“I-I’ve heard the rumors.”
The redhead laughed. “What, that we’re all diseased maniacs?”
“That, and that every one of you is a witch and has a familiar in the form of a wyvern.”
There was a moment of silence. Then the warriors exploded into laughter, their weapons drooping.
“Well, that’s a new twist on the old lies,” the redhead said, grinning. “Most of us do have pets, but they’re real wyverns, my lad, not demons. As to witchcraft, why, what’s the difference between that and a lord’s magic, I’d like to know?”
“Magic—magic follows rules,” Blaize stammered. “Witchcraft breaks them all and intends evil.”
“Oh, and the magicians only use their powers for healing and helping? Pull the other one, fellow! We’ve the same sorts of power as the lords, only we don’t think of it as magic! That lass with you, now, she has a way with animals, nothing more.”
“So … you’re not witches?” Blaize asked.
“Not a bit,” the redhead assured him. He called to his fellows, “Any of you have dealings with devils, mates?”
They all shook their heads with a chorus of denial, some amazed at the idea, some angry, most amused.
“So unless you’ve made a pact with a devil yourself, there are no witches here,” the redhead said. “I’m Bowles, by the way. Who’re you?”
“B-Blaize is my name.”
“Well enough then, B-Blaize,” Bowles mimicked. “What good are you, though? Do your friends just carry you along out of kindness?”
“Of course not!”
“What can you do, then?”
“Why, bring friends of my own,” Blaize answered. “They’re right here, waiting to see if I’ll need them.”
“Oh, are they indeed,” the redhead scoffed. “Tell them to show themselves and I’ll believe you.”
“Why wait?” asked a voice.
Bowles spun about to see Conn towering over him, glowing and glowering.
“Just say the word, Blaize,” said a voice behind Bowles. He spun about to see Ranulf leaning down with a genial grin and a spectral saber, its point at the man’s throat.
“Here, now! That’s my great-great-grandson!” Corbin cried, affronted. “Just because you died too soon to father a child is no reason to be jealous!”
“Oh, I fathered one, all right.” Ranulf cast the conjurer a quick glance. “I just didn’t get to stick around to watch him grow up—well, not in the flesh, anyway.”
“A ghost father’s better than none,” Conn protested.
“Yes, but not much, is he?” Ranulf said sourly. “He can’t play ball with you, after all. But my boy and girl did develop amazing imaginations.”
“How did you know we were coming?” Gar asked.
“Why, we heard your thoughts, of course!” Longshanks grinned. “Didn’t think you were the only one who could tell what a man was thinking, did you?”
“I can, but I usually don’t,” Gar said. “That doesn’t mean I won’t listen, of course,”
“Of course,” Longshanks agreed.
“Mind you, I’m always glad to make new friends,” Alea said warily, “but what made you decide we were all right so quickly?”
“Well, partly the wyverns liking your young friend there,” Longshanks said judiciously, “and partly that we can hear your thoughts and don’t find any malice in them…”
“…but chiefly that you were able to take all my teasing and toss it right back at me,” Corbin said.
“Well, it means we wouldn’t want to fight you if we didn’t have to, anyway,” Longshanks said with a grin. “Come share a meal with us, if you think you can trust us.”
They found the rest of the clan in an overgrown park surrounded on four sides by blank faced, empty-windowed ruins of buildings. The ragtag horde was gathered around a central campfire in the plasticrete ring of what had once been a goldfish pond. They were dressed in tunics, hoses, blouses, and skirts dyed in bright colors. Alea wondered where they had found the dyes. They hailed the newcomers cheerfully. Walking among them, under trees with varicolored leaves that none of the companions had ever seen before, Alea saw deformities of all sorts, as well as the wild or distracted eyes of madness and the vacant gazes of mental retardation—but most seemed quite sane, and many weren’t deformed at all, though they bore the scars of their lords’ cruelty. Runaways they were, like Mira and Blaize, but few seemed bitter and all seemed cheerful, even happy. Alea marveled that the outcasts had made a home.
Over meat-they didn’t ask what kind-the bragging contest began. It started with a question-innocent enough in its way, if you took it as it was intended. Longshanks looked straight at Gar and asked, “Are you a madman, a criminal, or a runaway?”
Gar stared, then smiled and asked, “Do I have to be one of the three?”
“No one else comes to the cities,” Solutre told him. “They’re afraid of the ghosts—and us. They’re right to be, too.”
“Are you so powerful a group of warriors as that?”—
“We have to be, to hold our own against the Hawks and the Hounds,” Bowles said.
Gar frowned. “What are the Hawks and the Hounds?” Bowles peered closely at him. “You really don’t read minds unless you have to, do you?”
“Uncommonly polite,” Longshanks noted.
“I can’t listen to every thought that comes by or I’d go crazy,” Gar said.
The others looked up, startled.
Gar decided that it took some effort for them to read minds.
Even then, they could probably only hear thoughts that were put into words or pictures. “Well, think of the Hawks and the Hounds and I’ll see them in your mind.”
“No need,” Bowles said quickly. “They’re the tribes that border us on each side of our wedge.”
“Wedge?” Gar asked.
“The road we followed came straight from the edge of the city,” Alea told him. “It probably goes straight through to the center of town. If there are more radial roads like that, the whole city’s cut up into … what? Eight wedges? Twelve?” she asked Bowles.
“Six,” he told her, “and we have to keep the Hawks and the Hounds away from our game if we want to have enough to eat.”
“Game?” Gar asked. “Are there animals in this city?”
“You’d be surprised how they came in and multiplied once the magic juice stopped flowing through the wires and the city died,” Longshanks said grimly. “Come hunt with us and see for yourself. What weapons can you use?”
“Weapons?” Gar asked. “Well, we all carry daggers and staves.”
“Won’t do much good against a dog pack,” Solutre opined. “Can any of you use a sling?”
“I can,” Gar and Blaize said together, then looked at one another in surprise.
“Take these, then.” Solutre handed them each a leather cup with thongs wrapped about it. “Spenser, fetch spears for these two! Just think of it as a staff with a point on the end,” she told Mira and Alea.
Spenser was a hard-faced woman who looked to be in her thirties, which in a hardscrabble society like this probably meant she was about twenty-five. She gave each of the women a spear. Thus armed, and with half the people in the party accompanied by rangy knee-high lop-eared mongrels with tan fur, long muzzles, and curving tails, they set off to see what kind of game a concrete forest could hold.
It had trees, for one thing, some in odd places. Wherever dead leaves had drifted and rotted to make humus, seeds had caught, sprouted, and, in growing, split the pavement. Even more, the wedge had apparently been laid out with a little park every few blocks; each had developed an orchard.
“Hold on—let’s see what’s ripe,” Solutre said.