by James Axler
Everyone had to admit Doc had a point.
“And we need a diversion,” J.B. said. “Something to make them look the other way.”
“Very well.” Sylvano rose to his full height. “I propose this. If we come, Raul will expect us to come in cannons and rockets blazing. I say we do. Senhor J.B., your leg is wounded. You will take command of the ship and the cannon. Sail into the harbor, then let yourself be driven back. That will draw their attention.”
J.B. had been given better assignments. “You?”
“I will lead my men through the beach cave. I would like Dr. Tanner to accompany me. Should we emerge successfully I will fire a blue rocket. Once we are engaged, come in and attack again if you are still afloat.”
J.B. looked at the islanders. “Them?”
“The slaves? I see little they can—”
“Not slaves!” Jak snarled.
“Veterans now,” J.B. agreed. He looked at Sylvano coldly. “And every man a volunteer. You show some respect, or you can forget about your ville and we can finish our battle right here on the deck of this tub.”
Zorime put a hand on her brother’s shoulder. “Sylvano…”
Sylvano didn’t need restraining. He looked over at the groaning, seasick men and sighed bleakly. “The Sons of the Sun,” he corrected. “Very well. I agree with Dr. Tanner. They will most likely balk at the caverns and will serve no purpose on the ship. I propose they disembark with my forces, but approach the ville landward along the coast. Senhor Jak will lead them. At the signal they will attack inward from the seawall.”
Jak shrugged.
J.B. pondered the three-pronged land, sea and subterranean attack. At night. With troops who hated each other. Sylvano seemed to read J.B.’s mind. He regarded the Armorer dryly. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Jak rolled his ruby-red eyes.
J.B. wished Ryan were here. “Kill the running lights. Head for the sea cave. We all attack on Sylvano’s signal.”
RYAN STOOD BEFORE his army. He had hoped for far more. Many of the farmers had refused to leave their families and their land. Others had flat-out refused to free their slaves, and Ryan didn’t have the time or the manpower to try to force them. Two hundred and fifty men from among the islands farm holders had signed on. They were led by a young man named Balduino. He was too young and too inexperienced in Ryan’s opinion, but apparently he was important and he was willing. Men came when he asked. His men were armed with single or double blasters. Most of those were scatterguns rather than longblasters, but at least they were loaded with lead instead of salt. Most of Balduino’s men had swords and looked like they might know how to use them. Moni had managed to recruit five hundred slaves. They had been grudgingly promised their freedom, and return to Sister Isle, assuming there was anything left of it, if they fought. They limped behind their overlords uncertainly, fingering the farming implements that had been thrust into their hands.
Victory was far from certain, and Ryan suspected losses would be appalling regardless.
“Honore, tell Balduino he needs to creep as close as he can to the ville. I’m going to take the med wag and ram the roadblock into the ville. When I’m in, they charge. He leads them.”
“I will come with you.”
Ryan stared down at the stout foreman. “Why?”
“Because I can drive a wag, and I am old and don’t charge well anymore. I drive. You shoot.”
“Fair enough,” Ryan decided. “Ask for six volunteers with blasters to ride in back. We crash the roadblock and head straight for the sec station and try to take it. If we can’t get to it, we head for the church. Either way that might be enough to distract them, and Balduino is inside before the nightwalkers know what happened. No mercy. We chill them all or go cold trying. Even if we fail and we hurt them bad enough, the rest of the farmsteads and Sister Islanders may have a shot of survival.”
Honore stared up at Ryan. “Why would you do this?”
“If my friends are dead, I live or die with the ville. If they’re alive, they need something to come back to besides nightwalkers and the shore blasters.”
“You are a brave man.”
“You just keep the wag on all four wheels when we crash the roadblock.”
Every head turned as the seawall lit up with the flash and thud of cannon fire. Out in the harbor answering fire illuminated a ship. Even at this distance Ryan could tell that the shore blasters were far bigger, and there were more of them. Shells hit the seawall with little effect. The shore blasters found their range, and the second salvo was brutal. The steamer’s crane tore from its moorings and fell across the deck, crushing crewmen. Two cannon balls punched into her side like explosive fists and ripped her belly open to the sea. The steamer got off two more badly aimed rounds that did little but dig craters in the beach. She limped toward the safety of the darkness beyond the harbor lights and the ranging buoys.
