It was the best of advice. Ryan could still recall a young man from War Wag Two — must have been four years ago — whose name had been Rocco Papini. He'd put down a mutie girl with two rounds from his little Czech-made blaster. Instead of putting a third bullet into the young woman's head, he'd drawn his knife and knelt down to cut her throat, thinking she was helpless. The fight had revealed one perfectly formed breast through a tear in the mutie's jerkin, and Rocco had turned, grinning to draw his friends' attention to it.
She'd opened him from groin to throat with a straight-edge razor, spilling his guts all over herself.
It had been Ryan, with his 9 mm SIG-Sauer, who had blown the mutie girl's skull apart, which hadn't been much consolation to the dying Rocco Papini.
Clegg tried to parry the next blow from the panga, expecting it to come at his face or throat.
Ryan feinted high, and then struck low, taking care not to put all his strength into the cut. The one fault of the cleaver was that its heavy blade sometimes hacked so deeply that it got lodged in bone and wouldn't come free.
This time it hit the staggering sailor near the top of the thigh. A reflex made Clegg half turn, saving his genitals from being sliced through. But the panga hit him across the leg, cutting muscle and snapping the femur. He cried out, thin and feeble, like a rabbit in front of a rattler. The man staggered, but didn't fall down.
Automatically his arms dropped and Ryan was able to take a half step in and open up the front of Clegg's neck with a steady cut that drew the edge of the panga across the taut skin. More blood gushed and the seaman fell at last, kicking and jerking, breath bubbling pink from the severed windpipe.
"Neat," J.B. said.
Nobody else spoke as the body finally ceased moving and became, undeniably, a corpse.
At that moment the front door of the tavern swung open, banging on its hinges, allowing in a shudderingly cold wind, carrying tendrils of fog upon its shoulders. Ryan was kneeling by the body of Jonas Clegg, wiping the blood-slick blade of the panga on its coat. He knew the others would be watching his back, so he didn't bother to turn around.
He heard the noise of heavy boots and the tapping of the ferrule of a walking stick. His mind went to the figure that he and Krysty had spotted through the creeping fog the night before.
The voice was harsh, the words grating one against the other like the broken edges of river ice as it broke up in the spring.
"Is he chilled?"
Ryan answered without looking behind him. "Try waking him if you think he's just sleeping."
"Who's done for Jonas? The one-eyed outlander? I don't hear thee, landlord! Speak up, Rodriguez, or I'll have thee flayed."
"It was... Captain Quadde... it was..." the landlord stammered.
The panga wiped free of blood, Ryan sheathed it at his belt and straightened. And turned to face the ugliest woman he'd ever seen in his life.
Chapter Fifteen
Captain Pyra Quadde was forty-seven years old. She was five feet ten inches tall and weighed in at a muscular one-seventy. Her hair was a wonderful deep auburn, spoiled by being filthy and greasy. She wore knee-length boots in stained black leather, cracked and dulled with salt. Her black skirt reached below her knees, and she was swaddled in several layers of thick sweaters. Over all was a dark blue pea coat with tarnished brass buttons. A belaying pin, its end gleaming from use, was stuck in the broad leather belt. Her right hand gripped a stout walking stick, its end gray iron and the handle a smooth piece of ivory.
From behind, Ryan guessed that she could have been mistaken for a middleweight male wrestler, run to fat.
From the front she was nothing but an astoundingly ugly woman.
Her complexion was sallow, the skin oddly tight in places, slack in others. The furrows and wrinkles were seamed with dirt. Spots and boils decorated her cheeks and chin. A bristling mustache clung as tenaciously to her upper lip as a beggar to his last ten cents. The eyes were sunken in rolls of fat, like raisins in dough, and they glittered like chips of jet, fixing themselves to Ryan's face. When she smiled, Captain Quadde revealed a most peculiar set of false teeth. Ryan realized with a shudder of revulsion that they had been carved from some kind of animal bone.
"Thou butchered goodman Jonas? Thou, with a single starboard glim to peek through? Is that true, Rodriguez? The truth, thou sniveling bastard."
The landlord couldn't meet her eyes. Glancing toward Ryan Cawdor, he decided he couldn't face him, either.
"Yeah," he muttered into the stillness.
"What?" She spoke softly, the way a cougar will snarl deep in its throat.
"Good evening, Captain Quadde," Ryan said. "I chilled your man."
"Thy name?"
"Ryan Cawdor."
"Why didst thou slaughter poor mild Jonas? He would not have harmed a sleeping babe." There was a snigger of laughter from someone near the piano, quickly muffled as the woman turned and stared in that direction.
"I didn't like the way he looked and spoke." The surging anger that had pushed him into the fight with the seaman still moved within Ryan. Gentler, like the waves on a beach after the eye of the storm had passed on, but still strong enough to fuel his instinctive dislike of the hoggish woman.
She moved closer, and he noticed that she limped on her right leg. His eye was caught by Krysty, who was looking at Captain Quadde with an expression of almost religious horror. Her lips were moving, and Ryan guessed she was whispering an invocation to Gaia, the Earth Mother. Her long crimson hair, sentient to the moods of its mistress, was coiled tightly and protectively about her skull.
"Didst thou not like the way Jonas spoke and looked?" the woman said musingly. "For that he was slain. Lies here leaking out his red, red roses."
Ryan allowed his right hand to drop to the butt of his blaster. "Don't come any closer," he warned her.
Pyra Quadde halted, a scant six feet from him. Veryslowly she lifted the cane in her hand, until, as cold as death, the ferrule touched Ryan's throat. He made no move to stop it, knowing that she couldn't manage enough leverage from where she stood to harm him.
"Thou dost threaten me, outlander?" she growled. "Thou hast no love for living. Knowest thou not that no man in Claggartville would dare to life a hand 'gainst me?"
"Then Claggartville doesn't contain many men, does it?"
The walking cane was lowered slowly, until it tapped on the boards. The woman moved back a step, seeing that the spreading pool of blood from Clegg's corpse was oozing stickily closer to the toes of her boots.
"I'd give a ram keg filled with jack to have thee 'board the Salvationwhen we sail the day after the morrow. To go hunt the great whales across the gray ocean."
Her eyes roamed around the silent tavern as she spoke, and Ryan felt a faint prickling of something that was almost fear between the blades of his shoulders. The way this stocky woman seemed to hold the entire ville in thrall was frightening. He'd seen enough barons running frontier pest-villes who had less presence than Captain Pyra Quadde.
"What dost thou want done with?.." the landlord stammered, pointing at the corpse and not knowing quite what to call it.
"Garbage! Heave it off the dock and let the eels take it."
"Aye, Captain."
The woman fixed Ryan again with her stare. "Thou hast had a day, outlander. Times pass. List, and thou canst hear it sliding by. Three days without work and thou must leave or work'll be found. Think on that, Ryan Cawdor."
"Get out into the fog and blackness where you belong, or stay and get yourself chilled like that piece of dead meat there."
"Big words, outlander." She spun around and stepped to the door, the stick tapping smartly. She paused for a moment, hand on the latch, and Ryan half drew the pistol, expecting her to turn holding a hideaway blaster.