No Man's Land Read online

  They were well away from the buildings now. The grounds were fairly well kept, and the perimeter was carefully watched by the stout but assiduous Oliver Christmas’s sec men riding patrols. Whatever the status of relations between the rival powers, generations of experience had taught the Uplanders never to take for granted Protector brutality and treachery. Nor the cornered-rat cunning of their current baron. The men were safe enough out here, in their footing and otherwise.

  “We speak on behalf of a group of concerned citizens of the Alliance,” McCormac intoned. “Fellow officers, as well as certain others who—good patriots all—find themselves compelled by age, infirmity, or unbreakable obligation to serve the Alliance in a purely civilian capacity.”

  “Men of our class,” Asaro added brightly and not altogether necessarily.

  “Of course,” Cody murmured, frowning. He wondered where this was going. He frankly didn’t like the direction he foresaw it might take.

  “To be candid,” McCormac continued, “we find ourselves concerned, specifically, about the conduct of Baron Al. He seems to be behaving in an increasingly autocratic and arbitrary fashion since our smashing victory over our hereditary enemies. And he seems to feel the popularity his success—to detract nothing from its brilliance and glory—has bought him from the unthinking rabble, gives him license to do whatever he pleases.”

  “Increasingly without regard for the concerns of responsible men,” Asaro said. “Men of our class.”

  Cody’s brow-furrowing deepened to a scowl. “Gentlemen,” he said briskly, “I have sworn an oath to serve my commander loyally and without hesitation. As have we all.”

  At that Asaro got a wild look in his pale eyes and opened his darkening face to rejoin. McCormac stilled him with a wave of a plump, peremptory hand.

  “Indeed,” he said. “And indeed, we all have sworn to serve the baron as commander in chief. For the duration of the emergency, I might hasten to add.”

  He looked at Turnbull. “But the emergency, can we not all agree, has now passed? With the crushing blow that the baron dealt the lowland scum—again, nothing but praise to him for that feat—surely the Grand Army has been rendered incapable of posing further serious threat to the welfare of the Uplands for the season. Or for years, possibly a generation.”

  Cody started to say something, but it came out as a sigh. He knew that was true; though his own first profession was a sheep-farmer and baron, he took his enforced secondary profession as a military officer of the Alliance with utmost seriousness. And he understood what the fat man said was perfectly true, well enough.

  And still, he thought, I mourn for the opportunity Al let slip through his clumsy fingers—to crush the Association serpent for good and all!

  Phil Asaro still looked hot beneath his high, starched collar, but he managed to offer, “The baron’s time has passed,” in what could pass for a civil tone.

  Well enough at least for Turnbull, a man as punctilious about his honor as his appearance, to allow it to pass as such.

  “So you see,” McCormac said, nodding with even more than his usual gravity, “what we encompass is fully in accordance with our law, both civil and military, as well as morality. However unlikely either the present general commander or his bumptious security chief are to see it that way.”

  Which was true. For all that Al was unusually forbearing for a baron—dare Cody think, weak?—he was also justly famous for his volcanic passions. Especially rages when he found himself seriously crossed. He might be almost as livered in his treatment of the Protectors as Jessie Rae accused him of being—his face went hot and his jaw tightened, and he swallowed as he fought not to envision the way her own passionate outbursts had made her full white breasts surge from her bodice—but he had an abrupt way when faced with outright opposition.

  And for all that his obesity and slovenliness betokened what could only be an equally disordered mind, Turnbull couldn’t deny that Oliver Christmas had shown himself time and again to be a zealous and shrewd defender of his ward. Even though he came of a house that had long been somewhat bitter rivals of the Siebert clan, he owed loyalty to the commander of the Alliance Army, not Al’s own person.

  Cody Turnbull’s heart lurched. His stomach rumbled in sympathy. However he hated to hear them, he couldn’t deny the heavyset baron’s words were true. Those very concerns had been eating at Cody Turnbull and robbing him of sleep ever since Al had, to his mind, inexplicably refused to deal the deathblow to which the Protector scum lay helpless—and the army cheered him for it.

