by James Axler
“Cafu,” Ryan said, “if you like pushing wags off cliffs, you’re going to love lighting this place up.”
Cafu blinked in happy incomprehension.
“Big fun, Cafu.” Ryan smiled and held his hands wide apart in measurement. “Big fun.”
Cafu savored his newfound grasp of English. “Big…fun.”
Ryan had seen black-powder-producing plants before. There would be mills inside with some kind of nonsparking grinding apparatus, either stone, bronze or lead to grind and mix the nitrate, charcoal and sulfur. The well and the sluice leading to the barn told Ryan they were wetting their powder, forming it into mill cakes and then corning it into granules that made it more powerful than loose powder and easier to load. Ryan had a very reasonable suspicion that the stone bunker was a munitions dump that neither the nightwalkers nor the slaves could get into. Cafu started to rise, but he pressed him down as the wide, double doors to one of the barns opened and a buckboard wag rolled out. Ryan had been wrong. Some slaves had seen the powder mill.
It was the last thing they had ever seen.
Eight men, mostly in their prime and probably recently taken from Sister Isle, were yoked like oxen to the wag traces. Unlike the other slaves, they had not been hobbled and none of them were tied in place. There was no need for it. Each man’s eyes had been put out. They lived for but one purpose, and that was to labor in the hidden mill and haul powder into town. The driver gave most of his directions with a whip, but there was little need. The wheel ruts were deep from an untold number of runs, and the slaves had trod the path untold times. A sec man with a long double-blaster rode shotgun and two additional sec men walked alongside the wag with their blasters over their shoulders and bayonets fixed.
Cafu surged up with a snarl of hatred, and Ryan had to forcibly shove him down. “No, Cafu! Wait!”
Cafu stayed down, but he stabbed out his finger at the human draft animals in outrage. “Nuno! Real! Pedro!” He knew some of them. Given their age, probably when they were children.
Ryan pointed to where the dirt road disappeared into the trees. “There.”
Cafu still shook with rage but nodded. They waited as the wag faded from sight. “Now,” Ryan said, “let’s go get some fun.”
“Big fun,” Cafu said. He wasn’t smiling anymore. The words from his lips were a death sentence. Ryan backtracked down the hill and Cafu limped after him. They circled through the trees and cut back toward the road. Ryan found a wide alder tree next to the road and planted Cafu behind it. Ryan pantomimed. “You wait here. I hit them from behind. No blasters.”
Cafu answered by unlimbering his club.
Ryan moved back, skirting the road. He ducked behind an alder as the creak of the wag and the groans of the slaves became audible. It was punctuated by the crack of the whip and the ugly laugh of the driver. Ryan thought he liked his job just a little too much. The one-eyed man drew his panga as the wag passed and waited for it to approach Cafu’s position. Ryan broke cover and loped out onto the road, his boots making little noise in the soft earth of the road. He vaulted up into the back of the wag, hurdled the pallet of powder kegs and chopped his panga into the side of the shotgunner’s skull. The blade bit into flesh and bone. Ryan put his boot between the driver’s shoulder blades and sent him sprawling out of his seat and down among the slaves. Ryan dived at the footman to starboard. The panga twisted down past the sec man’s collarbone and found his heart. Ryan hit the ground with a corpse for cushioning and rolled up with his blaster in his bandaged hand.
He needn’t have bothered.
The remaining sec man had barely unshouldered his blaster when Cafu’s club snapped his spine. The sec man keened like an animal and went rigid as he fell. Cafu had to put his foot in the man’s back and heave to rip the four-inch whale teeth free. The driver was thrashing and swearing among the slaves and trying to untangle himself from the traces. The slaves were crying out in blind fear and incomprehension. The driver managed to stand, then shut up when Ryan pointed his blaster in his face. “Cafu.”
Cafu came forward and put a hand on one of the draft slave’s shoulders. The man jerked but calmed as Cafu said his name. “Real…” Cafu named others. “Nuno, Pedro, Miguel.” Cafu started talking quietly in his native language. The slaves had neither eyes nor tear ducts to weep with, but they sobbed and choked as Cafu told them the situation. Ryan tore away the driver’s short blaster and sword, and flung him to the dirt. He kicked off his hat and slapped away his smoked glasses. Even in the overcast light beneath the trees he clutched his face.
