“Pis-pistol on the counter,” Dar suggested, his portrayed calm disfigured by his gasping breath and shaky arm. “Saber too — too. An-and anything else might — might tempt you to get yourself... killed prematurely.”

The lieutenant placed his Walther very carefully upon the countertop, his eyes never leaving the gaping muzzle of the 1911. The saber followed, along with his belt knife and a smaller pistol taken from a pants pocket.

“Pick him... pick him up,” Dar ordered.

The lieutenant blanched white, not moving.

“Or I can plug you and pick him... up myself,” Dar pointed out, raising the pistol. “The first way you maybe... maybe live. Your choice.”

The lieutenant bent quickly and nearly took Heinemann’s right arm before realizing his mistake. With a guilty glance up at his captor, he shifted to the corpse’s left, hoisting him awkwardly and laboriously by the arm still attached. The near-severed arm flopped grotesquely.

“Outside,” Dar motioned with the pistol, the saber now back in his left hand, that forearm pressed tight to the leaking wound in his lower abdomen.

In a back corner of his mind, he was thinking that old man Entigh was going to skin him alive for making such a mess of his daughter’s house.

The lieutenant hesitated at the front door. After all, there was still a firefight going on outside.

“Haven’t you guys got... got some sort of... of cease fire signal?” Dar demanded.

“Not that I can issue from here,” the lieutenant answered. “I’m not sure that they’d listen to me in any case. I’m a junior officer — little more than an oberfähnrich zur see... um, what your people would call a midshipman. This is only my first voyage with them. The crew will doubt my authority to order such a thing.”

“Hmph. Any of ‘em... any of ‘em speak English?”

Yes,” the lieutenant said. “Most of them, to one degree or another.

“Good. You yell just as loud as you can that they shouldn’t shoot us, and I’ll have my lot not shoot us either. Good?”

The lieutenant nodded vigorously. Still, though, he didn’t move.

“Now!” Dar raised the Colt again.

The lieutenant lunged out through the door, dragging his dead captain and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Nicht schießen! Nicht schießen!”

“Pop!” Dar called out on the heels of the lieutenant’s pleas, “don’t shoot, Pop! I’m bringing their leader out!”

Between the two voices, the firing inside the stead petered out. There was no sign of either Martin or Av in the yard, and the firing from the treeline continued undiminished. Dar realized that he didn’t know the signal to get them to stop, and cursed under his breath.

“The firing from outside the walls is a diversion,” he told the lieutenant. “They’re not aiming at anything inside. Tell your men.”

Dar had him lay the body of the pirate captain down in the middle of the yard while he stayed back in the shadow of the farm house, not wanting open space at his back. He made sure to have the lieutenant lay the dead man face up so that everyone could see him and there wouldn’t be any doubt. Then he had him call the men out of cover, hands above their heads, weapons held high.

He was careful the while to keep the lieutenant between himself and the approaching pirates. As much as that was possible, in any case, since he didn’t really know where in the darkness they were all hiding.

In retrospect, he admitted to himself that he might have been better off bringing the Tommygun and leaving the pistol and sword behind. But that wouldn’t have sent the same message as the saber did. Anyway, that was the excuse he gave himself.

Dar had them lay their arms down on the ground beside their dead leader and step well back. There were a passel of them.

“Coming in,” he heard his father’s calm voice from behind and to the side.

“Come ahead,” he said, leaning on the tip of the saber like it was a cane and keeping his eye on the men before him.

Pop came up from his left leading two prisoners, their strange looking rifles over his shoulder and a couple of pistols shoved down behind his belt, magazines removed.

“They like hideout guns,” he warned the older man as he passed.

Av joined them a minute or so later, behind one more pirate. “There’s still some up in the airship, I think,” he said when he’d rejoined the others. “Couldn’t flush ‘em fer nothin’.”

Martin was regarding the dead captain speculatively, glancing from the man’s body to his son with a gore-slicked saber in his hand and bloody like he’d been butchering hogs. He forced himself not to consider how much of the gore that soaked the clothes the lad wore in virtual ribbons might be his own rather than the pirate’s. There would be time for that later.

“You,” he ordered the lieutenant in fluent German. “You are?”

“Jaeger, Mein Herr,” the lieutenant stiffened to attention. “Leutnant zur See Christian Jaeger.”

“You’re in command now?”

The lieutenant blinked once or twice before stammering out, “I... I don’t know. I cannot be! There were...” but his training kicked in finally, and he clamped his mouth shut.

Martin grimaced. Fine, he thought. “Offiziere!” he barked in a parade ground voice. “Come forward!”

