by James Axler
"Careful, Ryan."
He kissed her lightly on the cheek. "Always am, lover."
"Finished saying thy goodbye to thy poxed whore, outlander?" Clegg sneered.
"Sure you don't want to run and get your poxy Captain Quadde and hide behind his skirts?"
"Hide behind… ?" Clegg began, looking puzzled for a moment. "Then thou knowest not that much about the Salvation!"
"Get to the steel!" someone yelled, and the sailor grinned wolfishly.
"Aye, let us to the steel. Dost thou have a knife, outlander?"
Ryan drew the panga with its eighteen-inch cutting edge from its sheath, the sight of the weapon bringing a burst of whispering from around the taproom of the inn.
"Bring the blood-red roses to thy cheeks, Jonas," one of his shipmates cackled.
Clegg drew his own knife, showing it had a double-edged blade around eleven inches long. "My sticker'll draw the teeth of thy butchering cleaver, my chilled outlander," he called.
"Fuck the talk. Fight," Ryan gritted, his whole body twitching with the adrenaline rush. He was filled with the burning desire to annihilate the man in front of him. He didn't really know why, but that didn't matter much in the Deathlands, either. There was something inherently evil about the whaling ship Salvation, and he was about to remove a little of it from the earth.
The extra length and weight of his panga was outweighed by the difficulty of using it effectively against a lighter blade in the hands of a skilled man.
The sailor was a tough fighting man, veteran of dozens of tavern brawls and dockside melees. Over the years he'd killed at least a dozen men in eye-to-eye combat.
Ryan, approaching the near side of middle age, was a whetted, flawless chilling machine, with no idea of how many men and women he'd sent into the endless dark.
Sensing that the one-eyed outlander held himself like an experienced knife fighter, Clegg kept off, moving around in a slow shuffle, feet scraping on the worn boards. The point of his knife was up, threatening Ryan with a cut at groin or belly.
The panga wasn't ideal for this sort of cut-and-thrust, dancing standoff. It came into its own when tables were falling and chairs thrown and a dozen men tangled in a bloody shambles of hacking steel.
"Take him, Jonas!" a voice yelled from the blurred ring of faces around the room. Ryan's concentration was totally fixed on the man in front of him, watching the eyes for the flickering change of expression that would mean an attack.
If he let the seaman get in too close, then he was done for. The dagger would be so much more maneuverable that it would be in and out between his ribs before he could counter with the cleaver.
"Sec men come by around this time!" Rodriguez called from behind the bar.
Ryan hardly heard him.
Everything around him was fading into the crimson mist that fogged his mind. In all the world there was only Jonas Clegg and himself. And the two steel blades.
Nothing more.
Sparks danced in the smoky air as the knife and the panga clashed, Clegg thrusting and Ryan managing to parry.
The sailor was grinning with the tension, lips pulled back wolfishly off his teeth. His breath panted harshly as he moved around. The man was good. Better than Ryan had guessed.
Clegg nearly knocked over a table as he pivoted away from his opponent. Pewter tankards rattled and he reached for one with his free hand, throwing it at Ryan in a shower of ale, hoping to take him off balance. The seaman came in after it, ducking in anticipation of Ryan cutting at his head.
Ryan second-guessed him.
Knocking away the spinning mug he immediately swung the long blade back, ready for a deadly, hissing cut. He aimed low, knowing that Clegg would try to dive in at him, aiming for his stomach.
There was the unforgettable jarring thunk that ran clear up Ryan's arm from wrist to shoulder.
A blind man would have heard a strange sequence of sounds in the barroom of the Rising Flukes Inn that night—the faint hiss of honed metal through the air; a clunk, like a butcher separating a row of chops from a carcass; a gasp of pain or shock or surprise; the tinkling of steel falling to the wooden floor. And something else falling. Heavier. Sounding like one of the meat chops. From all around came the gasp of released tension from the horde of spectators.
And then there was the odd pattering, like heavy rain, or a leaking faucet, pattering on the sawdust that covered the wooden floor.
The blood jetted from the severed stump of the right arm, spraying high in the air as the crippled man waved it helplessly, backing away from the inexorable figure of doom.
