On some of the side streets small domestic wags were parked, and just beyond the Harold Sissy Memorial High School, close by the lake, there was a big old Kenworth rig with chromed exhaust.
They followed the throng off the main drag and up the narrow slope of Quarry Road.
Several of the older men were smoking pipes, and Ryan wrinkled his nostrils at the familiar smell. He looked sideways at J.B., seeing that the Armorer had also recognized the scent.
"Maryjane, huh?" he whispered.
"How's that sit with that temperance hotel back there?" J.B. wondered. "From the Mayor Sissy Cannabis Plant?"
"Watch the tongue, friend," Ryan warned.
"Fireblast!" exclaimed Ryan Cawdor when they arrived at the quarry. It was possible that more people had gathered here than he'd ever seen in one place. He did a quick count in the gathering gloom, estimating there were something like seven thousand men and boys present.
That meant there was something wrong. Something, somewhere, that was terribly wrong.
"Doc," he said, noting the villefolk had left a circle around the five outworlders as though they were suspected of being plaguies.
"What?"
"You're the man of science."
"Was, my dear boy, was."
"What did that sign say when we came into the ville? The population?"
"Eight thousand four hundred and... and seven. Real big town for these days."
"Do me a rough count on how many's here."
The old man was silent, lips moving as he let his eyes run around the natural arena, ticking off the figures on the different ledges in the quarry. Away to their left there was some sort of disturbance in the crowd, with a phalanx of sec men pushing through.
"Something between seventy-three hundred and seventy-four hundred. Difficult to count a shifting mob of chapped-hand yokels in poor light. I counted legs and divided by two."
Finnegan was listening to the exchange. "Wait a fucking minute," he began. "If there's a total..."
"Keep your voice down," J.B. snapped. "We get the picture, Ryan. Total population eight and a half thou. Man seven and a half thou. Take off some male babies. Can't leave more'n a few hundred women in the whole ville."
All four of them pondered that. The chatter around them had subsided, and the great granite bowl was silent, with only the whistling of the wind to break the stillness. As on the previous evening, it had become bitingly cold, and a chem-storm was raging away to the north, the crimson clouds torn apart with golden curtains-of forked lightning.
There was a ramp that led to a raised podium near the middle of the quarry. The sec men were climbing it, with someone or something at their center. Jak Lauren had the keenest eyes.
"Cripple. They're wheeling."
Ryan saw him then: a tiny, frail man with a head, fringed with silvery hair, that looked too large for his body and a skin almost as pale as Jak's. They were only about fifty yards off, and Ryan could see the little hands, soft and pink, decorated with chunky rings and a golden bracelet. The legs trailed, wasted, in neat, highly polished shoes of black leather. The man wore a tailored suit of light cream cloth. As he was wheeled up to the platform, his head jiggled and rolled on his shoulders.
"Silence for Mayor Theodore Sissy," one of the sec men bellowed unnecessarily, since the crowd had fallen quiet the moment the leader of Ginnsburg Falls had appeared.
There was a microphone at the front of the stage, already adjusted to the height at which Mayor Sissy could speak into it comfortably from his chair. His voice was soft and trembling, like a nervous child.
"Bring them before us."
The stillness was broken by a murmur of sound that slithered around the quarry like some great rustling reptile.
A half-dozen sec men, including the leader of the patrol in the jeep, moved into the center of the quarry with two people in their midst.
"Let there be light," the cripple on the platform breathed. There was the sharp sound of a lever being thrown, and the whole place was flooded by arc lamps that stood on pylons circling the stone arena.
The stark glare made Jak's white hair stand out like spun magnesium. All round them the men and boys backed farther off, muttering and pointing. Fortunately they were distracted by the events at the middle of the quarry.
"Here stand Jolyon Manscomb and the whore. Taken in the act of adulterous lust. It is admitted that the whore lured him, as Eve lured Adam, with her cunt filled with honey. But both pay the price."
The woman was slightly built, with dull brown hair cropped raggedly at shoulder level. She was dressed in a short robe, like a shift, of some coarse material that looked as if it had been used as sacking. It was dyed a vivid, sickly yellow. The man, whose head was bowed and balding, was wearing a similar robe, colored flat ocher. Both of them were barefoot and both had their hands tied in front of them with a thick rope.
Ryan had noticed that he stood on uneven ground. It was covered with a thick layer of stones, ranging in size from pebbles to jagged chunks of granite as large as a man's fist. There were similar piles of stones all about the floor of the quarry, the nearest only a dozen paces from where he waited with J.B., Jak, Finn and Doc Tanner. He licked his lips, finding them suddenly dry as he realized what the stones were for.
"Outworlders, step forward," the little man in the wheelchair commanded, reading slowly from a creased piece of paper that one of the sec men had handed him. "Cawdor, Dix, Finnegan, Lauren and Tanner. All come to stand before me."
Conscious of every man's eyes upon them, the five stepped across the uneven ground, picking their way around the piles of stone. Ryan noticed that the woman in the sack robe watched them, but the man at her side remained with his head bowed, mumbling to himself, shoulders shaking as he wept.
"Welcome, outworlders, to Ginnsburg Falls." The little man had a face reminiscent of pictures Ryan had once seen in an old book of maps — chubby cheeks, pursed as though to blow a great wind across the quarry, eyes twinkling coldly in the flat light.
"Like a damnably evil cherub," Doc Tanner whispered.
That had been the word Ryan wanted. Cherub. But with a darker side of power and evil.
"When we have men in from beyond our borders, we allow them the privilege of aiding our rituals. You are blessed that you have an opportunity to prove your worth on your first night among us."
"Do he mean what I think he fucking means?" Finn said, looking around in disgust.
"Can the talk, Finn," Ryan hissed. "You'll get us all chilled."
Mayor Sissy had stopped, the merry glitter vanishing for a moment. When he resumed, the voice was a shade or two less amicable.
"The punishment of Jolyon Manscomb and the whore is now to begin. The shame is made worse by the help of the outworlders. By their actions shall they also be judged. Sec Commander?"
"Sir."
"Begin. Remember, all present, that you may share the stoning only when one full minute has passed on the counting of the sec commander here. To begin too early would disappoint me."
Ryan reached up and eased the patch over his left eye socket. He rubbed his cheek and found that he was sweating despite the cold.
"Are you ready, outworlders?"
Obviously an answer was required. Ryan coughed to clear his throat. "Yes. We're ready."
"Then begin."
Ryan didn't move. The others at his side tensed like hunting dogs. Without looking, he knew that fingers would be questing for the butts of blasters. He also knew that if they made one wrong move, death was a dozen heartbeats away.