"Val, there's a light on the river," Oran reported.

The three climbed a little promontory and looked north at the distant speck of light. It was near the western bank of the hundred-yard-wide river, but whether it came from boat or sh.o.r.e could not be seen at this distance. Who would be fool enough to burn a light right at the border? A guide for the returning fliers? Valentine wondered, suddenly hopeful.

They decided to check it out. Valentine and Oran readied their rifles and picked their way north, keeping under cover. When they got close enough to see that the light in fact came from a boat, they rested for a few minutes before creeping forward again.

"It's a small barge and a towboat," said Oran, who had the best night vision of the three, and therefore used the binoculars. They lay in a little hollow, peeking at the river from behind a fallen tree. "Looks like five men visible on the towboat. One's got a gun. No one is on the barge. It's riding light, must be practically empty. The light is on the barge, electric, not a lantern."

The towboat was attached to a ruined concrete piling projecting out of the lake, perhaps the last remnant of a dock.

Oran leveled the binoculars at the barge. "They got it anch.o.r.ed at the front and back. If anyone's in it, they're staying hid."

A gust of wind off the river made the men wrinkle their noses. They exchanged glances.

"I think we've found the nest," said Valentine.

They hashed out a plan. Valentine would take a bundle of dynamite and swim to the ship from the north end of the barge. When he set it off, the other two men would start sniping at the tugboat, with hope that it would be lit by the burning barge, and use the other bundle of dynamite on it from the sh.o.r.e. Gil said he was sure he could throw the bundle the thirty feet from the sh.o.r.e to the boat.

"Here, Val," DelVecchio said, pulling a hand ax from his belt. "You might need this. Who knows what might be in that hull?"

The weapon was light and handy, more of a fighting tomahawk than a tool. "Thanks. We'll meet back here," Valentine ordered. "If you're being chased, just go west like h.e.l.l, don't wait for me."

"Hope you don't puke easy, if you're going close up to that thing," Oran commented, tension written in boldfaced capital letters on his face.

"Let's not waste any time. I want to get this over before dawn. Maybe that Hood sleeps in the barge."

Valentine stole past the lounging figures on the tug. If five men were up and around at this hour, perhaps ten more might be crammed below. Or were they out, somehow helping the Harpies? Once he had the bulk of the barge between him and the towboat, he crawled through vegetation to the water. The dynamite, matches, and his pistol rested on his back, in a pack that might keep the water out for a moment or two, if he was lucky.

Valentine kicked off his shoes and crawled into the cold water. It reminded him of his bath, and how Cho had dried him off afterwards. He took the comforting wood handle of the tomahawk in his hand and half floated through the water toward the barge, moving like an alligator with just eyes and nostrils out of the water, the pack making a sea-monster hump on his back. He felt as alive and alert as if he had just finished a light breakfast after a long night's sleep, rather than having been awake for eighteen hours.

It was a good thing he hadn't eaten recently. When he slithered close enough to really smell the barge, a horrible musky odor mixed with a sharper turpentine-like smell a.s.saulted his nostrils. The hazy moonlight revealed details of the ancient barge, a ma.s.s of rust and paint and makeshift welds with M-33 painted on its side in three-foot-high letters. He shifted the tomahawk to his mouth, holding it between his teeth with straining jaws, and b.r.e.a.s.t.stroked into the river. He made for the stern anchor line. The gentle current a.s.sisted him with its chilly flow. He reached the cable, grateful for its hand-filling thickness. He climbed it, still gripping the ax in his teeth like a dog with an oversize bone.

The deck of the barge was as beat-up as its sides. It had a single hatch open to the sky. The battery-powered lamp, a conglomeration of what looked like a car battery and a truck headlight, pointed up into the night but seemed to bathe the whole top of the barge with an intimidating, revealing light. Valentine wished he had told Oran and DelVecchio to start firing when they saw him reach the barge; he could use something to draw the men's attention to sh.o.r.e. Still dangling, he gently placed the hatchet on the deck of the barge. Now or never.

He hoisted himself up on deck and crawled for the hatch. Expecting a shout at any second, he peered into the reeking hold. He could make out little in the dark, but there seemed to be floor six feet or so down.

He rolled over the edge and landed barefoot in sticky filth, ax ready. The hold stank like a slaughterhouse, and he had to fight down his gorge as he stood up in a cramped little area.