“So much for the sea assault,” Ryan remarked.
Honore shook his head. “I do not believe Sylvano would give up so easily.”
“Weight of shot. He’s outgunned.” Ryan shrugged. “Mebbe he’s dead.”
Honore grunted. “Perhaps.”
Ryan strode to the med wag. “Pick your men, and let’s hit them while they’re celebrating.”
DOC WALKED THROUGH Dante’s Inferno. By torchlight the caverns of the nightwalkers were hell on earth. They stank of human waste, and the fire pits were full of human bones. In many of the chambers the embers of the fires were still glowing. The smell of roasted meat was fresh, and every man knew what kind of meat it was. The walls were painted with blood and charcoal and who knew what else. The artwork ranged from the abstract to childlike depictions of the horrific and the obscene.
The nursery was the worst.
Torches burned in crude sconces gouged out of the rock. Nearly two dozen infants and toddlers lay in cribs made of dried seaweed, feathers and scraps of cloth. Four filthy, brutally abused Sister Isle women in various states of pregnancy were bound on similar beds. The wet nurses were seven-foot mountains of bloated, swollen lactating flesh. They rolled forward ponderously, shrieking at the invaders and waving huge billets of driftwood. They fell beneath a fusillade of musket fire. The nightwalker offspring screamed and howled. Sylvano turned to his lieutenant in disgust. “Vasco, bayonets.”
Doc was horrified. “Sylvano!”
Sylvano ignored him and nodded at Vasco. “Be swift.”
“Baron Barat!” Doc shouted.
Sylvano froze. So did Vasco.
Doc pressed on. “If the ville is taken, then surely you are baron now, Sylvano. I implore you, as lord of the ville, do not do this.”
“The nightmare ends here, Dr. Tanner. Tonight.”
“You yourself have said the nightwalker gene does not always run true! And look beneath the filth! Are any of these children deformed? Indeed, do not some have the pink skin of Sister Isle blood? The populations of both islands have taken terrible losses this day. You will need these children! They are innocent, unknowing, and as human as you or I until if and when the change comes upon them in puberty. I implore you, Baron Barat, do not begin your reign with infanticide.”
Sylvano stared into the middle distance wearily. “Very well, Vasco, stoke the fire to keep the children warm. We shall come back for them after the battle.” His voice was bleak. “Or their parents will.”
They continued through the twisting cavern system. They came to a chamber being used as a smokehouse and human limbs hung suspended over slow fires of driftwood and seaweed. Another cave was a storehouse containing hundreds of skulls. Doc’s compass told him they were roughly paralleling the beach and he detected they were slowly moving downward. The passage ahead opened on a blackened hole of blasted brick that led into the ville’s predark sewers. The sewers were a maze, but Sylvano seemed to know where he was going, and all they had to do was to follow the stench of burned powder and the muffled sounds of screaming above.
Doc cl
ambered up the rusting ladder and arose from the underground like Orpheus ascending from Hades onto a side street.
The surface wasn’t any better.
Half the ville was ablaze. Men, living and dead, were crucified on wagon wheels or hung from the eaves. Women were tied across barrels and sawhorses for whatever pleasure a passing nightwalker wished to take. Others turned on spits over cook fires. Nightwalkers tore charred flesh from human limbs like drumsticks, upended barrels of wine into their mouths and raped and killed. In the light of the bonfires and burning buildings they looked like the ogres, giants and trolls of Doc’s childhood fairy tales. They wandered about the conquered ville like dogs drunk on slaughterhouse blood. Baron Xavier Barat hung nailed to a great X of timber in the middle of the ville square. What had been done to him beggared description. Yet he was still alive, and they had left him his eyes so that even out of the peeled-off mask of his face he might watch the rape and fall of the ville.