“Speak English?”
“No!”
Ryan pinned him down with a foot to his chest. “Want to live?”
The driver contradicted himself. “Yes!”
“How many sec men at the mill?”
“Eight! Eight men!”
“How many workers?”
“Twelve!”
“How many slaves?”
“Two more teams! Sixteen!”
“Tell Cafu what you told me.” Ryan calculated as they spoke in Portuguese. Twenty hostiles, and all he had was surprise. Ryan watched as Cafu asked a few pointed questions of his own. He also had Cafu, and he had promised the man big fun. Ryan stripped one of the dead sec men of his hat, cloak and glasses. He nodded at Cafu to do the same. “Cafu, we’re riding in the wag. You tell Real, Nuno and Pedro they have to pull us.” Ryan fired off rapid-fire hand signals and Cafu began speaking to the blind men. It was heartbreaking to watch, but the men put themselves back under the yoke without complaint for what would be a short haul, and the last.
Cafu looked at the driver and hefted his club. Ryan shook his head. A deal was a deal. He put foot to ass on the driver to get him moving. “You, head for the ville. If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”
The driver covered his head with cloak and stumbled down the road whimpering and covering his eyes. Cafu tossed his club into the back of the wag and helped Ryan drag the corpses into the trees. Ryan put his longblaster in the back of the wag and took up the whip. The slaves turned the wag around with the ease of long practice and headed back to the powder mill. “Blasters?” Cafu inquired.
“Oh, yeah.”
Cafu put the double-blaster across his knees. They pulled their hats low over their faces as they approached the mill. The double door was still open as they pulled into the mill yard. A man walked out with a whip in his hand and shouted a question at Ryan. Cafu gave the overseer both barrels in the chest. Ryan took up his Steyr and hopped off the wag as shouts broke out in the mill. Cafu dropped the spent scattergun and pulled the handblaster from the dead overseer’s belt. They walked into the barn. Ville men looked up in horror as Ryan and Cafu walked in. The barn appeared to be for storage and lading. Half a dozen men were mill workers wearing aprons and work gloves. Two sec men sat at a table drinking wine. They rose, spilling their goblets and going for their blasters. Ryan sat each one back down with a burst through the chest.
Two sec men burst out of a side room pulling up their trousers and trying to bring auto-blasters into play. Their flushed, sweaty faces and the tumescence they were trying to conceal told Ryan they hadn’t been in the commode. Cafu pulled both triggers and the mill workers gasped as a unit as Cafu missed and put two loads of lead inches above a line of powder kegs stacked along the wall. Ryan didn’t miss. One man fell in the tangle of his pants with his heart blown out. The second fell twisting and screaming, trying to hold in his torn guts. A single blaster crack ended his suffering.
“Ryan!” Cafu shouted.
Ryan spun and a heavyset, bald ville man wearing an apron froze in place with a barrel stave in his hand. Ryan raised an eyebrow at the stave. The big man dropped it. “You the foreman?” Ryan asked.
He eyed Ryan with pure hatred. His accent was very thick. “Yes, I am…foreman.”
“Tell the other three guards to come out, and your men, or I shoot all of you.” The foreman shouted through the doorway to the other barn. Two sec men came o
ut with their hands up, followed by half a dozen more mill workers. Ryan pointed his blaster between the foreman’s eyes. “You’re missing a sec man, and in a minute you’re going to be missing your head.”
“Lucio!” the foreman shouted. “Lucio!”
Lucio was as tall as Ryan and his long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He came out of the side room with both his pants and his hands up.
“On your knees,” Ryan ordered. The men dropped and Ryan backed toward the side room. His lips curled in disgust. A blindfolded woman from Sister Isle was tied naked to the bed. She was beautiful despite the bruises all over her, like an older version of Vava. Blood spattered the bed all around her from a dozen minor wounds on her limbs and body. There was a taste for blood in the ville. Cutting had been part of the mill workers’ fun. “Cafu.”
