Robert Adams - Horses of the North

“There may possibly be more than just those obvious three, Chief Gus,” said Milo. “They could have infiltrated a few more armed men into this gathering, and we’d never have noticed the fact, probably. So let’s play it safe—get those men armed and watch carefully for any treachery from any quarter.”

The Reverend Gerald Falconer limped up until he stood only an arm’s length from Ian Lindsay and his Satan’s-spawn companion. Clearing his throat, he unhooked the silver pectoral cross from its heavy flat-link chain and held it bare inches from Milo’s face, intoning in his best pulpit voice, “Begone, imp of Lucifer!”

Milo just threw back his head and laughed, then said, “You superstitious fool. If you really, truly believe me to be some kind of Satanic monster or demon, then you and your two toadies there are the only ones hereabouts so stupid and childish. We’re all busy here, as you can clearly see, at men’s work. If you try to hinder us, I’ll send for two women I think you’ll remember; I’ll have them whip you back to your kennel, this time around.”

Emmett had no idea, of course, just what Moray was talking about. Still heavy with dread and certain doom, he nonetheless was awaiting the words and actions that would be his cue to draw from under his shirt the old .380 caliber revolver with the silver-bullet cartridge carefully set as next to fire in the cylinder. The parson would press the cross even closer to the face of Moray and demand that he kiss it to demonstrate to all here assembled his submission to God Almighty and his abnegation of Satan and all his unholy works. When the Beast recoiled from the sacred silver, Emmett knew that—for good or, more likely, for ill—he must produce the revolver and fire the silver slug into the heart of the thing that called himself Milo Moray.

“If you are not a lover of Satan,” said Falconer, “then kiss this cross, take it and press it to your breast, then bend a knee to me and swear that you abjure the Fallen Angel and do truly love and reverence the Lord God Jehovah and that you expect the salvation for which His only begotten Son died upon a cross like this. Doit, and I will believe you.”

Grinning, Milo extended a hand and jerked the cross from Falconer’s grasp. Bouncing it on his palm for a moment, his grin broadening, he nodded, then thrust it under his waist belt, saying, “Solid, isn’t it? Heavy, too—obviously solid silver or at worst, sterling; no hollow casting, this one. I thank you for the gift—it will melt down into some very impressive and valuable decorations for my saddle.”

The Reverend Gerald Falconer just stood rooted, gaping and gasping like a sunfish out of water. The damned creature clearly was not harmed in the least by contact with the holy silver. It was on his mind to speak a word that would stop Emmett when the sound of the pistol shot boomed in his ear.

Now sterling—an alloy compounded of about nine parts of pure silver to one part of pure copper—is somewhat harder than is pure silver; and pure silver, alone, is considerably harder than is lead; so this blessed bullet, propelled as it was by a load nearly triple that customarily used behind leaden pistol rounds by the fort armorers, sped undeformed through Milo’s hide vest and shirt and flesh, went completely through the head of a man standing thirty feet behind him, then blew off toward an unknown lighting place out on the limitless prairie beyond.

His grin became a grimace of pain, Milo drew his big, heavy-bladed dirk in a twinkling and, taking a long step forward, drove its sharp blade deep into Emmett MacEvedy’s solar plexus, holding the man’s pistol arm tightly and twisting the blade about in his vitals with vengeful relish.

Frantically, Grant MacEvedy unwrapped the crossbow, drew back the cocking lever, then fumbled a quarrel bolt from the pouch under his shirt, managing in the process to spill out all the rest onto the ground at his feet and tear the shirttail jaggedly. Glancing up for a moment, he saw the big knife of the bleeding but patently still living rover leader flash briefly in the sun, then he saw his father start violently, heard him make sickening noises.

Bringing up the crossbow, he tried to fit the bolt into the slot, only to find that it would not, for some reason, stay in place or straight. After frantic split seconds that seemed long as hours to the inept young man, he thought that he at last had gotten it positioned properly and he raised it up to sighting level in shaking hands.

Emmett MacEvedy gurgled and vomited up a great gush of blood. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and his head lolled. When Milo let go the man’s right arm, the legs buckled and the bloody corpse sprawled on the ground at his booted feet.

Aiming at his father’s killer, Grant MacEvedy squeezed his eyelids tight closed and jerked the trigger of the crossbow. The blunt, unpointed bolt took the Reverend Gerald Falconer in the small of his back a couple of inches to the right of his spine. The quarrel tore and lacerated a way through his right kidney and into the frontal organs beyond. But due principally to the fact that it had been launched from a bow that it did not really fit, it lacked power and did not—as it would otherwise have done at such close range—go all of the way through the parson’s body, but rather lodged in its agonizing place, heedless of the shrill screams of the man whose body now harbored it.

Poor, hapless Grant MacEvedy never even got a chance to see the bloody handiwork wrought by his clumsy efforts, for a brace of arrows from nomad hornbows pinned his eyelids shut and bored speedily, smoothly, relentlessly into the brain behind those eyes. He fell into a bottomless pit of darkness and was dead even as he hit the ground.

MacEvedy, fils et pere, both lay dead, and once Colonel, now Chief, Ian Lindsay regarded the gory bodies of his boyhood friend and his godson sadly, deeply regretting so sad and savage an ending, but recognizing that he had done all within his power to prevent it, done it in vain.

The Reverend Gerald Falconer knelt in a spreading pool of his and Emmett’s blood, hunched over the pain, hugging his agonized body and shrieking mindlessly, until Chief Gus Scott stepped forward, grasped a handful of the parson’s hair, tilted his head back and slashed his throat almost to the spine. The noises made by the death-wounded man had begun to rasp on his nerves.

For all that fresh wood and dung chips had been added to the central firepit, it now contained only a mere scattering of isolated, dim-glowing coals mixed among the gray ashes. The halfmoon rode high overhead in the star-studded sky of full night, and Chief Milo Morai was tiring, having spoken and simultaneously mindspoken for hours to the assembled boys, girls, cats and clansmen.

The tale that he had spun had been a complex one, dealing as it had dealt with times long past, times before those and snatches of time of even a greater age.

He had told the stories of the War and the Great Dyings of the most of mankind, he had recounted for his rapt listeners—young and old, human and feline and equine—almost the earliest years of the Sacred Ancestors, the progenitors of the Kindred folk known as the Horseclans. And the stories bore the stamp of hard fact, not of mere bard song, possibly embroidered and added to over the long years by who knew whom. For the teller of the tales spun this night had been there, and all who had listened to him had known that truth.

But his long, intricate tale had only whetted the appetites of his audience for more, and as he fell silent, a flood of questions broke upon him and washed about him. Some of them were spoken aloud, but a larger number were beamed silently, by cats and horses who could communicate in no other way, as well as by telepathically gifted humans.