Nothing. No movement in the ranks. “Unteroffiziere!” he tried.

Several men moved slowly forward. “You there,” Martin pointed, addressing an older, hulking petty officer who looked to be senior. “Any of your officer corps survive?”

“In ze chain of command undt on ze ground,” the man grumbled, “only him,” he chucked his chin in the lieutenant’s direction.

“There you go,” Martin told the young officer.

“But I’m...,” the young man stammered. “I.... Last month I was in University!”

Martin scrubbed his hand across his face, shaking his head. “I’m not asking you to lead them into battle,” he growled. “I’m telling you to call them down. Now!”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The lieutenant tried. Then he turned back to Martin, who already knew what he was going to say. “They’re afraid,” he said. There is still much rifle fire coming from the trees, and they are not safely behind these thick walls as we are. They fear also the großengewehr — that it will cut them down if they show themselves as it has the others.

“Dar?” Martin turned to his son. “Open the front gate, will you Son?”

“But Pop,” Dar demurred. “I don’t know the signal to get them militia guys to stop shooting.”

“The signal is you open the gate, Dar,” his father smiled.

Dar nodded and limped off in the direction of the main gate, pistol still at the ready, upper torso still curled around the tight-pressed forearm. He was ruinously weary, and the cuts the pirate captain had delivered to him were beginning that stinging ache that only cleanly sliced flesh could deliver really well. There were more of them than he remembered receiving, too, and each step was increasingly pain-filled.

It was all he could do to get the big double gate open and push one half of it out.

The incoming fire stopped immediately. Well, almost immediately. There were one or two pops before some of the more zealous militiamen managed to curb their enthusiasm.

Av turned facing north once the noise had died down, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Homer!” he called at the best volume he could. He didn’t know how far out Homer was. “It’s done, Homer! Stop shooting!”

There was a far off pistol crack that told him Homer had got the message. He turned back and nodded.

Martin himself called the men down then, assuring them that the great rifle would remain silent. This time they complied. The rope ladders that had been hastily hauled up at the first sound of gunfire were once again dropped over the side and several additional men climbed slowly down.

Hendrel Entigh was the first man through the gate, overhauling Dar, who was limping slowly back to the center of the yard where his father and Av had the prisoners.

“Where are they?” he demanded.

“Still in the cellar,” Dar told him wearily. “I didn’t have time to—” but Entigh was already running. “Don’t mind the blood!” Dar called after him. “It ain’t—!” But Entigh wasn’t paying attention.

“Say, Dar,” Av sidled up to him as he neared the group gathered around the dead pirate captain. “Lemme have a coupla tommygun magazines, will ya?”

Dar nodded and peeled two Thompson mags out of the long pouches on his pistol belt, only just then noting that the canvas along their upper edges had been shaved cleanly off, and that the steel bodies of the magazines themselves were deeply scored. He wondered idly if those magazine pouches were the reason he was still alive.

Av immediately thumbed the release lever of his weapon and dropped the magazine free, sliding the loaded stick into the notch in its place. He handed the empty to Dar before tapping Martin on the shoulder with the second loaded magazine. The elder Palin repeated the reload sequence in a curiously nonchalant fashion.

Dar spent a moment looking down at the empty magazines in his hand before looking up at his grandfather, eyebrow cocked.

“If they think it’s loaded,” the old man winked, “it’s loaded.”

Martin looked up at the Colt in his son’s hand and suggested he maybe should retrieve the rest of his weaponry rather than wandering around the stead half naked. Dar nodded dumbly and limped off for the house, left forearm still pressed to the growing pain in his middle. His pace was slowing as the full measure of his wounds began to make themselves known to his flagging body.

* * *

Hendrel Entigh hit the front door of his daughter’s house at a long lope, age be damned. He grimaced at the damage to the door and at the thick blood trail leading up to and through it.

If the foyer had been bloody, the kitchen was a slaughterhouse. He brought up short in revulsion, taking in the gore and bodies disbelievingly. Yes, this bore all the markings of Pale Horse’s work all right. Unpleasant memories flooded his mind at this visual reminder of who they’d all been when they’d been young and wild, before retreating to this backwater refuge and lives of supposed peace.

He shook himself and raced through the carnage and into the pantry, throwing the bolt to the trap door leading down to the root cellar. He all but fell down the stairs in his haste and the darkness below.

Evie Pascal was in his arms almost immediately, nearly hysterical.

“Poppa! Oh, Poppa!” she sobbed. “They killed him! They murdered Roland! Right on the front porch, Poppa! Shot him down like a dog! He wasn’t even armed!

