by James Axler
Sylvano exposed his mulelike teeth as their blades rang between them. “Yes, I await your response with Capoferro.”
“Such would be a logical expectation.” Doc surged forward with a flurry of feints and thrusts. “Unless one’s opponent knew his Agrippa!”
Sylvano came within an inch of losing his left eye. He jerked his head back as Doc knew he would, and Doc’s blade arrowed for Sylvano’s heart at the opening. Only shear athleticism allowed Sylvano to turn the thrust aside. The attack failed, but Doc was never one to forget his blade’s edge and Sylvano’s desperate defense left another opening. Doc lashed his blade across Sylvano’s forearm in retreat.
Purple blood spilled upon the antique Persian carpet that served as their fencing lane. Barat shouted out in alarm. “My son!” He moved toward the door, and Doc leaped back and flung a warning cut at the baron. Barat cringed back in the corner, clutching his hands.
Doc resumed his attack on Sylvano. The wound upon the big man’s massive forearm was long and deep. “Porphyria, as I suspected. The ancient blood disease, though undoubtedly mutated into some obscene form brought about by this new age. I fear it will take Herculean measures to stem your hemorrhaging, Sylvano. Come now! Let us cease this! I have a friend who is a healer of some skill. Release my friend in jail and I will prevail upon my other companions to assist you!”
Sylvano roared like a lion and charged. His blood flew in purple ribbons as he attacked. Doc suddenly found he could do nothing but parry and retreat. After he had divined the islanders’ illness, Doc had hoped Sylvano would falter once wounded. Instead Sylvano charged like a bull. Doc found his lungs burning in his chest. He had seen far too much exertion in the past two days, and the liquor and strong tobacco he had imbibed were no longer his friends. Grim reality reasserted itself. In strict chronology he was a man no older than Ryan, but biologically, being time-trawled had left him with the body of a sixty-year-old man. Temporally he had seen three centuries’ worth of the worst behavior humanity had to offer, and had the mental and physical scars to prove it.
Doc gasped for breath. Sylvano was larger, faster, stronger and younger than him. His rapier’s blade was a full foot longer than Doc’s. The old man had the superior skill, but as his wind began to fail he felt like he was fencing with a freight train unconstrained by tracks. Doc heard the baron moving behind him but he could pay no attention to it. Sylvano’s attacks fell like rain. Doc parried, retreated and parried again. His arm began to feel leaden. It was only a matter of time before the behemoth in front of him beat down his blade and butchered him.
Doc had but one last ace up his sleeve.
“Sylvano? For a man with the bleeding disease, taking up the sword must have taken great courage. I honor you for it.”
Sylvano ignored Doc’s compliment and concentrated on destroying him.
“And for a self-taught swordsman?” Doc’s praise was sincere. “You are magnificent. In this configuration I am finished.”
The giant’s sword flashed and flashed again. He didn’t commit himself. He left no more openings. Every time they crossed swords his thrusts and parries were hammer blows intent on slamming the last bit of speed and strength out of the old man’s failing arm. Despite his blood spilling in a river upon the floor, Sylvano knew he had his opponent. With two more steps Doc’s back would be against the wall and he would be done for. Still, something in Doc’s demeanor troubled the giant. “Why do you smile?”
Doc gasped. “It is just…that I know something…you do not.”
Sylvano rose to his full seven feet as Doc sagged back against the wall. The point of the old man’s sword drooped like a reed bereft of water. Sylvano moved in for the kill. “And what would that be, Dr. Tanner?”
“I am not left-handed.”
Sylvano displayed his status as a gifted amateur rather than a true swordsman. He should have run Doc through, but instead he gaped as Doc passed his blade from left hand to right. Doc summoned his last strength and attacked. There was very little left to draw upon, but he was proud of his bravado, determined to die well, and Sylvano had allowed himself to be awed. The giant gasped as Doc transfixed his sword hand just as Doc had transfixed his father’s. The heavy rapier fell from Sylvano’s pierced hand and he staggered backward, clutching his wounds, and shouted in genuine terror, “No!”
Doc lunged. Twice he had sought Sylvano’s heart and failed. On his third attempt his timing and his target were in perfect accordance. He thrust his point straight and true for the purple, beating fist of the giant’s life.
