by James Axler
As they approached up a path that crunched with gravel beneath her boots, the front double doors swung wide. An almost intolerable blaze of light poured out onto the broad front steps.
Silhouetted against that light was the tall figure of Baron Frost.
“Welcome to Castle Stormbreak, my friends,” he said. “Come in.”
Chapter Five
“He seems pretty sure we’re friends,” Mildred muttered darkly behind Ryan as the friends followed the tall, black-clad form of Baron Frost down a wide corridor lit by kerosene lanterns.
“Are you complaining?” asked Krysty, walking beside her.
“They have permitted us into their stronghold,” Doc stated, “and not relieved us of our weapons. So, apparently so.”
“Don’t check a gift blaster’s bore till you get out of sight,” Ryan said. “Stow it.”
Mildred emitted what sounded like a low growl. Ryan ignored it. J.B. was dangerously wounded and she was upset. Well, so was he.
He was glad Doc seemed to have pulled his focus together again. Yes, the Stormbreak locals, from their black-mustached baron on down, seemed well-disposed toward them. And had they harbored bad intentions it would have been easy to take down Ryan and his companions a dozen times over, starting with allowing the slavers to take them down before mopping up the slavers.
But as a baron’s dispossessed son himself, Ryan knew that if there was any bigger mistake than relying on a baron’s gratitude, it was relying on his consistency. Or anybody’s in the Deathlands. He’d learned that lesson the hard way, growing up alone as a young teen.
“Not cold now,” Jak said with satisfaction, bringing up the rear with his new best pal Ricky.
That summed it up as far as Ryan was concerned. For Jak, who almost always far preferred being outside of walls to being inside them, to be pleased at being indoors, for once, told the tale.
Baron Frost led them between framed portraits of thin, austere women and burly, grim, bearded men to a right turn, which took them into a large room. After the crushing gloom and marrow-biting cold outside, its shining chandelier, white walls and roaring fire both dazzled Ryan’s eye and seemed to scorch his face.
A woman stood before the giant hearth, which looked big enough to roast a bull moose whole without sawing off the antlers.
“Katerina, my dear,” the baron said in his deep voice, “I want you to meet our new friends.”
The woman turned. She was tall, with black hair veined by silver. Startling blue eyes looked out of a finely chiseled face. The black fur-collared dressing gown she wore wasn’t so loosely tailored as to conceal the fact that she had kept her figure despite the onset of middle age. Or that it was a pleasing one. She was strikingly beautiful.
She seemed well matched to her husband the baron. Ivan Frost’s black beard had his namesake in it, and he had a white blaze in the close-cropped raven hair above his rugged face. His eyes were a paler blue than his wife’s.
She smiled.
Ryan glanced back at Krysty, who stood by his right shoulder, half a step behind. She wasn’t touching him, but he felt her warmth and knew her presence.
She gave him a tiny wink.
Baron Frost was already introducing Ryan and his companions in a resonant baritone. His manner was certainly that of a baron, though Ryan couldn’t forget watching him lead his two fellow riders into the thick of battle.
Nor could he see any reason for the baron to take part in a battle. At the very least, Baron Frost would be a bad man to underestimate.
Katerina Frost shook Ryan’s hand and gave him a warm smile. She did the same with Krysty and Doc.
When she got to Mildred, the physician said, “Listen, my lady, I’m pleased to meet you and all. But your husband decided that my man should be brought here. I want to see him now.”
Ryan gave her a look. Belatedly she accepted the baroness’s hand and shook it.
“The wounded man is your husband?”
“Close enough,” Mildred said. “Right now, the important thing is, he’s my patient. And I need to see to him. He needs immediate treatment or he’ll die.”
“He is being tended to right now,” the baron said.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said harshly.
“No, Mildred,” Ryan said. “I will.”
She shot Ryan a glare. He met her look calmly.
She was an intelligent woman and a well-educated one. And sooner or later the former would get the better of the latter, he knew.