Without thought Doc drew his LeMat, put his front sight on the butchered baron’s chest and fired. The baron’s body sagged on the frame. Nightwalkers throughout the square looked up from their pleasures. Doc blinked and lowered his blaster. “Sylvano, I—”
“You saved me the sin of patricide.” Baron Sylvano Barat barked out orders as his men came up onto the street. “Three ranks of ten! Vasco! Fire the rocket!” Vasco put punk to fuse and the signal rocket streaked up into the sky. It burst like a hard shimmering blue flower against the clear night. A dozen nightwalkers roared forward, waving war clubs. Sylvano barked out battle orders. “First rank, kneel!” The first rank knelt with their blasters leveled at the charging nightwalkers. The second rank took aim over the first. “First rank! Fire! Second rank! Fire!”
The rifled muskets rippled in volley fire and all but two of the pale giants toppled and fell. Sylvano put them down with a burst each from his auto-blaster. “Reload!” Two female nightwalkers came screaming from an alleyway waving stone-tipped spears. “Third rank!” Sylvano bellowed. “Fire!” The pair of she-things fell almost at Sylvano’s feet. “Reload!”
“First rank! Loaded!” Vasco called.
“Second rank! Lo—” A stone the size of a bowling ball crushed the skull of the second rank leader. A spear tore through another man’s back like the bolt from a siege engine.
“They are on the rooftops!” Doc shouted. He flicked the hammer on his LeMat and the blaster brutally recoiled as he fired the shotgun barrel. A nightwalker on the eaves above screamed and clutched its face as the cloud of buckshot shredded its skull.
“Fire at will! We make for the church!” Sylvano shouted. Doc followed the surge across the square. They lost two more men to stones and spears hurled out of the alleyways and from the rooftops. The nightwalkers faded back into the alleys and out of sight on the rooftops. Sylvano snarled as he fired bursts at shapes in the smoke. “Where is your friend Jak and the Sons of the Sun?”
“I do not know!” Doc started as a throw stick the size of a scythe whirled inches from his head and broke the neck of the man next to him. Doc fired at the thrower, but the nightwalker had already melted back into the night. “He is delayed!”
“Delayed…” Sylvano roared. “Chosen men! Form square!”
The remaining men formed a very small square and moved in good order with bayonets bristling across the ville main square.
Raul’s voice boomed across the ville in mocking thunder. “You are too few, Nephew!”
Doc looked at the mutilated body of Xavier Barat in passing and then at the new baron of the ville. Sylvano’s face was desperate.
“Your rate of fire too slow, Nephew!” Raul taunted.
They ran up the steps of the church, and Sylvano hammered the butt of his blaster on the massive door. “Open! I command you!”
The bars were thrown back and the chosen men spilled into the church. It was already packed to the rafters with refugees. Doc estimated over two hundred, most women and children. A young man with a scalp wound and wearing the robes of an acolyte greeted them as other men slammed the great door closed and barred it. “Sylvano! We—”
Sylvano’s voice was iron. “Baron Barat.”
The acolyte goggled. “Baron…”
“Where are the landowners and their men?”
“Barricaded, each in their own manses, Baron. Barricaded as we are. It is the only safe place.”
“This church is not safe at all. The only reason the nightwalkers have not taken it already is because they do not wish to, and that keeping you bottled up here serves their purposes.”
“What shall we do?”
The conversation was cut short by a deep, feminine voice calling out in singsong outside. “Oh, Sylvano, my dearest! I have a new lover now! Come out and meet him!”
“And whom is that?” Doc asked.
“Xadreque.” Sylvano’s long teeth ground. “The woman I loved.” Sylvano raised his voice angrily. “Fight me, Uncle! Let this be between us!”
“Very well, Nephew! Let it be a duel. Let this battle be decided by champions!” Raul’s voice boomed amiably. “Come out and let us see the man you’ve become!”
“You don’t want to go out there,” Doc advised.
“You are right. I do not.” Sylvano unsheathed his great sword and handed his auto-blaster to Vasco. “If I slay my uncle, break out and charge. The nightwalkers may falter. If I fall, go out the back. Either way, make a fighting retreat of it to the beach and link up with the doctor’s friend Jak. Take the pier if you can and get our people on boats.”
“Baron?” Doc said. “I would come with you.”
“Oh?”
“If this is a duel, then you will need a second.”
