Fall with Honor (Vampire Earth #7)

Fall with Honor (Vampire Earth #7) Page 7

Across Cumberland Plateau, April: It is a land of sandstone bluffs and old coalfields, swimming holes and iron bridges, old loblolly pine plantations run amok and new deciduous forests.

Almost every kind of tree found east of the Mississippi can be found here, mixing among each other and gradually reclaiming land from the pines, each occupying land according to water requirements, with chestnuts and shortleaf pines atop the ridges and poplar, blacky gum, and maples in the bottoms.

For much of the early United States history, the eastern escarpment served as a barrier to the gradual migration west. The tough bluffs running the southeastern border dividing Kentucky from Virginia served as a natural choke. Cherokee and Shawnee hunted the land until passages through the Cumberland Gap were mapped out and opened. Even so, the region remained somewhat wilder than the states north and south until the exploitation of coal and timber resources made the area profitable.

The picturesque sandstone gorges once drew photographers, and protect the homes of cliff swallows and bats, but to David Valentine that spring they were a frustrating maze dotted with dead towns so decrepit they reminded him of his first operations as a Wolf in the run-wild forests of Louisiana. Negotiating ridges and valleys meant weary hours of scouting and camping as the columns wound their way east through the twisting, turning cuts, where one mile of red-shouldered hawk flight meant perhaps three up and down and back and forth.

Luckily, it is a wild region empty of Kurian holds. Kentucky always has gone its own way, even in its uneasy relationship with the Kurian Order.

Self-reliant to what some might call a fault, they saw off the first emissaries of the New Order in the chaos of 2022 with torch and buckshot, demanding to be left alone. Neither at war with the Kurians or cooperative with their Reapers, they bring coal to the surface and legworm grubs to market to trade for the goods they need. Every time a Kurian tries to establish a tower in the Cumberland, he finds his Reapers hunted, his Quisling retainers ambushed and hung, and the alleged rich prospect of Kentucky dissolving into a confusion of legworm tracks and ash.

The tribes have formed a feudal society, quarrelsome when at peace, uneasily united when threatened from outside. Every feudal society needs a king to smooth the former and lead them in the latter.

Karas' coins turned out to be only so much shiny dross when it came to bartering with other legworm tribes. Valentine's company went back to trading the crank-powered radios, rifles, and learn-to-read Bibles for butter and eggs.

But the legworm riders did offer spare worms, rigged for hauling cargo. Valentine's company received two, one to carry burdens while the other grazed in its wake, with roles switched the next day. Every third day the column rested now, to give the worms time to feed and recover. For all their size, they could be delicate if mishandled or underfed.

As they passed the more settled central part of Kentucky, the land became a patchwork of small towns and huge, clannish ranches. The towns were controlled by "badges" but rarely saw a Reaper, though Valentine heard fireside tales of bounty hunters and human traffickers who collected criminals and troublemakers.

Contacts with the underground dried up once they reached the ranch lands. Though the soldiers broke into a few locked NUC storage rooms in the dead of night, Valentine scanning for Reapers and his sharpshooters standing by with their blue-striped magazines in the rifles, they rarely returned to Javelin with full carts.

Where no small, easy game were to be had, Valentine felt it necessary to organize a hunt for larger prey.

"This is what's called hitting them where they ain't," Patel said to second platoon.

They were dispersed on a steep hillside overlooking a railroad cut. Valentine stood between Patel and Glass, who had the Grogs' .50 set up within a blind of machete-sculpted brush. Wolf scouts had relayed a report of a lightly guarded cargo train heading north on the Lexington track, and Valentine's company was dispatched to hit it if it looked like it contained anything useful.

Below them, an engine and ten boxcars stood on a single track in front of a blocked bridge.

The engine puffed like an impatient fat man.

Valentine stood above Patel, watching one of his Kentucky recruits talking to the engineer from the cover of a stand of thick redbud. A few other members of first platoon stood, looking at the blocked bridge. Another pair of soldiers, Rutherford and DuSable, who Valentine considered his two coolest heads, stood at the back of the caboose, swapping some captured New Universal Church activity books and Lexington newspapers for cigarettes and what looked like a sheaf of mimeographed crossword puzzles with the guards in the armored caboose.

Whether the engineer wondered why some technical crew just happened to be blocking a bridge where trains were running yesterday, Valentine couldn't say. Crow, the soldier in question, was a good talker and had worked rail crew as a boy and into his early manhood.

The binoculars in Valentine's hands stayed steady on the armored caboose. Patel watched the gunner in the little bubble just behind the engine. They were woefully attentive to duty, experienced enough on the lines to know that any unexpected pause called for extra vigilance.

"Faces. In the boxcars," Patel said. "It's not cargo; it's fodder."

"Another load heading up for Cincinnati," Harmony, a Tennessean, said. "Blood money."

Valentine swiveled his glasses over a few degrees. His vision blurred for a moment as redbud intervened, and then he saw it. A pair of haunted eyes looking out through the bars, knuckles white as the prisoner hefted himself up to the airholes at the top of the car.

He did some quick math. Maybe four hundred human souls behind that puffing engine, bound for destruction.

"No point hitting it now," Glass said. "Nothing we can use."

Valentine ignored him.

"What caused you to get culled, cuz?" Harmony said as if talking to the prisoner. "Heart murmur show up on a health check? Forget to make a payoff? Screwup under the boss's eye on a bad Friday?"

A clean-cut young officer left the caboose. Another railroad guard trailed behind him wearing the harassed look or adjutants everywhere in any army. After a conference with the engineer, they approached Crow, who gestured for them to come and look at the bridge.

They walked out to the edge of the gorge, and Crow pointed to the pilings at the base of the bridge. A couple of the idling workers fiddled with the pile of shovels and picks at the edge of the road; another went back to a captured pickup with a freshly painted logo the platoon had been using, avoiding the officer.

A perfectly natural move.

Captain LeHavre always told him not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This would be as good an opportunity as they would get with this train.

Valentine looked again at the young officer, wondered why someone hardened by experience wasn't on this trip. Maybe he was fresh out of some New Universal Church leadership academy, telling himself that this winnowing, distasteful in the particular, helped the species in general.

Tough luck kid.

"Give the strike signal," Valentine said. "Glass, have the Grogs hit the engine first, then the caboose."

Patel rose and made a noise like a startled wild turkey.

Rutherford and DuSable shoved the newspapers in their vests, reaching for the small, cylindrical grenades that hung within.

