"Spare clothes. Your Armalite. Handgun. Knives. Ammo. Grenades. Couple o' maps. Food you haven't eaten. Pack of cigars."

"That all?"

"Sure. What else should I see?"

"Get me a mouthful of water. Thanks. Nothin'. That's what else you should see. You listed it all, Ryan. It don't add up to much for better'n fifty years of livin'. Nothin' to add up to the pain of the mother that birthed me."

"What you've done isn't here, Trader. It's out yonder. Outside. You kept a lot of folks breathin' that would surely have been chilled."

"I chilled me some."

"Sure. They needed chilling. What you've done is to bring a little light to this pile of shit. Deathlands! If it hadn't been for you, then I'd have been dead. So would J.B., and everyone else in this war wag. You know it, Trader."

The two men remained silent, each locked into old memories. After some minutes the Trader reached out with a wasted, birdlike hand, and Ryan took it. Feeling the bones beneath the delicate skin, he held it gently, like a fledgling. As the war wag rumbled steadily northwest, the two old friends sat together in silence.

They were interrupted by the voice of Hunaker, crackling over the intercom. "Ryan. Ryan and J.B. Come to the driving console. Something you should see."

Chapter Fourteen

As he moved forward, Ryan felt the war wag judder to a halt, the engine out of gear, ticking over gently. On every side men and women had moved fast to their firefight positions, standing ready by the ob slits and weapon ports. But from the lack of urgency in Hun's voice, there clearly was no immediate emergency.

"What is it, Hun?"

"Look out front. Never seen nothin' like it. How 'bout you, J.B.?"

They squeezed in either side of her, peering through the forward screen. Ryan rested his hand on Hun's shoulder, conscious of the musky scent of her perspiration. He blinked his eye to rid himself of the sudden and unbidden image of Krysty, naked, moving beneath him.

"What is it? "he asked.

J.B., not one to waste words, simply shook his head. Hun pointed to the left, to the great jagged peaks of the Rockies jutting in toward them.

"Saw them first on this side. One or two. Feathers. Then this spooky kind of stuff."

Ryan was puzzled. Not many men had been this far into the Darks. The recently lamented Kurt was one of only a handful who had penetrated deep into the rugged fastness and survived. So who had put up all the decorations?

They were made out of branches of trees that Ryan believed were called aspens. "Quakers" they'd named them. Poles had been hewn from the silvery-green wood, with its criss-crossing black scars, then tied into shapes like the tepees that some of the double-poor of Deathlands lived in.

There were three of them, stretched across the crumbling relic of a road. The one nearest the edge was covered in a sprouting bunch of feathers. Red and yellow and golden-brown; hundreds of them. And topping it was a narrow-bladed knife of rusting iron, its haft wrapped in strips of what looked like dried leather or skin.

The right-hand tripod was leaning to the front, set close against a cliff of moss-streaked stone. Melt from a glacier, farther up the mountain, came cascading across the road in milky turquoise torrents. Tufted pink flowers decorated the poles, some of the flowers dead, drooping and falling on the damp earth.

But it was the center set of branches that caught Ryan's eye.

It was much the tallest, well over a tall man's height, blocking the trail. Ribbons of material were festooned all over it, tied in place with rawhide thongs. Small metal stars of brass and copper dangled from the silks and satins, chiming against one another.

And on the top, held in place with circling strands of green wire was... "A human head," said J.B.

The eyes had gone, and half the teeth were missing. The lower jaw dangled in a macabre leer, kept by a thread of gristle. There were still a few shreds of leathery skin clinging to the yellowed bone.

"What's that on its forehead?" asked Hun.

"Bullet hole," replied J.B.

"Looks like a warning," said Ryan.

"Do we stop, or go on, or what?"

"We go on."

War Wag One rolled forward again as Hun engaged the gears, driving straight for the center of the sets of aspen poles, crushing it beneath the heavy wheels. Ryan watched through the front screen, imagining he could hear the brittle crack as the skull was splintered, but through the armor he knew that was absurd.

In the next hour they came across three more sets of the weird signs. Both J. B. Dix and Ryan Cawdor stayed in the main control cabin, keeping the combat vehicle in a state of full fighting readiness with everyone on alert.

"How far?"

Hun threw the question over her shoulder. The trail ahead was becoming steeper, and the gauges showed a sharp temperature drop as night closed in on them.

Ryan eased the white scarf around his neck. "Not sure. All we can do is put together everything we know and add in Kurt's ravings an' what Krysty knew. Best map we have don't show us much. But if there's this Stockpile or Redoubt up there, then it's close to a place called Many Glaciers. Near as we can figure."

"We stoppin' soon?" Hunaker asked.

"Yeah. Give it another ten, then pull on over. That looks like a meadow along that river. Trees far enough back to cut down an ambush."

"What d'you think about those poles?" J.B. asked him, blowing out a perfect ring of smoke from the dark, evil-smelling cheroot.

"Warnin'. Some mutie religion trick. Maybe we're on someone's home turf. I've heard nothin' on any townies movin' up here."

Within a few minutes the huge war wag had finally pulled over for the night, and the usual sentries had been posted. Supper was cooking, and around a fire most of the men and women in the team were making and mending-cleaning armaments and repairing clothes.

Unusually in the Deathlands, the water was good. Ryan walked down and sat down on a large boulder, riven by the frosts, and flicked pebbles into the river. Alongside the rocks were patches of creamy Indian paintbrush and splashes of golden vetch, absurdly rich, their colors still bright in the last shards of the evening sun. The sky was a sullen red, streaked with wind-torn clouds in gray and purple. Over the tops of the highest range of mountains there was the usual silver lace of lightning.

Ryan Cawdor was not a man given to endless agonizing and self-doubts. But on this beautiful evening he felt a rare sense of melancholy. Things were changing. The majority of his friends had been chilled within the past week, and now Trader's race was damned near run. Whatever happened up in the topmost trails of the Darks, it would mean an ending of the old ways of life that had been his ways for over ten years.

"You look like a prickless mutie in a gaudy-house, Ryan."

"Hi, Krysty. Guess Trader's sickness has really gotten to me. He was almost like a father, if that don't make me sound like a stupe."

She sat down by him, stretching out her long legs, staring at her own reflection in the polished leather of her boots. "You don't sound like a stupe. I've only known the Trader a short while, but he's... somethin' special."

On the farther side of the valley, up a slope of rough scree, Ryan caught a flicker of movement. His rifle was still in the war wag, but his pistol flowed into his fingers without any conscious thought, only to be bolstered again when he recognized the white blur as one of the hardy mountain goatlike creatures that thrived near the tree line in the Darks.

A bright blue bird with a spiky crest came to drink near them, dipping its beak into the water in delicate, jerky movements. The smell of cooking stew came on the breeze to them.