Haven's Blight (15 page)

“Mebbe,” Ryan said.

They bought mangos from a stand by the central square and sat on a broken-down buckboard parked in the shade of a big sycamore. J.B. sat up on the box. Ryan leaned against the bed. Nobody seemed to care or even take notice.

“I just feel at loose ends, J.B.,” Ryan said. “Like a hex nut rattling around in an old tin can.”

J.B. bit into his fruit. Juices spurted down his chin.

“So Mildred told you to look me up and see if I could distract you.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

J.B. laughed. “Well, let’s talk about the other night.”

“That was bad trouble. The worst. And folks are on edge, between waiting for the Beast to hit again, or the pirates to come to town, or mebbe word of the latest swampie outrage up in the back country to drift in. Still, Haven isn’t a bad place to light. Not bad at all.”

J.B. cocked an eyebrow at his friend. “I’d call it more than somewhat likely it’d do you no harm to relax for a day or two. Put your feet up. Let your ribs finish healing.”

“They’re better,” Ryan said. “Mostly. But how can I relax when Krysty’s… I don’t know. Nobody knows. She looks fine. Except for acting dead.”

“And worrying yourself to death is going to fix that how?”

Ryan shook his head. He realized the worry had become a sort of addiction, like booze or jolt. He hated nothing worse than the sense of being out of control of himself. And here it was the core thing in his life, mebbe the one good thing, the redeeming thing—his intense love for his redheaded beauty—that was eating away at his self-control like rot at roof beams.

“So what I can’t figure out,” he said, trying to distract himself, “is why Mildred gets along so well with that skinny ice queen of a healer. They seem, pardon the expression, different as black and white.”

He knew Mildred might take offense at that phrase. She came from a day when humans hated each other on the basis of the color of the skin. These days, with the world crawling with swampies and stickies and scalies and scabbies and one-off muties, plus the fears and hatred of the haves and have-nots, skin color was just another thing in most villes, like blond hair or a boil on your nose or whether you wore rope sandals or went barefoot. A descriptor. A way of telling one broke-tailed, drag-assed shabby survivor in Hell from another.

But J.B. just laughed again.

“Ryan,” he said, “that girl gets homesick for her own time. In a lot of ways that count, we’re as different and strange to her as so many stickies. She’s with somebody now who speaks her own language. Mebbe not the same as she does, but a dialect.”

“Reckon so,” Ryan said, nodding. “But she’s got Doc to talk to.”

“Yeah. And you know what happens when those two rub up against each other. Get along like steel and flint. Make sparks.”

Ryan admitted that was true.

“So what’s your take on this place, J.B.?” he asked. “Seems like it’s not a bad place to roost, but I don’t know. When a thing looks to be too good to be true, it is.”

“You got that right. But mebbe this place’s different.”

“How you reckon?”

“Talk, mostly. The way people act. They fear plenty of things—there’s plenty to fear. Walking down the street in broad daylight—or who overhears what they say—does seem to be one of them.”

“Meaning the baron’s yoke lies gently on their shoulders. And he talks a good line. What do the people say about him?”

“They seem to love him. And his sister. They’re what you call a package deal. He puts his lily-white ass on the line fighting for them, and he doesn’t torture and kill them for fun like his old man and his piece-of-shit sec boss did. Elizabeth works to help the sick even when she’s so weak it seems a puff of breath’d blow her over. Fact is, everybody loves the baron and his sister,”

“Begging your pardon, John Barrymore,” a familiar voice said, “but I fear that simply is not so!”

Chapter Seventeen

They both turned. Doc ambled toward them. He was in his shirtsleeves, though he carried his ebony swordstick with its concealed blade in one knob-knuckled hand, and wore his inevitable giant LeMat revolver in a covered leather holster at his hip. His eyes were wild and unfocused and his hair stuck out to one side, like a broken bird’s wing.

“What are you talking about, Doc?” J.B. said. “You been wandering around the last couple days like a sick dog looking for a place to lie down and die.”

Doc joined the two men and hunkered down on his long pipestem legs in the shade of the plane tree. “Sometimes I do become lost in the mists inside my own mind, yes,” he said. “But have you known me to be openly delusional, my friends?”

“Yes,” they both said.

“Well, all that aside. I have heard many things these past several days. And some I believe that you, as I did, will find most unsettling.”

“I’m listening,” Ryan said.

“You are correct that our host—host and hostess, actually—are beloved. Widely and deeply. Yet a narrow and surprisingly virulent channel of dissent runs beneath the surface.”

“Would you try to speak English” the Armorer asked.

“Believe me, John Barrymore, I am. Indeed, I often feel impelled to say the same of you and your contemporaries—no matter. There are those in Haven who fear and resent Tobias and Elizabeth Blackwood. Even hate them with fierce passion!”

Ryan shrugged. “How’s that news? Nobody alive today stays that way without stepping on somebody’s fingers as they grab for the last crumb of food. Goes triple for a baron being a baron.”

