Haven's Blight (22 page)

“You sure that’s true, ma’am?” J.B. asked. “We’ve seen plenty of villes overrun because they couldn’t defend themselves and were attacked through no fault of their own.”

“I’m not advising helplessness, young man,” she said in a tone that reminded Ryan of his tutors back at Front Royal. “I’m saying there is a time to fight, and a time to talk. It is usually best to leave the former for when the latter fails.”

Blackwood shook his head. “The swampies don’t seem inclined to negotiate. They only slay and burn.”

“Have you tried talking to them, Tobias Blackwood?”

“They are as beasts,” he said. “Insensate.”

Sweet Julie turned back to Ryan. “Do
you
think you can fight your way to Papa Dough and take what you want from him by force?”

“If that’s what it takes to get Krysty back,” he said, “I’ll do it or die trying. I’ve been in way too many fights for that to be my first choice, though.”

“Quit stringing us along!” Mildred snapped. “Is there any way to get what we need for Krysty without fighting? Or is it possible at all? Are you leading us into a trap?”

“Now, Mildred,” J.B. said.

“Don’t ‘now, Mildred’ me, John! Why’re we even listening to this, this phony psychic?”

“Because your whitecoat pal Mercier told us it was an ace idea, Mildred,” Ryan said. Mildred’s jaw shut with an almost audible clack.

“The good healer means well,” Sweet Julie said, “even if she allows concern for her friends to overwhelm her manners. She raises sound questions. The answers are, there may be. It may be possible. And no, if I wanted to trap you, there are a thousand less elaborate snares I could set—and you’re wise enough to know that in traps as in most things simpler means stronger.”

“I’ll do it,” Ryan said.

“What?” Mildred yelped. “Has your brain gone critical mass on us?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t say ‘you.’ I didn’t say ‘we.’ Said ‘I.’ I’m going. I won’t ask any of the rest of you to go along. You should probably stay behind and help Mercier with her whitecoat stuff, anyway, Mildred.”

“No way! No
way
are you leaving the womenfolk behind when you go into danger! Anyway, I’m as fed up as you are, Ryan, cooling my heels watching Krysty not die and not get better without a thing on God’s green Earth I can do about it! I’m coming if I have to steal a boat and paddle after you myself.”

“There need be no talk of stealing boats, Dr. Wyeth,” Blackwood said gravely. “Whatever help I or my ville can spare you, will be yours.”

He looked at the Sweet Julie. “Still, I cannot help question the wisdom of this journey. I can see no other ending for it than blood and doom.”

“There is none,” she answered. “The questions are, whose blood? Whose doom? I can tell you that if the voyage is undertaken, much suffering and loss will be averted.”

He shook his head. “I find it hard to see—”

“That thing I foretold, when you came to me ten summers ago as a skinny tadpole,” she said. “How did that go, Tobias?”

He bowed his head. “It came to pass as you said it would.”

“Why cannot you predict the future for us with some particularity, madam?” Doc asked. “At least give us some hint of what awaits us in the land of the swampies?”

“What can I, an old blind lady who sits in the crack of a tree all day each day mixing potions, tell Ryan Cawdor and companions about fighting and dangers? You will face forbidding country, horrid beasts, hostile muties, and terrifying tests of your character as well as courage. There. What have I told you that you didn’t already know?”

“Well,” Doc said, “since you put it that way—”

“Besides,” she said, “my doom-seeing powers tend not to be rich in specifics, and are nothing I can control, anyway. All I get are occasional glimpses through the great, ever-shifting fog of probability. I have no more to give you than what I have already.”

Doc nodded. “Ryan, you know you can count on me.”

“Goin’,” Jak announced. “Not afraid swamps, beasts, mutie boogers!”

“I’m not used to being Tail-End Charlie on a thing like this,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them, “but it shouldn’t need saying anyway. You can always count on me, Ryan. Double when Krysty’s involved!”

Mildred scowled thunderously. “I already said I was in,” she said. “But—but what guarantee do we have that we aren’t chasing a will-o’-the-wisp? That we can actually bring Krysty back this way?”

