Playfair's Axiom
“You’ve done well,” Krysty said.
Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.
He also saw no reason to change.
And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.
“Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”
“Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.”
“What happens when you don’t?”
Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”
For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”
The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.
The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”
For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.
Whatever had been before there was a wide square here now. Ryan saw that the extant pavement had been eked out with paths of crushed gravel, and mosaics of jagged, salvaged concrete slabs. It was handsome work, he had to admit.
In the center of the plaza stood a low platform made of one big concrete slab laid with little regard for leveling: no finesse. It looked quite brutal by contrast to the almost unnatural primness of what they’d seen of the rest of the ville. A weather-stained tarp covered the slanted upper surface.
Garrison said nothing about the slab. Ryan didn’t ask for an explanation. It didn’t seem to bear on their continued survival one way or another.
Beyond it stood a sprawling two-story-tall block of pink brick, with a gabled slate roof and a brick chimney. It had a gaudily painted wooden entryway stuck onto the front, obviously a postdark addition. The garish gold and purple paint clashed with the ville’s overall reserve as harshly as the strange slab dais in the middle of the town square.
“Baron’s palace,” Garrison said.
“Never would have guessed,” Ryan commented.
Garrison led them down a side street to a gray brick house just behind the “palace.” It was unremarkable except for black iron bars on the windows. Garrison unlocked an iron-and-mesh sec door and opened it. The barred door had a steel flap in the bottom section. A closed wooden door was inside.
“In here,” he said.
“How long?” Ryan asked.
“Till you’re sent for.”
Ryan turned the knob. The inner door was one of the old flimsy predark plywood-sandwich variety that kept the wind and some of the cold out but a sturdy child could put her fist through. Of course with the outer door that didn’t much matter.
Inside was gloomy, musty and hot. Dust motes floated in the light through the open door. Some lumpy-looking pallets had been tossed around the wooden floor.
“How about food and water?” he asked Garrison. “We haven’t eaten all day.”
“You’ll be provided for,” Garrison said.
Ryan went in, followed by the others. “You got the run of the place,” Garrison said, closing and locking the outer door. “You might want to open the windows. Get some air.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
“What now?” Mildred asked when the sec boss went away.
“The usual. Scope out the house. See if there’s any way out.”
“Think there will be?” Krysty asked.
“Hell no. But we take nothing for granted.”
They searched the house, quickly but cautiously. They weren’t going to take for granted there weren’t hidden dangers, either. Given the sort of things that wandered around a ruined city there might even be unpleasant surprises their hosts knew nothing about.
But the place was as empty as an old skull.
As they finished their quick but thorough recon, somebody rattled the sec door. They went down to find several locals carrying several gallon ceramic jugs as well as several large covered pots. Under the longblasters of a pair of hawk-eyed sec men they unlocked the outer door and passed in the jugs and jars.
“Water,” Jak said, uncapping a jug and sniffing.
“But these are empty,” Mildred said. She held up the lid of one of the squat pots as if to prove her point.
Ryan just looked at her. “Oh,” she said, and replaced the lid with exaggerated care.
“So what now?” Doc asked.
“We wait.”
“I’m worried about J.B.,” Mildred said.
“Me, too,” Ryan said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. I’m going to sleep.”
He stretched himself on a lumpy canvas mattress.
A CLATTREING WOKE HIM. Burly Lonny stood outside, kicking the door with a boot. He held a large covered blue metal dish.
“They sent me with some vegetable stew for you,” he said. He set the dish on the porch, then shoved a bag through the flap-covered metal hatch in the bottom. Krysty retrieved it, opened it.
“Bowls and spoons,” she said.
“Wood spoons,” Mildred said, sitting up and blinking muzzily. “So we don’t dig our way out, I guess. They’re right on top of things, these folks.”
Lonny had stood up, still holding the dish. He had a strange and ominous look in his eyes.
“You’re gonna hunt her,” he said. “They’ll offer you supplies and jack, and you’ll take it. Because you’re just coldhearts who’ll do anything for pay. I know your type!”
“Hold on,” Ryan said, standing up. “Back up a couple steps. You lost me.”
“The princess!” Lonny snapped. “You don’t care about her. What they’ll do to her. Your kind don’t care!”
He snorted a deep breath through his lump of nose, drawing his head back on his thick neck. Opening the lid of the food dish he hawked and spit a big glistening green glob into the stew. Replacing the lid, he rocked the dish from side to side, to stir the mix up right. Then he bent down and shoved the dish through the hatch.
“There you go, coldhearts,” he said. He turned and marched off.
“What that about?” Jak asked.
Ryan shook his head. “Slagger’s a few rounds short of a full mag.”