Glass made a face, but patted Ford on the shoulder and pointed at the engine. He and Chevy swung their .50 and aimed.

"Open fire," Valentine said.

The .50 chattered out its lethal chukka-chukka-chukka rattle. The glass of the cupola turned to spiderwebbing and blood.

Crow froze up. One good shove and he could have sent the young officer headfirst into the gorge. Valentine silently implored him to move, but he ducked down at the gunfire.

Another of Valentine's men in gray denim, a thick-armed ex-motorcycle cavalry named Salazar, raised a shovel and bashed the adjutant with it as Crow still gaped. The soldier didn't have time to make sure of the adjutant, for the lieutenant had his pistol out. The flat of the shovel caught the lieutenant under the chin, tumbling him into the gorge.

Two hammering bangs, less than a second apart, sounded from the armored caboose.

Plumes of dust spouted up from the ventilators on the roof of the caboose. Rutherford and DuSable crawled like fast-moving snakes toward the front of the train, sheltering next to the wheels of the boxcars, where the men in the caboose couldn't bring their mounted weapons to bear.

The Grogs shifted their .50 to the armored caboose, emptying the rest of the box of ammunition, punching holes around the firing slits.

"Third platoon, covering positions," Valentine told signals, who spoke into his walkie-talkie, shielding the receiver with his palm. "Second platoon: Forward!" Valentine shouted over the firing.

They'd done it, and done it well, dozens of times in training. Now it was for keeps.

"Check fire," Patel roared, as a soldier paused to blast the caboose. "Check before you shoot. There are friendlies down there."

They did it well, moving all at once at a rush. Third platoon, higher on the hillside, moved forward to the prepared positions.

Valentine, half sliding down the steep hillside nearest the cut, landed and glanced at the front of the train. One of his men was already inside the engine compartment, waving off additional fire. At the bridge, there was nothing to see but Crow, kneeling beside the soldier who'd clobbered the lieutenant with the shovel, a bloody pistol in his hand.

Bee loped after him, one of her sawed-off shotguns in one hand and an assault rifle in the other, moving forward like a fencer with the assault rifle pointed at the caboose, the shotgun held up and back.

"Get Cabbage over to Crow," Valentine ordered as he approached the caboose. "He's not calling man down but I think Salazar is hurt."

Cabbage was the company medic, when he wasn't assisting the cook. Formerly a demi-doc in the KZ, he'd gotten sick of signing unfitness certifications.

"Cover the cars until we know for sure what's inside," Valentine told Patel.

People were shouting for help from inside the boxcars. Valentine looked beneath the cars, searching for explosives. He'd heard of the Kurians sending decoy trains lined with plastic explosive and claymore mines to take out guerrillas when someone hit the kill switch. This didn't look to be that kind of train, but it was best to make sure.

No sign of strange wiring leading from the caboose.

Valentine looked through one of the bullet holes into the armored caboose, saw a twitching foot. Rutherford slunk up beside him.

"I'm going in," Valentine said.

"Let me go first, sir," Rutherford said.

Valentine noticed blood running down from his forehead, already-caking into cherry flakes.

"Rutherford, you wounded?"

"It ain't mine, Major. I got some on me when DuSable and I were checking for booby traps.

It was dripping out of the caboose. The cars look clear. DuSable's checking the rest forward."

He was a cool head.

Second platoon had taken up firing positions, covering the caboose and the rest of the cars up to the engine.

There was some trouble with the caboose's metal door; it was either jammed good or latched from the inside. Valentine pointed to the hinge rivets and the second platoon entry man employed a monstrous four-gauge shotgun on the door. Then Bee smashed it open with her shoulder.

Rutherford slipped in, pistol held in a Weaver stance.

Nothing but blood and body parts awaited them.

Valentine checked the radio log. The set itself was as dead as the gunners inside the caboose, but there was a notation that an unscheduled stop had happed, with approximate location, and that the message had been acknowledged by LEX.

Lexington, Valentine guessed.

They opened up the boxcars, giving in to the pleading and pounding from within.

"Liberators," an old man in a black coat shouted. "They're liberators."

"That's better than 'shit detail,'" Ediyak commented.

They thronged around the soldiers, some in blue and yellow and pink clothing that looked like hospital scrubs woven out of paper fiber. In some Kurian Zones, they even begrudged you the clothes on your back when selected for harvesting.

"Please, stay close to the train. Don't wander off," Valentine repeated, walking up the line to check on Salazar.

Salazar had two bullets in him, or rather through him. The Quisling adjutant had opened up on him at point-blank, and Salazar still managed to half decapitate the Quisling before Crow finally fired his pistol.

Crow looked miserable, rubbing at Salazar's blood on his hands like Lady Macbeth.

"I think he'll live, sir," Cabbage reported. "Four neat little holes, two coming in and two going out. His left lung is deflated and he may have lost a big chunk of kidney, but that's just a guess without X-rays."

"Nearest machine is probably in Nashville," someone said.

They held an impromptu officers conference while second platoon distributed food from the stores in the forward-most boxcar to the "fodder."

Valentine had to snap Crow out of his misery.

"Crow, forget it. I need you in the here and now, okay?"

"Yes, sir," Crow said.

"Salazar's either going to make it or not. You poured iodoform into the wound and applied pressure. The rest is up to him and the medics. Worrying about fifteen minutes ago won't cause him to draw one breath more. Answer a few questions for me, and then you can go back to him."

Crow took a breath. "Yes, sir."

"They got off a message to Lexington. What happens if guerrillas hit a train?"

"It depends on if the train is just reported overdue or if they called in that they were being attacked," Crow said, his pupils gradually settling on the group of men around him.

"Let's assume the worst," Valentine said.

"They'll send out an armored train and motorbike and horse cavalry, backed up by at least a few companies of infantry and some light artillery in gunwagons. There's never been more than a few dozen guerrillas here. Too many Kurian-friendly legworm clans."

"How do they track the guerrillas?"

"Reapers, usually. I've seen them get off trains myself."

"Reapers mean there has to be a Kurian controlling them," Valentine said. Or the strange organization known as the Twisted Cross, but ever since the Nebraska Golden Ones smashed their facility south of Omaha, there were only a few odd units of them scattered around.

"I was told there's a Kurian in charge of rail security who goes around in an armored train,"

Crow said. "I never saw him though, just his Reapers."

"Brave of him to venture out," Patel put in.

"Yes," Valentine said absently. He was wondering how Gamecock's Bears would like a chance at a Kurian on the loose.

"What about the fodder?" Patel asked. "We can't take these people over ridges."

