Outlaw Carson (18 page)

The stallion shifted restlessly beneath
them, transferring his unease to the people astride his back.
Kristine tightened her grip on the mane. By God, if she was going
to disappear, she wasn’t going to do it without the horse.

The soft whistle cut through the air again,
and the horse picked up first one hoof, then another, following a
path only he could see. A rifle came into view at Kristine’s side,
brushing her arm.

“I
think
it’s a little late for
that,
bucko
,” she gritted through her teeth. She wasn’t
worried for Kit. He obviously had everything under control.
Everything. From the horse, to her, the Turk, and the very elements
of the air.

But how much control could one man wield
when he turned it on nature and this maze of earth and troubled
sky?

Things of power
. . . The phrase
came back to her, haunting in its accuracy. She’d fallen in love
with a man so far above her on the evolutionary scale, there could
be no hope for it. If she’d had even an ounce of adrenaline to
spare, she would have used it to salve her breaking heart. But
survival had a funny way of superseding all other emotions, and her
survival was very much in doubt at the moment.

Could he even see her, feel her presence, in
this quagmire? She hadn’t made much of a mark in the outside world,
where everything was more cut and dried, more crystal clear. How
could she possibly be making an impact on the bottom of a canyon to
nowhere?

The stallion suddenly picked up his pace,
snorting and tossing his head. Kristine bounced along for a few
yards, until he broke into a full-stride gallop.

“Damn him,” she heard the Turk curse as he
leaned low over her back, flattening her against the horse’s
neck.

The hell-bent ride through the shifting
white blindness seemed an unfitting end for a woman who had lived
her life in relative calm, until an auburn-haired stranger had
shown up on her doorstep. Her life had taken a turn for the worse
that day—and a definite but terribly short-lived turn for the
better, she admitted in the one small part of her mind not consumed
with her last prayers.

The canyon walls moved ever closer, the
stream grew ever deeper, and still the stallion plunged on, driven
by forces Kristine was incapable of understanding and the Turk
couldn’t control.

Suddenly the canyon ended in a blank wall of
stone. Kristine instinctively braced herself for the inevitable
crash, but the Turk hauled back on the reins, crushing her within
the straining vise of his arms. The horse reared and screamed, and
the echoes of that shrill cry reverberated down the length of their
tomb.

Before the stallion could recover his
footing, the Turk swung his leg over the hindquarters, dragging her
with him off the raging beast.

So help her God, Kristine thought, slumping
over the Turk’s arm, if the Turk didn’t get to him first, she just
might murder Kit herself.

As a rescue attempt, his was failing on all
counts. Scaring her to death was proving to be as effective and far
more imaginative than anything the Turk might have come up with.
She didn’t have a breath left in her body, or a muscle in working
order.

“Will you die for her, Turk?”

The voice came from above them, disembodied
by the mists, ringing with cold sincerity, and followed by the
authority of a neatly placed gunshot. The Turk flinched and almost
dropped her.

One-handed, he swung his rifle up and fired
a return shot.

“And I ask once more. Will you die for her,
Turk?” The voice came from a different direction.

The Turk jerked her around and fired again.
Kristine knew if she’d had even half her normal strength, she could
break away from him. And truly, being between two men shooting at
each other seemed the most dangerous position of the three. All the
nothingness around her, though, kept her firmly by the Turk’s side,
or rather, firmly in front of him. She’d rather die where she stood
than get swallowed up.

Ah, Kreestine . . . where is your
faith?

“Oh, no,” she whispered shakily. “Oh, no,
you don’t.”

“Silence!” the Turk hissed, tightening his
arm around her. Kristine tightened right back, grabbing him
wherever she could get a handhold.

And your courage, my love?

“Hah!” she scoffed. “Try about ten thousand
miles back!”

“Silence, I say!”

He got it, about a ton and a half of it in
deafening stillness. The eeriness of so much silence gnawed at her
nerves and his. Even the stallion had disappeared.