Mildred dropped her gaze and her shoulders slumped. She had remembered either that Ryan was their nominal leader, or which of the two of them had ridden with J.B. longer.
Still smiling, Lady Katerina patted Mildred gently on the shoulder. Then she moved on to be introduced to Jak and a blushing, stammering Ricky.
Krysty moved up and took Ryan’s arm. He knew she was trying to reassure him about his best friend. He didn’t brush her off.
“On my word as a baron,” Frost said, “your friend is receiving care as good as any which is likely to be available in our blighted world.”
Ryan met his eye. “I’m a baron’s son myself,” he said. “I know what the word of most barons is worth.”
Frost laughed. “Fair enough, Ryan Cawdor. Then, on my word as someone who has fought by your side.”
Ryan shrugged. “You seem a straight shooter. I’ll take your word because of that. But we want to see him.”
“Soon,” Frost said as his wife came back to his side. “But first, we must discuss a proposition.”
“It figures,” Mildred said. “You’re going to bargain for John Barrymore’s life.”
“And it’s lucky for us that they are,” Ryan rasped. “They could’ve let him die in the snow. All of us. Fireblast, Mildred, have some nuking sense. Haven’t you learned yet that the usual bargain you get offered in this world is ‘we kill you and take everything’?”
He felt Krysty squeeze his strong arm. Loving, gentle—and hard enough to send a message.
“Easy now, lover,” she said. “She’s worried.”
“So am I, rad-blast it,” he muttered back.
He looked at the baronial pair and rubbed his jaw. Stubble grated his palm.
“I’m listening,” he said. “Name your bargain.”
Katerina smiled; Baron Frost nodded.
“You’re clearly warriors,” he said. “Not just brave, but resourceful. We need your help.”
“We want our daughter back, Mr. Cawdor,” Katerina said. “We want your help.”
“Where is she?” Mildred asked. “If it takes more than a few hours, J.B.’ll be dead!”
“Our healers are confident they can keep him alive longer than that,” Frost said.
Krysty had moved to Mildred’s side and put an arm around her. Glancing back, Ryan saw her give the stocky healer a hug—that clearly carried the same import her hand-squeeze had to Ryan. Mildred glared and rolled eyes as bloodshot as those of a buffalo bull pissed off hotter than nuke red, but she held her peace.
“We will operate on your friend,” Katerina said. “And save his life—if that is possible. When you bring us back our daughter, we’ll let you have him back. And an appropriate amount of jack. All accounts squared.”
Mildred uttered a strangled noise. Ryan waved a hand as if batting back a mosquito.
“Why so generous?”
“Generous?” Mildred squawked. “What the hell are you—”
“Stow it.”
She shut up. Ryan hadn’t raised his voice. He only made it crack like a blaster.
“Generous, I said. Because it is. Barons don’t commonly put themselves out for the sake of random strangers who happen to wander into their land.”
“We try to hold ourselves to a high standard, Mr. Cawdor,” Frost said. “But the fact is, you’ve done us a powerful service already.”
“Chilling slavers?” Ricky piped up. Ryan scowled but didn’t turn it on the boy. The fact was, the kid was one of th
em now. So, like any of them, he got his say in council. Within reason.
The baron nodded. “Yes. And helping us locate their base.”
“So you can wipe it out?” Ricky asked.
Ryan did shoot him a glare this time. The youth’s dark eyes got wide and he drew his neck in between his shoulders like a frightened turtle.
“Sadly, that lies beyond our capabilities. Although, given time, we could get help from some of our neighbors. They’ve been hitting us all hard for months—not just stealing our people, but chilling, raping, looting. And destroying what they can’t carry off.
“But what we can do is harry them. Make it hard for them to do any more raiding. They do what they do to turn a profit, after all. We can, and will, increase their costs until they find some grounds that are easier to hunt.”
“So, make them somebody else’s problem, huh?”
“Exactly, Mildred. If you have a better solution, I implore you to share it.”
“She doesn’t,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it, either, truth to tell. So this is the bastards’ main base?”
