Haven's Blight

by James Axler

  He cocked his head and gazed at Doc. “You know, we could have used your help tinkering that contraption together. Reckon it’s right up your alley as a man of science and all.”

  Doc shied like a startled horse. “It most emphatically is not, my good man!” he exclaimed. “Capital punishment, especially public executions, is a barbaric ritual. I do not hold with them. Nor have I ever.”

  “But I thought, what with you coming from a time when they hanged a lot of people…”

  Doc glared. “In this, your own time, in which I unfortunately find myself cast away like Robinson Crusoe upon the savage shore, there exist men so debased as to compel innocent savants to perform indecent commerce with barnyard animals. Does that mean you endorse that practice?”

  “Easy, Doc,” Ryan said in a low voice. He wasn’t worried about J.B.’s tender sensibilities, owing to the fact he doubted there were any. He was worried about Doc working himself into a state over memories of things gone like bullets from blasters.

  “Well, no,” J.B. said, “can’t say as I do.”

  He pushed up his fedora to scratch the right side of his head. “The way I see it, this bunch needs chilling. They aren’t being tortured, so what’s the problem?”

  Doc looked away, shaking his head. “It is the principle. In any event, this all transpires with unseemly speed.”

  “Ryan heard St. Vincent advising the baron that swift justice’ll help stamp down any trouble before it gets going.”

  “Indeed? And the baron agreed?”

  “That St. Vincent seems to have a double load of influence over Blackwood for a servant,” Ryan observed. “Even the boss servant.”

  J.B. shrugged. “He served Tobias and Elizabeth’s old man, too.”

  Ryan squinted at his friend. “How does that recommend him as an adviser?”

  “Well, it seems he was always pretty attached to the kids. He may’ve played some role in bringing Dornan down, too.”

  “Would that very fact not tend to display a propensity for treachery on St. Vincent’s part?” Doc asked.

  “Mebbe St. Vincent hated the old bastard,” Ryan said. “Plenty other people did, for good reason. He doesn’t sound like a barrel of fun to work for.”

  He shrugged. “Speaking of which, St. Vincent doesn’t work for us. So I hardly see as it matters a spent round.”

  “Heard some talk when I was helping build the gallows,” J.B. said. “That sec boss, Guerrero, palavered some with his lieutenants. And that worried-looking tubby guy, Barton.”

  “Yeah?” Ryan said.

  After wakening he’d sat up holding Krysty’s unresponsive hand for a while, then he went downstairs, ate a slight breakfast alone, and drifted outside not too long ago. He’d spoken to no one in the house except for exchanging a few words with the woman who served him beignets, with real powdered white sugar, and coffee. “Landry still refusing to talk?”

  J.B. nodded. “Nobody else knows jack. Grunt-laborers, the bunch. Don’t know what actual evidence there is to tie the baron to the Beast. Landry wouldn’t tell them. Just assured them it was true.”

  “And they accepted that?” Doc asked.

  “They were scared, and used to just accepting anything Landry told them. Only one guy claimed he had the straight goods Blackwood knew all about the Beast and was covering it up. A ’cropper named Luc Corday. He went straight to Landry with his skinny, and Landry told him not to tell the others squat.”

  Jak stood to one side looking bored and disgruntled. The night’s events had prevented him going for a scheduled predawn hunting trip with his local friends. He snorted a laugh.

  “’Fraid they go half-cocked, make triple-big mess. Ha!”

  “Could be,” Ryan said. “Why doesn’t Guerrero just ask Corday what he had?”

  J.B. chuckled. “Can’t,” he said. “Corday was the dude whose head you split with that panga of yours, kicking off the dance.”

  Ryan swore feelingly.

  “Triple stupe,” Jak stated. “Attack baron on one man’s say-so! Even big-boss type.”

  “They are irrationally unhinged by the depredations of the Beast,” Doc said. “Such fear can cloud even the thinking of men who, candidly, have more practice of thinking.”

  “Turns out the whole mob was Landry’s own employees,” J.B. said, “sharecroppers and haulers. Or poor relatives. Reckon Landry handpicked them for being double scared and half smart.”

