Playfair's Axiom. James Axler

outer door and passed in the jugs and jars.

      “Water,” Jak said, uncapping a jug and sniffing.

      “But these are empty,” Mildred said. She held up the lid of one of the squat pots as if to prove her point.

      Ryan just looked at her. “Oh,” she said, and replaced the lid with exaggerated care.

      “So what now?” Doc asked.

      “We wait.”

      “I’m worried about J.B.,” Mildred said.

      “Me, too,” Ryan said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. I’m going to sleep.”

      He stretched himself on a lumpy canvas mattress.

      A CLATTREING WOKE HIM. Burly Lonny stood outside, kicking the door with a boot. He held a large covered blue metal dish.

      “They sent me with some vegetable stew for you,” he said. He set the dish on the porch, then shoved a bag through the flap-covered metal hatch in the bottom. Krysty retrieved it, opened it.

      “Bowls and spoons,” she said.

      “Wood spoons,” Mildred said, sitting up and blinking muzzily. “So we don’t dig our way out, I guess. They’re right on top of things, these folks.”

      Lonny had stood up, still holding the dish. He had a strange and ominous look in his eyes.

      “You’re gonna hunt her,” he said. “They’ll offer you supplies and jack, and you’ll take it. Because you’re just coldhearts who’ll do anything for pay. I know your type!”

      “Hold on,” Ryan said, standing up. “Back up a couple steps. You lost me.”

      “The princess!” Lonny snapped. “You don’t care about her. What they’ll do to her. Your kind don’t care!”

      He snorted a deep breath through his lump of nose, drawing his head back on his thick neck. Opening the lid of the food dish he hawked and spit a big glistening green glob into the stew. Replacing the lid, he rocked the dish from side to side, to stir the mix up right. Then he bent down and shoved the dish through the hatch.

      “There you go, coldhearts,” he said. He turned and marched off.

      “What that about?” Jak asked.

      Ryan shook his head. “Slagger’s a few rounds short of a full mag.”

      He picked up a chipped bowl and a wood spoon from where Krysty had laid them out on the floor, went to the dish. Opening the cover, he spooned himself a bowl of stew.

      Mildred gagged. “You aren’t seriously going to eat that?”

      Ryan sat down cross-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, facing the door.

      “Had worse,” he said, and dug in.

      Chapter Eight

      From the heaviness of the fist banging on the steel outer door Ryan knew who he’d see when he opened his eye.

      “Garrison,” he said, sitting up. His body felt as if mules had been playing kickball with it.

      Around him the others roused themselves from sleep. Outside the shadows were lengthening toward afternoon. The light had gone mellow, softening the edges of things.

      “Baron wants to see you,” Garrison said.

      BARON SAVIJ WASN`T what any of them expected.

      His room made up pretty much a big chunk of the upper story of the baronial palace. The chamber was decorated lavishly. And also in what, even by Deathlands standard, was pretty dubious taste.

      The chamber was festooned with swatches and banners of purple and gold silk. Giant velvet paintings, of bare-breasted women, Elvis the King, African warriors and, in close-up, a snarling tiger’s face, hung from every wall. Candles and lanterns burned everywhere, hanging by chains from golden lamp-stands, on gold-painted stands by the walls, from a candelabrum overhead. Dominating all was a vast bed canopied in purple and gold and green satin, and hanging behind it, a giant tapestry—evidently also predark, since the figures were too precise and the colors too bright even after decades for handwork—of a black man with a ferocious Afro. He wore an abundance of gold jewelry and strode defiantly with an electric guitar in one hand and a panga not unlike Ryan’s in the other, at the head of a retinue that consisted primarily of scowling, hypermuscular thugs with shaved heads, and beautiful women.

      The curtains of the big bed were parted to reveal the baron, lying with his head propped on a green satin pillow.

      He had been a big man. That was obvious from his frame beneath the purple satin coverlet. From the way his sallow, mottled cheeks had fallen in it was clear he’d suffered catastrophic weight loss. He turned his hairless head right to face the newcomers and blinked gum-encrusted eyes at them.

      The room stank of incense and stale piss and shit. It even made Ryan’s titanium-steel stomach restless.

      A young woman in a green smock dabbed at the baron’s eyes with a cloth soaked in some sort of a solution. He waved her away feebly.

      “Let me see these people,” he said in a slow, cracked voice.

      Garrison and Strode had escorted the companions to see the baron of Soulardville. He blinked at them slowly. Though his complexion was mottled with greenish and yellowish bruiselike marks, Ryan guessed he had been a medium dark-skinned black man. His eyes were a dark blue, which would probably have been startlingly intense had they not been clouded and dimmed by his condition.

      “You look…strong,” Baron Savij said. “Reckon…you’ll do.”

      Ryan just stared. Krysty said hastily, “Do for what, Baron?”

      “I want my baby back,” he said. A tear rolled down his right cheek to make a dark stain on the pillow. He stretched a clawed, discolored hand toward them. “Bring her to me. Please.”

      His eyelids fell shut, his arm dropped like a dead bird. His hand dangled off the edge of the bed, palm up. The female attendant hastened to ease it back onto the coverlet beside him.

      “He dead?” Jak asked. The words were horribly loud in the sudden deep silence.

      Krysty shushed him fiercely. “What I say?” he protested. Doc took him gently by the arm and led him aside.

      “You’d better go now,” Strode said. She looked no more than usually concerned for the health of her prize patient.

      “Is he?” Ryan asked as she led them toward the stairs.

      “Is he what?” the healer asked a bit impatiently.

      “Dead.”

      “No. Just exhausted.” She seemed minded to say more. Instead she flicked her eyes toward the sec boss, who stood gazing down at his baron with a thoughtful frown rumpling his face.

      They started down heavy stairs of dark-stained wood. “Rad sickness?” Mildred asked quietly. The ville healer had assured her J.B. was resting well and she and the others would get to see him once the bosses were finished with them. Mildred seemed to have accepted the healer’s competence. She still was obviously none too pleased with their situation. But then, who was?

      Lips pressed together, Strode nodded briskly. “Apparently he broke open a hidden rad pit while leading an expedition into ruins to the northwest of here. He took a substantial dose. Probably ingested some.”

      “Lethal dose?” Mildred asked.

      “Only time will tell. At this point some random disease could swoop in and carry him off opportunistically. Pneumonia’s a real threat. Even with scavenged antibiotics, there’s a limited amount we can do.”

      “Rad death,” Jak said softly, and shivered. Not much scared Jak. But death by radiation exposure would frighten the balls off a brass statue.