Kit grinned down at them from where he knelt
on his lofty perch, well satisfied with the state of her mind and
the courage she denied. He took a moment—and only a moment—to rest
his forehead on his upraised knee, thanking the gods for sending
her to him. The meteorologically induced mists of Chatren-Ma would
lift with the noonday sun, when shafts of light struck the canyon
floor and warmed the air. He wanted her back before then.

The bandit was a Bonpo, a believer in
shamans and demons. Kit had lured him to a place where both might
reside, resisting the fierce urge for immediate reprisal in the
Turk’s compound, where death would have been the only answer. Kit
knew the exact limit of his own skills, and he knew the Turk’s. The
match was too close to call with a degree of safety for
Kristine.

But in Chatren-Ma he held the deciding
factor—fear. The Turk couldn’t avoid it, and Kit had faced it
before, in this very place. He’d gotten lost in the early morning
mists on his search for the
Kāh-gyur
. They’d sneaked up on
him, lapping at his feet, then his ankles, and all too quickly his
knees.

The Turk was feeling their power now. Kit
sensed his fear, and Kristine’s. For that he had regrets.

To further his goal he took aim again.

The Turk jumped, swore, and thrust Kristine
away from him, but not before she saw the seam on the sleeve of his
coat slice open. It was the last thing she saw, for in her next
breath she was swallowed up.

Shadows moved within shadows, surrounding
her with damp fingers of trailing moisture.

“Kit?” she whispered. When no answer was
forthcoming, she tried another name, a name filled with as much
mystery as the place. “Kautilya?”

Still nothing.

She took a tentative step with her hand
outstretched, searching for the canyon wall. She found more
nothing. Had he moved the earth too?

Kit dropped off the ledge, landing on his
feet with his knees bent, and fired another shot. It would be so
easy to kill the Turk, but the compassion he’d forsworn five days
before stayed his hand. Sang Phala had not left him, and the old
man had not trained him for murder.

Yet he would have a token for this week’s
work, and he would retrieve his
khukri
. He checked
Kristine and fired again at the Turk, urging the man farther away,
down toward a cut in the wall, taking more cloth from the left side
of his thick wool coat so the Turk would not mistake his
direction.

Kristine kept creeping away from the sound
of gunfire, one inching step at a time, drawn by what she thought
was a lifting of the mists ahead of her. Soon she could see her
hand in front of her face. Then the stone of the canyon wall came
into view.

And then Chatren-Ma, the hand-chiseled walls
of rock clinging like a puzzle to the steep mountainside, rimmed by
morning sunlight and beckoning her nearer.

* * *

Kit knelt on the ground, tracking Kristine’s
trail and swearing softly to himself. He should have known better
than to leave her on her own. She’d physically wandered away from
the box canyon the same way her mind often wandered off, on a
tangent he hadn’t foreseen. But what set his teeth on edge and
tightened his hand into a fist were things she hadn’t foreseen.

She was headed toward Chatren-Ma, and the
ancient monastery was not a place for doubts or the faint of heart,
or for a believer in anything but truth. He loved her, yes, but
only she knew the strength of her own base mettle. If she hadn’t
found it yet, she soon would. He needed to be there in case what
she found was not enough.

He traced the imprint of her foot in the
dust, then slowly lifted his gaze to the towering shelf of rock
rimmed with a black slash. She’d passed through the shadow. He had
no choice but to follow where he’d planned on going alone.

* * *

Difficult but not impossible. Kristine
thought, eyeing the narrow gap on the trail, a break, an empty
space, an abyss of thin air no more than eighteen inches wide that
she had to step over to get to the solid trail beyond. She would
have gone back hours ago if the opportunity had arisen, but she’d
gotten herself good and lost, and high. Oh brother, had she gotten
herself high.

The ledge she stood on dropped away in a
dizzying fall of thousands of feet. Vertigo, though, wasn’t her
problem. The gap was a definite problem. Maybe more of a problem
than she could handle, and she still wasn’t any closer to the
monastery carved into the canyon wall. There had to be a trick to
it.

“More than one, Kreestine,” Kit said from
above her.

He startled her, but she had the good sense
not to look up at him, or even to twitch too much.