“But these are not generalized animosities, Ryan. Some people actually blame Baron Blackwood for the Beast’s attacks! Or at the very least, believe he knows more about them than he lets on, and therefore allows its depredations to continue through inaction, for some dark reason of his own.”

“Forgive me if I’m skeptical,” Ryan said.

“How do we know this isn’t more random crazy thoughts? You’ve been acting like you had your skull soup stirred up some these last few days.”

Doc smiled thinly. “In this case, my friend, the key word is
acting.
When I act insane, people talk freely when I’m around—as if I am not there. Even before I became a companion of yours I learned the value of pretending to be an even madder hatter than I was during my torture at the hands of the unspeakable Cort Strasser.” Doc shuddered. “The sows,” he said in a hollow voice. “I still remember the sows…”

“Those sows’re all chills, now, along with that bastard Strasser,” Ryan said. “Focus now, Doc. Why does anybody blame the baron for the Beast?”

“It seems there was a Beast in the old days, too. The late Dornan ended it, after he killed his own father to supplant him. Some people who blame Tobias now yearn for an iron hand like Dornan’s to take control of the ville. They even yearn for his sec boss, Dupree.”

“So mebbe the old baron wasn’t so bad as Tobias made him out to be to Ryan?” J.B. said.

“I’ve also heard tell of that,” Doc said. “Horrific stories. Dupree would often troll in people apparently at random for torture, to see what was going on. Or more likely, given the long-understood inefficacy of torture for forensic means—”

“Talk plain, Doc!”

Ryan waved a hand at the Armorer. “Let him go. He’s on a roll.”

“—given that, most likely the torture was meant to elicit names of parties to imaginary conspiracies, spoken in order to make the pain stop. Dupree could then show what a splendid job he was doing, and at the same time emphasize baronial power, by handing those named over to Baron Dornan for the baron’s pet method of execution.”

“Which was?” Ryan asked.

“He would stake them spread-eagled in this very square, and have a heavily laden wagon driven over their limbs again and again, breaking them multiple times. Perhaps this very wagon, according to some.”

J.B. jumped down from the box. Ryan stood away from the wagon’s side.

“He would then have the broken limbs threaded through the spokes of a wheel, and leave the victim to expire in unendurable agony before the public’s eye. A method comparing very favorably to a Renaissance execution technique called, appropriately enough, ‘breaking on the wheel.’”

“Dark night!” J.B. said. “That makes my skin just creep. And you say some people actually want that back?”

“They believe such measures enhanced the safety and fortunes of the citizenry.”

“There’s always that kind of nonsense goin’ on,” Ryan said. “Nobody loves everything. There’s always dissidents running down the current boss and pining for the old one.”

Doc shook his head. “Alas, I fear there is more substance to this talk. Because of who it is doing the talking.”

“Who’s that?”

Again Doc shook his head. “While I might be able to identify some on sight, I can put no names to any faces. What troubles me is that those who suspect Tobias of complicity in the Beast attacks run the gamut from the lowest social rank to the highest. Historically, that is an explosive mixture.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. He jutted his jaw forward. “Likely I wouldn’t know who the people were if you did tell me their names. But if there’s important people in the ville talking openly with the poor folks that way, I’d say Tobias and his sister have themselves another problem. Could be worse than pirates and the Beast put together.”

“You really believe him, Ryan?” J.B. asked. “I mean, I don’t know. It still sounds kinda crazy to me. Everybody I talk to just can’t get over loving the two Blackwoods.”

“Doc tells straight,” a voice said from behind them.

Both Ryan and the Armorer jumped. J.B. spun in air like a cat, snatching comically at his hat.

Behind them Jak leaned against the box of the wagon, his arms folded, grinning sarcastically.

“Don’t sneak up on a man like that!” J.B. exclaimed. “Good way to find yourself staring up at the sky.”

“Didn’t!” Jak said. “Been here five minutes.”

“You did not see him arrive?” Doc asked sweetly.

The Armorer scowled ferociously. Ryan grinned.

“They both got us,” he said. “So, give, Jak. What did you hear?”

A shrug. “Same like Doc. Local boys got arguing, on bayou. Lucky Louie knocked Wet Willy out flatboat for saying baron know where Beast from. Wet Willy got hollerin’ about Gotch Eye gone get him. Made so much noise, others stopped laughing and hauled back in.”

“You know,” J.B. said, “reckon that’s as many words as I ever heard you string together before.”

“Yeah, and I’ve got to tell you, J.B.,” Ryan said, “you’ve turned into a real chatterbox.”

“So what do we do about this?” J.B. asked, ignoring his friend’s comment.

“Such information is the sort of thing a baron might reward most highly,” Doc said with a glint in his eye.

“I’m not coming within a longblaster shot of
that
spiderweb,” Ryan said. “Selling information like that makes enemies. And it makes barons wonder how a body happens to come into possession of such dangerous facts. I’d rather walk across the Great Salt with my canteen as dry as a bone.”

Doc smiled slyly.

“I do believe the cagey old bastard was testing you, Ryan!” J.B. exclaimed.

“If I were doing such a thing, our fearless leader passed with flying colors,” Doc said. “As I would have predicted.”

