Six years I knew you, he thought. Battle and hunt and camp and barroom. We saved each other's lives more times than I can count. You taught me better than half of what I know. Go with God, brother.
He dismounted and knelt for a second with head bowed over clasped hands, asking that there be mercy for the soul of Jose Menendez, onetime sergeant in the Lomas Altas Emergency Guard, of late troop leader in Vogeler's Villains. Then he covered the ravaged face with a broken shield.
And for you, Greg, Tommy, Dave, Will, he thought, fury building. You all deserved better than this.
Singh was gray-faced and shaking. "The wild men will suffer for this; their tents will burn and their women will weep," he said thickly. "We will avenge them, we will-"
"Wait!" Kaur said. "Would the wild men leave their armor? Harness on the horses?"
Ingolf took a deep breath and then another, scrub bing a hand across his face, the rough leather of his glove scratching and pulling at the hairs of his cropped beard.
"Think, you cheese-head hayseed, goddamnit," he whispered savagely to himself.
His eyes darted about. "Yeah, and the arrowheads, and everything else… cloth, tools, shoes… they'd have stripped the bodies bare and dug out all the broken arrows. And scalped them. And butchered the dead horses for their meat and hides. All that this bunch took was the live horses and the shetes and knives and bows."
"You are right," Singh said.
He pulled a broken lance shaft out of a horse's torso with a grunt, then stabbed it into the ground to clean it off. The three of them stood around it and looked, with Kuttner still mounted and keeping an eye out.
Ingolf grunted again. The lance head was about eight inches long, fastened to the mountain ash shaft with a skillfully forged tubular socket heat-shrunk onto the wood. It wasn't quite the style of any he was familiar with, but it was far too well made for a wild-man troop, even this far west. And…
He took it from the Sikh and held it so the westering sun caught the surface and showed irregularities, especially where dried blood stuck. A rayed sun was etched into the steel.
"Kaur!" he said. "Your shete!"
She drew and held it out beside the broken lance; the design on the sun figure was identical.
"Something stinks here," Ingolf said grimly.
A sound from Kuttner interrupted him, and then Kaur's cry of alarm an instant later. Ingolf vaulted into the saddle and got out his binoculars. The sun was wink ing on more lance heads, and beneath them the distant dots of riders. He rough counted…
"At least thirty," he said. His head twisted around. The ground here was flat as a tabletop and devoid of cover, no place to make a stand. "We'll head south for the river-there's broken country there."
"Wait!" Kuttner said. "Give me two more horses and I'll lead a drag."
The three Villains looked at him, surprised. Leading a drag was a standard trick of plains-country warfare, to raise a plume of dust and deceive watchers. Volunteering for it here was also suicide…
"Better me than all of us. You can escape and tell the bossman in Des Moines what happened to his expedition."
Nodding in grudging respect for the man's loyalty, In golf started to help. It took only a few seconds to rig some gear on the end of a rope; Kuttner took the lead ing reins of the two packhorses and spurred his mount straight east. He didn't even bother to take his remount. Ingolf felt a slight pang-one of those horses was carrying the bundled proceeds that Jose had left for them back in Innsmouth-but living through this and find ing out who was responsible for the massacre was more important.
The three of them paused only to sling spare quiv ers to their saddlebows and then turned south at a gal lop, each leading a single remount. Grass whipped at his thighs and the horse's face; Boy ran with his head lifted, and the sound was a constant shhhsshsh beneath the drumbeat of hooves. Distantly behind them a bugle blew; the enemy, whoever they were, had spotted them. Now everything depended on how fresh the killers' horses were and how their luck went.
They went flat-out for two miles, just outside the line of burned ground, then reined in to a canter; the horses were beginning to blow, fruits of two thousand miles of hard work. Luckily they'd all been reshod recently, so they'd be less likely to go lame unexpectedly. They all looked over their shoulders as well. Kuttner's dust plume was clear, where his drag scratched the ashy soil of the burn. And behind him…
"A bunch of them split off after Kuttner," Kaur said. "At least a dozen are still after us, though, Captain."
"A dozen's better odds than thirty." Ingolf grunted thoughtfully.
It puzzled him; the stunt Kuttner had pulled was the sort of thing you did for comrades-in-arms or close friends, and the man had never even tried to be that, despite their going all the way to the Atlantic and back together. He'd always been a disagreeable bossy son of a bitch; they'd come to grudgingly respect him, but no more.
They turned onto the burnt ground-trying for the river would be impossible otherwise, but it made their dust plume a lot worse. As they switched horses Singh and Ingolf exchanged glances; they both rode a lot heavier in the saddle than Kaur, by at least thirty or forty pounds. Her horses were less tired to start with and would last longer in a stern chase. Useless to try to get her to bug out, though.
Ingolf's next glance was over at the sun. Three hours to dark, he thought. Just low enough to get in our eyes, not enough to do us any good.
A few instants after that the extra plume of gray ash told him their pursuers had crossed onto the burned ground too. Canter-trot canter-walk… the dust grew closer; the enemy were pushing their horses hard, or they had lots of fresh remounts, or both. Probably both.
"Uff da," Ingolf swore.
That they couldn't hope to win an arrow duel was so obvious none of them had to say anything about it. There weren't any good options when you were outnumbered by five to one, but riding over an open plain and shooting was about the worst possible choice. If you had any choices.
"Which we don't," Ingolf muttered to himself.
"They think they can pin us against the river before we can cross," Kaur said clinically.
It turned out they were right; the riders were in close sight before the fingers of lower land stretching down to the Illinois River came in reach, no more than three or four hundred yards behind. Ingolf peered over his shoul der again; there were fifteen of them and all had helmets on, and of the same variety-low rounded domes with a central spike and cheek flaps. He made a hissing sound between his teeth. Even most full-time paid soldiers didn't usually wear uniform equipment. That was the sort of thing you saw only on a Bossman's guards.
And not the Bossman of Des Moines. His folk's gear is different, shaped more like the old army helmet.
He couldn't see for sure what they were wearing for armor, but he could be certain it wasn't the bright polished chain mail favored by the household troops of Iowa's ruler.
They carried lances, little upright threads tipped with an eyeblink of metal. The bottom four feet or so of each was probably resting in a scabbard-a tube of boiled leather slung at the right rear of the saddle, which kept it out of the way when you were doing something else. Right now the something else was drawing their bows.. ..
"Incoming!" Kaur shouted and ducked, hunching in the saddle so that the shield slung across her back covered the largest possible share of her body.
A dozen arrows fell in a hissing sleet, mostly five or ten yards short but uncomfortably well aimed and bunched. A single exception slammed into the back of a remount with a hard wet thmack sound, and the animal collapsed behind them, its hind legs limp, screaming like an off-key bugle as it struggled and jerked and the shaft in its spine waggled.