In the book-lined study Brother Joseph sat leaning back in a secretary chair with his hands folded across his bit of paunch. When a quiet female acolyte wearing the signature tie-dyed T-shirt ushered them in, the preacher seemed lost in thought or meditation.
Or asleep, Ryan thought.
The self-proclaimed holy man kept his offices in the back of an erstwhile commercial space across the plaza from the palace, which he had converted to a temple of sorts. The front room had chairs arranged in forward-facing rows, as well as tables around two sides of the room. A couple of those seekers Joseph had mentioned at dinner sat poring over books by the light of candle lanterns. From the smell Ryan guessed the candles were made out of animal-fat tallow.
Bro Joe’s inner sanctum was snug and modest. A slow sluggish breeze blew in through the window. It carried smells of some night-blooming flowers that competed with incense remnants that permeated everything, especially the shelves and shelves of books arranged around the room. The volumes were mostly histories or inspirational and religious titles, Ryan saw with a cursory skim of his eye. The shelves were interspersed with predark posters sandwiched between plastic sheets, the sort that showed pictures of flowers and sunsets and carried inspirational messages in flowing script. Ryan ignored them, too.
He did flick a glance to Krysty and wondered how Brother Joseph kept hold of these people if weak beer was all he had to offer.
To all appearances these people had it triple soft easy. But this kind of prosperity drew predators and scavengers the way a fresh corpse did. Soulardville’s occupants hadn’t laid down the enormous effort and sweat it took to build, much less maintain, the perimeter around the ville without mighty powerful incentive, more than either the most charismatic or coercive baron could supply. There had to be threats. Clear and ever-present ones.
Plus, the tactician in Ryan knew walls like Soulardville’s meant dick without manpower to keep eyes skinned on them. And blasters to back them. The razor tangles, fences, hedges and stone barriers wouldn’t have kept him out ten minutes; they’d barely make feral child Jak Lauren break stride. And Ryan and company knew for a fact the Soulardites had weapons and knew how to use them.
No, no matter how soft they had it, these people weren’t soft. It took grueling work to grow the food and perform all the other more mundane tasks of keeping a settlement this size alive. So he had to ask himself what kind of hold Brother Joseph had on the Soulardites.
The guru’s eyes opened. They were amber, unremarkable eyes…you’d think. But somehow he had a trick, a bit of theater, that made it seem as if spotlights had come on in the lantern-lit dimness, augmented by a smile whose whiteness argued that predark toothpaste was a prized item of salvage hereabouts.
“So, my friends,” he said. “Welcome to my
sanctum sanctorum
.”
“We couldn’t very well refuse the invite,” Ryan said. The invitation had been relayed by a soft-voiced acolyte. Given the way Garrison sat at the preacher’s right hand
at dinner—and the alarmed way Saga reacted to having some of Bro Joe’s beefier acolytes called in on him—Ryan had been under no illusions it had been anything but a command.
“After your wonderful hospitality at dinner,” Krysty added, giving Ryan a quick admonitory lash of her emerald gaze.
Brother Joseph’s smile, which had relaxed a bit, expanded once again. “It was truly my pleasure,” he said. “Our pleasure, I should say. Obviously, entertainment is at a premium in a community such as ours. And our people naturally hunger for news of the outside world—unrelievedly grim as it tends to be. We all found your accounts of your travels riveting. Although, I don’t doubt, unduly modest.”
Ryan caught a grin tugging at the sagging corners of Doc’s mouth. He could read his thought easily enough:
My boy, you don’t know the half of it.
The one-eyed man certainly hoped Brother Joseph didn’t know the half of it. By now they had a canned account of their doings and goings, recent and otherwise, down as pat as any professional con artist. It was every syllable dead-center true: no point risking getting tripped in a falsehood, however minor. And you could never tell what bizarre bit of rumor or news might have filtered in here.
“It is always our pleasure,” Doc said, “to sing for our suppers. All things considered, it’s one of the lightest prices we pay to eat.”
Brother Joseph nodded. It wasn’t news to him, likely, if it was really true he’d wandered the Deathlands himself before drifting in here.
He leaned forward across his desk. “I have a proposition for you,” he said.
“We’re listening,” Ryan said.
“As you may have gathered, the baron’s beloved daughter, Princess Emerald, has disappeared. Roughly two weeks ago.”