“By no means, Mr. Cawdor. It’s merely a forward base for a segment of the sizable network of slavers that has plagued this coast for years. They invade a territory in force, plant themselves and send out smaller raiding parties. Then withdraw.”
Ryan heard a rustling that he knew meant Ricky Morales was shuffling his booted feet as if he needed to take a piss. His adored older sister, Yamile, had been kidnapped by the slavers who trashed his home ville and murdered his mother and father before his eyes. He traveled with the companions, searching for her, convinced she was still alive. And despite the fact she had been taken on the distant island of Puerto Rico, they’d learned enough in recent months to know that the slaver network extended from the islands of the Carib to the Cific Ocean.
Ricky also knew what thin ice he was walking on—alien as that was to his tropical homeland. Also, he probably knew that the baron and his wife were unlikely to know anything about his sister’s fate. No matter how much they knew about the slavers.
“Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do it.”
“Ryan!” Mildred couldn’t hold back anymore. She even tore free of Krysty’s arm—and Krysty was as strong as most men her size. “We don’t know what they’re doing for him! We don’t know what they can do!”
“It wouldn’t matter a bent empty cartridge case if all they could do was sacrifice a bastard goat, Mildred,” Ryan said. “We already know we can’t save him. We’re empty.”
“Ryan,” Krysty said urgently. “She does need to see him now. We all do.”
“Me, too.” Ryan turned back to the baron. “Take us to see him. Show us what you can do.”
“With pleasure,” Frost said.
The baron gestured. A slender young man in linsey-woolsey tailored to look like a uniform came to his side. The baron murmured a brief command. The aide nodded and took off.
Ryan’s brows rose.
“Your pardon, Baron,” Doc said, “but if I may be so bold—was that language you were just speaking Russian?”
Ryan already knew that answer.
“Yes,” Frost said.
“Will you kindly tell us why you speak it here?”
Katerina smiled again.
“Why, because we—our family in particular, but pretty much everybody hereabouts, these days—are descended in part from the crew of a Soviet submarine that foundered off this very shore as the skydark began.”
Chapter Six
“The B-276 Kostroma was her name,” Baron Frost stated as he led the companions briskly down a corridor into the depths of the fortress. “She was a cruise-missile-armed Sierra-class nuclear boat. As the war began she was cruising at shallow depth near the coast of what was then the state of Maine, when she was hit by an Mk-48 torpedo launched by an American attack sub. Tradition says she was SSN-706, the USS Albuquerque. How the crew could have known any such thing is debatable, but this is what we are taught.”
He led them down a stairway to a basement with damp concrete walls, faintly lit by a single kerosene lantern hanging halfway down its short length. At the far end of the basement was a double swing door.
“For reasons unknown, the American boat broke off the attack. Kostroma did not sink—at least, not right away. But with her titanium pressure hull breached, Captain Andreyev managed to ground her in shallow water not far from this very cliff, at a place where the land descends to the sea. Most of the crew got ashore alive. They even managed to offload most of her supplies, including her surgery and medical gear. And, speaking of which—” he pushed open the double doors “—we are here.”
Katerina stepped into the glare of light, then to one side. Ryan strode into a basement room with walls painted glaring white and a drain in the brown tile floor.
But unlike most such rooms in baronial basements, this was not a torture chamber. Or, if it was, it was a sophisticated one.
The walls were lined with cabinets and sinks, like a predark infirmary. Ryan had seen plenty in his time, buried deep in the lost redoubts, that contained valuable salvage—and the secret mat-trans network.
In the center of the room stood a table, gleaming chrome like the vanadium-steel doors of a redoubt. J.B. lay prone on a pallet atop the table. His head was back, with a roll of cloth to support his neck, and a mask covered his mouth. An olive-drab Army blanket, evidently American, covered his body to the rib cage. The top of a bandage was visible above it.
Mildred uttered a little gasp. But when she walked by Ryan she was upright and in full command of herself. She was a professional, in a way almost no one was in this desperate and decaying age.