Sylvano smiled bleakly. “Then I accept, Dr. Tanner. Come, let me introduce you to my uncle. Vasco, bolt the door behind us.” The door was opened and Doc followed Sylvano down the steps onto the square. Doc gaped at a nightmare. Raul Barat strode out of the smoke with horrible casualness. Red-velvet drapes stolen from a house were belted about him with ropes in a toga of royalty. Laurels of woven branches crowned him in a twisted mockery of Roman splendor and the crucifixion. He carried a horrific, hafted blade with sickening ease in one hand. A woman well over six and half feet tall and similarly bedecked spooned into his side. She carried a net over her shoulder and a spear in her hand. Blood smeared both their mouths from feasting.
“Greetings, Nephew.” Raul turned his ghoulish gaze up and down Doc. “Dr. Tanner, I presume.” He looked at the huge sword in Sylvano’s hands. “For me?”
“I had it forged specially.” Sylvano nodded. “I named it Raulslayer.”
Raul eyed the great blade. “Charming.” He weighed the flensing blade in his hand. “You know the sad thing of it is, we have taken most of the ville’s blasters, and yet our hands are too large to wield them.” He plucked Xavier Barat’s blaster out of his toga. “But my petite flower Xadreque has no such problems.” He tossed the weapon to her.
The titaness caught it with a grin. “Goodbye, my love.” Xadreque shot Sylvano through the head. The iron cap he wore beneath his hat could stop a stone but not a bullet and he fell dead to the ground.
“Foully done!” Doc shouted. His sword hissed from its cane. Instantly he knew he had made a mistake. He should have drawn his pistol and shot, but the shreds of his honor and the dark clouds of madness often fought within him. In this case they were in agreement. Xadreque pointed the blaster at Doc. He ignored her as he drew himself up and saluted his blade. “Raul Barat, I challenge you for the barony.”
“I gave my dear brother the fate I had long planned for him. Sylvano died like the fool he was, but you, Dr. Tanner? My brother actually suggested a duel between you and I. Let us see what you can do.” Raul’s flensing blade hissed through the air like a razor-sharp meteor at Doc’s head.
The duel was lopsided from the onset. Doc was a scarecrow standing in front of a mountain. It was like a man with a toothpick battling a man armed with a shovel. Raul’s reac
h was literally inhuman and his whale-breaking weapon threatened to shatter Doc’s slender blade with every parry. All Doc could do was evade. Raul had every advantage Sylvano had had, but at twice his power level and even greater speed. Raul was as fearless as he was cruel, and he was insane. He played Doc like a cat with a mouse as Doc’s strength flagged. The old man once more took refuge in the one thing he had faith in.
“Why do you smile, Dr. Tanner?” Raul enquired.
“Because I know something you do.”
“Oh, and what is this mutual information we share that amuses you so?”
“That no matter what happens here, my friend Ryan will kill you.”
Raul snarled and Doc hurled himself into a last desperate attack. At that moment explosion after explosion rocked the shore batteries and the call “Sons of the Sun!” rocked the seawall. Automatic blasterfire ripped into life on the inland edge of the ville followed by crashing and nightwalker screams. Raul disengaged and stepped back. All Doc could do was put his hands on his knees and wheeze in relief.
A twentieth-century ambulance came tearing down the main street of the ville with its lights flashing and siren blaring.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ryan and Honore rammed the roadblock with the lights flashing and the siren wailing. The carts blocking the road came apart, and so did one of the nightwalkers behind them. The med wag’s tires were from a carefully maintained stock of preskydark material, but the ancient rubber ripped off the steel belts as the wag fishtailed across the cobblestones from the impact. Honore struggled to keep the wag on course. Ryan leaned out of the passenger window, his blaster on full-auto. A nightwalker towered out from between two burning buildings, topping the roof of the wag by a head. Ryan shoved the submachine blaster out like a big pistol and held down the trigger. His burst walked up the giant from crotch to collar.
Behind them Balduino and his tiny army of landowners charged the broken roadblock. The new freemen of the main isle limped after them in a mob. The med wag caromed down the street toward the square. The men in the back shouted in alarm, and the wag swerved even more wildly as huge rocks and chunks of lumber struck the wag’s sides. Honore hit the square and weaved through bonfires, barbecuing bodies, crucifixions and rape racks. Ryan’s eye narrowed. Dead ahead Doc appeared to be in another fencing match. This time it was with Raul, and Doc appeared to be losing. “Step on it!”
