'Don't spend too much time in the dressing room, brother,' I said as I tossed him his clothes. 'It's time to take our leave of these sweet, gentle people. Our car awaits us down the block.'
Garth handed me my smoked glasses, pointed to the scabbard in my belt. 'Is that what you were hacking with out here?'
'As a matter of fact, yes. This is Whisper. Observe.'
Shhh.
I barely brushed Whisper against the edge of the doorframe, and a yard-long sliver of wood dropped to the floor.
Garth raised his eyebrows slightly, grunted. 'Impressive,' he said as he began to dress.
'That she is.'
'She?'
'She has a sexy feel to her.'
Garth laughed. 'You've been too long in the wilderness, brother. You've always tended to anthropomorphize, but this is ridiculous.'
Garth finished dressing. We closed the shed door, repositioned the planks across it as best we could, then moved around the building, keeping low and in the moon shadows.
'How much money have you got in your pockets?' I asked.
'Change.'
'What about the cash in the car, assuming it's still there?'
'About forty dollars.'
'We need money, or goods to barter. Whisper's too specialized an item, and she's the only weapon we have at the moment. There's more stuff where she came from-a room behind the Reverend's office. Maybe I should go back in there and look for something we can sell.'
'Agreed,' Garth replied tersely. 'Make it fast.'
'You want to wait outside?'
'No. We'll stick together.'
We circled around the building with the Reverend's office, still saw nobody. We went to the front, quickly entered, closed the door behind us. I led Garth through the darkness, positioned him in the second doorway while I went to rummage around in the items on the table.
Most of the stuff was junk, nothing to even begin to compare to Whisper, and would undoubtedly be discarded when it reached Ramdor-whatever that was. However, one item was of more than passing interest-a leather pouch filled with gold coins which must have weighed upwards of five pounds. I put the gold in the pocket of my parka along with the hard plastic case containing my glasses, then turned toward Garth.
The beam of a powerful flashlight hit me squarely in the eyes.
'Hold it right there, dwarf!' Mike Leviticus commanded.
It felt as though someone had poured molten metal into my eye sockets; I shrieked, clapped my hands to my face and slowly crumpled to my knees as white-hot rivers of neon flashed around inside my head with kaleidoscopic, searing fury.
There was a soft coughing sound, like the pop of an air gun, and something whistled through the air over my head and pinged into the wall behind me.
Intent on sneaking up on me in the darkness, Leviticus had apparently missed Garth altogether-until now. There was the thud of a fist hitting flesh, then a crash as the flashlight fell to the floor. Scuffling, muttered curses, then the sharp, ominous sound of wood breaking-that would be Leviticus swinging with the bony side of his hand at Garth's head, missing and hitting a wall.
Leviticus, I assumed, would be a heavy hitter in karate. Garth was not. The popping sound I'd heard had to be a tranquilizer gun, which meant that a Loge or Loges placed a high premium on keeping us alive. However, now that he was being pressed, Leviticus might well feel that he could afford to kill Garth. Garth's body could be preserved… and they still had me.
Me was going to have to get rolling.
The sounds of struggle continued as Garth and Leviticus flailed blindly at each other in the darkness. Somebody fell across the table just above my head. The table collapsed, and I rolled away as various 'offerings' rained down on me.
My eyes still burned with acid-heat, but I took my hands away from them and tried a tentative squint just as I heard another soft cough.
The flashlight, unbroken, had rolled across the room, and its strong beam was now focused on a small area in a corner, beneath the window. Garth, blood running from a cut on his forehead and with his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, was a few feet away, struggling to get to his feet amid a pile of junk, cardboard boxes, and blocks of Styrofoam.
Leviticus was by the door, reaching for the light switch.
I picked up a broken table leg and threw it at the bare, overhead bulb just as Leviticus threw the switch. The bulb exploded with a flash which I managed to avoid by closing my eyes and turning my head away. The movement cost me a half second. When I opened my eyes again, Garth had only managed to work his way to his knees, and Leviticus was striding purposefully toward the flashlight.
I leaped to my feet, kicked a section of broken table to the side, and sprinted across the room. I launched myself into the air and landed on the Warrior's back just as he was bending down for the flashlight, knocking him off balance. Instantly I wrapped my left arm around his throat while I searched for his eyes with the fingers of my right hand.
Leviticus knocked my hand away, half turned and lunged backward, banging me into the wall-once, twice. The third time did it. Stunned, the wind knocked out of me, I lost my grip on his neck and ignominiously fell to the floor.
Struggling not to lose consciousness, I groped in my pocket for my glasses, found them, ripped them out of their case and put them on.
With the glasses on, I could only see the beam of light and the things it touched; it touched the tranquilizer gun, then swung around into my face and approached like an attacking sun. Desperately, I struggled with fingers that wouldn't work properly at the zipper of my parka, which seemed to be stuck.
'You two have given me enough trouble,' Leviticus said in a dry, almost bored voice as I gave up on the zipper and reached under the edge of my parka. 'Now I'm- '
Shhh.
Lunging forward, I swung the huge blade of Damascus steel in an arc, aiming at a point behind the light, and felt only a slight tug on the handle as Whisper cut through the flesh and bone of Mike Leviticus's wrist. Blood splattered over my face. Leviticus's initial grunt of surprise was drawn out to a soul-deep, sorrowful moan as his hand and the flashlight flew across the room and landed against the wall with sufficient force to break the flashlight. Then I heard the Warrior sit down hard on the floor.
I rolled away, sprang to my feet and whipped off my glasses, preparing to strike again. It wasn't necessary. Leviticus had apparently felt he needed only his hands and the tranquilizer gun to handle us, because his shoulder holster was empty. He was slumped against the wall, staring in my direction with eyes that were rapidly glazing over with pain and shock. The fingers of his right hand were wrapped around the stump of his left wrist as he tried to stanch the flow of blood. He wasn't having much success; the blade of bone that made his hand such a formidable weapon also made it more difficult for him to close his fingers tightly. Blood oozed-and occasionally pulsed-out of the stump. The tranquilizer gun had fallen, skidded out of his reach. I turned my attention to Garth.
Garth had never made it out of the pile of debris in the middle of the room. He was sitting with his head lolling back and forth, as if he were asleep. There was a steel dart with narrow green stabilizers sticking out of his left shoulder. I replaced Whisper in her scabbard, kicked the tranquilizer gun even farther across the room, then hurried over to him.
The cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding and looked to be minor. I pulled the dart out of his shoulder, then pulled back his parka and shirt and looked at his shoulder. There was a thin trickle of blood, but it was obvious that the thickness of the parka had prevented him from getting a full dose of the drug in the hypodermic mechanism that was part of the dart. But he'd gotten enough to pose a problem.