  “Why attack last night?” Doc asked. “In full knowledge we were on hand to aid in the house’s defense?”

  “Heard that before I took off back to bed last night,” Ryan said. “They got to yammering at Guerrero and his sec boys about how Landry told them the Beast struck again.”

  “Wild-goose chase,” J.B. said. “Sec goons bitched about that all morning long. None of the captives could say who the Beast chilled, or where. Nobody else heard a whisper about any of it.”

  “So Landry made it up, to get them stirred enough to move on the baron,” Ryan said.

  “I warned you,” Doc said, “such sentiment has been building for some time.”

  “So once he got his crew good and riled,” J.B. said, “old Landry said they had to act now because Blackwood was about to recruit us outlanders to help him root them out ’cause they were talking against him. Brought up old Baron Dornan and his wagon-wheel executions. That scared ’em right into action.”

  Ryan shook his head. “What lit Landry’s fuse? You’d think in his position he’d need to have some sense.”

  “Even in a ville as apparently orderly as Haven,” Doc said, “the Darwinian pressures of hanging onto large amounts of wealth and influence would weed out the utterly foolish.”

  “Like I said, he isn’t telling,” J.B. said. “All he’ll say is that he did it for Haven, and they never meant to harm Blackwood. His people back him—they all keep insisting the plan was never to hurt the baron, much less depose him. The whole idea was to take him captive and force him either to reveal the Beast’s hiding place or to agree to dispose of it himself.”

  Ryan gave him an arch-browed look of skepticism. “Why in the name of blazing nuke death wouldn’t the baron chill the Beast if he knew where to find it?”

  “Hey,” the Armorer said. “I didn’t buy the deal. Just passing on what I heard.”

  “Triple stupe,” Jak repeated.

  Ryan grunted. It was that. But it all refused to settle down and lie peacefully in his brain.

  “Too many questions,” he muttered. “And they’re all in a rush to chill the only one who seems to have any answers.”

  “Don’t think they can lean too hard on Landry, if you know what I mean,” J.B. said. “He’s still got a lot of kin and contacts. They may not be too eager to associate themselves with him just now, but there’s a limit to what Blackwood could do to him, even over something like this.”

  “I doubt the baron is the sort to countenance torture,” Doc said.

  “No,” Ryan said. “He wouldn’t let Guerrero’s boys do more than cuff the prisoners around a bit. Not that it took more than that to get them all singing like birds. Except for the one who knows something.”

  He shook his head. “I just can’t get it all to hook up and make sense.”

  Doc laid a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “My friend, if you insist on having all the world’s questions answered, and all her loose ends neatly tied, you will merely drive yourself to madness. Trust me on this.”

  “He’s got you there, Ryan,” J.B. said. “Doc’s made the trip many times.”

  Instead of rising to the Armorer’s bait, Doc only nodded sadly.

  A commotion announced the arrival of the baron and his retinue. He wore a tail coat and a high-collared shirt that looked uncomfortable, as if he were doing penance. He carried an umbrella. His sister walked beside him, her black hair done up in a bun. Her severe black dress with white lace collar made her face look almost as pale as her brother’s. Or perhaps it was more than that.

  They t
ook their places facing the gallows. Ryan sauntered over to join them, his companions trailing him.

  “Ryan, friends,” the baron said, nodding to them. Elizabeth smiled briefly and halfheartedly.

  “Baron. Ma’am,” Ryan said. “Kind of surprised to see you here, Lady Elizabeth.”

  “I feel obliged to face the reality of what we’re doing here, Mr. Cawdor,” she said. “It appalls me, however necessary.”

  He was also surprised to see her up and around. The last he’d heard, the previous night’s excitement had dropped her into a relapse. Mercier and Mildred had been buzzing around her like bees at the last bloom of autumn when he’d gone down for his solo breakfast.

  Blackwood squeezed his sister’s hand. “You speak for me, dear sister,” he said gravely.

  “You sure it’s a good idea to send them off this quick, Baron?” Ryan asked.