  My honor is my loyalty, he thought, and vice versa. Yet which way did true loyalty lead?

  Loyalty to the Uplands Alliance had to supersede all, of course. That much was obvious.

  He cleared his throat. “Gentlemen,” he said with a quiet assurance he didn’t altogether feel, “I admit that, despite misgivings, you have interested me. Please continue.”

  After all, he told himself, what could it possibly hurt to listen to them?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You what?” Snake Eye shouted at the old man’s reddened, water-streaming face. “You told who?”

  “Gah!” Old Pete said, and vomited a thin stream of slurry of water, dinner grits, beans and rotgut into the green algae soup in the stock tank from which his captor had just yanked his head.

  The abandoned farmstead on the western fringes of the no-man’s-land between the Uplanders and the Protectors was still dark, although a thin line of pallor showed in the west. Concerned to make sure his primary quarry hadn’t headed off somewhere in immediate response to whatever information they’d pumped out of the grizzled old bastard, Snake Eye had continued to shadow Ryan’s party for a couple of days. He reckoned the scabbie was headed in to sneak around the battlefield and grab what he could from the corpses, bloating slowly in the sun and river humidity. He doubted the pickings would be fat—the armies and their camp followers would’ve looted the ace swag, plus grave details from both sides were burying the corpses, although that was a task that would take some time. Snake Eye calculated he’d have plenty of time to scoop up Old Pete for the conversation they were having now.

  Except it had also, apparently, given Old Pete time to hit a gaudy to spend some of his meager take from the war zone. And run his white-bearded face.

  “They seemed like nice fellers!” the wrinklie sputtered when he stopped gagging and started breathing air again instead of the water Snake Eye had pumped into the concrete tub. It apparently saw somewhat frequent use from passersby, since there was more water getting thick and green and scummy in the bottom than the season’s rains would account for. “Anyway, I was drunk, and it seemed to me like I was seein’ the faces of, you know...all them poor chills. All swole up and blue, staring at me with empty eye sockets and all. It felt like I owed ’em an apology or something.”

  “An apology?” Snake Eye demanded. “How did that possibly translate into telling a bunch of strangers in a saloon about the treasure? A secret you’d kept for years?”

  “Well, since I already done told them other young folks about it, I thought to myself, ‘Pete, where’s the harm in it, really? You done broke the ice already—’”

  He probably tried to finish the word, but if he did, he did so underwater as Snake Eye thrust his head under it again.

  “Corruption!” he swore. He was as furious as he could remember being.

  The wrinklie thrashed and struggled futilely against the mutie’s iron strength. Snake Eye ignored that as an obvious byproduct of the process.

  Sure, he was mad at Old Pete—hot past nuke red. But most of all he understood the proper target of his rage was himself.

  He was the best. The best blaster for hire in a world full of blasters, where hiring out your piece and your trigger finger—and your willingness to use them both in concert—was one of the few ways to advance yourself in the face of universal want, privation and general despair. Just staying alive as a mercie was a brutal challenge that claimed mos
t of those who tried it at a young age. Staying alive at all in the Deathlands was a challenge the majority of people born failed at.

  Yet Snake Eye hadn’t just survived, he’d clawed his way to the top, despite the potentially lethal disadvantage his mute put him at, of that bloody pyramid. He was the best. No question.

  Well, yes, he made himself remember—one question remained. The man who lived in a thousand whispered campfire yarns and gaudy-house whispers, the invincible one-eyed chiller and his band of mysterious travelers. Some said he was the best: Ryan Cawdor. And if a man looked into the matter, as few dared to do—and Snake Eye had—he could find abundant evidence to back that claim.

  “To be the best,” a wise man who’d mentored Snake Eye loved to say, “you got to beat the best.” Which of course was why eventually Snake Eye had to chill him, as another step up that bloodstained pyramid.

  Snake Eye reckoned he was better than Ryan Cawdor. He was willing to stake his life on it, which of course was exactly what he was doing.

