CHAPTER 13
THE COST OF ARROGANCE
The sun had no mercy in it. On the second day in the New Mexico desert, the heat stopped being a nuisance and became a hot blade driven into the throat.
The red dust no longer rose only with the hooves; it seemed to float in the air, static, clogging the nostrils and splitting the lips.
Nero drew rein on the black stallion, stopping in the dwindling shade of a rock shaped like a tooth.
He reached to the saddle and pulled down the heavy leather canteen. He shook it. The sound that came out of it was a dry rattle. Empty. The hunter looked behind him. Elena had stopped just at his back, her face covered by the kerchief up to the eyes.
“Pass me your canteen.” Nero’s voice came out as a rough whisper, scraping his dry throat.
Elena pulled the metal flask she carried at the side of her saddle and threw it to Nero. He caught it in the air. It was far too light. When he opened the cap, only three drops of hot water fell into the sand, evaporating instantly.
“What?” Elena’s eyes went wide as she pulled the kerchief down. “I thought you refilled the extra barrels on the wagon before Gideon took the whole thing apart!”
“I saw to the guns and the ammunition,” Nero answered, his blue eyes narrowing, the cold tone shifting into a contained irritation. “You were the one responsible for the provisions out of the saloon.”
The two of them turned their heads slowly toward Gideon. The machinist came pushing his mount along, his goggles full of dust and an expression of pure exhaustion on his face. As he pulled up beside them, he caught the lethal look on both his companions’ faces.
“What is it?” the inventor grumbled. “If you’re waiting for me to squeeze water out of metal, forget it. My canteen ran out this morning.”
“Gideon…” Elena put her hand on the handle of her whip. “You didn’t bring the water cans from the workshop?”
“Me?” Gideon let out a hysterical, cracked laugh.
“I spent the entire night forging a steel mount and balancing a two-hundred-round machine gun on a damned horse! I assumed the two desert professionals would know that human beings need to drink water!” Three brilliant minds for killing.
Not one for surviving. The desert did not forgive arrogance.
The Oblique Detour
Elena tore the leather map out of her pocket and opened it violently, her hands shaking slightly with the onset of dehydration. If they stayed on the original route north, the next known water source was three days of hard riding away. They would be dead in thirty-six hours.
“We have a problem,” Elena said, pointing at a deep crack drawn into the relief of the map, west of their present position. “There’s a gorge called Ca?ón de las Sombras. A thread of snowmelt off the mountains runs down there. But that area… the map says to keep away.”
“Apache?” Gideon asked, swallowing hard on saliva that no longer existed.
“Worse.” Elena looked at Nero. “The Apache call the ones who live there Wun-adi… ‘The Faceless.’ It isn’t a proper tribe. They’re exiles, criminals and renegades out of several nations who went mad in the caves. They don’t plant, they don’t raise cattle, and they don’t hunt animals.”
Nero looked at the pack horse. The rotating reaper was there, silent under the tarpaulin. If the horses died of thirst, the gun would be left behind. If the gun was left behind, the girl Mia would die at Fort Ross. Nero’s arithmetic had always been simple.
“Their blood has water in it,” Nero pronounced, turning his horse’s head to the west. “We’re going into the gorge.”
The Canyon of Shadows
Two hours later the three of them were descending a steep, claustrophobic trail.
The stone walls of the canyon were so high that they blocked the sun, dropping the riders into a cold grey gloom.
The silence in there was absolute, broken only by the echo of hooves and by the distant — and torturing — sound of running water in the depths.
The horses whinnied, nervous, their ears up.
They could smell the water, but they could smell something else as well.
Nero raised a hand, ordering a halt. He dismounted silently, drawing one of his Colt Patersons.
His eyes focused on the ground near an exposed root.
There were bones. A great many bones. But they were not buffalo or coyote.
They were human ribs, clean, scraped with flint knives until not a single piece of cartilage was left.
Caught on a dry branch above them, a charm made of three children’s skulls swung in the cold wind of the gorge.
A strange sound began to echo off the stone walls. It was not an Indian war cry. It was a rapid clicking, made with the tongue and teeth — click-click-click — multiplying among the seams of the rock above them.
“Nero…” Gideon whispered, his hand shaking on the holster of his engineer’s revolver.
“They’re in the walls.” High above, thin figures with pale skin covered in ash and war paint made of clotted blood began to emerge from the crevices.
They wore no cloth garments, only cured human hide and necklaces of teeth.
Their eyes were hungry, their open mouths drooling in anticipation.
Nero walked to the pack horse’s flank and, with a single pull, tore off the waterproof tarpaulin. The bronze and steel of the reaper gleamed in the gloom of the canyon. He pulled Gideon’s bronze catch, releasing the gun’s pivot.
“Gideon, Elena… stay close to the horses,” Nero ordered, taking the crank in his right hand and aiming the ten barrels at the first line of bluffs. “They want meat. We’ll give them lead.”
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