  Blackwood’s greyhound chest expanded and contracted in a mighty sigh. “Candidly, no. But given our unsettled conditions here in the ville I fear justice must be seen to come swiftly and certainly, or the people will lose all regard for it.”

  “Isn’t that how tyranny so often begins, brother?” Elizabeth asked. Ryan tried not to gape. She’d voiced exactly the sentiment that had flashed through his mind, and which he wasn’t about to say out loud.

  Almost as much to Ryan’s surprise her brother nodded. He had his long hair wound into a sausage-like queue at the back of his neck. “It is. All I can do is hope that I’m equal to the temptation to proceed ever faster down the same slippery slope that’s claimed so many.”

  “At least you’re willing to try,” J.B. said. “Most barons I’ve seen have already taken that hill at a dead run. If you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  “What about Landry?” Ryan said. “He’s the key to the whole thing.”

  “He’s as stubborn as a mule and as tough as an old cypress tree,” Blackwood said. “He wouldn’t talk if I consented to torture him. I rather be put to the torment myself! My father—”

  It was Elizabeth’s turn to squeeze his hand. “There, brother. Be calm.”

  He mastered himself with visible effort. “In any event, it’s most vital of all that he be executed along with those he led into criminal folly. I won’t have a double standard of justice for the high and low in this ville, and I want the people to see that with their own eyes!”

  “What people’s eyes see,” J.B. murmured, “and what kind of conclusions they draw from it, can be completely different things.”

  Instead of flashing into anger, like any normal baron would do when contradicted by a mere citizen, and an outlander at that, Tobias Blackwood only nodded gravely. “You speak the truth, Master Dix. Yet all we can do is all that we can do.”

  FRANC LANDRY HAD to be helped up to his place at the left-hand end of the line of condemned men by two burly executioners. He wasn’t the only one. But in his case it was purely because of his leg crippled by Ryan’s 9 mm slug. He tried his best to go to his death with back stiff and head high.

  Some of his condemned followers thrashed and blubbered and cried out for mercy as they were wrestled into place. A cordon of grim sec men armed with staffs and clubs held back the crowd. Which really meant they held back a couple dozen mourners, relatives of the condemned, who wept and wailed and held out their hands to their doomed kin.

  “How this will serve any end but to increase ill-will and dissonance within this ville,” Doc said, “escapes me entirely.” He wore his frock coat and held his swordstick as if he were attending a royal coronation.

  “You’re right on that one, Doc,” said Mildred, who had emerged from Mercier’s lab to join her friends at the last minute, apparently for the same reasons Elizabeth Blackwood was there. Mercier remained at her labors. Ryan reckoned she’d do the same if she was the one sentenced to hang, up until the actual moment they came to walk her to the gallows.

  “It’s a hard call,” Ryan admitted. “But if you’re going to be a baron, that’s the kind of choice you got to make.”

  The others piped down. They remembered all too clearly certain choices Ryan had been forced to make, to keep them all together and safe. Some of them had been downright stonehearted. He was a man who did what he had to, and he knew what it cost.

  “An irony,” Doc remarked as each condemned prisoner was fitted with a black hood. The key difference with the ones they’d used to hide their features the night before was that these lacked eyeholes. “In my day it was always bruited about that the hoods were to spare the condemned from seeing their own demises coming. The truth was, it was to spare the onlookers from looking into their eyes as they died, and seeing their faces twist in final contortions.”

  “Lots of folks take to executions like a boozer to shine,” J.B. said. “The more face contorting, the better.”

  “Not this bunch,” Ryan said. Eventually, several hundred Havenites had gathered in the square. They showed none of the sympathy for the condemned the relatives did, but neither did they show a flake of eagerness as far as Ryan could see. They stood as stiff and uncomfortable in the rain as their baron and his sister.

  Doc sighed. “For all its difficulties, this community seems unusually favored, in its rulership and in what it has built for itself,” he said. “I fear such an event as this might well mark its high-water mark.”

  “Much as I hate to,” Mildred said, “I’m going to have to agree with you twice in a row. I don’t like this at all.”

  “Makes everybody,” Jak said.

