by James Axler
“So do you like to fence, Doc Tanner?” she asked. “Or do you just stab the unsuspecting?”
“I prefer the latter, when it is feasible,” he said.
“I took you for a man of honor.”
He shrugged. “In this day and age, what is that? And in any event, whatever honor I once had was thoroughly stripped from me.”
Into his mind flashed an image of Jordan Teague, immense and gross in every sense.
“I don’t believe that,” Sand said. “I myself am a man of honor—when it suits me, anyway. And one honorable man can recognize another.”
“‘Man’?” he said.
She laughed.
“Why don’t we just chill him?” grumbled one of the sec men standing faceless in shadow.
Doc heard a smack and a whimper.
“What’d you go and do that for, Trumbo?”
“You don’t know this Baron, Elliott,” the sec boss growled.
“My sec boss,” Sand said with a lilt. “He knows me so well. You do not. And my choice of word appears to have taken you aback, Doc Tanner.”
“Well, do you consider yourself—”
“Something I doubt you have referents for.” She tossed her short sandy hair away from her face. The rising breeze ruffled it like a lover’s fingers. “You have a curious manner to you, like a man out of time. And I myself find myself out of step with this age.”
Keep talking, Doc thought, with a faint flame wisp of hope beginning to curl and dance inside his dark soul. Perhaps all my friends will accomplish their tasks and make good their escapes.
“I identify myself with a gentleman,” she said, with surprising earnestness that made her seem somehow vulnerable despite her assured manner. “A lord of the manor, a prince who takes seriously the welfare of his people—unlike most.”
“I thought a prince, like a baron, found it better to be feared than loved?”
“Machiavelli, Doc Tanner? An unfashionable bit of knowledge in this time when reading is a rarity. Anyway, that was all parody. He was a devout republican who sought to expose the baseness of the royalty and self-made magnates of his day. And consequently was misunderstood by roughly everybody, forever.”
She made a flipping gesture with her cane. “I can identify. And now—”
She took a step forward with her left boot and assumed the en garde position. “Enough foreplay. Let’s do it for real.”
Doc mirrored her. “Ah, but this seems hardly gentlemanly,” he said. “Mine is of fine steel, and pointed. Yours, alas, is a stick.”
She cocked a sculpted eyebrow. “So, you haven’t abandoned honor entirely, then, have you, old man? If you truly know how to handle that toothpick, you know that a properly wielded stick is nearly as formidable as a bared blade. And also—”
She whipped the stick upright in front of her face as if saluting. She gripped the wooden cane, twisted slightly and pulled. It slid free to reveal a slender upright blade with starlight jittering on its well-polished length.
“I have one, too.”
He barely had time to register surprise before she stamped her lead foot and lunged. The wickedly pointed tip of her blade darted toward his face like a striking adder.
Chapter Twenty
Ryan grunted as he labored to pull aside the steamer trunk at the foot of Baron Sand’s canopied bed. The bed itself was a remarkable construction, enormous, massive, with a canopy hung with pink and purple, and satin sheets piled high with cushions. Big black iron rings were set deeply into the stout oak at the corners of the frame.
“Impressive,” said J.B., standing by examining it. The Armorer was a man who appreciated good craftsmanship, no matter what.
Jak stood by the door, his big knuckle-duster hilted trench knife in hand. The concussed sec man lay with his face to the foot of a low chest of even stouter construction than the bed frame, of some kind of age-weathered wood and carved with odd exaggerated Maltese crosses. He breathed with soft gurgling sounds around his gaudy silken gag, and showed no signs of resuming consciousness. Ryan judged either he was a triple-good actor or that Ryan had nailed him harder than intended. He thought the man’s jaw was possibly broken.
“Fireblast,” he said. “Does she make all her sex toys out of lead?”
The two courtiers now sat on the floor with their backs to the closet, clinging to each other. The bleach-blonde’s eyes were blue and as round as saucers. At closer range she looked to be at least Ryan’s age, and not having weathered the years well.