“Princess?” Mildred all but snorted.
Brother Joseph shrugged. “It’s what everybody calls her. She enjoys a certain popularity among the citizens of our commune, notwithstanding her definite willful streak. As for her going missing, there’s no mystery as to how or even why. She left on her own power, in order to escape certain civic obligations.”
“And the baron wants her back,” Krysty said. “As any father would.”
Brother Joseph nodded. “Naturally,” he said. “But I emphasize there’s more at stake here even than the wishes of our beloved, if tragically stricken, leader. Her return is imperative for the continued safety and security of this ville. I daresay even its survival.”
“Want we bring back,” Jak said.
Joseph smiled as if the youth had revealed a remarkable truth. “Precisely! And we are prepared to reward you most handsomely for her safe return.”
“How handsomely might that be, Brother?” Ryan asked.
“We’d provide you ample supplies of ammunition, food and water as well as medicine. We can pay in local jack as well. And of course, there’re the considerations of the meds and attention provided to your friend Mr. Dix, today and during his convalescence.”
They dickered some as to specifics. In the end Brother Joseph gave in to most of their demands.
“We enjoy a degree of prosperity here,” he conceded. “And our need is great. Lady, gentlemen, I believe we have a deal.”
“Not guarantee princess alive,” Jak said. “You know?”
Brother Joseph sighed. “I understand the realities of the world without our walls all too well, my friends. Princess Emerald is a highly intelligent young woman, however spoiled. She was obviously resourceful enough to slip outside the perimeter despite our vigilance. Despite her relatively sheltered life, I would expect her chances of surviving to be good. But as we all know too well, so much of survival in the aptly named Deathlands relys on mere chance.”
“Yeah,” Ryan rasped.
“So while obviously we should prefer that our errant child be returned to us safe and sound, we will accept conclusive evidence that you have indeed discovered her should she have met with some…misfortune.”
“What does she look like, Brother?” Krysty asked.
“She’s seventeen years old. Black complected, considerably darker than your Mildred or myself. She has straight black hair that she wears about shoulder length. She’s perhaps five feet eight inches tall, broad of shoulder and rather…full of breast and hip. Beyond her tender years, one might even say.”
“Fat?” Jak asked.
Brother Joseph chucked. “Not at all. She’s most athletic. Muscular and agile. Her father, though perhaps a bit indulgent in many ways, insisted she be thoroughly trained in armed and unarmed combat starting as soon as she could toddle unassisted. Her most striking characteristics, overall, are her eyes. They are a brilliant green. Her mother named her for them.”
“Where is her mother?”
“Sadly, she died five years ago. One of the earliest victims of King Screamwing’s flock, in fact.”
He rose. “And now I need to ask your indulgence to retire for the evening. We have an important civic
ceremony tomorrow morning at which I officiate. I must get my rest.”
“Sure,” Krysty said.
“Some of Mr. Garrison’s people are waiting to escort you to your quarters,” the preacher said. “I bid you good-night.”
“G
UESS WHERE
we stand?” Jak said as they walked across the plaza in the moonlight. A pair of Garrison’s sec men toting longblasters followed them, not close enough to listen in but close enough to leave no doubt they were shepherds.
“What else did you expect, young Jak?” Doc asked, strolling grandly along with his cane, his straggle-haired head held high as if he were walking out on some high-society promenade back in his day. “In the end we remain at the mercy of our hosts. For myself, I find I quite prefer their gentle approach to whips and chains.”
“I liked the subtle way he reminded us they’ve got J.B. hostage,” Mildred said sourly. “Ryan, are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” he said. “Am I a doomie, here? Can’t read the future. Except if they give us back our blasters, and they turn us out the gates without food and water, we’ll likely be dead in a few days. And if we turn down this gig, what chance is there that they’ll keep nursing J.B. till he’s back on his pins again? Doesn’t seem like we got much of a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Krysty said gently.
Ryan sighed. “Okay. Ace. Mebbe what I should have said is, I don’t see that we’ve got any better choice. Fact is, I don’t see this is necessarily such a great one. Others I can see’re all worse, double down.”