“Hi.” Her voice sounded hushed and
insignificant against the radiant panorama spread out before her in
mile after endless mile of sun-baked, gilt-edged landscape. The
rift valley pushed the canyon walls even farther apart, leaving
room for a river basin to widen and flow over the acres of stone
tumbled from the cliffs.

She didn’t bother to wonder where he’d come
from. She’d been lost in the maze of paths scoring the cliff-face
long enough to know they had more secrets than the CIA. She’d
popped out of nowhere a couple of times herself, to find herself
dangling over a whole lot of nothing.

“Give me your hand,” he said, “and I’ll pull
you up.”

A sensible request, but she wasn’t
buying.

“What happened to the bandits in the mist?”
she asked, not daring to look up, which she’d discovered was much
worse than looking down.

“They are probably home by now.”

“And the Turk?”

“That one has a long walk, but he is young
and strong, and maybe his horse will stop for him.” He paused, then
added, “Maybe not. The stallion was running pretty fast when I
released him. He found my mare less accommodating than he’d
wished.”

“Oh,” she said, finally understanding what
had turned the not exactly docile animal into a nostril-flaring,
head-tossing beast. “You planned for everything, didn’t you.”

“Almost.” She heard his heavy sigh. “Give me
your hand, please, Kreestine.”

She still had a hundred or so questions, and
this time she was getting answers. “What about the mist? Did you do
that?”

“You overestimate my talents. It is nothing
more than that which happens every morning during this season.
Nothing more than cold air condensing water vapor. The canyon is
empty now.”

“I’ve seen river mist,” she said, her tone
skeptical, “and that ain’t it.”

“We are in Chatren-Ma. There could be more,
but not by my hand, and nothing I can explain.”

She didn’t know whether to feel better or
not, or safer or not. She did know she couldn’t stand on the ledge
indefinitely. Her path had dead-ended . . . and Chatren-Ma still
beckoned like a promise just beyond her grasp.

She had another question, something along
the lines of “Why didn’t you come for me yesterday?” or “What made
you so sure the Turk wouldn’t hurt me?” or even “Didn’t you care
that he had me at his mercy?” But no matter how she phrased it in
her mind the words seemed too personal, the doubts too real to
expose to a man she might have only slept with. A man who’d said
he’d wanted to leave her, and then by some quirk of fate had found
she’d left him first and shown up at the exact place he’d professed
to want to go. Complicated stuff to be dealing with on a ledge
barely wider than her foot was long.

She knelt and dusted her hands with dirt for
traction. She had a job to do. She had a discovery and a name to
make. Kristine Richards was on the road to glory, a damned tiny but
guaranteed road to glory. Whereas love, it seemed, held no
guarantees at all.

Slowly and carefully turning toward the
stone wall behind her, she flattened herself against it and raised
her arm high in the air. Strong, warm fingers wrapped around her
wrist. She gripped his forearm with her other hand, and prayed he
could lift a hundred and twenty-five pounds of dead weight. She
helped where she could, jamming the toes of her boots into every
nook and cranny the cliff offered, and trying to think light,
trying to be light.

I’m a cloud, a mere tuft of cotton
floating on the wind, lighter than the air, less substance than a
dream
.

She heard his labored breath, then his other
hand clenched the collar of her coat. With a heave and a groan, he
got most of her onto the upper path, she hung there, resting, her
legs suspended in space.

He drew a deep breath and pulled again, and
Kristine swung her knee onto the ledge. He pulled once more,
rolling her on top of him as he collapsed on his back.

“You are no cloud, Kreestine,” he said,
gasping, “but it was a good thought.”

They lay there for long moments, catching
their breaths, and that more than anything proved to her he was a
mortal man.

“Next time . . .” she said breathlessly.
“Next time I’ll send the coat up first.”

“Good.”

Still neither of them moved. She rested her
head on his chest, checking out her new perch. His was a far cry
better than the one she’d left. His was ten feet wide and had a
good solid path carved in either direction. She could set up
housekeeping on such a good ledge.