by James Axler
“But what—?”
“Wait one.” She turned and vanished into her cave. He took advantage to catch up on breathing. It was too confusing to think, so he gratefully gave up trying.
Maman Fucton waddled out into the sunlight again. “Come here and hold out your hand, boy.”
Numbly, he obeyed. She pressed a vegetable-fiber packet of herbs into his hand. It smelled pleasantly of mint and lilacs. She raised her arms over her head, exposing impressive arm bushes. Her smell was like that of fresh earth, not at all offensive.
“By the power of High John the Conqueror, and St. Excelsior, and Mama Yemana!” she declared. “Bless these fruits of Gaia’s bounty, and let them help to reclaim Gaia’s child, to the extent they shall be required!”
He looked at the packet in his hand. He looked at Maman Fucton. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She made shooing motions with her hands. “Now, go. Go! Chop-chop! You and your friends must set off before noon, to redeem your promise to Papa Dough and save your woman from peril.”
“From peril? What peril?”
“Papa Dough will tell you as you make ready. He has more truths to tell you, which you must urgently listen to. You are ready to hear them now.”
“But—”
“No buts! You must arrive back in Haven tomorrow morning before the sun clears the horizon.”
“Tomorrow morning? We’re the better part of a week out of Haven. It’s impossible to get back by then.”
She smiled. “After what you have experienced here, you think to tell me what is possible and impossible? Now hurry. The daylight, you waste it!”
Chapter Thirty
The sound of an explosion roused Amélie Mercier instantly from her fitful sleep on the cot in her lab. She sat up, grimacing in irritation. The thin sheet fell from her slim nude body. She knew precisely what that noise meant, knew what was happening.
“The fool,” she said aloud. “He has introduced chaos into the system. He outsmarts himself at last.”
She rose and dressed hurriedly, then headed out the door for the big house.
Another blast greeted her. A ball of smoke rolled up a sky milky with predawn light from the direction of the waterfront. She heard a clatter of shots, and screams.
She set out at a brisk pace up the walk to the big house.
MERCIER STOOD OVER the supine body of Elizabeth Blackwood and watched the drug she’d injected take its effect.
The illness was hereditary. Baronial records suggested it skipped generations. Her father’s exhaustive notes, combined with Mercier’s own researches—and observations—suggested that what was involved wasn’t purely a mutation. Rather, the shadowy predark technology of nanotechnology was almost certainly involved. Lucien Mercier’s lab journals contained snippets of information, gleaned from old government buildings by scavvies, that hinted of research programs designed to create supersoldiers: fast, strong, and nearly unkillable.
In her unnatural sleep, Elizabeth began to toss her raven-haired head from side to side, clutch the sheets and moan. The process normally took some minutes. Mercier knew that somehow, presumably through the agency of nanotechnological assemblers in her system, Elizabeth’s body would absorb the sheet that covered her body as well as unusual quantities of air, to bulk out her muscle mass and strengthen her bones and sinews for the transition.
This was what Amélie’s father had been brought to Haven for, on such generous terms, when she was but a small child who had lost her mother under mysterious circumstances. It was to learn the true nature of the Curse of the Blackwoods, and save the baron’s daughter, about Amélie’s own age, from transforming into a humanoid predator that lusted uncontrollably for blood and human flesh. So far the best Lucien’s research, and his daughter’s, had been able to achieve was a means of temporarily controlling the change. And it came at the cost of severe physical debilitation.
There were, simply, times when the Beast had to be allowed to run free to kill and ravage. Only that restored Elizabeth Blackwood from the brink of death. This was the terrible secret burden the siblings carried, the shared cancer that ate at their souls—because they truly loved and care for their people, felt genuine anguish for the suffering the Beast caused. Mercier couldn’t understand such expansive sympathy herself. But she had learned to recognize the symptoms.
Another thunderous crack was barely muffled by distance. Mercier recognized the report of a high-explosive warhead. The ville had no such weapons. It signified the pirates had found a way to evade Tobias’s sec force and attack the ville directly.
Diverging urgencies warred within her. She felt a twisting need to return to her facility, to do her best to safeguard it from the raiders. Yet there was something she had determined to do here first.
Left to its own devices the curse acted in accordance with biological cycles that the best efforts of two generations of Mercier whitecoats had been unable fully to analyze. Extreme physical and emotional stress tended to trigger it, she knew. That was why, sooner or later, it always overpowered the suppressant drugs. When Elizabeth’s reduced state began to threaten her life, the curse kicked in.
“Listen to me, Elizabeth,” Mercier said with low-voiced intensity. Changes had begun to take place, seen as a writhing as if ants crawled beneath the woman’s skin. “You are in danger. Your brother is endangered.”
Mercier had administered a counteragent to the suppressant, along with a small quantity of amphetamine, to accelerate Elizabeth’s heart rate and blood pressure and help fool the curse assemblers into believing their host was in mortal peril. Already the change had suppressed Elizabeth’s rational mental processes. But in her current state, early in the transition, one could still speak to her midbrain, her emotions, and her deepest fears, buried in her reptile brain.