Words of the Trader came to Ryan's mind as he advanced grimly after Clegg, careful to avoid the slippery puddles of blood. "Get a man going… Chill him quick an' best you can."
It was the best of advice. Ryan could still recall a young man from War Wag Two—must have been four years ago—whose name had been Rocco Papini. He'd put down a mutie girl with two rounds from his little Czech-made blaster. Instead of putting a third bullet into the young woman's head, he'd drawn his knife and knelt down to cut her throat, thinking she was helpless. The fight had revealed one perfectly formed breast through a tear in the mutie's jerkin, and Rocco had turned, grinning to draw his friends' attention to it.
She'd opened him from groin to throat with a straight-edge razor, spilling his guts all over herself.
It had been Ryan, with his 9 mm SIG-Sauer, who had blown the mutie girl's skull apart, which hadn't been much consolation to the dying Rocco Papini.
Clegg tried to parry the next blow from the panga, expecting it to come at his face or throat.
Ryan feinted high, and then struck low, taking care not to put all his strength into the cut. The one fault of the cleaver was that its heavy blade sometimes hacked so deeply that it got lodged in bone and wouldn't come free.
This time it hit the staggering sailor near the top of the thigh. A reflex made Clegg half turn, saving his genitals from being sliced through. But the panga hit him across the leg, cutting muscle and snapping the femur. He cried out, thin and feeble, like a rabbit in front of a rattler. The man staggered, but didn't fall down.
Automatically his arms dropped and Ryan was able to take a half step in and open up the front of Clegg's neck with a steady cut that drew the edge of the panga across the taut skin. More blood gushed and the seaman fell at last, kicking and jerking, breath bubbling pink from the severed windpipe.
"Neat," J.B. said.
Nobody else spoke as the body finally ceased moving and became, undeniably, a corpse.
At that moment the front door of the tavern swung open, banging on its hinges, allowing in a shudderingly cold wind, carrying tendrils of fog upon its shoulders. Ryan was kneeling by the body of Jonas Clegg, wiping the blood-slick blade of the panga on its coat. He knew the others would be watching his back, so he didn't bother to turn around.
He heard the noise of heavy boots and the tapping of the ferrule of a walking stick. His mind went to the figure that he and Krysty had spotted through the creeping fog the night before.
The voice was harsh, the words grating one against the other like the broken edges of river ice as it broke up in the spring.
"Is he chilled?"
Ryan answered without looking behind him. "Try waking him if you think he's just sleeping."
"Who's done for Jonas? The one-eyed outlander? I don't hear thee, landlord! Speak up, Rodriguez, or I'll have thee flayed."
"It was… Captain Quadde… it was…" the landlord stammered.
The panga wiped free of blood, Ryan sheathed it at his belt and straightened. And turned to face the ugliest woman he'd ever seen in his life.
Chapter Fifteen
CAPTAIN PYRA QUADDE was forty-seven years old. She was five feet ten inches tall and weighed in at a muscular one-seventy. Her hair was a wonderful deep auburn, spoiled by being filthy and greasy. She wore knee-length boots in stained black leather, cracked and dulled with salt. Her black skirt reached below her knees, and s
he was swaddled in several layers of thick sweaters. Over all was a dark blue pea coat with tarnished brass buttons. A belaying pin, its end gleaming from use, was stuck in the broad leather belt. Her right hand gripped a stout walking stick, its end gray iron and the handle a smooth piece of ivory.
From behind, Ryan guessed that she could have been mistaken for a middleweight male wrestler, run to fat.
From the front she was nothing but an astoundingly ugly woman.
Her complexion was sallow, the skin oddly tight in places, slack in others. The furrows and wrinkles were seamed with dirt. Spots and boils decorated her cheeks and chin. A bristling mustache clung as tenaciously to her upper lip as a beggar to his last ten cents. The eyes were sunken in rolls of fat, like raisins in dough, and they glittered like chips of jet, fixing themselves to Ryan's face. When she smiled, Captain Quadde revealed a most peculiar set of false teeth. Ryan realized with a shudder of revulsion that they had been carved from some kind of animal bone.
"Thou butchered goodman Jonas? Thou, with a single starboard glim to peek through? Is that true, Rodriguez? The truth, thou sniveling bastard."