"No, we'll have to use the train," Valentine said. "We've crossed over enough old tracks this week. Is there a line we could use?"

Crow scratched his chin. "Lessee, sir. There's an old spur that heads off east at first, hooks around more south. Skirts the south end of the Boonwoods. It fed some mines that went dry.

That'll get us back toward brigade maybe even a little ahead of them."

By "Boonwoods" Crow meant the Daniel Boone National Forest, according to the legworm ranchers' description of Kentucky's regions.

"Yes," Valentine said, reading the doubt on Crow's face. "What's the problem?"

"Major, it's really overgrown," Crow said. "The engine has a brush cutter on it, but we'll have to go slow, move fallen logs and whatnot ourselves. They'll catch up to us easy, especially since it's obvious where the trail is leading."

"We'll blow track at the cutoff," Valentine said.

"That'll only slow them up for an hour or so," Crow said. "Their rail gangs can do anything but build a bridge in just a few minutes."

"I don't suppose there are any bridges."

"Lots, but they'll dismount and follow. If we even get that far. Somebody might have torn up track for scrap steel or used ties to build a cabin. You never know."

"We'll risk it," Valentine said. "At the very least these people will be no worse off than they were before."

Valentine joined Preville up at the ridgeline at company HQ, where he talked to Seng over a scrambler. Seng didn't sound happy about it. Valentine had been assigned to conduct logistical raids, not start small-scale guerrilla warfare on the Cumberland a week before they were due in Virginia, but Seng was too good an officer not to see a chance to bag a bunch of railroad security troops more adept at flushing guerrillas out of the tall timber than facing combined arms attacks.

"I've only got a few Wolves left at HQ. Most of them are elsewhere," Seng said, his voice crackly thanks to the scrambler.

"I'll try to keep the Reapers homing in on lifesign," Valentine said.

Then he broadcast in the clear to "Allegheny HQ" that they'd intercepted the train carrying

"Doctor Faustus" and he was safely on the way back. Some lonely slob, probably working the transmitter out of some shack near Mount Eagle and creating nonsensical chatter between Seng's HQ and the mythical operations' headquarters, acknowledged.

That would give the Kurian intelligence services something to chew on for a while as they examined the manifests of those shipped north as aura fodder. Hopefully some selection officer would be chopped for a screwup that existed only in Valentine's imagination.

It also might give the impression of a quick, fast-moving raid. If half the pursuit forces headed into the Kentucky hills following their foot trail, that many less would be left to pursue the train.

The toughest part of getting going again was convincing the transportees to climb back into the boxcars. Valentine didn't blame them; the Kurians hadn't bothered to provide much in the way of food or sanitary services. They refilled the cars' big yellow freshwater jugs from a handy stream, and his troops shared out what rations they had handy.

Valentine sent Rand with the carts that would have carried off whatever goodies they could have raided from the train, plus the small amount of supplies they'd bartered or scavenged on this trip, back east toward headquarters. He put Crow up front and the wounded Salazar with company headquarters in the caboose, now freed of bodies but not the sticky, coppery smell of blood despite a quick swilling-out. Cabbage already had an IV going, with Salazar as comfortable as doping could make him.

Even better, the intercom with the engine still worked.

The train bumped into motion. Bee didn't like being in the train, for whatever reason. She clapped her hand over her head and made nervous noises.

Valentine had nightmares of meeting a high-speed relief train coming south head-on and had to make plans for the abandonment of their charges. But they made Crow's turnoff, and the rocking and clattering increased as they moved down the old spur line.

The terrain around here was too hilly for good legworm ranching, but herds of sheep and goats grazed on the slopes. They passed signage for old coal mines, saw the rusting, vine-covered remains of old conveyors and towers frowning down on slag piles tufted with weeds and bracken fighting for a precarious existence on soil that had accumulated in nooks and crannies. In some places more recent strip mining scarred the hills, leaving the Kentucky ridges looking like an abandoned, opened-up cadaver on an autopsy table.

They set up watches, allowing most of his men to rest. There was little enough left to eat.

Valentine didn't think much of their guide, a rather slow man in his thirties who thought that by "guide," his duties required telling old family stories about who got married in which valley, the hunting abilities of his preacher's astonishing coon dogs, and the time Len Partridge got his index finger blown off by Old Murphy for sneak-visiting Mrs. Murphy while he was off gathering legworm egg skin. Valentine did manage to glean that the Kurians still sent trains into this region in the fall to trade for legworm meat, though it was sandwiched into a story about a wounded hawk his cousin Brady nursed back to health and trained for duck hunting.

Luckily there were only brief delays due to downed trees on the tracks. The men moved-or in one case dynamited-the trees with high-spirited enthusiasm. The audacity of a theft of an entire train had been the highlight of the march across Kentucky.

But the sinking sun set him nervously pacing the caboose until he realized he was making the rest of the occupants nervous, and he distracted himself by discussing Salazar's condition with Cabbage.

They came to a small river and stopped to check the bridge's soundness, with Valentine thanking his lucky star that he had such a diverse group of ex-Quislings in his company. He consulted his map and saw that the river arced up into the hills where Seng was headquartered. Sheep and goats and several legworms grazed in the valley.

"The bridge'll hold, sir," came the report over the intercom. "We can take a span out with dynamite and slow up the pursuit."

Not the Reapers. They'd come hot and hard with men on horses, or motorbikes, or bicycles, homing in on the crowded lifesign in the railcars-

Valentine tapped the intercom thoughtfully. "I want a conference with all officers,"

Valentine said. "Give the refugees fifteen minutes out of the cars."

They traded the captured rifles and shotguns and boxes of ammunition with the shepherd families for a generous supply of sheep and goats. The shepherds and goatherds thought him a madman: He was willing to take kids, tough old billies, sick sheep, lamed lambs. Valen-tine was interested more in quantity than future breeding potential. He warned them that there'd be some angry Reapers coming up the tracks shortly, and they'd better clear out and play dumb.

Then he had his men load the animals onto the boxcars.

The toughest part was convincing Patel to leave the train with a squad of men to guide the hundreds of refugees into the hills.

"Do I have to make it an order, Sergeant Major?" Valentine asked. Valentine hated to fall back on rank.

"It'll come to a fight when they catch up to you, sir. The men will need me."

"I know the job now. I was lucky as a junior lieutenant. My captain put me with his best sergeant on my first operation in the Kurian Zone."

Patel relented and walked around to the remaining NCOs, giving tips and hurrying up the loading of the livestock.

