Haven's Blight (20 page)

“It’s a hard call,” Ryan admitted. “But if you’re going to be a baron, that’s the kind of choice you got to make.”

The others piped down. They remembered all too clearly certain choices Ryan had been forced to make, to keep them all together and safe. Some of them had been downright stonehearted. He was a man who did what he had to, and he knew what it cost.

“An irony,” Doc remarked as each condemned prisoner was fitted with a black hood. The key difference with the ones they’d used to hide their features the night before was that these lacked eyeholes. “In my day it was always bruited about that the hoods were to spare the condemned from seeing their own demises coming. The truth was, it was to spare the onlookers from looking into their eyes as they died, and seeing their faces twist in final contortions.”

“Lots of folks take to executions like a boozer to shine,” J.B. said. “The more face contorting, the better.”

“Not this bunch,” Ryan said. Eventually, several hundred Havenites had gathered in the square. They showed none of the sympathy for the condemned the relatives did, but neither did they show a flake of eagerness as far as Ryan could see. They stood as stiff and uncomfortable in the rain as their baron and his sister.

Doc sighed. “For all its difficulties, this community seems unusually favored, in its rulership and in what it has built for itself,” he said. “I fear such an event as this might well mark its high-water mark.”

“Much as I hate to,” Mildred said, “I’m going to have to agree with you twice in a row. I don’t like this at all.”

“Makes everybody,” Jak said.

A
T
LAST
THE
SIX
prisoners were hooded, and nooses tied with the traditional thirteen knots fitted around their necks. Those unwilling, or in the ringleader’s case unable, to stand in place on the waiting trapdoor, were held upright by sec men.

There was more than one yellow-tinged pool on the traps already.

As Guerrero marched self-importantly to the big lever that would spring all six traps at once, Franc Landry began to speak.

“Fools!” Landry declaimed. His voice rang clear and sharp as a big bronze bell despite the muffling black cloth. “You poor, deluded fools! Baron Tobias knows the truth about the Beast. Don’t you see? The Beast is—”

Blackwood nodded. Putting his back into it, Guerrero hauled back on the lever.

Landry was cut off mid-declaration. Six necks broke with a sound like a string of firecrackers going off in a burlap bag.

Chapter Twenty-Two

As Ryan walked away from the scaffold and the six corpses that hung from it, he felt a fleeting contact of warm flesh on his left hand. Something with sharp edges was pressed into his palm.

He whipped around, ready to fight. A kid stood there, ten at most, a sturdy blond boy in sun-faded blue shorts and a shapeless homespun smock, feet bare on the rain-damp grass. The boy smiled, showing a couple of missing front teeth.

“Supposed to give you a message, mister,” he piped up. Then he was gone in the crowd that was slowly and quietly dispersing back to its daily routines.

Ryan turned his hand over. There was a stiff piece of card stock wedged in his palm. It had writing on it in a loopy, spidery cursive.

“What you got, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Some kid gave me this note,” he said, holding it up. “Stuck it right in my hand before I knew he was there.”

“If he goes into some honest trade the world’ll miss out on a fine pickpocket,” the Armorer said. “What’s it say?”

Ryan handed it to him. “Read.”

J.B. did. “Huh,” he said. “Going to go?”

“Why not?” Ryan said.

“I can think of mebbe a thousand reasons offhand.”

“Me, too,” Ryan admitted. “But if we’re starting to attract serious attention, I’d like to get some clue how or why.”

J.B. nodded. “I hear you. We got protection as guests and big pals of the Baron and his sis. But we may be painting bull’s-eyes on our foreheads, too. You going do like it says and go alone?”

“Fireblast, no,” Ryan said with a wolf’s grin.

I
T
WAS
A
SIZABLE
warehouse on the bayou waterfront. Although its planks were warped and weathered, it looked to be in good repair. Ryan paused to give it a good scoping by starlight from outside before striding to the orange rectangle of light cast from within.

Somewhere up the broad bayou a gator bawed.

Ryan stepped through the open door and sidestepped immediately so as not to leave himself silhouetted in the door, an easy target. Inside he found stacks of wooden crates, casks and huge glass carboys filled with brown fluid. It smelled strongly of tanned leather and some unidentifiable spice, as well as the kerosene lantern hanging from a roof beam in the middle of the large central storeroom.

“Cawdor? Is that you?” a voice called. A door stood open in an office walled off from the far riverside corner of the building, to Ryan’s left. The light of a second lantern shone from it. “Come on in.”

He walked to the door. Inside the man he knew from Baron Tobias Blackwood’s dinner table as Al Bouvier sat behind a desk. He had his booted feet up on a green felt blotter.