“And I can’t find Rolly anywhere! Have you seen him? Is he alright? Oh, Poppa, what’s happening? Who are these people? Why are they doing this to us?”

Entigh tried to console her as she held him in a death grip, sobbing her heart out.

The three of his grandchildren present raced forward from the vainly comforting grip of ‘Tilda, the family’s maid, and clung to his legs, venting their own terror and grief. They’d seen their father’s body lying at the base of the stairs when the pirates had hustled them down from their rooms and into the cellar. They were farm children — they were familiar with death. They’d known what the blood on his nightshirt and the still glaze of his eyes had meant.

Four of the six ranch hands stood stoop shouldered and heads bowed at the far end of the room, shame rolling from them like fog down the mountain on a cold spring night. That they’d have stood no chance at all against the army of men that had attacked the stead seemed not to console them, and Entigh had scant attention to spare in any case.

Evie was still demanding to know where her oldest son could be and if her father had seen him. How did he tell her that he’d been outside the walls the whole time while other, harder men had freed her?

He started easing her toward the stairs, wondering if he shouldn’t maybe take her out the other way rather than up through the gore-washed kitchen. But that other door was still locked from the outside.

“Evie, he said softly, catching at her chin and forcing her to look up at him. “We need to go back up into the house now, Evie. But you need to be strong.”

“Roland...,” the sobbing intensified as the image of her husband lying dead on the floor washed back through her mind.

“No, Evie,” he consoled. “The others. There are some—”

“That’s right!” she said, voice rising. “That Palanna boy was here. There was some sort of fight. He told us that he was here for us, but then he left, and he didn’t take us with him!” she fell to sobbing again.

Palanna boy? “No,” he shook his head. “It was Martal—”

“No, Poppa,” she sniffed. “He said it clear as day. Darnan. Darnan Palanna. Is he alright?”

He was still shaking his head as he helped her up the stairs, struggling with half of her weight on him and the younger children still trying to cling to his legs. She had to be wrong. She had to be. There were four dead men in the kitchen, and the trail of another leading out the door. Darnan couldn’t — that couldn’t have been the boy he knew; the soft-spoken, polite mechanic and part time teamster. The boy his youngest daughter followed like a puppy. He wouldn’t let himself—

They’d reached the top of the stairs, and Evie spotted Dar at the big table where the hands ate when they were in from the range. He was stuffing the pistols from the table into empty holsters. She released her father and raced to the startled boy, catching him up in a bear hug and sobbing out her thanks, seemingly oblivious to the blood that began instantly soaking into her nightgown.

Dar froze, wincing, leaning slightly back, his arms out and up, like he was surrendering to a robber. Totally unprepared for such a happenstance, he looked over at Hendrel, eyes wild.

Entigh made a wide gesture with both arms, mimicking a hug. Dar gingerly closed his arms around the crying woman, patting her on her back as she cried into his shoulder, alternately thanking him and lamenting the loss of her husband.

Rolly? Entigh asked silently, mouthing the word broadly.

Dar shrugged as best he could within the vice-like grip he found himself in.

Entigh finally moved forward to pry his eldest daughter from her rescuer before she could realize he was bleeding all over her, and Dar took a long step back, his face flushed with embarrassment and pain.

“Sorry, Mr. Entigh,” he told the old man. I was in here the whole time, so I don’t know what hap— what went on outs— uh, I was in....”

“That’s alright, Dar,” Entigh told him. We’ll figure it out. You’d better head out and see if your father needs anything.”

“Yessir!” and Dar turned eagerly for the door, taking up his Thompson, which seemed to weigh two hundred pounds.

“Don’t forget that,” Entigh warned, gesturing to the floor.

Dar stopped and looked down in the direction indicated. The saber. “Sorry, Sir,” he said. “But that’s not—”

“This is your work?” Entigh gestured widely about the room.

“I’m sorry about that, Sir,” Dar ducked his head. “I—”

“Don’t be. My point is that you fought the man who owned it, didn’t you?”

Dar was more uncomfortable than when he’d actually faced the pirate. “Yessir,” he said. “I suppose I did.”

“Then that sword is yours, Dar,” Entigh told him. “Call it a trophy, or a prize, or tradition, but it’s yours now.” He paused for the idea to sink into the young man’s head before continuing. “Along with all of the consequences it brings.”

Consequ—? “Sir?”

“Just take it, Darnan,” Entigh told him flatly. “I’ve things I must do just now. I’m sure your father or Tall Pines will explain it to you in good time.”

“Yessir!” Dar ducked his head again.

It was awkward carrying both sabers and the Thompson, but he managed it.