"Give 'em hell, billy goat legion," Patel said as he walked off with the crowds from the boxcars and into a hillside defile on the far side of the river. Patel wanted to put at least a ridge between the tracks and the lifesign he was giving off before nightfall.

David Valentine watched them go, silently wishing them luck.

The animals he'd purchased but couldn't fit into the train, he left behind to muddle the tracks. They'd fuzz up the Reaper's sensing abilities for a few moments, anway. The smell of goats reminded him of his induction into the Wolves. Valentine wondered what he'd say if he could have a talk with that kid he'd been.

He thought of a young couple he'd noticed, clinging to each other in doubt as they looked back at the boxcars as Patel led them into the defile. How did they get selected for harvesting?

Sterile? Passing out anti-Kurian pamphlets printed in some basement? The woman had mouthed "thank you" at him. That goat-sniffing kid would have written Father Max a long letter about those two words.

"It's worth it," Valentine muttered.

Valentine still had a few refugees: the old unable to make a long walk, the sick, and a few devoted souls who stayed behind to tend to them. He gave them a boxcar of their own just in front of the caboose.

Then they pulled across the bridge and dynamited the center span in a frosty twilight.

Valentine didn't hear any cheers as ties spun like blown dandelion tufts into the river. He had too many engineers in the attenuated company who'd sweated over the calculations and effort required to build a bridge.

The train squealed into motion again. Now the clatter of the wheels passing over points was accompanied by the bleating of goats and bawling of sheep.

Now the question was whether they'd make enough of a lifesign signal to draw the Reapers. He had what was left of his company, plus the refugees, plus whatever signal the sheep and goats would send.

He sent another message to Seng, reporting the destruction of the bridge.

"Scouts confirm you are being pursued. Two trains out of Lexington. The rear is heavily armored with engines at either end. Coming your way. Over," headquarters reported.

"A Big Boy might be managing the pursuit. Over."

"GC will attend to it," Seng's headquarters replied. "Instructions on the way. Over and out."

Valentine slowed their progress to a crawl, both to check for track obstructions and so they could easily see a messenger. He smelled roasting goat in the refugee car-with tarragon and cumin, it seemed. The resourcefulness of soldiers in feeding themselves still found ways to amaze him.

A mile later the intercom crackled. "Stopping. Rock slide."

Valentine swung off the caboose and took a look. His Cat-sharp eyes made it plain. That ended it. Piles of sulfur-colored limestone had ended the chase. This was no tree that could be sawn and rolled, or blown. The rock slide would take his entire company working with beams, chains, and the train engine to clear.

At least half a day, working in daylight.

The door in the next car opened. Valentine caught a whiff of the improvised charcoal brazier they had set up under an air vent. Glass and the Grogs were eating chunks of goat meat toasted on skewers made from bedsprings. Other members of the company dismounted from the train to take a look at the rock slide. Everyone shook their heads.

It was a tight little corner of Kentucky, Valentine decided, looking at the steep hillsides to either side, the braaak of complaining sheep and goats from the railcars magnified by the cut.

They'd come at least ten miles. Horsemen or cyclists would be strung out, keeping up with the Reapers. Would whoever was puppeting the Reapers risk them? Valentine wondered if there was a finders-keepers policy for the rail security Kurian.

The hills around this cut would allow his troops to set up murderous cross fire. There'd be no danger of the men hitting each other; they'd be shooting down.

There was a slight upward slope to the rail line. Valentine thought of the wild cart ride he'd taken down Little Timber hill.

"Set up company headquarters back in that rock pile," he told Ediyak and Preville. "Try to make contact with the brigade."

"Yes, sir."

Valentine felt something tickling at the back of his scalp. He decided it was his imagination, fretting at the dark and the delay, with Seng still miles away. He put some men to work making stretchers from the rickety beds in the boxcars.

He posted Glass and the two Grogs in the rocks above at the source of the fall, having him take some illumination flares. The .50 would have a nice look down the cut from that point, and they could make a quick retreat over the ridgeline.

He put Rutherford and DuSable on the other hill, just above the caboose, with a machine gun taken from one of the train's mounts. He made sure they had pistols with Quickwood magazines loaded and ready.

Valentine posted himself with the majority of the platoon around the caboose. The cupola gun in the engine could cover a quick fallback and serve as a rally point in the rock pile.

Valentine posted Crow at the coupling between the engine and the boxcars.

He walked from position to position, checking the men, checking that nagging itch at the back of his neck that was turning into a doubt, stiffening the hairs there. He told Bee to stay in the caboose. She'd be an unpleasant surprise to any Reaper who clawed his way in.

There were Reapers somewhere off to the west. Or maybe it was the Kurian, reaching out with his senses, searching for his quarry.

Valentine heard a sudden burst of voices from company headquarters. He saw a flash of messy, knife-cut hair in the dim light from the LED bulbs lighting up the radio log.

Duvalier?

He clambered up the rocks, saw Duvalier putting away her sword into the walking-staff holder. He smelled sweat, rubber, and lubricating oil on her.

Ediyak's mouth was opening and shutting like a landed fish, and Preville trembled like his heart had been jump-started.

"Sorry, guys, had to make sure. Where's your major?"

"Right here," Valentine said, stepping across a rock.

She sat down on a rock and rubbed her thighs. "Three hours on a bicycle bumping along a railroad. The things my poor body does for you."

"That's it. I'm shooting for senior rank," Preville said to Ediyak, sotto voce.

Valentine offered his canteen and Duvalier cleared her mouth out, then drank.

"I wish we could have saved you a few miles. These rocks prevented it," Valentine said.

Duvalier unwrapped a piece of dried legworm jerky and took a bite. "Seng's got half the brigade on the way. The Bears and what Wolves he has left are on their way to the bridge you dynamited, along with some of the legworm troops. Karas gave another whoop-'em-up speech and sent them off hollering. There's a big file of legworms following this track too. They're tearing a bunch of new holes in their mounts, prodding them at speed."

"Any orders for me?"

"Just to let them know if you found some good ground for an ambush."

Valentine let himself soar a little. Seng saw an opportunity to sting the Kurians good and was grasping for the rose and not minding the nettles. Even if it drew lots of troops into this part of Kentucky, he'd be across another line of mountains by the time they could organize themselves.

"Can you help me here?" Valentine asked.

"Sure. Want me to brew up some of this Kentucky hickory nut coffee? Not like those cafes in the French Quarter, but it's hot."

