«To sterilize wounds and start fires,» he said virtuously. «Why? You don't think I'd drink it, do you?»
«How long have you been a follower of the Lord?»
«I was recruited when I was eighteen,» Rivas told her, truthfully.
«Huh,» she said. «You can't have taken the sacrament very often if you're still walking around at your age.»
Unable to think of a reply, he just shrugged.
She leaned back against the sign and pitched the breast bone into the fire. «I don't—what's the matter?» she asked, frightened, for he'd leaped to his feet and his face was gray.
«Uh—» He turned and squinted back the way they'd come. «Nothing. But we're wasting time. Let's get moving—if we crank, we can be at the Regroup Tent tonight.»
He didn't begin to relax until they were mounted and riding south down a well-preserved highway, and even then he kept glancing back anxiously; for he'd suddenly remembered a little more of his dream and he was pretty sure now that it hadn't been a dream at all, that he really had been mockingly spoken to, very late last night, while he was feverishly half awake—spoken to by the hemogoblin whose face was somehow a caricature of his own.
And he was sure, too, that the glimpse he'd remembered earlier, the glimpse he'd thought was of himself sucking his thumb, had actually been a fevered memory of seeing that thing sucking its sustenance from his self-inflicted knife wound.
When the sun was near meridian two columns of smoke appeared in the south, and a third began upwardly staining the blue sky within the next half hour. Rivas and Sister Windchime couldn't hear anything but the grasshoppers and lizards in the dry grass around them, but every time a long straight length of street offered a chance to see some distance, Rivas stood up in the stirrups and peered, trying to see through the mirage ripples and guess whether the troubles ahead—whatever they were, some consequence of the advance of the San Berdoo army, he supposed—would obstruct his progress toward the Regroup Tent.
After a while the street they'd been following turned sharply to the southwest, and they had to strike out across the fields and flattened housing tracts. Eventually they were fortunate enough to find a southward-snaking dry riverbed, and they rode down the middle of it for almost an hour before noises from ahead made Rivas call to Sister Wind-chime, softly, «Stop.»
«What is it?» she asked, already a little nervous herself.
«I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's people coming this way. Whoever it is, we don't need 'em. Come on,» he said, quickly hopping out of the saddle to the gravelly dirt, «let's get up the slope here.»
Sister Windchime dismounted and they led the horses up the eroded slope. After the first few minutes of dusty scrambling they were in shade among trees, and at the crest of the slope they found a segment of narrow paved road still not quite reclaimed by colonies of tall asphalt-crumbling weeds and the downhill tug of the annual floods.
«Quiet now,» Rivas whispered. «We'll just let 'em move on past us and then be on our way again.»
Over the rustling of the branches around them he could now hear a sort of windy ululation and a faint metallic clatter—but it wasn't until the first scream raised startled crows from the trees ahead that Rivas realized what must be going on. It's a band of hooters, he thought.
Though he'd several times talked to people who'd survived hooter attacks and once or twice come across the remains of people who'd run afoul of them, Rivas had never seen a band of them himself, and he wasn't eager to. He was glad he and the girl had found concealment, and he hoped everyone down there in the riverbed would be too busy to note the tracks of two horses on the dusty bank.
Again, and more loudly now, came the eerie fluting sounds, discordant and choppy.
«It's hooters, isn't it?» the girl whispered.
«Yeah,» he said. More fervently than ever he wished he'd grabbed Nigel's hat. The shift from motion in sunlight to stillness in shade had got him disoriented again, and thoughts were as hard to hold onto as lively fish in a bait tank. He caught one, and was able to add, «Probably running down some luckless fugitives from the troubles along the coast.»
Branches framed a segment of the gravel riverbed below, and as the hoarse yells and thudding footsteps and the clatter of bicycles got louder, Rivas kept his eyes on it. Almost unconsciously he had taken out the loaded slingshot and hooked it over his wrist. He felt Sister Windchime's hand close tightly on his shoulder, but he couldn't spare her a glance to see what her expression was.
«What are you going to do?» she whispered.
«Nothing, don't worry. This,» he whispered, raising the slingshot, «is just in case they try to come up here.»
Minutes passed and the sounds grew louder and sweat tickled his forehead and neck. Damn, he thought tensely, why do there have to be all these obstacles? All we want is to get to the Regroup Tent, get back to where we belong, in the hands of the Lord. The affairs of the world are ephemeral, I believe that, and the ways of the Lord are all important, I believe that too—so why must the world's ways always be so noisy?
A particularly raw scream erupted only a short distance ahead, and seemed to shake the leaves. Someone was cursing exhaustedly and a child was sobbing.
«We've got to help them,» Sister Windchime whispered.
Rivas glared sternly at her. «Are you backsliding, sister? Everyone dies, and if they are of the Lord it's a cause for rejoicing, and if they're not then their death means less than that of a fly.» Though it's noisier, he amended. «Perfect yourself before you take it upon yourself to improve the condition of others.»
Tears glittered in her eyes. «Well, that's,» she faltered, «that's all . . . true, of course, it's logical . . . but this"—she waved downward—"this is real.»
«The world seems real, sister,» he told her gently. «With the cleverness of its illusions it tempts us to participate in them. Why, this show today is probably just a test which the Lord has sent to measure our strength. Be brave and do the right thing.»
He had turned to look at her, but now a motion below made him snap his head back. A horse had appeared below; a little girl rocked in the saddle and a man was jogging alongside with the side-to-side weaving of total exhaustion. All three creatures were covered with dust and spattered with blood.
Then a rattling, glittering construction had flashed across his view, and the man fell to his knees with a sob, and coins of bright red blood began rapidly appearing under him and around him on the smooth stones—
–and in the same instant Sister Windchime put her heels to her horse's flanks and went avalanching down the slope.
Rivas, though swearing with fright and rage, was right behind her.
The cloud of dust they raised in sliding and scrambling down to the riverbed made it hard to see anything, but to his left Rivas heard the skid and clatter of one of the hooter bikes turning around, and he lifted the slingshot and faced that direction. Then he could see the thing through the dust: the two high-wheels that stuck out to the sides at an upward angle looked like the eye-stalks of some big metal insect, and under the cross bar that connected them he could just see the rider, hunched over the pedals; the bike was still leaning way over from its sharp U-turn as it bore down on Rivas, and the starboard high-wheel was spinning from having touched ground.
Rivas held his arm straight out, and fright made him risk the slingshot's elastic by drawing the stone all the way back to his mouth. He let fly and then without waiting to see the effect vaulted off his horse and landed in a crouch on the gravel. As he squinted around for Sister Windchime he fitted another stone into the slingshot's leather pouch, and when he heard quick, rhythmic fluting ahead of him he drew the stone back and peered.