Demon (GAIA) by John Varley

to the wall, but one was dead, another badly wounded. The third crouched by her sisters, an arrow ready, looking very frightened. The two groups were twenty meters apart, and the newcomers showed no signs of wishing to join up with the archer. Who the hell
were
these people, anyhow? Apparently they didn’t trust anyone. He hadn’t seen anybody so suspicious since…well, since Cirocco Jones. It wasn’t going to be easy to rescue them.
    Until that moment, he hadn’t realized he
was
going to rescue them. He wasted a few minutes trying to talk himself out of it. Looked at reasonably, it seemed the most foolhardy thing he had tried since the day he swaggered into a bar and told the most dangerous woman alive he planned to kill her.
    He looked down at the face of the baby boy.
    “What the hell do you have to smile about, mister?” Conal asked him. Then he turned and hurried back over the bridge.
    ***
    “A hundred, did you say?” The Titanide named Serpent raised a dubious brow.
    “Hell, Serpent, you know I can’t count to twenty-one without opening my fly. There’s
about
a hundred, maybe a hundred twenty.”
    “Describe the smaller one to me again?”
    “Drawings on her face. A real fright mask. The other one—”
    “They are tattoos,” Serpent said.
    “You mean they don’t come off? How do you know?”
    “She has a third eye drawn on her-forehead, doesn’t she.”
    “Yeah…yeah, I think so. Her hair was bouncing around a lot. They were pretty busy trying to look six ways at once…. How did you know?”
    “I know her.”
    “Then you’ll come?”
    “Yes, I think I will.” He looked around the big warehouse that served the Titanides as a trading post, picked up two other Titanides with his eyes. “In fact, I think we’ll make it a troika.”
    ***
    They sounded like the Apocalypse minus one as they thundered over the wooden bridge. Conal, clinging to Serpent’s back, wished he had a bugle. It was the friggin’ cavalry to the rescue, by God. The people in the back of the mob spent only a moment gaping at the sight, then scurried like hyenas from a carcass. They ran anywhere they could go. Many of them jumped into the putrid waters of the lake.
    But a lot didn’t have time to flee. The Titanides waded in, weaponless, and began breaking necks.
    Conal had worried the women might fire at these apparitions, but apparently their suspicious natures didn’t extend to Titanides. They watched, alert for an opportunity to break through and get away from the wall. Then Serpent lifted Conal and tossed him over the heads of the circle of people.
    He landed on his feet and just managed to stay on them, stumbling forward, holding the baby out in front so they wouldn’t be tempted to shoot him. He had been gone for almost a rev, and during that time the women had been stoned by the crowd. He tripped over a large, loose rock, fell, and crawled around the makeshift barricade of luggage they had been crouching behind.
    He looked up into the face of the blonde amazon. Nineteen, he decided. There was a line of drying blood down the left side of her face. He felt a surge of anger; he wanted to kill the bastard who did that. There was more pressing business, however, such as the gun she held to his temple. He held out the baby and put on his most winning smile.
    “Hi. I’m Conal, and I think this belongs to you.”
    Another of Cirocco’s favorite aphorisms: Never Expect Gratitude. Her upper lip curled contemptuously, and she jerked her head toward the older woman.
    “Not me. It’s
hers.
”

Travelogue
    At about the same time Conal was charging to the rescue in Bellinzona, an angel came to Cirocco Jones in Phoebe.
    She stood at the edge of the three-kilometer cliff that marked the northern highlands and watched the angel approach from the south. Beyond the angel was a dark mountain. It had four distinct peaks, each a different height. To Cirocco, it resembled a broken bottle planted butt-first in the ground, with dirt