The landlord couldn't meet her eyes. Glancing toward Ryan Cawdor, he decided he couldn't face him, either.
"Yeah," he muttered into the stillness.
"What?" She spoke softly, the way a cougar will snarl deep in its throat.
"Good evening, Captain Quadde," Ryan said. "I chilled your man."
"Thy name?"
"Ryan Cawdor."
"Why didst thou slaughter poor mild Jonas? He would not have harmed a sleeping babe." There was a snigger of laughter from someone near the piano, quickly muffled as the woman turned and stared in that direction.
"I didn't like the way he looked and spoke." The surging anger that had pushed him into the fight with the seaman still moved within Ryan. Gentler, like the waves on a beach after the eye of the storm had passed on, but still strong enough to fuel his instinctive dislike of the hoggish woman.
She moved closer, and he noticed that she limped on her right leg. His eye was caught by Krysty, who was looking at Captain Quackle with an expression of almost religious horror. Her lips were moving, and Ryan guessed she was whispering an invocation to Gaia, the Earth Mother. Her long crimson hair, sentient to the moods of its mistress, was coiled tightly and protectively about her skull.
"Didst thou not like the way Jonas spoke and looked?" the woman said musingly. "For that he was slain. Lies here leaking out his red, red roses."
Ryan allowed his right hand to drop to the butt of his blaster. "Don't come any closer," he warned her.
Pyra Quadde halted, a scant six feet from him. Very slowly she lifted the cane in her hand, until, as cold as death, the ferrule touched Ryan's throat. He made no move to stop it, knowing that she couldn't manage enough leverage from where she stood to harm him.
"Thou dost threaten me, outlander?" she growled. "Thou hast no love for living. Knowest thou not that no man in Claggartville would dare to life a hand 'gainst me?"
"Then Claggartville doesn't contain many men, does it?"
The walking cane was lowered slowly, until it tapped on the boards. The woman moved back a step, seeing that the spreading pool of blood from Clegg's corpse was oozing stickily closer to the toes of her boots.
"I'd give a ram keg filled with jack to have thee 'board the Salvation when we sail the day after the morrow. To go hunt the great whales across the gray ocean."
Her eyes roamed around the silent tavern as she spoke, and Ryan felt a faint prickling of something that was almost fear between the blades of his shoulders. The way this stocky woman seemed to hold the entire ville in thrall was frightening. He'd seen enough barons running frontier pest-villes who had less presence than Captain Pyra Quadde.
"What dost thou want done with… ?" the landlord stammered, pointing at the corpse and not knowing quite what to call it.
"Garbage! Heave it off the dock and let the eels take it."
"Aye, Captain."
The woman fixed Ryan again with her stare. "Thou hast had a day, outlander. Times pass. List, and thou canst hear it sliding by. Three days without work and thou must leave or work'll be found. Think on that, Ryan Cawdor."
"Get out into the fog and blackness where you belong, or stay and get yourself chilled like that piece of dead meat there."
"Big words, outlander." She spun around and stepped to the door, the stick tapping smartly. She paused for a moment, hand on the latch, and Ryan half drew the pistol, expecting her to turn holding a hideaway blaster.
But she opened the heavy door, her dark shape silhouetted a moment against the white fog beyond. Then she was gone, with only the rapping of her stick fading away down the alley.
"Up to the room," Ryan ordered, collecting the others with his eye. It wasn't the time to linger in the cramped bar, among so many threatening strangers.
DONFIL WAS LAST into their room, shutting the door gently and leaning his shoulder against it. "Lot of sour badness in that woman," he said.
Krysty nodded. "Right. I could hardly breathe with her in the same room, Ryan. Why did you have to push the fight with…?"
"Because I had to. I did it, he's chilled and we move on."
"If I may venture a small suggestion," Doc said. "I think we would do well to consider the possibility of moving on from…from…from whatever this dreary place is called. Ah, Claggartville. It came back to me."
"I hate this place!" Lori said vehemently. "It's fulled of badness. We shall…should get out and back to the gateway and go someplace else. "
Ryan looked at Jak and J.B., the only two in the group who hadn't spoken. "How about it?"
