SHIKARI IN GALVESTON S. M. STIRLING PROLOGUE: A FEASTING OF DEMONS “I told you not to eat him!” the man in the black robe said. “Come out!”
He was alone, standing on a slight hillock amid the low marshy ground. The log canoe behind him held more—three Cossack riflemen, their weapons ready, a young woman lying bound at their feet, and a thick-muscled man with burn scars on his hands and arms. He whimpered and cowered and muttered pajalsta—please, please—over and over until he was cuffed into silence by one of the soldiers.
Beyond them the tall gloom of the cypresses turned the swamp into a pool of olive-green shadow, in which the Spanish moss hung in motionless curtains. There was little sound; a plop as a cottonmouth slipped off a rotting log and into the dark water, and muffled with distance the dull booming roar of a bull alligator proclaiming his territory to the world. The air was warm and rank, full of the smell of decay…and a harder odor, one of crusted filth and animal rot.
“Come out!” the one in black snapped again; he was a stocky man in his middle years, black-haired, with a pale high-cheekboned face and slanted gray eyes.
They did; first one, then a few more, then a score, then a hundred. The man laughed in delight at the sight of them: the thickset shambling forms, the scarred faces and filed teeth, the roiling stink. One with a bone through his broad nose and more in his clay-caked mop of hair came wriggling on his belly like a snake through the mud to press his forehead into the dirt at the man’s feet.
“Master, master,” the figure whined—in his language it was a slightly different form of the word for killer, and closely related to the verb to eat.
“He sickened,” the savage gobbled apologetically. “We only ate him when he could not work.”
The robed man drew back a foot and kicked him in the face; the prone figure groveled and whimpered.
“A likely story! But the Black God is good to His servants. I have brought you another blacksmith…and weapons.”
He half turned and signaled. Most of the men in the canoes kept their rifles ready and pointed; a few dragged boxes of hatchets and knives out and bore them ashore. A moaning chorus came from the figures, and hands reached out eagerly. The man in black uncoiled a whip from his belt and lashed them back.
. . .
