Susan pulled out two quarters and silently held them up. The innkeeper squinted.
“Silver, is it?” he asked.
Susan tossed the coins on the table, still without a word. The innkeeper reached to pick one up, and Raven’s hand shot out, catching him by the wrist.
“Our drinks first,” the nobleman said.
“I’m no thief,” the innkeeper said, “but I’ve not seen coins the likes of these before, and I’d study them, to ascertain their worth.”
Reluctantly, Raven allowed the man to pick up one of the quarters. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, ran a finger around the milled edge, and looked it over.
Pel waited, wondering what the man would make of the copper sandwiched between layers of whatever the silvery metal was-Pel knew perfectly well that there wasn’t much actual silver in modern American coins.
“Most peculiar,” the innkeeper said, “and whilst ’tis surely worth something, changing it’s not to be simple.”
Susan fished more coins from her wallet.
In the end, eleven mugs of lukewarm ale cost a dollar and fifteen cents in coin, leaving Susan’s change-purse almost empty.
* * * *
Amy sipped her ale and stared out the window, ignoring what little conversation was going on around her. The sky had gone grey and the daylight was dim, but it was still far brighter than the tavern’s interior, and the gallows stood out vividly.
Those three men had been hanged and disembowelled-hanged by the neck until dead. The evisceration was just an extra; they had died of hanging. Their necks were twisted, their features puffy, their tongues thrust out and swollen; flies were crawling on their faces, on the dark protruding tongues. Their hands were out of sight, presumably tied behind their backs. And Amy couldn’t forget the odor that came from them, a thick, heavy odor she never wanted to smell again.
She didn’t think this had been the sort of quick, one-snap-and-it’s-over, break-the-neck hanging that she had always heard about; she thought this had been slow strangulation. She shuddered, and sipped at her ale, and wished she had something else to drink.
She had never seen a hanged man before. It wasn’t like the movies or TV, where the person still looked like a person, just hanging; the features were distorted, and the body and legs seemed somehow thin and stretched.
That might have something to do with how long they’d been hanging, of course, or with having their guts pulled out. The ale suddenly tasted sour at the thought, and she put her mug down.
She wondered why the three had been hanged; were they murderers? Or rapists, perhaps? Was rape even considered a serious crime here?
Or maybe a crime didn’t need to be serious to merit hanging, here in Shadow’s country. Maybe they were up there because they’d stolen a few apples, or a loaf of bread, or talked back to the local magistrate. Maybe they were hanging there just because Shadow didn’t like them. Had they done anything as serious as Walter and Beth had?
She swallowed, not drinking, but just trying to keep down what she had already drunk.
She had sent Walter and Beth to their deaths at the hands of Imperial troops, and she suddenly found herself imagining the two of them hanging side by side like that, on a gallows, necks twisted, faces discolored, tongues lolling, bodies stretched. She could see just what Walter’s face would have looked like, a parody of what she had seen so often when his features flushed and distorted with anger or lust.
But he was a rapist and a murderer, he had killed that other girl, he had beaten Amy repeatedly. He had known what would happen if the Empire ever caught him. He had brought it on himself; nobody had told him to keep slaves, to rape women, to strangle poor Sheila, whom Amy had never met, whom Amy had replaced. He’d thought he wouldn’t be caught, that he could get away with it forever, but the Empire had come looking for Amy and the other Earthpeople, and she’d told them what Walter had done, and he’d been hanged for it.
Hanged, with his face congested with blood, his tongue swollen and protruding, body limp and lifeless, no longer a human being but just a thing.
Amy shuddered.
That dead thing back on Zeta whatever-it-was had fathered a child on her, too, which only made it worse. What kind of a human being was it who did things like that?
And Beth, who’d been hanged as well, even though she was a slave, the same as Amy had been-the Empire never knew that, had taken Amy’s word for it when she said Beth was guilty, too. Plain quiet Beth, who’d helped Walter abuse Amy, and who had mostly stayed out of Walter’s way the rest of the time. What kind of woman had she been, to help her master, her captor, against another victim?
But then, Amy knew she had heard of such things before. Patty Hearst had helped the SLA, hadn’t she? Amy remembered the name for it, for hostages coming to help their captors-the Stockholm syndrome. It happened all the time.
And it wasn’t new. The Sabine women had sided with the Romans against their own brothers and fathers, hadn’t they? Why should Beth have been any different? Why side with a loser?
Because it was right, Amy answered herself. Because siding with the abuser was wrong, it was evil, it just encouraged more abuse.
Would she ever have helped Walter with someone new? She had resisted-why couldn’t Beth?
But of course, Beth had been there for years, not just weeks. Maybe she had fought at first; maybe she had resisted just as much as Amy had, until it finally sank in that resistance did no good. No Imperial troops came to rescue Beth, the way they had saved Amy. Beth had seen Sheila die for fighting back.
What did it matter, anyway, Amy asked herself. Walter and Beth were both dead, and nothing could bring them back. If Beth hadn’t deserved hanging, it was a little late to worry about it. Beth had given up, and had died for it, and that was too damn bad, but why was Amy worrying about it? So there were three dead men hanging in the town square-nothing could bring them back, either, and what business was it of hers, anyway? She didn’t know anything about it.
She did know that she wouldn’t be staying in this town, though. She wouldn’t stay in a place where those corpses could be left out there. Why hadn’t they been cut down and decently buried?
They were meant as a warning, of course, and as far as Amy was concerned, they’d worked-they’d warned her away from this place, once and for all. Anyone who could stay here would be accepting things like that, would be as bad as Beth.
And, Amy reluctantly realized, the same was probably true of anywhere Shadow ruled. She couldn’t just settle down, not here, not anywhere.
But walking into Shadow’s fortress was suicide, and wasn’t that wrong, too?
There was no way out. There was no right thing to do. She was trapped.
She sipped more ale. She wanted to cry, but fought back the urge-not here, not now, not in this town.
Later she intended to cry, but not now.
* * * *
“What do you suppose they did?” Pel asked, nodding toward the window as he picked at a splinter in the tabletop.
Raven shrugged. “Doubtless they irked Shadow somewise,” he said. “As you’d do, by troubling it in its fortress.”
“You don’t think we should do that, do you?” Pel asked unhappily.
“Nay, I do not,” Raven said.
“But what else can we do?” Pel asked. “It’s our only way home, the only way we can get you your guns, the only chance we have. There are only eleven of us; we can’t fight all Shadow’s monsters and magic by ourselves.”
“Yet that’s just what you attempt, is’t not?”
“No, it isn’t,” Pel insisted. “We aren’t trying to fight them, we’re trying to get past them, to destroy Shadow itself. Like Frodo and the Ring. Or like assassinating Hitler to end World War II.”