Haven's Blight (14 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Although Blackwood House was shaded by ancient weeping willows, the air in the front foyer was as flat-iron hot as that outside. The windows and curtains all stood wide open to admit any breath of breeze.

Unfortunately there wasn’t any.

Closing the big door behind him, Ryan padded inside. Flowers sprayed in frozen explosions of color and scent from vases set on tables, beneath ancient faded oil paintings of people riding horses in front of what looked like the house itself. Along with their delicate odors he noted the harsher smells of varnish and ammonia.

He wore the white cotton shirt that had been awaiting him when he awakened. Its weave was a bit coarse and irregular, enough to convince him it wasn’t predark salvage. It was good cloth; it was light, as cool as possible and didn’t itch his skin. The shirt was well made. It was a big improvement on the shirt he’d been wearing when they carried him here, which even before the fight with the swampies was in bad shape.

He wore the same baggy, many-pocketed camou pants he’d worn then. The many rips and tears had been neatly mended while he recuperated. And each and every night his and his friends’ garments were gently but insistently confiscated for washing by the quietly efficient house staff. Ryan gathered the baron, or perhaps his sister, didn’t want their guests, esteemed or not, stinking up the house with dirty clothes. Although apparently Jak had needed some persuading, which Ryan understood from the others had been provided by the soft-voiced and achingly beautiful Elizabeth Blackwood herself, the procedure didn’t bother Ryan much. Fresh clothing was always provided in exchange.

One thing: the baronial siblings believed in a soft touch and soothing ways, and it seemed to work well enough for them. But their chief steward, St. Vincent, was cut from different metal entirely. For all his soft voice and snooty accent, he had shown himself a martinet who cut none of his subordinates slack.

St. Vincent, at the moment, stood inside the dining room, polishing silver at a sideboard. Despite heat more stirred than alleviated by the generator-powered ceiling fan, he was impeccable and crisp in his high-collared white shirt and black trousers. He never seemed to sweat. Looking at him made Ryan feel shapeless and grubby, which wasn’t anything that bothered him much before.

“Ah, Master Cawdor,” the majordomo said with a smile as professional as a gaudy slut’s. “May I help you, sir?”

Ryan didn’t hold the smile’s likely falsity against the man, any more than he would a gaudy slut. It was equally a part of St. Vincent’s job. And if you were boss servant for a baron, whether a stoneheart like Dornan or relatively benign like Tobias—if his words and, so far, actions were to be believed—only death was surer than that you’d have to act like you liked some people you didn’t.

“I was wondering if any of my friends were here?” Ryan said. “I was out for a walk in the woods to stretch my legs.”

“Alas, Master Cawdor, I fear not. J. B. Dix is, I believe, touring the Hadid family metalworking shop. Young Master Lauren went out before dawn with some of his friends to practice crossbow hunting up Breakleg Creek. Mildred Wyeth assists Miz Mercier with her researches in the laboratory. And Dr. Tanner appears content to…wander our fair ville, no doubt absorbed in his own thoughts.”

“Yeah.”

The little pause seemed to confirm what Ryan had feared—Doc’s mind had decided to wander, and it wasn’t necessarily taking the same route his body did. It didn’t surprise him much. They’d been wound to near the breaking point for days. Now the inevitable letdown of what was, at least for now, a literal Haven of peace and safety had no doubt caused his fragile grip on reality to slip. Ryan could never help wondering: might Doc someday stray so far from the real world he’d never find his way back?

“Thanks,” he said. “I, uh, I think I’ll just head upstairs, look in on Krysty.”

“Of course,” St. Vincent said.

Ryan turned to head to the stairs. The majordomo called him back.

“Master Cawdor?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope I don’t speak out of turn when I say, I hope that you’ll choose to stay here and work with us.”

“At least till Krysty’s up and around. After that we’ll have to see.”

“It would be immensely beneficial were you to remain with us long term. Our baron could use a strong hand at his side.”