The feathered man had regained a little bit of his attitude. “Why don’t you open it and find out?” he asked challengingly.
“Oh, Ike,” the woman said, “don’t make them mad. They’re so brutal.”
Feather Dude laughed. “Relax, Arabelle,” he said. “If they meant to chill us, we’d be dead.”
“We could change our minds, though,” J.B. said mildly.
The feathered man’s eyes got as wide as Arabelle’s. They were yellow, Ryan noted.
With a final heave and groan of effort, he got the chest free of the foot of Sand’s absurd bed. The floorboards where it had been didn’t look all that different from those around them, but J.B. smiled slightly. Pulling his knife, he knelt and thrust it between two of them.
A four-foot slat came up readily. J.B. laid it aside as Ryan, who had stepped away to give his friend room to work, shifted his Scout on its sling so that he could hold it by the pistol grip, ready for use at need. Naturally he hoped not to have to do any blasting. It would bring anybody left in the house right down on their necks. And in the confines of these sturdy whitewashed walls the report would make his ears ring for a week.
In a moment J.B. had a four-by-two-and-a-half-foot space opened in Sand’s floor. On his knees he bent in, taking his lock-pick kit out of one pocket.
Ryan became aware of something that prickled his nape beneath his shag of curly hair. Jak stiffened.
“No shooting,” he said from the door. His ruby eyes looked up at a corner of the room, toward where Krysty and the others had presumably been staging their diversion.
“Not good,” J.B. said. He frowned with concern. But small clicking sounds indicated he was still at work on the lock of the strongbox sunk in the hidden well in the floor.
“Weren’t you wondering why there’s hardly anybody here?” Ike asked.
“Heard a bunch of folks were out back watching the light show,” Ryan said without much conviction.
“But that’s just our friends who like such things,” the mutie said. “Arabelle and I have sensitive ears. But Sand and that surly, burly sec boss of hers took off with most of his team long before all that horrible racket started.”
“Fireblast,” Ryan breathed.
“Your friends are chilled or captured now,” the feathered mutie said with grim satisfaction.
“Ike!” Arabelle said in horror. “Don’t tell them that!”
“Chill now?” Jak asked.
“Shut it,” Ryan growled. It felt as if a clammy hand had closed on his heart and was squeezing. Not just because of the dreadful danger to his life-mate Krysty. The others, too—even the new kid Ricky. He was as ready to lose even one of them as he was to lose a part of his body.
The scar down the left side of his face and the vacant left eye socket twinged. Another one, he mentally amended.
“Got it,” J.B. said. He bent and a moment later brought out a sturdy box. It looked to be made of some presumably fairly light-gauge metal. It was right about the size, Ryan thought, to hold a human head.
He stood, holding it. “Hefty.”
“Right,” Ryan said. He gestured to the two captives with the barrel of his longblaster. “You two. Into the hole. Be a tight fit, but you look like you know each other.”
“Wh
at?” the feathered mutie said.
“You can’t—I’m claustrophobic!” Arabelle wailed.
“Shut it,” Ryan said. “You can go in still breathing, or otherwise. Your choice.”
With the woman sniffling and the mutie glaring defiance, the two complied.
J.B. set down the metal box to help Ryan push the steamer trunk back over the opening. They didn’t bother replacing the floorboards.
Even if the two inside were stronger and more determined than Ryan reckoned, he and his friends should be long gone from the house by the time they managed to push it far enough aside to free themselves.
J.B. picked up and reslung his shotgun and his Uzi, which he had shucked to work on the lock. Tucking the box under his arm, he turned to Ryan.
“Ready,” he said. “You reckon—”
“Got no time to reckon,” Ryan said. “Jak, take point.”
Jak opened the door, which had been open a crack to let him peer out, and slipped into the corridor.
“Shitfire!” a voice exclaimed.
