Prologue

      With a whistling scream the cannonball arced across the clear blue sky.

      Snake Eye could probably have seen it had he looked. The things were often visible in flight, and his human eye was very keen.

      So was the other eye, hidden behind a black enameled-leather patch.

      He didn’t bother, any more than he bothered to duck when the explosive charge went off a street over in the small, deserted ville called Taint. It was well named. Not much to look at, much less visit, even by modern-day standards, Taint was a cluster of a few dozen ramshackle structures of sun-warped, rotting planks, scabbied brick-and-concrete chunks, and even sod, piled together without much thought, much less upkeep, on a stream that ran through a wide, flat valley on its way to the Des Moines River. At the moment, it happened to lie right between the armies of the Uplands Alliance and the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, who were coming together in the latest installment of their generations-long war.

      Snake Eye was the perfect mercie. He was good at his job, faster than any normal human, and his heart was cold beyond stone. He always fulfilled a contract and took pride in the fact.

      As he did in every aspect of his job. A happy mutie was Snake Eye.

      If a person despised him because he was a mutie—and never troubled to hide it—that wasn’t his problem. He couldn’t be bothered to care. If a person tried to give him trouble for being a mutie, that wasn’t his problem, either.

      He stood in the mouth of a narrow alleyway that stank of piss and rot, where he could have some cover as he glanced up and down the street with his one exposed eye. Because he was confident in his abilities didn’t mean he was cocky; it was his heart that was stone, not his narrow, hairless head. He knew that a random piece of shrapnel or a slug could chill him as readily as any dirt-grubber or sheep farmer caught up in events beyond his control and forced to play soldier.

      Snake Eye adjusted his slouch hat and moved off with purpose down the narrow rutted street. He had a pretty fair idea where he would find his subject this fine April morning. A ville currently being contested via black powder cannon being fired from outside by two full-on warring baronial armies seemed a pretty unlikely hiding place for a man who was never known for being long on courage.

      But the merchant Ragged Earnie was also a noted homebody, and he had more than one reason for sticking tight to the little store where he lived, aside from a desire not to leave his precious goods untended where stragglers might get an urge to loot them—not that he’d confront an armed sec man if one did, of course. Taint prospered, to the extent it did, from lying in essentially neutral ground in the conflict between cattle barons of the river valley and the sheepmen of the higher country above the bluffs to the north. Earnie had prospered, too, if much better than the ville at large, speaking proportionally. Now he might hope to cut a deal with the winner, provided he survived the barrage.

      And that was no blue-sky prospect, either: these were the Deathlands, where not even the prospect that the sky would turn a weird venomous yellow and send tornadoes to smash you with debris or suck you up to your doom was as terrifying as when the sky turned orange and tortured and rained down Hell. Naturally his subject had a storm cellar, and shells and solid iron balls raining down from the sky were a pretty fair excuse for taking shelter there, too.

      Or just staying out of the way of random bullets and other trouble. A few sec men from both sides had had the poor luck, or worse judgment, to wander into Taint. Now, as Snake Eye left his brief shelter and turned onto the block where his subject had his store, a pair of them were carrying on their own miniature war right in the damn street where Snake Eye needed to go.

      Actually, the kid in the hayseed canvas shirt and trousers, with a green Uplander armband tied around an arm, was an obvious conscript who might as well still have sheep feces on the heels of his boots. He was lying prostrate in the street, and the man standing above him getting ready to shove a bayonet into his belly was obviously a veteran. The guy’s status as a sergeant was made obvious by the fact that he wore an actual uniform, if of blue-dyed homespun rather than pricier scabbie.

      The long, narrow blade made a wet sound going in. Walking calmly down the street toward the little drama, Snake Eye heard the bayonet grate on the hapless kid’s spine. The Uplander let loose a gagging, strangling, squealing scream and thrashed wildly.

      The Protector leaned on the rifle, driving the bayonet deep. Even without currently being able to see the bearded face, Snake Eye knew he wore a big old grin beneath that blue kepi-style cap. The bluecoat’s posture made it clear how much he was getting off on his victim’s unbearable agony, as a red stain spread across the kid’s shirt.

      Smiling, Snake Eye reached up and flicked his eyepatch onto his forehead with a thumb.

      The sergeant heard the crunch of boots in the mostly dry mud behind him and looked over his shoulder. Blue eyes went white in a face that showed hard years and harder mileage, even through the wiry black beard and the grime and soot caked onto it.

      He looked Snake Eye in his hidden eye and screamed.

      Frantically the soldier began to tug on his weapon. He assumed anyone who looked like that, much less a man who would so boldly approach a sadistic murder being carried out under the guise of warfare on an open street in the middle of the day, could mean no good.

      And rightly so. But in his sadistic glee he’d plunged his bayonet all the way through the howling boy’s skinny body and deep into the mud below. It was hard enough getting a blade out of flesh; that was a big reason Snake Eye preferred a blaster. Now the sergeant’s main weapon was well and truly stuck.

      Snake Eye was always fast on the draw, but he never rushed. That was part of what made him the deadliest blaster in the Deathlands.

      The faster-than-human speed and reflexes didn’t hurt, either.

      He pulled his right-hand Sphinx autoblaster from below the black duster he always wore, brought the weapon to eye level and shot the sergeant through the face. He smiled, slightly, as he saw the man’s eyes go wide and then start from their sockets to either side of a black hole that appeared between them. A divot of skull, like sod with black grass, flew out behind in a spray of blood and brain matter.

      The Protector fell right down across the body of his victim, who continued to struggle and screech.

      Snake Eye slipped the patch back into place over his right eye.

      That kind of moaning scream came from deep down in a man’s bones. It hit other humans the same way. It was designed to be heard and responded to, even above other noise—even the sound of a cannonade and the boom of shells.

      And as such the horrific scream would draw other humans like flies, that inhuman, keening wail that barely seemed to pause for breath.

      As Snake Eye swung by, his long legs never breaking stride, he drew his left-hand blaster and without even glancing around put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson bullet into the kid’s right eye. The mercie didn’t need anybody else horning in. He had a job to do, and the dust of a ville that’d been snakebit in the dick even before two armies started to bash the hell out of it to shake off his boot heels.

      He was a successful chiller. The best. And as such he had a schedule to keep.

      * * *

      A CANNONBALL HAD created an impromptu skylight in a corner of Ragged Earnie’s cramped and crowded little general store. It was either an iron round or another shell that never went off, as was none too uncommon for the state of modern artillery