A gutter ran the length of the deck, filled with noisome excrement. The hollow interior was empty.

No. As his eyes adjusted, Valentine realized that a panting shape leaned against one wall. It was a Harpy, wrapped up in its own wings as though in a leathery coc.o.o.n. A trickle of blood pooled beneath its rump. Wounded, maybe dying. The debris on the floor included a melange of bones. A cl.u.s.ter of human skulls decorated a metal pillar, part of the barge's rusting structure holding up the deck. The heads looked like a yellowish bunch of coconuts.

There was a door forward out of the hold. A body lay at the bottom of stairs descending from the door: pale, naked, and headless. But it was nevertheless familiar.

Valentine had found Cho.

An awful kind of warmth filled his stomach. He no longer minded the reek. He padded toward the sleeping Harpy with slippery steps. He could make out slit nostrils and a toothy, pointed jaw decorated with bristling catlike whiskers protruding from the tent of folded wings. Wet drool dripped out with its rapid, shallow breathing. He raised the ax and buried it in the face with a bone-crushing blow. The thing never knew what happened, falling nervelessly sideways. Valentine leaped on top of it, bringing the blood-and-brain-soaked tomahawk down again and again with a series of wet smacks. Flecks of blood splattered his snarling features.

A familiar flapping sound came from the hatch, and the light reflected from the deck lamp was obscured by a winged shadow. Valentine crossed the hold to the forward stairs to the door, keeping clear of the hatch. He could sit there, light the dynamite, and blow a few Harpies to kingdom come.

Shots echoed from outside. DelVecchio and Oran must have panicked at the returning Harpies and tried to prevent them from reentering the barge. Valentine somehow ignored Cho's body, took his pistol, and tossed the backpack onto the stairs. A Harpy flopped into the hold, one wing injured.

"Welcome home, f.u.c.ker," Valentine cursed, putting a bullet into its stomach. The spent cartridge case pinged off the metal interior.

The Harpy screamed out a horrible, burbling kind of call. Language or pain, it brought answering shrieks from outside. Valentine knew he was drawing all kinds of ugly from the skies as well as the tugboat, but he wanted Cho's body to have a lot of company feeding the crayfish and gars. He heard, for the first time in his life, the chatter of a machine gun fired in anger. The tugboat crew must have a support weapon mounted on deck. He prayed that DelVecchio and Oran were smart enough to pull out now and head west.

He pounded on the roof of the hold, dislodging a shower of grit. "Dinner, dinner, come and get it!" he shouted.

The wounded Harpy pulled itself toward him, gremlin mouth open in vicious antic.i.p.ation.

Other flappers dropped into the hold.

Valentine took two steps backwards toward the door and found the bundle of dynamite and tin of matches. Grabbing a bunch of matches, he struck them against the rough side of the stairwell. They flared into life, illuminating the dank little closet s.p.a.ce. Valentine lit the fuse, dropped the matches to the floor, and picked up his pistol. He fired a shot into the vague shapes collected in the hold. He placed the hissing dynamite on the first stair and pushed at the hatch.

Locked.

He bashed at the hatch with his shoulder, closing his eyes to the expected oblivion that would blow him to b.l.o.o.d.y fragments, but the rusted lock gave way. He threw the door open and dashed onto the deck, then dived for the water on the river side of the barge. He felt a bullet pluck at him as it pa.s.sed through his shirt at the armpit.

He was under water when the explosion hit. The boom sounded muted, but its force thumped at him even through the cushioning protection of the river, knocking the breath from his body. He surfaced, gasping for air.

The shattered rear half of the barge upended as pieces of its hull splashed into the river all around. The towboat was a ma.s.s of flame, the machine gun silent. The Harpies' incendiary bombs must have been on the towboats deck in readiness for another attack. Valentine got his bearings and submerged again, swimming for sh.o.r.e. No doubt a few very unhappy Harpies still circled above. His fingers struck the river bottom.

As his brain cleared, he realized that he was unarmed. His pistol was at the bottom of the Saint Francis, dropped when the concussion from the explosion racked him, and the tomahawk was probably landing somewhere in Mississippi. He gathered himself and ran out of the water and onto the river-bank.

Picking up a river-smoothed rock in each hand, Valentine hurried under the protective overhang of the trees. He felt defenseless as a rabbit with raptors circling above but made it to the little hollow without trouble. What was left of the tugboat was floating downstream in flames.He crept to the place where he had left the other two and whistled softly.

