William Dietrich - Getting back

Ico's illumination of the slitlike windows in Rugard's cabin had signaled the waiting convicts- warned by Ico of Raven's plan- to rush the front door. It had also alerted Raven and Amaya, who had crept in behind Rugard's men. Once she found the activator missing from where she had hidden it and guessed what Ico had done, Raven had realized that his betrayal might be another kind of chance. Now it was all playing out as she had expected. With a little luck, the tables would be turned. "Let's go!"

The women seized either end of a stout wooden log and ran up the dark hill toward the cabin door. Raven had noticed a curious detail: the Warden had built his stout door to open outward so that any attackers could not easily batter it inward against its log frame. An excellent plan to keep assailants out.

Or the Warden in.

Even as they heard the shouts and cries of the men inside, the women slammed the log firmly against the door, bracing it against the dirt. Then they lit two brands and ran along the cabin wall, firing its thatched roof.

Heavy shoulders crashed against the cabin door from the inside but it didn't budge. In an instant, smelling the smoke, the Warden understood. "It's a trick! A trap! The table, the table! Get up on the roof and out of here!"

Even as they dragged furniture over to boost themselves to the inner lip of the half-covering roof, a wall of flames breathed heat on the cabin eaves. From somewhere in the dark, a woman screamed. One of the braver convicts hauled himself up on the roof and danced on its brushwood frame to try to dash through the curtain of flames. He broke through near the wall and crashed back down into the cabin, burned, smoking, and howling. Frantic, the men hurled themselves again against the stout door. It wouldn't give.

"We're going to fry!" one of them yelled.

"No we're not! Get back to the cliff!" Rugard snapped. "The fire will just bring the others to unblock the door!" He started to cough then, cursing, as smoke billowed from the underside of the thatch. His men began bailing spring water, throwing it up toward the growing conflagration, but it did little good and in any case wasn't really necessary. There was no real danger, the Warden thought: there was a sufficient gap between roof and cliff where the flames wouldn't reach. If they had to they could retreat into the stone storeroom. But Dyson was getting away, a jerking fly now against the stars high above. That was humiliating.

Angrily, the Warden clutched Ico's arm. The smaller man seemed in shock, hypnotized by the flames, his nose bleeding from where he'd been hit. "Why didn't he cooperate, like you promised?"

Ico shook his head. "The woman. She's bewitched him."

"Where are they going?" Rugard demanded. "Where will they signal?"

"They won't," he said, and pointed shakily.

The Warden followed his finger. The activator to penetrate the jamming was sitting on the cabin floor. He sprang forward and grabbed it, suddenly exultant. Yes! "He dropped it?"

"He clobbered me with it. I would have had him otherwise."

"They can't signal without this, right?"

Ico looked at the spreading flames, smoke boiling out. They could hear the confused shouts of the rest of the compound as it was roused by the fire.

"Not here. Not unless she's lied to us again." Why had Dyson thrown away the means of escape? Desperation at his own clumsy attack? Or something more? "But now they have the transmitter. So we can't signal without them, either."

The fugitives rendezvoused at a dry creek bed in a side canyon where Amaya had cached their packs. Behind them was a confused yelling and the glow of fire. The three men were scraped and bruised from hastily sliding down the rear of the rock tower, Tucker limping painfully from a sprain. The women were panting. When they'd slipped by the cluster of boulders where they'd originally planned to meet, they saw more of Rugard's men waiting there and ran. Ico had obviously told the Warden where their supplies were supposed to be stored. It was good Amaya had moved them.

"Little snitch," Raven now muttered.

"Are they going to burn?" Amaya asked worriedly, looking back at the flickering orange.

"Just held up a bit, and angry as hornets. We have to move fast if we're going to get away and signal for rescue. You've got it, right?" She turned to Daniel.

"How did you know to pen them in like that?" he asked her instead.

"When Ico disappeared I got suspicious. Then I found the activator was gone. Amaya and I got a log to brace the door shut."

"But you let them lower me into the cabin anyway."

"Yes. Because we needed the transmitter. If I'd warned you off, our position would be hopeless. Now we can still get back."

"Don't you mean you can get back?"

"Ethan and I are your best hope."

"You're ruthless, you know that?"

"I'm practical. Besides, it was your friend who betrayed you, not mine."

Daniel was quiet at that.

"Can we just go, please?" Tucker said impatiently.

They shouldered their gear and fled into the canyon of the women's camp, brushing by a few confused occupants who'd turned out groggily at the noise and confusion. They paused at a cook hut to snatch a last few bites of food, but even as they did they heard the call of a cattle horn. One of the women was blowing an alarm to relay their direction, so they hurried on. As the fugitives reached the end of the canyon they saw the torchlight of a posse entering its head. Many of the convicts were drunk or unconscious, but not all.

"We're in a race," Tucker panted. "I'm slowing you down."

"Amaya's cooked up something to slow them down," Raven replied.

"If it works," the second woman said.

They entered a gorge at the upper end of the women's valley. The defile wasn't much more than a slit in a huge rock that looked like it had been split asunder, but it was a door leading to the desert east of Erehwon. Narrow as a corridor in places, the cleft's floor was sand and its lower reaches stained dark where past floodwaters had swirled through. Only a wedge of sky with a scattering of stars, hundreds of feet above, shed any light. Ethan and Raven had used the passageway to slip away before and now were using it again, but this time pursuit was only a mile behind.

"What will they do if they catch us?" Tucker asked, limping along.

"I've been through this before," Ethan said. "We get away, or we kill ourselves. Surrendering is not an option."

A fall of rock had almost plugged the slit at its midway point with a wall of boulders difficult to climb over. Floodwaters had carved a low sandy tunnel under the rocks that Raven and Ethan had earlier crawled through.

"This is the place I told you about," Raven said to Amaya.

The other woman nodded. She stooped to dig in her pack as they paused to catch their breath. They could hear the calls of pursuit behind them, like the baying of hounds.

"Why are we stopping?" Daniel asked. "We have to move."

"Raven and I think we might slow them down with this," Amaya said. She took out a leather skin shaped roughly like a sphere and slightly smaller than a basketball. Cord and a coating of hardened fat helped seal the outside.

"What the devil is that?"

"It's a bomb." She announced it as proudly as she would a baby.

The men looked at her in confusion.

"I got the idea when we saw the stables. If we set this off at the right moment it should block this gorge and scare hell out of them too. It will buy us time."

"You're serious, aren't you?" said Tucker.

"Remember the sulfur spring? That was one ingredient of gunpowder. Have you ever made it?"

"Not in the last couple of days."

"It's simple, really. All you need is sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate in the right proportions."