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and remained dripping and painless in its side.
    “Kill you,”
the cactus crooned in its feeble voice, in an ugly Ragamoll.
“Murder.”
It heaved its enormous weapon.
    “It weren’t us!”
shouted Cutter. He threw the militia insignia in the cactus-giant’s path, and fired his repeater at the badge, making it dance and ring until all six barrels were empty. The cactus was still, its shillelagh paused. Cutter spat at the badge until his mouth was dry. “It weren’t us.”
             
    He was something they had never seen. Cutter thought he must be Torqued, cancered by the bad energy of a cacotopic zone, but that was not right. In the last empty village, the vast cactus-man told them of himself. He was
ge’ain
—between them they rendered it “tardy.”
    By arcane husbandry, cactacae of the veldt kept a few of their bulbs nurtured in a coma for months after they should have been born. While their siblings crawled squalling from the earth, the
ge’ain,
the tardy, slept on below in their chorions, growing. Their bodies distended as occult techniques kept them unborn. When
finally they woke and emerged they were mooncalf. They grew prodigal.
    Their aberrance afflicted them. Their woody bones were bowed, their skins corticate and boiling with excrescence. Their augmented senses hurt. They were the wards, the fighters and lookouts for their homesteads. They were tabooed. Shunned and worshipped. They had no names.
    The fingers of the tardy’s left hand were fused. He moved slowly with arthritic pain.
    “We not Tesh,” he said. “Not our war, not our business. But them come anywise. Militia.”
    They had come from the river, a mounted platoon with rivebows and motorguns. The cactacae had long heard stories from the north, where militia and Tesh legions skirmished. Exiles had told them of monstrous acts at militia hands, and the cactus villagers fled the snatch-squad.
    The militia reached one village before it was emptied. Those cactacae had sheltered northern refugees full of carnage stories, and they had determined to fight first. They met the militia in a fearful band, with their clubs and flint machetes. There had been butchery. One militiaman body was left behind, to be punished by the
ge’ain
amid the ripped-up cactus dead.
    “Two weeks gone they came. They hunt us after that,” the tardy said. “They bring Tesh war here now?” Cutter shook his head.
    “It’s a fucking mess,” he said. “The militia we’re following—they ain’t after these poor bastards, they’re after our man. These cactacae’ve panicked because of what they’ve heard, and made themselves targets.
    “Listen to me,” he said to the leviathan green man. “They who done this to your village, they’re looking for someone. They want to stop him before he can give a message.” He looked up into the big face. “More of them’ll come.”
    “Tesh come too. To fight them. Fight us on both sides.”
    “Yes,” said Cutter. His voice was flat. He waited a long time. “But if he’s to win . . . if he can get away, then the militia . . . maybe they’ll have other things to think on than this war. So maybe you want to help us. We have to stop them, before they stop him.”
             
    With misshaped hands to his mouth the tardy gave a cry as base as animal pain. His lament rumbled over the grass. The animals of the hot night paused, and in the still there was an answer. Another cry, from miles off, that Cutter felt in his guts.
    Again and again the tardy sounded, announcing himself, and over the hours of that night a little corps of the
ge’ain
came to
him on huge and painful steps. There were five, and they were various: some more than twenty feet tall, some barely half that, limbs broken and reset, unshapely. A company of the lame, the crippled strong.
    The travellers were cowed. The tardy mourned together in their own language. “If you might help us,” Cutter told them humbly, “maybe we can stop the