and Alfie, her sec boss in all but name, followed a pace behind.
Conn didn’t need to take his eyes off Wymie’s wary blue ones to know that as soon as they entered the light
some of Potar Baggart’s most trusted sec men had silently stepped in to block the way behind them. They completed the circle that ringed Conn’s headquarters.
Potar himself stood a bit to one side, gigantic arms crossed over his ox-like chest. His face showed an expression of smug contempt. But Conn doubted there was anything there to make the uninvited, but not wholly unexpected, guests wary. He usually looked like that, since becoming Conn’s sec boss.
Frank Ramakrishnan was not present. When one of Potar’s spies reported that Wymie was on her way through the camp to see him, Conn had sent him into the big camp on an invited errand to check the stores of supplies extorted from the surrounding countryside. Only Conn and his sec men remained.
She stopped. Her mouth and brows were set in lines of grim disapproval.
“You won’t find it so pleasant when you hear what I’ve come to say, I reckon, Mr. Conn,” she said.
Around the camp fireflies frolicked, crickets sang. Somewhere a nightjar called. As if in reply came the bass-fiddle sawing croak of a bullfrog from the bottoms nearby.
“I’m all ears.”
“To start, I passed by the latest poor souls you tacked up outside the camp. The cannies had been at them. Ate them alive.”
He shrugged elaborately. “Some might call that justice playin’ out. They were collaboratin’ with your sister’s killers, after all. So what could possibly be more appropriate that their own former friends puttin’ an end to them?”
“It looks more like puttin’ on a cruel show to make
people think you’re makin’ progress,” she said. “And to keep the ones as don’t in line. But you’re no closer to runnin’ down those coldheart taints than you were when you were standin’ back behind your bar, are you?”
“At least we’re draining the swamp,” he said, forcing his tone to stay level and his face affable. It was good he had plenty of practice in those things from running a gaudy. “You yourself acknowledge the outlanders who murdered your sister had help. Is it so surprising, really, that some of that help came from known malcontents?”
“How do you know they were guilty?”
He allowed himself the luxury of a quick smirk. “Privileged information,” he said. “Rest assured, my dear—they were observed having dealin’s with the coldhearts’ coamer allies.”
“See?” she flared. Her eyes seemed to become self-luminous with growing rage. Though he was far from weak nor incapable himself, he was glad to have Potar nearby. Wymie was as strong as an elk for all her beauty, and had never had the tightest grip on her temper. “There’s that monkey talk again, even coming from your own lips, Mathus Conn! Our real enemies are these outlanders you let slip through your grip. Not even their traitor allies. And least of all a bunch of made-up grave-robbin’ boogeymen!”
Potar made a sound low in his thick throat like a volcano getting ready to cut one. “Show more respect to Mr. Conn.”
“There, there, Potar,” Conn said. “Let Wymie speak her mind.”
“We’re getting off-course,” she said. “Sure, you whipped the bunch I scraped together into line. And you’ve made ’em grow by leaps and bounds, and a
power of good on you. But they seem to be turnin’ more and more into your personal, private army, day by day. There’s even talk you’re fixin’ to lead them off to war on the Corners, just for failin’ to join up under you!”
“Well, wasn’t it you, yourself, who said that those who weren’t with us were against us? I resisted that at first, as you know. But I came around to your view. So now we need to make others do so as well, until we’ve rooted out this evil from all the Pennyrile.”
“While vengeance—
justice
—for my murdered baby sister just seems to keep gettin’ further and further away.”
He spread his hands, palms up. “What would you have me do?”
“You need to take all your high-and-mighty army,” she said, leaning forward and saying the words with a fury that surprised him despite her evident anger, “and not send it gallivantin’ off to the west, nor the east, nor even the south. You need to send them right straight down into that hole in the ground, and tell them not to come out until they bring back the coldhearts who killed Blinda and lay them at your feet!”
He sighed theatrically. “But we’ve moved beyond that now, Wymie. Don’t you see? Your sister’s death was regrettable, sure, but by now, just one out of many. You need to step back and look at the bigger pictu—”
She drew herself up to her full, imposing height, but with her flamboyantly black-haired head lowered like an angry bull’s.
“Did you just say my sister’s death didn’t mean nothin’?”
“Well, to you personally, of course it did. And to many of your followers. But in the greater scope of events that
have overtaken our homeland, a single death just doesn’t have much meanin’, after all.”
With a single tearing scream of, “You
bastard
!” she launched herself at him. So furious was her onslaught that Conn feared he would be battered to the ground before his security team could respond.
But while Potar Baggart was built like a mountain, he could move like the wind. At least in short spurts. Even as she got close enough to slam him in the head with her powerful fists, Potar whipped up next to her, and flung her aside with an even more powerful blow to the side of her head.
Angus and Alfie called out in outrage. Alfie flung himself forward, ignoring the Remington cap-and-ball revolver stuck through his belt to reach for the vastly larger Potar with both hands. At least a touch cooler-headed, Angus flashed out his own Ruger Old Army.
Blaster shots cracked from the darkness.
“Take five, everybody,” Ryan said.
With relief, Ricky slipped his pack and longblaster off his shoulder and lowered them to the mostly level stretch of cavern floor. A moment later he lowered his butt alongside them. The stone felt smooth and cool through his jeans. He recognized by now that the path had been made, or at least improved, by the patient, unspeaking, incessant labor of the coamer worker-drones.