“Dear Lord,” Book said, dashing over to him. He put his arm around Dunwoody’s shoulder, peeling him away from the support of the rough brickwork. “What happened?”
“Oh, Shepherd Book,” he moaned, “hide me. Hide me quick.” He tugged at Book’s arm, urging him back into the passageway, which was barely wide enough to walk down two abreast. “This man, he saw my money — like a fool I was counting it in plain sight — and he came at me.”
“Robbed you?” Book asked, and Dunwoody nodded.
“Yes, but only after he sucker-punched me a good one. Then I got mad and I gave ’im a piece of my mind, and he’s gone back to get some others, and he said they’re going to beat the living tar out of me and make me lame in both legs.”
“No, they won’t,” Book said. “There’s two of us now, my friend.”
Dunwoody grabbed onto Book’s jacket and with a surprising turn of strength pulled him deeper into the shadows inside the mouth of the passageway. At their feet, a rat squeaked and darted away.
“Please, Shepherd, don’t let them see us,” he begged. “They’ll beat me black and blue.”
“They won’t,” Book promised. “I’ll protect you.”
Dunwoody glanced round into the street. Suddenly he jolted, his eyes widened, and he stuffed his fist in his mouth.
“They’re coming, oh, they’re coming,” he whispered around his hand. “Oh, dear God, they’re going to hurt me bad.”
Book turned, hand digging into his bag for his weapon. As his fingers closed on it, something hard slammed down on his shoulder from behind and pain shot down his arm and back. He staggered in a half circle.
Dunwoody stood with his crutch aloft. He had just hit him with the implement.
Book raised a hand to defend himself, but not in time. The crutch came down again, hard. He managed to twist sideways, so that the blow was a glancing one. Nonetheless it caught him on the side of the head, staggering him. Sudden pain cast a veil over his vision. His ears rang.
Now there were three more men, rushing up along the passageway to join Dunwoody. Accomplices. This was all an artfully staged con. The blood on Dunwoody’s mouth, his dazed look, his panic — all designed to get Book to lower his guard. And Book, like a perfect idiot, had allowed himself to fall for it.
“I’m sorry about this, Shepherd,” Dunwoody said to the still dazed Book. “Truly I am. But I got me this bum leg, and Southdown Abbey is just too far a walk. I wish you hadn’t flashed your coin so freely. It caused a mighty temptation in my heart, I’m sure you understand.” He wiped his gory mouth with his hand, then licked at his fingers. “Yum,” he said. “Plum sauce.”
Then he turned to hail the three new arrivals.
“Coin bag’s in his pants pocket,” he said. “Plenty there.”
“Let’s soften him up a little first,” said one of the others. He was carrying a baseball bat.
“Yeah,” said another, this one armed with a cudgel. “I went to one of them schools run by priests. The strict kind. Don’t got me no love for religious types.”
Nor for grammar, Book thought. Your education was clearly wasted on you.
As one, the four men set about belaboring Book. They got in several good licks, until the apparently cowed Book surprised them by giving the cudgel wielder a solid punch to the gut. The man doubled over, winded, gasping for breath. Book managed to wrest the cudgel out of his hand and brandished it at the man with the baseball bat.
The man stepped back, out of Book’s range, and whirled the bat. Whether by accident or by design, he clouted the cudgel out of Book’s grasp, leaving him weaponless again.
“Put the guy out of action, somebody!” Dunwoody declared. “Come on, there’s only one of him, and he’s just a preacher.”
Yet the ferocity with which Book fought back was anything but cleric-like, and in the close confines of the passageway there wasn’t room for more than two of his assailants to attack him at once, which evened the odds somewhat. Grunting furiously, he dove at Dunwoody, head down like a linebacker. Dunwoody slammed into the passageway wall, his grip on his crutch loosening. Book snatched the walking aid from him and drove it ferrule-first into Dunwoody’s groin like a lance. Crutch met crotch, and Dunwoody let out an agonized whoof of air, sinking to his knees with his hands clasped around his private parts. He looked about fit to vomit.
Then the baseball bat slammed into the backs of Book’s legs, and all at once Book, too, was on the ground. From the thighs down he had lost all feeling and his legs were as supportive as two rubber bands.
The bat whirled at him a second time, on a collision course with his head. Book blocked the attack with the crutch but not as solidly as he would have liked. The bat transferred much of its momentum to the crutch, which then crashed into his temple with brain-jarring force. For a second time Book’s vision became unfocused and his ears sang like a tabernacle choir.
The fourth attacker now lunged for Book’s pants pocket, determined to get what they had arranged this elaborate setup for. Book was woozy, all but powerless to prevent him.
Then, abruptly, the man with the baseball bat was screaming. “Get off! Get your gorramn hands off of me!”
This was followed by a series of sickening pops and cracks, the sound of several small bones breaking in swift succession. The bat fell to the ground and bounced away, making a noise like a rapid tattoo of notes on a xylophone, while the man who had been holding it stared down at his right hand. The fingers were twisted every which way like a bunch of mangled bananas. He looked at the appendage as though unable to believe that it belonged to him. His face was riven with agony.
A figure slipped past him, a blur of motion, and all of a sudden the man who had been going for Book’s money was flying backwards, propelled by a flat-palmed punch to the sternum. It was as though he had had a rope lashed around his waist, the other end tethered to a horse, and someone had whipped the steed into a gallop. He hurtled all the way out into the street, coming to land on his front in the gutter. He attempted to rise but fell back with a strangulated groan, his face plunging into what was either a puddle of spilled liquor or, more likely, the spot where a drunken reveler had recently relieved himself. Book, although the thought was uncharitable, rather hoped it was the latter.
The man whose hand had been injured was in too much pain to do anything but whimper and mewl. This left just Dunwoody and the cudgel man still standing. Thanks to Book, neither had much fight in him, but that didn’t prevent the fast-moving figure — a savior, it seemed — dealing with them as decisively as he had their compadres. Dunwoody went down like a collapsing house of cards, victim of a savagely forthright closed-fist knockout punch. The cudgel man’s turn was next. The figure shot out a leg, toes catching him under the chin. His head snapped back, his eyes rolled white, and he was out cold even before he hit the ground.
Gradually Book’s head cleared. He looked up to see a hand reaching for him, not in aggression but with the obvious intent of helping him to his feet. Blindly, faithfully, he took it.
As his eyeline drew level with his savior’s, a bemused smile spread across Book’s face.
“As I live and breathe,” he said huskily. “Can it really be?”
The man opposite reciprocated the smile. “Mika Wong, at your service. Long time no see, Derrial.”
15
“Not the gorramn chickenfeed hood again,” Mal slurred as Donovan Philips came towards him with the burlap sack in his hands.
Mal had come to just moments earlier, sitting propped up against a bulkhead. He had no idea how long he’d been out, or where he was, but he was thirsty and he had to pee. The shuttle was still spaceborne, that much he could tell from the rumble of its engines. Whatever its final destination was, it hadn’t yet made planetfall or even entered atmo. The artificial gravity was still on, and artificial gravity felt different from real gravity. On-world, your weight distribution was more even and there wasn’t that vague dizziness which dogged you all the time when you were shipboard and which you never quite got accustomed to, no matter how good your “space legs” were.