was left to flounder in the desert. All those wounds, all that ju-ju, all the strain. It had finally been too much for him. In retrospect, he was amazed that he had held out against madness so long.
But the stranger was here. There was no doubt about that. The man and his horse were massive, not in size but in substance. This was reality. The stranger pulled a pouch and paper from his waistcoat pocket and rolled himself a cigarette one-handed. He struck a match on the horn of his saddle and lit his smoke.
'Who are you?'
The cigarette burned. 'Just a drifter.'
'Where did you come from?'
He threw the cigarette away, ash in the sand, and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
'No place special, son,' he waved a hand at the desert, 'out there somewhere, I guess.'
Stack's head hurt. Sand drifted against the Oscars. A wind was rising, whipping the tops of the dunes.
'Why did you come?'
'You needed help. I always try to help.'
The stranger adjusted his hat, fixing it tight to his head. An unheard-of cloud drifted across the face of the moon. No, not a cloud, a
'Looks like a sandstorm's blowing up,' he said. 'I'd best be on my way.'
Stack opened his mouth, but had nothing to say.
'So long, pilgrim,' said the stranger, pulling his kerchief up, and turning his horse away.
Stack finally got it out. 'Thank you…'
The horse picked up speed, and the stranger's slicker billowed around him like a white cloak. He raised his hand to clamp his hat to his head, half turned in the saddle, and waved a farewell.
'Thank you, thank you.'
The stranger rode off into the night. Darkness and the wind swallowed him. For a few moments after he was gone, Stack could hear hooves, then there was just the whistling of the wind and the shifting of the sands.
He turned, and walked past the dead Oscars, back towards Fort Apache.
X
Everything was going wrong. The androids weren't responding. Lauderdale had had Stack in his sights, but a sandstorm had blown up and his viewpoint blanked out. He tried to activate the nuke, but hadn't been rewarded by a big bang. There was someone in the desert with Stack, but there was no way of telling who. He didn't like that.
Also, half the Ops Centre had shut down without warning.
Rintoon was still crying 'mutiny.'
Lauderdale pushed angrily away from his console, and wheeled around, looking for a course of action.
The demon had stopped coming through the speakers. It was still in the works, Lauderdale knew, but it was busy with its own battle.
What would Elder Seth want him to do now? What was the Path of Joseph?
“I'll have them all flogged within an inch of their lives!' screamed Rintoon. 'Flogged, flogged,
The Colonel was making whipping motions with his arm, relishing in his imagination the thwack of leather against flesh.
At least, he was happy.
What to do, what to do?
Lauderdale's hands were shaking, and his heartbeat was up. He loosened his tunic collar.
'Lay open their backs, and pour salt into the weals…'
Lauderdale was afraid. His mouth was dry and his tongue was swollen. He trembled with the fear that he had lost his way, had strayed from the Path of Joseph.
He had bitten his lips and his tongue. There was blood in his mouth.
The Path was clear. Lauderdale would see the way ahead if only he performed one more blood sacrifice.
He looked at the ranting, mad old man and knew what he must do.
The sabre mounted above the map was from the Battle of Washita in 1868. Some people said it was Custer's. That had been a massacre too. He hummed 'Garry Owen,' the tune the 7th Cavalry Band had played that day when the long-haired general put Black Kettle and his sleeping Cheyenne men, women and children to the sword. Not feeling the pain, Lauderdale punched through the glass and gripped the weapon by the hilt. He pulled it free, and swung it in a neat arc towards Rintoon's neck.
The Colonel paused in mid-rant as the sharp sabre bit deep.
Lauderdale drew the sword from its scabbard of flesh, and plunged it in again.
'Mutiny,' breathed Rintoon.
Lauderdale's mind went red, and he hacked until his arm was too aching to hold the heavy sword. It clattered on the floor.
Blood pooled around his boots. He dropped to his knees, and washed his face in it.
XI
In the mind of the machine, Sister Chantal wrestled with the demon.
It tormented her as it had done before, but with its energies applied a thousandfold. It was like being caged with an angry lion.
'Suffer, sssissster!' It sang in Petya Tcherkassoff s mainly synthesized voice, 'ssssssuffer and burn!'
It wore the faces of her ghosts—her father, her mother, Marcello, Georgi—and screamed obscenities. It tried to force its way into her skull, and make her wallow in filth, rubbing her face into every discarded scrap of herself. Every unfulfilled, unnameable desire, every impulse, every vice was trotted out in brain-filling Technicolor and graphic three-dimensional detail, with stereophonic agony on the soundtrack.
Her fingers tapped the keyboard automatically as she regurgitated the text she had been taught.
The horror show played on.
Mlle Fournier discovered her in the nursery, carving chunks out of Marcello's chest with a breadknife as she rode the boy to a bloody climax.
'Chantal, Chantal, you wicked child, wicked child, you should be punished, be punissssshed, you sssshould die, die, die…'
Marcello screamed, pain co-mingling with ecstasy.
'Chantal, Chantal, don't you like me any more? Cut deeper, cut deeper. Cut where the blood runsssssss black…'
In a whore's bed, while Isabella watched, she was sandwiched between Thomas Juillerat and the Pope, screeching.
'Oh, Chantal, Papa and