An answering warble came out of the darkness. The pair joined him.

"Quite a show, Val," complimented Oran, returning Valentine's rifle. DelVecchio put the other bundle of dynamite back in his pack. Bourne could use it on more tree stumps or trade it for corrugated tin to build a new barn.

It felt good to have a rifle in his hands instead of rocks. "Oran, you need a break. I'll take point on the way back. You can keep us on course, and Gil, you cover."

"Sure thing, boss."

The light of the burning towboat faded as it sank behind them, and the three started for home. Not knowing how well the Harpies could see, hear, or smell, they stayed under the trees. Nothing dived at them or circled above. Later they sang softly as they walked through the shadowed woods, like young athletes returning home from a successful match.

Beneath the bare-boughed canopy, Valentine felt safe from any of the surviving Harpies.

But the trees made the Reaper's attack that much easier.

It stepped from behind a tree, plucking the gun from DelVecchio's hands and sending it spinning into the night. With its other hand, it picked him up by his backpack, holding the giant young man at arm's length like a filled diaper.

Valentine and Oran spun around, flicking the safeties on their rifles. The Reaper put the frantic DelVecchio between them like a shield.

"Drop him," was all Valentine could think to say.

"No! Wait! No!" DelVecchio was screaming. "Don't let him... don't shoot."

you might as well shoot, foodlings, the Reaper whispered, its voice all hissing air and menace, you'll all three be dead as soon as i take you.

"G.o.d, let me go," DelVecchio gibbered. "Val, get it off me!"

Valentine thought his heart was going to break out of his chest, it pounded so hard. His tongue felt dry, and his eyes seemed misted over. Only a burning sensation from the region of his kidneys prevented him from fainting dead away. He waved at Oran, motioning him to spread out. The Reaper couldn't hold DelVecchio in two directions at once. Oran, eyes fixed on the hypnotic yellow eyes of the pale, black-clad figure before them, did not respond.

Valentine stepped backwards, rifle at his shoulder.

The thing turned its gaze to Valentine, bringing Oran out of his trance. Seeing Valentine stepping away, he turned and ran off into the night, discarding gun and pack.

run! i'll catch you, the Reaper breathed after him. hide, i'll find you. It turned to Valentine, shifting its gaze in a quick, lizardlike movement, shoot, and i'll pull your legs apart, one joint at a time, as easily as you'd yank off a fly's wings.

Valentine continued pacing backwards, lowering the gun barrel somewhat. He stepped behind a thick tree trunk, aiming his gun.

The Reaper laughed at the gesture, a sound indistinguishable from a cat's spitting fury: pha pha pha!

useless. It looked at Gil, the young man quivering in its grasp, you got one thing right, foodling, the predator said into DelVecchio's ear as it drew the thrashing figure close, i am a G.o.d!

DelVecchio screamed as it turned him around, pointed teeth tearing a hole in his neck. Gil pushed and flailed against the creature's grip, screaming the blubbery underwater screams of a man with a severed windpipe.

"Sorry, Gil. Hope you'd do the same for me," Valentine muttered, exhaling and squeezing the trigger.

The .45 sh.e.l.l found DelVecchio's backpack. The dynamite exploded in pinkish-orange light, throwing Valentine on his back with a warm, irresistible punch. Valentine's ears roared, and his head filled with light as he plunged into unconsciousness.

It was almost dinnertime when the exhausted residents of Weening heard a shout from the guard tower.

"Walker coming in." A moment's pause while the watchers in the tower employed an old telescopic sight. "It's Valentine. Alone."

The residents gathered, the still-smoldering barn behind them, to greet the strange apparition.

Barefoot, pants in tatters, shirt reduced to a few ribbons, and pale with fatigue, David Valentine walked into Weening. He held his rifle in one hand and bulging backpack in the other. He examined the crowd, looking for a face.

"Mr. Helm," he croaked, reaching into his backpack. "We killed the thing that got your son.

And Gab. And Gil. Steve, I don't know about."

He pulled out a skull covered in sticky soot from the fire he'd used to burn off the flesh and hair. In everything but color it resembled a human skull, with an oversize forehead and an unusually long jawbone. The charred bone was bluish black and looked as if it had been carved from a block of onyx.

Randall Helm refused the offering and instead put his arms around the weary eighteen- year-old and walked him home.