  AT LAST THE SIX prisoners were hooded, and nooses tied with the traditional thirteen knots fitted around their necks. Those unwilling, or in the ringleader’s case unable, to stand in place on the waiting trapdoor, were held upright by sec men.

  There was more than one yellow-tinged pool on the traps already.

  As Guerrero marched self-importantly to the big lever that would spring all six traps at once, Franc Landry began to speak.

  “Fools!” Landry declaimed. His voice rang clear and sharp as a big bronze bell despite the muffling black cloth. “You poor, deluded fools! Baron Tobias knows the truth about the Beast. Don’t you see? The Beast is—”

  Blackwood nodded. Putting his back into it, Guerrero hauled back on the lever.

  Landry was cut off mid-declaration. Six necks broke with a sound like a string of firecrackers going off in a burlap bag.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As Ryan walked away from the scaffold and the six corpses that hung from it, he felt a fleeting contact of warm flesh on his left hand. Something with sharp edges was pressed into his palm.

  He whipped around, ready to fight. A kid stood there, ten at most, a sturdy blond boy in sun-faded blue shorts and a shapeless homespun smock, feet bare on the rain-damp grass. The boy smiled, showing a couple of missing front teeth.

  “Supposed to give you a message, mister,” he piped up. Then he was gone in the crowd that was slowly and quietly dispersing back to its daily routines.

  Ryan turned his hand over. There was a stiff piece of card stock wedged in his palm. It had writing on it in a loopy, spidery cursive.

  “What you got, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

  “Some kid gave me this note,” he said, holding it up. “Stuck it right in my hand before I knew he was there.”

  “If he goes into some honest trade the world’ll miss out on a fine pickpocket,” the Armorer said. “What’s it say?”

  Ryan handed it to him. “Read.”

  J.B. did. “Huh,” he said. “Going to go?”

  “Why not?” Ryan said.

  “I can think of mebbe a thousand reasons offhand.”

  “Me, too,” Ryan admitted. “But if we’re starting to attract serious attention, I’d like to get some clue how or why.”

  J.B. nodded. “I hear you. We got protection as guests and big pals of the Baron and his sis. But we may be painting bull’s-eyes on our foreheads, too. You going do like it says and go alone?”

  “Fireblast, no,” Ryan sa
id with a wolf’s grin.

  IT WAS A SIZABLE warehouse on the bayou waterfront. Although its planks were warped and weathered, it looked to be in good repair. Ryan paused to give it a good scoping by starlight from outside before striding to the orange rectangle of light cast from within.

  Somewhere up the broad bayou a gator bawed.

  Ryan stepped through the open door and sidestepped immediately so as not to leave himself silhouetted in the door, an easy target. Inside he found stacks of wooden crates, casks and huge glass carboys filled with brown fluid. It smelled strongly of tanned leather and some unidentifiable spice, as well as the kerosene lantern hanging from a roof beam in the middle of the large central storeroom.

  “Cawdor? Is that you?” a voice called. A door stood open in an office walled off from the far riverside corner of the building, to Ryan’s left. The light of a second lantern shone from it. “Come on in.”

  He walked to the door. Inside the man he knew from Baron Tobias Blackwood’s dinner table as Al Bouvier sat behind a desk. He had his booted feet up on a green felt blotter.

  The big-bellied man swung down his feet and stood. He wore a white shirt with big sweat-stain half-moons under the arms, dark brown pants with suspenders to hold them up. To his right a glazed window stood open, covered with an expensive scavvied metal-mesh screen to keep out the night bugs, some big alarming specimens of which were crawling around on it buzzing their wings in frustration. The window opened on the river. Though Ryan couldn’t see it, he could hear its slosh and gurgle and smell the tannin-rich black water.

  “Take a load off,” Bouvier said. He waved at a wooden chair set in front of the desk with a big thick hand.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Ryan said, and sat.

  “Thanks for coming,” Bouvier said. He hefted a square-sided glass bottle three-quarters full of dark amber fluid, tipped it side to side to make the liquid swirl.

  “Whiskey? It’s real bourbon from what they tell me used to be Kentucky. Not shine colored with tobacco spit.”