OLD NATHAN(73)

There was no animal life visible anywhere on the plain, and no vegetation save scales of lichen—white and gray and rusty orange—which slowly powdered even raw stone. Plumes of vapor marked cabin-sized potholes where rock bubbled, and the wind occasionally burned instead of cutting with cold.

"What I'll make you, Chance Ransden," the cunning man said softly, "is glad t' git off t' whar ye belong."

"You thunk I was afeerd uv ye, back t' thet world, didn't ye, Nathan?" Chance said. "Waal, I'm another guess chap thin ye took me fer."

Old Nathan stepped across the V-shaped trench between his hillock and the one on which Ransden stood.

Ransden hopped back. He raised his hand in the air. "Ye say ye're the Divil's master, old man?" he asked.

Old Nathan stared at the image of the younger, stronger man. "Aye," he said.

Chance snapped his fingers.

The rim of a fuming pothole ten yards behind Ransden began to move. Minerals deposited by steam shivered away in blue-green and saffron patches. Something was coming to life, the way the first rains cause toads to break free of the capsule of hardened slime in which they have survived summer and drought.

"Waal, Ridgeway," said Chance Ransden. "I say I'm the Divil's sarvint. Let's see who's the wiser uv us, shall we?"

The thing from the rock cocoon was gray and looked somewhat like an ape. It would have been taller than most men if it walked upright; instead it shambled forward in a crouch, occasionally touching down the knuckles of a slab-like hand. Its upper canines were the size of a man's thumbs, and each finger bore predatory claws.

"Thar's nowhere t' run, old man!" Chance cackled. "Ye kin run till Hell freezes over, en ye still cain't git away!"

The creature shambling forward was no ape nor any other living thing. The eye sockets beneath its deep brows were pools of lambent flame.

There were fears in the heart of every man. Chance Ransden's soul stood as naked as those of his son and the cunning man, but his master had offered him an ally. . . .

"I'm too old t' run, Ransden," Old Nathan said. He reached into the air. "B'sides, I warn't niver airy good at it."

His fingers crooked and—

—closed on the hard angles of his knife. There when he needed it, and he hadn't been sure.

But he was sure he would not have run. He'd known since the day the bullet struck and passed on at King's Mountain that there was nowhere to run from the worst fears, the true fears. . . .

The backspring clicked with assurance as Old Nathan opened the main blade. There was a faint sheen of oil on the steel.

Ransden looked startled and backed again. For the first time he may have realized that there was content to the cunning man's boast to be the Devil's master.

But steel wouldn't win this fight, any more than Bully Ransden's strength had done.

"C'mon thin, durn ye," Old Nathan muttered, to himself rather than to the ape hulking toward him. He stepped over a trough in the rock, then stretched his long shanks in a leap to close with the creature.

The ape lifted onto its hind legs to meet the attack, but the cunning man was already within the sweep of the long arms before they could grasp him. He held the knife with the cutting edge up. The creature's hide plucked at the point before giving way. Its breath reeked with an unexpectedly chemical foulness, like that of stale urine.

\Old Nathan started to rip upward against the resistance of the gray skin and the belts of muscles beneath it. The ape bit into the top of his skull with a pain like nothing the cunning man had ever before experienced.

He was on his back. The creature was twenty feet away, patting at the gash in its belly and roaring like the fall of a giant tree. There was blood on its fangs, speckling the froth bubbling across the broad lips.

Old Nathan couldn't see out of one eye and his hands were empty. He sat up and only then realized how much his shoulders hurt. The ape's claws had raked furrows across him before the creature flung the cunning man away.

He wiped his left eye with the back of his hand, then blinked. That cleared enough blood from the eyesocket that his vision, though dim, was binocular again. He needed the depth perception of two eyes. . . .

The jackknife, slimed with a greenish fluid that was not blood, lay beside his right hand. The ichor crusted and turned black where it touched the silver set into one bone scale.

Old Nathan picked up the knife. The tacky ichor would give him a better grip. Despite dazzling flashes of pain, he got to his feet before the monster started toward him again.

The ape bellowed and spread both arms. There was blood on the creature's foreclaws also. Old Nathan stumbled when he tried to leap forward. That worked to his advantage, because his opponent's great hands clapped together above the cunning man so that he was free to stab home again within an inch of the first wound.