The big-bellied man swung down his feet and stood. He wore a white shirt with big sweat-stain half-moons under the arms, dark brown pants with suspenders to hold them up. To his right a glazed window stood open, covered with an expensive scavvied metal-mesh screen to keep out the night bugs, some big alarming specimens of which were crawling around on it buzzing their wings in frustration. The window opened on the river. Though Ryan couldn’t see it, he could hear its slosh and gurgle and smell the tannin-rich black water.

“Take a load off,” Bouvier said. He waved at a wooden chair set in front of the desk with a big thick hand.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Ryan said, and sat.

“Thanks for coming,” Bouvier said. He hefted a square-sided glass bottle three-quarters full of dark amber fluid, tipped it side to side to make the liquid swirl.

“Whiskey? It’s real bourbon from what they tell me used to be Kentucky. Not shine colored with tobacco spit.”

“You pay and pour, sure. Thanks.”

Bouvier chuckled as he splashed two fingers into a heavy tumbler. “Here,” he said, pushing it toward Ryan. He poured himself a shot.

Ryan studied it a moment. “Not used to drinking the strong stuff from a clean glass.”

Bouvier laughed. “Whiskey like this, you clean a glass special if you got to.”

The heavyset man picked up his own glass and looked interestedly at Ryan. Without hesitation the one-eyed man raised his glass and took a sip.

“Smooth,” he announced.

Bouvier took a sip of his own and sat back grinning. “You’re a man who knows his way around good whiskey. Sip instead of slam.”

Ryan shrugged. “Good things are few and far between in this life. A wise man learns to appreciate them.”

Reckon he really wonders if I was worried he was trying to dose me, he thought.

“I won’t step all around the blaster’s muzzle, Cawdor,” Bouvier said. “I’ll get right to the trigger and not waste your time. What did you think of today’s little production?”

Somewhere right outside the structure an owl hooted softly. “Seen worse,” Ryan said. “Could have lived without watching it anyway.”

“And the sentences? You think they were just?”

Ryan shrugged. “Those men put my people and me in harm’s way, who’d never done a thing to them. Anyway, I’d already chilled some of them myself. So I’d be a bit crazy to gripe about it.”

Bouvier regarded him a moment with shrewd gray eyes. Ryan crossed his legs, sipped his whiskey and remained silent. He thought he had this deal scoped already, but he wanted to hear it confirmed from the man’s own mouth.

“Did you think the punishment went far enough?”

“Torture a bad man, you’re just as bad as him,” Ryan said. “A man needs chilling, chill him clean and have it done.”

Bouvier nodded. “Laudable, laudable. Yet what would you say if I told you that it was excessive softness that necessitated that whole unpleasant business in the square today?”

“I’d say I’d need to hear more to know what mark you’re shooting at.”

“Fair enough! Simply put, Tobias coddles his subjects disgracefully. The inevitable result?” Bouvier slapped his beefy palm on the desk. “They take advantage!”

He leaned forward. His big face, already glossed with sweat, flushed redder and redder as he warmed to his subject. “Tobias talks about the cost of defending us properly. But there are plenty of idle hands in this ville, let me assure you. For one thing, we have wagloads of these backwoods squatters who don’t contribute anything to the common good. They should be compelled to give back, rather than continue to take and take. Don’t you agree?”

Who aren’t forced to live on your pay so you control them, more like, Ryan thought. “I hear that,” he said.

“But Tobias won’t crack the whip when it’s called for. He wants the people to love him. Realists, Mr. Cawdor—men like you and me—realize it’s better to be feared than loved.”

Ryan raised his tumbler to sip so he wouldn’t have to respond. The word “loved” went through his belly like a needle point. He thought about how good it would feel to smash this man’s fat face for profaning a word whose true meaning he had no idea of.

“And that’s what caused the attack last night,” Bouvier said. “Sheer lack of discipline among the people of this ville.”

“I thought it was men who let fear of the Beast get so deep in their bones they lost all sense,” Ryan said. “That and an ambitious man with more power and wealth than sense or loyalty.”

“Huh?”

Bouvier blinked. He didn’t seem angry, just a bit lost that the script had been deviated from. Ryan decided he wasn’t used to listening to any voice but his own.

“Well, of course, of course,” the big man said. “And that poor fool Franc was only able to rouse those sorry dirtbags to suicidal folly because Tobias hadn’t seen to it that they feared their baron more than their boss.”

“Likely.”

Bouvier nodded emphatically, as if he’d just won a major concession in some big business negotiation. “So, just between you and me and the wall, Haven needs a strong baron. Don’t get me wrong. Tobias is a fine man. A great warrior. He means well. But he’s too nice, and being nice and having good intentions grease the chute to hell.”

He dropped his voice low. “Do you see where this is going, Mr. Cawdor?”

“You want to be baron?”

