“No.” He said it simply and quietly, but there was a power in it backed up by the expression on his face and in his usually blank eyes.
Krysty tried to speak but nothing would emerge. It was all she could do to shake her head before taking up her watch with her back firmly to the fissure in the earth.
Jak sank down gladly against the sleepers, welcoming oblivion… .
* * *
BARON K SHIVERED as he recalled that day, shivered because he had no real memory of the day the children were taken. What had come before was still etched into his mind as though someone had taken a wag battery, cut it open and poured the gunk into his brain. And what had come after, when the whole ville had awakened from what seemed to be a stupor that could only have been induced by some kind of jolt was only too clear. But of that time—the time when the exodus had occurred—there was nothing.
And while Morgan stared into the fire, K brought back to mind the awful task of having to outline that moment to the one-eyed man and his crew as they had sat in front of him.
“You can’t tell us anything? But you expect us to go after these coldhearts with no real clue as to what they can do.” The man known as Ryan Cawdor had looked around at his people, all of whom were looking as incredulous as himself.
K squirmed. Part of the strategy that had made him a baron was to be in complete control of everything that went on around him. To admit that he hadn’t been was almost like an admission of weakness. And weakness was anathema to him.
“The only way I can explain it is that it was like the kind of sleep you get when you’re exhausted…when you’ve been on the road for days, and you kept traveling until every muscle is at breaking point, and your eyes are out on sticks with the grit of the road rubbing them raw. That moment when you’re just running on fumes one moment, and the next your body just gives up and you fade so quick you don’t even know it until you wake up and it’s dark, and your face is embedded in the dirt.”
Ryan sniffed. The baron had a colorful turn of phrase, but it served its purpose. He knew that feeling. They all knew it.
“Okay, so you just nodded out,” he said simply. “Your point is what? That these coldhearts drugged you in some way?”
The baron’s laugh was cold and bitter, with no humor. “The whole ville? How would they make that happen?”
Ryan shrugged. “Could be easy enough, from what you say. Gather the whole ville together in one place, make like it’s some kind of festival, and just spike whatever you’re going to give them. Doesn’t have to be anything mutie or some kind of weird shit.”
“Doesn’t have to be, but it probably was,” K had said with a shrug.
Doc, at Ryan’s elbow, indicated Morgan, who was seated by the baron. “I fear that perhaps you have been listening to your friend,” he said in an amused tone.
Morgan glared at Doc. His eyes bore into him, and for a moment the scholar experienced a shiver of apprehension as it seemed that the grizzled old-timer was peering into his soul. Morgan smiled slowly and slyly.
“You know that I can’t influence the baron in this matter, and you know that there are stranger things…what was it? On heaven and earth, Horatio, or something like that.”
Doc looked uncomfortable. Yes, he knew that, but he was unwilling to accept at face value that K was right.
Maybe he was…
There was silence, broken eventually by the baron, who was hesitant as he tried to express what had happened, and what had led him to enlisting the outlanders on a task that he was so unwilling to undertake himself. Or to put his people at risk. When the outlanders had come their way, the ville folk had been suspicious. So soon after the ones who had stolen their young, it was remarkable that they had not chilled the newcomers on sight.
Yet there was something about the six people who had ridden into the ville in a battered wag that was on its last legs that set them apart from the ones who had come before.
“Listen, Ryan,” K said carefully. “When they came, I should have read the signs. A bit of me did. But another bit of me couldn’t do anything about it. Why the fuck was that? You tell me,” he continued before the one-eyed man had a chance to speak. “All I know is that they did what they liked. In my ville. And then they took our kids. My kid,” he said quietly, almost as an afterthought, but one that he deliberately downplayed. “I can’t trust myself to follow them. I can’t trust any of my people, much as I can any other time. This is…different.”
“Then why us?” Ryan questioned.
K looked him squarely in the eye. “Because you haven’t fallen under the spell. Because you’re prepared…” He railed off, but seemed far from done.
“And?” Ryan said.
K shook his head. “Because you need the gold I’ll give you for it.”
Chapter Three
Ryan was the last one to take watch, and was still staring out across the wastes when the others had roused themselves and risen to join him.
Krysty walked over to him as he stood on the lip of the crevice, surer of his footing now that he could see the gaps between land and empty air.
“You see anything, lover?”
“Like what?” He turned and looked sharply at her. There was something about her tone that set his senses tingling.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Like a trace of where they went after they disappeared over the edge.”
He said nothing for a moment, that single, ice-blue orb burrowing into her consciousness, probing that mind it knew so well. Finally, he said, “There are some tracks. They were careful, no doubt, but no one can be that careful. No one.”
She nodded. “That’s good.”
“Something you want to tell me, mebbe?” he asked quietly. “About what you saw in the night?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t see anything…not actually see…and I’ve got to be honest with you, lover, I didn’t get so close. There was a way weird feel to it, and Jak… Well, I don’t really know what Jak saw, but it was something that wasn’t just a bunch of coldhearts.”
“This whole business has the ring of the macabre and mysterious about it,” Doc announced, moving near and clapping his hands together as he did so. “I do so love a mystery, especially when knowledge of it could save my skin. It resembles some stories I used to read by a young man called Pope. Edgar Wallace Pope, as I recall. Liked a touch of the bizarre. A bit like these fellows we are chasing.” Doc’s tone, which had previously been jocular, now became somber, his voice lowering. “I really do think you and young Jak should share this with us, no matter how silly or odd you may feel about it.”
“Doc’s right,” Mildred said, also coming near. “No matter how odd it is, even if it isn’t spooky, the fact that they’re making us feel like that means it’s one of their weapons.”
Jak had remained apart from the group, which had slowly clustered around Ryan. He was ruminative, as though weighing how to explain himself. He joined them, then. Looking away from them, he began. “Not sure how say. Deal with things in front you—hit man, chill mutie. Blades and bullets, know where are. Not with this. Shit scare kids with…didn’t feel like that, though.”
And so hesitantly, as the sun grew higher in the sky, Jak went on to outline how he had felt the previous night when he had