Storm Breakers Page 17

  It hadn’t been that much less chilly inside the foyer than out. It was scarcely warmer here. Ryan could sense the presence of a woodstove in the shadows not far behind the mayor—mostly by the smell of smoke, since he felt barely a hint of warmth on his nose and cheeks from it. It had to have had some sort of stovepipe cobbled up to an outlet in the dome, likewise unseen, to chimney out the smoke.

  That turned the emptiness and ache where J.B. belonged into an active pain, like a knife in the ribs. J.B. would’ve been fascinated by exactly how the smoke exhaust was handled—as opposed to Ryan, who merely noted such a thing had to be. J.B. always had to know how things worked.

  Can this geezer tell us something that’ll get him back? Ryan wondered. It was the best shot he could see, other than to explore blindly along the coast, which would eat more time, and double or triple the risk of discovery. And disaster.

  The clock ticked.

  “Harrumph,” Thrumbull said, turning back to glare at Ryan with rheumy brown eyes. “Commerce. These look like vagabonds out of the wasteland, not merchants. Very well, I shall play along. What do you offer in exchange for this information, then?”

  That was a tricky question. “We have jack,” Ryan said.

  Thrumbull’s scowl deepened. He seemed to sense his guests weren’t talking about copious quantities of jack.

  His oldie face was well-suited for scowling, but his body still showed wide shoulders beneath his black coat. The garment was much less dapper than his aide’s, and it seemed to have both shrunk and sagged away from a large frame. But his dome of balding skull was imposing, for all the liver spots splotched across it, and the mayor’s vanity apparently denied him the absurd yet common expedient of combing lank gray strands over the top of it. His long upper lip seemed to press his mouth into a line of sheer disapproval, even at rest. His eyebrows, though—they were awesome gray wings sweeping outward from formidable shelves of bone and flesh and fit to intimidate a stickie on jolt.

  Still, there was something pathetic about him, as if his furious demeanor was a show to help him deny some awful truth to himself.

  Ryan gave his head a tiny shake. He had no time for fancies like that. They didn’t load any blasters for him. And now Alysa Korn stepped up beside him to confront the old dragon.

  “I am Alysa Korn,” she announced, standing as straight as the barrel of her rifle. “I am a sec woman in the service of Baron Frost of Stormbreak.”

  “Ahh,” the mayor rumbled, though less openly skeptically now. “The Rooskie ville up the coast.”

  “Yes, Your Worship. Stormbreak trades regularly with your ville, is it not so?

  “It is,” the mayor said, a bit begrudgingly.

  “Baron Frost and Lady Katerina have need of your help in a matter most urgent,” the girl said. “In return they are prepared to offer trade concessions as well as other considerations.”

  The mayor sat back and folded his big hands across his sunken chest and still-rounded paunch.

  “Indeed. What is the information they prize so highly?”

  Ryan saw her pale green eyes flick sideways toward him. “Slavers have kidnapped their daughter and heir, Lyudmila. We know they brought her this way. We have been told they have a sea base not far from here. We want to know where it is. Also, if you have heard anything about Lyudmila herself, we would very much like to know what.”

  The clock ticked. The eyebrows rose into bristling arches. “You think we have commerce with slavers?”

  If it wasn’t for the fact Doc often talked that way, Ryan would have had a hard time catching his meaning. This whole ville seemed like something out of the distant past. Not so far as Doc’s day, perhaps, but older than Mildred. It struck him as early twentieth century, somehow.

  “You have to have some information on the slavers, Mayor,” he said, “if only to protect yourselves against them.”

  “Do they ever attack Tavern Bay?” Krysty asked, slipping up to stand a half pace behind Ryan’s other shoulder.

  “Ha!” the mayor said. “No. They have reason to fear us. We have means of dealing with intruders!”

  “You’re quite correct that we do receive intelligence about the slavers and their movements, Mr. Cawdor,” Cosgrove said. “While we get few travelers from the landward side, we deal regularly with people from the surrounding countryside. For various reasons the slavers no longer prey on them directly, at least not much. But our farmer and woodcutter neighbors have no reason to love them, and frequently report their movements.”

