Not only did Breeze Castigleone not look anything like a Tartarus resident, but he also didn't resemble any Pit boss Kane had ever met. But Kane knew Castigleone hadn't risen to prominence in the Tartarus Pits of Snakefish on his looks and fey manner alone.

  He possessed a cunning and absolutely ruthless brain, which in tandem with his talent for manipulation and unlawful acquisition of goods made him something of a genius. He had also, in the very recent past, somehow managed to smuggle a great number of death-dealing ordnance out of the Magistrate armory and into the possession of an old enemy of Kane's.

  The old enemy was dead now—or so Kane fervently hoped—but the mystery of how Castigleone had accomplished the deed and whether he could repeat it remained to be resolved.

  "Do you think we can get down to business now?" Castigleone asked impatiently.

  "Sure." Kane turned toward Tashlyn, extending a hand. "My side arm, if you please."

  The woman's painted lips curled back over her teeth in a theatrical sneer. "In your dreams, sec man."

  "Sec man" was an obsolete term dating back to pre-unification days when self-styled barons formed their own private armies to safeguard their territories. It was still applied to Magistrates in the hinterlands beyond the villes, so Kane figured Tashlyn was a native of the Outlands, not Russia. The accent was an affectation, probably an imitation of one she had heard in an old vid dealing with spies or vampires.

  Still, Kane didn't like the term. Even though he was no longer a Magistrate, he still considered it an insult, but he didn't allow the anger building within him to show on his face. "I'm not dreaming, Tasha. Give me back my gun or I'll take it from you, Belevedere notwithstanding."

  He took a menacing half step toward her, and Castigleone interposed, "I'd prefer you weren't armed during the initial phase of our negotiations."

  Eyebrows knitting together at the bridge of his nose, Kane spun toward him, mouth opening to voice a profane rejoinder. The rejoinder clogged momentarily in his throat when he saw Breeze Castigleone had exchanged his miniature fan for what appeared to be a miniature pistol. The auto derringer wasn't really miniature and its stainless-steel frame made it look very business-like. He guessed the pistol was an old Semmering American derringer, loaded with a single but nevertheless deadly .38-caliber round.

  Kane forced a mocking smile to his face and held

  up the Commtact. "You didn't want me sending any messages to my companions with this, right? Well, since my companions haven't heard from me in a while, I'm sure they're on their way here." He waved toward dense stands of sycamore trees about half a mile away, the trunks snarled with undergrowth. "Hell, they may be watching us right now."

  Castigleone glanced toward the trees with a skeptical arching of eyebrows, but he said nothing. Kane continued, "If they see me standing here with your painted-up gaudy slut holding my gun, and you with a gun on me, there won't be a single solitary phase of negotiations at all, initial or otherwise."

  "I see." Breeze Castigleone gestured with the derringer to the Commtact. "Then I suggest you contact them and let them know everything is under control. That is, if you actually have companions anywhere around."

  "Gee," said Kane blandly, "you mean you want me to lie to them? Won't my pants catch on fire?"

  Castigleone frowned. Kane maintained an unblinking gaze on the man's mustached face, adding, "You claimed my reputation made you overcautious. If you know that much about me, then you know my reputation is shared with a couple of other people, too, right?"

  Grudgingly, Castigleone nodded. "Right."

  "Then I would think you'd want to be triply overcautious. I showed my good faith when I met up with you alone, at dawn. In my estimation, it would be an exceptionally good idea for you to show yours."

  Tashlyn stepped forward, slapping the end of her truncheon suggestively against a thigh. "You're bluffing, sec man." Her words came out as a contemptuous growl. "Fuck your reputation. Even if you're who you say you are, I don't think you have any friends anyplace. You're just another fugitive from the barons with a price on your head."

  The shot could not have been timed better, although Kane found fault with the aim. The hard, flat crack of sound against the brazen sky was almost swallowed by the heavy thunder of the surf. The .50-caliber bullet kicked up a spurt of sand a yard from Tashlyn's left foot. A poor shot for Grant, but Kane figured the round had been fired from the big Barrett sniper rifle strictly for effect.

  The effect was immediate and pretty much everything Kane could have hoped for. Belevedere rose from his boulder with a grunt of surprise. Tashlyn skipped backward several feet, bleating in wordless alarm. Only Breeze Castigleone didn't move. His frown molded itself into a resigned smile. He placed the derringer in his blazer pocket and held out both hands toward Tashlyn. "Give Mr. Kane his gun, Tasha, sweetheart. We don't want him or his companions to think we're unfriendly."

  The chalk-and-vermilion-faced woman hesitated for a moment, then she hissed in disgust and tossed the power holster. Kane caught it easily in his left hand. With his right, he fitted the Commtact back into place behind his ear. "Now," he declared matter-of-factly, "when I tell them everything is under control, my pants won't catch on fire."

  Chapter 2

  Grant pushed aside a leafy bush and scanned the beach with somber dark brown eyes. Their color seemed more of an angry, dangerous black in the mottled sunlight. He held his head as if he were listening for something other than the squawking of seabirds and the boom of the surf.

