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Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.
“And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”
“In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”
“Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.
“It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”
“Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”
The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.
“No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”
Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!
“I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”
“Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.
“There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”
The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s lame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.
“Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”
Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word erstwhile when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.
“Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”
“Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”
The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.
“But he’d said too much. They always do.”
“He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”
He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.
The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”
Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.
“You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”
“Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”
Tap-tap against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.
“Against me?”
“Who else? I told him who sent me, after all. It was the courteous thing to do. Not to mention the fact that you specified he would know why he was being chilled, and who was responsible.”
“But...but—that’s ridiculous!”
“How so? I place my services on the market for anyone to purchase, so long as they have the wherewithal to pay. As Earnie did have.”
Erl’s thoughts flew like bats caught in a Deathlands twister. He tried to will them into some kind of plan. Some kind of way out.
“I can pay you to cancel the contract!” he blurted. “Pay double! Triple.”
Snake Eye reached up and twitched the patch onto his forehead. Erl froze in shock.
The eye that was revealed was fully intact. And fully inhuman. Perfectly circular, staring and lidless, it was a blazing yellow with a black slit pupil.
A rattlesnake’s eye.
Snake Eye smiled regretfully and continued to tap the cold, thin steel edge against Erl’s quavering, helpless throat.
The last of Erl’s resistance evaporated.
“Listen, I can take you to the place! The hidden treasure! It’s not twenty miles from here.”
“Is that so?” The blade was withdrawn.
Erl almost melted in relief. His thoughts, contrarily, suddenly came together.
“You’ll never find it without me,” he said in firmer tones.
He felt a sudden sting across the front of his neck. It wasn’t until a red mist of his own blood sprayed out before his horrified eyes that he realized Snake Eye had slashed his throat with a single rattlesnake slash.
“Why?” his lips said. All that came out was air gurgling from a cut windpipe, bubbling through blood.
“I beg to differ, Mr. Kendry,” said the chiller, who had stepped neatly aside, out of the way of the pulsing blood. It was already dwindling before Erl’s eyes as he gagged and fought for breath. “If two idiots such as you could find the treasure once, I can find it now. And I’m sure I can track down other rumors about it to narrow the location further.”
Erl’s vision was fading. He saw the hateful face of his killer smile.
“As I said, Mr. Kendry—” the stoneheart’s words came as if shouted down a well that was somehow growing deeper as he spoke “—they always say too much.
“And last of all—you should take with you, wherever you’re bound, the fact that I always, always keep my contracts.”
Chapter Seven
Baron Al Siebert of Siebertville, commander in chief of the Uplands Alliance Army, was a man as big as his blood-foe Baron Jed was small, Ryan saw as the companions were ushered into the command tent under guard. Baron Al was also as unkempt as the rival general was fussily neat. He wore canvas trousers with the fly unbuttoned, held up—if barely—by suspenders stretched over a big gut. They looked as if the Baron had slept in them, and his wiry black beard and the hair around his gleaming sunburned skull were wild.
The troopers with the companions were casual. They kept their carbines slung. Though their longblasters were stashed with their packs in the tent where they’d spent the night after Lieutenant Tillman Owens’s patrol had brought the companions inside the lines, they still openly wore such sidearms. And accordingly they hadn’t been frisked at all, to say nothing of the half-assed job Jed’s sec men had done earlier in the evening. Both the fresh-faced young lieutenant and whatever superiors he reported to had accepted the newcomers as what they purported—truthfully enough—to be: mercies seeking gainful employment with the Uplander Army.
Now the sun stood high over a surprisingly clear sky. A good breakfast, hot and plentiful and with lots of chicory in lieu of the hard-to-come-by coffee, still warmed Ryan’s gut. And by the looks of it, the Uplander general had only just recently hauled his mass up off his cot.
Baron Al was bent frowning over a map spread on a low table. Old and faded though it was, Ryan recognized a U.S.G.S. contour map, no doubt of the terrain he and the Protectors were currently facing each other across. He didn’t look up as they entered.
Several men were clustered around the map table. In the daylight Ryan had noticed that the Uplanders seemed more casual in their approach to uniforms than their opposite numbers. Most of the troops he’d seen obviously wore whatever they left home in, with a green armband, often nothing more than a random handkerchief or scrap of cloth, tied around one biceps to denote affiliation. At most, some of the officers and the odd noncom wore a green uniform blouse or tunic, although these were of a sufficient variety of patterns that “uniform-like” would probably hit closer to the bull’s-eye. The baron himself wore not a scrap of green, evidently trusting his substantial height and distinctive appearance to identify his own allegiance.
Unlike their boss, the obvious junior officers—aides and subcommanders, or so Ryan reckoned—who studied the table with Al did wear uniform uppers, tailored-looking and even reasonably clean. Only the man who hovered at the baron’s right elbow wore a complete set: spotless green tunic with a double row of double-shiny brass buttons, crisp green trousers with yellow stripes down the sides, brown boots polished like mirrors.
“You overslept again, General,” the fashion plate was saying in a prissy tone of voice. He was good-looking enough, if a person went for that type: fine features, long nose, keen brown eyes, black hair. The only thing that spoiled his handsomeness was the fact that, though clearly Al’s junior by a decade or two, the man had a bald spot on his narrow head almost as big as the one the baron sported. “Are you sure that’s the example you want to set your men?”
“Who gives a rat’s ass what kind of example I set, Cody?” Al rumbled, running a stubby forefinger along a terrain contour. “The men know why we fight. Better for them if I get enough sleep so I can think straight. It’s not as if our pickets wouldn’t warn us if Jed tried a sneak attack. Not that he’d take the ramrod out of his skinny ass long enough to try any such unorthodox maneuver.”
He raised his head, lacking only a set of short horns to look like an old, if admittedly pattern-balding, bison bull. “Dammit, where’s my chicory?”
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