Cafu came forward. His breath hissed in at what he saw. Ryan held the mill men under his gun as Cafu cut the woman’s bonds. She flinched as Cafu removed her blindfold. Ryan was just relieved she still had eyes underneath it. The woman broke down sobbing into Cafu’s arms and clutched him. “Thais,” Cafu murmured. “Thais.” They knew each other.
Ryan had the terrible feeling they were related. “Cafu.”
Cafu took his stolen ville cloak and draped it around Thais’s shoulders. Lucio gave Cafu the evil eye as he led Thais out of the rape room. He said something and the woman flinched and began crying anew. Lucio and his friends laughed. Lucio started telling Cafu something Ryan figured was about how Cafu and all the slaves were going to suffer. Lucio held up his hands and clearly ordered Cafu to free him. Ryan took a step forward to beat him down.
Cafu drew his spare double and shot Lucio in the head.
Lucio tipped backward, missing most of what he had above his eyebrows. Cafu shot the sec man next to him without mercy. The last sec man screamed and turned to flee. He howled as he heaved on the bar of the back door with his bound hands. Cafu unlimbered his club and swung it into the sec man’s kidneys. He shrieked like the damned as the great teeth tore into him and fell. Cafu’s club rose and fell twice more and the man’s screaming ended.
Ryan looked at the mill men. “Anyone else got anything to say?”
No one piped up.
Ryan backed up enough to see into the mill proper. The two mills were human powered with wheels like ships’ capstans driven by the blind men who now knelt and huddled in fear beneath the pushing poles. The sluice from the well came through the wall and had taps that fell into vats for wetting the powder. The walls were lined with racks for drying the powder cakes. “Cafu.” Cafu kept his glare on the millers as he approached.
Ryan nodded at the blind, huddled slaves by the mills. Cafu walked among them, many of whom he knew by name. Cafu got the mill slaves lined up, each holding the shoulder of the one in front of him, and led them into the yard. He began handing out the swords and blasters to the blind men. Ryan indicated the kegs along the wall and Cafu gave six to the last men in line and then put Thais at the front of the train.
Ryan glanced up at the hills and shrugged at Cafu. “Where?”
Cafu came back and whispered in Ryan’s ear. “Moni.”
Cafu knew where Moni had gone. Ryan didn’t give the blind freedom train much chance, but no place was safe, and if they could get to the farm Moni had taken her refugees from the nightwalker attack to, there was a chance the arms could get into some angry hands and another front could be opened.
Thais waved back to Cafu and got her train moving up into the hills.
“You.” Ryan turned to the foreman. “And your people. Your boots. Get them off.”
“What?”
Ryan pointed his blaster at the foreman’s feet. “Your boots.”
The mill workers began to unhappily comply. They shifted from bare foot to bare foot dreading what they suspected. Ryan pointed his blaster out the door. “Now go.”
“Go?”
“Get out of here, and without your hats, gloves or shades.”
The foreman’s face contorted with rage and his men cried out in consternation. Ryan stared them down implacably. The foreman spoke through his long, clenched teeth. “Cloaks?”
Ryan shrugged. “Sure.”
The mill men pulled their black cloaks over their heads and clutched them about themselves like monks. They hunched as they gingerly stepped out into the light of day on their fish-white feet. They huddled and bumped into one another, gasping and cringing in ones and twos. Thais and her blind column were making one whole hell of a lot faster and more orderly progress. The foreman was the last to leave. He regarded Ryan bitterly. “You wish to send the baron a message?”
“I’ll send it myself.” Ryan was going to send his message to Baron Barat skyhigh for the world to see. He watched the foreman go. The millers managed to get into a better assembled mob once they got under the trees. “Hey, Cafu.”
“Ah?”
Ryan went over and picked up the fallen shotgun and started reloading it for Cafu. “Didn’t I promise you some fun?”
“Big fun?”