  He kept the stock of the heavy Barrett rifle jammed firmly against his right shoulder and his finger resting on the trigger guard. He gazed steadily through the twenty-power telescopic sight at the four figures outlined sharply against the beige sand and blue sea. The dazzling light reflecting from the ocean in a glimmering wave pattern forced him to squint.

  "What's going on?"

  Grant didn't remove his gaze from the scope to glance over at Brigid Baptiste, lying on her stomach beside him, but peering through a compact pair of binoculars.

  "I don't really know," he replied, softening his lion-like growl of a voice to a rumble. "But it looks like my .50-cal calling card has made everybody a lot more friendly. Kane has his Sin Eater back."

  Grant's long jawed face was twisted in a scowl.

  Droplets of perspiration sparkled against his coffee-brown skin like stars in a night sky. Standing four inches over six feet tall, Grant was an exceptionally broad-chested and wide-shouldered man, with a heavy musculature.

  Gray sprinkled his short-cropped, tight-curled hair at the temples, but it didn't show in the sweeping black mustache that curved fiercely out from either side of his grim, tight-lipped mouth. He wore camou pants and an olive-drab T-shirt. His own Sin Eater was strapped securely in its power holster around his right forearm.

  "And it looks like Kane is fiddling with his Comm- tact," Brigid replied, still peering through the eyepieces of the microbinoculars. "He doesn't seem to be seriously injured."

  Her thick mane of red-gold hair fell from beneath the long-visored, olive-green cap on her head. Tied back in a ponytail, it flowed down the center of her spine nearly to her waist. Her delicate features had a set, almost feline cast to them. Her complexion, fair and lightly dusted with freckles across her nose and cheeks, held a rosy hue.

  Her eyes weren't just green, but were a deep, clear emerald, glittering like jade. Tall and willowy, with long, taut legs, her slender, athletic figure reflected an unusual tensile strength. Her arms rippled with hard, toned muscle. The unflattering khaki shirt, whipcord trousers and high-topped jump boots she wore did little to detract from her undeniable femininity.

  An Iver Johnson TP-9 autopistol hung in a slide-draw holster at her hip and a Copperhead close-assault subgun was slung from a strap around her shoulder.

  Still peering through the rifle scope, Grant commented, "If he is hurt, I think he gave as good as he got."

  "I don't like the looks of that big guy," Brigid breathed. "He seems a little put-out with Kane."

  "Yeah," Grant grunted. "But Kane has that effect on most people, if you haven't noticed."

  She grinned bleakly, continuing to study the scene through the binoculars.

  Grant shifted the Barrett, pushing the rifle forward on the built-in bipod, settling the buttstock firmly in the hollow of his shoulder. Chambered to take .50-caliber ammo, the weapon possessed massive recoil, which only made' sense, since it had been introduced two centuries before to take out armored targets and blast holes through concrete walls.

  A burst of static filled his head and then he heard Kane's voice echoing inside his skull.

  "Testing," Kane intoned. "One, two, three. Testing?,

  "Got you," Grant said softly. "Calibrate the audio pickup for Brigid, too."

  Brigid tapped her right ear. "My Commtact is already calibrated. Reading you, Kane."

  "As you may already know, I've been formally welcomed by Boss Breeze Castigleone and his chamber of commerce."

  "So we see," Brigid said wryly. "Are you all right?" "I got slapped around a little while Breeze verified my bona fides," replied Kane, "but nothing feels like it was knocked too loose. You're here a little earlier than I figured."

  "When we lost contact with you," Brigid responded, "we decided not to wait with the jeep and came down to find out what was happening. We've only been here about five minutes."

  You timed it just fine," Kane's voice said. Through the scope and the binoculars, Grant and Brigid watched him turn in their general direction and wave. "Breeze wants you to come on down. There's no reason to hide anymore."

  "Is it safe?" demanded Grant.

  "As far as I can tell," Kane said in a studiedly neutral tone.

  "If it's not safe, if you think it's a trap," stated Brigid, "wave twice."

  Kane didn't wave. Instead he said, "I think we're all right for the time being."

  Brigid adjusted the focus of the binoculars, trying to bring the four figures on the shore into sharper relief. She swallowed a yawn, tired from the past few days of the hard overland journey from the Darks. Even traveling by jeep, one of the several vehicles that was part of the Cerberus rolling stock, the trip was difficult. However, she reminded herself, the journey itself was less difficult than getting word to Breeze Castigleone he had buyers for his merchandise. If the potential customer hadn't been Kane, he would have no doubt refused the meeting out of hand, suspecting that Baron Snakefish might be pulling a sting.

  Brigid didn't know much about the ville of Snakefish, or the baron who had taken its unique and grotesque name as his own, except that he had participated in the siege of Cobaltville during the so-called Imperator War. All of the nine baronies in the continent-spanning network were standardized, so there probably wasn't much to know.

  However, Snakefish possessed a certain historical significance, inasmuch as it had been an important commerce center on the `Cific coast in the century following skydark. Although roughly half the state of California lay beneath the sea, the region around the ville had received only a light once-over with neutron bombs. Much of the mammalian life was killed off, but many of the structures remained standing.

