Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

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The storm had Krysty in its thrall, whirling her up and over

Ryan was after her, feet skidding on the wet planks, blinded by the spray. One hand

reached for the slippery rail, while the other grabbed helplessly at the torn canvas shroud

that held his lover.

His fingers brushed it, and he saw it snag for a moment on the stanchion on the end of the

stern. The one-eyed man snatched the moment to lock his hand in the rough, soaked

material, steadying it for a couple of seconds on the brink of the drop, feeling Krysty's

weight tugging against him.

Agonizingly it was shifting him as well, lifting him, pulling him up and over the rail,

following her toward the thrashing, whirling paddle.

He was over, managing to twist like an acrobat and grab the iron stanchion, hanging on to

the suspended canvas with his other hand. Ryan clung there, poised between life and

death, aware that nothing could save them. In a few seconds his grip would go, and they

would be doomed.

He had closed his eye, then opened it once more—to find that he was staring, inches

away, into the blankly incurious steel eyes of the Magus.

Eclipse at Noon

James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY •

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST •

AUCKLAND

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen

property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the

author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This, like so many others, is for Liz.

But this one is with all my thanks for the happiest and finest life together that anyone

could ever have.

Whatever happens, a part of me will always be with you.

First edition September 1996

ISBN 0-373-62533-2

ECLIPSE AT NOON

work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in

any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission

of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada

M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and

have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all

incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in

the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in

other countries.

Printed in U.S.A.

One should head eventually for the place where the land becomes mainly sea and the sea

becomes mainly sky.

—From Midnight Rambler,

the Collected Thoughts of Chairman Mark,

published by Islander Press of Key West,

Prologue

The paths across the side of the tree-lined valley seemed endless to the terrified woman.

If only she'd thought to bring a blaster, she could have gunned down the madman who

pursued her with such relentless ferocity. But she'd trusted Straub.

As she ran and dodged, water showering off overhanging branches, Countess Katya

Beausoleil swore a dreadful oath to herself to slaughter Straub, slowly and in the utmost

agony, for what he had done to her.

Ryan Cawdor was about thirty yards behind, clumsy with his wounded leg, unable to run

flat out. His arms were stretched in front of him, fingers aching to grasp the slender white

neck and tear and mangle and throttle it, to force the life from the protruding eyes and

smile at the purpled tongue.

At least there would be that.

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

But the woman kept ahead, arms pumping, racing toward the end of the path. The

observation platform over the gorge was at the dead end of the path a hundred yards

away.

SHE WAS BACKED against the raw face of the cliff, trembling, mewing like a kitten,

fingers knotted into the flimsy wire fence, her weight against it, making it sway back and

forth. Ryan faced her, blocking the exit back toward the ville, his spine touching the

rusting supports. Behind him was the drop of hundreds of feet, the last hundred or so

sheer down to the thread of foaming water racing below.

"You didn't have to butcher them all," he yelled, voice torn from his throat in a scream.

"It was just you and me."

The countess made a move toward him, her mouth working. "Listen to me," she began.

"Straub played—"

Ryan swung a roundhouse, feeling the satisfying force of the impact as the woman's

cheekbone splintered, the force of the punch knocking her down against the rocks, the

back of her head cut and bleeding, her hair soaked and matted. Her bright eyes half

closed for a moment.

"Get up, bitch," he whispered, inaudible above the thunderous roaring. "I'm going to beat

you to a bloody pulp and then drop you over the fucking edge. One way all the way

down. Pay a fraction the price. Then Straub."

Her eyes blinked open, and he stooped and swung her up, gripping the torn material of

her dress, holding her balanced while he measured the next punch.

Krysty Wroth was in sight, stopping and cupping her hands. "Ryan! Hey, Ryan!" she

shouted in a voice that would have shattered crystal at a hundred paces.

Ryan started to turn, disbelief stark on his face, his mouth sagging open. He blinked

through the driving rain, seeing a blurred vision of a tall woman with a shock of bright,

fiery hair. Another figure, hair like snow, was at her side, as were three others, farther

back, staring at him.

"Krysty…" he whispered, a rush of knowledge paralyzing him for a moment.

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Katya Beausoleil pushed against him with all her failing strength, catching him off

balance, propelling him hard into the frail fencing. He heard rusting iron creak and snap.

And he was staggering backward, feet brushing air, falling away.

Krysty screamed once.

Ryan was over the edge, pushing the limp body from him, rolling onto a steep slope of

treacherous mud. His fingers scrabbled to find purchase, but failed to find a grip. He

spread himself, his arms and legs wide, somersaulting over and over, the gray sky and the

dark, shining dirt whirling around him.

He glimpsed the white dress below him, vanishing over the last sheer brink and tumbling

into the water, disappearing from his sight.

He quickly reached the final frontier himself, skidding over it, hopelessly out of control.

Flying.

Flying, falling, spinning.

He hit the surface of the flooded river with a crushing, fearsome impact, trying to keep

his body straight, blacking out. The shock of the icy, raging torrent brought him around

for a snatched moment.

