Dies the Fire (66 page)

Angelica went through her list; then she darted back to make sure her assistants weren't spoiling anything.

After a quick check she began beating on a triangle. Everyone gathered 'round their mess hearths by squads and families, as youngsters carried the food around; tables were too much of a bother to drag along on the move, but they had good groundsheets so you could sit down dry and reasonably comfortable around a fire—most were leaning against their saddles, cowboy fashion. Shadows closed in around the fires and the first stars appeared in the east.

Woburn bit into his burrito, then looked down at it with surprised pleasure as the tangy carne asada hit his palate, cooled with sour cream.

“All right,” he said to the Bearkillers' leader. “You've got a real slick operation here, Mr. Havel. Now, you were hinting that you could do something about the Devil Dogs.”

“That depends,” he said. “They've got some sort of base, right? A hideout you can't come at, or more likely they've forted up someplace you can't take.”

“They're at St. Hilda's,” Woburn said, respect in his voice.

Havel's ears perked up at that; he saw that Ken Larsson's did, too. It was one of the big Idaho tourist attractions; you couldn't live in the state and not know about it.

He held up a hand for a moment, and turned his head to Will Hutton; the various bosses-of-sections were eating around Havel's fire tonight, as usual when there was serious business to discuss.

“Will, St. Hilda's is a Benedictine abbey over by that butte. Near the top of it, in fact.”

He pointed southwest. A wide cone with gentle slopes dominated the rolling plain, visible many miles away; right now it was silhouetted against the westering sun as the long July evening drew to a close.

“Built like a fort,” he added. “I saw it a couple of times before the Change.”

“Me too,” Ken said. “Literally like a fort, Romanesque Revival. Nineteen-twenties construction; ashlar stone blocks, a hard blue porphyry, and walls over three feet thick at the base. Four stories in a block around a courtyard, with two towers on the front—both nearly a hundred feet high. Interior water source, too. Not surprised some bandits took it over. It's the closest thing to a castle in the state, after the old penitentiary in Boise.”

Woburn nodded. “When the Change hit, the Devil Dogs stole real bikes, mountain bikes, and then horses, and looted a bunch of wilderness outfitters; after that they started raiding for supplies. That was bad enough. Then in May, they changed their operations. Got a lot of good weapons from somewhere, and then they hit St. Hilda's.”

“What happened to the Sisters?” Hutton said, concern in his voice.

“They killed some of them and threw out most of the rest; Mother Superior Gertrude is staying with me. And since then they've been using it as a base. They've been giving us hell—well, you saw it.”

Havel looked at Signe, and she opened a plastic Office Max filing box. It was filled with neatly labeled maps in hanging files; she pulled out the west-central Idaho one, tacked it to a corkboard, and propped it up where the command staff could see it.

“How many?” Havel said. “Organization? Leaders? What's Iron Rod like? What weapons, and what's their objective, if it isn't just loot?”

Woburn looked at the map. “There were about fifty to start with,” he said. “Twice that now—they've been recruiting from the—no offense—road people.”

Havel smiled thinly; road people was what settled folk around here had taken to calling the wanderers, those stranded on highways by the Change and others who scoured about looking for food. They were a natural breeding-ground for brigandage, not to mention for transmitting disease, and neither well-regarded nor very welcome.

“None taken. We're going somewhere, not just wandering around aimlessly looking for a handout or what we can steal.”

“I can see that,” Woburn said, looking at the map, and then the purposeful activity about him.

He tapped his finger on the map: “Anyway, there's near a hundred fighting men, plus . . . well, they had some women with them to start with. There are more now—some kidnapped. Some men they've taken and are using as slave labor, too.”

Havel nodded; he'd seen similar things in embryo elsewhere, but not on this scale . . . yet.

“I presume you've tried smoking them out,” Havel said. It wasn't a question.

Woburn flushed in embarrassment. “Yeah. You understand, things were total chaos right after the Change, and then we were all working as hard as we could to salvage bits and pieces. People around here are real spread out, and without trucks or phones it took us weeks to get any organization going at all. First we knew was when they started hitting farms—or hitting them up for tribute and ransom.”

“Then you got a big posse together, and they handed you your heads,” Havel guesstimated.

Woburn looked aside a bit. “Yeah. Two hundred men, and we had an I-beam for a battering ram, and some extension ladders.”

Havel winced slightly, picturing how he'd have managed the defense.

Woburn nodded: “Thing is, they've made the place into a real fort. They filled all the windows on the lower two stories with rebar grates and then bolted steel plates over the inside and outside and filled the holes with concrete—the Sisters were doing a construction project and there was plenty of material. Steel shutters with arrow-slits in the upper windows. They'd cut down all the trees around, so there wasn't any cover for us, and they poured boiling canola oil down on us from the top . . . we lost twenty dead, and six times that number injured, a lot of them real bad.”

“And that was the last time you could get that many together,” Havel said.

“Well . . . yeah.”

This time Woburn's look had an element of a glare in it. Havel looked at Ken Larsson, and the older man spoke thoughtfully, tugging at his short silvery beard.

“Either they've got someone very shrewd in charge, or they have an implausible number of construction workers in their ranks. Something odd there. Starving them out, perhaps? Or catching parties of them on the move?”

Woburn snorted. “There's no communications! What men I can scrape together end up running from one place that's been raided to another. If we get a big bunch together, they just retreat into the fort and laugh at us until we go away—we can't keep up a siege, everyone's needed on the farms. That place is stuffed with stolen food.”

