There was a blur of motion in the shadows about sixty yards in front of me and perhaps thirty feet lower. I moved forward cautiously, keeping my head in shadow, and peered at it, but saw nothing. A very long time went by, and I turned everything over and over in my mind while I tried to stay ready, calm, and watchful. Esmé had found something or someone creeping up on us, and had had a quick, silent, deadly fight with it down there. Probably someone on their way up to our present position.
If Esmé had won, she would now be creeping down the trail of shadows, over the boulders, to the place she had picked for setting a main force for the ambush, probably hoping that the force there would be small, maybe just one or two, so that she could take it out herself—or if it were large, she could see it, crawl back, let the rest of us know, and come back with some firepower. No doubt she was going to take a while about it—if she had won.
If she had lost, whatever beat her was now on its way here. I moved the pistol around on the belt, carefully, never taking my eyes off the slope below, scanning as hard as I could, my hand resting on the butt. I could now draw it fast, I knew where the safety was, and I would draw it as soon as something moved, and fire as soon as it wasn’t Esmé. I thought that anything that had overcome her, when she had the advantage of surprise, would probably get me, but a shout and a shot might make all the difference to our people back at the esty.
I squatted, changing my position slowly, just often enough so that nothing would stiffen or go to sleep, and watched and tried to be in the state of empty readiness for anything that is supposed to be characteristic of martial artists. The slope was motionless and silent. The shadows were imperfectly dark; a blade of grass, a bit of saguaro, or a white rock might shine a little in them, and might seem to move now and then, helping to keep me alert but nervous. The bright spots where the moonlight hit fully were distracting and tempting as places to rest the eye, but if you did that, they seemed after a while to float up away from the shadows, and instead of a dimly lit rocky, scrubby hillside, you could find yourself looking at an uninterpretable set of blobs of light and darkness that made no particular sense and might not interpret into reality fast enough.
I tried to check the road and the desert beyond it regularly too, and to keep an ear out behind me in case someone with even more night-fighting talent than Esmé had crept around behind me and was about to drop on my shoulders.
I wasn’t moving much, but I was busy, as the shadows shrunk and reached westward, and the half-moon—now too bright for me to look at as my eyes had become completely dark-adapted— crawled up the sky toward the zenith, shortening the shadows and lighting more of the landscape. I guessed that it had moved about thirty degrees, roughing it as a third of a right angle, since I took my post, which meant around two hours had passed. It seemed like much less.
How long had it been between taking up our position and Esmé’s going forward? I had no idea, but not as long as I had been waiting here, I figured.
A half-moon with the curved side east, like this one, is bang overhead just when the sun comes up, and since I was really beginning to hope the sun would come up, I stole a couple of upward glances. The moon was perhaps ten degrees, which would take about twenty more minutes, from the zenith; the first glow before dawn should be happening any moment. I watched and waited.
A voice behind me said, very softly, “Lyle, please take your hand off that gun. If the safety is off, please put it back on.”
“Safety is on,” I said, and very slowly took my hand away from the pistol butt. “Esmé?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She sat beside me, her teeth chattering as if she’d just been drenched in a freezing bath and then sent out into a winter wind.
I ventured to ask, “Any chance there are any more?”
“I don’t think so. God, I have to hope there aren’t. I can’t... oh, god, Lyle, no, I think we can just talk, now, if you want to. And I want to, need to, even I’m just having a lot of trouble doing it. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you what happened. But it’s pretty goddam gruesome and I’ve never felt so shook in my whole life, and I would really appreciate it if whatever you say or do is the most soothing thing you can come up with.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
She leaned back against the rock, and then moved so that her shoulder rested against mine, obviously needing the comfort of the touch. Just in case she’d made a completely wrong guess about whether there were any more attackers, I kept my eyes on the slope, but I listened as she said, “I found a barely marked trail—mostly just little bitty cut handholds and footholds, and some trampled spots in close to rocks, it was a very clever setup to keep people from noticing that there was any trail there—and I followed it down, staying about five meters off to the north of it. Sure enough, after a while I heard some noise—not much, a boot scrape maybe, or a breath. I had someone coming up that trail. I crept on over and got into a shadow. Somebody passed by me, and I jumped in behind them and went for a silent kill.
“Well, guess who it turned out to be when I jumped onto the trail? Our old multi-lived friend, Billie Beard. This version of Billie knew her stuff, too—I jumped her from behind, hard as I could, and got her trachea squeezed and stuck her in the kidney before she could get into the fight properly, and I still felt like I was trying to hog-tie a steer with masking tape. I sawed through her carotid while I had her in a half nelson, which is incredibly messy and scary. I hope we get to someplace where I can wash, and soon.
“At that point I figured, okay, Billie Beard was going to be a lookout, and there had to be an ambush right in the place I had picked out. I crawled down the hill and was delighted to smell some kind of cheap booze—rotgut bad enough that it might have been vodka, tequila, maybe just straight grain alcohol. Quiet little noises, almost like someone wrestling.”
She leaned in close and said, “This is not romantic, but if you would just put your arm around me, I would really, really appreciate it. Right now I’m afraid I’m either going to cry or throw up. I promise if it turns out I’m going to throw up, I’ll get away from you. But I think more likely I’m just going to cry, and I guess I’m literal enough that I want a shoulder to do it on. And I’ll say I’m sorry, in advance, if I accidentally get any blood on you.”
I hugged her in one arm, and sat back, where I could no longer see the slope below us, figuring that it made much more sense for me to trust her judgment than my paranoia; if she thought all threats were ended, then anything that could surprise us was something I wouldn’t stand a chance against, anyway.
After a few deep breaths and a couple of “Uh” and “Well” false beginnings, she said, “I was almost laughing, with relief that this was going to be so-easy, and at the chance for some revenge. I crawled forward and there were two high-powered rifles and a couple of grenade launchers, leaning against a rock—and two people moving around in the shadows. The reek of booze was amazing.