The force of the current was unimaginable, filled with sucking maelstroms and

murderous smooth boulders. Ryan was sucked under and spit out into the air, then drawn

deep under once more, into the welcoming darkness. His eye closed.

Chapter One

Krysty Wroth stood and stared blankly into the singing space, spray pasting her fiery hair

across her forehead, her bright emerald eyes dulled and lifeless. Her fingers gripped the

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

rusting remains of the security fence that ringed the crumbling viewing platform above

the abyss.

Her lips moved, and she whispered Ryan's name as she peered into the gorge. The two

tiny figures were spinning, vanishing and rising again in the turbulent water of the racing

river, moving at incredible speed between the sheer walls of wet rock.

"Mebbe he can stay up," said John Barrymore Dix, the Armorer, as he stood by her

elbow, pushing back his fedora.

Jak Lauren shook his head, his red eyes glowing in the gloomy half light like burning

rubies. His torrent of snowy hair dripped in dreadlocks across his scrawny shoulders, his

face, pale beyond belief, staring out over the steep ravine.

"No," he whispered, responding to J. B. Dix's comment. "No way could make it there.

Not after fall."

Mildred Wyeth, the stocky black woman doctor of the group, had one arm resting lightly

around Krysty's waist, comforting her. Her right hand was on the butt of her Czech target

revolver, but there was nobody left to shoot.

The last member of the group, panting heavily, arrived late as ever. Doc Tanner had

witnessed the last scene of the dreadful drama from farther away, blinking through his

watery blue eyes at the fight and the fall. Now he stood stricken, his hands clasped in

mute prayer in front of him, the ebony swordstick glistening with water, its ferrule resting

on the soaking concrete.

"I wonder whether we should not be trying to convey ourselves down the stream,

following it along, until we can do something to recover the body of our dear, dear

friend."

Krysty turned slowly to face the old man, seeing the tears that clung to his lined cheeks,

and felt the first numbing awareness that Ryan was possibly dead.

Probably dead.

"He's gone, Doc," she said quietly. "Never be able to find the body."

Jak coughed. "Look far along. Seems cliffs get lower. Not right leave Ryan to vultures

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and coyotes. Rest of you stay if want. Going to try find him." He looked at the other four

companions. "He'd have done it for me."

THEY LEFT the huge mansion behind them and set off along the windswept, barren

rocks, moving westward, following the line of the river.

A watery sun peeked through ragged strips of dark purple clouds, barely bright enough to

cast a weak shadow behind the friends. They picked their way, slowly climbing lower

toward the river, though its foaming surface still seemed to be several hundred feet below

them.

Ryan's body had long vanished.

The woman's corpse had been caught within their sight for a few minutes in a vicious

backwash under a jagged fall of twenty or thirty feet, where the water stripped away the

tattered remnants of the clothes, leaving the corpse pink and dappled with blood, then as

white as a wind-washed bone.

Finally, perversely, the river let the body go, washing it farther away at dashing speed

until it, too, vanished as the gorge curved toward the north.

Evening was closing in.

J.B. eased the Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun on his shoulder. "Take five, people."

With Ryan gone he had automatically assumed control of the friends.

Jak was carrying Ryan's rifle on his back, the Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action, 10-round, 7.62

mm hunting weapon. Though their exit from the ville had been close to the edge of panic,

everyone had their clothes and weapons.

Krysty sat and leaned against a stunted pinon a few paces from the edge of the drop. Her

face was drawn and tense, her hair matted close to her nape in a tight ball. She closed her

eyes and spoke a brief prayer to Gaia, the Earth Mother, that a miracle might have

happened and that Ryan might be spared from the pounding, grinding doom.

But her heart told her the inalienable truth—that nobody could have survived that drop.

Not even Ryan.

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

THEY FOUND WHAT REMAINED of the corpse of Countess Katya Beausoleil just as

the sun was finally sinking in a copper glow behind a range of low hills toward the west.

The river was widening and becoming a little more gentle, flowing between wooded

banks of thick gray mud.

The head was missing from the body, sunk in some deep pool, ripped away in ragged

tendrils of sinew and gristle, the flesh a dirty white color. One arm was gone, torn off at

the shoulder, and the other had disappeared. The legs had both been broken a dozen

times, splintered stumps of bone showing through the wrinkled, pallid skin.

There was no way of recognizing the elegant, powerful woman who had been their

hostess and had brought murder and disaster to them. What remained of the corpse lay

sprawled in the mud at the edge of the river, water lapping at it, making it rock gently

back and forth.

"Should get it?" Jak asked hesitantly.

As they looked across, a pair of mutie fish-falcons swooped in from the north, out of the

pines. They had wingspans approaching twenty feet and huge bronze hooked beaks.

Golden eyes looked incuriously at the five invaders of their territory as they sliced

through the dusk, settling on the raggedy flesh of the dead woman.

"Let it lie, Jak," Mildred said. "Bitch got something like she deserved."

Doc nodded his agreement. "I have encountered divine vengeance many times in

Deathlands. To be ripped apart and then be food for the fowls of the air in a river of vile,

stinking mud is an apposite ending for that ghastly, murderous person."