Valentine smiled. "Not that easy. The Reapers could be here any time. I'd really like another trained Hunter up with my men. You could jam yourself between a couple of boxcars, wait for a chance to make a move."

"Me? I'm a heroic kinda fighter, Val. When bullets start to fly I prefer to head the other direction."

Valentine touched her on the shoulder. "I know. Just this once. Please, AH."

She looked off down the tracks and into the Kentucky night. "No, Val. I don't like the odds.

Multiple Reapers, at night?"

Duvalier at least had the sense to refuse quietly. At most, Preville and Ediyak heard her.

Valentine wondered if she'd obey a direct order. Technically, Cats bore the rank of captain, but he suspected she'd tell him to get stuffed and bring her up on charges. "All right, how about a job more in line with your tastes?"

"I hope it doesn't involve climbing back on that bike."

"No, I want you to scout out a good, covered route away from the rails and up this ridge.

Take Ediyak with you and show her it. If a Reaper starts sniffing around in our rear, take care of him, or warn me."

"That's more my style," she said, fixing a button on her coat. "Want some of this bug jerky?

It's not half bad. I think these guys use molasses."

Valentine stomped down his vexation with Duvalier. "Ediyak, go with Smoke here. Don't worry, she's just marking out a line of retreat. She'll keep an eye on you out in the dark."

"Two eyes," she agreed, smiling at his clerk. Ediyak was rather good-looking at that. But then the kind of Quislings who ended up in the Order's services had better access to nutrition and grew up well-formed.

A soldier trotted up.

"Sir, Red Dog is acting really weird. He's hiding under the sheep and whimpering. Harmony says they used to have a hound that acted just the same way when there were Savio- mean to say, Hoods around. He told me to get you. "

Valentine still felt disquieted.

He turned to Duvalier. "You'd better make your exit now, or you won't have an option anymore."

She gestured to Ediyak. "Direction is the better part of valor," she said. Ediyak picked up her rifle and checked it.

Valentine was beginning to suspect Duvalier liked to misquote Shakespeare just to bug him. He reached into a cargo bag and extracted a flare pistol on a lanyard and a pouch of flares.

"Don't get yourself taken," she said to Valentine. "One is my limit for heroic rescues." She gave him a quick buss on the ear, standing on tiptoe to reach, kissing lightly enough that Valentine felt like Peter Pan brushed by Tink's wings.

Then the Kentucky night swallowed her.

They were right about the dog. Valentine tried to tempt him out from under the train engine, but the dog bobbed his head and whimpered, tail tucked tightly between his legs.

"I know just how you feel, ol' buddy," one of the company said.

Valentine nodded and reached, opened a Velcro flap on his canvas ammunition harness.

He extracted one of the blue-taped magazines, loaded it, borrowed some camouflage gun tape, and married a regular 9mm magazine to the Quickwood bullets.

Valentine walked up to his foremost pickets. He knelt, sent them creeping back to the main line, relieved in more ways than one.

They were out there. Reapers. Valentine's heart began to hammer.

Use it. Use the fear.

It woke him up with a capital awake. Each insect in the Kentucky night hummed its own little tune with its wings.

Valentine saw brush move. A peaked back, like an oversized cobra hood, rose from the brush.

Valentine felt its gaze. Every fiber, every nerve ending, came alive. He felt as though he could count the blood capillaries in his fingertips and the follicles on his scalp. Individual drops of sweat could be felt on his back. He opened the front grip on the gun, put the machine pistol tight to his shoulder-

The attack came from the hillside. Valentine heard a flap-laundry on a line. The gun went up without Valentine willing it and the muzzle flash lit up a falling, grasping parachute of obsidian-fanged death.

The next one was up to him before he could even turn to face it.

WHAM and the gun was gone, spinning off into darkness. Valentine fell backward, rolled, came up holding his sword protectively in front, noted coldly that the Reaper he'd shot was clawing at its chest, foot-long barbed tongue extended and straining.

The unwounded Reaper advanced at a crouch, a thin sumo wrestler scuttling insect-like in its squat. The inhuman flexibility of its joints unsettled. Your brain locked up in frozen fascination, trying to identify a humanoid shape that moved like a fiddler crab.

Valentine backed up a step, opening his stance and setting the sword behind, ready to uncoil his whole body in a sweeping cut when it leaped.

It sprang, taking off like a rocket.

BLAM! BLAM!

Shotgun blasts struck it, sent it spinning away as unexpectedly as a jack-in-the-box yanked back into its box as Valentine's sword sweep cut the air where it would have been.

Bee rose from some brush clinging to the small gravel swell the tracks ran along, other shotgun now held forward while she broke open the one she'd just fired with her long, strong fingers.

Valentine heard crashing in the brush as the shot-struck Reaper ran away. Valentine's instinct was to pursue. If it was running away, it was damaged and disadvantaged. He forced himself back to his senses and his men, sheathed the unblooded sword.

"Good work, Bee," Valentine said.

"Beee!" Bee agreed.

Officers' whistles cut through the darkness somewhere down the tracks that led toward the pursuing Quislings. Valentine located the sound. It came from the middle of a trio of tall robed figures in the center of the columns. Valentine saw movement all around them in the dim light.

Someone-Glass probably-had the sense to fire an illumination flare. The firework burst high, lighting up the steep-sided cut as it wobbled down.

The railroad cut was full of troops walking their bicycles uphill in two open-order lines up either side of the tracks, carrying their rifles at the ready so that the muzzles were pointed toward their open flanks rather than at their comrades.

Valentine backed up a few steps, fired another flare with his own gun as he retreated toward his line, more to highlight himself to his men. He drew a shot and then another from scouts the Quislings had sent forward. Luckily these troops didn't have nightscopes.

"Check fire, check fire. It's the major," someone shouted.

Valentine made sure Bee was following-she was backing through the brush like a living fortification between him and the advancing troops-and came up to his men. They'd stripped the boxcars of bed frames, thin mattresses, and water barrels and improvised a breastwork, shielding it with cut brush.

"Fire on my order. Single shots only, and take your time," Valentine said. "Pass the word.

Single shots only. We're guerrillas, remember. All we've got are deer rifles and bird guns.

Sergeants on up, have your pistols out with Quickwood magazines in."

Valentine trotted to the other side of the tracks, passed the word to the troops in the opposite of the cut. As he was about to climb into the caboose, Valentine heard something skip and bounce through the dirt toward the fortification.

"Grenade," he shouted, embracing gravel like it was his mother.

It blew on the far side of the breastwork. The men began to shoot back, placing careful single shots. The machine guns from the caboose opened up and drew fire in return.