“The red-haired outlander woman in the room down the hall poses a deadly threat to your brother and to you. She has been sent by enemies to seduce him, so that he will throw you aside and be easier to bring down. She’s evil, Elizabeth. She will come between you and Tobias. She means to destroy you both!”
Elizabeth’s head whipped from side to side on the pillow. Some of her hairs had already begun to bond with the pillowcase and subsume its substance. Her features had, just at perceptibility’s edge, begun to lengthen as the bones of her face literally restructured themselves into a protruding muzzle for more efficient biting.
But she heard. Fear was obvious on her increasingly strange face. Fear and rage.
Mercier sucked in a short breath, clipped lower lip in upper teeth. She dared not remain here. When the Beast took full control, the only warm-blooded creature on Earth it wouldn’t attack on sight was Tobias.
It is enough, Mercier decided. When the Beast awakes, its first act will be to eliminate the menace of Krysty Wroth.
The woman turned, unlocked the door and went out. She closed the door but didn’t lock it again.
Despite the rattle of gunfire, now faintly visible in the still corridor half filled with early dawn light, she felt triumph, and the satisfaction of a job well done.
That should do it for at least one of the bitches, Mercier thought as she walked with her customary brisk precision down the hall. With luck, it may even eliminate both barriers that stand between me and achieving my long-sought happiness with Tobias!
Mercier went down the stairs and out the front door. She could hear screams and shouts as well as pops of single shots. Snarls of full-automatic fire answered them. Black smoke rolled into the sky from the direction of Blackwood Bayou. It stung the mucous membranes of her nose, throat and eyes.
Mercier returned to her lab. Fighting hadn’t yet reached it. Once inside its familiar sanctuary, she bolted the heavy metal door, then set out with cold-blooded efficiency to make certain preparations for what to do should the door successfully be forced.
Amélie Mercier considered herself a realist. She found it inconceivable to face potential disaster without proper plans.
“That’s the Black Joke herself, tied up at our own wharf as pretty as you please,” he said. “She seems to have towed a number of smaller boats along behind her, packed with Black Gang pirates and their allies. Reports indicate there may be as many as two hundred of them.”
Guerrero shook his head. “How could they get to the river? The mouth is blocked by chains and traps and sentries.”
“They weren’t supposed to get through at all,” Barton said grimly. The baron’s stout aide was dressed in shirtsleeves and dark trousers tucked into heavy boots. He had four single-shot handblasters stuffed through the belt, and carried a cutlass whose blade was already red-stained. “But they’re here, so we have to deal with them.”
“The way the bayous twine together, there are ways to get into one of them and slip to our bayou upstream of our obstacles unobserved,” said a squint-eyed straw-haired man named Baker, who knew the country between the ville and the coast well. “We can’t watch every nook and cranny of the coast. Once they got in and found their way to the river, they powered up it faster than even our swamp telegraph could spread warning.”
“But to do that they’d have to know the way,” Barton said hoarsely. “They’d need guides.”
Blackwood sighed. He had already confronted the disagreeable truth in his mind.
“We’re betrayed, whether by a spy in Haven or unfortunate locals captured by the pirates and forced to guide them past our watchers. That’s for later. As Barton says, we need to deal with—”
From the edge of his eye he saw movement.
Even against the tumult of blasts, shots, screams and roaring flames, a loud human voice could carry a remarkable distance, attracting attention even against a background of furious noise. His companions, all sec men, ville leaders or sec men known to the baron as steady types, didn’t chatter or permit their voices to rise.
So the two lean, dark men in baggy, filthy blouses of unbleached linen and ragged trousers who prowled into the yard clearly weren’t expecting company. They were plainly two of Black Mask’s island allies, with machetes in their belts and smokeless-powder blasters in their hands.
Blackwood’s moon-white right hand tossed the black rifle in the air. The quick motion caught the intruders’ attention. They turned, their eyes and mouths going wide, and tried to swing their weapons to bear.
Blackwood caught the pistol grip. As if the rifle was an outsize handblaster, he stuck it out to arm’s length. He shot the intruder to his right first, then the one to his left, both through the chest. Both men collapsed to the ground, neither able to fire his blaster.
A jerk of Guerrero’s broad thumb sent a couple of sec men to slit the throats of the pirates, who thrashed and moaned on the dirt.
“—deal with the situation we face,” the baron continued as if nothing had interrupted. “We must move now. Those shots would have been heard. I’ll lead the resistance here. Barton, you take four men as escorts and raise the farmers and ville folk north of town. When you bring them, send scouts and try to take the marauders in the flank.”
Barton looked shocked. “Baron, my place is at your—”
Blackwood stopped him with a wolf grin. “Old friend, isn’t your place where I send you? This is how you’ll best serve me and Haven. Now go, and remember no one is expendable except the invaders!”
He could feel the others’ spirits rise. This would be a long day and a bad one, no mistake. The enemy had twentieth-century weapons and apparently vast stocks of ammo. But Haven held the advantage of terrain, of men and women fighting for homes and children. It was up to him to ensure the coldhearts paid the greater price, and his people the lesser.
As the others checked the loads in their blasters a thought panged him. Elizabeth.