  Several of the structures were part of a gasoline-processing complex, which in the decades following, the holocaust made Snakefish one of the wealthiest villes in the country, at least by the standards of Deathlands. Other than having access to a resource that was more precious than the gold, the ville was the birthplace of a bizarre religious sect that worshiped the giant mutie rattlesnakes in the area. The religion and the source of the ville's wealth vanished at about the about same time, when sabotage caused the fuel refinery to explode. The ville itself burned to the ground, taking with it a goodly number of its two thousand inhabitants.

  " One of the few survivors was determined to rebuild the ville, to restore its former glory as the primary power on the far western coast. During the process, he took the name of Snakefish for himself. By the time of the Program of Unification, the new ville of Snakefish, although scarcely as prosperous as its predecessor, was a power to be reckoned with. It and its baron were absorbed into the ruling baronial oligarchy.

  Grant gusted out a sigh, breaking her reverie. "It probably makes more tactical sense to drop the three of those slaggers in their tracks."

  "Probably," Kane agreed inanely, his voice sounding strange, filtered as it was through the Commtact. "But it's a little difficult to cut a deal with corpses."

  Brigid could sense Kane's suppressed smile even if she couldn't see it clearly. The painted woman with her ridiculous clothing made her shiver, while the huge black man with the bloody nose made her queasy. "Who are those other two?" she asked.

  Kane's distant figure pointed first to the big man then to the woman. "Belevedere," he said. "Tashlyn. Breeze calls her Tasha."

  There was moment's silence, then they heard Kane say, "They just want to know who they're dealing with before they come out." He paused and added, "Breeze wanted to know why I told you that."

  Grant pushed himself to his knees, pulling the sniper rifle to him and folding up the bipod. "Tell him we're on our way."

  He slid the rifle into its felt-lined leather carrying case and zipped it shut, then rose, angling it over a shoulder. Brigid climbed to her feet and checked her pistol to be sure it was loose enough in the holster to be drawn easily, but not so loose it would fall out if they had to start moving fast.

  "Ready?" Grant asked.

  She shrugged. "Not really, but when has that ever made a difference?"

  Grant's lips twitched under his mustache in a fair imitation of a smile, then he pushed aside the foliage and stepped out. He and Brigid marched deliberately away from the tree line toward the four figures silhouetted against the bright blue of the Cific. The two people put on sunglasses to protect their vision from the shimmering glare.

  Brigid briefly wished she and Grant had packed out more ordnance from the jeep, but she tried to convince herself that grens and other firearms wouldn't be necessary. As it was, the vehicle was parked beneath a canopy of camouflage netting nearly five miles to their rear.

  Hitching her gun belt high, she asked, more or less rhetorically, "Do you think we can trust them?"

  Grant countered darkly, "According to what we learned while we were in Ultima Thule, Castigleone supplied some of the material that Zakat used when he tried to loosen the Antarctic ice sheet. So what do you think?"

  Kane heard both the question and response, but he wisely refrained from offering his opinion. When Grant and Brigid walked to within a score of yards of the four people, Breeze Castigleone all but ignored her, but flicked his appreciative gaze up and down Grant's massive frame.

  "The boss likes big men," commented Tashlyn to no one in particular.

  "And really painted-up ladies, too," Brigid murmured. "No accounting for taste."

  She sub-vocalized only so Grant and Kane could hear her, but apparently the woman guessed her remark was disparaging and she speared Brigid with a venomous stare. Brigid, her eyes masked by the dark lenses of sunglasses, kept her expression blandly neutral.

  Castigleone flashed the two newcomers a toothy, welcoming grin. "Former Magistrate Grant and ex-Archivist Brigid Baptiste, the other two components of the much-debated triumvirate of terror. It's a great honor to meet all of you."

  "We're here to do business, not to be honored," Grant retorted flatly.

  Breeze nodded. "Just so. But we can be civilized while we're doing it."

  He turned and waved an arm toward the distant dock stretching out from the marina. Almost immediately a dinghy swung around the far end of it, riding on the swells. The faint sound of a low-powered outboard engine reached their ears. Only one man appeared to be aboard, sitting in the stern and piloting the craft in their direction. Kane estimated the boat to be around twelve feet long, just barely big enough in beam and length to accommodate the six of them.

  "We need a boat to look at the merchandise?" inquired Kane suspiciously.

  Castigleone smiled thinly. "We do indeed. How else do you think I've managed to keep it hidden from Baron Snakefish's foxhounds for so long?"

  "I assume you mean his Magistrates," Grant remarked.

  "Of course."

  The dinghy motored into the shallows, foam frothing from the prow, and the pilot cut the engine. He was a middle-aged, seam-faced man with the rawboned look of an outlander. Everyone, Castigleone included, waded out and climbed aboard the dinghy. As Kane estimated, the fit was tight, particularly after Belevedere hauled himself into the craft. Despite the cramped quarters, Kane was encouraged since almost no maneuvering room remained. Of course, he reminded himself sourly, that could turn out to be a double- edged sword.

 

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