Dies the Fire

Juniper smiled, heart-glad to hear her friend was still alive, and only somewhat surprised; Luther was a tough old bird, and nobody's fool. And… it never hurts to have references.

A good deal of that happiness evaporated when they stopped at 99W and Polk. Someone had gone to the trouble of knocking down the ruins that stretched along the riverfront-she saw a wagon of cleaned-up bricks go by, pulled by a dozen sweating townsfolk-but the sheer extent of it shocked her. She could see all the way to the waterfront from here. A sour ashy smell clung to the fallen buildings. Broad streaks of destruction reached north and westward, too, looking more recent. There were a fair number of people about, but nothing like the numbers before the Change; about a tenth as many, at a quick estimate, but probably a lot more had moved out of town to work the land.

"I was here the night of the Change… presumably a lot of other people had the same idea, and headed out?"

Jones cleared his throat. "A lot happened that first week-the fires burned for days, and we had to tear down firebreaks to stop them. Then there were the food riots… we had outbreaks of cholera and typhus… a fair number of people moved off to Salem when the state government said they should… We've got about six thousand in the area the Committee controls."

She nodded, but suspected that "food riots" covered a lot of internal conflict; better to blame everything on outsiders, once order was restored once more.

She took a deep breath. It had been silly, expecting anything but devastation here, too. This was a hopeful sight.

I should be glad so much was saved, she thought. It's a good sign that they're already salvaging building materials.

Jones made another throat-clearing noise: "So you'll realize. well, probably you can't stay very long. We're still extremely short of food, just barely enough to get ourselves through to harvest, and except in special circumstances we just can't feed outsiders."

Juniper looked at the rubble that covered the site of the Hopping Toad. Odds were nobody had tried to search the basement.

"Oh, I think we may have some things that would interest your Committee," she said with a smile. "Besides our trade goods, that is."

Luther Fi

The big farmhouse kitchen was a lot more crowded than it had been that night of the Change; brighter, too, with three gasoline lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Juniper's presence required a lot of shuffling and pushing about of tables and chairs; and the meal wasn't anything like the fried-chicken feast she remembered so fondly, either. There were a round dozen sitting down to di

She got a bowl of porridge, some anonymous mixture of grains with husks in it, and the dried beans she'd contributed from the basement cache of the Hopping Toad were served with obvious reverence. Everyone got one hardboiled egg, as well. For the main meal of the day among people doing horse-heavy manual labor, it wasn't much.

At least the porridge is fairly good. Smells nice, too, like fresh-baked bread, and it tastes a little sweet. Maybe molasses-and-rolled-oats livestock feed?

"We got to work right away, because of that. And we were lucky," Fi

Edward Fi

"We were lucky to get out of Salem before everything went completely to hell," he said. A grin. "Looks like I'm going to be a farmer after all, like Dad wanted. And my kids after me."

"Not just farming," Luther said grimly.

His eyes went to the door. Outside in the hallway chain mail shirts hung on the wall, with swords and crossbows racked near them, and pikes slung from brackets screwed into the ceiling.

"Well," he went on to Juniper. "Things are looking up, provided we can keep this sickness away; the doctors have some medicine left, but not much. The first of the garden truck looks set to yield well-I give those people at the University that, they busted their… butts getting seed out to everyone and into the ground, and we've laid claim to a fair piece of fall-seeded wheat. Lord, though, doing everything by hand is hard work! If we could get some more harness stock, that would be grand-that team of yours would have been real useful around here."

"Cagney and Lacey are useful around our place too, Luther."

He nodded. "I expect they were, but if you can spare any… We stopped using horses when I was about twelve, but I remember how."

"We could use more stock too," she said happily. "But my people were going to try scouting east for them." Then: "About this committee ru

"Back!" Havel shouted as the crossbow bolt buzzed past his ears.

All three men spun their mounts and went crashing through greenery and lawn until they were out of range- a hundred yards was plenty, unless the crossbowman was a crack shot. He blessed Will Hutton's liking for nimble quarter horses and his training of man and beast; and the wide sweep of Larsdalen's lawn made it next to impossible for anyone to sneak up on them.

One nice thing about horses was that for the first ten miles or so they were a lot faster than men on foot.

"Christ Jesus, what the fuck do you people think you’re doing? " Havel shouted, rising in his stirrups to shake a fist at the window.

"They weren't trying to kill us, Boss," Josh said.

"I know that, or I wouldn't be trying to talk," Havel snarled. "But anyone who got in the way of that bolt would be just as dead, accidentally or not. What sort of idiot fires a warning shot that close without a parlay?"

Eric was flushed with anger too. He pushed his helmet back by the nasal and called out: "What are you doing in my family's house?"

A voice came from the same upper window, thin and faint with distance: "Who the hell are you, mate?"

Havel blinked at the harsh almost-British accent… An Aussie, by God. What in the hell?

"Mr. Zeppelt?" Eric said, still loud but with the anger ru

"Eric? Your pa bloody well hired me, didn't he, sport? I've been looking after the place and the staff."

"Wait a minute," Havel said, baffled. "You know him?"

"Well, bloody hell," the voice from the house said, dying away.

A few moments later the doors opened and a short stout man with a crossbow in his arms came out; he was balding, with a big glossy-brown beard falling down the front of his stained khakis. A tall horse-faced blond woman with an ax followed him. Several other figures crowded behind her.

"That you in the Ned Kelly suit, Eric-me-lad?" the man called. "Who're your cobbers? S'truth, it's good to see yer! C'mon in and have a heart starter-we're a bit short of tucker, but there's some neck oil left."