Baron Barat’s blaster sounded like a cannon going off in the small study.
Doc’s thrust missed as a huge, invisible fist slammed him sideways. His legs no longer obeyed him and he buckled. Doc sighed wearily as he fell. “Oh, bother.”
Chapter Eight
Ryan rose from his drug-induced dreams like Orpheus ascending from Hades. Every horror he had seen, every atrocity he had witnessed, every terrible act he himself had been forced to commit or had visited against him in this fire-blasted world had come to him, come back assisted, exaggerated and multiplied tenfold by his imagination and the hallucinogenic vileness Baron Barat had poured forth into his cup. The world spun as Ryan became aware of his surroundings. He tried to rise and put his feet beneath him, but fell. Constable Jorge-Teo and his sec men laughed as Ryan fell from his bunk and knocked over the slop bucket.
Ryan lay naked in filth. A shuddering smile passed across his crusted lips. Naked except for his eye patch. That was the second and last mistake these chill-pale, rad-blasted sec muties were ever going to make. The men stopped laughing as someone pounded on the door. Ryan lay where he was and spent time gathering himself.
The door opened. Jorge-Teo called out in greeting. “Father Joao! I see your fishing trip went well!” He laughed again and called back to the holding cells. “Hey! Prisoner! Your friends are here!”
Ryan ignored the imperative to look and just lay on the concrete. Ryan recognized Mildred Wyeth’s voice as she made an outraged snarl. The constable wasn’t pleased with Ryan’s recalcitrance. “Mateus! Get him up.”
Mateus was a lanky man as tall as Doc but with black hair and bad teeth. He walked up to the cell and drew another of the home-rolled, double-barrel blasters the sec men in these parts seemed to favor. “Hey, this one is loaded with salt.” He jerked the barrels upward, indicating Ryan should stand. “But you still won’t like it.”
Ryan still felt as weak as a kitten, and being blasted with rock salt wasn’t going to improve matters. He crawled across the floor and used the bars of the cell to haul himself up to a swaying, standing position. Jak and Mildred were bound by the hands. Neither one looked injured. The sec man behind Mildred couldn’t seem to keep his chalk-white hand off her behind. The muzzles of the blaster pressed against the back of her head were telling her to shut up and love it. Another man was putting Jak’s and Mildred’s weapons and packs in a locker. Ryan’s blasters weren’t among them, and he suspected the baron had confiscated them for himself. Ryan met the eyes of a chalk-faced man in a hooded black robe with red piping. His black hair was tonsured rather than long, and he had a short mustache and beard. He wore a golden crucifix around his neck.
Father Joao.
“Prisoner.” The priest gestured at his captives. “You know these?”
Ryan looked back and forth between Jak and Mildred. He spit as he surveyed Jak. “He’s one of you.” Ryan’s eye slid across Mildred in disgust. “I don’t know what kind of rad-burned mutie that is.” Ryan turned and shuffled back to his bunk. He waited for the double blast of rock salt in his back, but it didn’t come.
The constable was amused once more. “Well, either our friend is a very uneducated man or he is lying.” He examined his two new detainees. His eyes lingered long on Mildred’s shapely form. “An African and an albino. I must say I am intrigued.”
Mildred was in no mood to be contrite. “Why don’t you start singing Ebony and Ivory and watch what
happens.”
Constable Jorge-Teo stared for a few uncomprehending heartbeats and then jerked his head at the sec man behind her. “Valter!” Mildred crumpled as Valter drove the butt of his blaster into her kidney. The men all laughed. Father Joao tsked in unconvincing disapproval. Valter stared down at Mildred in open cupidity.
“I want this one.”
Jorge-Teo scowled and his hand went to his semiauto blaster. Father Joao raised a warning hand. “It is the baron who decides who is to breed with who and when outside of marriage.”
Tension filled the sec station.
Valter broke the tension with a leer. “Who said breed?” He stared down knowingly at Mildred as she pushed herself up to hands and knees. “She has other holes.”
Jorge-Teo grinned and called back, “Prisoner! What do you think?”
Ryan stayed in the shadows of his bunk. The slop bucket scraped as he pulled it to him. He had nothing left in his stomach, but he stuck his finger down his throat and retched. The sec men all laughed once more.