"Don't see any point staying," Jak mumbled, head down. "No work. No jack. I say go."
The Armorer still stayed silent. He walked across to the low window and peered out, wiping at the condensation with his sleeve.
"J.B.?"
"Trader used to say something about the man who doesn't get into a firefight but runs away, lives to run away on another day."
Ryan had heard it before, but the old joke still amused him. "Sure, but what do we do? I agree with Jak, in a way. Can't see much to keep us in this ville. Woman like that Pyra Quadde looks like she could pull a lot of strings in Claggartville. If someone mebbe plans to coldcock me, I'd rather not stick around for them."
"So we go?" Krysty said, the relief heavy in her voice.
"When should we plan our departure?" Doc asked, sitting on one of the beds, cracking the knuckles of his right hand with a sound like distant musket fire.
"Tonight?" Donfil suggested, also sitting down to avoid being stooped almost double under the low ceiling.
"Old bitch watch for us," Jak said, joining the Armorer at the window, looking across the fog-shrouded roofs toward the masts of the ships. Now that they knew the layout of the quay, it was possible to work out which was the Salvation. Farthest to the right, as they saw it.
"Mebbe," Ryan agreed.
"Lot of sec patrols on the roads. Might have to blast our way out."
J.B. was right. From what they'd seen of the ville, it was tightly run. The seven companions would have the firepower and could certainly get clear of the outskirts of the place. But that didn't guarantee that they could get back to the beach where they'd left their raft and make it across the treacherous waters of the sound. The ville was full of ships of all sizes. The sec men might simply shadow them from the sea and then pick them off like ants in a sugar bowl.
"First light? No. Dark's better." Ryan scratched the side of his nose with his index finger. "Can't wait until the three days are up. Too much pressure on us. Too many eyes. Too many mouths flapping about us. Best if we sit out the day tomorrow. Let them think we're ready to take anything on the third day. Early meal at evening."
The Apache smiled. "Truly but the Anglos are the masters of cunning and deceit that our fathers warned us against."
Krysty grinned. "Up here and out the window. Over the flat roo
f into the alley. Up through the fog, if it rises every night. We can circle around and the patrols won't be alerted like tonight."
"That's the plan. Anyone got anything to say? Things we should do? Mebbe things we shouldn't do? Anything?"
J.B. coughed. "Only usual things. Dark clothes and greased weapons. Lori to cover her hair and muffle the bells on her spurs. Doc to grease his knees to stop them creaking."
Everyone laughed. A joke from the Armorer was more rare than a necktie on a chicken.
"That's it, then." Ryan looked at his friends again. "Around this time tomorrow night. We go. Tomorrow we keep moving and stick together and try to keep a low profile. Let's not attract too much attention to ourselves."
Everyone agreed.
"AGAIN, OUTLANDER! Again, again!"
It seemed as if every inhabitant of Claggartville was gathered around Ryan and the others on the side of the main dock, close by a weathered clipper ship with a falcon for a figurehead.
"Smite the mark with the iron again, outlander! Thou hast nine scores from nine casts. Not a harpooneer in all New England could do better."
Donfil smiled courteously at the skinny old man who was handing him the long harpoon. "I'll try it for you."
"Not too much attention, Man Whose Eyes See More," Ryan whispered.
"Relax, One Eye Chills. The more they like me, the less they'll worry about us running from them." He turned away from Ryan to look among the open expanse of spray-slick cobbles, between the rows of eager faces, all of them looking at the heavy oak door that stood propped up against a pile of empty oil barrels. The white-bearded elder had paced it out, counting aloud, so that everyone there could ooh and aah.
It was a full forty paces. At the center of the door was a doubled circle of whitewash, not as large as the head of a child. The wood around it was chipped and scarred where it had been used as a target or test of skill for several years.
The seven friends had been walking through the ville in the bright morning sunshine, all the night's fog burned away. Whereas there had been mainly curiosity on their first walk around the streets and alleys, there was now suspicion, tainted with fear. It was obvious to Ryan that the shadow of Pyra Quadde lay heavy over Claggartville. The news had spread that he had fallen out with the Salvation's skipper.