* * *
STEEL RANG ON steel, and sang as it slithered clear.
“‘Vous auriez bien dû rester neutre,’” the baron recited, smiling, as they fought. “‘Où vais-je vous larder, dindon? Dans le flanc, sous votre maheutre? Au coeur, sous votre bleu cordon?’”
Taken by surprise by the baron’s sudden attack, Doc had barely managed to bash her blade aside with his own in time. Then he’d danced a long-legged step back and engaged his foe with form more befitting his skills.
He’d understood what she’d said, of course. “You’d best have stayed neutral. Where shall I hit you, turkey-cock? In the side, beneath your sleeve? In the heart, beneath your blue ribbon?”
He also knew where the quote came from.
Of necessity he concentrated his attention entirely on his foe and her oddly graceful bulk. He was too skilled to narrow his focus to her point alone, or even her blade. That was a quick path to perdition. Or whatever awaited such a lost soul as he.
He realized all too well that he was practically inviting any one of the semicircle of watching sec men to back-shoot him, whether with his opponent’s sanction or not.
But that’s mere bagatelle, he thought. Inasmuch as my life is already forfeit, why should I concern myself with the precise manner in which it is claimed?
At least being back-shot was likely to be quicker than what awaited him should he be taken captive.
As they fenced back and forth there on the edge of the bluffs overlooking Nukem Flats and the farms and huts and manor of Joker Creek, he finished the verse.
“‘Les coquilles tintent, ding-dong! Ma pointe voltige: une mouche! Décidément...c’est au bedon, qu’à la fin de l’envoi, je touche.’”
Meaning, “The sword hilts ring, ding-dong! My point flutters: a fly! Decidedly—the belly, where at the last verse’s end, I strike.”
At the last she smiled ruefully. She was heavier than he, and if she was a hair shorter he couldn’t see. But she was as light on her feet as a ballerina. Her wrist was strong, her blade was fast, and her form was excellent. If a little showy.
“You are clearly a man of culture,” she said, stepping back and saluting him, “to match me quote for quote from Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“And you, as well,” he said, “to know your Rostand in this lost age.”
He didn’t see fit to mention that the play had debuted in Paris just a year or two before he was time-trolled from the bosom of his family. For one thing, it would’ve taken too much breath to explain. And would have been as likely to distract him as his foe.
As for breath, she seemed to have it to spare. She launched a lunging thrust for his face. From her body’s motion he knew it was no feint. He parried seconde, turning his blade counterclockwise and up, rolling his hand on its back. He riposted, striking back at her face, which even in starlight he could see was lightly sheened with sweat.
She parried prime, counterclockwise and down, dancing back. She laughed and, stamping her right foot once again, launched an attack.
He had his opponent’s measure now. He gave ground rapidly, sidestepping the rock that had sheltered him. He sensed the sec men around him, surly shadows, half seen and out of focus. He could spare them no attention. He was luring her on, inviting the baron to press her attack. She did, stamping, thrusting from low to high and high to low, her round face getting redder and redder.
As a man who knew a thing or two about the science of fisticuffs, Doc was familiar with a phenomenon called punching oneself out. It referred not to literally hitting yourself, but to attacking with such a fervent flurry that you spent all your wind and energy.
Even as she was calling him a scullery servant and inviting him to hang on tightly to his spit, she exhausted herself striking air and his singing blade.
He danced back away from a final thrust for his face. Her point stopped quivering in air a hand span from his nose. And he beat her blade down and counterattacked.
“Prince,” he roared in triumphant French, “ask God’s forgiveness! I lunge, point-high, I skirmish, I thrust, I feint—”
He did, stamping himself in a lunge, clashing blades briefly in a flashing exchange. He dropped his wrist to his left to attack upward from the inside low line. She parried in desperate octave, counterclockwise and down again. The blades met almost too late to stop him from puncturing her right side under the short ribs.
He withdrew and stabbed for her face. Her blade whipped up clockwise into high position: quarte again.
