Havel knocked the dying man over backward with a grunt of effort as he shouldered past him; he fell with his head and shoulders in the fireplace and lay there with his hair burning and his blood frying and crisping and stinking on the hot iron of the log holder.
That left Eric and Jailhouse Bob on one side of the sofa and Havel on the other, moving fast towards the bandit's end to take him in the rear. The man had been on the attack, ready to take a few cuts to get in under Eric's polearm with his knife and finish him quickly before the two men could gang up on him, just exactly the right thing to do.
He hadn't quite managed it, and there was blood flowing from a shallow cut on his cheek. Now he backed again, moving fast in a straddle-legged crouching shuffle, his head swiveling between the two opponents coming at him. The knife in his hand was nearly a foot long, almost a bowie, and sharpened on the recurve; it glittered in the lantern light as he moved it in small precise arcs at the end of his long arm.
No fancy Ramboesque serrations on the blade or Klingon wings on the plain brass quillions; it was a professional's weapon, and even two-on-one Bob was likely to do some serious damage before he went down.
Behind him Astrid Larsson walked out of the hallway. She was entirely naked and spattered with blood; mostly someone else's, far too much to come from the bite-marks on her small breasts. There was an old-fashioned alarm clock in her right hand, and a collection of small heavy objects in the curve of her other-coffee mugs and paperweights.
She threw the alarm clock, hard; it jangled as it hit Bob's shoulder, and there was a look of dawning panic in his narrow hazel eyes as he flicked them back and forth, darting between the girl and the two armed men.
She followed it with a coffee cup, which missed, and a paperweight, which didn't. The skinny bandit made a sound, a scream of animal rage and fear.
Women scare him, Havel realized. That's why he hurts them.
"Kill him," Havel said to Eric, and moved in to do just that as a mug flew past Bob's head.
The bandit reversed the knife with a swift flip and threw it at Havel; then he turned and dodged Eric's thrust with the point of his naginata and jumped straight through the window, arms crossed in front of his face as he smashed through the glass. He was lucky-you were about as likely to cut your own intestines out doing that as not-landed flat on the veranda, and took off running towards the darkness.
Havel twisted to let the big blade go by; you could get hurt by a thrown knife, but generally only by accident. Then he put a booted foot on the windowsill to follow; he didn't look forward to chasing the stick-thin killer in the dark, but he wasn't going to have him hanging around, either.
Astrid walked to where her bow and quiver hung by the door, put a shaft to the cord, drew, and loosed through the window. Her movements had the smooth inevitability of a sleepwalker's.
The arrow made Havel jerk aside in surprise; it went by close enough that he could feel the wind of its passage, and hear the whhhptt of cloven air.
"He wanted to rape me but he couldn't," she said with a calm like ice on a river just before the spring surge cracked it, ignoring the savage lash of the bowstring on her forearm.
"So he took me into Mom's room and he killed her; he said he'd be able to do me after that."
Havel completed the vault and dropped down onto the broken glass that littered the veranda; it crunched and crackled under his boots.
Twenty yards away, Jailhouse Bob lay in the pathway, pulling himself along on his hands. His legs were limp, and an arrow stood in his lower back. It jerked and quivered as he tried to drag himself along, looking over his shoulder with a snarl. Havel shook himself, as if he were coming out of deep cold water.
Eric Larsson was on his knees at the edge of the veranda, puking with a violence that threatened a pulled muscle in his back, and obviously wasn't going to be much use for the immediate future. He walked over to the middle-aged black man instead, and went down on one knee to cut the rope lashings that held him.
"My family?" Will Hutton asked, working his arms and rubbing at his wrists.
"Hiding out in a thicket by the road with most of your gear," Havel said. "Should be fine."
"Lord, but that's good to hear," Hutton said, slumping in relief. He began to offer a hand, then realized Havel still had the knife in his. "Many thanks: "
"Mike Havel," he replied, and waved the blade slightly. "Consider this my contribution to public hygiene."
Hutton had a heavy rural-Southern accent, but sharper and more nasal than Gulf State gumbo; Havel thought it was probably Texas originally. The Corps was lousy with Texans of all varieties, and he'd heard that slurred rhythmic twang a lot in some sandy and unpleasant places.
"I'm Will Hutton," the black man replied, standing cautiously and stretching. "Nothing broke, I don't think."
He looked out into the darkness. "You going to finish off that skinny peckerwood? He's a mean one, the worst of the lot. Best be careful, like you would with a broken-back rattler."
"No hurry," Havel said. "I thought I'd let him ripen a bit; he isn't going to crawl out of reach with an arrow through his spine."
He looked at his right hand and his knife. It was dripping, and in the faint light the whole of his hand and forearm looked as if they were coated with something slick and oily and darkly gleaming.
Some distant part of his mind realized that the sight would probably come back to him for years-when he was trying to sleep or eat or make love-but right now it wasn't particularly interesting.
He could just cut Bob's throat, but Havel didn't want to get that close without a good reason; Hutton was right- the man's legs were out of commission, but his arms were still working and his teeth too for that matter. Instead he carefully wiped the blade of the puukko on the clothes of the dead bandit pinned to the wall by the spear, and then sheathed it before he went back into the cabin.
Astrid was still standing with her bow, staring at nothing; Signe was huddled into a ball on the floor, staring at the corpse of the bandit leader. Havel went past in silence- there was nothing he could do to help at that moment- and checked the bedrooms.
Mary Larsson lay spread-eagled on her bed; the mattress was saturated, and it dripped thick strings of blood onto the floor. Havel took one quick look and then carefully avoided letting his eyes stray that way while he found a blanket and covered her.
I hope she died fast, he thought, breathing through his mouth against the smell.
Unfortunately that didn't seem very likely.
Her husband was trussed to a chair in the corner of the room; alive, not too badly beaten up, but staring with the look of a man whose mind had shut down from overload, and there were vomit stains down the front of his shirt and tear-streaks through the white-gray stubble on his cheeks. Havel freed him with a few jerks of his knife, and pulled him erect.
"There's nothing you can do here," he said. "Come on, Ken." The older man's lips moved, almost silently.
Havel went on: "Astrid and Signe are fine." Or at least alive. Technically speaking, they weren't even raped, I think. "They need you, Ken. They need you now. "
That seemed to get through to him; he stumbled along under his own power. Havel left him with his daughters in the living room as he hefted the dead body of the bandit chief and half carried it out to pitch over the railing of the veranda; Will Hutton watched with somber satisfaction.
Then Havel pulled the spear out of the wall. The young bandit's body came with it; the point pulled free of the wood and the heavy corpse flopped down into the pool of blood and fluids, but the square shoulders of the knife caught on something inside. Havel put a foot on the body and worked it free, careful not to loosen the bindings; then he hefted the pole into an overhand grip like a fish gig before walking out towards Jailhouse Bob.