But I’ve done what I could for my dear sister, he thought, set guards at the house and a pair on her door. Beyond that, well, I have things to fight for, as well.
Besides, he thought, she should be perfectly safe in her bedroom.
ST. VINCENT’S HEART sang, though he made himself walk up the stairs to the third story with his accustomed stiff-backed yet elegant dignity. Opportunity presented itself; he’d decided to leap. He knew better than to trust the pirates and their notorious leader. But then, he didn’t have to. What was important was that surely the pirates would solve the Tobias problem. Or at least severely weaken the foolish young baron’s grip.
In the former case, provided Cawdor returned from the swampie realms—and if he were truly worthy, in an evolutionary sense, would he not do so?—he’d be far less squeamish about taking over a ville without a baron. Should Tobias, on the other hand, somehow survive the onslaught of the Black Gang, well, arrangements could be made.
In any event Black Mask’s stoneheart pirates were out for loot and plunder. Once they’d sated their base desires they’d leave, regardless of their shadowy leader’s agenda. Leaving the field clear for strong men, men of decision, who could guarantee a grateful populace no such calamity would ever befall again.
In the meantime, St. Vincent perceived a second golden chance: at last to ingratiate himself with the object of his long desire. Naturally he was stooping on it like a hawk on a hare.
Two sec men armed with muskets and cutlasses stood guard at the door to Elizabeth’s room. Their eyes were wide and their faces stiff with terror and resolve. How thoughtful of Tobias to deploy them here as he sallied forth to fight the invaders.
St. Vincent merely nodded at the two of them, walked up to the door and rapped with the backs of his knuckles. “Elizabeth? It’s me, St. Vincent. I need to talk to you.”
Neither peasant lump of a sentry objected when he opened the door to Lady Blackwood’s chambers. After all, he was the majordomo. He had the run of the house. If St. Vincent had business in the lady’s bedroom, that was his business.
Especially for a brace of bumpkins who’d never seen the inside of the house before, nor ever expected to.
His knock got no answer. He knew Elizabeth neared the end of her cycle, when her body would need renewal and rebel against the restraints and ravages of Mercier’s drug. But she still had strength enough to awake and to escape to safety, with the noble help of St. Vincent, and a long-laid plan for getting out of the ville secretly and in a hurry. He would ensure she was well aware of who had actually saved her while her precious brother was gallivanting off about his self-absorbed derring-do.
Not far from town, but not easy to find, a farmhouse waited. He and Elizabeth would be safe and comfortable there until the pirate threat, like a hurricane, inevitably blew over. During which time a hand as masterful as St. Vincent’s could surely cultivate the seeds of gratitude into most delicious blooms.
He opened the door. “Elizabeth—”
The honeyed flow of words stopped in his throat as if they’d turned to stone and stuck there. There were hints of Elizabeth Blackwood visible in the grotesque elongated shape that crouched on the cratered ruins of the bed. The skin was the same pallid ivory. The perfect features were drawn forward into something resembling a snout, but the structure of those fine cheekbones remained the same. The mane of black hair that hung down her back seemed little changed, if perhaps somehow coarser.
The shriveled dugs and skinny, wiry haunches certainly didn’t suggest the form of his long-time and secret beloved, which in his official capacity he had contrived to glimpse nude on sundry delightful occasions. And when the eyes, those distinctive violet eyes, turned and briefly locked on his, there was nothing remotely human about them.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “wait—”
The creature spr
ang. As opened jaws and outspread talons flashed toward him, he cried out the last coherent utterance of his life. “Not the face!”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Sorry, boys,” said the captain of the Pocket Rocket. The dumpy forty-foot wooden riverboat had picked up Ryan and friends not long after their swampie captors had removed their blindfolds. “That smoke there’s rising from the Haven docks. Means trouble.”
Mock Murphy had a shock of light brown hair and a face that seemed to consist entirely of seams. As it had throughout their brief relationship, a corncob pipe protruded from a corner of his razor-slit mouth.
“You can bring us down to the ville without going all the way to the main docks, if you’re worried about the fire,” Ryan said.
A boom hard-edged with high-frequency harmonics rolled up the river toward them. A flight of startled cormorants rose squawking from a sandbar.
Murphy shook his head. “That there’s artillery. I’m not goin’ nowhere near that.”
Ryan winced. The reluctant river captain was right, and the one-eyed man had an uncomfortable feeling as to who sported artillery like that along this stretch of coast.
Frustration boiled his guts. He had thought Maman Fucton’s prediction of how long it would take the party to return to Haven was either a poor joke or delusion. But no sooner had he returned to Papa Dough’s ville, none too steady on his pins, than the swampies marched the outlanders to their own boats, which had apparently been brought to Dough’s ville by water, blindfolded them once more, and set out. Shortcuts braiding the waterways of the river and bayou system had to have allowed them to make their way to Blackwood Bayou in half a day.
When the blindfolds had been removed their pirogues were already tied to a trio of cypress trees on the banks of the main channel, and the sun was getting low in the western sky. Jon Dough and a few companions bade them farewell and melted into the dense brush. The companions and their two surviving Havenites were left none the wiser how the boats had been propelled.