Did the Reapers know they were chasing nothing but sheep and goats yet?

More whistles, and the Quislings came forward at a rush, bright flowers of shotgun blasts cutting through the brush as the assault began.

He fired another flare and saw them coming, heads bobbing as they advanced, the foremost less than twenty yards away, covering each other with bursts of fire that pinged off the caboose or thwacked into the bed-frame breastworks. If they could be turned now . . .

"Fire at will!" Valentine shouted.

Gunfire roared into the night. Grenades bloomed and died, each one exploding more softly as the ears became overwhelmed by the noise. Valentine saw figures falling or diving for cover.

A Reaper ran toward them straight up the rail line, a satchel held in each hand. The Kurian animating the Reapers must have been either desperate or determined to overwhelm them in an all-or-nothing gambit. Bee fired and missed, and then tore up its robes with her second barrel. Valentine didn't need to wonder what was in the satchels, or see the digital seconds ticking down. God, his pistol was out there somewhere-

A sergeant, Troust-though the men nicknamed him Surf, as he combed his thick blonde hair into a wave on his forehead-appeared beside Valentine and rested his 9mm on a step of the caboose, firing steadily, aiming with each shot. Valentine duly noted his coolness as though already composing the report.

The Reaper stiffened, leaning oddly, and started a throw, but the blood drinker's fingers refused to release. The momentum of the satchel toppled it, and Valentine saw the astonishment in its eyes.

Valentine saw heads rise as the Quisling soldiers scrambled out of the way of what was coming.

"Down!"

Valentine covered his ears and felt the weight of Troust come down on the back of his head. The satchel charges went off in twin booms that must have echoed in Georgia, and Valentine felt the world momentarily give way.

Surf let him up, the weird underwatery feel of the explosions' concussion sapping his strength and wits. A Quisling in a torn green uniform was at the barricade, staggering as he tried to climb over, and suddenly Valentine's backup pistol was in his hand and he shot, realizing as the bullets hit that he was killing a man trying to surrender.

More bursts of fire came from the darkness down the track. The gunfire seemed wrong.

Those titanic blasts should have been an operatic blast at the climax of the fight, not punctuation in the middle of a long, deadly symphony. His flare hung on a tree downslope, sputtering as its light died.

More whistles, low and muted to his outraged ears. Valentine saw wounded men being carried back.

Had to do something to break up the attack.

"Empty the caboose," he told Troust. "Fall back to the rock pile as soon as the cars start moving."

Valentine crept along the tracks, sheltering from the wild high bullets in the wheels, Bee trailing him like a gigantic dog. He opened each boxcar door about halfway. A goat jumped out. The other livestock looked stupidly at him, jumping and quivering at each shot.

He climbed into the engineer's cab, told the soldier there to start the train backward, and hurried to the back door.

He found Crow still posted, moving the barrel of his rifle at every sound.

"I want you to uncouple as soon as the cars have a little momentum."

"While the cars are moving?" Crow asked.

"Yes."

The cars bumped into motion, their squeals curiously innocent after the noise of combat.

Valentine gauged the train's speed.

"Now, Crow. Release!" Valentine shouted down from the engine.

Crow waited until the tension came off the coupling, then pulled it. Pressure cables for the car brakes hissed as the valves closed.

Valentine extended a hand and helped pull him back into the engine as the man working the controls applied the brakes. The rest of the cars pulled away, picking up speed on the slope.

"You did well, there," Valentine told Crow as the latter wiped his greasy hands on a rag.

The sheep and goats didn't like the motion and began to leap from the train. First a few goats, and then the sheep, all in a rush. Some went head over heels as they came off in a mass, a waterfall of wool and tufted hair. The goats' instinct was to head for high ground, and the more nimble goats made the escape up the hillside first. The sheep stuck together in bawling clumps.

Crow slipped and Valentine lunged, caching his arm. Crow's toes skipped on the tracks, sending up pebbles and dust. The train wasn't moving that fast, but the engine's tonnage could maim or kill even at a crawl. Valentine hoisted him into the engine compartment as the gunner opened up on some unknown target. Tracers zipped off into the darkness, zipping like hornets with meteor tails toward an enemy.

"Back up toward the rock pile," Valentine told the engineer, who applied brakes and sent the engine in the other direction. The gun overhead chattered again and Valentine heard casings clink into the canvas bags that prevented the spent shells from rolling around underfoot in the control cabin. Then, to the men at either side, he yelled, "Fall back! Fall back up the tracks."

Bullets rattled off the engine in reply. But the men began to move, NCOs tapping their charges on the shoulder and gesturing.

Valentine watched the spectacle of confused sheep and goats caught in a cross fire. Even experienced soldiers would hesitate to just gun down animals-there wasn't a man among them who didn't sympathize with the poor dumb brutes with little control over their fate, for the obvious reason that soldiers occasionally felt like sheep in that way-and Valentine's company used the confusion to scuttle back behind the rocks blocking the railroad cut.

The rocks were comforting in their thickness and sharp edging. There was good cover for shooting all along the fall; a crenellated wall on a medieval castle wouldn't have been more heartening.

The engineer and Crow leaped for the rocks, jumped over, and took cover, Crow leaving his rifle behind in his panic, the idiot. Valentine picked it up.

He tapped the gunner's leg. "C'mon. Leave it."

The gunner ignored him, emptied the weapon's box, and stood dumbly for a moment, as though waiting for someone to reload the weapon. Then he turned and looked down at Valentine with confused eyes. There was blood running down his face from a wound on his scalp.

"Out, back to the rocks," Valentine shouted, slapping him hard on the ankle.

The gunner finally left the cupola, slithered like a snake out of the battle seat and stirrups, and jumped out.

Valentine reversed the gears on the train one more time, clamped the pedal of the deadman's switch shut with a heavy wrench left for that purpose, and sent the engine puffing back down the tracks after the freewheeling boxcars, more to open the field of fire from the rock pile than anything. He paused in the doorway, suddenly tender about jumping, and leaped so that he landed on his good leg. He scrambled back toward the rock slide as sheep bleated in alarm at the engine picking up speed through their midst.

Valentine wished he'd thought to set some explosives in case a hero tried to jump into the cab to stop the engine before it collided with the boxcars.

The Quisling rail soldiers came up the cut one more time, but Glass and Rutherford and DuSable poured fire down the cut as the rest of the company took positions in the rock pile.