"No sign of Ryan. Not even a rag of his clothes," J.B. commented. "Nothing."

Krysty sighed and stretched, standing to stare around in the dying light. "Nothing more

we can do tonight," she said. "We might miss something."

"Camp a little way inland from the river," the Armorer suggested. "No sign of any pursuit

from the ville. Must be a good ten miles away by now."

For a few moments they watched the rapacious scavengers as they ate, peeling away a

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

long strip of intestines, squabbling noisily as they tugged it between them.

Krysty shook her head. "Just hope that what's left of Ryan isn't…" She let the sentence

fade into the darkness.

"We'll make an early start in the morning," Krysty announced, heading away from the

quiet river.

Behind her, Jak and J.B. exchanged a meaningful, hopeless glance, but neither of them

spoke.

Chapter Two

Ryan had lived within the silent shadow of death for all of his adult life. Indeed, as a

child his constant companion was the tall man in the hooded cloak, with the scythe across

his shoulder.

As the river dragged him under, already barely conscious from the steepling fall, he

slipped in and out of blackness, his fading mind dragging up images of some of his other

close calls with mortality: an ax, wielded by a man dressed as a monk, in a brown habit

and shaved head, the huge blade slicing a crescent-shaped cicatrix of flesh from Ryan's

arm, hissing by to strike golden sparks from the stone-flagged floor of the chancel; a ball

from a nineteenth-century dueling pistol, plucking at his sleeve, barely drawing a bead of

blood; a cell in the Everglades, where tidal water swilled in and out, rising within inches

of the packed mud ceiling, forcing him against it, struggling for life for the long, cold

hours until the salt waves receded once more, kicking away at the deadly snakes that

swam around him; pinned to a giant sequoia with a hunting arrow through the sinews of

his shoulder, holding him helpless while he struggled to reload his musket, watching the

black-masked warrior moving toward him through the pools of bright sun and dappled

shadow, another shaft already notched and ready.

The waters carried him along at a terrifying pace, faster than a man could run, bouncing

him off boulders, rattling the teeth in his head. An undertow tugged him down into icy

deeps, holding him there for eternities, blacking him out again. His mind plucked

memories from his past.

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Axler, James - Deathlands 33 - Eclipse at Noon

He lay on a truckle bed in a shotgun shack in rural Georgia, as weak as a kitten from an

amoebic fever, helpless while a little girl of eight years climbed onto his chest holding a

filthy pillow in both hands. She leaned over his face, smiling gap-toothed into his eye,

and began to suffocate him.

He ran along the corridors of an old mansion in the hills above the Cific Ocean, a

hundred miles inland from where the coast had been before skydark, fleeing the flames.

He had iron shackles around his ankles, the flesh suppurating beneath the rusted and

bloodied metal. The ceiling burned as the bright golden flames flashed overhead,

scorching Ryan's long hair. He could smell his flesh roasting.

Ryan saw the jabbing tusks of a rampaging elephant in the private zoo outside the ghostly

ruins of old Sacramento. The animal had trapped the Trader in a corner of its enclosure,

trying to knock him down and kneel on him. Ryan and the young John Dix had gone in

unarmed against the massive beast, and he felt the pain of broken ribs set against the

exultation of winning the combat.

Ryan drew in a screaming gasp of air, filling his tortured lungs as the racing current

threw him momentarily to the surface. His right leg was numb, and he guessed it might

have been broken. The original gunshot wound was painless against all the other injuries

and bruises and cuts. His whole body was solid pain, and he was so weak that he couldn't

even kick to stay on the surface. Once more he was drawn under into the world of singing

blackness and desperate memories of hard times gone.

He tried to retain his hold on sanity in the pit filled with cockroaches. He was bound hand

and foot, helpless on the slimy floor, in total darkness. And the mutie insects, some of

them nine and ten inches long, covered him, countless thousands, scurrying, rustling as

their long tendrils brushed Ryan's naked skin. He kept his eye and mouth closed, but was

unable to check them from investigating his nostrils, probing into his ears. He had rolled

back and forth ceaselessly, crushing hundreds of the vile insects, feeling their bodies

crunch and squirt, mingling with his own blood and sweat.

A baron had tried to put pressure on the Trader by capturing his young one-eyed

lieutenant and burying him alive in a mahogany casket with silver handles, the lid

screwed tight. Ryan had been drugged, wrapped in a silken shroud, his head placed on a

satin pillow. He could hear the earth thudding on the top of the heavy coffin and tried to

take shallow, slow breaths to make the small amount of trapped air last that few vital

minutes longer, fighting blind panic.

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Axler,James-Deathlands33-EclipseatNoonThestormhadKrystyinitsthrall,whirlingherupandoverRyanwasafterher,feetskiddingonthewetplanks,blindedbythespray.Onehandreachedfortheslipperyrail,whiletheothergrabbedhelplesslyatthe orncanvasshroudthatheldhislover.Hisfingersbrushedit,andhesawitsnagforamomentonthe...

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