Willa Fodor, the second uptime member of the audit team, brushed the snowflakes off her eyelashes. Willa was navigating. The down-timer sergeant of the guards who had been sent out with them was very efficient in a lot of ways, but he had never learned to read an uptime map. Worse, he was from somewhere in Brunswick, so had no more idea about where he might be in rural Franconia than anyone else in the group.
They had had a professional guide until three days ago, but he had come down with what looked to Maydene like walking pneumonia and she had insisted on leaving him in a place called Volkach, where the group had reserved rooms at the inn for two weeks. They had seen a whole bunch of villages since Volkach. They stopped at the bigger ones, where the Amtmaenner or district officers were headquartered. Most of the places had been willing to provide a boy to lead them to the next town or village on their list. They had collected oaths of allegiance in Schwebheim and Grettstadt, Donnersdorf and Sulzheim, with no problems. But, for some reason, no one in Sulzheim had been willing to guide them to Gerolzhofen. And Gerolzhofen had been locked down. Nobody outside the walls. No people. No pigs. No chickens. Definitely no welcome for the NUS administrators.
"Where are we going?" Estelle McIntire, the third auditor, thought that was the more important question, given the way the flakes were starting to come down.
"Someplace called Dingolshausen. That's the last stop on this route. Michelau is beyond it, but the people from Michelau and Neuhof came up to Donnersdorf and did their oath-taking there. Bless their beautiful hides. Then we double back not quite to Gerolzhofen and head south to someplace called Neuses am Sand and then someplace called Prichsenstadt. And from Prichsenstadt, we go back to Gerolzhofen and see if they'll let us in. Charming place, according to Meyfarth. They burned more than two hundred fifty `witches' about fifteen years ago. We've got to go back by way of Luelsfeld, again, though. Too many people had gone to market in Kitzingen the day we went through there. Then we go back to Volkach and from there we cross to Astheim and go home to Würzburg. The guys gave us an easy run, comparatively speaking. Chivalry and all that, I suppose."
"We'll let the army deal with Gerolzhofen." Maydene's voice was decisive. "The kind of behavior they are showing is Scott Blackwell's problem, not ours."
Willa rubbed her eyes again. "If Johnnie F.'s map is right, the left fork here has to be the one to Dingolshausen. We're lucky that it's cold enough that the snowflakes aren't melting and making the ink run." She shook them off the map.
"It's just delightful that something is going right today," Maydene said. "I am duly grateful."
Willa kept on. "The right fork has to go to Neuses am Sand, so the worst thing that can happen is that we take the oaths out of order. We can fib about that, in a pinch. It's a loose-leaf notebook. Let's move somewhere. This snow is starting to come down really hard. We need to get inside."
Maydene felt like the strap of her rifle was about to cut through the muscles of her right shoulder. Wrapping her reins around the saddle pommel, she reached up to transfer it over to the left. A sudden gust of wind blew a clear spot amidst the snowflakes, giving her about forty feet more vision than any of them had had for nearly an hour. The rifle came into her hand and she shot. In an instant, the three women were in the center of a circle formed by the guard company. Every hill along the roadside seemed to erupt men out of the snow.
Maydene's shot was hurried. She missed her target, but hit the man next to him in the shoulder. He spun around, striking one of his mates with his own gun and tangling up another.
Watching, Gerhardt Jost was impressed. He wouldn't have thought such a severe-looking middle-aged woman could react that quickly to an ambush. In fact, she'd reacted so well that the bishop's mercenaries were startled. And she was already jacking another bullet into the chamber.
That meant the bishop's men had lost the advantage of surprise. Already, the uptimers' guards were starting to fire. So was one of other American women. The third had fallen off her horse, when the beast started from the gunfire, but Jost didn't think she was badly injured.
None of the guards were shooting very accurately, true. But neither were the bishop's mercenaries. It was enough for them to simply be firing at all.
An ambush had just become a small pitched battle.
"Now?" asked Rudolph Vulpius quietly. The old man seemed to be practically quivering with eagerness.
"Not quite," answered Gerhardt. "Let the responsibility for the bloodshed be clear."