“If you want guarantees, young woman,” Sweet Julie said, her voice for the first time snapping with asperity, “you’ve come to the wrong place.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Are you completely out of your mind, Ryan?” Mildred demanded as the pirogue slid along the dark water, leaving a wake of lazy ripples that disturbed the tiny pale green plants that covered the surface. “Bringing us on this wild-goose chase up this damned sewer on the word of some crazy old charlatan?”

“You wanted to come along, Mildred,” J.B. pointed out. He rode the third of the three small watercraft with Doc. Ryan and Jak were on the lead boat. Mildred was in the middle with two of their six volunteers from Haven, whom she had dubbed Team Heart of Darkness for some reason. The others were doled out by pairs in the other pirogues.

“Yes, I did,” Mildred said. “But that doesn’t mean I thought it was a good idea.”

“Too late turn back,” Jak called, grinning. He was standing in the bow, keeping watch. The two Havenites in the boat with him and Ryan, towheaded teenage boys named Cole and Cody who claimed not to be related although they were near identical and inseparable, had quit urging him to sit. He’d shown his customary grace and his own not-inconsiderable experience with water-wags, so they made an exception in his case.

A screw-steamer riverboat, the
Gypsy Tailwind,
had given the eleven adventurers a ride up the Blackwood Bayou half a day, or about eight miles as J.B. reckoned it through use of his microsextant. They’d tied up to a tree along a sandbar to let Ryan and company pull up the three pirogues the steamboat had been towing and transfer themselves and supplies aboard. The
Tailwind
’s captain, a guy named Mackerel, tooted the steam whistle three times in farewell as the pirogues paddled up a bayou to the northwest. Then he proceeded on his merry way upstream, carrying a load of Caribbean fruit and planks sawn by Haven’s combo water and stream-driven sawmill to a ville called Coverton.

A swollen orange sun hung low above the trees. The six Havenites who had come to guide and guard the companions into Papa Dough’s domain rowed the pirogues down a bayou so narrow Ryan could practically stretch out his arms and trail his fingers through the long, skinny beards of Spanish moss that dangled from the cypress boughs. Bullfrogs uttered their bass-fiddle moans from the shallows. A nutria sculled past the other way with powerful strokes of its tail, effort fully holding his blunt, buck-toothed, oversize-rat face clear of his own bow wave.

One of the juveniles, who Ryan had been assured had battle experience, provided the propulsion for the small flat-bottomed boat he shared with them. In the next pirogue Mildred sat alongside Rameau, a dignified yet easy-humored black man of about J.B.’s size and stature, who added to the piratical cast of his dark, rakish ax-blade features with a neat beard, a gold ring in one ear, and a red bandanna tied around his long dreadlocks. He bossed the Havenite contingent.

Rowing was Rameau’s taller shadow Bluebottle, just as lean as the boss, with big harsh cheekbones and a bronze cast to him that suggested American Indian blood. A seasoned mutie fighter, he was one of a pair of guides Blackwood had insisted on sending along.

The second was Terance, another frontiersman type and guide. A squint-eyed rawboned redhead, he had almost grotesquely huge and powerful hands stuck on the ends of his snake-wiry arms. He occupied the final boat with J.B. and Ferd, who rowed. Ferd was clearly along for muscle. He was about six and a half feet of it, built like a stump, and about as communicative. He had a face like a ham and big tufts of brown hair sprouting from his saucer ears.

“We’d best find us a nice dry place to haul the boats ashore and get settled for the night,” Rameau said. “This is no place a body wants to get caught careless by night.”

Chevrons and wings of night herons flapped majestically overhead, interspersed with the occasional outsize great blue heron, their spear-beaked heads tucked back against their bodies on their long necks, their legs trailing all stilty behind. Flying higher, the other way, were flocks of pink Roseate spoonbills, heading for their nests in the saline mangal along the coast. Smaller birds flicked and squabbled in the underbrush close by on both sides.