“Me?” Bouvier sounded genuinely surprised. “Oh, no. No, that wouldn’t work at all. To be sure, I’m a skilled manager, and I possess many of the attributes necessary for true leadership. But Haven in its current sad state needs a leader type, if you know what I mean. A hero whom the people can rally around!”

I’ve seen Tobias fight, Ryan thought. He looks like enough of a hero for me, swinging those two swords of his. He didn’t say it. The truth was, he was enjoying the conversation.

“Where do we fit into this?” he asked instead.

“Haven’t I made my meaning plain, Mr. Cawdor? I want you to step up and be baron of Haven.”

“Mighty kind offer, there, Bouvier.” Ryan rose. “But I’m not looking to be the baron of anyplace. Even if I was, if I was the kind of a man who repaid a man’s hospitality by stabbing him in the back and throwing him out of his own house, what kind of man would I be?”

Bouvier looked up as if he didn’t understand what Ryan was saying. “You mean, you won’t do it?”

“You catch on fast, Bouvier. Anyhow, I suspect the way things would really work out is, I’d only be your puppet. And I don’t crave having your hand shoved up my ass to work my jaws.”

Bouvier’s face went purple, then white. “How dare you?”

“Easy.”

A sickly grin spread across Bouvier’s heavy face. “So you think I’ll let you talk to me like that and just walk out of here free and clear? You know a bit too much to be allowed to wander around loose now, don’t you think?”

“No,” Ryan said, “I don’t think. See, a little while back you may have heard an owl hoot. But that was no owl. It was my friends letting me know the coldhearts you had waiting outside to put the hard arm on me if I didn’t play along have been taken down and tied up safely. They can all be glad they don’t all have second mouths to whistle through. You can, too, if you care about them.”

Bouvier laughed, a bit too brassily and loud. “You really expect me to believe that?”

A scratching sound came from the window. “Move your eyes right, Bouvier,” Ryan said. “Easy, now. Don’t want to make any sudden moves.”

Bouvier looked that way and gasped. Jak’s ghostly face was leering in at him—over the vented rib and front sight of his Colt Python handblaster, whose muzzle he’d dragged down the screen to get Bouvier’s attention.

“But that wall hangs out over the water!” Bouvier exclaimed, almost indignantly.

“My friend Jak there, he climbs like an old wall lizard. See, we been wandering the Deathlands for years, my friends and I. You think this is mebbe the first time some small-time schemer tried to muscle us into backing their little ville power play? Not that it ever makes any kind of sense but bad.”

Bouvier looked thunderstruck. “What do you mean?”

“You try to sign us on because you reckon we got strong arms and cold hearts. You say you think I might make a good baron because I’m strong. Well, yeah, I am, and worse, I’m smart. And as hearts run, none run colder than mine when business needs getting done.

“All of which leads up to—if we’re so hard and bad and mean, how is it anything but stupe to go out of your way to step on our shadows by threatening us?”

He started to leave. “Wait, Cawdor!” Bouvier called.

Ryan stopped.

“If you tell the baron—” Bouvier said. He had his bluster back. He either had bigger balls than Ryan gave him credit for, or was a bigger stupe.

Ryan cut him off. “Don’t sweat that. Blackwood may be out of the usual line of cut from a different kind of metal than your standard-issue baron, but if he gets to smelling sufficient smoke, even he’s going to reckon there’s a fire. So I just plain don’t want to know.”

He grinned as an idea struck him. Leaning over the desk, he snagged the half-full whiskey bottle by the neck.

“This’ll pay me for my time. If you’re half as smart as you think, you’ll call us square. I’m going to walk away now, Bouvier. You’ll be happier if you do likewise.”

“Please, wait,” the hog-sweating merchant cried. But as usual, Ryan was as good as his word.

Once out the warehouse’s front door he cut quickly left, once again to get him out of the fatal funnel. Before he walked ten paces upslope J.B. fell in beside him.

“Any trouble?” Ryan asked.

The Armorer grinned. “Not a bit.”

Ryan tossed him the bottle, which J.B. caught one-handed.

“What’s this?”

“Payout,” Ryan said. “You won the bet. He really
was
that stupe.”

“I
TELL
YOU
, there was nothing I could have done!” the fat man blubbered. “No power on Earth was going to sway him.”

“I’m disappointed, Mr. Bouvier,” the man who stood in deeper shadow next to one of the big house’s outbuildings said. “Really, I expected better of you.”

The man didn’t raise his voice. He’d long ago learned he seldom had to. Plus, of course, it was useful for these little conspiratorial tête-à-têtes. While they were behind the house, on the far side from the rooms belonging to the baron, Elizabeth, and those ever-so-troublesome guests of theirs, it never paid to take things for granted.