  “We don’t have a firm offer in hand, Cosgrove,” grumbled the mayor.

  “Leave the negotiations to me, Your Worship,” the aide said. “No need to trouble yourself. I’m sure Baron Frost will be openhanded to any who help him recover his child. And certainly the slavers are disreputable types whom we owe few favors.”

  The mayor uttered a rumbling sound. His jaw, which was visibly broad beneath the loose gray flesh of his face, sank toward the top of the vest he wore beneath his coat, as if fatigue was overcoming him.

  In the stretching silence the ticks of the clock seemed to fall like hammers on Ryan’s heart. He wasn’t sure why he felt such tension. Worried about J.B., he told himself. That’s all. Natural enough.

  “See them off, Cosgrove. Give them what they want and send them on their way.”

  “But it’s cold out there!” Mildred exclaimed.

  The man’s big head snapped up, and his old eyes blazed with anger.

  “What concern is that of mine?” the mayor snapped. “Tavern Bay is no place for strangers to spend the night. Be off with you!”

  The ringing of the clock, startlingly loud in the large emptiness of the rotunda, seemed to chase them as Morlon Cosgrove led them out, mocking their hopes and dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Trader took his convoy up north to the ville of Erie, a port in Sandusky Bay at the southwest end of Lake Erie. It was uncomfortably close not just to the Toledo ruins, but to fallout footprint from the wrecked Davis-Besse nuke power plant in the uninhabitable ville of Oak Harbor. The rad detectors in Trader’s war wags registered radiation far higher than background. Strange things were said to happen around there. Marsh Folsom said the rad emissions likely played tricks on people’s eyes and even brains.

  J.B. didn’t know if that was true, but he did understand the place was named for more than just the big-ass lake it was situated on.

  J.B. rode in disgrace. He suffered in silence. He’d learned as a kid that complaining never did any good. If anybody even noticed, it was likely to bring you even less of what you wanted and more of what you didn’t.

  He responded the only way he had, when fists and fury hadn’t served—he threw himself into work and learning. It was the best way to lose himself.

  It was the best way to distract himself from the feelings that had betrayed him.

  They’d always been uncomfortable companions, anyway.

  But he still felt them. Too many. And bad ones.

  Especially where Rance Weeden was concerned. As she promised, she had frozen him out completely—except for work, where she remained a good if now-distant boss.

  But that distance ate at him. He’d been totally caught up in her—the torrid nightly sessions of lovemaking. Not enough to detract from his work, but enough to absorb him otherwise thinking of her when he wasn’t having sex with her.

  Now, to be shut off from the vigorous, avid strength of her long taut body—even any sign that he was more to her than just another part, like a carburetor or manifold—ate at his belly like a mob of hungry rats.

  He’d tried talking to her—even sweet-talking, though he knew he wasn’t any good at it. It didn’t matter. If it wasn’t work-related, she didn’t acknowledge his existence, much less his words.

  Once, before they hit Erie, he decided to take the manly course and just grab her and make her kiss him.

  The swelling in his jaw went down after a couple of days. He was able to eat food other
than soup through a straw. But the hinges of his jaws still creaked when, a week after leaving the rad-ridden ville, they hit the Lantic coast in what had been Maine, to park the convoy to landward of the wide stinking salt marsh that guarded a seaport ville called Tavern Bay.

  * * *

  “WE SAW SURPRISINGLY few folk abroad on our way through your fair town,” Doc said. Mildred frowned. She was not in the mood for his archaic pomposities. “None, in fact.”

  “People tend to keep indoors after dark here,” said Morlon Cosgrove, as he led them away from the rotunda down a corridor inadequately lit by candles flickering on pedestals that seemed to Mildred to be made of things like improvised hat-racks. “Especially in the depth of winter. Also, the people of the ville tend to be wary of strangers. They have reason, as you can certainly appreciate.”