“Baron Blackwood seems to have a plenty strong hand of his own.”

St. Vincent’s smile was as thin as a razor cut. “A ville can’t have too much strength at its head, Master Cawdor. Don’t you agree?”

“Strength is good,” he said, and moved on.

“R
YAN
,” M
ILDRED
shouted, “what the hell do you think you’re doing barging in here like that?”

The workroom was dim after the hot light of morning. It smelled of chemicals.

Ryan made a fist of his forehead and jutted his jaw, which was shadowed blue despite the fact he’d shaved it himself with a straight razor and soap lather that morning. It was the only graceful way to escape from one of St. Vincent’s staffers doing the job him or herself. They were persistent as stickies, those Blackwood House servants. Except covered in nice instead of mucus.

“I want to see what’s being done for Krysty,” he said stubbornly. “You two have been thick as thieves in here since I woke up.”

“We’re doing the same thing we were doing last time,” Mildred said furiously. “And the time before that, and all the other times—trying to work out how to cure Krysty and wake her up, which we aren’t doing right this minute because you’re back here pestering us again!”

Amélie Mercier stood to one side, her expression cool and detached. She made no effort either to rein Mildred in or to support her. She seemed more to be observing the interaction as though under a microscope. As when he’d first seen her, once again was forcibly reminded that she was a very handsome woman despite her almost deliberate plainness.

Ryan, feeling a tad traitorous because of his attraction to the woman, cast his gaze around the room. It was an actual bunker with concrete walls inside and out. J.B. had told him with some admiration how it had been built during Mercier’s father’s—and Dornan’s—time first with stout hardwood logs, which were then covered and reinforced with concrete and rendered as waterproof as anything could be in this climate where the difference between the blackish bayou water, the ground, and even the air was largely a matter of degree. If not opinion.

The room was lit with some kind of panels that gave off a steady white light. Since the house had artificial electric power, it was small surprise Mercier’s facility should. Nonetheless Ryan was impressed with both the size and completeness of the workroom. To his eye, of course, it was all gleaming polished steel and glass, with some ceramics thrown in and no purpose his brain could calculate. Mildred assured him it was wonderful.

Mostly what it did was put Ryan on edge. It reminded him too much of predark laboratories they’d encountered. The very things from which the awful devastation of the Big Nuke emerged. And the people, some devolved into near-mindless cultists, some still working at a high level despite being crazed like terminal-stage jolt-walkers, they’d too often found occupying such surviving facilities.

But Mildred had assured him, about half a hundred times so far, that was nonsense. Amélie Mercier, like her father before, did wonderful work here—lifesaving work. Ryan reckoned Mildred would know. He’d learned to respect her opinion when it came to the group’s health. If she said Mercier could bring the goods, Mercier could.

“I just wish you’d hurry up,” he said.

Mildred started to puff up—like a stepped-on toad frog, J.B. put it—which for some reason always made her deflate in helpless laughter.

But it was Mercier who spoke. “I appreciate your concern,” she said, her voice cool. “I am making progress. Dr. Wyeth is a great help. But, please, we must be allowed to concentrate in order to help Krysty.”

There was an air of recitation, here, that fascinated Ryan. He wondered if she’d learned to fake some kind of what Mildred called “bedside manner” by dealing with so many sick or wounded Havenites. Mebbe her old man taught her. From what little Ryan had heard the dead whitecoat had been almost as mean an old polecat as Dornan.

For some reason Mercier’s quiet speech, however stilted, let the air out of Mildred.

“Ryan,” she said, “we know you love Krysty. All of us love her. It’s like part of each and every one of us is lying there on that bed up in the house. And I know it’s got to be so much worse for you. But you just can’t keep jogging our elbows.”

He held up his hands, as if holding them at bay. “Fireblast,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides. “I just feel helpless. Useless as tits on a boar hog. Sorry about the language.”