More sheep and goats fell than men, but the return fire was inaccurate in the dark. Mortar shells began to explode on the hillside. The fire corrected, and a shell dropped into the rocks.

Valentine heard a scream and he saw Cabbage run forward toward the blast, the big medical pouch bouncing on his hip.

Valentine drew his sword. The Reapers would come now, with the whole company listening to the sound of a man screaming his life out. Or they'd kill the men high on the hillside and then come tumbling down the grade like jumping spiders.

But he didn't feel them. The only cold on the back of his scalp was from the chill of the Kentucky spring night.

"They're coming! Brigade's coming," he heard Ediyak shriek from somewhere above.

Valentine felt a lump in his throat. He heard horse hooves and a motor from somewhere up the cut. The mortars shifted fire, sending a few rounds exploding back along the ridge, and then went silent.

Valentine saw a wave of soldiers pour over the ridgeline to his right, taking up positions to fire down on the railway Quislings. Every yard the enemy had fought for now meant a yard they'd have to fall back under fire from support weapons on the hillside. Valentine saw hands go up or men stand with rifles held over their heads, hurrying toward the rock slide to surrender.

His company ran forward to group the prisoners and relieve them of their weapons.

Valentine saw one officer carrying the machine pistol he'd lost; he recognized the colored tape holding the magazines together.

Harmony relieved the prisoner of his souvenir.

Valentine felt dazed, half awake, with the smell of gunfire and smoke and livestock and sweat in his nostrils. The weird elation that settled on a man when he starts to believe he'd survived, won, picked him up and floated him back toward the foremost troops to report.

Seng, frowning, sat in the passenger seat of his Humvee, issuing orders into a headset.

"You caused me at least two days' delay, Major," he said in response to Valentine's salute.

"More likely three."

"Yes, sir," Valentine said, wondering if he was in for a dressing down.

"I'll take it," Seng said. "Gamecock's Bears and the legworm outriders are hitting the support train now, and the Wolves are raising hell with some artillery tubes at the crossing they set up where you destroyed that bridge. A captured prisoner says their Kurian Lord's in a panic, disappeared into some secret area of his command car."

One of Valentine's company trotted up and presented him with his recovered gun. It now bore a nice set of scratches on the barrel just behind the foresight, a souvenir of the Reaper's power.

Valentine begged off from the questions and congratulations to check on the wounded.

Which reminded him: "I've got wounded, sir. Can we set up a field hospital here?"

"Of course. This ridge is good defensive ground. I'll establish brigade HQ here until all our, ahem, stray sheep and goats are rounded up."

The fight already had a name-Billy Goat Cut. Valentine heard one of his corporals relaying the details to a Guard sergeant deploying his men for a sweep of the battlefield to look for enemy wounded or hiding.

Duvalier wandered out of the hills with Ediyak trailing behind, his clerk looking like she'd just been through the longest night of her life. Duvalier carried a Reaper skull by its thin black hair.

"Found him lurking on the ridge, all dazed and confused," she said, sticking the skull on a rail grade marker with a wet squelch that sounded like a melon being opened. "I thought I'd solve his problem for him."

Just like a Cat. She did everything but leave it on the back step.

"Don't mess with that," a corporal warned a curious Guard. "You'll seize up and die if you get some of that black gunk in you."

"It's safe once it's dried," Duvalier said, rubbing some on her index finger and making a motion toward her mouth. Valentine slapped her hand down.

"Cut it out, Ali. What's the matter with you?"

"I wonder sometimes," she said.

Valentine's holding action was just one-third of the story. The Bears, Wolves, and assorted legworm-mounted troops had fallen on the support trains like hyenas on a pair of sick cattle.

Gamecock had found a piece of tentacle that looked like it came from a Kurian in the wreckage. It was already sealed in a specimen jar for eventual delivery to the Miskatonic.

Of course, there was no way to identify the remains positively. Valentine imagined the Kurians weren't above sticking some unimportant former rival or inconvenient relative in an aquarium marked "In case of emergency, break glass," so to speak, should a body ever need to be left behind while the Kurian stuffed itself up a hollow tree somewhere, or in the rear engine that managed to decouple and escape at full speed.

Moytana's Wolves had their own triumph, tearing up the artillery support hurrying toward the railroad cut. They were already working on chain harnesses so the legworms could haul the tubes up and down Kentucky's hills.

Seng was wrong about the delay. It took four days to get everyone organized, the refugees and the two men too shot up to move to a local brand.

Miraculously, Valentine had no one killed in the fight; his only losses were wounded-and the jibes from the rest of the expedition.

They crossed the Big Sandy into West Virginia. Special Executive Karas commemorated the occasion by having his legworm riders offer a banquet.

They sacrificed an egged-out legworm to feed the troops. For all their size, legworms didn't offer much in the way of edibles. The tenderest pieces were the claw-like legs themselves. They reminded Valentine of the shellfish he'd eaten in New Orleans and the Caribbean. The farther away you traveled from the legs, the worse they tasted. The riders assured him younger legworms were both tenderer and tastier, as were unfertilized eggs-"Kentucky caviar."

Legworm flesh barbecue was something of an acquired taste and depended greatly on the quality of the barbecue sauce. Southern Command's soldiery invited or shanghaied into attending chewed manfully.

Valentine ate his with a lot of cider vinegar.

They put Karas' chair on another stump, this one only a foot off the ground at the high end of the picnic field's slope, but it still gave him a commanding view and a sort of dais from which to command his legworm-riding knights-errant.

Seng tapped Valentine on the shoulder. "Major, our ally heard about Billy Goat Cut. He wants to see you."

Gamecock and Moytana were there as well, along with a Guard captain whose command had taken a whole platoon of railway security troops prisoner. A small crowd of legworm riders and soldiers had gathered to watch events, while sneaky dogs, including Valentine's company mutt, raided unattended plates. Valentine saw Duvalier's freckled eyes in the crowd.

She had a broke-brim felt hat pulled down almost to her knees and looked lost in her ratty old overcoat.

The leaders of the assorted clans of the Kentucky Alliance arranged themselves behind Karas. His handsome face smiled down at them.

Valentine saw Tikka again, standing next to her adoptive brother, Zak. Zak had a welt at the corner of his eye, but then it was a rare day when there wasn't a good fistfight in the Alliance camp. Kentucky men fought the way New Universal Churchmen golfed, as both a recreation and a social ritual.

"The major first," Karas said. "Congratulations on your brilliant fight."

"Brilliant" wasn't the world Valentine would have chosen. Brilliant commanders bagged their enemy with a minimum of shooting back.

