Dies the Fire

He laughed, and handed the shield and dripping sword to a servant. Quite a few of the guests joined in the laughter; this wasn't a crowd where the police had many friends.

"Making these weapons and armor requires considerable skill. Using them requires even more. But when you do have them and do know how to use them, you're like a tank to the unarmored and untrained. A hundred men so armed, acting as a disciplined unit, can rout thousands."

Emiliano nodded slowly, and saw others doing likewise. That made sense…

"Now, you'll also have noticed that traditional means of exchange-money-is worthless now. Right now, there's only one real form of wealth: food."

Yeah, and we spent a couple of days wasting our time robbing banks and hitting jewelry stores, Emiliano thought with bitter self-accusation.

He'd been living on ca

"There's enough food in this city to feed the population for about two months, if nothing was wasted. One month, more realistically, if there was a rationing system; a great deal has already been lost and destroyed. Then everyone would die. There is, however, enough for a smaller but substantial number of people for a year or more. And remember, gentlemen, there is no government anymore. Not here in Portland, not in Oregon, not in the United States. Or the world, probably, come to that."

That got an excited buzz.

"Yo," one of the Crips leaders said. "We thinkin' move out to the country, get the eats. With no guns, the farmers not much trouble."

Arminger shook his head again. "Not yet. In the long run, yes. Everything that's been invented in the last eight hundred years is useless now. There's only two ways to live in a time like this-farming, and living off farmers. I don't feel like pushing a plow."

Emiliano nodded; and again, he wasn't the only one. His father had been born a peon on a little farm in Sonora, and he had no desire at all to be one himself. Living off farmers, though…

A haciendado, he thought, amused. He leaned forward eagerly, hardly noticing when the banquet was brought in. He was in a golden haze from more than the wines and brandies and fine liqueurs by the end of the night.

Lord Emiliano, he thought. Got a sound to it.

Five

Sssst!" Michael Havel hissed, and held his left hand up with the fist clenched.

Footfalls stopped behind him as he peered into the brush and half-melted snow along the Cente

Just being on it was a relief; all he knew of this particular stretch of country was maps and compass headings, and it was an enormous mental load off his shoulders to be able to follow a marked trail-even if it was still wet with slush, and muddy. As a fringe benefit of being here between the end of cross-country skiing season and the begi

He'd trimmed and smoothed a yard-long stick from a branch; it was as thick as Astrid Larsson's wrist, and nicely heavy. He let it fall from where he'd been carrying it under his armpit; the end smacked into his palm with a pleasant firmness. The snowshoe hare made a break for it as he moved, streaking up the slope and jinking back and forth as it went; he whipped the stick forward and it flew in a pinwheeling blur.

"Yes!" he said.

The throw had the sweet, almost surprising feel you always got when you were going to hit. The rabbit stick hit the hare somewhere in the body, and it went over in a thrashing tangle of limbs and a shrill squeal. He started forward, but Astrid's voice checked him: "There's another one!"

The second terrified-rodent streak was much farther up the slope; he waited as the girl brought the bow up, drawing in a smooth flexing of arms and shoulders as it rose.

The string snapped against her bracer, and the arrow flashed out in a long beautifully shallow curve; he followed it with an avid hope born of days of hard work and short rations.

Damn! he thought; the other snowshoe jinked left at just the wrong moment.

Astrid muttered something under her breath as she recovered the arrow. Then she checked it-you had to keep broadheads sharp-and smiled at him in congratulations.

"Better luck next time," he called to her.

He trotted to his kill and finished the hare off with a sharp blow of the rabbit stick; the animal was a young male, a little under two pounds, with the relatively small ears and big feet of its breed. He was crouched by the side of the trail getting ready for the gutting and ski

Eric Larsson was on one end, and his sister on the other. They both exclaimed in delight at the sight of the rabbit; even their father looked up from where he walked beside his wife and smiled.

"And that's why they call it a rabbit stick," Havel said, gri

He'd stripped off his sheepskin coat and rolled up the sleeves of his fla

Astrid drifted off ahead; she could shoot rabbits easily enough now, and was certainly willing to eat her share, but she didn't like to watch the butchering. Eric followed, probably to tease her-someone was going to have to tell the kid to lay off it, but Havel remembered what his brothers had been like and doubted it would happen anytime soon. The problem there would come when Eric got some food and rest and felt full enough of beans to try pushing at the older man, and hopefully this whole lot would be off Michael Havel's hands by then.

Ken stayed beside the stretcher as he always did at stops, holding Mary Larsson's hand; he and his wife talked in low tones, usually of inconsequential things back in Portland, as if this was just a frustrating interruption in their ordinary lives.

Which means Mr. Larsson knows his wife better than I thought, Havel told himself. Which will teach me to try and sum someone up on short acquaintance.

Biltis the orange cat also jumped up on the stretcher, burrowing down to curl up beside the injured woman in what Astrid insisted was affection and Havel thought was a search for somewhere warm and dry in this detested snowy wilderness. She made a pretty good heater-cat, though.

He gri

Signe Larsson came up; she leaned his survival pack against a tree-she carried it, when she wasn't on stretcher duty, freeing him up to forage-and squatted on her hams with her arms around her knees, watching him skin and butcher the little animal. She didn't flinch at the smell or sight of game being butchered anymore, either.

He'd roll the meat, heart, kidneys and liver in the hide, and they'd stew everything when they made camp-he still had a few packets of dried vegetables, and the invaluable titanium pot. You got more of the food value that way than roasting, particularly from the marrow, and it made one small rabbit go a lot further among six. Plus Mary Larsson found liquids easier to keep down. The antibiotics gave her a mild case of nausea on top of the pain of her leg; he was worried about the bone, although the pills were keeping fever away.

"Who calls it a rabbit stick?" Signe said after a moment, nodding towards the tool he'd used to kill the hare.