Havel nodded. “And they can see you coming, since they hold the high ground. And they probably hit the farms of your supporters, and probably some farmers and ranchers are already paying them off or slipping them information and don't get attacked.”

“I don't blame them,” Ken Larsson said, wincing at the memory of what he'd helped bury.

“I do!” Woburn said; his face flushed with anger. “The Devil Dog honcho, Iron Rod—he's started calling himself Duke of the Camas Prairie, the bastard! You saw what his scum did!”

Havel nodded politely. Behind the mask of his face he thought:
And they're getting stronger, while you get weaker. If things go on the way they are, you'll all be on your knees to Duke Iron Rod by this time next year. Or on your backs, depending on your gender and his tastes.

“I suppose you tried to get some help from Boise,” Havel said.

He didn't bother making it a question. Woburn spat into the fire.

“There's plague in Boise, too. Really bad, and typhus; we haven't had but one outbreak here, thank God. That was in Grangeville, and we managed to damp it down quick with quarantine. Iron Rod's been careful not to attack the Nez Perce . . . yet. He'll be their business if he finishes us off!”

“That's too bad about Boise,” Havel said. “There's a lot of good land west of the city with gravity-flow irrigation; they might have made it.”

And I've got friends there,
he thought.
I hope Eileen's OK, even if she did dump me, and the folks at Steelhead.

The thought was oddly abstract. Things had closed in since the Change; people and places beyond a day's ride were . . . remote. The world felt a whole lot bigger.

“Could be worse,” Signe said unexpectedly. “It could be like the coast . . . or like St. Louis.”

Everyone shivered slightly. A spray of bicycle-born fugitives had made it from the big cities of the Midwest, and from the Pacific coast. A lot of people didn't believe the stories. Nobody wanted to believe them.

“OK,” Havel said. “Here's your problem. They've got an impregnable base. You've got more men—” Although not a lot more; there were probably only about five thousand people left within three or four days travel. “—but yours have to stay split up most of the time, and his are concentrated. He can strike any ranch or farm with superior numbers, then retreat behind his walls if you get together. And he doesn't have to worry about getting a crop in. It'll be worse at harvest time, which is soon. It's always easier to stop other people doing something than it is to do it. The grain'll be dry enough to burn then, too. If you don't get rid of them in the next month or so, they'll wreck you. You'll have to surrender, or move far enough away he can't reach you.”

“The filth destroy what they can't steal,” Woburn said bitterly. “We can't farm if we have to stand guard twenty-four hours a day! But if we leave, get out of range, we're homeless, we're road people ourselves.”

Ken Larsson nodded. “You're spread out too much,” he said. “Even resettling townsfolk on the farms, the properties are too big and too widely scattered, which means every household's on its own and impossibly far away from help. What you should do is group together, village-style, with settlements of . . . oh, say fifty to a hundred people, minimum, in places with good water and land. Then they could defend themselves—run up earth walls and palisades, too, maybe. And have specialists where they need them. We're all going to run out of pre-Change tools and clothing eventually.”

“I can't make people give up their land!” Woburn said, scandalized.

Ken shrugged. “They don't need most of it,” he pointed out. “This area”—his hand took in the Camas Prairie—“produced wheat and canola and beef for hundreds of thousands of people. Now it only has to feed the few thousand people who live on it; and that's going to take only a fraction of the area, which is lucky since you won't have the labor to work more anyway. What would be the point in growing more when you can't ship it out? To watch it rot?”

Woburn looked sandbagged. “Hadn't thought about it in quite that way,” he said. “Haven't had time, I suppose.”

Havel cut in: “Essentially, what Iron Rod's trying to do is charge you rent for living here, by making life impossible for people who won't knuckle under. You have to winkle him out of his fort. And you also need a standing force; full-time fighters, well equipped and trained.”

Woburn's eyes narrowed. “You asking for the job?” he said softly.

The obvious drawback was that a standing force would be functionally equivalent to Iron Rod and his merry band, and might well end up with similar ambitions.

Havel laughed and shook his head. “Emphatically, no!” he said. “We've got a destination further west. But you ought to think about raising some Rangers or soldiers or whatever you want to call them. And if you can't afford it . . . well, think about whether you can afford Duke Iron Rod.”

Woburn took a deep breath; he looked relieved. “Thing is, Mr. Havel, I was wondering—”

“Whether we could get rid of Iron Rod for you,” Havel said. He looked at Ken Larsson, who nodded imperceptibly.

“I'd heard that you did some work like that elsewhere,” Woburn said.

“Not on this scale, we didn't. I've got forty people I'd be willing to put into a fight,” Havel said. “Forty-five if I stretch it and include some damned young teenagers. Getting into a stand-up toe-to-toe slugging match with the Devil Dogs by ourselves isn't on. I'd like to see the people who did that”—he pointed towards the sacked farmstead, invisible in the gathering dusk—“in hell where they belong, but I'm not going to get half my people killed to do it. And frankly, Sheriff, this is your fight and not ours.”

Woburn's face dropped. Larsson went on: “There are things we could do, though, as . . . ah, contractors.”

Condottieri,
Havel thought silently.
Which means, literally, “contractors.”

He nodded, as if reluctant. Ken Larsson took up the thread smoothly: “When I was studying engineering, back in the 1960s, I had a professor who taught us the history of the field. And until a couple of hundred years ago, what engineers mainly did was build forts and engines to knock 'em down. Now . . .”