That evening Bourne opened a jug of homemade whiskey and he, Valentine, and Helm took turns solemnly chiseling the names gilman delvecchio, gabriellacho, and dorian helm into the polished obsidian skull of the Reaper, still a little warm from its hours in the boiling pot. By the time the jug was recorked, the skull was mounted, slightly askew and off-center due to alcohol-impaired judgment, over the main gate of the village.

It stands there still.

Four

Ouachita Mountains, February of the forty-first year of the Kurian Order: The snow is retreating up the rugged, rocky hills of the Ouachitas, but an Arkansas winter still sits firmly in the saddle. In the narrow valley between two low mountain ranges pointing like cleft fingers at the blasted ruins of Little Rock, a little collection of cabins marks the temporary home of Fort Candela. It is a fort in name only; the soldiers are scattered across twelve square miles of the valley floor. There is electricity most of the time and fresh food some of the time, but warmth and companionship by the cabin hearths always.The erratic war is blessedly far from the men and women quartered in this valley. They concentrate on making and repairing equipment, cutting and sewing new uniforms, eating, drinking, gambling, and trading. And most important, training. This winter, like every other for the past twenty-odd years, recruits get paired up with seasoned veterans, until the green soldiers can do what the vets do and know what the vets know.

Specialists and artisans travel through, giving lessons and once in a while taking on permanent apprentices if a recruit shows unusual ability at veterinary work, perhaps, or in making quality leather goods.

The officers in charge of Fort Candela make decisions and act on them. One recruit has hopelessly bad vision, another drinks too much, and another cannot keep up on practice marches. The culls are offered support jobs-honorable service in paid labor outfits-or are returned to civilian life. Those who do not try for home are absorbed by the labor- hungry farms and towns of the Ozark Free Territory, but a few malcontents become "b.u.mmers" and inevitably a matter for the law.

For the rest, the question becomes Guards or Hunters. Seven out often go to the Guards, the military regiments that provide a defensive core for the Ozark Free Territory. Guard service is rewarding: The soldiers get the finest uniforms Southern Command can produce, ample ammunition for marksmanship training, and frequent parties and barbecues, games and riding contests. Many of them are mounted, adding to their dash and swagger. They also get plenty of opportunities to mix with civilians. No New Year's dance is complete without a handsome contingent of young Guards in polished boots and crisp charcoal-gray uniforms, kepis with regimental-colored neckerchiefs hanging to precisely the base of their tunic collars. The Guards are the well-ordered, well-disciplined, rea.s.suring face of Southern Command, who can and do fight, giving their lives in defense of wives, children, and sweethearts.

The others-the men and women who will become cold-eyed Hunters ranging outside the friendly reaches of the Ozark Free Territory to slay the minions and Quislings of the Kurians-are brought before the Lifeweavers.

A glossy black house cat named Sailor Tom ruled the cabin with an iron paw. Six men shared the bunkhouse nestled in a hollow between two spurs of Fourche Mountain, but none disputed the feline's claim to the warmest chair by the stone fireplace or the best tidbit from the steer quarter hung in the cool room. The heavy cat looked like a witch's familiar with a lynx somewhere in the family tree. He strutted around the cabin on muscular rear legs, half-wild and all att.i.tude. Sailor Tom a.s.serted his authority with a rising corkscrew growl that blossomed into a biting, clawing fury aimed at anyone foolish enough to ignore that first and only warning. He gained his nickname when one Wolf declared, "If that torn spoke English, you just know he'd be cussing like a sailor." The men tolerated the bad-tempered cat and pointed him out to recruits as an example of tenacity to be imitated.

The men depended on stored food to get them through the winter, and Sailor Tom exterminated trespa.s.sing mice, rats, squirrels, and even rabbits with samurai spirit.

The cat's realm encompa.s.sed a two-room, sooty kingdom full of beds and furniture as roughly finished as the men who occupied them. A fireplace of watercourse stones dominated one entire wall at the "sitting" part of the bunkhouse, and a two-hundred-years- old-and-still-going-strong potbellied stove warmed the "sleeping" part, a musky warren of bunk beds and old blankets hung for gloomy privacy.