Ryan handed Cafu the scattergun and reloaded his handblasters for him. Cafu watched carefully. Ryan considered his options. He went along the wall where the filled kegs were stacked and began pulling out random bungs. Black grains of powder began spilling out like sands through an hourglass. Cafu watched with interest as Ryan took a cask and began drawing a long black line of powder on the floor and walked it into the mill yard. Cafu followed as Ryan kept pouring past the wag and out onto the road. He didn’t stop until the cask was empty. Ryan rose and surveyed the long black line snaking back into the mill. He took another cask and the foreman’s keys and drew a second line into the stone bunker. It was full of powder kegs. The two lines came to a point in front of Cafu.
It was too bad J.B. wasn’t here to see this.
“Cafu.” Ryan pointed at the little starter blaster on Cafu’s belt. Cafu drew it and stared at Ryan. The one-eyed man pointed to the end of the powder trails in front of them. “Have some fun.”
Cafu pointed the blaster and fired.
The charge blasted into the black powder and ignited it. The powder lines rapidly began flashing, snapping and pulsing smoke as each powder granule blew up and ignited those around it. The powder lines popped and hissed and left a trail of gray ash and smoke in their wake. Cafu watched the powder fuses in wonder as they snaked toward the mill and the bunker. His jaw suddenly dropped as he figured out what was happening.
“Big fun!”
Ryan took him by the shoulder and pulled him farther back into the trees. The powder line burned past the wag and into the mill. Ryan crouched behind a tree and plugged his ears. Cafu did the same. They watched as wisps of powder smoke drifted out the door. Several seconds passed. Cafu blinked in disappointment. “Big…fun?”
The powder mill disappeared in smoke and fire. The roof emerged from the fireball and rose up on a column of smoke and fire. The walls blew outward and sections of timber and chunks of stone scythed through the trees in all directions. The wagload of powder went up an eye blink later. The air pulsed with the heat of the double detonations and a solid wall of smoke swept through the trees in a wave driven by hundreds of pounds of black powder fulfilling its destiny.
The bunker went up like skydark.
Ryan hugged the tree against the gale. It was gone as quick as it had come. He opened his eye to find Cafu sitting stunned on the ground, blinking and yawning. His face was a mask of black powder smoke out of which shone glazed eyes and grinning teeth. Ryan was pretty sure that even down in the ville the baron had gotten his message.
Most of the trees had been stripped of their leaves by the blasts and they fluttered down in a shower. Bits of stone and metal began raining to earth and pattered through the treetops. One of the brass millstones returned to earth like a molten meteor and thudded into the road. Ryan and Cafu watched for long moments. Smoke continued to rise, but there was little in the way of fire. Most things that were combustib
le had been blown to smithereens. The wind shifted and showed them a pair of blackened, smoking holes in the ground where the powder mill and the powder bunker had once stood.
Ryan helped Cafu to his feet. “Big fun?”
Cafu shook his head in wonder at the pillars of smoke rising into the sky. “Fireblast,” he agreed.
“Cafu.”
Cafu slung his club and hoisted his new blaster. “Ah?”
“The blood.” Ryan held up a finger and shoved it against his inner elbow. “Where do they draw the blood?”
KRYSTY’S FIRST THOUGHT as she spewed her guts was that despite the terrible wrongness of being broken down in one place and reassembled in another, this time the jump had gone right. She and J.B. had definitely gone somewhere this time.
“J.B.! Wherever we’re going next, we’re taking wags.”
J.B. managed a groan in agreement as he sat up.
“You okay?”
The Armorer nodded.
“Let’s recce,” she suggested.
J.B. pushed himself to his feet. “Right.”
Krysty shoved the lever on the door to the mat-trans. It swung and two men in dun-colored tunics and sandals nearly got shot. They had clubs in their hands, but they shrank from J.B.’s blaster. Krysty and J.B. were coated from head to foot with smoke particulate crusted with just about every form of filth and fluid a stickie could excrete. It showed on the strangers’ faces. The bigger one nodded hopefully and poked himself with his thumb. “Nando.” He nodded at his compatriot. “Enzo.” He looked at J.B. and Krysty hopefully. “Jebbee? Kreestee?”