  And one key element of Snake Eye’s surviving, let alone making that triple-hard and brutal ascent, was total, ruthless objectivity. Especially about himself.

  When something this bad happened to Snake Eye, Snake Eye’s unpatched eye never looked far for whom to blame. It was him.

  Because to be the best, you had to beat yourself. If you played at that level, your worst enemy was always you. That was the conviction Snake Eye formed at an early age, and had lived by ever since.

  Nothing was done to Snake Eye. Nothing happened to him. Not since he’d been born with just enough of a taint showing to ensure he’d never be able to pass as human, even if he covered up his yellow serpent eye. He either did it to himself, or permitted it to happen.

  He noticed the old scabbie had stopped struggling.

  “Corruption,” he said again, softly. He hauled up the oldie. The man was as limp as a half-full bag of wet gunpowder and twice as useless.

  Snake Eye had let himself get so caught up in his anger and his thoughts he’d drowned the old bastard.

  He let the deadweight drop. The balding head lolled on one side, tongue sticking out, its blueness showing as unnatural darkening in the starlight that gleamed on the curve of one old eyeball that would continue to stare at nothing until it rotted to slime and dissolved in the water—or, more likely, some enterprising raven picked out for a tasty snack.

  He went back to his horse, who grazed in the grass nearby, taking a moment to unfasten the two pack donkeys he’d tethered to a post of a corral fence. He dumped the packs from their backs and left them free.

  Snake Eye was ruthless, but he wasn’t cruel. Not without reason, anyway.

  With the sense of comfort knowing his goal and taking action to win it always gave him, he rode south as a sickly gray light stole across the grassland.

  * * *

  CODY WOKE SUDDENLY to find the thin chintz curtains in his quarters on the second floor of the headquarters just barely lightening with a hint of dawn. By reflex his hand sought and found the .44-caliber Schofield revolver on the nightstand beside his musty feather bed.

  Al had shifted his quarters to be closer to the new Alliance lines. He now occupied another farmhouse that had lain derelict for a year or two. It had serious artillery holes, hastily patched to keep the rain out and the floors and stairways not too unsafe. Nothing could be done about the general air of decay, though, the smells of dry rot, dust and mold.

  “Wait,” a husky female voice said from the gloom at the foot of the bed. “Turn on the lamp.”

  His heart seemed to jam itself in his throat. “Jessie Rae?” He hardly dared to breathe the syllables.

  He hardly dared to imagine he wasn’t dreaming.

  “Turn on the light and see” came the answer in kittenish tones.

  Laying down the handblaster Turnbull used a flint-and-steel striker converted from an old-days cigarette lighter to spark flame to the wick of the kerosene lamp beside the bed. Turning the flow up to a low ochre glow, he turned to behold his nocturnal visitor.

  His heart, which had been fluttering like a trapped bird in his throat, now seemed to stop.

  It was Lady Siebert. Her voice had already told him that. But Jessie Rae Siebert as he had never seen her before—except in his waking dreams, of course. And even there he’d only permitted himself to indulge sparingly. So it was fair to say that the vision that greeted his wondering eyes exceeded his wildest dreams.

  She was clothed. Her negligée was short and silky, blue to match her eyes, which were huge and round with emotion.

  “I need help,” she said, gazing into his eyes. As he saw with a stab through the belly of guilt when he tore his eyes away from the little peaks her stiff nipples put in the low-cut bodice of her frilly garment. “Your help, Cody. Please.”

  “J-Jessie Rae,” he croaked. “Lady. You shouldn’t be here.”

  She came to the bed. Her breasts swayed like sea waves as she threw herself to her knees beside him.

  “You won’t send me away!” she begged. “Please! I—I have nowhere else to turn!”

  The touch of her palm burned like hot iron on his thigh.

  Cody Turnbull was no virgin, but he had never sated his lust with a woman of his own class, and especially not illicitly with a married woman of good station.

  Especially not one married to his general.

  Passions he couldn’t have named had he even dared try clogged his throat. He shook his head mutely.

