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A whirring thock, and a hammerblow that forced a grunt out of him and a feeling of intense cold. He stared for an instant at the arrowshaft in his right shoulder, punched through leather and mail and planted deep in bone. The arm wouldn't obey him, and Epona turned and bounded eastward on her own.
Whirr- thock. Another impact, in his back this time. Blackness.
"No," Jed Smith said, looking up from his back at the officer of the Sword standing over him.
"What did you say?" Major Graber barked.
Jed Smith hissed between his teeth and stiffened into quivering silence as one of his men set the bone that had snapped under the torque from the arm loop of his broken shield. Then he gasped as the splints were bound with coils of bandage. It was a simple greenstick fracture and ought to heal in a month or so…
"I said, no," he rasped tightly. "What part of that don't you understand, Major?" Then, to his own man: "Whiskey!"
The cowboy who'd set the arm handed him a flask. He drank, letting the cold fire burn down his gullet. It took away a little of the pain, and more of the heart sickness.
"I'm on the Prophet's business!" Graber said incredulously. "And I need those horses."
"And I've been fighting for the Prophet, the old Prophet, since before you got your first hard-on!" Smith snarled. "And I need them horses worse than you do."
He jerked his head at the chaos of the camp. "I lost more men this morning than I did in the whole Deseret War, and half my horses. I'm not giving you the rest, not when I have to get wounded men back to Rippling Waters… and these kids, somehow, and our plunder, what's left of it."
"We'll leave you our mounts," Graber said. "They're better stock than yours and there are more scattered back for ten miles."
"They were good stock," Smith said, taking another swallow of the raw grain liquor.
As if to make his point, one that had been standing with its head down slowly collapsed, going to its knees and then to its side in a clatter of gear. The trooper of the Sword knelt beside it, stroking its muzzle as it rolled its eyes in blind supplication.
"Now they're foundered and half of them are like to die and most of the others will be wind-broke until they do die. I'm not leaving my men stranded here with nothing but this dog fodder to ride and the passes due to close soon and that's that."
Graber's face was slick with sweat and the mud it had made of the dust on his face. He still glanced around at his men, and Smith knew exactly what he was thinking. There were at least twenty-five of the Rippling Waters men still fit to fight, and they were grouped around their Rancher and glowering at the regulars out of Corwin-whose arrogance nobody liked. Half the Sword troopers were scattered back along the way, walking and carrying the tack from their foundered mounts.
Graber thought he might-would-win any fight, but that would leave his command utterly wrecked and easy prey for any band of Mormon guerillas, or half a dozen other threats. And Corwin would be very reluctant to punish a powerful Rancher with a distinguished record of early support for the Church.
The Major of the Prophet's household troops slowly flushed, until his face was brick red, then stared at Smith with his lips moving-verses from the Dictations.
" The wise… man… is… known… he… commands. .. his… passions-"
The blood of rage slowly ebbed, and he spoke calmly:
"Four horses, then. Four fresh horses."
Smith pushed away the throbbing hot-and-cold sensation of his arm, and the growl of the whiskey in his empty belly. Corwin would not be happy if he denied all help… and he didn't want to, either. The Dictations and Book of Dzhur said a man had an obligation to repay, for good and ill. The false merchants who'd said that they came from Newcastle had built up quite a balance.
"Fine, Major. Pick 'em yourself," he said. "We're going home. Consider them a gift in the service of the Church."
Graber nodded curtly and turned, pointing his finger to one horse after another. His men ran to prepare them in silent obedience, and the officer said:
"Scout! High Seeker!"
A tall lanky man with his hair in braids ambled over; he looked tired, the way a horse did after pulling a hay cutter for a day, but strong as seasoned wood anyway. The Seeker… Smith blinked. He didn't look tired, or fresh, or like anything, somehow.
"It'll be days before we can move," Graber said. "I may have to find fresh horses, somewhere. Follow them. Mark the track. Don't lose them."
"I haven't yet," the Scout said.
The man in the robe the color of dried blood shrugged and nodded, smiling.
"Shit, shit! " Ingolf Vogeler said. "We can't stop, not here. It's bare as a politician's lie!"
Mathilda looked at him wide-eyed. "He… those arrows have to come out. He's badly hurt. But-"
Father Ignatius nodded without turning as his fingers worked. Ingolf looked around; the Mormons were getting ready to leave, turning north into the mountains or southward to the Snake River sagelands. Edain Mackenzie sat by Rudi, elbows on knees and face buried in his hands, his dog pressed against him and whining softly as she stared up into his face.
Epona was a little distance off, giving soft snorts of equine distress. He'd thought for a moment he'd have to kill the mare before she'd let them pull Rudi off her back.
"I'm sorry," Nystrup said, at his own horse's head. "You've done well by us, but I have to get my people out of here. We'll scatter, and that will draw some of them away."
"Not if their scouts are as good as I'm afraid," Ingolf said, beating his right fist into his left palm. "Shit!"
Nystrup winced. "Goodbye… and we'll pray for him. For you all."
Ingolf took a deep breath as the guerilla leader mounted and legged his horse southward; the others were looking at him anxiously, and you had to show willing. Nothing broke men's morale faster than the leader showing the flibbertigibbets.
The problem is that if this had happened during the Sioux War and he was one of my troopers, I'd give Rudi the mercy stroke and we'd run like hell to save the rest of the outfit, he thought. Not exactly an option here!
"Father Ignatius?" he said.
The cleric finished his examination. "I don't know how much damage the arrow in the shoulder did, but moving him will make it worse. The one in the small of the back is a more immediate danger. The point turned when it broke the mail-links. It is lodged at a slant and it is far too close to the liver and to several large blood vessels; motion may work it inward. And four ribs were broken, and there's soft-tissue damage. But if I operate now, he ca
"He'll certainly die if we stay here until the Cutters arrive," Mathilda said; her face was drawn, but her mouth was firm and her brown eyes level. "Their guardsmen, the…"
"Sword of the Prophet," Odard said neutrally; he was watching Rudi with an unreadable expression in his narrow blue eyes.
"The Sword of the Prophet, they'll be slow, from the state their horses were in. But the other one, this Rancher Smith could come after us quickly."
"If he wants to," Ingolf said. "He doesn't know we've split up. If he did want to chase us, he'd be here already. But someone will come after us, and sometime from the next fifteen minutes to the next couple of days."
"We could move a little north and find a place to hole up, then tend Rudi," Odard said. "I don't like to risk moving him more than absolutely necessary."
Mathilda nodded anxiously, and clasped his hand where he rested it for a moment on her shoulder.
Ingolf looked around, drawing on the maps in his head. They were several days out of Picabo-call it a bit over a hundred miles eastward as the crow flew. The mountains had been closing in from the north for a while, but there was still open country to the east north of Idaho Falls. It would be crawling with Cutter patrols… but probably with Mormon guerillas, too, and if they could "No, we're going to head east, fast," he said. "This is too close, too easy to saturate with men once they get organized. We've got to break contact. The only part of Wyoming the CUT doesn't really control is thataway. And the mountains start well west of the old state line. We'll have to chance it. When we get to the mountains, we can tend to Rudi."