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to the Tigers in his own tongue. They began to fan out, slinging their
carbines over their shoulders and drawing their swords.
"Unclean weapons like guns have their uses," the captain continued, "but only
the katana
the sword can quench the samurai's thirst for ven-geance."
Kane contemplated the meaning of Kiyomasa's re-mark for a couple of seconds,
then swiftly stepped to the lip of the ridge. With a geniality he didn't feel,
he said, "I'll take point. It's part of my tradition."
Kiyomasa stared at him with an indefinable ex-pression on his face then
lowered his visor with a short, slapping motion. "Aft so deska
, Kane-san."
Kane wasn't sure what he said, but he assumed and hoped Kiyomasa wasn't
warning him to keep out of his way.
Chapter 10
Kane picked his way slowly down the steep decline, his companions and the
Tigers of Heaven following at a discreet distance. When he reached the
outskirts of the ruins, he waited and watched and listened for a minute. There
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was something both fascinating and repellent about the houses, roofless and
silent in the night Many of the fallen walls showed black glassy surfaces, as
if they had been exposed to intense heat and the stones vitrified. Peeping
through tangled vines here and there, he saw the rust-red streaks of what had
once been vehicles, which gave him some idea of the many years the city had
lain unattended. By the standards of the Outlands, scavengers should have put
the wags to other uses long ago.
He tried to find some hint for the cause of the city's collapse, but there was
no sign of a single catastrophe, no bomb craters, no evidence of shelling.
Despite the fact some of the ruins showed signs of fire-
blackening, others did not Some buildings still stood among others that were
no more than ragged foun-dations. Wide dark bands of dried mud discolored many
of the walls, from the ground to half their heights. Evidently, the two rivers
tended to flood in-termittently.
Kane gestured and his party joined him, the Tigers again impressing him with
how quickly and relatively silently they moved in their armor. He stalked down
a broad avenue. Farthest from the edge of the river, the city was better
preserved than elsewhere. Here most of the buildings still stood. They were
low, long structures set upon terraces and facing curving streets. The streets
were narrow, and they had to keep to the center for the bushes and creepers
had narrowed it still further.
Many of the plants bore flowers, and Brigid won-dered aloud if they had once
been part of gardens that
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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty overgrew and overflowed to make a
continuous thicket The area had all the appearances of a resi-dential section
of the city, what she knew were once called suburbs.
Brigid said, "I mink this place was what the pre-darkers called a commuter
community, a specially built or expanded township for people who worked in
large metropolitan areas but didn't want to live or raise their children
there."
A few minutes later, Brigid pointed out a big square of plastic rearing from
the ground, almost cov-ered by bramble bushes. It depicted a cartoony Sun
wearing a big smile, a sombrero and dark glasses. The bright read copy read
Welcome to Vista del Sol Our Future's So Bright We Need Shades!
Kane didn't know whether to laugh or scoff.
On impulse, as they passed one of the rambling houses, Kane strode up a walk
to peer inside. Grant, Domi and Brigid followed him, the Tigers waiting out on
the street. The doorway was wide and tall. The wooden frame disintegrated into
fine powder when he brushed against it with a shoulder. Inside all was a
shambles. Dead leaves filled the hallways, and the rooms showed evidence of
being long-unused nests for vermin.
The interior smelled musty, which was not surpris-ing, but it also held
another odor, faint but detectable.
Domi sniffed and said quietly, "Smoke."
It was the first word she had spoken in more than an hour. Kane and Brigid
experimentally sniffed the air and detected the faint odor of wood smoke.
Grant did not bother, inasmuch as his nose had been broken three times in the
past and always poorly reset. A running joke during his Mag days was that
Grant could eat a hearty dinner with a dead skunk lying right next to his
plate.
They followed the scent of smoke out of the resi-dential section and down a
side lane. The street ahead of them looked as if it had been a mix of
storefronts and apartment buildings. Many of the structures lacked roofs, and
there wasn't a single pane of glass visible in any of the windows.
Kane once again took the point, leading them quickly along the narrow,
overgrown alleys and through deep shadow between roofless walls. They passed
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doorways leading into nothing but darkness.
Up ahead he caught the murmur of voices, the muf-fled clink of steel. The odor
of smoke thickened. The alley took a sharp turn and butted up against the base
of a high wall, about eight feet tall. It extended from the side of a
multistoried apartment complex, forming a wide square enclosure on its rear
side. The designers of the building had gone in for a Spanish Mission style
architecture, meant to evoke the days of hidalgos and caballeros. Fake adobe
covered over bricks, and a square, bell-tower-like cupola rose from the top of
the structure. Most of the adobe stucco had peeled away from the walls decades
before, revealing the mortared brick beneath.
Thick, flowering vines sprouted from the brick-work. Using hand signals, Kane
informed his party of his intentions. Kiyomasa nodded brusquely, and he and
Grant made a stirrup out of their hands. They heaved
Kane high enough so he could see what lay on the other side of the wall.
In a spacious but litter-strewed courtyard, a few Magistrates were pacing
restlessly, but most of them sat around a small fire, eating their rations
from the self-heat packages. They stared at the flames and smothered yawns.
Several of the Mags lounged on the flagstones with their helmets off, Pollard
in-cluded. Kane recognized several Franklin, Hotch-kiss, Brady. A few others
he knew by sight but not by name.
An empty swimming pool, half-filled with scraggly tumbleweeds and debris,
served as the prisoners'
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