He showed them to her. ‘We’re going to tie these onto our feet, just as soon as we find someplace we can hide the mules. Then we’re going to go on, leaving a false mule trail, until we can find a place to hide ourselves – a small place that they won’t think of searching, because they’ll be looking for people and mules, not people alone.’
‘Hide the mules! Where?’
‘I don’t know where. I’m praying we can find a place.’
They did find a place, across a little stream and up a draw, a dense grove of Jubal trees in a tiny box canyon on the opposite side of the narrow valley from the trail. They rode their animals down to the stream, leaving a clear trail, and taking time to water the animals well. Then they led the animals over rock up the curving draw and tied them deep among the trees. On their return, they wiped out all prints, then donned the false mule shoes and walked back to the trail from the stream, leaving clear but infrequent imprints.
‘We’ll come back for them when the pursuit passes us by,’ Tasmin asserted, allowing no doubt to creep into his voice.
Donatella stopped on the trail to wipe her forehead and settle the straps of her pack. They had left most of their gear on the mules, taking only what was needed for survival. ‘What if we didn’t get the tracks into that grove completely wiped out. What if they don’t believe the tracks? What if they go down into that draw?’
‘Then they’ll have two more mules and most of our equipment. But they still won’t have us. Now we have to leave as much trail as we can before dark.’
Walking on the false mule shoes was neither easy nor quick. Twice in the following hour they spied on their pursuers, who were drawing frighteningly close. The second time, Donatella saw them clearly and she put the glasses down with an expression of horrified surprise that she didn’t offer to explain. Tasmin let her alone. Attempting a mulelike pace while keeping his balance on the false mule feet required total concentration.
They had not gone far enough to satisfy him when it began to grow dark. ‘We can’t go much farther, Donatella. The soil is getting shallower along here. If we just keep going, we may find ourselves on a barren slope when they catch up with us. I wish I knew for sure what they intended. It might make a difference….’
Her abstracted silence broke with a rush of words. ‘I know what they intend. Killing. Torture. One of them is a man I know about, Tasmin. I saw him through my glasses, saw him clearly. I’ve seen that face before. I know who he is.’ Her voice faded to silence, as though the name could not be uttered.
‘Tell me,’ he ordered.
‘His name is Geroan,’ she answered. ‘He works for BDL, for Harward Justin. He’s an assassin. A hired killer.’
‘How do you know?’
‘A friend of mine met him. She told me about Spider Geroan.’ Donatella had turned white herself, for something more than mere recollection of what a friend might have said. Tasmin waited for her to go on, but she bit her lip and was silent.
‘We have the rifle,’ he offered.
‘We daren’t use it. The moment we use it, they’ll be sure we’re here. And we only have one rifle. They probably have six or seven.’
‘True,’ he nodded. ‘You’re right. They can’t know we’re here. Not yet. Not for sure.’
‘It’s been a long time since I came this way, but I don’t think there’s anything ahead of us to help. It gets more and more barren the farther up this valley we go, and narrower. There’s no way out on either side. Just precipices with no passes through them. The only ways out are back, the way we came, where the pursuers are right now, or at the southern end….’
Where they were seemed barren enough, a slope of hard igneous rock that looked as though it had not changed since it had been spewed out molten except to be sparsely netted with soil-filled cracks. There were only a few stunted Jubal trees, their meager fans trembling in the chill wind. Occasionally there were veins of softer, lighter stone running parallel with the trail: pale, sedimentary strata, the bottom of some ancient sea, layered between stripes of the harder stone by cycle after cycle of vulcanism and alluvium, one replacing the other.
As they moved on, these veins tilted into a wall on their right, at first low, then towering, a striped and undulating outcropping where the softer strata had been eaten away to leave shadowed pockets between the wind-smoothed shelves of harder rock.
As his eyes and mind searched for a hiding place, Tasmin chewed over what Donatella had said about the man following them. There had been fear in her voice, abject fear, more fear than would have been occasioned by no more than she had told him. It was not merely that the man was an assassin. Tasmin started to ask her, then caught himself. She was already afraid. Talking about it might only make it worse.
He turned his mind to the stone, concentrating on it, searching for something his traveler’s sense told him must be there, somewhere….
‘Stop,’ he cried. The trail curved to the right around the slope where wind had chewed deeply between the layers, making horizontal crevices that held darkness in their depths. One of these pockets, slightly above their heads, was almost entirely hidden behind fragments fallen from the shelf above. ‘There,’ he pointed. At one side of the shelf a hole gaped, thicker than their bodies, accessible from the trail by a tumbled stairway of fallen rock.
He was halfway