Four veteran Wolves and two recruits shared the cabin. Pankow, Gavineau, Big Seth, and Imai saw to it that neither David Valentine nor Marquez, the other Wolf Aspirant, enjoyed a moment's peace. Anytime they were not actually in the field or attending a lesson as part of their caste training, the four Senior Wolves dedicated themselves to seeing mat the would- be Hunters idled as little as possible. Not just with training. Marquez found himself held responsible for the firewood supply and general cabin maintenance. The firewood might seem an easy task for a man in the middle of a forest, but the Wolves insisted he fell, and consequently haul, the timber from two miles away. If he so much as looked at one of the bushy pines surrounding the cabin, the trainers accused him of wanting to expose their temporary home to the enemy.

The Wolves a.s.signed everything else to Valentine. "Everything else" included cooking, washing up, laundry, stocking the pantry, mending, disposing of Sailor Tom's half-eaten corpus rodentia, and the morning ersatz coffee. The men accepted a certain amount of slackness and inefficiency in all his responsibilities excepting the last. No matter that Valentine may have returned from a night orientation march exhausted at the first pink of dawn, if the coffee was not steaming and ready to be poured at the customary rising hour of 6 a.m., he was thoroughly cursed and punished. This required a fell run up Bald k.n.o.b, a forty-degree-grade hill bare of trees, under the disapproving eyes of the four coffeeless Wolves.

Valentine learned from all four, but his princ.i.p.al mentor was Evan Pankow. The child of a representative from Ohio, the then seven-year-old congressman's son had watched his privileged world disappear in a few insane weeks when the Raving Madness virus swept the United States. Young Evan was one of the few people immune to the virus. While this protected him from a death that claimed better than three quarters of the United States population, his genes were useless against the war and chaos that followed. He followed a stream of refugees into the tidewater of Virginia, where he got his first taste of the Kurian Order. He witnessed an albino man with yellowish eyes and a soft voice claiming to be a "crisis governor" kill an entire family in a hotel room. The boy, forever after avoiding the Reapers, was flown southwest by a woman who had also witnessed the "crisis governor" in action. Pankow had lost his parents, and she had lost a son, leading the two to form an increasingly real mother-son bond.

The pilot's name was Jamie Kostos, a former journalist who wrote some of the first pamphlets examining the Kurian Order. Her early writings, accurate in fact but mistaken in a.n.a.lysis, brought her to the attention of the Lifeweavers. Through her, Evan became a student of the Lifeweavers and a Wolf.

In his twenties, Pankow helped found Southern Command. Now fifty, with a seamed face and world-weary eyes that reminded Valentine of a Karsh portrait of Ernest Hemingway he had seen in one of the Padre's books, Pankow devoted himself to training a new generation of Wolves to carry on the struggle.

One late-February afternoon, with snow camouflaging the mud surrounding the little cabin, Pankow lectured his Aspirant about, of all things, tea.

"It's way too easy, when you're outdoors and on the move, to just eat rabbits and such,"

Pankow said, running his ungloved hand across the soft needles of a mountain spruce.

"Especially in cold weather, you get hungry for meat and fat, and forget about everything else. But you've got to get your greens. You know what vitamins are?"

"Yes, I do, sir. It's those letters, A, B, C, and so on," David responded.

"Yeah, well, when I was a squirt we got them in stuff like breakfast cereal, little candy pills: d.a.m.n near everything said 'vitamin fortified." Now it's not so easy, it being winter. Take these spruce needles. In the spring, the little buds taste pretty good; you can just chew them. But if we pull some of these needles and boil them up into tea, you get as much vitamin C as from an orange, even. Ever had an orange?"

Valentine shook his head.

"Too bad. Sweet and juicy like a watermelon, but tart, too. Anyway, your greens aren't a problem in summer; any fool can pull up a dandelion, chew its leaves, and roast the root, but winter's a different story. You don't get your vitamins, you end up losing teeth, getting fevers. You'll catch some virus and die even if the scurvy doesn't take you. Trappers in Canada used to die of it; rabbit fever, it was called. They were starving their bodies to death while stuffing themselves with fresh meat every night. So never just eat meat, on the trail or at home. Add a lot of greens if you value your eyesight and your teeth."

"We should just raid more food off the Kurians," Valentine suggested.

Pankow scowled. "That's not so easy. But before you can fight, you have to be healthy in mind and body. I know it seems hard, what we've been having you do, but soon your body's going to be like a whole new machine. We're trying to get you as strong as possible so nothing quits on you once you start keeping the Way of the Wolf."

"When will that be?"