“I don’t think he cares,” Valter stated.
Jorge-Teo nodded at Father Joao. “Perhaps you should go outside and keep watch.”
“Constable!” Father Joao lapsed into Portuguese as he protested.
Jorge-Teo returned the conversation to English for the benefit of the captives. “Come now, Father, we all know what you do in your cottage with that little island girl the baron gave you.”
Father Joao’s alabaster skin flushed pink.
All the sec men laughed once more. Jorge-Teo shrugged. “You can do the same to the African when we are finished. As long as her womb is not damaged, the baron will not mind so much. I believe we would all like to see it.” The men laughed again, but cruelty replaced shame in the priest’s eyes as he moved to the door. Jorge-Teo raised a cautioning hand. “You see the baron’s wag or his personal guard, you knock three times. Best we apologize later than be caught now.”
“Yes, Constable, I understand.”
“And, Father?”
“Yes, Constable?”
“I know you are distracted, and we are in town, and you pray for us, but remember our duty. Keep an eye out for the nightwalkers.”
All lust and cruelty drained from Joao’s face. Valter and Mateus both handed him a blaster and the priest took them. “Yes, Constable.” Joao stepped out in the night.
Nightwalkers. Ryan filed that away. He rose as the sec men began unbuckling their swords and blaster belts. They shucked off long coats and shirts to expose worm-pale flesh. Valter and several others dropped their trousers to reveal the purple, engorged flesh rising between their legs. Ryan flipped up his eye patch. A pair of curved spring-steel slivers made a frame around its edges. They had keylike flanges and cuts on both ends. The picks popped into Ryan’s hand with a squeeze of the patch. He pulled the eye patch back into place and stalked to the bars of his cage. The constable’s sec men had no attention to spare for a vomiting prisoner.
They had fresh meat in front of them.
Mildred suddenly rolled over and snapped her boot up between Valter’s legs. Most of the men laughed and roared as Valter keened and dropped. They liked a victim with a little life in her. But not too much. Mateus stomped on Mildred’s stomach, and she gasped and curled.
Ryan silently slipped his picks into the tumblers and began working the lock.
Jak struggled violently, but he got a flurry of fists and boots for his trouble.
Ryan felt the ancient lock responding to his seduction. The lock was old but oiled and well maintained. He suspected the holding cells had frequent guests. The constable was just stupid enough to keep the hinges of the cell doors well oiled, as well. He should have known that nothing should open silently in a jail.
The would-be rapists heard nothing as Ryan stepped from his cell.
The sec station blasters were all chained, and the sec men had piled their weapons on the other side of the room. Constable Jorge-Teo and his men stood in a circle, pants down, as Valter stood over his victim. Mildred feebly tried to kick him and he stomped on her ankle in reprisal when she failed. Valter grabbed Mildred by the legs and savagely flipped her onto her stomach.
Ryan draped a sword belt over his shoulder.
Valter took out a knife and began cutting his way down the back seam of Mildred’s khaki cargo pants. “Christiano! Hold her!” Christiano helpfully grabbed Mildred by her beaded plaits and rammed her face into the floor. Jorge-Teo dropped his pants. “Muisa!” He pointed to the man holding Jak. “That one does not move.”
Muisa’s paper-pale fist fell into the side of Jak’s neck three times and left him twitching on the floor.
Ryan silently removed a whaling lance from the rack. Long ago Ryan had been upon the waters of the Lantic and chased Leviathan. He took up the seven-and-a-half-foot killing spear, and it felt familiar in his calloused hands. Half of the length was a wooden haft as thick as his arm. The rest was an iron shaft tipped with a fist-size lozenge of sharpened spearhead. Ryan took the lance in the underhanded hold. He took three short, sharp steps forward and let fly. It was a heave rather than a throw. Like many implements designed for killing rather than fighting, it was the weight of this weapon that did the work. The whaling lance was made to sink through half a fathom of whale flesh to seek its life.
Valter’s spine proved little barrier to the twenty-pound pike.