He picked up a chipped bowl and a wood spoon from where Krysty had laid them out on the floor, went to the dish. Opening the cover, he spooned himself a bowl of stew.
Mildred gagged. “You aren’t seriously going to eat that?”
Ryan sat down cross-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, facing the door.
“Had worse,” he said, and dug in.
Chapter Eight
From the heaviness of the fist banging on the steel outer door Ryan knew who he’d see when he opened his eye.
“Garrison,” he said, sitting up. His body felt as if mules had been playing kickball with it.
Around him the others roused themselves from sleep. Outside the shadows were lengthening toward afternoon. The light had gone mellow, softening the edges of things.
“Baron wants to see you,” Garrison said.
BARON SAVIJ WASN`T what any of them expected.
His room made up pretty much a big chunk of the upper story of the baronial palace. The chamber was decorated lavishly. And also in what, even by Deathlands standard, was pretty dubious taste.
The chamber was festooned with swatches and banners of purple and gold silk. Giant velvet paintings, of bare-breasted women, Elvis the King, African warriors and, in close-up, a snarling tiger’s face, hung from every wall. Candles and lanterns burned everywhere, hanging by chains from golden lamp-stands, on gold-painted stands by the walls, from a candelabrum overhead. Dominating all was a vast bed canopied in purple and gold and green satin, and hanging behind it, a giant tapestry—evidently also predark, since the figures were too precise and the colors too bright even after decades for handwork—of a black man with a ferocious Afro. He wore an abundance of gold jewelry and strode defiantly with an electric guitar in one hand and a panga not unlike Ryan’s in the other, at the head of a retinue that consisted primarily of scowling, hypermuscular thugs with shaved heads, and beautiful women.
The curtains of the big bed were parted to reveal the baron, lying with his head propped on a green satin pillow.
He had been a big man. That was obvious from his frame beneath the purple satin coverlet. From the way his sallow, mottled cheeks had fallen in it was clear he’d suffered catastrophic weight loss. He turned his hairless head right to face the newcomers and blinked gum-encrusted eyes at them.
The room stank of incense and stale piss and shit. It even made Ryan’s titanium-steel stomach restless.
A young woman in a green smock dabbed at the baron’s eyes with a cloth soaked in some sort of a solution. He waved her away feebly.
“Let me see these people,” he said in a slow, cracked voice.
Garrison and Strode had escorted the companions to see the baron of Soulardville. He blinked at them slowly. Though his complexion was mottled with greenish and yellowish bruiselike marks, Ryan guessed he had been a medium dark-skinned black man. His eyes were a dark blue, which would probably have been startlingly intense had they not been clouded and dimmed by his condition.
“You look…strong,” Baron Savij said. “Reckon…you’ll do.”
Ryan just stared. Krysty said hastily, “Do for what, Baron?”
“I want my baby back,” he said. A tear rolled down his right cheek to make a dark stain on the pillow. He stretched a clawed, discolored hand toward them. “Bring her to me. Please.”
His eyelids fell shut, his arm dropped like a dead bird. His hand dangled off the edge of the bed, palm up. The female attendant hastened to ease it back onto the coverlet beside him.
“He dead?” Jak asked. The words were horribly loud in the sudden deep silence.
Krysty shushed him fiercely. “What I say?” he protested. Doc took him gently by the arm and led him aside.
“You’d better go now,” Strode said. She looked no more than usually concerned for the health of her prize patient.
“Is he?” Ryan asked as she led them toward the stairs.
“Is he what?” the healer asked a bit impatiently.
“Dead.”
“No. Just exhausted.” She seemed minded to say more. Instead she flicked her eyes toward the sec boss, who stood gazing down at his baron with a thoughtful frown rumpling his face.
They started down heavy stairs of dark-stained wood. “Rad sickness?” Mildred asked quietly. The ville healer had assured her J.B. was resting well and she and the others would get to see him once the bosses were finished with them. Mildred seemed to have accepted the healer’s competence. She still was obviously none too pleased with their situation. But then, who was?
Lips pressed together, Strode nodded briskly. “Apparently he broke open a hidden rad pit while leading an expedition into ruins to the northwest of here. He took a substantial dose. Probably ingested some.”
“Lethal dose?” Mildred asked.
“Only time will tell. At this point some random disease could swoop in and carry him off opportunistically. Pneumonia’s a real threat. Even with scavenged antibiotics, there’s a limited amount we can do.”
“Rad death,” Jak said softly, and shivered. Not much scared Jak. But death by radiation exposure would frighten the balls off a brass statue.
“Hard way to go,” Ryan said.