  “You have trouble with outlanders?” Ryan asked. “I’d judge you were pretty well protected, what with being surrounded on three sides by salt marsh and one way in from the mainland.”

  The mayor’s aide laughed briefly, as if he paid for it by the heartbeat. “You of all people should realize how imperfect even the best defenses are.”

  Mildred frowned again. Granted, she was doing that a lot lately. But this time it was because she was puzzled. She wasn’t the heavy tactical mind in the group—but not even she thought a makeshift barricade guarded by a fat middle-aged guy and a skinny adolescent boy would keep any even moderately determined malefactors out of Tavern Bay for long.

  But what the oily aide said next drove thought of anything else right straight out of her brain.

  “Remember, we do have to deal with the slavers passing by on a distressingly regular basis, which is why we have, in fact, heard about the baron’s abducted daughter.”

  Her heart jumped up to her throat in excitement. J.B.! she thought. How I miss you.

  “They’re reports,” he added. “Nothing more substantial than rumors, I must admit. But persistent ones.”

  Which only threw a bit of cold water on Mildred’s flaring hopes. Half a bucket, say.

  They came into the foyer. The cold now beat from the door; if the area was heated Mildred couldn’t feel it. To one side what had to have been the curving information desk moldered under dust. Mildred wouldn’t have been surprised had a security guard’s skeleton still sat behind it, cobwebbed in its final doze on the job.

  “And now,” said Cosgrove, with something Mildred doubted even naive newbie Ricky would take for actual amiability, “it’s time to discuss the quid to the pro quo you mentioned.”

  Mildred barely caught the reference. She hardly expected her companions to do so.

  But Ryan nodded.

  “Yeah. That’s how it works. Korn, I think you’re on.”

  The platinum blonde and the smarmy factotum negotiated briefly and calmly. Mildred tried to rein in her distinctive distrust of the man. He seemed to be just professionally unctuous; there was no reason to suspect that covered anything more than concern for himself, and little for others, which was scarcely an uncommon trait.

  In the Deathlands it was just closer to the surface than it had been in her time. The terrible truth was, the more hard lessons the savage present taught her, the better her own times looked in retrospect.

  Mildred tuned out the actual terms. Her distaste for commercial transactions had faded since her reawakening. Or maybe just been pushed way into the background by lots of things that were lots more distasteful. But she still had little interest in them. The girl may have sometimes seemed to show the affect of a robot—not surprising to Mildred, now that she knew her to be an abuse survivor—but it did give her at least the appearance of calm strength here.

  Though Mildred also knew that they didn’t really hold the hammer hand here, either. As close as she could reckon, though, Alysa managed to satisfy the oily little functionary without giving away the whole farm.

  Alysa started to hand over the agreed-upon amount of jack to seal the deal. Mildred noticed it wasn’t all the amount Baron Frost had entrusted his sec woman with to procure assistance on their quest—explicitly including information. She had to nod. The girl’s not much more than a child, she thought, but damn, she can handle herself well. And not just with a horse, sword and blaster.

  But Ryan held out his hand. “Right,” he told Cosgrove. “You got your terms. You’ve seen the color of our jack. Before we hand it over I think it’s time we got the pro quo.”

  Cosgrove smiled thinly and it was quickly gone.

  “You are clearly an educated man, Mr. Cawdor,” he said. “You also make a sound point. As I told you, we have received reports from several sources. While details inevitably differ, there are consistent strands. All suggest a young woman fitting the description you gave us was taken past here in the last week, headed for the slavers’ sea base.”

  “Anything else?” Ryan asked.

  “She was spotted in a wag that looked as if it was a predark. She was held under heavy guard and appeared the only captive being transported. She showed no sign of injury and appeared in good health, albeit unhappy, which is scarcely surprising, after all. At the very least, the slavers would seem to consider her extremely valuable merchandise.”

  He looked at Alysa and performed a slight bow. Mildred couldn’t tell if it was mocking or not. Indeed, that summed up just about everything this dude did. Whatever else he may or may not have been, he was smarmy.

