Ravenshaw, The Complete Series by Wallace Macfarlane

Author:Wallace Macfarlane [Macfarlane, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

V

A HURTLING body knocked Ravenshaw off his feet. A shotgun bellowed. He was in the middle of a melee and he got up with a broken branch in his hand. A man in mottled brown and red came at him and Ravenshaw broke the length of punky aspen on his head. The man went down. Over the grunts and blows and shouts of the donnybrook came a whooping, steamy whistle - whoo-woo, whoo - wow, A man in green spun him around and Ravenshaw mashed his nose sideways with the heel of ‘ his hand. He caught a glimpse of Nell being dragged off before he was blindsided and hit dirt. His fingers closed over the shotgun barrel. The stock was bent but solid. He swung it right and left with satisfying thunks and shoved the butt into the stomach of a man who staggered into Austin Mummery and knocked him over. The whistle sounded again.

The fight stopped as suddenly as Ravenshaw got into it. Men in red and brown ran downhill to a peculiar vehicle with a fiat platform. It began to move with a stately achoof-achoof noise. Jain had been dragged aboard with Nell. Ravenshaw ran toward it and sprawled over a body. The platform picked up speed on eight big wheels, mashing the sagebrush, lurching and creaking at 10 mph.

“My God, what’s happened?” Mummery clutched his arm. “Where did all those crazy Indians come from?”

“Custer’s last words,” snapped Ravenshaw. The man who had tripped him was Ned Vasu, dead and already dusty with a shotgun blast in his chest. Mummery was babbling. The old man drew back in alarm when Ravenshaw pulled away, and did not follow him down the slope. No one followed.

Ravenshaw jogged through the sagebrush, thinking about the revolving barrel at the funhouse in Santa Cruz. Once you slipped, there was no way to go but head over heels until you found your feet again. Nell Rowley had the preposterous ability to slip into the infinite worlds with as much effort as falling through tissue paper hoops. He did not know how she did it, he only knew he had the nightmare sensation of being dropped into the middle of noon-time Istanbul with no trousers. A worse nightmare was being separated from Nell and marooned in an alternate world.

A wide shallow river ran down the valley with flourishing cottonwoods on either side. The sage was tall and the bunch grass thick. Aspen and low oak grew on the slopes. The leaves were just beginning to turn color and this country obviously had more rainfall than his own world. The mechanical platform disappeared behind a low hill and Ravenshaw dropped to a walk with a stitch in his side.

Beyond the river was a rise to a bench, a low mesa with broken hills beyond. There were two long, enormous blurs on the bench, unlike anything he had ever seen before. A smaller blur squatted between the two. The sun was warm and the temperature in the seventies; there were no heat mirages and the air was crystal.

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