mouth kept opening and closing, as though she was about to faint. In the quiet, Ryan heard her spurs tinkling.
'We go when we please, old man,' J.B. said.
'Don't you speak to my brother like that, you glass-eyed shitter!' spat Rachel.
'Brother!' exclaimed Finnegan. 'Thought he was your husband.'
'Ah, you clever fat prick, he is. Brother. Husband. I'm his wife.'
'Then?..' said Ryan, pointing to Lori.
'Oh, the dummy. She's his daughter's daughter. Don't have the brains of a frozen piss hole.'
For a few moments everyone was silent, trying to assess the situation. Hun broke the stillness by getting up from her bed, starting to dance to the music. But she suddenly saw Quint and the others in their frozen tableau.
'What the fuck does?..' She pulled off the earphones, and they could all hear the shrill, tinny music.
'Keeper says you been wicked. Keeper says you been to see the place where death lives.'
His voice was becoming louder and more querulous, with spittle spraying from his lips, dangling in his beard. Ryan noticed that the knuckles of the old man's right hand were whitening on the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The sequins on his jacket shimmered in the overhead lights.
'Keeper says the law is set on them as breaks it. Keeper's word runs like the law of maintenance. To venture without is to die. To break...'
There was no warning.
Lori suddenly moved, pushing past Quint, sending him staggering into Rachel, running toward Ryan, dropping her own gun. Mouth open. Talking.
Screaming!
'It's trap! They kill! Kill 'em, Ryan!'
The room exploded with violence.
Chapter Ten
Britva had amputated three toes from his right foot, using the open cutthroat razor that had given him his nickname. After his fall into a pool a few days earlier it hadn't been possible to stop and light a pyrotab to dry out his socks and boots — not without running the risk of being abandoned as the unlamented Nul had been. So he'd waited and hoped. But eventually the blackness had come and the swelling. The toes had bled very little.
Uchitel had watched him closely for any sign of weakness, but the little man with the trimmed beard had kept up well.
The invasion was going better than he'd hoped. The one disappointment was that Alaska was just as poor as Russia.
The two communities they'd found and destroyed so far were even smaller than those across the ice river. One had consisted of only three wretched hovels containing seven human beings, four of them with strong mutie traits. Three of the locals had killed themselves as soon as they saw the invaders looming out of the driven snow.
Bet one of them had been kept alive: a lad of around eighteen in surprisingly good health, despite being riddled with lice.
Uchitel prodded his stallion to move faster. The temperature was dropping fast as night approached, and shelter was yet another couple of miles away, in the lee of a low ridge. Since arriving in America, Uchitel no longer felt the need to keep checking behind him. Those horseback soldiers, if they really did exist, would have given up days back, not daring to leave their own terrain.
The American boy had given them hope of better days to come.
Pechal had taken the lad, helped by Urach, watched carefully by Uchitel, who had held his phrase book open on his lap. The boy was stripped and tied to a skinning frame outside the hut where his mother lay raped, sodomized and dead.
After his failure with the trapper, the leader of the Narodniki had spent time studying the book, gradually learning how to choose his words with greater care. Now, he felt ready.
'Where are big house and store?' he asked, trying to pronounce each word the way the book said.
'What?'
Pechal laid a thumb on the boy's right eye and pressed; the boy screamed and tensed his skinny white body against the cords. Blood trickled from his burst nails, and his ribs stood out like a line of picket fencing. The pain was so severe that the boy lost control of both bladder and bowels simultaneously, making Pechal curse and step hastily away from him.
'Don't hurt him, Pechal. Not yet. I have read how America was a place of great riches. Everyone owned several houses and trucks and guns. It cannot be far to such places. I will ask him again.'
Bizabraznia, the Ugly One, came swaggering by, clutching an earthenware beaker of
'If he won't fucking talk, Uchitel, then I'll fucking rip off his fucking balls. Hear him sing then.'
'Leave him be.'
All three of Uchitel's followers looked at him, hearing the familiar crack of command. The woman staggered unsteadily off toward the others, who were cooking a stew of root vegetables. Urach backed away from the helpless boy, resheathing one of his surgical-steel knives. Pechal pulled the gray hood of his long cloak over his head, bowing slightly. But Uchitel noticed how Sorrow's long curved nails were driven so hard against the palms of his hands that crescents of blood showed brightly.
'We would like to visit some reputable stores. Which do you recommend?' asked Uchitel, moving closer to the helpless youth, careful to avoid the fouled snow.
'Stores, mister?' gasped the boy. 'I heard tell of 'em. Where Traders go. Ain't none. Not for a month's march there ain't.'
Though most of the boy's words were incomprehensible to Uchitel, the negativity was clear. There was a long silence while he thumbed through the book.
'Can you direct me to the best place to buy a real bargain, if you please? Thank you.'
'I don't know nothin' 'bout nothin', mister. Swear to the blessed savior, Jesus Christ crucified, I know fuckin' nothin'. I can't help you.'
Uchitel blinked, fighting to control his temper. His translation book wasn't getting him anywhere. At the last hamlet he made the mistake of speaking to an old man only to find the dotard was deaf as granite. It had been a mercy to slit his throat for him. But now he was still failing. Failing was something that Uchitel didn't like.
'I will try again. I think his head is filled with ice,' he said to the other two.
The boy stared from one to the other, his face twitching with nerves, the cold making his whole body tremble. Already the yellow snow around his bare feet was turning to ice. These barbarians with such awesome blasters had come from the west. But everyone knew there was nothing to the west, just a land where chaos ruled and muties lived. The gross woman who had tugged at his penis with her rough hands had been frightening, but the one who was their leader and who was trying to speak to him in a crooked and halting tongue was the worst.
He had eyes of gold, like the ferocious mutie wolves that ravaged the land and were hunted for their furs. Never had the boy seen a man with such eyes. The face was kindly, the mouth full lipped and generous. Yet the young lad could hardly breathe for the fear the man inspired.
If only he knew what the man wanted, he would tell him. Tell him anything. If his family hadn't already been butchered, the lad would betray them now for his own life.
'I request you direct me to where I can find food and clothes.'
It was Uchitel's last try. If this didn't work.
Suddenly an idea came to the boy. They wanted to find some place where there were clothes and food in abundance.
'Yes,' he said.
'