Mildred sighed again. “You need to find something better to do,” she said, “instead of pacing the ville like a panther in a cage, brooding.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Any suggestions?”

Mildred shook her head. “No clue. Go find J.B. and ask him.”

“If you will excuse us, Mr. Cawdor,” Mercier said.
That
was the tone he guessed she had been taught to use on barons.

“Yeah, okay,” he said again and turned to search for his old friend.

“I
GOTTA
SAY
I’m just as glad to shake that place from my bootheels,” Ryan muttered as he paused at the almost physical impact of the heat and sunlight outside. That was another thing the lab had: some kind of climate control that kept it fairly cool and dry. He wondered why Blackwood hadn’t arranged something similar for the house. Probably because of cost, and in this case the workroom—lab, he supposed—had priority.

He had to admire a baron who’d sacrifice his own comfort for some greater end.

Ryan wandered at random. The ville proper got its name from the fact it was built on a flat mound that rose almost thirty feet above the wide Blackwood Bayou that ran alongside it, providing
haven
from all but the mightiest storm surges or tsunamis. Some residents he’d talked to claimed the ville’s center was built on the buried ruin of a predark town. He had no idea if that was true or not.

Following Mildred’s advice, he kept asking passersby and idlers if they’d seen the Armorer. Some had, but J.B. seemed to have always moved on once he got there.

Haven consisted of maybe a hundred buildings of various sizes. The biggest were a handful of large houses on the outskirts that, like Blackwood House, predated the Megacull and skydark. In some cases by a century or more. The rest were mostly made from planks, with shake roofs. They got progressively smaller and more rickety the farther toward the outskirts you worked. Out in the woods it was mostly shotgun shacks and shanties like the one where they’d found the remains of old Bluie’s family and friends strewed like flesh confetti.

There were some pretty impressive postdark structures down by the Blackwood Bayou waterfront, big and permanent. Following his latest lead from a girl in a modest food shop Ryan made his way down the corduroyed ramp road. Warehouses and sizable workshops fronted on the weather warped-plank docks. The bayou here was actually a respectable river, navigable to Haven by shallow-draft seagoing craft such as the Tech-nomads’ yachts, and farther upstream for fifty or a hundred miles by flat-bottomed riverboats.

One such, a steam-powered stern-wheeler about the size and length of a predark bus, if much broader abeam, was tied up to the dock now. She had a single soot-blackened stack and the name
Delta Queen
painted on her chipped and peeling prow.

J.B. stood on deck talking about her engines with a red-haired, red-faced woman a little taller than the Armorer and about twice as wide, who smoked a corncob pipe, cussed like a coldheart and turned out to be the owner-captain.

“Catch you later, Nat,” J.B. told her as he walked down the gangplank to boom his heels on the wharf. “Safe running upriver.”

“Keep yer tail outta traps, you sawed-off smooth talker!” the beefy woman said, waving with one hand and mopping sweat from her big brick-colored face with a greasy handkerchief with the other.

“You really know the way to a woman’s heart, J.B.,” Ryan commented as they walked back up the crushed-shell footpath to the center of town.

“Yeah,” J.B. said with a big grin. “Talk about her engines! You know, they built them a generation back, somewhere upstream. Big parts like the boiler are scavvie, or put together from it. But they’re casting up there. Plus making smaller parts out of brass, like they do here. Some good work.”

“So it isn’t true the whole world’s just waiting to run out of salvage and die?”

“Well…” J.B. shrugged. Despite the awful wet heat, he was wearing his leather jacket along with his fedora. “It’s just a matter of people doing what they just natural do—make stuff and sell it to each other.”

“Why aren’t more people doing that, then, instead of scraping by on what they can root out of ville ruins and scratch out of the ground?”

J.B.’s shrug had more amplitude this time. “Reckon mebbe the Tech-nomads got it right—too many people on the bottom are too scared of oldie tech, and change. Too many people up top got them vested interests in what Trader liked to call your status quo. That and just plain inertia.”