that brought me to this point and headed into the gauntlet.
It was as bad as I feared. A couple of times I dodged around rocky outcroppings and caught another whiff of lamp oil. Finally I emerged on the trail where it ran closest to the cliff’s edge, my arms slashed from protecting my head and my shins cut from pushing their way through the branches. Exhausted, I sat down on a fallen tree beside the path to catch my breath. I tried to read the ground to see if my man had already passed, but it was too rocky, and the traces I saw could easily have been my own from earlier that day. Sweat from the exertion trickled into the various cuts and scratches, and the stinging made me even angrier. I was sure I’d missed him, that my frantic race to intercept the bastard had been for nothing. Then, from up the trail, I heard the distinctive neighing of my own borrowed horse as she came toward me.
I ducked out of sight behind the fallen tree and pulled a branch down over me. The dead man’s horse went past first at a leisurely trot, smugly unconcerned with the huge drop to its left. Then my gray mare followed, far more slowly, and actually turned my way as if she could see me. If she’d given me away I’d have pushed her off the cliff with my bare hands, but she went past without a sound.
My man had to be next, so I got ready. I heard him approaching slowly, letting his horse set the pace. He would be alert for pursuit, not ambush. I hoped. Then he was right in front of me.
He wore another one of the camouflage cloaks, but appeared taller and older than the man hanging dead back in the shack. I could see only his chin and its sandy-colored beard. His bow hung from his saddle, beside the quiver of arrows. No way he could nock one quickly.
I waited until he passed, then jumped over the fallen tree and grabbed a handful of the cloak. He was too surprised to resist and I yanked him easily from the saddle onto the rocky trail. He landed with a startled, “ OW! ”
I jumped onto him and pinned him with my weight and the cloak’s material. He struggled to get his hands free, and I punched him in the face. He grunted and stopped wriggling, so at least it got his attention. He glared up at me with fury that he knew, for the moment, he had to control.
“Nice shooting back there,” I said. “Now why don’t you tell me about Lumina?”
“Go to hell,” he hissed, and with a sudden burst of energy threw me aside. I rolled toward the edge of the cliff, but flattened myself and clutched the ground before I went over.
The guy jumped to his feet and threw off the cloak. He wore modified leather armor, the kind used as a status symbol by a certain type of criminal. It was covered with sword nicks and little pockmarks made by arrowheads, testifying to the wearer’s supposed history of violence. They were easy to fake, of course, but my gut told me he’d come by his honestly.
He drew his sword and attacked. I rolled out of the way just in time and the sword buried itself in the rocky ground. I got to my feet and drew my own sword, wishing now I hadn’t punched so many people that day. My grip was pathetic when I parried his next blow, and he damn near knocked the hilt right out of my hand. I responded by kicking at his groin. He turned and caught the blow on his hip, but it still made him grunt because my boots had metal toe caps for just such contingencies. His leg nearly buckled, and I jabbed with my sword, forcing him to awkwardly back away. I feinted, he moved to block it and I jumped inside his guard. I slammed the blade of my own sword into his chest and slid it up until the edge was horizontal against his throat, just biting into the skin.
We’d ended up closer to the cliff than I liked. “Tell me about Lumina,” I repeated. “And why you want to know so bad you’d kill some poor girl over it.”
He laughed. This close I saw the little patches of white hair that had grown from sword cuts on his scalp. He’d done his time, apparently. “Some ‘poor girl’? Pal, you don’t know who you’re talking about.”
A shudder went through me. I recognized his voice from that night: he’d been the torturer defending his professional skill. The dead man at the cabin had called him Frankie. That cold rage came again as I said, “I know she died being peeled alive by you.”
“Who are you working for, tough guy?” he demanded; suddenly he was now interrogating me. “You know Marantz doesn’t like strange noses poking into his business.”
“Then Marantz should’ve hired better people,” I said as if the name meant nothing. But it did; in my business, you got to know all about people like Marantz.
He laughed. “Okay, to tell you the truth, we were-” Then he head-butted me in the forehead. I reflexively slashed with the sword and cut the skin of his throat as I fell back, but not deep enough to do any real damage. I sat heavily on the fallen tree and my sword fell from my limp hand. I shook my head hard, and my vision cleared in time for me to see the man’s weapon glint in the sun as he brought it around in a wide, full-power slice at my neck. I leaned back so that it swished over my chest, then jumped up so that in one move I pushed him back and punched him in the jaw. He dropped his sword and, with an annoyed cry of, “Oh, god damn it!” fell backward over the edge of the cliff.
Almost.
I grabbed the front of his tunic, dug my boots into the dirt and managed to hold him with just his heels barely on the edge. The drop below was about forty feet, onto the same hard rocks that had so gently cradled me and his other victims. It might not be fatal; it definitely would leave a mark.
He froze, his arms flung wide for balance. All I had to do was open my hand. “Ready to talk now, smart-ass?” I said.
He glared at me. “I got nothing to say to you. You shouldn’t have been there that night, and we should’ve made sure you were dead. Mistakes all around.”
“Who is Lumina?” I asked.
He laughed. “The fire dreams are made of, pal.”
Dirt crumbled under his feet and he slipped a little. I couldn’t hold him balanced like this much longer. “What’s Marantz after?”
More rock fell. Somewhere a crow signaled to its brethren. “You are in so much trouble. Once Marantz hears about this, you and everyone you know will be mutton on the fire. You get me?”
I had to admire the guy’s balls for trying to talk his way off the edge of a cliff. “I get you.”
“Now if you let me go, we might be able to work this out. I can talk to Marantz for you. I mean, yeah, you killed Jimmy up at the cabin, but he was a kid and he wasn’t too smart, so he’s no loss. Marantz won’t give a shit.”
“ You killed Jimmy, Frankie. Remember? And does Marantz give a shit about you?”
He grinned. “Hey, we’re family.”
I didn’t know if he meant it metaphorically or literally, and really didn’t care. The chill was back: the image of Laura’s dead face in the moonlight loomed vividly before me. “You tortured a helpless girl to death. You damn near killed me, and you did kill the best horse in the world.”
“The horse?” he said in real surprise. “You’re upset about the horse?”
“Not anymore,” I said, and let him go.
His last words were something like, “No, wait!” But we were way past negotiating.
I watched him bounce off the side of the cliff about halfway down and land with the kind of limp thud that said he wouldn’t be getting up. Still, I sat down and waited to make sure he wasn’t faking. When something thick and crimson seeped out from under his head I was pretty sure, but after two crows landed and began pecking at the skin of his hands with no response, I knew he was really dead.
Killing him had felt good, but not smart. He might’ve said more if I’d kept at him. But hopefully he said enough: Marantz. That one name told me an awful lot. With a sigh, I got to my feet and walked down the trail toward the cut.
SEVEN
It was dark by the time I got back to Neceda riding my loaner horse and leading the other two I’d acquired. It had not been hard to catch them: once they weren’t being herded, they stopped and began grazing on whatever pitiful scrub they could find at the top of the cut. The two bad guys’ horses were placid and much easier to handle than my gray curse.
After collecting them, I returned to the shack, but a search of the hanging man’s corpse revealed nothing of