  She took that as refusal to send her away, apparently, because she twitched the comforter off him, and as he gasped as if she’d hit him with a bucket of winter-cold water, swarmed up to straddle his thighs with her own. The touch of bare skin on skin was electric; her inner thighs were soft flesh bedding over firm muscle.

  His penis, standing straight up in defiance of all that was decent and right, practically vibrated with forbidden lust.

  “You know I’ve always wanted you, Cody,” she said. Her fingers closed around his rod. His body jerked involuntarily and he moaned.

  Cody moaned again as she began to pump her little firm fist up and down on his dick. “But I can’t lie with you yet,” she said. “Not until Al is out of the way.”

  “I can’t—” he managed to choke out. “Disloyal—”

  With her free hand she grabbed the front of her nightie and yanked it down. Her breasts bobbed free. They were full and as sweet as ripe pears—how well he knew that—but he was unprepared for the creamy perfection of them. Or the way her pale-pink aureoles had contracted to nothing as the nipples pushed forth, as if begging for his mouth.

  “I can’t raise a hand against my general,” he moaned. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done to say those words to her here and now, with her leaning forward, jacking him off, a lock of hair swinging by the side of her pertly perfect face, her breasts bobbing in time to the exquisite illicit motion of her hands. Harder than leading a charge of cavalry against the Protector guns last summer at Holmun’s Ford, even after a blast of grapeshot sprayed his best friend’s blood and guts all over his face and the right side of his body. “Swore...oath—”

  Smiling angelically, she shook her head. “I’d never ask you to harm him,” she said. “Your loyalty does you credit, my love.”

  He moaned again, this time with a whine, when she let go of his cock. He was that close to spending the lust that threatened to burst his body like an overripe cherry.

  Then she scooted her round rear down his legs and leaned forward. Her big breasts flopped onto his crotch to either side of his rigid tool.

  “But I’m calling on your greater loyalty,” she said, as she used her hands to squeeze her breasts together around Cody’s erection and work them up and down. Her eyes never wavered from his shocked gaze. “You swore an oath to serve the Alliance and its army. Not one man. Not even my husband. And you can’t know what it’s like to be bound to a brute like him! His booze-reeking breath, his clumsy paws mauling my tender flesh. Not lik
e your strong and lean and manly hands, Cody Turnbull!”

  He clutched handfuls of the sheet beneath himself and groaned aloud.

  “Tell me you’ll help me! Tell me you’ll help the Alliance against my husband’s overweening pride.”

  “Uh, I—”

  “Please,” she said, rolling her shoulder to add an entirely unknown dimension to the wonderful sensation her breasts were giving to his cock. “Please, tell me you will! When at last Al’s deposed and put aside, I can give myself to you. That sweet thing, my love—”

  She stuck her posterior in the air with abandon that even now shocked him. The green lacy fabric slid onto the small of her back, giving him a glimpse of the two white, apple-round mounds of her cheeks.

  “Yes. Yes!” he screamed. His body vibrated like a tuning fork hit with a ball-peen hammer.

  She showed him a delighted smile, which she proceeded to wrap around the swollen purple head of his cock. As she sucked in with delicious pressure, her tongue played sweet music where shaft met head. With a gargling cry he spent himself in violent spurts.

  As his cock, slick and wet, bobbed out of her mouth, the dawn air caressed it with cold fingers.

  “So we have a deal,” she said in a businesslike tone. She sat up and stuffed her breasts back into captivity. “We must strike quickly.”

  Cody Turnbull uttered a sound like a sob and let his head fall helplessly back onto his pillow.

  * * *

  “TOP OF THE MORNING to you, Baron,” Snake Eye said, setting his black gelding alongside the Protector commander’s high-stepping chestnut. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  The early-morning sky showed brilliant blue through breaks in high white clouds. The sunlight glittered on the dew on the grass that clothed the low-rolling countryside south of the Grand Army camp, where Jed Kylie had chosen to take his morning exercise in company of his sec boss and a quartet of guards. They stared at the mercie, who had apparently sprung directly from the green landscape, as if he’d appeared out of a purple puff of smoke.