Karas stood up. "A presentation is in order, I think. Bravery must be rewarded, just as treason must be punished."

"Bow," Tikka urged in a whisper that somehow carried.

Valentine wanted to tell her that the only time a Southern Command officer bowed was as sort of a preamble before asking a lady for a dance (Captain LeHavre used to say that it gave you a last chance to make sure your shoelaces were tied), but decided to cooperate in the interest of keeping the new allies happy.

"I dub you a knight of the New Kentucky Homeland," Karas said as he looped the medallion over Valentine's head. Valentine notice that Karas' hands smelled like a cheap Kurian Zone aftershave called Ultimate, strong enough to mask a hard day's body odor in an emergency. Valentine liked Karas a little better. No one with royal pretentions would walk around smelling like a blend of gasoline and window cleaner.

Valentine straightened again.

"Kentucky thanks you, son of both Southern Command and our own Bulletproof."

Kind words, but Valentine hoped he wasn't using the word Ken-tucky the way the Kurian in the Pacific Northwest used to be called Seattle.

While Moytana, Gamecock, and the Guard captain got their ribbons and medals, Valentine examined his decoration.

It looked like a piece of old horse show ribbon with a brassy circle at the end. Valentine looked closely at the medal. It was an old commemorative quarter glued facedown on a disk of brass-the Kentucky state design, rather nicked and scratched, but as clean and polished as elbow grease could make it.

Karas must be some kind of coin enthusiast. That or he was a student of the little common details that built a culture and a community.

Zak gave Valentine a discreet wave. His sister winked and moist-ened her lips.

The rest of the march had its share of difficulties. Valentine lost two soldiers of his company, whether through desertion or simple loss he never learned-they took bicycles into a town that allegedly had a good, safe market and never returned.

Seng was moving too hard to the northeast for Valentine to delay in searching for them.

He led a detail in civilian clothes into town but could learn nothing.

Bee slept outside his tent like a dog. Duvalier brought home grisly trophies now and then-Quisling scouts, an unfortunate pimp who tried to drug her at trans-Appalachian Inn, a Reaper who'd lost a foot to a bear trap.

Word of Red Dog's Reaper-sensing powers spread, and Seng attached him to brigade headquarters as scouting and detection gear. The dog went out with Wolf patrols and nighttime picket checks. Red Dog's cheery enjoyment of his excursions rubbed off as they neared their goals.

There certainly were pleasures to the march. Valentine loved the vistas of this piece of country. The old, round, wooded mountains had a tumbledown beauty, and seemed to keep secret histories in the silent manner of aging former belles.

Valentine visited the Bulletproof camp and learned some of the ins and outs of the Kentucky Alliance. All the clans were powerful orga-nizations, powerful enough so the Kurians kept watch on them and sometimes started feuds to prevent any one from getting too powerful. At least that's what Zak thought, expressing his opinion over some well-diluted bourbon at one evening's camp.

After a final pause that allowed Brother Mark and a pair of Cats to attend a meeting with the guerrillas and the underground, they marched to a map reference point and made camp on a defensible hillside. It was well watered, with a nasty rock pile to the north on one flank and a swamp to the south. Below, just visible between two lesser hills, was the town of Utrecht, seemingly chosen for its misty, moun-tain environs and the echoes of history in its name.

The representatives of the guerrilla army guarding the town seemed woefully undermanned, tattered but well-armed. The leg-worm ranchers mixed with them more freely than the Southern Command troops.

With Bee leading the cart horses and Ediyak sitting beside with the company fund, Valentine took a barter cart down into the valley and saw a better ordered group of men, perhaps in reinforced regiment strength, camped on another hill to the northeast of town.

Thinking that this was the partisan army proper, he turned the cart onto a road skirting town and toward their pickets, and received yet another surprise when he saw tattered flags identifying the men as belonging to Vermont and New Hampshire.

"Who the hell?"

"I'll be damned. Those are the Green Mountain Boys," Ediyak said. "Jeebus, all that's missing is a complement of Kee-bec Libertay for us to have every Freehold east of the Mississippi represented here."

Valentine waved hello to a corporal's guard watching the road but the soldiers just stared at him, waiting for orders from their superiors.

They were good-looking men, wearing woodland camouflage, boots, leather gaiters, and a good selection of Kevlar. Most had 4x combat sights on their assault rifles. On closer examination Valentine saw what were probably masked gun emplacements on the hillside, and a headlog or two peeped out from covering brush at the edge of open hillside pasture.

Anything short of a divisional assault on this hill, with armored car support, would be torn to bits.

Their tents weren't laid out in an organized fashion, but in little groupings that made their gently sloping hillside look like it had sprouted a case of green ringworm. Camouflage netting covered some tenting and mortar pits; others were open for the world to see.

"Dots, you magnificent bitch," Valentine found himself saying. Good God, how did all this come about? She'd played her cards very close to the chest.

His vision had come true-and then some. He'd imagined leading some Wolves and technicians to the aid of the guerrillas. Lambert had taken that idea and turned it into something for the history books.

It made him clammy just to think about it.

Valentine turned back into town. It was a rather old-fashioned main-street type of town, and every third building seemed to be named after somebody or other, nineteenth-century achievement emblazoned in Romanic letters in stone ready to bear witness to their greatness until wind and rain wore down even their gravestones.

The civilians either were keeping indoors, were terrified, or had fled the gathering of forces. Valentine saw Southern Command uniforms mixing with the timber camouflage of the Green Mountain Boys, guerrillas in patched riding coats and legworm leathers, all meeting and talking and buying each other drinks. A trio of milk-shouldered girls in halter tops, plump and tempting, called out to the soldiers from the expansive porch of an old Victorian mansion just off the town square. Valentine wondered if some entrepreneur had followed a regiment on the march and set up shop, or if it was a local establishment operating discreetly under Kurian eyes and now enjoying a quick gold rush of uniforms.

Bee whooped excitedly. Valentine saw a tower of faun-furred muscle, back to him, moving through the crowd in the middle of a complement of men with foxtail-trimmed ponchos hanging from their shoulders. Valentine felt his throat swell. He whipped the cart horses, hard, and caught up to the short column.

"Yo! Old Horse," Valentine called to the Grog's back. It ignored him, perhaps not hearing him in the noisy street. "Hey, Uncle!" Valentine yelled.

The men in back turned, and so did the Grog.

It had a long scar running up its face and a fang missing. An eyelid drooped lazily; the other glared at him, keen and suspicious.

It wasn't Ahn-Kha.