Free The Devil Delivered and Other Tales by Steven Erikson

moss beneath a tire’s track. The coyote contemplates, and might even smile as the can rusts and withers to dust, as the wrapper crumbles under the sun, as the moss slowly springs back.
    The coyote stays in our wake, and patiently awaits the coming of our bones, scattered like a sprung bundle of sticks. A disarticulated map to mull over, the wind moaning through the holes in our skull. It listens to that song, but soon tires of the repetition. In a world where nothing changes, we’d best move on.
    Humped-back transports crawled a ritual dance on the plain below. William leaned sideways into the wind, his broken boots precariously gripping the edge of a ridge, and studied the mechanical dance on the valley floor. A score of smaller vehicles buzzed randomly through the greater design. He watched two converge, then drive out from the swarm, approaching him side by side, lumbering steadily up the slope.
    Daniel and Jack Tree emerged from the vehicle on the left. A squat, wide man stepped out from the vehicle on the right. The stranger wore sunglasses and a baseball cap with the Ladon crest above the brim. His face was lined, clean-shaven, and almost flat, the bones underneath Mongoloid, the incisors in his maxilla and mandible shovel-shaped. A hairline crack along his zygoma revealed an old, poorly healed, broken cheekbone.
    “Can you hear me?” Daniel asked, stepping close.
    William nodded.
    “Can you see me?”
    He nodded again. Cranial characteristics displayed the wondrous lineage of Daniel, so close to that of the Asian stranger. William turned and studied Jack Tree. Caucasoid traits for the most part. Even the bones contributed to the mask that had dissipated like smoke the possibilities of prejudice, a trick of sympathy that swayed the media, enraptured the public.
    “See any spy teams out there, William?”
    He looked back at Daniel.
    “Sorry, applied anthropologists, then.”
    William shook his head.
    “Our arrays picked up a heat signature,” the stranger said, his wide-boned hands on his hips. “Big one. We tracked you from it.”
    William smiled and said, “I would speak, if you can hear me.”
    The stranger frowned at Daniel, then shrugged. “I hear you fine, son.”
    “A pillar of flame. I am reborn to the hour. Watch me burn, gentlemen.”
    Jack Tree barked an uneasy laugh. “You’re talking to an engineer, Potts, not some goddamned mystic.”
    “The fire is only the beginning,” William said, steadying his gaze on Jack Tree, who stepped back. “The wheel will spin, and lightning will scar the sky. There’ll be thunder, but from the earth. And the clouds will not fall, but ascend. Heaven, gentlemen, is not shot through with orbiting machines. There is no happy hunting ground. You had it, once, but it’s gone now, and that, Jack Tree, is what’s written on your heart. The truth you have chosen to hide, even from yourself.
    “The buffalo were doomed. You didn’t need us. You didn’t need us for war, or spite, or murder. Granted, we busted up your game something awful, but the four horses needed riders, and you rode them. I am here, and I see how the cold wind shakes each of you. The ghosts are dancing, my friends.”
    A cell buzzed at the stranger’s hip. He snatched at it with a blue hand. William watched the blood pool in the man’s torso, pulling away from the extremities. The man cupped a hand over the earpiece, listened, then nodded. He returned the phone to his belt.
    “Fucking weather pattern sprung up out of nowhere. We’ve got a blow coming.” He swung expressionless eyes on William. “A fucking bad one.”
    “They won’t stay at home any longer,” William said, smiling at Jack Tree. “They’re coming with you. I’m sorry about that, but they refuse to be forgotten. Not now, not again.”
    “William,” Daniel said earnestly, “you’d better come with us.”
    “We dug them up,” William said, still watching Jack Tree. The hypothermia was far too rapid; it was a