But it was a feint. His point was already withdrawing. He slashed his blade around hers, struck it from inside to out.
Worn down from her flurried attacks, she had let her grip grow slack. His swift stroke knocked her sword out of her hand and sent it spinning end-for-end into the chaparral.
Her blue eyes grew huge in her flushed face, which now streamed sweat. Her nostrils flared as he placed the tip of his own sword at her throat.
Then lights exploded through his skull from a hard sudden blow at the back of it.
His sword dropped from his lifeless fingers, the cold hard earth hit his knees and brutal arms pinioned his behind him.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Ryan!”
The one-eyed man turned. He and J.B. had just emerged from the front door, Jak having slipped out first to confirm the way was clear.
It was Krysty, flying out of the deeper shadow of the big, windowless building next to the barn from which he’d sniped the Crazy Dogs’ spotter. Mildred and Ricky trotted behind her.
“Where’s Doc?” he asked. He could see in the glow from the house that she was unhurt.
Krysty ran up and hugged him tight. The air oomphed out of him. In times of stress she forgot her own strength.
“Taken,” she said quietly.
“We got hit the second we launched the diversion,” Mildred said. “They were all over us. Caught us wholly unprepared.”
Ryan grunted.
Krysty pushed off and looked around.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“We’re fit to fight, yeah,” Ryan said. “Got what we came for.”
“Where is everybody?” Mildred asked. “I know where all the sec men are. Up there presumably dancing on poor Doc’s head. But how about the mobs of peasants with torches?”
“We best move and talk,” J.B. said. “Not give them a chance to form the idea, so to speak.”
Ryan led them away from the Casa de Broma toward the southeast, back toward Amity Springs pretty much on a line. It meant they slogged across furrows and trampled barely sprouting crops. Ryan wasn’t of the mind to care.
“Nobody’s come out to see what the ruckus is about,” Ryan said as Jak trotted past into the lead. “Reckon
they’re more prudent than curious. I wasn’t exactly yearning to have to fight our way clear. Whether it was people sniping us from the shadows or the angry mob thing.”
“Ho, there!” a feminine voice, brassy and bold, rang out like mythical angels’ trumpets on high. “Ryan Cawdor!”
“Don’t stop,” Mildred urged as the words echoed off the cliff face. Jak called the same warning, less grammatically.
Ryan stopped. He turned and gazed back at the bluffs behind the big house. They were about a hundred yards off at this point.
On the heights just east of the baron’s manor a rude dome of garish yellow light thrown by driftwood torches wavered against the black sky and banished the stars. In the middle of the glow stood the baron. Beside her stood Doc, his head thrown back defiantly, his gray-white hair wild. The squat form of Trumbo stood beside him, ostentatiously pointing a pump shotgun at the old man’s skull.
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” Sand called, “I’d wager you have a little something of mine. And it appears I have something of yours. I believe that forms the basis of a trade, wouldn’t you say?”
“Do not do it, Ryan!” Doc cried.
“You shut up!” Trumbo bellowed. He whacked Doc in the kidney with the butt of his scattergun.
Doc dropped to his knees with a groan Ryan could plainly hear.
“I meant to sacrifice myself that the others could escape,” Doc managed to say. “Leave me to my fate.”
“I’m not making any deals,” Ryan called back.
“Ryan!” Krysty exclaimed.
“What?” Baron Sand called out.
“It’s just a payday, Ryan!” Mildred exclaimed.
Ryan shook his head. “We worked hard for this,” he said. “And I don’t negotiate with hostage-takers.”
Krysty put a hand on his arm. “Ryan,” she said softly. Her eyes glinted with tears.
“Don’t worry, Krysty,” he said.
Then up at the cliffs he shouted, “I’m calling your bluff, Baron. You keep him awhile. I don’t reckon you’re the sort to chill for chilling’s sake. And you don’t strike me the sadistic type, either.”