“Know any good ones?” Garrison asked.
Ryan shrugged. “Easier ones and quicker ones, sure.”
“Wait,” Mildred said, stopping dead halfway down the steps. “I know the man in that tapestry. That’s Savij!”
“The first Baron Savij, yes,” Strode said. “He founded Soulardville in the days just after the bombs quit falling. He and his posse showed up one day armed to the teeth and took over.”
“I knew him,” Mildred said. “Knew of him, anyway. He was a famous gangster rapper. Unlike a lot of them he was the real deal. Authentic street thug, been shot half a dozen times, suspected in a dozen murders but somehow never convicted. Supposedly kept his posse supplied with cocaine, hookers, illegal automatic weapons, explosives and rocket launchers.”
“Sounds like our founder,” Strode said.
Frowning, Mildred shook her head. “I remember reading once that Soulard was a totally white-bread little suburb. How would a bad-ass black man like Savij take over a place like that?”
Garrison chuckled like gravel shaken in a gallon can. “Who was gonna stop him?”
They came out onto the ground floor. A young woman was lighting kerosene lanterns against evening’s impending arrival.
Two men stood on a dark brick floor near the landing. One was tall, erect in bearing, lean with just a hint of pot belly pushing out the front of a T-shirt tie-dyed in a red and orange and yellow sunburst, over which he wore an open sky-blue shirt. Sun-faded jeans and sandals completed the ensemble. He wore a three-lobed golden pendant, each lobe of which was engraved with a spiral.
Late-sun glow from the street gilded a round cheek and a head of neat dreadlocks just long enough to tie into a queue at the back of his neck. He was a middle-aged, relatively light-skinned black man with laughing eyes and a trim salt-and-pepper beard.
The shorter man was a little skinny white guy dressed in a red, green, black and gold T-shirt bearing an image of the original Savij. It had to be relatively recent scavenge by simple virtue of the fact it was intact. It was, however, filthy; Ryan, accustomed to the smells of himself and his friends after days of wandering in wilderness and ruin, felt a bit of a twinge at the sheer intensity of his body funk. He had a ratlike face, much of which was concealed, probably for the better, by big dark glasses. His hair hung over the shoulders of his shirt in tangled dreadlocks, so greasy they not only made it impossible to tell what color they might originally have been, but also actually left obvious stains when they brushed the already grimy fabric.
“I’m Brother Joseph,” the tall man said in a rich baritone voice that flowed like honey. “This is my associate, Booker.
“I am the spiritual guide of this community of seekers,” Joseph said. “I’m pleased to meet you all at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“What would that be, Brother?” Krysty asked, putting some sugar in her voice. Men tended not to get suspicious when a question came out in that kind of tone from that kind of face and body. Krysty had a great many assets—mental, spiritual and physical—and she wasn’t shy about using any of them to help her friends survive.
In this case, Ryan knew, it could be important to know whether their reputations had preceded them. It happened. If they had, it might give them leverage they wouldn’t otherwise have. Conversely, if the saga of One-Eye Chills and his merry band wasn’t known here in the rotted-out corpse of St. Lou, it might just mean potential enemies could underestimate them. And whatever the sentiment of the ville as a whole, they had enemies here: burly Lonny’s bizarre behavior with their food demonstrated that.
“Why, your running battle and heroic last stand in the ruins of downtown,” Joseph said. “You would be Krysty, would you not? Our patrol’s reports scarcely do your beauty justice. Nor your obvious intelligence. And you, Mildred—”
He turned the considerable candlepower of his smile on Mildred. “Our own healer gives high marks to your field treatment of your wounded comrade. Had you not taken the actions you did, promptly and efficiently, we would not have had the opportunity to save his life.”
“Hmm,” Mildred said. But she didn’t seem quite so full of piss and vinegar as she had a moment before.
“And you are Jak, the valiant youth,” he said, turning and nodding. “And you, sir—Doc. I’m afraid our people made rather heavy weather of your full name.”
“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, sir, at your service.”
“An honor to meet you, Doctor. You are clearly a man of education. And last, the hero-figure, the leader-from-the-wilderness. Ryan. You must be a most remarkable man.”
For once Ryan felt at a loss for words. He felt Krysty sidle against him and take his arm. “He is,” she said.
Brother Joseph beamed more brightly. “Indeed! You are all remarkable men and women. Every man and woman is a star, the oracle tells us. But now you’ll want to pay a visit to your fallen comrade. I trust you’ll forgive me this brief delay. After an afternoon of praying and meditating over what your advent might mean to this ville, I found myself dying to meet you. You’ll join us in an hour for supper, I hope?”
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