"Guns! Down!"
Ahn-Kha dropped his machine gun directly in front of his long-toed feet, raised his arms in surrender. The Scrubmen had picked the wrong day to point a weapon at Ahn-Kha. The Golden One didn't let out a battle roar, he simply brought both mighty fists down on the spears in front of him. Wood shattered, knife tips dug into dirt. With his fists planted, he swung out with both long-toed feet and kicked the two Scrubmen facing him toward Iowa.
In later years it was said that they fell just short of Burlington.
Valentine drew his legworm pick and borrowed parang. He jumped back from the extended spears, heard a pellet buzz by. His enemies, off-balance and overextended in their lunge, turned it into a charge.
Valentine heard motion behind and dropped to the ground, rolling. Two ranks of spears clattered against each other. Valentine heard the snick of a blade sinking home as the Scrubmen met.
He lashed out at an ankle with his parang, pinned a foot to the turf with his pick, let it lie and rose, lifting and twisting a spear.
"Looksee!" "Watch hims!"
A four-armed blur. The Brushmen had never fought Cats before.
He saw a Scrubman go down, weighted by ratbits biting at the tender flesh behind his knee and on the inner thigh. The scratching, pulling furies came away with tendon and other terrible trophies clamped between paired front incisors.
Valentine had read somewhere or other that, given time, rats could gnaw through concrete and some thinner types of conduit. These were a good deal larger and had obviously learned exactly where a man was vulnerable.
The Scrubmen valued survival rather than honor. They took to the brush with alacrity, sending pellets whizzing overhead to cover their retreat.
What the Wolves did with the wounded, Valentine didn't know and didn't want to know. The cries were brief, and for that he was thankful.
Frat's head appeared at the top of the crest of the horseshoe.
"Major, looks like they left a few things behind," Frat called.
Valentine trotted up to Frat's position with Ahn-Kha parting prairie grasses like a living snowplow.
Frat led him to a four-foot-deep ripple in the earth, closed over by oak and grasses into a shady tunnel. A line of people, anchored by a Gray One at each end, were linked by neck collars and six-foot wooden poles.
Valentine had rarely seen such ghastly restraints. The leather was filthy and rotted, with flies buzzing around dried blood caked and recaked at the edges.
"Free those people."
They looked thin and bruised. Valentine guessed the Scrubmen had kept their captives moving with lashes from thin tree limbs and yanks on the collar chain.
"Can you get anything from the Grogs?" Valentine asked.
Ahn-Kha spoke to the pair.
"They say they're on their way north," Ahn-Kha translated. "Those two, they're deserters from the Two-Mouth's army."
"Who is Two-Mouth?"
"A great man. Killer of Red-Blanket, chieftain of the Deathring Tribe. Conqueror of the Golden Ones. Ruler of Rails-between-the-Rivers."
"The Gray Baron," Valentine said.
"In too many words," Ahn-Kha said. "But when the Gray Ones get around to talking, talk they will."
"Why did they desert?"
More burbling words and emphatic gestures.
"They were part of a rail crew. They thought they were supposed to fight, not lay ties and iron," Ahn-Kha said. "They're young warrior Grogs, they want a tally of enemies, not a record of track laid. Since they couldn't fight, they fled. But Two-Mouth has a standing reward for deserters and any and all humans."
Valentine questioned the humans himself. They were two groups that had met up while fleeing the Great Plains Gulag. They'd struck the Missouri River and followed it southeast, and were planning to turn due south and head for Southern Command's forces once they dried and smoked some of the Missouri's famously oversized catfish. But the Scrubmen had smelled the drying fish and taken them prisoner.