He proved so unresistant to whale spears that the blade punched all the way through his middle and sank into Christiano’s face where he knelt holding Mildred’s head against the floor. Ryan’s stolen sword hissed from its sheath as he stalked forward among the suddenly screaming blood-spattered sec men. He was only a middling sword-fighter. Nevertheless Doc had tried to teach him a few things in his more lucid moments. Ryan rammed his blade through Mateus’s heart with an authority that would have done Doc proud.
The constable’s blaster rose.
Jak jumped up from the floor and put both boots into Jorge-Teo’s chest. The constable went flying over a desk, and his blaster sailed across the room. Jak couldn’t break his fall with his hands tied, and his breath blasted out of his lungs as he hit the concrete hard. The remaining sec man grabbed for the pants puddled around his ankles and screamed for mercy. “No! No! No!” Ryan rammed his blade through the man’s vitals and the sec man fell vomiting blood the color of wine.
Father Joao flung open the door. “Que inferno…” His already fish-belly complexion paled at the carnage in the sec station. Ryan darted his sword across the distance between them but it clanged off the door as Joao slammed it shut again.
Jorge-Teo was up and running for his office.
Ryan sprinted after him.
The constable slammed the door to his office shut behind him and flung the bolt home. Ryan dived through the frosted window. Jorge-Teo screamed as Ryan tackled him in a shower of glass. The two men rolled across the floor and Ryan came up on top. His fist pistonned into his opponent’s face like a jackhammer. Jorge-Teo’s lips split apart and his parrotlike teeth shattered beneath Ryan’s knuckles. He checked his bloody hand midblow as Jorge-Teo’s eyes rolled and he went limp. The one-eyed man rose and dragged the half-conscious constable back into the main jail.
Jak was free of his bonds and he rose from putting the wounded sec man out of his misery. As Mildred stared at the ruins of her pants, Ryan dropped Jorge-Teo. He walked over to the locker and pulled on his clothes and boots. He wished for his blasters; his blades were there. He tossed Mildred her pack and she quickly stepped into her spare pair of pants. Ryan strapped on his panga and then slid his slim-bladed combat knife into the top of his boot. He stalked across the room and picked up the constable’s fallen blaster. It had a long barrel and said MAUSER on the slide. Ryan checked the load and found a spare mag in the constable’s coat.
Mildred checked the loads in her blaster. “Where’s Doc?”
“Baron had him brought up to the manor.”
“Where that?” Jak asked.
> “Dunno.” Ryan looked down at Jorge-Teo. “He’ll tell us. Where’re Krysty and J.B.?”
“The mat-trans only lets two people through at a time, and it looks like it’s set on a seventy-two-hour schedule,” Mildred said. “Jak and I came through, so I’m thinking J.B. and Krysty got denied and are still back at the redoubt. The stickie situation was getting pretty ugly when we left and can’t be getting any better. They’ll be running out of food and water soon.”
Ryan checked his chron. Two more days till Krysty and J.B. could jump, and the baron would have a welcoming party waiting. Ryan quickly filled his people in on the situation on the other island and what had happened after the crossing as the church bells began to ring the alarm out in the square. “I don’t like it but we’re going to have to split up. Mildred and I are going after Doc. Jak, I want you to get yourself a black hat and blend in.”
Without a word Jak rummaged through the caped long coats of the fallen sec men. They were all too large, so it came down to the least bloodstained. Mildred tucked his snow-white hair up into the broad-brimmed hat while he pulled on gloves. Jak tucked his blaster away and picked up a pair of the local weapons. He put on a pair of the local smoked lenses and gave Ryan a shrug.
“At first glance,” Ryan said, “you’ll do.”
“Job?” Jak asked.
“Father Joao. Get him. Get his boat. We need off this island and access to the sister isle and the mat-trans escarpment.”
“Got it,” Jak said. “Meet where?”
“Doc and I made landfall a couple miles north of the ville. Be there at dawn. We’ll meet you.” Ryan thought of the cave. “Don’t come within sight of land until sunup. If we aren’t there, then try again at noon, then dawn tomorrow. If we still aren’t there, then getting Krysty and J.B. is your priority.”
Jak moved to the back door of the sec station without another word.
Ryan turned his eye upon his former jailer. Ryan had beaten him senseless and Jorge-Teo’s eyes were still rolling. Ryan yanked him up by the hair and slapped him back to lucidity. “Where’s the baron?”