Free Casca 18: The Cursed by Barry Sadler Page B

how.
    The horse's chest struck the cart at full gallop, smashing and overturning it, and strewing its load of grass and cowshit and dismembered body pieces along the street, with Casca tumbling among the mess.
    The impact wrenched the crossbar of the shafts from Deng's grasp, leaving him standing. The shrewd old man appraised the circumstances in an instant and slipped quickly through the open doorway into Ju Liqun's store.
    He was already moving before he saw the great warlord Zhang approaching from the other end of the street, but this appearance hurried him, and he was quick to close and bar the door behind him, motioning to his daughter's family to be quiet while herding them into the back room where all five of them huddled in the farthest corner.
    Zhang and his entourage were startled by the noise of the crash and were astonished to see what appeared to be Hu Wei flying through the air, accompanied by a number of sackcloth bundles which came apart in their flight to reveal the same Hu Wei's head, as well as his arms and legs and trunk. The horse was screaming shrilly, its chest impaled on the iron boss of the wheel, its belly punctured by several pieces of broken wood, the blue bag of its intestines oozing out.
    Zhang and his men came to a halt.
    Two Hu Weis?
    Zhang was not a man to worry easily, but he was highly superstitious. It had never occurred to him that his tax gatherer might have two heads, but now it seemed that he had, and a whole lot of other spare parts as well.
     
     

CHAPTER TEN
    Casca came to, lying on his stomach, to find himself looking into the mad eyes of Hu Wei, staring at him out of the dead head that sat before him in the roadway.
    He tried to rise, but neither of his arms would take his weight: He rolled onto his back and sat up.
    Beyond the city gates he could see an approaching cloud of dust. Horses. He began to remember and realized that these were his pursuers. And that he owed one of them an eye.
    He swiveled on his rump and saw that the other end of the narrow street was blocked at the turn by another band of horsemen, whom he rightly took to be the warlord Zhag Jintao and his cohort.
    "Jupiter's fat ass," he cursed, "what a busy fucking town."
    "Hu Wei," the warlord called from where he sat astride his horse. "Why do you have two heads today?"
    "By the two headed dog, Janus, who guards the way to Hades, I'll show you," Casca muttered as he picked up Hu's head. He reversed it and rammed it hard onto the ornamented spike atop his helmet.
    Groggily, he got to his feet, turning as he did to look back along the road.
    A babble of excited and apprehensive shouts broke from Zhang's men as they saw what they took to be their comrade in arms with his back to them, while his head glared at them from above his helmet.
    The thrust of the spike had set off some nervous response, and the eyes were blinking rapidly, the tongue vibrating in the open mouth.
    Everywhere along the street doors were slamming shut, bars falling into place.
    The pursuing horsemen were now slowing to approach the gates at a walk to comply with the established protocol. Nobles of the imperial court would not set a bad example merely to pursue a malefactor.
    And Baron Ying Ruochen and his lieutenants had another reason to slow their pace.
    Casca had turned back to face the warlord, and they could now see Hu Wei's writhing head. It was much more animated than the iron mask they had been looking at a moment earlier.
    Zhang, for his part, felt more comfortable looking at the mask and the back of Hu's head, even though the Korean's long black hair hung down over the forehead of the mask and lent it the look of a live face.
    " Er, Hu Wei," Zhang asked respectfully, "who are these horsemen who pursue you?"
    Casca swung around to glance toward the gates, then back to Zhang. The effect, as Hu's head wobbled on the spike and his hair swayed about above the mask, was to make both heads look very much alive.
    The approaching army was still