She looked small, slouched in her chair among the Titanides, but she was actually just over six feet. Her clothing was black, including a hat that resembled the one Zorro wore in one of Conal's favorite comics. It left most of her face in shadow, but the nose was too grand to hide. There was a thin cigar clenched in her teeth and a blue-steel .38 tucked into the waistband of her pants. Her skin was light brown, and her hair long and streaked with silver.
He stepped up to the table and faced her. He was unafraid; he had been looking forward to this.
"You're not a wizard, Jones," he said. "You're a witch."
For a moment he thought he had not been heard over the clatter and roar in the pub. Jones did not move. Yet somehow the tension of his blazing aura moved out and electrified the air. The noise gradually died away. All the Titanides turned to look at him.
Cirocco Jones slowly lifted her head. Conal realized she had been looking at him for some time-in fact, since before he approached the table. She had the hardest eyes he had ever seen, and the saddest. They were deep-set, clear, and dark as coal. She looked at him, unblinking, from his face to his bare arms to the long-barreled Colt in the holster on his hip, his hand opening and closing a few inches from it.
She took the cigar from her mouth and showed him her teeth in a carnivorous grin.
"And who the hell are you?" she asked.
"I'm the Sting," Conal said. "And I've come to kill you."
"Do you want us to take him, Captain?" one of the Titanides at the table asked. Cirocco waved her hand at him.
"No, no. This appears to be an affair of honor," she said.
"That's exactly right," Conal said. He knew his voice tended to get high and squeaky when he raised it, so he paused a moment to slow his breathing. She wasn't going to let these animals do her dirty work for her. It seemed she might make a worthy opponent after all.
"When you came here, hundreds of years ago, you-"
"Eighty-eight," she said.
"What?"
"I came here eighty-eight years ago. Not hundreds."
Conal refused to be distracted.
"You remember someone who came here with you? A man called Eugene Springfield?"
"I remember him very well."
"Did you know he was married? Did you know he left a wife and two children back on Earth?"
"Yes. I knew that."
Conal took a deep breath, and stood straight.
"Well, he was my great-great grandfather."
"Bullshit."
"It is not bullshit. I'm his grandson, and I've come here to avenge his murder."
"Mister... I don't doubt you've done a lot of crazy things in your life, but if you did that, it would be the craziest thing you ever did."
"I came billions of miles to find you, and now it's just between you and me."
He reached for his belt buckle. Cirocco jerked almost imperceptibly. Conal never saw it; he was too busy unbuckling his belt and throwing it and his gun to the floor. He had liked wearing that gun. He had worn it since his arrival, as soon as he saw how many other humans went armed; he thought it a pleasant change from the Dominion's stuffy firearms laws.
"There," he said. "I know you're hundreds of years old and I know you can fight dirty. Well, I'm ready to take you. Let's step outside and settle this honorably. A fight to the death."
Cirocco shook her head slowly.
"Son, you don't get to be a hundred and twenty-three years old by doing everything honorably." She looked over his shoulder and nodded.
The Titanide behind him brought the empty beer mug down on the top of his head. The thick glass shattered, and Conal slumped to the floor into a pile of orange Titanide droppings.
Cirocco got up, tucking her second gun back into the top of her boot.
"Let's see just what sort of dirty trick he really is."
There was a Titanide healer present; she examined the bloody scalp wound and announced the man would probably live. Another Titanide pulled the pack from Conal's back and started going through it. Cirocco stood over him smoking.
"What's in it?" she asked.
"Let's see ... beef jerky, a box of shells for that cannon, a pair of skates ... and about thirty comic books."
Cirocco's laugh was music to the Titanides because they heard it so seldom. They all laughed with her as she passed the comics around.
Soon the place was buzzing with tinny balloonchip voices and sound effects.
"Deal me out, folks," she told the people at her table.
Conal woke with the worst headache he had ever imagined. He was being bounced around, so he opened his eyes to see what was causing it.
He found himself suspended head down over a two-mile drop.
Screaming hurt his head badly, but he was unable to stop. It was a high-pitched, child's scream, almost inaudible. Then he was vomiting, and nearly choked on it.
He was bound in so much rope he might have been wrapped by a spider. The only part of his body with any freedom was his neck, and it hurt to move that, but he did, looking wildly around.
He was strapped to the back of a Titanide with his head on the monster's huge hindquarters. The Titanide was somehow climbing a vertical rock face. When he leaned his head all the way back he could see the thing's rear hooves scrabbling on ledges two inches wide. He watched in horrified fascination as one ledge broke away and a shower of stones fell up and up and up until he lost sight of them.
"The bastard threw up on my tail," the Titanide said.
"Yeah?" came another voice, which he recognized as Cirocco Jones's.
So the Demon was somewhere near his feet.
He thought he would go mad. He screamed, he pleaded with them, but they said nothing. It was impossible that the thing could climb such a slope by itself, and yet it was doing it with both Conal and Cirocco on its back, and doing it about as fast as Conal could have walked on level ground.
Just what sort of animal was this Titanide?
They brought him to a cavern midway up the cliff. It was just a hole in the rock, ten feet high and about as wide, forty feet deep. There was no path of any kind leading to it.
He was dumped, still in his cocoon of rope. Cirocco wrestled him into a sitting position.
"In a little while, you're going to answer some questions," she said.
"I'll tell you anything."
"You're damn right you will." She grinned at him again, then hit him across the face with the barrel of his own gun. He was about to protest when she hit him again.
Cirocco had to hit him four times before she was sure he was out. She would have hit him with the gun butt, except that would have pointed the barrel at her, and she hadn't lived to be one hundred and twenty-three by doing stupid things like that.
"He shouldn't have called me a witch," she said.
"Don't look at me," Hornpipe said. "I would have killed him back at La Gata."
"Yeah." She sat back on her heels and let her shoulders sag. "You know, sometimes I wonder what's so great about reaching one hundred twenty-four."
The Titanide said nothing. He was loosening Conal's bonds and stripping him. He had been with the Wizard for many years, and knew her moods.
The back of the cavern was ice. On a hot day like this one, a trickle of water flowed over the rock floor. Cirocco knelt beside a pool. She splashed water on her face, then took a drink. It was icy cold.
Cirocco had spent many nights here when things got uncomfortable down at the rim. There was a stack of blankets as well as several bales of straw. There were two wooden pails: one for use as a latrine, and the other to catch drinking water. A hammock was suspended between two pitons driven into the rock. An old tin washboard provided the only other amenity. When she had to stay for a long time, Cirocco would string a clothesline across the mouth of the cavern to catch the dry updrafts.