  “I apologize if that sounds insensitive. But they are slavers. And the value they obviously put on her does suggest they have treated her well, and will continue to do so.”

  Mildred and Krysty swapped looks. Yeah, the physician thought. At least until some major perv buys her for a ton of jack.

  But they wouldn’t let it get to that point. Ryan was on the case. And his friends. Motley a crew as they were, they were good at tracking and chilling. And they were all acutely conscious J.B.’s life—or at least his freedom—lay at stake.

  “Can you tell us where this slaver base is?” Ryan asked. “Where their big ship puts in?”

  “Yes.” He looked at Alysa. “How well do you know this coast?”

  “Not intimately,” the slim girl said. “I have served as onboard sec on trips by boat as far down as New Portsmouth. Additionally, I have maps.”

  “You probably won’t need them. Are you familiar with the small sheltered anchorage about seven miles from here? A sort of nook or inlet among high granite cliffs?”

  Her brow creased briefly. Then she nodded. “I remember our captain urging me to stay alert. Sometimes raiding ships lie in wait there, to rush out to attack passing vessels. No one molested us, though.”

  “That’s the place,” Cosgrove said, nodding. “It’s called Smuggler’s Cove.”

  “For crap’s sake,” Mildred said with a snort.

  Cosgrove laughed. It seemed the most genuine thing he’d done. “The people of what once was Maine have long prided themselves on being blunt-spoken. Especially the coasters. Although others might as easily call them unsubtle.”

  “You can find the place from here?” Ryan asked the sec woman.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, let’s save the discussion of quaint local customs for another time. Right now I reckon we need to shake the dust of this place off our boot heels in a hurry, so we have a chance of finding someplace to lie up the night without freezing solid.”

  “May I suggest the Carcosa Arms? It’s our local hostelry. It lies right across the square from town hall. You passed it on your way in.”

  “Your boss said we weren’t supposed to stay here,” Ryan said. “Why do you even have a hotel, if you don’t let outlanders stay the night?’

  “We do entertain regular guests, usually merchants and commercial travelers of one sort or another. It is not that we are actively hostile, or even inhospitable. We do tend to be suspicious of outlanders, and for adequate reason. Far from everyone who visits Tavern Bay does so with benign intent.”

  “Still
,” Krysty said, “the Mayor seemed pretty emphatic we should go.”

  Cosgrove laughed again. “His Worship is a man much weighed down by his concerns. He can sometimes seem abrupt in his judgments. It seems to me that in this occasion he was overhasty. Especially in the light of the benefits this transaction had brought us.”

  “You’re sure?” Krysty asked.

  “Not like,” Jak said.

  “You never like,” Ryan said. “But I’m not sure we won’t be better off moving along. It’s not healthy to stay in a place where we aren’t wanted.”

  “Ah, but I won’t hear of it!” Cosgrove said. “You are honored emissaries of a highly esteemed and powerful baron. We can do no less than provide our best accommodations—free of charge. Or shall we say, free of further charge?”

  “Are you sure it won’t get you in trouble with Mayor Thrumbull?” Krysty asked.

  “Our plainspoken common people have a saying— ‘what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Floorboards squeaked beneath J.B.’s boots as he walked back down the darkened corridor.

  It was gut-deep night in the old hotel. Though the Northeast coast’s early-summer night wasn’t too hot, inside the Carcosa Arms Hotel it was stuffy and it didn’t seem as if any of the windows would open. It smelled musty and of old paint, and something else he couldn’t quite put a finger to, along with the inevitable smell of fish and rotting ocean creatures that pervaded the whole ville of Tavern Bay.

  Still, the place had a functional lavatory here on the ground floor. J.B. was returning from the facilities to the room he shared with five of Trader’s people, having been roused from his bed by the need to pee.

  He was not happy. Even being one of the team of ten Trader had hand-picked to follow him into the decaying old coastal ville and back him up on whatever secret business he meant to transact there didn’t much mollify him.