Sunrise Lands

He and Kaur and Singh threw their lassoes over bits of the burning wagon, snubbed the lariats to the horns of their saddles and backed the animals, pulling it lurch ing and smoking a safe distance from the others. The horses snorted and protested, but they were too well disciplined to really balk. Then they turned west again, riding hard.

"Shit," Ingolf swore; it was far too serious for uff da.

The first body was an ostler named Sauer they'd hired east of Kalona; he'd quarreled with his farmer and been turned out of his cottage and job, but he'd always pulled his weight on the trip. Sauer had burned, and died of it. The rest of the bodies were hidden by a heaving carpet of buzzards and crows and ravens, but they were just off the scorched zone, where streaky fingers of black stretched into the bronze-brown of untouched prairie. The bluestem was trampled flat for several hundred square yards. Carrion birds took wing in a black cloud as the riders came up, revealing the arrow stubs.

"Hit them as they came out of the smoke," Singh said grimly, pointing to where a ragged line lay, along with several dead horses.

Ingolf nodded, his throat too tight to speak. A straggling trail of bodies showed where the pursuit had gone.

"These took one with them each," he said with angry pride, reading the signs on the ground.

A circle of bodies marked where Jose and about a dozen had made a last stand. The sudde

Six years I knew you, he thought. Battle and hunt and camp and barroom. We saved each other's lives more times than I can count. You taught me better than half of what I know. Go with God, brother.

He dismounted and knelt for a second with head bowed over clasped hands, asking that there be mercy for the soul of Jose Menendez, onetime sergeant in the Lomas Altas Emergency Guard, of late troop leader in Vogeler's Villains. Then he covered the ravaged face with a broken shield.

And for you, Greg, Tommy, Dave, Will, he thought, fury building. You all deserved better than this.

Singh was gray-faced and shaking. "The wild men will suffer for this; their tents will burn and their women will weep," he said thickly. "We will avenge them, we will-"

"Wait!" Kaur said. "Would the wild men leave their armor? Harness on the horses?"

Ingolf took a deep breath and then another, scrub bing a hand across his face, the rough leather of his glove scratching and pulling at the hairs of his cropped beard.

"Think, you cheese-head hayseed, goddamnit," he whispered savagely to himself.

His eyes darted about. "Yeah, and the arrowheads, and everything else… cloth, tools, shoes… they'd have stripped the bodies bare and dug out all the broken arrows. And scalped them. And butchered the dead horses for their meat and hides. All that this bunch took was the live horses and the shetes and knives and bows."

"You are right," Singh said.

He pulled a broken lance shaft out of a horse's torso with a grunt, then stabbed it into the ground to clean it off. The three of them stood around it and looked, with Kuttner still mounted and keeping an eye out.

Ingolf grunted again. The lance head was about eight inches long, fastened to the mountain ash shaft with a skillfully forged tubular socket heat-shrunk onto the wood. It wasn't quite the style of any he was familiar with, but it was far too well made for a wild-man troop, even this far west. And…

He took it from the Sikh and held it so the westering sun caught the surface and showed irregularities, especially where dried blood stuck. A rayed sun was etched into the steel.

"Kaur!" he said. "Your shete!"

She drew and held it out beside the broken lance; the design on the sun figure was identical.

"Something stinks here," Ingolf said grimly.

A sound from Kuttner interrupted him, and then Kaur's cry of alarm an instant later. Ingolf vaulted into the saddle and got out his binoculars. The sun was wink ing on more lance heads, and beneath them the distant dots of riders. He rough counted…

"At least thirty," he said. His head twisted around. The ground here was flat as a tabletop and devoid of cover, no place to make a stand. "We'll head south for the river-there's broken country there."

"Wait!" Kuttner said. "Give me two more horses and I'll lead a drag."

The three Villains looked at him, surprised. Leading a drag was a standard trick of plains-country warfare, to raise a plume of dust and deceive watchers. Volunteering for it here was also suicide…

"Better me than all of us. You can escape and tell the bossman in Des Moines what happened to his expedition."

Nodding in grudging respect for the man's loyalty, In golf started to help. It took only a few seconds to rig some gear on the end of a rope; Kuttner took the lead ing reins of the two packhorses and spurred his mount straight east. He didn't even bother to take his remount. Ingolf felt a slight pang-one of those horses was carrying the bundled proceeds that Jose had left for them back in I

The three of them paused only to sling spare quiv ers to their saddlebows and then turned south at a gal lop, each leading a single remount. Grass whipped at his thighs and the horse's face; Boy ran with his head lifted, and the sound was a constant shhhsshsh beneath the drumbeat of hooves. Distantly behind them a bugle blew; the enemy, whoever they were, had spotted them. Now everything depended on how fresh the killers' horses were and how their luck went.

They went flat-out for two miles, just outside the line of burned ground, then reined in to a canter; the horses were begi

"A bunch of them split off after Kuttner," Kaur said. "At least a dozen are still after us, though, Captain."

"A dozen's better odds than thirty." Ingolf grunted thoughtfully.

It puzzled him; the stunt Kuttner had pulled was the sort of thing you did for comrades-in-arms or close friends, and the man had never even tried to be that, despite their going all the way to the Atlantic and back together. He'd always been a disagreeable bossy son of a bitch; they'd come to grudgingly respect him, but no more.

They turned onto the burnt ground-trying for the river would be impossible otherwise, but it made their dust plume a lot worse. As they switched horses Singh and Ingolf exchanged glances; they both rode a lot heavier in the saddle than Kaur, by at least thirty or forty pounds. Her horses were less tired to start with and would last longer in a stern chase. Useless to try to get her to bug out, though.

Ingolf's next glance was over at the sun. Three hours to dark, he thought. Just low enough to get in our eyes, not enough to do us any good.

A few instants after that the extra plume of gray ash told him their pursuers had crossed onto the burned ground too. Canter-trot canter-walk… the dust grew closer; the enemy were pushing their horses hard, or they had lots of fresh remounts, or both. Probably both.

"Uff da," Ingolf swore.

That they couldn't hope to win an arrow duel was so obvious none of them had to say anything about it. There weren't any good options when you were outnumbered by five to one, but riding over an open plain and shooting was about the worst possible choice. If you had any choices.