Kane reached the cave mouth first, but reaching a place and holding it are different trades. He set two men at the boulders covering the upper trail, and went into the dark himself with a fourth man โ and a canvas sack that clinked, soft and heavy, in a way Silas recognised before he saw it.
Powder. Sticks of it, wrapped in oilcloth, and a coil of fuse like a sleeping snake.
Silas came up the trail at a run with Joseph beside him. His breath tore โ the collapse of two days past still lived in his limbs โ but the sight of that sack put iron back into his legs.
"Kane!" he shouted, and ducked as both riflemen fired. Stone chips stung his face. Joseph's answering shot drove both men behind their rocks, and in that bought moment Silas went over the lip of the cave mouth and down into the cold dark, leaving his rifle behind: there was no room in that throat for a long gun to swing.
Kane's lantern swung ahead of him, throwing the petroglyphs into leaping life, but he passed the marked chamber as a blind man passes a church, seeing nothing but the three seal stones in the throat beyond it, dark with damp from the great water pressing on their other side.
"You cannot have it, friend," Kane called, almost cheerful, kneeling by the seal. "Mr. Bragg has run the figures. A valley with a spring he cannot own owes him for his trouble. So there will be no spring. Not for anybody. Arithmetic."
"That stone is a keystone, Kane." Silas edged forward, palms open. "Blast it and the throat comes down on the water and on us. You will bury the spring for a hundred years and yourself forever, for a man who will write your name wrong on the payroll."
Kane threaded the fuse with hands steady as a seamstress's. "Then I will be misspelled in good company. Stand back, Hart. Heroes are just fellows who mistook the size of a thing."
The second man came at Silas out of the dark with a knife, as Kane had planned. They went down together on the wet stones, and Silas got his forearm under the man's jaw and held on while the world narrowed to grunting and cold water soaking through his shirt. Above them, Kane was humming as he packed the charge against the wedged seal stone.
Joseph shouted from the chamber โ he had got past the boulders. Kane's pistol answered once, and the sound in that stone place was the end of the world. Joseph fell back against the petroglyph wall and slid down it, leaving a dark smear of red among the ochre hands, his own hand pressed hard to his side.
Saya came through the gap, saw her cousin, saw Kane rise with a lit match cupped in his palm โ and did the bravest thing in that whole war for water. She picked up the lantern and threw it past Kane, deep into the black throat beyond the seal, where it shattered and died.
In the total darkness Kane's match was a single star โ and the fuse, which he could no longer see to light, and the seal, which he could no longer see to guard.
His last shot was fired at the sound of Silas rising. It was a fine shot, by ear, by a master โ and it took the knife man, who was rising too, full in the chest. Kane heard the wrong man fall. In one caught breath Silas heard him understand it โ then the two met at the seal stone, chest to chest, Kane's hands seeking anything, and Silas driving him backward, step by grinding step, off the wet ledge and into the black where the lantern had died.
Kane fell without a cry. A sound below, then the trickle's music, then nothing.
Silas struck a match with scraped knuckles, found the charge, fuse unlit, drew it away from the seal stones with the care of a man lifting a sleeping child, and drowned the whole sack, stick by stick, in the trickle pool.
When Silas came up into the full morning, with Joseph's arm over his shoulders and Joseph cursing him weakly for a slow mule, the fight below had changed. Bragg, seeing Kane's party destroyed, had made his last mistake. He had ridden into the open himself, drawn his pistol, and levelled it at Chief Taklish โ who stood, as he had stood all morning, in front of his people.
Saya reached her grandfather first. She did not strike the gun. She simply stepped between the barrel and the old man, Tomi clinging to her skirt, and said, in a voice the whole valley heard: "Then shoot the healer and the child first, Mr. Bragg. Let the marshal find that arithmetic."
Bragg's hand shook. It had never shaken holding a pen over another man's ruin; at last the pistol sank, Joseph's young men came out of the rocks with rifles levelled, and the camp closed around Cornelius Bragg like slow water around a stone.
Chapter 26: Breaking the Seal