LITMIR.BIZ

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face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.

      “Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.

      The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”

      “Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”

      His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.

      “Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”

      “My biz?”

      “What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”

      “Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”

      Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.

      But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.

      Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?

      Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.

      Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?

      As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.

      Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.

      As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.

      “Eat this, mutie lover!” the sec man snarled, swinging up the scattergun to fire both barrels at point-blank range.

      Flame and thunder filled the street as the hellstorm of lead ricocheted off the defensive forcefield that surrounded Delphi. The mix of buckshot and bent nails sprayed randomly to strike the nearby buildings. Predark glass shattered and a rusted wag shook from the barrage, but that was all that happened.

      No longer chuckling, Delphi approached the trapped man and stopped just out of reach as the sec man swung the smoking scattergun at his leg, trying to smash a kneecap.

      “Do you know how long it took me to make those stickies smart? To raise their baseline intelligence above that of a slavering beast?” Delphi whispered, his hand ever-so-slowly lowering the crystal rod. “To teach them how to sharpen sticks into spears. How to hide and ambush an enemy? Do you? Do you have any idea of the effort I invested into this project?” His hand began to shake slightly, as his voice took on a hysterical tone.

      “Now I have to start from scratch again somewhere else!” Delphi bellowed. “More of my precious time wasted! More inefficiency!”

      “What are you, a feeb? The muties were chilling us!” the sec man panted, his shaking fingers fumbling to shove a fresh load of black powder and nails into the chamber of the weapon. “The triple-damn stickies were eating our kids! They would have wiped out the whole ville in another few months! We had to ace them. We had to!”

      “Cretinous fool, that was the idea!” Delphi yelled, waving the wand.

      There was a flash of blue sparks, and a powerful hum filled the air. The partially loaded blaster suddenly turned red-hot, then white-hot, and the sec man threw it away just as it detonated. The blast ripped the scattergun apart, and blew off both of the sec man’s hands. Now shrieking in pain, the mortally wounded man raised his arms to stare at the ragged stumps spurting bright coppery blood.

      Delphi gestured again, and the tattered strips of flesh dangling off the ruptured arms glowed with a terrible cold fire, and the gaping wounds closed, as if the limbs had been thrust into a raging furnace and cauterized. The sobbing sec man couldn’t believe it. The bleeding had stopped, but there had been no pain. No pain at all!

      “Fool. You’re not going to die that quickly,” Delphi said in a flat monotone. “First, you must pay for your crimes. Only then can I leave to find Ryan and his crew.”

      Ryan?

      “Wait! I can help! I know Cawdor!” the sec man whimpered, trying to hide behind his half arms. “He trusts me! I can find him for you!”

      “Oh, my hunters already know where he is,” Delphi said, his merciless eyes starting to twinkle. “Besides, I never deal with traitors. Tsk, tsk, turning on the man who saved your ville. How sad. Now your death will be much more…unpleasant.”

      The crystal wand flashed again.

      RIDING UP THE SIDE of the hill, Ryan and the companions spread out slightly so that they didn’t offer a group target to anybody hidden in the thick cactus growing on the sandy dune. There was no sign of anybody, but only a feeb took chances.

      Cresting the top, the companions stopped as they saw the row of bloody crosses sticking out of the damp soil. There were the tattered remains of people nailed onto the wood, the bodies hanging limply with their stomachs slit open, the distended bowels hanging down into bowls on the ground. The prisoners had been opened wide, and their intestines removed, but left connected. Alive, but disassembled. There was a growing smell in the air of blood and nightsoil, a foulness so thick that the companions could almost taste the hellish reek.

      Leaning over sideways in her saddle, Mildred began to noisily lose her breakfast, and Krysty closed her eyes to mutter a prayer of forgiveness to the Earth Mother Gaia.

      Leveling their blasters, Ryan and J.B. checked for traps as they started toward the horribly mangled bodies. Neither of the warriors had ever seen anything quite like this before, which disturbed them greatly. Bits and pieces of the prisoners were tossed around, the ground alive with insects and green lizards. Scorpions battled over a split tongue, while a swarm of beetles hurriedly consumed something too obscene to be closely identified.

      “Remember the craz eunuch from Nova ville?” J.B. asked out of the corner of his mouth.

      “Eugene,” Ryan replied. “Yeah, I would have sworn this was his work, if Shard hadn’t aced the bastard right in front of us.”

      “There were students, folks he was teaching his techniques at the ville. Mebbe…” J.B. left the sentence unfinished.

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