She bent to examine J.B. His color didn’t look promising to Ryan: his skin looked as if it was dusted in double-fine wood ash. But Mildred did some gingerly probing, then nodded.
“He seems stable,” she said, looking up. “For the moment. He’s feverish, just by touch.”
“Because we have been unable to fully clean out the foreign material, including cloth, injected by the bullet,” a crisp female voice said, “we expect that infection has set in. I have given him antibiotics, and I believe we can contain the infection.”
Everyone had turned to face the speaker. A door stood open to a side room. Ryan, who was in the habit of taking in every detail of his surroundings at a glance, had noticed it the instant he walked through the doorway. He frowned; he hadn’t taken adequate account of the fact that someone might be in that other room.
He frowned at his lapse.
The person in question wasn’t threatening at first glance. She was a tiny woman, shorter even than Jak. Ryan would be amazed if she was a hair over five-nothing, and she might not be that tall. Her skin was darker than Mildred’s, though of a different color-blend. Her eyes were big and black in a squarish yet undeniably pretty face. She wore a pale green lab coat over a dark T-shirt and jeans, and she carried a clipboard.
Mildred stepped back and glared at her. The other woman put her head to one side and peered at her like a large, quizzical bird.
“This is Lindy Rao, our healer,” Katerina said. “She has earned our complete trust with her skill and knowledge.”
“Is that oxygen?” Mildred demanded, gesturing at the mask.
The Stormbreak healer shook her head. “We generate and store emergency electricity by various means, largely windmills and batteries. It is insufficient to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen electrically. But enough to allow us to run a low-power air pump. That is merely air under moderate pressure to help him breathe.”
“Is that a good idea? He has a pneumothorax.” Mildred glanced at Ryan and her friends. “That’s, uh, a collapsed lung. Sucking chest wounds usually cause that.”
Ryan gestured for her to continue her discussion with the local healer.
“I’m aware of that,” Lindy said simply, with neither defensiveness nor apology. “We have a chest tube to release the air that has escaped into his
pleural space.”
They started discussing which antibiotic J.B. had been dosed with. Since they knew about that, and Ryan didn’t have to, he turned to their hosts as Krysty went to stand by Mildred’s side.
Partly, he judged, to check on their wounded friend herself. Partly to lend emotional support to Mildred. And partly, he was sure, to serve as control rod should Mildred show signs of becoming critical.
“Lindy comes from a family of healers famous in this part of New England,” the baroness explained. “They have preserved much medical knowledge from predark. The healers they train are as good as any we have heard of in our modern world.”
“Fair enough,” Ryan said. “So tell us more about this deal we’re getting into.”
Baron Frost gestured at the door through which they’d entered. “If you will accompany us, we can discuss the matter in more comfortable surroundings. In which we are less likely to disturb your friend.”
“Fine with me. Mildred?” Ryan turned to look at the woman.
“I want to talk with Healer Rao more,” Mildred said. “About J.B.”
“It’s ace, lover,” Krysty said. “I’ll stay here for a bit and keep her company.”
Ryan scowled. “You’re in this, too, Krysty. And I don’t have J.B. to talk sense into me when I need it.”
“I’m fine,” Mildred said in a subdued voice. “Really. I just—I just need to talk it out.”
Krysty hugged her. Then she turned to Ryan. “She’ll be fine,” she echoed. “Really.”
“Then catch up with us when you’re done here,” Ryan told Mildred. He followed the Frosts out.
* * *
“OUR DAUGHTER, LYUDMILA, is a free-spirited young lady,” Katerina said.
Krysty sipped green tea. They were all, except for Mildred and J.B., seated in the sitting room where the baron and his lady had first received them. She felt oddly comforted by the pale, elegant surroundings. It was a room where Doc, a man of the nineteenth century, might feel at home.
Doc had been trawled out of his time and family by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, to be ruthlessly used, prematurely aged, driven the better part of mad and abandoned in the middle of Deathlands when he had proved too difficult a subject for their experiments.