LITMIR.BIZ

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overworked and barren. When the rains came, they soaked in and stayed. Even when the surface was dry and cracked, just beneath was sodden. They would never get thirsty, but they couldn’t grow any crops that wouldn’t rot before they reached maturity. So any jack Valiant made on the gas was eaten up by the need to buy food. Usually from the very same traders.

      But the baron was ambitious. And a baron with ambition but no jack and no manpower was a very dangerous thing.

      RYAN WAS SLOWLY starting to feel like himself. The aches were still there, but through sheer force of will he cast the pain to the back of his mind. He concentrated on flexing every muscle in his arms and legs. His feet and hands were numb from the ropes that had been tied when he was unconscious—he assumed that the same was true of the others—but there was enough give in the ropes for them to burn on wrists and ankles as he flexed. Moments later tingling ached and burned in his fingers and toes as circulation began to return feeling to those extremities.

      Still, there was a void where memory should be. He was aware that they were being taken somewhere for a purpose, but that purpose still escaped him. It lurked on the fringes of his consciousness, but was tantalizingly out of reach.

      It looked, in the saturnine light, as though he was the only one to be awake. Maybe not. If any of the others had awakened, then they would be doing their best to disguise it, as he was, until they had worked out the how and why of being here.

      Hawknose. Stupe name, he thought. Why was it called that?

      Then it began to return. Slowly.

      ‘SEEMS A WEIRD name, don’t it?” Travis chuckled, and it wheezed its way from laughter into a cough. He hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it out the door. “Mebbe it is, unless you know why.”

      “And you’re going to tell us?” Mildred asked in a wry tone. It had been obvious that the grizzled man had been lacking in company, and was glad of the chance to talk.

      “Since you ask so nicely, I will, little lady.” Travis’s eyes twinkled. He would, in all likelihood, have chuckled again if it hadn’t run him the risk of another coughing fit. “See, if we hadn’t had to move back in the early days, it would have been obvious. Originally, in the days before skydark, we came from a little place that was under the shadow of a bluff that was shaped like a hawk’s beak. Least, that’s what they say. I wouldn’t know. I might look old, but I ain’t really all that. It’s just this fancy living that’s made me so soft.” He chuckled again.

      “Not much story,” Jak commented. He was tired, and hadn’t taken to the old man who was providing them with accommodation. The sooner he shut up and let them sleep, Jak thought, the better. It would be an early start. The albino youth didn’t mind hard work, but when it was monotonous it was that much harder to take the shit that went with it.

      Travis shook his head. His graying hair hung in matted dreads that brushed his shoulders, putting his lean jaw into shadow.

      “If that was all there was to it, then I’d agree with you. But it ain’t. See, we’d been there for hundreds of years, they say. Since the white folks first come to the old lands, there’d been a Hawknose. Almost as long as the Indians—and look what happened to them. We were survivors. And so it was with skydark. There were caves, they say, under the bluff that went right into the earth. Our people took all they could carry, and they stayed there until it was okay to come out. Some tried too early, just to see, and that was the end of them. But they did it for all of us, and we remember them for that.

      “See, that’s what we do here. We look out for each other. Hell, most of us are related. It was such a small place. We get people stop by, drop kids or father them, then…well, some stay and some fuck off. Don’t make no matter to those of us who have blood going right back. But I guess it stops us being all born with four heads and no legs, or some such shit.”

      That made sense. Since they had arrived, Mildred had noticed that most of the people looked like they came from a small gene pool. The men and women looked alike, and there was little to tell between one person and the next. And yet they hadn’t shown the signs of mutie inbreeding that she had seen elsewhere on their travels.

      So yeah, that made sense, Mildred thought. Unlike his story. Where the hell was that going?

      Travis had to have seen the look on her face.

      “The name. Why’d we keep it? That must be what you’re wondering. Well, it’s like this. After they came out of the caves, they saw that the old ville had been flattened by the hawk’s nose. The fucker had blown off some time during the years they were hiding, and it had wiped out the whole ville. Too much shit there to clear and build. “Sides which, it was a sign. Leastways, that’s how they took it. Time to move on. So they hit the road—what was left of it—and ended up here. Good place to be.”

      “You tried to dig that land?” J.B. murmured, his muscles aching in memory of his day’s work.

      “Listen, son, you say that, but look at it this way—would you rather try and dig wet earth or live on rocks that can’t grow shit at all? And ain’t got no water?”

      J.B. shrugged. He guessed the old guy had a point. “So why is this called after the old ville?” he asked, wanting to hurry Travis along for the same reasons as Jak.

      The old man sniffed. “Should have thought you could see where I was going with that. We’re a loyal people. We stick together. We look after each other. And we remember the sacrifices of those before us. This was called Hawknose for where we come from, and in memory of the others. And one day, that name will be pretty damn big. Valiant believes in that. We all do.”

      There was something about the way that he said it—an almost messianic zeal—that would brook no argument. Not even daring to exchange glances, the companions let the comment slide. But when the old man had finished wandering the rooms of the shack they now shared with him, and had left to go to the communal bar that lay in the old gas station, Krysty let out a long sigh.

      “This is going to be a long wait until the next convoy rolls into the ville,” she said softly.

      “That, I fear, is possibly the sanest and truest thing that we have heard all evening, my dear,” Doc muttered. “It is one thing for the baron of a ville to be so deluded and yet so firm in a conviction. But for this to infect his whole people?” He shook his head sadly.

      “They don’t seem to be a threat,” Ryan said. “Unless you mean to themselves,” he added with a grin. “We’re just going to have to tough it out, people.”

      They had been in the ville a short while. Long enough, however, to know that it was a typical struggling settlement, going nowhere and fighting, like everywhere else, for survival. There wasn’t enough jack to go around, and the land they lived on made raising crops and livestock an uphill struggle. The only thing they had going for them was the gas station and the reservoir. It kept them in business. Traders put them on the route as it suited them to have a way station here, but there wasn’t enough trade, gas or traffic to make it anything other than a case of the ville paying out with one hand for the jack they’d just taken in.

      The grandiloquent Baron Valiant was onto a stone-cold losing proposition. But if he was anything like his people—or they like him, however it may be—then he was stubborn, proud, a believer in his heritage.

      A fool.

      Yet it suited Ryan and the companions to stop here. They had been riding sec on a convoy and it had taken this detour to refuel, a stopover that was short by any convoy standard, and that said a lot about the way the ville was viewed. Hawknose was the last place a person would want to get stranded. But the convoy was uneasy. There were tensions between the trader in charge and the quartermaster, who was bucking to oust his boss and take over. He had the backing of half the crew, and was looking for the right place to stage a mutiny. From the time they had hooked up with the convoy, it was obvious that this was why they had been hired. With no agenda, no knowledge of anyone else on the convoy, the companions would just follow orders and collect their pay.

      Except that

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