"Find them for me, Sheriff. I don't like sitting here with my thumb up my ass and a blindfold on."
"Will do, boss," Bauer said cheerfully, and left in his turn.
Renfrew stood for long moments looking at his map, and then traced a thick finger down from Mount Angel, through the Waldo Hills and over the Santiam, past the ruins of Lebanon and down to Sutterdown and past it to the Mackenzie clachan at Dun Juniper. Somewhere out there the First Levy of Clan Mackenzie were hovering. Somehow he didn't think they were just waiting to react to what he did. Which meant they were planning something themselves, the dirty dogs:
"Not thinking of going further south, my lord?" Sir Buzz Akers asked him, handing him a blue plastic plate heaped from the buffet. "Heading for Dun Juniper, on the hope that they'd come out and fight us if we attacked their holy place?"
Renfrew started slightly. "With an open left flank all the way from Molalla to here, sixty miles as the crow flies and half again as much on foot? Christ, no!" he said.
Then he smiled unwillingly as he realized his younger vassal was teasing him out of his brooding mood, took the plate, ate a spring roll and forked up a mouthful of potato salad. When he'd swallowed, he said: "We should be back up around Mount Angel, doing one thing at a time. It'd take a while, but we could do it, nice and safe, and our good Pope Leo could send the wicked abbot to the stake, he does love a nice cheerful blaze at an auto-da-f. Then we could move on the Mackenzies with Mount Angel as a base of operations, not a hoe handle stuck up our collective assholes."
Sir Buzz looked at him oddly. "Do you think this campaign is in danger of failure, my lord?" he asked.
"Hmm? Oh, no, we'll win all right, there's not much doubt of that. We outnumber them so heavily we can afford to make mistakes, and they can't. I just don't want it to cost us more than it has to. That's why we should have taken Mount Angel first. Then I'd have four thousand men here, and we'd be able to leave plenty west of the river to make sure the Bearkillers didn't interfere, as well. Alexi uses his brains instead of just his balls and his fists like that idiot son of his, but I'd be happier if he had more troops, too."
He pointed his white plastic fork at the symbol on the map that represented
Dun Juniper, less than a day's march away to the southeast, even going around the spurs of hill which thrust out into the flat valley; that would be even nastier to take than Sutterdown, although not as bad as Mount Angel. From the descriptions the terrain would be a nightmare for a large force, and ideal for the sort of sneaking-through-the-trees business the kilties delighted in.
"Besides," he went on thoughtfully, prodding at the map, "I don't think Juniper Mackenzie is home right now."
Near Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
Dennis Martin Mackenzie stopped with a wheezing groan and shouldered his way through the circle of watchers, his long war ax in his hand. The three-mile run from Dun Juniper had left him purple-faced; he was a heavy-built man, and his usual trades of brewing and carpentry and leatherworking didn't do much for his cross-country ability. But that wasn't what made him feel as if his heart was squeezing itself up through his lungs. He recognized the smell of blood- a great deal of it, like iron and salt and copper, and the other unpleasant scents of death. Two horses down, and "Oh, Hell," he said, falling into old habits. Then: "Lords of the Watchtow-ers of the West."
Aoife lay with her head on Liath's chest; from the blood trail, she'd crawled there, though it was hard to imagine anyone having the strength to do so, with those wounds. A man lay not far away with his face cut open, and another with a spear standing up from his chest. The pale features of the dead looked very white in the dusk, but the blood was nearly black.
Poor kids. Too damn young – He'd seen a world die in the Change and its aftermath, but this was far too personal-he'd watched these two grow from childhood. A rising babble of talk cut across his thoughts.
"Quiet!" he said. "In fact, why don't the rest of you folks get back to the Dun? We're going to need some space here and we don't want the traces all trampled over. Jack, Burach, stay up at the edge of the woods and turn people back, would you? And send for a cart."
Most of the bystanders left. His eyes took in the scene and he stooped to examine the bodies; someone handed him a lantern, and he turned up the flame. That gave brighter light, but it made the space under the tall black walnut into a cave of light in a great, dim reach. Leaves rustled above him, turned ruddy by the flame.
The crossbow bolt that had killed Liath was pre-Change, the shaft made of some light metal; so was the one sunk behind the ear of Aoife's horse, lodged immovably in bone. There were three more bolts in the other horse's chest and throat, and another standing three inches deep in the dense hardwood of the walnut tree, at about head height. There was no sense in trying to get that out; instead he gripped one that was sunk in the horse's breast by the inch of wood still showing and withdrew it, the pinch of his powerful hand and thick-muscled arm pulling inexorably. It was modern, lathe-turned from dense ash-wood, the head a simple four-sided steel pyramid designed to pierce armor, and the vanes cut from salvaged plastic-credit cards, Visa, to be precise. "Protectorate issue," he said, swallowing a curse.
So were the mail-lined camouflage jackets on the two dead men; that was what a forester wore in the Association's territory-foresters being a sort of rural police-cum-forest warden. These, however:
He picked up one of the dead men's hands, ignoring the unpleasant limpness, and the little chill that always ran up his neck at the thought that his own hands-those marvelously precise and responsive instruments-could be so easily rendered futile and lax, already blotched purple beneath the skin with settling blood no longer kept in motion by the heart. There was a thick curd of callus on the inner web of the man's right hand, extending up the inside of the index finger and thumb, and more on the heel of his hand. Swordsman's callus, exceptionally well developed. Scars showed white on the thick right forearm; there weren't any scars on the left arm, but it had another band of callus just inside the elbow, where the inner strap of a horseman's kite-shaped shield ran. The man was young, although the great slash across his face made it hard to be sure; he was broad in the shoulders and long in the legs, well fed but without an ounce of excess flesh, and his hair was cut longer at the front, cropped close behind the ears.
"Knight or man-at-arms," Dennis said grimly. "Probably a knight." He looked around. "OK, they took off with Rudi and the girl. We and the Dunedain aren't the only people who can do commando raids. Laegh."
A young man who'd stayed when the crowd left looked up from quartering around the trampled ground. His sister Devorgill had stayed as well. They were both noted hunters, only two years apart in age, tall and lean and with brown hair drawn back into a queue; the quickest way to tell them apart was by Laegh's mustaches. "How many of them?" Dennis said.
"Six came here, Uncle Dennis. Four left-with eight horses, and the one the little princess was riding. First one came up here and climbed the tree- climbed it with irons on the feet, look, you can see where it scarred the bark. The others waited in the thickets lower down. Then they came up to wait in ambush, leaving the horses there with one to hold them, and I think the first, the scout who called them, was a woman. A large woman, or a boy nearly grown. Walking light, not digging her heels in like the others. She watched the Dun for hours from a high branch; it wouldn't carry my weight well. Then she slid down quickly-when she saw the riders headed this way, I guess. First the princess came, galloping fast, and on her heels the Chiefs son-he fell from his horse-and then Aoife and Liath. After the fight the strangers went down the north slope, riding hard, taking both children with them."