“So, what J.B. asked,” Jak said.

“Huh?” Ryan said.

“What now?”

Ryan thought a moment, scrubbing his tongue along the inside of his teeth. “What we usually do,” he said. “Keep our heads down, eyes open and blasters ready.”

“Perhaps, even without trying to parlay these tidings to our advantage,” Doc said, “it might after all be prudent as well as considerate to warn Tobias something is afoot.”

Ryan cocked a brow at him. “Contradicting yourself, or second thoughts?”

“I encompass worlds, my dear.”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Tell him what?” J.B. demanded. “That Doc’s been wandering the ville spying on his subjects.”

“No,” Ryan said slowly, as his mind processed the options. “No need for that kind of detail. I think Doc’s right, though. I should mention to him, without going into specifics or making a big fuss about some loose talk going around. Nothing else, not angling for any kind of reward.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” J.B. asked.

Ryan grinned. “Better be?”

A
S
HE
CAME
OFF
the stairs onto the top floor of the big house Ryan heard a murmuring voice. He froze. It seemed to come from the door to Krysty’s room, which he could see stood open.

He soft-footed down the corridor. It was made easier by the fact a runner of dark, floral-figured carpet ran down the hardwood floor. Not that he needed help. He could move like a stalking catamount when he wanted.

He felt no sense of menace. Quickly enough he recognized a soft feminine voice speaking. Still, it was a mystery, and he hated mysteries, especially in the room where his lover lay helpless.

At the edge of the open door he stopped. He realized the speaker was Elizabeth Blackwood. He leaned carefully around the doorjamb.

The baron’s sister sat next to Krysty’s bed with a large old-looking volume open on her lap. She wore a dress of lightweight off-white linen with her raven hair streaming unbound down her shoulders. Her beautiful wan face was set in concentration.

“‘Leaving the main stream,’” she read, “‘they now passed into what seemed at first sight like a little landlocked lake. Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill wheel—’ Oh, Mr. Cawdor! Can I help you?”

“Sorry to intrude,” he said. “I was just coming by to check on Krysty. I, uh, I guess she’s still the same?”

The slim shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Yes. At least she appears to be peacefully asleep. It doesn’t look like any coma I’ve seen.”

“No.”

Elizabeth folded the book shut. “Amélie believes she is fighting off the effects of the snake poison. Dr. Wyeth says Ms. Wroth has an unusually robust metabolism even for a person of this time and place.”

“Robust,” Ryan said. “Yeah, that’s one way to say it.”

When the dark-haired woman continued to look quizzically at him, he went on. “After the Big Nuke, it’s said that waves of plague rolled all around the world. Some were gene-engineered, or so I hear. Plenty were just natural, what with all the billions of dead bodies lying around unburied everywhere. Sickness took more than the nukes did. Mildred claims the people who were susceptible to disease died out and didn’t pass on their genes. So everybody alive today got triple-tough immune systems.”

“We still have disease,” Elizabeth said. “Some quite terrible.”

“Yeah. That’s a fact. Some of those just might be artificial plagues somebody made up in a lab just to be triple mean.”

She shuddered. “How could anybody set out deliberately to create something so awful?”

“Some folks’re just bad,” Ryan replied.

“Do you really think so? I have a hard time believing that. Isn’t evil a choice we make? Perhaps the outcome of a chain of choices?”

“Mebbe,” he acknowledged. “Then I guess perhaps some folks just choose to be bad.” But he’d run across plenty were so deep-dyed bad that it seemed like they had to be born to it. The name Cort Strasser, which had come up once today, returned to mind.

“I fear you may be right, Mr. Cawdor. Would you care to be alone with Ms. Wroth?”

“No. No, you’re fine. I can see she’s in good hands.”

He pointed to the book. “Wind in the Willows?”

Her face brightened. It made her beauty almost unbearably radiant. Like looking at the noonday sun.

“You know it?”

“Read it as a kid. It was a favorite of mine.” His father, Baron Titus Cawdor, had kept a well-stocked library at Front Royal, and insisted that his offspring be read to as youngsters, and learn to read as early as they could.

“Really? I hope you don’t think it’s too childish to read to a grown woman. I mean, if she can even hear me—I hope she can. I feel she can.”

For a moment Ryan felt too hollowed out to speak. Me, too, he thought. I talk to her at night.

“It’s okay,” he said. “She likes it. I’m sure.”

Elizabeth smiled.

“I guess I’ll head out, leave you two to it,” he said.

He started to turn away, then stopped. “Thanks,” he said, and walked down the hall.

“T
HERE
’
RE
SOME
PEOPLE
in the ville who seem to have a grudge against you,” Ryan told the baron a short time later, in Blackwood’s study. “Seems some of them have a notion you’re somehow to blame for the Beast. I know. But I thought you might need to know that kind of talk’s going around.”

Blackwood sat at his desk shuffling through documents, apparently ville records and ledgers. Ryan was impressed. Most barons didn’t bother with any kind of paperwork, even when they could read. And had paper.