"Tia?" he said.
"Don't get settled in, Chucho," she said quietly. "Just water and feed the horses, load some oats, then hitch up. Tell the gate guards and the people at the barricade out on 84 that you're heading for the Circle D, but don't turn off at Jenson's place. Keep going west; push the horses as hard as you can without killing them."
He nodded, unsurprised. They were working for the Kyklos and the Meeting, and they were getting paid for it… but the family business could do without losing its capital assets, too.
And I like Dobben and Maggie, she thought. I've traveled a lot of miles staring at those equine rumps.
"Hugh" helped with the crates, slobbering and grunting but heaving two at a time up onto his broad stooped shoulders. When the last of them was stacked, Murdoch made a production of giving his day laborers their pay, with a little extra for the ones who worked for him regularly.
"You boys get on home to your families," he said. "And Sim, tell the house staff they can go home early. With my wife and the boys off visiting relatives, I can shift for myself tonight."
One of them grinned at him, a youngish man. " I'm goin' next door, patron," he said.
"It's your money now that I've given it to you, Stan," Murdoch said. "Remember, tomorrow's a holiday-time off for the Bossman's speech. See y'all at the House!"
They left, swinging the big entry doors of the warehouse closed. Murdoch's smile ran away from his face as they did, and he checked the lock on the smaller entry door beside it, moving confidently in the darkness, as a man did when he was intimately familiar with a place.
"This is bad tradecraft, letting two agents know each other's identities," he said in a voice that was much colder and had less of the twanging local accent when he turned to face them. "All these years we've been doing business and I didn't know you worked for the Lady Regent until I got that message-"
" With, not for, Ben," BD said patiently. "I'm a perfectly genuine businesswoman. I just do… things on the side sometimes."
And pull yourself together, Ben. It's hard enough to control my own nerves without having to deal with other people's.
"And maintaining your cover isn't going to be important soon," she went on. "Or do you want to be here when the trebuchets start throwing thousand-pound rocks and bundles of incendiaries over the wall? Even Sandra can't make sure a siege engine doesn't drop a boulder or a jug of napalm on your head."
He was silent for a moment, fiddling with an expensive incandescent-mantle lantern; then it lit with a hiss, and a circle of yellow-white light drove the dense blackness back.
"No," he said quietly. "That's why I got my family out on the train to Walla Walla last week. But I've… been here and in this character for a long time. Since the War of the Eye. I keep slipping mentally and thinking I am my cover. And… I've got friends here. My wife was born here, and so were my children. I don't want to see Pendleton wrecked 'in order to save it.' "
"Going native?"
A sigh. "No, not really. It's not such a bad place…"
"If you don't end up sold to the woolen mills, or the Working Girls' Hotel, or worse," BD said. "Besides, hopefully we can make things a lot easier on the ordinary people. I'm not a great fan of the PPA, but even they don't do that sort of thing."
Anymore, she tactfully left unvoiced, and went on aloud:
"That's what this mission is all about, at least as far as I'm concerned. Plus the strategic stuff about keeping the Prophet and Boise at bay."
Murdoch nodded. Then he started as the big man beside BD straightened, took the soft pieces of rubber out of his cheeks, spat on the concrete floor, and pulled a pillow from under his coat. Suddenly he seemed much bigger… and not simple at all. And when he took off his gloves, the auburn fuzz on the backs of the great spade-shaped paws was a horrible mismatch for the raven thatch on his head.
Murdoch's eyes bulged. "You're-"
"John Hordle, at your service," he said, in the rich accent of rural Hampshire, still strong after a generation here in the Western lands.
"You're Little John Hordle! The one who killed Big Mac!"
"The very same. That disguise works a treat, even if you 'ave to drool an' slobber a bit. A bit undignified, innit? Still, it's worth it. Not so easy to hide, when you're my size."
Murdoch nodded. "Come on, then."
"You know," the big man said as they walked towards the office that was partitioned off from the floor of the two-story warehouse, "back when I was a nipper in 'ampshire growing up around the Pied Merlin-me dad's family's pub-I always fancied the Wild West. Clint Eastwood an' all them old shows on the telly. Shame to have me romantic notions ruined, innit?"
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the doors and the courtyard, and the street beyond:
"Or maybe it was different before the Change, the first time?"
"Not much," BD said. "Except they had guns so it was louder, and there wasn't a city wall, so it might have been less crowded. There were forty saloons and sixteen bordellos here back when it was a real cow-town with about two thousand people."
"It's the mobilization," Murdoch said defensively. "The town's bursting at the seams right now-it's worse than the Whoop-Up. And you saw the foreigners?"
"Yes. The Boise men I recognized, but…"
"CUT," Murdoch said grimly. "Not just the wandering preachers-we've been getting them for years-but soldiers and officials out of Corwin."
"When?" Hordle said.
"A few of them two weeks ago, then the rest just the past three days; and it's not just troops, there are high officers of both them and the Boiseans quartered at the Bossman's House. The Cutters are acting in concert with the Boise people. Carl Peters invited them in, but…"
"But the bugger has forgotten the saying about the camel's nose. Quick work on the villains' part, though," John Hordle said. "And we're not before time, eh?"
Murdoch put the lantern down on a desk for a moment, and then stepped to the rear wall of the office where a picture hung.
"I could let you down with the winch," he said. "But that section's closed off from the rest on the inside. This part doesn't officially exist-"
The picture was a Remington print set in an ornate frameCoronado's March, all desert and dust and lances and armored Conquistadores. BD glanced at it, then suddenly realized…
You know, down in the Southwest, something precisely like that might be happening right now and that could be a photograph of it.
She shivered slightly and set the thought aside. If you'd lived through the past couple of decades, you got used to things like that; you also got used to pushing them away when they hit you again.
There was a click as the merchant-spy's fingers explored the frame of the print, and then a section of wall the size of a small door swung open. He led them into the staircase beyond; the temperature fell as they descended through dirt held back by boards and then into a broad tunnel of coarse light-textured volcanic rock like hard dense pumice.
The lantern left a moving bubble of light in darkness Stygian enough to make the nighttime streets seem like noonday, showing ancient posters and even dust-choked storefront windows. There was a cold smell of abandonment and mouse droppings, like an old house where nobody had lived for a while.
"Welcome to Underground Pendleton," Murdoch said, a little nervous as he went on: "Dug by the Chinese."
"Chinese?" Hordle said.
"There were a lot of Chinese workers here once," Murdoch said; he seemed to have a perverse pride in local history, even the more questionable bits. "They dug tunnels so they could get from one part of town to another. It's easy, the rock's soft and cuts like cheese."
"Why not use the streets?"
"Because the local Anglo-Saxons had a habit of shooting them on sight for no particular reason besides a dislike of Chinamen," Murdoch said.
"I've 'eard of the underground economy, but this is ridiculous," Hordle said. "Roit useful for what we've in mind, though. You said there was tunnels, but this is a bloody maze, mate."