“Whatever you say,” Ryan called back. Blackwood had generously placed him in overall command of the expedition. “You know the country. I always try to listen to the man who knows.”

Rameau grinned a startlingly bright grin and nodded. “That’s the way to enjoy a long life,” he said. “Peel your eyes for a suitable landing, generic blond boys! Justify your existence on this Earth.”

“S
O
, R
YAN
, you must love this woman much, to walk into the open jaws of an alligator for her as you do.” Rameau’s dark eyes glittered in the light of the campfire.

Big bats fluttered around the fringes, feasting on bugs drawn by the dancing light. Overhead Chuck-will’s-widows wheeled and cried out, occasionally visible as dark cruciform shapes against the stars, or when the firelight touched their speckled breast feathers. The crickets and the tree frogs sang their nightly songs. Somewhere out there Bluebottle prowled on sentry duty.

Ryan grunted. Then he realized he owed Krysty more than that. “Yes,” he said clearly. “Yes, I do.”

Rameau nodded sagely. “She must be much woman.”

“She is,” Mildred said, “though maybe not how you mean.”

Rameau laughed, as he often did. “Dear healer lady, you wrong me! I hear about heroic deeds with Tech-nomads. Krysty Wroth must be a woman of great smarts and wisdom, as well as beauty.”

“I hear she has big old boobs,” Cody announced. Or Cole. Even though he knew it was a failure of a key command skill, Ryan was damned if he could tell one from the next. He wondered about their allegedly respective daddies, and if they were really as unrelated as their mommas apparently assured them they were.

The white-blond kid oofed as Terance, who squatted on his haunches next to him turning several small carcasses that sizzled and crisped on spits over the fire, gave him an elbow in his ribs.

“Hey!” the kid yelped. “What you do that for?
Cochon!
”

“Teach you some respect, boy,” the gaunt and somewhat mad-eyed man said. “Call me a name again, and you’ll be eating your meat with about four less teeth.”

“Insulting the woman of a man like Ryan,” Rameau said, “losing teeth should be the least of your fears.”

The boy lapsed into sullen silence. His clone, sitting on the other side from Terance, tittered. The boy shot him an evil glance.

“No roughhousing,” Rameau said.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Captain Rameau,” said Doc, who had hung the appellation on the Havenite, not that Rameau appeared to mind, “I think the real question is, what motivates you and your comrades to accompany us, given that you all seem convinced we march directly to our doom?”

“For glory, of course,” Rameau instantly declared, then laughed as if he’d told a wonderful joke.

“Glory’s not much use to a body when dirt’s hitting your face,” observed J.B., squatting across the fire, next to Mildred.

“
Au contraire,
my friend! That is when it is of most use. If you have fame, that is the only thing that distinguishes you from the billions and billions who have lived and died and been instantly forgotten.”

“If you say so,” the Armorer said. “I mainly value what I can shoot, eat or—” he noticed Mildred giving him a raised eyebrow “—hold on to,” he finished lamely.

She patted his thigh. Ryan thought his thin cheeks flushed slightly. Mebbe a trick of the firelight, he thought.

“Baron say I go,” Ferd announced in a voice like a boulder rolling down a wooden chute. “I go.”

Even his local companions stared at him in surprise. Those were as many words as Ryan had heard him say in the whole journey so far.

“Baron Tobias says he’ll pay us!” Cody said.

“And we can count on him in the future for jobs and rewards and stuff!” Cole added.

“Mebbe it’s peering down the bore of a gift blaster,” J.B. said, “but remember what they say about barons and gratitude.”

“Ah, but Tobias is different,” Rameau said. “I admit myself that the fact he asked me specifically to go, made it hard to say no.” He grinned. “And the promised reward for guiding you into swampie territory didn’t hurt, either, eh?”

“I notice you don’t say anything about bringing us back alive,” Mildred said sourly.

Rameau shrugged expressively. “Baron Tobias asks much of his people, which we give freely because he gives much to us. But he doesn’t ask us to perform miracles, my dear lady!”