“I’m not trying to tear you down, lover,” she said. “Never
that. I know we don’t have any really appealing choices here. I agree that taking the preacher’s job is probably our best shot. It’s just that we should never forget that even when triple-huge events intervene, we always have a choice of what to make of them. Even if it’s just to die rather than submit.”
“I hear you,” Ryan said.
Jak was walking along frowning, his head tipped to the side and his white hair streaming down to the right shoulder of his jagged-edged camo shirt. An unaccustomed smile split his lean lupine face.
“Hum’s stopped,” he said cheerfully.
“What’s that, lad?” Doc asked. “What hum?”
Jak frowned and stared at him. “What mean, what hum? Same hum since we hit the perimeter. Loud. Makes teeth buzz and head hurt.”
“No offense, my hot-blooded young friend,” Doc said, “but judging by the expressions of our associates, here, I judge you are the only one who hears any hum. Heard. Are you quite certain you were not imagining it?”
Furiously Jak shook his head. “What? Think I droolie? Heard rad-blasted hum. Made me feel funny.”
“As we age,” Mildred said, “we tend to lose both the upper and lower ranges of our hearing. And Jak’s got unusually keen senses anyway. Is it possible he hears something that’s really there, but that we can’t because we’re too old?”
“Mebbe so,” Krysty said.
“But what can it mean?” Doc asked.
Ryan shook his head irritably. “We don’t know. We don’t have enough information. It’s just another nukin’ unanswered question about this ville.”
A figure stepped from the shadows as they approached
their house with the wrought-iron bars on the windows. The moonlight glimmered on a curve of high forehead.
“Garrison,” Ryan said.
“Cawdor,” the sec boss said. He nodded generally at the others. “A word with you? Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Ryan…” Mildred said dubiously.
Jak had gone tense, as if prepared to leap at the sec boss’s throat and tear it out with his sharp white teeth.
“Don’t worry,” Ryan said. “Both of you. Face it—these people’ve had us dead to rights since they yanked us out from under the noses of the coldhearts in the rubble this morning. Anything they want to do to us, they don’t have to get tricky to do it.”
A smile spread slowly across Garrison’s face. “You’re a smart man, Cawdor.”
Ryan waved the others on. “Settle in. Start resting. We’ll need all we can get and then some.”
“I won’t keep your friend long,” Garrison said. “I promise.”
They walked south along the street. A yellow glow was visible above the trees that masked the horizon to the south.
“Breweryville,” Garrison said, noticing Ryan studying the glow. “They keep at it night and day. Brother Joseph calls ’em crass materialists and opportunists. All I know is, they’re pretty powerful and pretty well-heeled.”
“Why haven’t they knocked you over yet?”
“Give me a break, Cawdor. You’ve seen the defenses. And you’ve seen our people know how to fight. I know as well as you do walls and wire tangles and all that shit just keeps out the amateurs and the not-so-serious-minded. Do you think any of us’d still be here if we were content just
to sit on our asses and trust a hedge and some angle iron to keep us safe?”
“Point taken.”
“Now I don’t say the brewmeister couldn’t take us, if he wanted us. But he’d have to want us awful bad. We’d make him pay triple anything he’d ever pry out of the smoking wreckage that kind of fight left of the ville. And whatever else you can say about the old b-meister, he’s one sharp stoneheart.”
Ryan nodded. That made sense to him.
Garrison stepped out to stand in the street squarely before Ryan. “Listen, Cawdor,” he said, in the same calm, deceptively casual tone that was all the one-eyed wanderer had heard come out of his head. “I live for this ville. Nothing else. To serve it. To protect it. My daddy served Soulardville, and his daddy, and his daddy before him. Whether I like it or not I will do whatever is necessary to protect this ville.”
He paused and his forehead creased in a scowl. He had good eyebrows for it.
“This ville may not be perfect, but it’s order and peace. You’ve seen what’s waiting out there in the rubble. All that and worse is hungering to get in, every hour, day or night. I’ll die if I have to, to keep that out and preserve what we got. Scabs and all.”
Garrison studied Ryan’s face by the light of a crescent moon. “I suspect you’re about the same with your bunch.”
“Mebbe.” A smile quirked Ryan’s lips. “I’d rather do what it takes to keep us all alive. Me included.”
“I hear you.”
Garrison briefly gripped Ryan’s shoulder. His hand was dry and strong, just as Ryan expected.