“Nutria’s done,” Terance announced.

“W
HAT
COULD
YOU
possibly have been thinking?” Though it never got loud, St. Vincent’s voice rose to a squeak of outrage. “Did you deliberately betray me?”

The confounded woman had the audacity to smirk at him, he thought.

“Your way wasn’t working,” Amélie Mercier said. “So I decided to get the intruders out of the way for a time myself and leave us both an open field once again.” She shrugged artlessly. “Perhaps for good.”

“So you bribed that wretched long-haired mountebank who lives in a tree to spin a fanciful tale for Tobias and his guests?”

He had his voice under control again. It was his baseline prudence, no more that had kept him alive through two barons—and the bloody transition between them, in which he had played such a key role. Tobias lay asleep three stories up, exhausted. His sister slept like someone well drugged, which she was. He feared no servants overhearing. He had personally chased them all off to their beds in their quarters in the building behind the main house. He had taught them to fear the consequences of crossing him.

If only he could have done as much for Tobias’s whitecoat.

“
Mais non.
I decided on the spot to take advantage of what she said. After all, I could as well have ended it all with the proper words. Tobias trusts my judgment on scientific affairs.”

“And we know how prudent he is to trust you, eh, my dear?”

“I would never hurt him!”

Then suddenly the veneer of scholarly reserve, and any hint of civilization, peeled back like lips from a snarling wolf’s teeth. “That bitch sister of his is another question! How I wish I dared put her out of the way!”

“Damn fool woman!” St. Vincent exclaimed. “Don’t you know Elizabeth is no threat to you that way? Tobias’s love for her is purely brotherly.”

He was horrified the instant the words were out of his mouth, although he understood well that a bullet would never go back in the blaster. That they were true made the outburst all the more inexcusable, not less. St. Vincent was a man who held a high regard for the truth. It was why he was most economical in giving it away.

But from the woman’s sly look, which, though she doubtless thought it concealed, was an open book to such a master of manipulation as St. Vincent, he knew at once his foolish candor wasn’t going to be punished after all.

“Even if that’s true,” Mercier said, “her
condition
obsesses him. He’ll never look at me as long as she’s around.”

“So why not just inject her with air, cause a fatal embolism, and be done with it?” St. Vincent had read extensively; even as a lad he had understood instinctively what potential power that gave him over a population most of which couldn’t read, and of those who could, most didn’t care to.

“Because Tobias would suspect something was wrong. He’s so brilliant. And it would take no genius to figure out I’m the one in charge of her care.” She smiled. “Besides, I rely upon your cunning to dispose of Elizabeth. You are the Devil.”

The healer, the committed rationalist, spoke the words with simple conviction.

He smiled. “Yes, dear child,” he said, “I
am
the Devil, which you would do well to remember should it come into your powerful but unduly focused mind to cross me again.”

She left. He stood glaring after her, realizing his pulse was elevated.

Calm yourself, man, he told himself sternly. Just because we’re entering the endgame doesn’t give you license to get worked up and lose your self-control.

The pieces and plans were in play. The many tentacles he had cast forth were converging. If one failed, another wouldn’t.

The outlanders’ departure was a setback, but it was only that. Whether or not Ryan Cawdor and his friends joined with him—whether or not they ever came back from Papa Dough’s domain—Haven would have a new baron soon. A strong, vigorously ambitious baron.

And St. Vincent would be the true power behind the throne.

“Naive child,” he said, shaking his head as he thought again of Amélie Mercier, “do you really believe I’ll simply let you sail away safely into exile with Tobias once I supplant him?”

He smiled thinly between his immaculately manicured beard and mustache.

“But then, I suppose you really do.” And he took himself off to bed, thinking happy thoughts about the folly of the wise.

S
OMEWHERE
IN
THE
MORNING
’
S
black hours, a bloodcurdling scream yanked Ryan from sleep.

All they found of Ferd was his big footprints in damp soil beneath a tree, with a double-size pile of human excrement between them, and some blood splashed at the base of the tree he’d squatted to relieve himself under.